House of Slide Hybrid

by Juliann Whicker

  Eventually the dancing stopped, and Ash was the focus of attention. He dropped beside me and took my hand in his firm grip, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

  “Do you have anything I can eat?” he asked Chloe before she had a chance to grill him. She frowned at him while I stood, needing distance from the faces that stared curiously at us.

  “I’ll go ask Jones if there’s more stew,” I offered, moving away from Ash. Why was he there? Why had he left Lewis alone? Maybe if I brought food he would be done answering questions and I could find out.

  “Don’t disturb Jones. If there’s anything left it’ll be in the pot,” Chloe warned never letting her gaze off of Ash. “Hybrid camps don’t usually have any Cools, much less two.”

  I scrambled away from the fire and barely heard Ash’s reply, something about coming to check on his cousin, like Orrin was his cousin. Maybe he was; what did I know? I found the stew pot and a bowl and was busily scraping the sides when Zeke sighed beside me.

  “Sand, I think I’m leaving,” he said, sounding so alone and sad that I turned around to look at him. His white hair stood out as bright as ever but his downcast face hid his eyes.

  “Why? You don’t know enough to be safe yet, do you? You should stay.” I had a hard time concentrating on his words when I wanted to get back to Ash, afraid to find out but needing to know. I’d definitely seen Lewis, hadn’t I? What had happened to the color of his soul?

  He looked up at me, and there was a flash of something strange in his eyes that made me really see him. “I think I’m ready. All these drills that we do, over and over again, and I don’t get to use my full potential. Besides that, I feel like I don’t fit in. I’ve got one of the strongest gifts here, but I’m not being taught how to use it, only general stuff about demons. It would be different if we had a real trainer instead of Jones who tries, but he can’t have seen and faced down anything real.”

  “You’re really leaving here to take on demons? Wow. I didn’t think you were stupid. How can you fight something if you admit that you haven’t learned enough?” I heard my voice rise, but wasn’t sure why his words frustrated me so much.

  “Maybe I’ll find a different camp, one where they have us go and actually do something instead of stay in a carefully protected cell keeping occupied while the rest of the world burns.” His voice was so angry, his eyes like shards of ice as he looked at me.

  “Do you want to keep the world from burning or make it burn faster?” I wasn’t sure. There was something so desperate about him; it reminded me of myself.

  He shook his head as he backed away from me. “I just wanted you to tell Chloe that I’m sorry that I had to go. Tell her tomorrow, okay?”

  “So you have a head start and she doesn’t have time to drag you back where you belong? I don’t think so. You’ll get killed out there, seriously, it’s not safe…”

  “You think it’s safe in here? It’s been nice knowing you, Sand, but if you think I’m safe anywhere I am, you’re crazy. The longer I’m here the more in danger everyone else becomes. It’s always going to be like that. People always get hurt around me, the ones I care about get hurt the most. I meant to stay away from people here—I always do, but I get to know them and it’s harder…”

  It was exactly how I felt. “Hey,” I said as I put a hand on his arm. It was only a quick touch, but something about it made him react, throwing my arm off of him.

  “Tell Chloe…” he said as he left, disappearing in the darkness.

  I stood there beside the cold stew pot with Ash’s bowl in my hand staring after Zeke. I couldn’t just let him leave, not when he wasn’t alone, not really. Jones could help him, someone could help him if only he let us.

  I put down the bowl then ran after Zeke, sure I could catch up with him before we left the camp, but he was faster than I’d thought. I caught glimpses of his white hair in the moonlight as I chased him. He slowed, seeming to wait for me until I finally caught up with him.

  “What do you want?” he demanded, his voice as cold and empty as it had been full a moment before.

  “You’re wrong to think that there isn’t help for you here. You’re not the only one who has problems. I can’t tell you how many times in the last year I wanted to run away, but what good does that do?”

  He cocked his head and stared at me in a way that seemed familiar and distant at the same time. “Would it be so bad,” he murmured as he stepped closer to me.

  “I guess that depends how much you like running,” I said but felt a little bit weird, like I’d missed a step in this conversation. Something weird was going on with him, his energy shifting so instead of feeling the intense energy of him, it was like it had reversed, so energy was being sucked towards him instead.

  “How did they do it?” he asked as he took another step closer.

  I began to get a creepy feeling at the back of my neck and took a step away from him. Hybrids were unstable and I was beginning to think that this was a bad idea. “Do what?”

  “Leave your soul like that, so utterly untouched, perfect, unguarded? You must have been locked up for years, but you never mention it. Maybe you don’t remember.”

  I took another step backwards and found myself backed against a tree while he moved towards me so quickly that I barely had time to open my mouth to scream.

  Chapter 17

  Zeke’s hand touched my skin and the scream shriveled in my throat as my legs convulsed once then collapsed. I stared at the face now strange, a twisted kind of mask that didn’t seem to see me. So this is what he meant when he hurt people, a distant part of my mind noted as I stayed unmoving at the base of the tree, staring up at him unable to blink. The feeling of energy being eaten by him increased as he hung above me.

  “You’re the reason I had to leave,” he said in a sing-song low voice that was as piercing as it was low and gentle. “That soul is too much, too tempting. I know what you must be, bait for my kind, or what’s left of us.” There was no bitterness only cold emptiness. “But you don’t know, and so I’m sorry for what I’m about to do to you.”

  He put his hands on either sides of my face while I stared, unable to do more than twitch my arms. He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead on mine, inhaling deeply.

  The world collapsed on itself as he pulled my soul, sparks imploding inside of me, a black hole that ran through me erasing emotions, thoughts, me. It was only a moment before he turned away from me, searching the darkness, letting me fall over limp in the mud and dead leaves. He made a sound like a hurt animal before he was gone, tearing through the woods like a feral creature.

  My limbs started to thaw but there were spots of emptiness inside of me. I could curl the tips of my fingers when I felt new hands on me, hands that pulled me up to a sitting position and one of the most beautiful faces I’d ever seen peered at me with blatant curiosity in his coal black eyes, eyes that matched the curls framing his face.

  I took a shuddering breath and realized that I hadn’t been breathing. Another breath, and another, I tried not to hyperventilate while the beautiful stranger rubbed my wrists then worked up my arms to my shoulders. I would have shrugged him off if I could, but I could barely manage to not fall back over.

  “I apologize,” he said in a low dark voice that had all the control and modulation of a well-oiled gun. “Allow me to introduce myself.” His accent was as beautiful as he was, darkly alien. He stopped rubbing my shoulders for a moment while he performed an elaborate bow. “Raoul, House of Grasse at your service.”

  He continued touching my shoulders then my neck, not pausing on the runes where they were melted into my skin. I flinched away from the touch as I waited for pain, but his touch was the opposite of pain, soothing actually, and kind of pleasant if you could call the opposite of torture pleasant.

  I shifted away from him as mobility returned and said, because my tongue had managed to unstick from the roof of my mouth, “Wha-at?” It wasn’t good but at least it was something.

&nbs
p; “That creature which attacked you is going to die,” he said pleasantly, soothingly, like I wanted Zeke to die.

  I pulled away from him, lurching to the side but managing to get his hands off of me.

  “You-’re not-a Hy-brid,” I said between ragged hitches of breathing.

  He smiled like I was a complete idiot and I wondered why I was still there when I was able to move. I tried to get to my feet but only managed to hit my head on the tree. So that explained why I was still there.

  He reached into his dark coat and drew out something that reflected the silver moonlight. “I should be tracking him, but I could hardly leave you like this, defenseless,” he said as he took the shimmering object and pressed it into my hand. “You shouldn’t ever be unprotected, not when you’re so very precious.”

  The words came across straight creepy as he leaned over me, a stranger I didn’t begin to know but who acted like he knew everything about me. I realized what was curled in my frozen fingers—a knife that was small enough to fit perfectly in my hand. It was nothing like the huge dagger Lewis had presented me with—

  I jerked away from him, struggling to loosen my grasp on the knife as I remembered Lewis’s knife at my Mother’s Wild House and their Intending ceremony. I had to stab Raoul, had to make my arm move in his direction, pushing the pointy piece of metal into his flesh, preferably somewhere it wouldn’t kill him because he had saved me from whatever Zeke was doing to me. I got my arm to swing in the general direction of Raoul who had the nerve to take my hand, still wrapped around his little knife and press a kiss on the back of it before he stood, elegant, in pointy black boots, bowed to me, then disappeared into the darkness.

  It took me a few more tries before I made it to my feet, knife still clutched in my hand. What was I supposed to do with another Wild blade? Did this mean that he was my Intended? Wasn’t it against the rules to have more than one? Surely Wilds weren’t okay with anyone having more than one Intended. Things would get so messy. Wilds hated mess. It couldn’t have been an Intending Ceremony. There was no ceremony. Wilds loved ceremony, and me in my gray uniform couldn’t have looked less ceremonial.

  I took a deep breath. No thinking, only moving. If I thought about what Zeke had done…yep, hyperventilating again. One breath. One step. One breath. One step.

  I veered in the direction of camp, at least I thought it was the direction of camp, not thinking about the thing Zeke had almost done.

  “Dari,” Ash’s voice whispered low. I fell against his chest, glad when his cool hands caught me, dragging me to the edge of camp where he helped me sit on a fallen log. Ash wasn’t going to lift me up like I weighed nothing, not like Lewis. “What happened?” he asked, lifting up my hand where it still held onto the knife. I frowned at it until finally my stubborn fingers opened and the knife dropped into the mud.

  I shook my head, unable, unwilling to put that sensation into words, to admit what I didn’t want to think about.

  “I came to camp to tell you that he’s stirring,” Ash continued in his compelling voice. “I think he’s going to be okay. Dari? Are you all right?”

  I’d made a sound, one of those unidentifiable things that come from deep inside your belly. It was a sound of relief, of pain and anxiety so long held in check. It was a physical relief to hear that Lewis was all right.

  I collapsed against Ash, sobbing for no rational reason, soaking his gray shirt with tears I’d managed to hold back for so long. He was all right. Lewis had survived and was out there somewhere. Nothing else that had happened mattered, not the weird Wild, not Zeke, not Aiden, nothing. I felt the heavy ache in my chest shift until I felt like I could float off the ground.

  I pulled away from Ash, wiping my face hastily with my sleeves.

  “Can you take me to him? I don’t know how long it will take for my legs to work again, and I’ll get lost.”

  “I don’t have to take you,” Ash said quietly, leaning back so I wasn’t touching him. He pointed behind me. “He’s here.”

  I stopped breathing as I turned towards the darkness. My heart lurched, the bond craving intensified along with the bloodlust leaving me slightly nauseous and dizzy, but then all of that disappeared as he moved closer and I saw the panes of his cheek in the mottled moonlight, his skin appearing as cold as the night.

  It didn’t matter that I was dizzy as I moved towards him, my heart leaping around in my chest as I was consumed, not with the desire to slash him open and take his blood, but with relief. Pure, unadulterated relief that left me even dizzier than Zeke’s whatever had done.

  One step, another, closing the distance slowly, testing the consuming need to complete the bond, but it was eclipsed by the other sensation, the joy that he was alive, that I hadn’t killed him, that I had another chance of making things right, that he was there, with me.

  “Hi,” I said in a voice that was barely a whisper. I felt so full of things to say that I didn’t know where to start. I took another step, then another, until I broke into a run that cut through the space between us until he was there, not more than two steps away from me. “How are you?” I asked as my fingers itched to break the space between us, to touch his skin and smooth his hair the way I’d grown accustomed to touching him while he’d been asleep.

  “I’m burned out,” he said in a voice that was dark, cold, strange to hear in the night.

  I frowned at him, unsure what he meant. “You were burned out,” I said.

  “Am. The fury is gone and isn’t coming back. That part of me is gone.”

  He rubbed a hand across his face and I felt a weird relief that made no sense to me as I stepped forwards, smoothing the skin of his cold arm with my fingers.

  “It’s okay.” I told him as I tangled my other hand in the fabric of his shirt. “I’ll find you a coat. I’ll keep you warm and safe. Nothing else matters so long as you’re alive. What else matters? We’ll figure this out.” I needed him to put his arms around me, but he had them down by his sides. Was he fighting the bond? “We’ll be bound together, if that’s what you want; if you don’t want that’s okay too. I’m so happy that you came back to me. I was so worried, so scared, and even though I have the bond that aches it doesn’t matter because I’m never going to do anything to hurt you. I’m going to keep you safe, no matter how hard it is, how long it takes. I’m going to protect you.”

  He sighed then put his hands on my back. I pressed my face into his shoulder, holding him as tightly as I could, hanging on for dear life as I heard his heart pound. He wasn’t as warm, but he was still solid, still smelled like sunshine on grass. I pulled away to turn my head and kiss his neck, his jaw, the rough patches on his cheek and chin. Every centimeter of skin was so precious, so perfect.

  “Dari, we need to talk.” His voice was low, darker than before. I shivered as I nodded, holding him tighter.

  “The Code. Right. Well, we’ll get married then, before the bond stuff, and then it’ll be fine. We could stay here, fight demons, we could go anywhere, do anything, so long as we’re together nothing else matters.”

  He dropped his forehead against mine and I froze for a moment, reminded of Zeke and the emptiness, the hollowness. I froze and my breathing caught as he touched my face gently with his hand. It wasn’t like Zeke. It was nothing like Zeke, opposite of Zeke. I felt things inside of me growing and swelling as he breathed my breath, as he tightened his hold on my face, careful, deliberate with an underlying desperation that I could taste.

  “There are things you need to know before you say anything like that.”

  His face was such a riotous combination of tenderness and intensity that I wasn’t sure what to think. His hand smoothed around the back of my head while I lifted a hand feeling fire in my fingertips as I touched the planes of his cool face. Fire. He felt it too. I could see it in his eyes even if they would never burn again. The emptiness roared to life inside of me as his soul wrapped around mine. I shook apart, held together by his hands where they framed my face.

>   “It doesn’t matter.” I took a half step towards him, pressing my heart against his. He turned his head to the side.

  “What happened tonight? Someone touched you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I slid my hand up to his hair, turning his gaze back towards me. He looked so dark, so desperate when he looked at me, like he didn’t want me to see the pain and fear inside of him. I took a deep breath and smiled determined to make what had happened okay even while I felt a stirring sickness in my stomach that corresponded with the memory of Zeke’s emptiness swallowing me. “I got attacked by an unstable Hybrid but a Wild saved me. It’s not very interesting, except…” I opened my mouth then closed it, hating the thoughts that went through my head, things I really didn’t want to think, about the Hollow one who was going to destroy the world, and the fact that I might have already met him. How could I protect him if I kept something like that away from him? I opened my mouth to tell Lewis about how Zeke had messed with my soul but instead said, “The Wild that saved me gave me a knife. He wouldn’t take it back so I think he’s got a weird idea about something Intendingish.”

  “Wild blades are interesting.” His voice sounded so flat that I pulled away, or I would have, but his arms wouldn’t cooperate. I relaxed against him, glad that however his voice sounded his arms were where they belonged: wrapped firmly around me.

  The rest of it came out in a rush. “Zeke paralyzed me and messed with my soul. He might be the one who’s going to destroy the world. Don’t worry about it though. I’m sure that we can take him.”

  He laughed, the kind of laugh that I never wanted to hear again, but at the same time he buried his face in my hair and pulled me tight against his body, so the laugh wasn’t as awful as it might have been. His arms were such a relief, strong in spite of his burning out.