Page 4 of Bound to the Dorm Elf
SKYLAR
The road’s been nothing but shadows and that damp, piney smell you only get in the woods after midnight. My headlights cut two clean swaths through the dark, turning the wet asphalt into silver ribbons. I’ve got the heat turned low so it doesn’t fog the windshield, and my tote bag is riding shotgun, stuffed with a couple of books on cross-cultural kinship systems, a new spiral notebook, and way too many highlighters for one human being.
The hum of the tires and the soft drum of rain tapping the roof have me drifting between thoughts — half on the sociology project due next week, half on the fact that Coach wants me to practice batting against curveballs tomorrow. The road curves and unspools again, the trees on either side crowding in close like gossiping aunts. I barely see another car out here this time of night.
And then it happens.
Something—no, someone—steps right out of the tree line and into my lane. Not a deer, not a raccoon, not some drunk frat boy playing daredevil. This… thing… is massive. A wall of shadow and height, easily over six feet—no, more—broad in the shoulders, with what looks like black armor clinging to him inplates that glint once in the high beams. My brain throws out words like “cosplay” and “renaissance fair” but they don’t stick. This is heavier, older. The kind of medieval that smells like blood and iron.
“Oh my God?—!”
My foot slams the brake pedal to the floor. The seatbelt cuts into my shoulder, the steering wheel jumps in my hands, and the tires scream against the wet pavement. For half a second, the world is nothing but the high-pitched shriek of rubber and my own pulse hammering behind my eyes.
And a thud.
It’s solid, sickening, too much like the sound of a bat hitting a ball wrong, jarring all the way up my arms. The wheel vibrates against my palms. My teeth clack together. My headlights catch the gleam of white hair whipping across a face I barely register before the figure spins away and crumples to the ground.
I sit there, frozen, both hands still strangling the wheel. My breath saws in and out, ragged, shallow, tasting like metal. Every thought piles on top of the last —Did I just kill someone? Oh God, oh God, do I call 911? What if they’re dead? Am I about to throw up?My stomach twists, a knot of cold and nausea.
The rain patters harder. Somewhere behind me, a car whooshes past in the opposite lane, horn blaring once in disgust before fading into the trees. I can’t move. My brain’s stuck in this awful loop:You hit them. You hit them. You hit them.
I shove the shifter into park and fumble with the seatbelt. My fingers feel like they belong to someone else — clumsy, slow. The buckle pops free and I’m out in the cold before I can talk myself out of it.
The air outside is knife-sharp, biting the heat right out of my cheeks. My sneakers slap on the wet road as I round the hood. The figure is still there, sprawled in the beam of my headlights like something dropped from a nightmare. The armor — if that’swhat it is — is battered and dark, worked with faint lines I can’t make sense of in the glare. His skin, what little I see of it where the plates don’t cover, is—God, it’s not even human color. Not pale, not tan. Dark, deep, like polished obsidian under a sheen of rain.
He’s moving.
Not much — just a push against the asphalt, a shift of weight — but enough to make my heart climb into my throat. He turns his head toward me, and his eyes… his eyes are red. Not irritated-from-lack-of-sleep red. Not contacts-red. Glowing, alive, the kind of red that makes your lizard brain want to run back to the car and lock the doors.
I should back up. I should say something normal, likeAre you okay?orDon’t move, I’ll get help.Instead I just stand there, raindrops prickling down my scalp, staring like an idiot.
He growls something low, rough, the words sliding past me without meaning. It’s not English. It’s not Spanish either — nothing I’ve ever heard, guttural and sharp-edged all at once. The sound curls in my gut, all threat and pain.
My mouth is dry as paper. “I… I’m sorry, I didn’t?—”
He pushes himself up, every movement deliberate, like the weight of the air itself is against him. When he straightens — or tries to — I realize just how much bigger he is than me. I take a half step back without thinking. The glare from the streetlamp catches the wet edge of something along his side, and I realize it’s blood, soaking down in thick ribbons that the rain can’t wash away fast enough.
He takes one step toward me.
It’s slow, but it’s still enough to send my pulse into overdrive. His gaze is fixed, unblinking, like he’s trying to read something in my face that I don’t know I’m giving away. He opens his mouth again, and before I can flinch, the world tilts.
Not for me — for him.
His knees buckle. One hand slaps to the wet pavement, the other clutching his side. He sways like a tree in high wind, and I hear the wet slap of blood hitting the ground over the hiss of the rain. For a second, the red in his eyes flares bright, the way brake lights do right before the car ahead of you stops dead. Then it dulls, flickers, fades.
“Hey—hey, stay with me, okay?” I hear my own voice, high and fast. “Don’t—oh my God, don’t you dare pass out, you can’t just?—”
But he’s already gone.
His head tips forward, white hair spilling across his face, and his massive frame collapses sideways, hitting the asphalt with a sound that makes me wince. I’m left standing there, my breath clouding in the cold, staring at a stranger who should not exist, bleeding out on the road in front of me.
And all I can think is… what the hell just happened?
I drop to my knees beside him, ignoring the cold bite of wet asphalt through my jeans. My hands hover, useless for a second, because I have no idea where to start. Up close, the details slam into me all at once, stealing what little air I had left.
His skin isn’t just dark — it’s deep, glossy black, like obsidian pulled straight from the earth and polished until it could hold my reflection. The rain doesn’t dull it; each drop slides off in silver trails that vanish into the shadows of his armor. My fingers twitch toward his arm before I think better of it, because every instinct screamsdon’t touch.
His hair — long, stark white, streaked darker where it’s plastered to him by rain — spills past his shoulders, the strands catching light from the nearest streetlamp and throwing it back like cold fire. The clothing under his armor is nothing I’ve ever seen in person, only in illustrations from ancient history textbooks: layers of dark fabric stitched with precise, geometric patterns, threads that gleam faintly when the light hits just right.
