12. Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
Torres
Voss makes me do the entry twelve times before he's satisfied, and on the eleventh he stops the whole floor to tell everybody what I'm doing wrong.
"Again. Torres — you're arriving with your weight already committed. Where's your back foot?"
"Behind me."
"Where specifically."
I look down. It's about four inches further back than it should be, which means the second I close I've got nothing left to push off if the other guy moves.
"Yeah," I say. "Okay."
"Don't yeah okay me, fix it."
I fix it. Take twelve does what it's supposed to do, and Declan — who has spent the last forty minutes patiently letting me get it wrong on him — gives me a look that says finally, and I tell him to shut up, and he hasn't said anything.
"Better," Voss says. "Reset. Both of you."
He lets the floor go early and holds me back, which he does to about two people a term.
"The first-year group you've been helping with," he says. "You've covered it when I'm short."
"Four times."
"Five. You got Halden through her first shift without her losing her mind about it, and I've had that girl in tears twice." He folds his arms. "What are you doing next year?"
"I don't know."
"Do you want to keep helping?"
I open my mouth and nothing comes out, because the honest answer is yes, badly, and I haven't said it to anybody including myself.
"Think about it," Voss says. "Come and tell me when you've got an answer and I'll tell you what it takes," and he goes and leaves me standing on an empty floor with a towel in my hand.
Jessica's in the corridor when I come out, leaning against the wall with her bag over her right shoulder, reading something on her phone. A loose piece of chestnut hair hangs in her face. I get maybe two seconds to look at her before she looks up.
“You looked good out there.”
“I did the same thing wrong too times.”
“I didn't say you were good. I said you looked good.”
She smiles and falls in beside me. “Why'd he keep you?”
“I'll tell you later.”
“Later?”
I catch her by the back of the neck and kiss her. She comes up on her toes, one hand catching in my shirt.
“Come to my room tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Eight?”
“I'll be there.”
Back in my room I sit on the end of the bed and don't do anything for a while.
Do you want to keep helping?
Do you want to be doing that?
Yeah. I do.
I've known the answer since he asked. I just haven't said it out loud yet.
So I call Leo before I lose my nerve.
He picks up on the fourth ring and the first thing I get is a lot of Frosthaven common room behind him — somebody's music, somebody else objecting to the music — and Leo saying something to a person who isn't me.
"—no, because it's my turn, you had it — hello?"
"It's me."
"MATEO." Something moves. The background goes quieter, which means he's walked out into the corridor. "Okay. Hold on. Let me look at you." A pause. "You look European."
"What does that mean?"
"You've got a collar."
"It's a shirt, Leo."
"It's a serious shirt." He settles somewhere. "How's life among the aristocracy? Have you learned which fork? Do you have opinions about wine now? Are you going to come back with an accent?"
"My instructor asked me what I'm doing next year." Protection was the rotation I got given. Teaching wasn't on the sheet.
Leo goes completely silent for three seconds, which I have never once achieved before.
"Say that again."
"He asked me what I want to be doing next year."
"You have a plan," Leo says, delighted. "You're making a plan. Jake owes me money."
"Why does Jake owe you money?"
"He said you'd come back the same. I said you'd come back with a five-year plan and a nice coat." I can hear him grinning. "How's the girl? Does she know how annoying you are? Has she found out yet, or are you still in the part where you're charming?"
“She found out on the first day.”
“And she kept you anyway?”
“Apparently.”
Leo laughs. “You happy?”
I don't answer right away.
“Yeah,” I say. “I am.”
“Good. That's good, man. Actually."
"How's everybody?"
"Alex is Alex. Terrifying. Running everything and pretending she isn't." Something scrapes — he's sitting down.
"Gray's fine. Jake's fine and irritating.
Jim's reading things nobody asked him to read and then telling us about them.
Dalton's still Dalton." A shorter pause, and the humor goes out of his voice.
"RJ's good. Properly good. Better than when you left. "
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." Then, instantly back: "And I've got three theories about a thing here that nobody will listen to."
"Are they good theories?"
"They're excellent theories. Jim did statistics at me about them."
I laugh, and then I don't say anything, and Leo notices.
"Okay," he says. "What's actually going on?"
"Nothing."
"Mateo."
"It's nothing, it's—" I rub my face. "They took her."
"I know they took her. You told me they took her."
“Yeah, but I told you afterwards.” I rub a hand over my face. “I could feel her the whole time. I knew she was alive. I knew which direction they'd taken her. I could feel when she was scared. Too many hours of that, Leo, and I couldn't get to her.”
Leo doesn't say anything, which is how he listens.
"And she's fine. She's completely fine. She was in the corridor an hour ago giving me a hard time about my back foot." I make myself say the rest of it. "But she walks into a room now and something in me goes quiet. Every time."
"How often are you checking?"
"What?"
"The bond. How often are you checking she's there?"
"Constantly."
"Yeah," Leo says. "That's about right."
"You didn't do that."
"I absolutely did that. Ask Alex. Ask anybody." He blows out a breath. "It doesn't just go away. The worry fades a bit, and one day you notice you didn't check on her for an hour and you feel weird about that instead."
"That's a genuinely useful answer."
"Don't tell anyone." A pause. "Are you all right, though?"
"Yeah."
"Mateo."
"I'm all right," I say, and mean it, which is new. "That's kind of why I'm calling."
“So, my combat instructor, Voss, has these first-year groups,” I tell him. “Mostly kids who show up thinking they're the shit because they've got a wolf, right up until somebody half their size puts them on the floor. I've been covering when he's short.”
“You love that.”
“More than I should.”
“No, you love the part where you teach them how not to end up on the floor next time.”
I look at him.
“Yeah,” I say. “That part.”
"You'd be great at that."
"You don't know what it involves."
"I don't need to know what it involves, I watched you do it in Red House for free," Leo says. "You used to sit in the corridor with the new ones at two in the morning. You think nobody noticed that? Everybody noticed that."
I don't have anything to say.
"So what's the problem?"
"The problem is saying it out loud. Here. In this building. That I want to build something at this school instead of being a guy who's here because of who he's sleeping with."
"Is that what you think you are?"
"It's what it looks like from outside."
"Then go back and tell him yes," Leo says, "and find out what it takes, and do that. That's the whole of it, Mateo. I'm not sure why you needed me for this part."
"I hate you."
"You called me," he points out, "which means at some level you wanted to be told the obvious by somebody who's known you since before you had a collar."
I sit there for a second.
"Come and visit," I say.
"What?"
"Come out here. See the place. I'll show you the arena, and the mountains, and the dining hall where they serve a gray pie that has to be seen." I'm talking too fast and I don't stop. "Bring Alex. Bring all of them. Dalton, Gray, Jake, Jim, RJ — the whole thing."
Leo's quiet.
"You remember that night in the dining hall," he says. "When Jon told us he was coming back here, and I said we'd visit when he was set up."
"And I said sure."
"And I said that didn't include you."
"I remember."
"Well." I can hear him smiling. "It includes you now."
"Leo—"
"I'll talk to Alex," he says. "She'll want to come, and if Alex is coming then everybody's coming, and Jim will end up running it and RJ will complain about how Jim's running it and then Dalton will take over."
"That's what I'm counting on."
"RJ'll want to know about the place before he agrees to anything. Actual information, Mateo. Not vibes."
"I can do information."
"You cannot do information."
"Jessica can do information."
"Now that's a promising development," Leo says. "Right. Go and talk to your instructor. And Mateo—"
"Yeah?"
"Tell him I said you're a lot of work."
"He knows."
"Tell him anyway," Leo says laughing at me.
Jessica comes at eight with wet hair and a bottle of something Declan pressed on her on her way out, and she's barely through the door before she's asking about Leo.
"Tell me about him. Everything. Immediately."
"Why?"
“Because you never talk about your friends.” She drops onto the end of my bed. “I know you here. I want to know what you were like before you came to Luftis.”
So I tell her about Leo. The theories. The way he'll build an entire case out of nothing and then defend it.
The fact that he talks constantly and then, once every few months, says the single most accurate thing anybody's said to you all year.
She laughs so hard at the theories that she has to put the bottle down, and I sit there watching her laugh at my friend and something in my chest goes stupid.
"He's coming," I say. "Maybe. He's asking Alex."
"Alex is—"
"Leo's mate. All six of them are mated to her."
"Six."
"Yeah."
“I want to meet her immediately.”
“I told him to bring everybody.”
“All seven?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. When?”
“Leo's talking to Alex.”
“Tell him I'm serious. I want them here.”
Then I tell her about Voss.
“He asked if I wanted to keep working with the first-years.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.” I grin. “Turns out I really like knocking cocky eighteen-year-olds on their asses.”
“I'm shocked.”
“That's not even the best part.”
“What's the best part?”
“Teaching them how to stop me from doing it again.”
She looks at me for a second. “You're serious.”
“Yeah.”
“So what happens now?”