12. Hale
Hale
“Ithink that was the most interesting Combat Theory lecture, ever,” I state as we leave the room ahead of everyone else.
“Yeah, fucking brilliant,” Asha mutters, rubbing her elbow. “This stupid body.” It’s a hiss, and it’s pissed off.
“We’ll get your real one back—”
“And then what?” she demands as she turns on me. “Will you still want to fuck that body, Prince Hale?”
“Whoa,” I say, putting my hands up. “Why are you attacking me?”
She sighs heavily. “I hate that this is the weak body you met, fucked, fell for, bonded with…. whatever. Doesn’t matter,” she mumbles and storms off.
It doesn’t take me long to catch up with her tiny strides.
I move past her and stop in front of her, blocking her way.
She glares up at me, tears pricking her eyes.
I fall three heads over arse for her. Deeper than before.
It’s real, visceral, savage and completely instinctive.
I keep my hands loose at my sides because if I grab her the way I want to, she’ll take it as proof of every accusation she’s throwing at me.
“You think I care what body you’re wearing? ”
“I think you’ve only ever known this one.”
“I’ve known you in it. That’s not the same thing.”
She goes quiet at that, which worries me more. Asha being quiet means she’s building something worse behind her tears.
“When you get your real body back,” I say, “you’re still going to be the same fucking menace who threw a pillow at my head and threatened to peel my skin off.
You’re still going to argue with Blackridge—which no one does, by the way—because you can’t help yourself.
You’re still going to be chaos wearing a crown. ”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then explain the point, because I’m not following the maths that gets you from ‘I’m in a weaker body’ to ‘Hale only wants this one.’”
She wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand, furious with herself for the tears rather than with me, I think. “The point is you don’t know me. You know a witch with crap shoes and a temper. You don’t know the goddess who eats armies and bathes in blood.”
“Literally?” I ask, with a smirk, knowing the answer already.
The scathing look sent my way makes my cock hard. “Literally.”
“So teach me.”
That stops her.
“You keep saying I only know this version of you like it’s some kind of insult,” I say.
“It is. Don’t you see that?”
“Have you considered that if I fell for the dumbed-down version of you, then I will be enraptured by your true self?”
“Don’t use the word enraptured,” she mutters. “It sounds weird coming from you.”
“Fine. Enraptured is off the table. What word do you want?”
“None of them. I want you to stop trying to fix this with words.”
“Then what do you want me to do?”
She stares at me, quiet, her jaw clenched so tight it looks like her teeth will crack.
“I want you to remember that when I’m her again, I won’t need you the way this body does.
I won’t get cold and want your fire for warmth.
I won’t bleed weak little witch blood you can heal with a look.
I’ll be a goddess with no mercy, and you’ll be a hellhound who happened to catch my attention while I was slumming it in a body that couldn’t fight its way out of a wet paper bag. ”
“Ouch,” I mutter, hurt by her words even though I know she is using them deliberately.
“Yeah, ouch,” she says and turns to leave.
“No,” I say, grabbing the back of her tee and drawing her to a stop. I won’t lay my hands on her to restrain her.
She jolts to a halt with a low growl. “Let me go.”
“Nope. Never. This isn’t an attraction to your pretty, witch face and perky arse, Asha. This is soul deep. Why don’t you understand that?”
She twists enough to look at me, and I let her go. Her tee is all skewed, but she ignores it. “Soul deep. I don’t even know what a soul is, Hale. This is what you have to understand about me.”
Now it all starts to make sense. I kick myself for not realising it sooner. Of course she doesn’t. Gods don’t have souls. They have… I narrow my eyes. “What do you have instead of a soul?”
“Huh?” she asks, taken aback by my random question.
“You said you don’t even know what a soul is, which means you have something else running the show. What is it?”
She blinks at me, and for a second the fury drains out of her face, replaced by something more careful.
“Chaos,” she says slowly, like she’s working it out as the word leaves her mouth.
“I don’t have a soul. I have chaos. It’s not a feeling.
It’s not an anchor. It’s a force that doesn’t attach to anything unless it chooses to. ”
“And it chose to attach to us.”
“It shouldn’t have.”
“But it did.”
She looks away from me, towards the courtyard where rain keeps hammering the stone, and I watch her throat work like she’s swallowing something bigger than words. “That’s what scares me,” she admits, quiet enough that I have to lean down to catch it.
“You’re scared, so you keep pushing us away. Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Be scared or push you away?”
“Both. In that order.”
She smiles slightly before it drops away. “Tell me more about your family. King and Queen Hellhound.”
“Those are not their titles,” I say with a laugh, “but okay. What do you want to know?”
Maybe this is easier. If she knows more, she won’t be so afraid.
“Everything,” she says. “Are they anything like you?”
“My father’s worse. Bigger, meaner, twice as loud when he loses his temper. My mother’s the only creature who scares him.”
“I like her already.”
“She’d like you. She threw a chair at him once for missing my sister’s debut in the arena. And by chair, I mean obsidian throne.”
Asha fights a real smile now instead of the brittle one she’s been wearing since the lecture hall. “Sister?”
I nod slowly. “Gaia.”
“Pretty. Do I want to know about the arena?”
I place my hand lightly on the back of her neck and walk us down the hallway towards the stairs for the dining hall. “My mother rules a hell dimension. Some call it Hell. It’s one of several. She likes to smash naughty demons over the head with a baseball bat studded with nails.”
Asha blinks up at me. “I think I just fell in love.”
I scrunch up my nose. “With my mother?”
She smiles and looks away. “And your dad?”
“He is the Master Hellhound. He is one of seven husbands to my mother.”
Asha blinks. “Wow. Your mother is badass.”
“She’s the ruler of Hell. What did you expect?”
“Not that.”
“She also has a wife.”
Asha raises her eyebrow. “Wow. Can I meet her?”
“Maybe, one day.”
“Not fair, but I get the reasoning. You think I’ll like her more than you.”
“Would you?”
She holds my gaze for longer than necessary before answering. “No, probably not.”
“Progress.” I kiss the top of her head and lead her to the all-you-can-eat buffet in the dining hall and let her go to start piling food onto plates for both of us. She is diminutive next to me, and it fires up my protective instincts when Eska moves in next to her.
“Don’t even fucking look at her, wolf,” I growl.
He growls back. Aggressive to the last. “Fuck off, Hale.”
“Do you want this to turn into another courtyard smackdown?” I ask calmly, placing the plates on the tray Asha is clutching as she grimaces at us both. “Was your forced time-out not long enough?”
Eska inhales deeply. He is trying to hang onto his temper by the looks of it, and that just intrigues me. “I said fuck off. I’m getting food.”
“So get it and move on. Away from the witch.” I make a shooing motion.
He glares at it and then makes the mistake of shifting his gaze to Asha. He sneers, and I slam my hand into his shoulder.
“I said, move along.”
Eska stumbles back a step before he catches himself, fury cutting sharp lines across his face. His wolf-gold eyes flick to Asha again, and I feel the growl building in my chest before I’ve even decided to let it out.
“Touch me again,” he says, “and see what happens.”
“Try me.” I take a step closer, close enough that he has to tip his head back to keep glaring at me. “I’m not the one who’s going to regret it.”
Eska’s attention drops to Asha again briefly before he sneers and moves away.
But I see why he did seconds later.
Tobin and Leith have moved into the dining hall and are fast approaching, looking like they are about to burn something down. Eska knows he is outnumbered and outgunned.
“What?” I ask, taking the plates back from Asha’s tray to load up some more. “Why do you two look like you set the library on fire, and it burned you back?”
“We didn’t set the library on fire,” Tobin says. “The library ate a journal.”
“So, normal then,” Asha says as we move away from the food to find a table.
“Talk,” I say as we sit. “Before I decide the suspense is worse than whatever you’re hiding.”
Tobin glances around the hall. The tables are filling up, none of the students paying attention beyond the usual wary distance they keep from our corner.
Leith waits until a group passes before he leans in. “I found a journal in the records office,” Leith says.
“A diary?” I ask with a frown. “Where is it?”
“It’s gone. It tore itself out of Tobin’s magic and disappeared into a wall. It contained a line about a hollow god. It also let us read sovereign script neither of us should be able to read.”
Asha leans closer. “What was the line?”
“The Hollow God endures,” Leith says. “Then it gave us this—hollow isn’t empty, hollow is hidden. Then something about the first sovereign dividing death to preserve it.”
“That’s a lot of syllables to say nothing.”
“It means something,” Tobin says. “We just don’t have the rest of it yet.”
“And the journal ran off before you got the rest of it. Convenient,” Asha mumbles as she sits back and shovels food into her mouth.
“Not convenient. Deliberate.” Leith glances towards the hall entrance like he expects the thing to walk in on legs. “Something didn’t want us finishing the sentence.”
“SilverGate,” I say.
“Precisely. SilverGate is protecting StormGate,” Leith says and sits back.
I narrow my eyes. “What makes you say that? Is it not protecting itself?”
Leith shakes his head, and I sit back, food forgotten for once as I glance at Asha.