Where Sean is malfunctioning, Killian has gone full shutdown. He was already withdrawing before, sure, pulling away inch by inch, spending his time by windows and exits like he’s auditioning for a vampire melodrama. But I thought we’d made some progress after what happened on the rooftop.
Now there’s an edge to his silence. An anger that wasn’t there before, directed at something I can’t figure out. He’s been grinding his teeth so hard I can hear it from across the room, and he mutters in his sleep.
Yesterday, I walked into the kitchen and he had his hands flat on the counter, head bowed, fingers white against the marble. When I said his name, he jerked upright like I’d caught him in a trance.
“You okay?”
“Fine.”
That’s always the answer.Fine.
He never means it any more than I did.
I brought it up to Micah and Rowan separately, because I’m not above a good old-fashioned strategy of divide and interrogate. Micah frowned, adjusted his glasses, and said he’d noticed Sean acting weird but figured it was just Sean.
Which is… fair. The man once spent an entire afternoon trying to teach Villeneuve’s koi fish to high five. There is a wide latitude for “weird” when it comes to Sean Brewer.
Rowan was more thoughtful about it. “Killian’s been tense,” he said, which qualified for understatement of the century. “But I don’t know why, other than the obvious reasons. He’s not talking to me. He’s not talking to anyone.”
“He’s talking to Sean,” I said.
Rowan’s eyebrows shot up. “How do you know?”
“Because I came downstairs two nights ago and they were in the courtyard arguing. As soon as I opened the door, they both shut up. Sean startedwhistling.”
“Sean can’t whistle.”
“I’m aware.”
And then there was the running.
Tuesday morning, I found Sean in the back garden in his wolf form, sprinting in circles.
He wasn’t even chasing anything. Just... running in a wide loop around the fountain, tongue out, making these frustrated whining sounds. When he saw me watching from the window, he stopped, sat down, and stared at me with his one good eye like he was willing me to understand something through sheer golden retriever intensity.
I opened the window. “You good?”
He let out a noise that was half bark, half anguished groan, and went back to running in circles.
The bond gives me no clues, except the distress I feel coming from them both. Whatever happened, it’s like they want to tell me, but they either can’t or won’t and it’s frustrating as hell either way.
Even Villeneuve is acting off.
He hasn’t spoken to me directly in two days outside of class, which isn’t unusual in itself, but the way he’s doing it is. He’s not avoiding me the way he was before, where I’d catch him watching and he’d look away.
Now he’s avoiding me like I’m a live grenade.
He leaves rooms when I enter them. Takes corners when he sees me coming down the hall. He even sent Margot to deliver a message that could have been a text.
“The Professor says dinner will be at seven,” she told me earlier in her wispy, unnerving way.
“He couldn’t walk twenty feet to tell me that himself?”
“The Professor is indisposed.”
“He’s in the next room. I can hear him turning pages.”
Margot’s expression didn’t change because Margot’s expression never changes. “Shall I relay a message?”
