Though that wasn’t what turned her guts to soup.
It was the taste of him. The taste of his skin. He’d shoved his hand over her mouth so fast and firm she hadn’t had a chance to close it. And now her tongue was touching the soft plume ofhis palm. Sweet as syrup from something overripe, that sense informed her.
And she hated it for that.
She hated all of this.
It didn’t even help that the girl got it right, and no wraith howled its way into the lecture hall. Or that when he finally let her go, he almost seemed to be trembling, too. As if he’d been afraid, on some level, the same as she had. No, no, the only thing that she could think of was that she would never get that out of her head now.
He was the worst person in the world.
Her mortal enemy until the day she died.
And now she had to always know that he tasted like sin.
Chapter Six
She decided the best course of action was to get really fucking excellent at fighting things with magic. And not just because three students were now missing after her first class, and the one who had returned after being grabbed by a gargoyle was simply not the same as he had been.
There was also her mortal enemy, making everything worse.
He had ended Hargreaves’s lecture by somehow transporting her out of the hall and into a tree outside. It had taken Anaya half an hour to help her down, and both of them had been late to their next lecture on the history of the Underneath. Professor Cobble had been a good deal warmer and friendlier than Hargreaves—like a human sparrow, Anaya had whispered—but he had still been displeased.
They had spent most of the lecture being pecked by invisible crows.
She still felt sore hours later.
And so it had to be done. She had to make him afraid of her. To figure out his weaknesses and use them against him. But of course the problem was: doing something like that wasn’t exactly easy at Harrowhall. There was no student database you could just look up. No outside internet you could use to unearth who anybody was.
The place was a closed circuit.
All she managed to really uncover was his full name and what he was mostly popular for, and even that happened quite by accident. She went the wrong way and wound up passing a trophy cabinet, and when she glanced inside, she saw it. A picture of him in the captain’s position of some kind of sports team. Then below, it said who the captain was.
Harker St. James.
The perfect moniker for a man like him.
Posh and pretty and cold sounding, and easily shortened to something cool.Hark, they probably cheered, on the sidelines of whatever match he was playing.Hark, his teammates most likely called, across a field for whatever sport he played. The one they called Gauntlet, she imagined—because that seemed to be the favorite topic of discussion in the university paper she’d picked up from the shop the other day.
The very, very expensive shop, on the edge of campus, that everybody called Boddies.
But was actually called Bodlin’s. Bodlin’s, filled with everything you could want, but nothing you could afford. Wands were out of reach, pens you could fill with magic cost a fortune, even candles and practice kits and scarves emblazoned with the name of the university team were too much. But she had managed to get theHarrowhall Gazette, and read about the bloodbath the game against a school called Omundson had been.
Apparently, the aim of the game was to prevent the opposing team from getting anything magical through a sort of hoop, by any means necessary. And he’d lopped off someone’s arm with a teleportation spell, before they could get the winning point.I suppose it’s a small mercy that he didn’t do that to me, she had found herself thinking, after reading. Though of course she couldn’t be comforted by that for long. There was still time, after all.
And now she had yet another example of how ruthless and brutal he could be.I am a goner, she thought, as she dashed down the right staircase to the dining hall. Or at least, the dining hall was what Anaya had called it in the note she’d sent to Mina’s drawer. But when Mina got there, she discovered that those two words didn’t really cover it.
It looked more like an exclusive club, made for expensive cigar smokers. She found Anaya ensconced in a huge leather chair, leaning over a polished mahogany table with claw feet. And her own huge seat was just as good. It felt like sinking into velvet butter. She groaned over it, loudly enough that Anaya laughed.
“Wait until you see what happens with the food,” she said, as she handed Mina a menu. Or what Minathoughtwas a menu. But there wasn’t actually anything on it. It was just a thick rectangle of cream card, with the name of this particular dining hall at the top.North Side, it said and then below, in curlicue script:Please make your selections.
“I don’t understan—” she went to say, but before the words were out, a gentleman in what looked like full black tie arrived, with a silver trolley. He set two salvers in front of them both, and sets of silverware, and just as she looked up to ask, he removed both silver domes to reveal what was beneath.
Two plates of food.
And the one in front of her was exactly what she would have asked for, if someone had bothered. As if the menu just knew what she wanted and supplied it. It gave her two fried eggs withsunshine bright yolks, a slice of ham thick as a paving slab and still sizzling, a side of neatly cubed potatoes clearly fried in something more savory than vegetable oil. The whole thing smelled divine—far better than anything she could have paid for.
But that was fine. This, at least, was covered under the terms of her enrollment.
