Howl I Met Him: Werewolf Trials

Chapter 5

Nobody slept that night.

Reyna sat on the edge of her dorm bed at two in the morning, staring at her own scraped palms like they belonged to someone else, replaying the way the creature's eyes had locked onto hers.

Waiting for permission.

She didn't know what that meant. She didn't want to know what that meant. But her body kept humming with something that wasn't quite fear, low and electric under her skin, and every time she closed her eyes she saw red.

A knock came at the window.

Not the door. The window. Third floor.

Reyna nearly fell off the bed.

She crossed the room, heart in her throat, and found Kade balanced on the narrow ledge outside like gravity was optional for him, one hand braced against the frame, hair damp like he'd showered off the fight but not the night.

She shoved the window open. "Are you insane?"

"A little."

"You could've knocked on the door like a person."

"Curfew." He climbed through without waiting for an invitation, dropping onto her floor with an ease that made the whole stunt look less impressive than it should've. "Also, doors have witnesses. This didn't."

"Very reassuring. Very not-suspicious."

"I need to show you something." He held up his forearm, and for the first time she noticed the gauze wrapped around it, dark at the edges where blood had soaked through. "Before Ashworth's people patch me up properly and this disappears."

"Kade, what-"

He peeled the gauze back before she could finish.

Underneath, along the pale skin of his inner arm, a mark had risen up dark red, almost black, in a shape that made her breath catch. A crescent moon, split down the middle by a jagged line, like something torn instead of drawn.

Her own left wrist throbbed, sudden and sharp, like it had been waiting all night for a reason to.

She looked down.

The same mark sat there on her skin, faint but undeniable, in the exact same place.

"That's not possible," she whispered.

"That's what I thought too." Kade's voice had gone quiet, careful, like he was handling something that might shatter if he pushed too hard. "It showed up right after the fight. I didn't notice until I was cleaning the wound."

"Why do we have matching creepy tattoos, Kade."

"I don't know."

"You always know something."

"Not this time." He sat down on the edge of her bed, elbows on his knees, staring at his own arm like it might start explaining itself if he looked hard enough. "The old texts mention marks like this. Barely. A line here, a footnote there, nothing anyone ever took seriously because nobody's seen one appear in two hundred years."

"What do they say?"

"That when the seal chooses to bind two people together instead of one, it means the threat's too big for a single bloodline to handle alone." He looked up at her, and there was something careful and unguarded in his face that hadn't been there in the courtyard, hadn't been there with an audience. "It's not a curse mark, Reyna. It's a warden bond. The oldest kind."

Reyna's stomach did something complicated. "A bond."

"Yeah."

"Between us."

"Yeah."

"So what, we're stuck together now? Magically? Against our will?"

"I don't know if it's against anyone's will." His eyes didn't leave hers. "The bond only activates in the old texts when both people are already reaching for each other. It doesn't create the pull. It just makes it visible."

The room went very quiet.

Reyna was aware of her own heartbeat in a way she hadn't been a minute ago, aware of how close he was sitting, aware that if she leaned forward even slightly the last of the distance between them would disappear entirely.

[Do not lean forward. Do not. This is a very bad time to develop a personality around one specific boy's forearm.]

"That's a lot to process at two in the morning," she said instead.

"I know."

"You couldn't have led with the bond thing? You just showed me your arm like it was a bug bite."

"In my defense, I panicked." The corner of his mouth twitched, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders. "I've had this mark for four hours and I've mostly just been sitting with it feeling insane."

"Welcome to the club. We meet whenever the universe decides to ruin our week."

That earned her a real laugh, quiet and surprised, like it had gotten past his guard before he could stop it, and for a second the whole terrifying night shrank down to something almost bearable.

Almost.

His eyes dropped to her mouth, just briefly, just long enough for her to notice, and her whole body went very still and very aware all at once.

Neither of them moved for a long moment.

Then a floorboard creaked in the hallway outside, and Kade was on his feet in half a second, mask sliding back into place like it had never slipped at all.

"I should go," he said. "Before someone sees me in your room and decides that's the scandal of the week instead of the actual monster."

"Right. Yes. Great plan."

He climbed back out onto the ledge, and paused there, one hand on the frame, looking back at her with something unreadable in his expression.

"Reyna."

"Yeah?"

"Don't let anyone see that mark. Not Ashworth, not the council, not anyone." His voice had gone hard again, careful in a different way now. "If they find out the bond activated, they'll stop treating you like a suspect and start treating you like a weapon."

"Great. Love that upgrade."

"I mean it." His eyes held hers one more second. "Please."

Then he was gone, dropping down the ivy along the wall with a grace that shouldn't have been possible for someone who'd been mauled a few hours earlier, and Reyna sat back down on her bed with her wrist still throbbing and her whole chest full of something she didn't have a name for yet.

She didn't get long to sit with it.

Her door banged open without so much as a knock, and Fen barreled in already talking.

"Okay, so, small thing, don't panic, but I just heard Ashworth's people questioning the guy who ran into the library yesterday, the one who told Kade the thing got loose."

Reyna yanked her sleeve down over her wrist on pure instinct. "What about him?"

"They're saying he's the one who opened the east wing door." Fen's face had gone unusually serious, the joke drained clean out of it. "Except he swears he didn't. Says someone gave him a key and told him to check on a noise, and by the time he got there the door was already open and the thing was already loose."

"Someone gave him a key."

"That's what he's saying."

"Who?"

Fen hesitated, and that hesitation alone told Reyna she wasn't going to like the answer.

"He won't say. But I heard one of the professors

mention a name while they were arguing about whether to believe him." Fen dropped his voice down to barely a whisper. "Ashworth."