The silence runs for exactly three seconds.
Thane turns around.
"Ashford," he says, and manages to make it sound like a greeting and a warning simultaneously.
"Valorix." Ryder walks toward us. His stride is measured and even, and the death magic I associate with him is running high. I can feel it through the bond, cold and controlled and very close to not controlled at all. "The response team has been looking for you. Both of you. There's a debrief."
"We were just heading there," I say.
"Were you." His eyes move to the scorch mark on the wall. Back to Thane. "Long route."
"We ran into a complication," Thane says.
"I can see that."
The temperature in the corridor has dropped on one side and risen on the other, Ryder's death magic pressing cold against Thane's residual heat, and I am standing between them in the literal sense of the word, and this will be a problem in ten seconds if I don't intervene.
"The complication was a near-bond formation," I say, because I've decided that brutal honesty works here. "My null current pulled on Thane's fire during the fight. I stopped it. We were discussing it."
Ryder looks at me. The bond is still blazing and I can feel every degree of what he's not saying, the controlled fury of it, the thing underneath the fury that I'm not examining right now because this is not the moment.
"You stopped it," he says.
"Yes."
"You stopped a bond formation on your own."
"I've had practice," I say, and the look he gives me tells me he knows I mean the first bond, the one between us, the one I tried to stop and failed. His jaw tightens.
"We should discuss this," he says. "Properly. Not in a hallway."
"Agreed," Thane says. "Once I've spoken with the debrief team."
"I wasn't talking to you."
"I gathered." Thane's voice is very even. "I'm talking to you. Whatever is happening with Angelic's null current involves all three Houses at this point, Ashford. You don't have exclusive jurisdiction over it."
"I'm her professor."
"You're her bonded," Thane says, and the word is flat, clinical, stripped of anything inflammatory. "That's different. And you know it."
Ryder takes two steps forward.
I step sideways, putting myself between them, which is not a good strategy against a reaper and a dragon but it's the one I have. "Stop."
Neither of them stops. They've both stilled in the specific way of people calculating range and angles.
"I said stop." I don't raise my volume. I've learned that volume doesn't work on either of them. "Ryder. The debrief team is waiting. Thane needs a healer for his ribs. I need both of you to be functional adults for the next forty-five minutes and then you can go back to whatever territorial nonsense this is."
A beat.
"His ribs," Ryder says.
"The possessed professor had him off the floor. Two or three bruised, not broken. He refused to let me look properly."
Ryder's eyes move to Thane's torso. His face flickers, too fast to read, and then it's gone. "Healer's station is on the second level. You know where it is."
"I've been here longer than you've had a reason to care about my injuries," Thane says.
