Page 12 of Bonds of Magic
“Plus, you know, losing a sister,” Felix put in. Keelan nodded absently.
“I’m surprised she’s even here,” Ash said.
“You don’t think she’d leave, do you?” Keelan asked. “After this?”
“No, but you saw her. She looks like she wants to tear someone in half with her bare hands.”
Min shook her head. “Val’s smart. She’s a Hunter, but she knows better than to go off half-cocked. She’ll be planning, though. Gathering information. And when she has enough, she’ll be out for blood.”
I swallowed, thinking about Valeria’s pain. One more thing that was my fault.
I was in no shape to participate in combat that afternoon, especially not as Cinda’s potion was wearing off. Noah barked my name at the beginning of class and told me to make myself useful cleaning a bunch of mats in the corner. He barely looked at me as he said it. No acknowledgement at all of what had happened last night.
Not that I really wanted that. But Noah always found a way to cut me to the bone, no matter what he did. It was uncanny, really.
Towards the end of class, he walked over to my corner to dump another mat on the pile I’d finished wiping down.
“I’ll meet you at your room tonight at 7:45.”
I blinked. “What? Why?”
He looked at me like I was dumber than he thought, which was saying something.
“Yourlesson,” he said, in a voice that dripped disdain.
“No, I know that,” I said, shaking my head. “I just—why my room? With Professor Romero, we used his.”
“And we’ll use mine too. But I don’t live in the manor, and you can’t be walking around the woods alone.”
He lets the sentence hang there, freighted with guilt and disgust.
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Of course.”
He gave me a withering look. “Just finish cleaning the mats, okay? And be ready.”
Be ready? For a lesson with him? Was such a thing even possible?
I sighed, my shoulders falling. It had been a long day—and it was far from over.
3
CORY
Ispent the rest of the afternoon wondering where exactly Noah lived, and what his quarters would look like. I’d accidentally stumbled on his cabin in the woods once before, but since I’d stumbled on Noah a second later, I’d barely glimpsed the roof before he hustled me away.
Maybe he didn’t really live in a cabin. Maybe he lived in a toadstool that had shingles, or a hollow log that happened to have an attic. The idea of someone so gruff living somewhere so twee made me laugh despite the awful sadness of the day.
And in the end, it turned out I wasn’t that far off.
That night, after a long walk down two different meandering paths in the shadowy woods, Noah and I came to a little clearing with a tiny, quaint cabin, surrounded by night-dark pines and birches, whose bright white trunks gleamed in the moonlight.
The cabin had a sharply peaked roof, a slightly leaning chimney, gingerbread shingles, and carved wooden shutters thrown open to let the glow of cabin light out into the darkness. It was theantithesis of what I knew of Noah as a person, and it only got stranger once we went inside.
There was a warm fire in the fireplace, burning merrily behind a grate. A knitted, knobbly afghan in russet, orange, and gold lay on the sofa. House plants sat on the mantle and all the windowsills, including one behind the kitchen sink.
The place really was tiny. It was all one room, so the kitchen was one wall of the cabin, the living room a second, and the bedroom a third.
Noah’sbedroom. My cheeks heated as I looked at his bed. It was nothing special. A wide mattress held by a solid wooden frame. But it was covered by a quilt made of intricate, colorful hexagons that must have taken someone ages to make. I wondered who’d given it to him, and why.
