Chapter 20
"You're still carrying it," Thane says.
We're two corridors above the lower archive, moving through the academy's main east wing, and he means the weapon he gave me. I'm still holding it. I realize this and don't put it down.
"So are you," I say.
He glances at his own hand, which is also still armed, and doesn't respond to that.
The lockdown has thinned the hallways to almost nothing.
A few faculty members moving in pairs. A maintenance crew sweeping ash from a doorframe near the east stairwell.
The overhead lights run cooler than usual, the magic that feeds them drawn down into the lower levels where the response team is still working through whatever the wraith left behind.
The corridor is long and pale and quiet.
Thane's breathing has evened out. His ribs are still bothering him. I can tell from how he favors his right side when he thinks I'm not watching. He's not going to say so, and I'm not going to point it out again.
"The tracking seal was placed within the last forty-eight hours," I say. "The compound hadn't fully cured. Someone put it there after the lockdown was announced."
"Which means they knew the lockdown was coming before the announcement." Thane stops at the corridor junction, checking the east branch before we take it. "Or they caused it."
Neither option is comfortable to sit with. I don't try to make it comfortable.
We turn east. The hallway here is older, the stone a different shade, the ceiling a few inches lower.
I know this section. It connects the training annexes to the main academic wing, a route I've taken enough times that my feet know the turns without input from my brain. Usually I make this walk alone.
Thane is beside me at a distance that isn't quite deliberate. Close enough that I'm aware of it.
"Your father's regards," I say. "You didn't explain that."
"There's nothing to explain."
"Thane."
"There's nothing useful to explain," he corrects. "My father has resources. He's used them before to communicate through channels I'd rather not think about." He pauses. "Using a wraith-possessed faculty member to deliver a message is a new approach."
"That's not a message. That's a threat."
"Yes." He doesn't elaborate. The word lands and stays there, and I let it.
We're halfway down the east corridor when it happens.
It starts as heat. Directed, concentrated, running along the left side of my chest like a wire pulled taut.
I know what it is. I've felt similar currents before, threading under my skin when I've been in contact with power that my null nature decides to pull toward itself.
This is different in degree. The wraith fight left channels activated in me, and now I'm standing in a narrow corridor with a dragon shifter whose fire I've been absorbing secondhand for the last two hours, and my body has decided this is an excellent moment to try to close a circuit.
I stop walking.
Thane stops half a step later, turning to look back at me.
"What?" he asks.
He's got a bruise forming along his jaw from where the possessed professor got a hand to him.
His shirt is torn at the left shoulder. His eyes are still carrying the residual gold of combat-heightened fire, and the air around him is several degrees warmer than the corridor air, and I can feel the heat of it against my skin like standing too close to a hearth.
And then his fire stutters.
I see it. The flame running along his forearms, which he hasn't fully retracted since the fight, flickers. Goes dim. His face changes fast, startled, and he looks down at his hands.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
"Nothing." I take a step toward him because stepping away feels wrong and because I'm incapable of making good decisions in corridors. "Are you hurt? Your fire..."
"It's not... I'm not hurt." He raises his head. "You're pulling it."
"I'm not doing it on purpose."
"I don't care about purpose, Fairmont. Stop."
"I told you, I'm not..."
But his fire is guttering again, and I feel it land in my chest the moment it does, a rush of warmth that isn't mine, and the channel that opened during the fight pulls harder without my permission.
I press my palm flat against his forearm without thinking, trying to break the contact, trying to interrupt whatever the null current is doing, and the touch does the opposite of what I intended.
Dragon fire runs up my arm like a lit fuse.
It doesn't burn. That's what stops me cold.
It should burn. Thane's fire has scorched stone walls in this building.
It brought a wraith-possessed professor to his knees.
And it runs up my arm and settles into my chest like heat from the sun on the first warm day after a long winter, everything like heat my body has been waiting for without telling me.
Thane grabs my wrist.
"Stop," he says again, and his voice is different now, lower, strained in a way that has nothing to do with his ribs.
"I'm trying." I am. I push against the current, pushing outward like I learned to push against the tracking seal's anchoring, but this current isn't a ward construct. It doesn't have a seam. It's responding to biology, and it doesn't care about my preference for keeping things compartmentalized.
"Angelic." His grip on my wrist tightens. He almost never uses my first name. It registers somewhere below conscious thought, like a key turning in a lock I didn't know was there. "Look at me."
I'm already looking at him. His eyes have gone full gold, the dark brown swallowed entirely, and his jaw is tight, and there's a tension running through his whole body that I recognize from training, someone holding back.
"There's a bond trying to form," he says. Flat. Controlled. Furious about both. "Between us. I can feel it."
"I know."
"Tell it to stop."
"You think I have an off switch for this?" I try to pull my wrist back and he doesn't release it. "Let go, Thane."
"If I let go right now, this gets worse." His fire has fully retracted, all of it, pulled back to nothing, and I can feel the absence of it like a door closing. The cessation of heat that was just present. "The contact is the only thing keeping it from accelerating. Don't ask me how I know that."
"Dragon instinct?"
"Dragon instinct," he confirms, and the gritted tone tells me he wishes he had a different answer.
So we stand here. His hand around my wrist. The corridor empty in both directions. The current running between us like a live wire that neither of us plugged in.
I push against it harder, methodically, like I've learned to push against foreign magic.
It resists. Whatever this is, it isn't ambient.
It's targeted, specific, tied to Thane's particular fire signature in a way that my null nature has catalogued without informing me. The pull eases, slows, and I exhale.
"It's slowing," I say.
"I noticed." He hasn't released my wrist. "What did you do?"
"Pushed back."
"You can push back against a bond formation?"
"I can push back against everything else. I'm hoping bond formations follow the same logic."
He's quiet. The current dims further, settling into something lower, no longer acute. I feel the moment it drops below the threshold of immediate danger, and I think Thane feels it too, because some of the tension leaves his shoulders.
He still hasn't let go of my wrist.
"What are you doing to me?" he asks. The question isn't rhetorical and it isn't gentle.
He takes one step forward, and the corridor is narrow enough that the step brings him close, and the free hand he isn't using to hold my wrist comes up and presses flat against the wall beside my head.
The position is what it is and we both know it. "Explain it to me. Clearly."
"My null nature absorbs magic." I don't move away. "Yours runs hot. I spent two hours training with you, went through a wraith fight in close proximity to your fire, and now my body has decided your specific frequency is compatible."
"Compatible," he repeats.
"I don't have a better word for it."
"You almost formed a second bond with me in an academy hallway."
"I stopped it."
"You stopped it," he says, and there's rawness underneath the repetition, an edge he hasn't fully controlled. "You pulled my fire through your skin without flinching, broke a bond formation with pure stubbornness, and you're standing here explaining it to me like it's a minor inconvenience."
"Would you prefer I faint?"
The gold in his eyes flickers. "No. I'd prefer..." He stops. His jaw works. "I'd prefer to understand what you are."
"You deserve the confusion," I say. "I've been confused about you since the first week of term."
That lands. I watch it land.
"That's not the same thing," he says.
"Isn't it? You burned my things. You made sure everyone in this building knew exactly how much you despised having a null in your House.
And now you're..." I gesture with my free hand at the general situation, at the wall beside my head and his grip on my wrist and the residual warmth still running between us.
"This. So yes. I think confusion is the appropriate response for both of us. "
He releases my wrist.
Doesn't step back. Just releases it and drops his arm, and we're standing close enough that I have to tilt my head slightly to meet his gaze, and his expression is the most unguarded I've ever seen it.
Thane Valorix doesn't do soft. But the armor is down in a way it wasn't even in the archive, even when he was bleeding and admitting his father sends threats through wraiths.
"I know what I did," he says. "I'm not asking you to forget it."
"Good. Because I won't."
"But what's happening between us..." He exhales. "It isn't nothing."
"I'm aware."
"And you stopped it anyway."
"I stopped a bond from forming without my consent," I say. "Yes. I did. I'd do it again."
His face shifts. It isn't anger or offense. It looks like respect, and it's more unsettling than anger would have been.