Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
The next morning at breakfast Lily looks at me across the table and says, "You look terrible."
"Thanks."
"I'm serious. When's the last time you actually slept?"
I think about it. "I don't remember."
She frowns but doesn't push it, and we eat in silence for a while.
The dining hall is loud this morning, louder than usual, and that pulling sensation is there in the background like it always is when Caspian is somewhere in the room.
Low and constant, a fishhook dragging at my sternum, asking me to look up and find him even when I've decided I won't.
I keep my eyes on my plate.
I haven't slept more than two hours in three days, not since the pull started waking me.
I don't fully understand what's happening to my body, only that it's doing something without my permission, orienting itself toward a person who has made it clear he wants nothing to do with me.
My skin feels too tight. There's a low ache under my ribs that never fully switches off, just quiets when I'm alone and surges when I'm anywhere near him, and the exhaustion of fighting it is starting to sit in my bones like something physical.
I'm trying to ignore all of it when someone sits down at the table beside ours.
Not right next to us, but close enough that it's intent.
A boy I recognize from the library, curly brown hair and glasses, always bent over mathematics texts.
He's got his breakfast tray and he isn't looking at us but he's close enough that the empty radius people have been keeping around me now includes him.
Lily notices. "Huh."
"What?"
"That's Theo Carver. Third year. He just sat in the exclusion zone."
"So?"
"Nobody sits in the exclusion zone. Not unless they're making a statement."
I look at Theo but he's focused on his food, not acknowledging us at all. Something about it, the way he just sat down and started eating, completely unbothered, makes my throat tight.
I look away before he catches me staring.
In Shifter Biology that morning Ms. Rivera continues her lecture on mate bonds, and every sentence she says lands somewhere in my chest with the weight of something I'm not supposed to know applies to me.
"The bond can form between any compatible shifters," she says, walking the front of the room with her notes, "but it is strongest between wolves.
The pull is biological and undeniable. Some describe it as aching, others as magnetic attraction.
The bond seeks completion through physical proximity and eventual claiming. "
I am writing this down. I am keeping my hand steady on the pen.
"However," she adds, "the bond can only complete between two shifters. A human cannot complete a mate bond, no matter how strong the pull feels from the shifter's side."
My pen stops.
Several students turn to look at me, heads tilting in unison like they smelled something interesting, and I keep my eyes on my notes and I feel my face go hot from the neck up.
After class Rivera stops me at the door.
"Nova, that wasn't directed at you specifically."
"I know, ma'am."
"Do you?" She's watching me with careful attention, like she's trying to help without overstepping. "If you're experiencing something you don't understand, you can come talk to me. I have office hours Monday and Wednesday."
"I'm fine, ma'am. Thank you."
I leave before she can say anything else.
In the corridor between Biology and History I'm walking with my head down, books against my chest, watching the floor tiles and thinking about nothing important, when I round a corner and nearly walk straight into someone.
Caspian.
We end up face to face, close enough that I can smell him without meaning to, woodsmoke and something sharper underneath, something animal and warm. That pulling sensation detonates in my chest so hard and fast I actually take a step back before I've decided to move.
He's looking at me with that expression he's been wearing every time our paths cross, confusion and anger and something under both of those that he hasn't named yet, and I can see the tension across his jaw, the way his hands have closed at his sides.
"You need to stop," he says. His voice is low and comes out like something dragged over gravel.
"Stop what?"
"Whatever this is. This." He gestures between us and the frustration in it is almost convincing, the gesture of a person furious at something they can't fight. "Make it stop."
"I don't know how."
"Figure it out." He steps around me and walks away. I stand there in the middle of the corridor with my heart pounding, that ache under my sternum so sharp it's almost a cramp. I press my hand flat against the wall and breathe through it before I can make myself move.
The worst part is that I understand his anger. Whatever is pulling at me is pulling at him too. He didn't ask for it any more than I did, his life is complicated in ways I'm only beginning to understand, and I still feel like I've been punched.
I keep walking. My legs know where they're going even when the rest of me doesn't.
At lunch Lily has her tablet out, telling me about a third-year who apparently shifted during a practical exam and got hiccups for two hours afterward. Someone started a betting pool. She's laughing as she explains it and I'm trying to follow the story but keep losing the thread.
The pull has been sitting in my chest since the corridor and it won't settle.
My food is in front of me and I've eaten maybe a third of it because eating takes attention I don't have right now.
My eyes want to find Caspian's table regardless of what I tell them.
I can feel where he is in the room the way you feel weather moving in, something barometric and involuntary.
"You're not listening," Lily says.
"Sorry."
"What's going on?"
"Nothing."
"Nova." She sets down the tablet. "I'm your friend. You can actually talk to me."
I look at her and for a moment I genuinely want to.
I want to explain about the pulling sensation, about what Rivera said in class, about Caspian in the corridor telling me to make it stop.
I want to say: something is happening to my body and I don't understand it and I'm terrified. Instead I hear myself say:
"I'm just tired."
She doesn't believe me. I can see it in the set of her mouth, the small careful pause before she lets it go, and I feel the distance between what I said and what's true like something I'll have to account for later.
The tutoring session with Professor Harmon is at four.
I walk across campus in the late afternoon cold, the sky going grey at the edges, and by the time I get to his office my eyes are burning from lack of sleep and my concentration is somewhere on the corridor floor where I left it after running into Caspian.
He notices immediately. He notices everything immediately, which is either reassuring or unsettling depending on the day.
We're fifteen minutes into my argument on territorial consolidation when he cuts me off.
"That's not your argument."
"Sir?"
"You're giving me the textbook position. I asked you to think." He leans back in his chair and watches me with that unhurried attention, and I look at the page in front of me like the answer to why my brain isn't working is written there. "What's affecting your concentration?"
"I'm tired."
"That's the second explanation you've given today that explains everything and nothing."
I go still. "Sir?"
"You've been present in this room consistently and I can count on one hand the times you've been genuinely distracted." His voice is careful, the same tone he uses for complicated historical questions. "Something has changed."
I could lie. I could give him tiredness or stress or any number of things that are technically true and he might accept them. I hear myself say instead: "Do you know anything about mate bonds, sir?"
The question drops into the room. His expression doesn't change but something moves behind his eyes, a subtle tightening, and he says: "That's outside my area of expertise."
"But you know the basics."
"Everyone knows the basics." A pause. "Why are you asking?"
"Academic curiosity."
"Try again."
I look at him. He's looking back at me and I can see him putting pieces together, leaning forward slightly in his chair with his forearms on the desk, and he says: "Are you experiencing a pull toward someone?"
My throat closes. "I don't know. Maybe."
"Who?"
I don't answer. I don't need to. It's written all over me, in my posture and the direction I won't look and the way I've gone quiet at exactly the wrong moment.
"Caspian Jett," he says, and his voice is completely flat, and it's not a question.
"I think so." I press my thumbnail against the edge of my notebook. "But I don't understand it. Rivera said the bond can't complete if one party is human. So why would I feel anything? What does it mean?"
He's quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I look up at him.
Something is happening behind his eyes that he isn't letting reach his face.
A tension in his jaw, controlled fast, and then he says: "There are rare cases where dormant shifters experience partial bond recognition before their first shift.
If you have latent shifter genetics that haven't presented yet, your body might be responding to compatibility before the shift has occurred. "
"But I can't shift."
"Not yet. That doesn't mean you never will.
" He stands and goes to his bookshelf, running his finger along the spines with his back to me, and when he turns around he's holding a thin volume.
"Read this. It covers delayed presentation in shifter genetics.
If what you're experiencing is what I think it might be, you need to understand it. "
He crosses back to the desk and holds it out.