Chapter 3

SOREL

~•~

I got in the car.

I still don’t know why. My legs just did it, folded me into this leather seat that smelled like money, and then the door shut and the noise of the courtyard cut off all at once and it was just me and him and the guy from before in the front.

“Take the long way,” Ramiel said. “She needs a minute.”

“I need a lot more than a minute.” My hands wouldn’t stop. I sat on them. “I need somebody to tell me what just happened back there. You hit him. He went down like you shot him and you barely moved.”

“I know.”

“That’s it? You know?”

“What do you want me to say?” He asked, his tone laced with sarcasm.

“I want you to say sorry, we made a mistake, here’s your stop, get out.” My voice cracked on it. “I have class at two. I have a commission due Friday. I bought that guy coffee an hour ago, and now I’m in a car with a person who—” I stopped. “Pull over. I want out.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You can’t, or you won’t?”

“Both.”

“That’s kidnapping,” I said. “You get that, right? This is a kidnapping. People saw. Everyone saw.”

“Everyone saw me protect you. That’s what they saw.” He turned and looked at me, those eyes, that pale blue that didn’t sit right on a face, and I made myself look back even though everything in me said don’t. “What’s the last thing you remember feeling? Right before I walked over. In the courtyard.”

“Humiliated.” I answered.

“Before that. When the air changed.”

I went cold.

“You felt it,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“I don’t know what that was.”

“Yes, you do. You just don’t have a word for it.” He sat back. “Neither does anybody, really. There’s an old one, but you wouldn’t like it.”

“Try me.” I scoffed.

“Resonator.” He answered, his voice cold.

“That’s not a word.”

“It is where I’m from.” He said it flat, like that explained anything. “You don’t have a scent, Sorel. To people like me. Everybody on this earth gives off something, all day, you can’t help it, and we read it the way you read a face. But you, you give off nothing. You’re the only quiet thing I’ve ever stood next to.”

“Okay.” I pressed back into the door. “Okay, you’re insane. That’s, that actually makes the most sense of anything you’ve said. You’re rich and you’re insane and you decided today—”

“Marcus had three friends by the steps,” he said. “You heard my friend Tobias say it. Three more. Do you think I made them up?”

I didn’t answer. I’d heard it. That was the problem.

“They weren’t lining up to hurt you,” he said. “That’s the part you need to understand. They were lining up to take you. Because what you are doesn’t happen anymore. There’s maybe a handful left in the world, if that, and you walked into a courtyard full of the exact people who’d kill each other to own one.”

“Own.” The word came out of me wrong. “Own one.”

“I’m being honest with you, since that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” He asked, still maintaining sarcasm.

“People can’t own people.” I stuttered, trying to make sense of how fast everything was going

“You’re right.” He held my eyes. “Which is why I did what I did. So nobody could.”

The car went quiet. Tobias didn’t say anything up front. I looked out the window and watched my whole normal day go by outside the glass, students with backpacks, a girl walking a dog, the coffee cart, all of it ten feet away and completely gone now, like a place I used to live.

“What did you do?” I asked. “Back there, when you said that thing. Mine, witnessed. What did that do?”

He was quiet a second too long.

“It married us,” he answered like it was nothing. “More or less.”

I turned and looked at him.

“Pull the car over,” I said. “Pull it over right now, I’m going to be sick.”

“I’m not pulling over,” he said. “You’re not going to be sick. You’re going to breathe, and you’re going to listen, because I’m done beating around the bush here.”

“Then say it straight.” I had my hand on the door handle. I don’t know what I thought I’d do, throw myself out of a moving car in the middle of Caldemoor, but I held it anyway. “You keep saying people like you. Like you’re not the same as me. So what are you?”

“You won’t believe it.”

“I just watched you put a guy on the ground without moving your arm. Try me.”

He looked at me for a long second. Outside the window Caldemoor slid by, the gray stone, the towers of Virehaven up on the hill behind us getting smaller.

“I’m a Werewolf,” he said, so casually.

I laughed. It came out ugly, half a sob. “Okay.”

“You asked.”

“No, you’re right, that’s, that’s perfect.” I was shaking now and laughing at the same time and it scared me how close they felt. “Werewolves. At Virehaven. Going to class. How many of you are there? Just out of, you know, curiosity, while I lose my mind.”

“At the school? A handful. More than you’d want to know about.” He said it calm, which was worse. “Marcus. The three by the steps. Tobias, up front. Me.”

“Stop it.” I teased.

“You wanted the truth right?” He asked, a bit confused.

“I wanted you to be a normal crazy person.” My voice broke all the way. “The kind I could get away from. Not this. Not—you’re not a wolf, you’re a guy in a coat who needs help—”

“Sorel.”

“Don’t.”

“Look at me.”

I didn’t want to but I looked anyway. I always looked when he said it and I hated that already.

“His name is Vassek,” Ramiel said, quiet now. “I’m going to let him up to the surface. I won’t touch you. You’re safe. But you need to see it, because we don’t have time for you to spend deciding whether I’m lying or not.”

“What are you—”

He breathed out.

And the air in the car went thick, that same heavy feeling from the courtyard, except a hundred times more, pressing on my ears, my chest. His shoulders changed first. They got wider, then his hands on his knees, the fingers going long, dark hair coming up over the backs of them, over his wrists, and even up his neck.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even scream. I just watched it happen a foot away from me.

His face was the worst part. It was still him in there while his jaw pushed out and his teeth came in too sharp and too many, while the hair spread up his cheeks. And his eyes.

His eyes lit up.

That pale blue I’d already decided didn’t belong on a person, it went bright, lit from the inside, glowing in the dark of the car like two cold little lamps fixed right on me.

“Oh my God,” I said. It came out as nothing, no air behind it. “Oh my God, oh my God—”

“Breathe.” His voice came out lower, rougher, scraped, but it was words, he was still talking, this thing was still talking to me. “I told you. You’re safe.”

I was pressed so hard into the door the handle dug into my back. Up front Tobias hadn’t even turned around. Like this was normal. Like a monster opening up in the back seat was normal.

“Put it back,” I begged. “Please, please put it back, please—”

The hair started to pull in and the shoulders dropped. His face came back to itself piece by piece, the teeth, the jaw, all of it folding down until it was just a man again in a coat that didn’t fit right anymore, breathing hard, watching me.

But the eyes stayed bright a second longer than the rest. Like Vassek wanted one more look before he went under.

“Now you believe me,” Ramiel said.

I was about to open the car’s door.