House of Slide Hybrid (13 page)

“I don’t do confessions.”

“Then you shouldn’t go around kissing soulless girls in the woods.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. “I’m Axel, Hybrid, son of Lewis of Carlyle, a House that decimated more Hollows than any other. My mother is not a Hotblood alone, but half Nether.” He opened his eyes and gave me a scowl before continuing. “Some people wish to hunt those with rich blood. I don’t like killing them. They are addicts. They wish to die if they can’t have more of the Nether mists. I’m perverse in that I dislike killing people who want to die. I much prefer to end the lives of cruel beasts who strain and snarl.” He raised an eyebrow. “Are you following?”

He had as much Nether as my father. That meant a lot. Not to mention his father, however much Nether he had in his blood, which if he was a bloodthirsty and powerful Wild probably meant more than Slide. I nodded mutely.

He continued. “I spent the first ten years of my life with my mother’s clan until a Wild decided to kill them all. His was my first death. I had no one. I lost myself in the woods until Pisces the monster found me and bound me. Twenty years I spent more or less, no aging, creatures of death and darkness bound by a love of the hunt until Old Peter trapped me. Tamed me. Separated me from the darkness and taught me to be human again. Is it clear so far?”

I nodded although I couldn’t really comprehend what that meant, living in the woods with a monster like the curved fanged, clawed silvery beast I’d had nightmares about.

“After my time with Old Peter, I stayed with friends of my father’s House, friends who taught me pain, taught me to control my gifts of fire and flame like your Trainer will teach you.” He shook his head. “I tired of killing for them. I don’t make a good assassin. I get distracted and don’t feel the loyalty. I acted the part of the Wild, but I remembered Hotbloods. I found Old Peter, convinced him to teach me Bloodwork, and when I’d learned all he could teach me I experimented with the possibilities. I hunted demons. I made friends some would barely call human.” He shrugged. “Someone stole my paintings. I found Old Peter once again and he pointed me towards you. I lost my soul, lost my heart, but you’re welcome to keep it. I never did anything useful with it anyway.”

“You’re really the Nether?” I reached out and touched his face carefully with my fingers. “You can move through space and time with your Nether mists? Does it come out of your pores or what?”

“That’s mostly Pisces,” he said, swallowing, like my fingers on his cheek made him nervous. “It takes a lot of effort to produce any kind of mist without him. He’s great if you like hunting. Have you hunted recently?”

“All that time I didn’t want to tell you about how I took death, and you knew.”

“You had my soul, Dari. Of course you hunted.”

I turned away, crossing my arms over my chest. I wanted to scream, to pound on him until he hurt as much as I did, but then again he had to deal with burning veins and I didn’t. I shook my head. Vengeance wasn’t me. It would have been me if Devlin hadn’t taken my soul, but he had, and so I stood shivering and feeling alone.

“You should go,” he said.

I spun around, took two steps until I was pressed against him, and pulled his head down to meet mine. I drank him in, kissing him like I’d never see him again, which maybe I wouldn’t. I pulled away, his shirt fisted in both of my hands.

“What is your number?”

“Number?” he repeated, blankly.

“Phone number. If I want to get in touch with you, what number do I call?”

He shook his head. “I’m not available by phone.”

“Don’t you have friends who I could call who…”

He shook his head, no.

“So, I have to find a psycho Hybrid who knows where you are if I want to see you again?”

“You want to see me again?”

I stared at his shirt, at my knuckles that even in the dim light I could tell were going white from holding on so tight.

“I need to see you again. This hasn’t been enough.”

“Nothing will be enough,” he whispered, leaning forward to smooth my back with his palm. “That is, until the bond is completed and we are forever one.”

“That’s insane.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But at least now we’ve been introduced.”

“I didn’t tell you who I am.” I pulled away from him, my head spinning and my knees weak. “I might never see you again.”

“I could die, and then you’d never need to complete the bond.”

I glared at him. “No dying.”

He gave me a half smile. “You could give me your number and I could call you. That might be fun to talk to your mother. We could catch up.”

I frowned and looked around for a pencil or pen. I saw a piece of charcoal on the floor that must have rolled off the shelf when the Aiden trashed the place. I retrieved the charcoal and grabbed his arm, glancing up at him when he turned it over, showing me the lighter skin of his inner arm. I wrote the number, having to cross out the five that looked like a two. With trembling fingers, I drew the dark charcoal over his skin, refusing to look up at him until I’d finished.

“When will you call me?” I demanded after I’d finished, tucking the charcoal into my pocket.

He stared at me, his eyes bright gold, intense and hot. “I’m still not entirely certain that I’m letting you leave.”

I swallowed. “You want me to stay so that we can finish the bond?”

“I don’t want you to get runes. It will probably kill you and you know how I feel about you dying.”

“I’ll be fine. I saw it.”

“In a dream?”

I frowned. “Don’t worry about me. I’m the one who rescued you, remember?”

“After Old Peter and I saved you and your whole family from slaughter.”

I winced.

“Sorry,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, the one with my number written on him. “Don’t rush into anything, all right? Hybrids with runes that take are extremely rare.”

“My Trainer, a Wild Cool Hybrid has runes,” I said, defensively.

“Matthew of Carve is your Trainer?” he asked, thoughtfully.

“You know him?”

He nodded. “For a Head he isn’t all bad. He doesn’t meddle as much as most. Of course when he does, it’s cataclysmic.” He grinned like that was fun. “He’s always had a strange alliance with Slide. He knows very interesting arcane things. Maybe I should have a conversation with him.”

I laughed. “My parents and Satan had a ‘conversation’ with him. Satan was washing blood off his knuckles. Is that the kind of conversation you’d be having?”

He shook his head. “No. I want to know what he thinks about your soul.”

“My soul?”

The main lights came on, making me blink and feel exposed as he shrugged and turned to rummage around in a shelf before he came back with a jar and a pile of gauze.

“Your soul was fragmented. Otherwise you would have died when your brother took it out of you. He did something very dark, very forbidden. Most of the references have been destroyed.”

“Why do you want to know how Devlin took my soul?”

He stared at me. “Information like that could change the world.”

“For the better, or worse?”

He smiled a smile that I didn’t recognize. “That depends where you stand.”

He stood close to me as he began wrapping the bandage around my wrist with barely enough pressure for me to feel him much less hurt.

“I still don’t know why you want to know how Devlin took my soul.”

“I want to know who else has that knowledge and what they’ve been doing with it.”

His eyes flashed gold while I tried to understand.

“Jason is dead,” I whispered, tightening my grip on his arm.

“And the Houses behind his involvement are dispersed like a dandelion puff to the four winds. But someone wanted your brother’s blood. Someone who Jason betrayed.”

“The House of Slide and my father took care of everyone involved with Jason.”

He shrugged. “Maybe that’s true. It’s time to get you home, or your uncle’s house anyway,” he said, turning away from me, going to grab my black puffer coat from the cold cement.

“You keep telling me what to do. If what you told me about your life is true, the first thirty years barely even count. You’re very bossy for someone who’s not really all that much older than me.”

He laughed as he walked towards me, holding up my coat as I reluctantly put my arms through, feeling the tug of the bandage.

“And living without a soul, or only a fragment of one, would give you three times as much pain as an ordinary life. That makes you forty. If I’m twenty, and you’re forty, you’re much too old for me.”

I shook my head as I fingered the bandage on my wrist that covered the burn marks from the unbalanced Hybrid that I hadn’t really noticed, not with Lewis in the same room as me. “Thank you for the bandage. You’re very neat and gentle. You should be a doctor.”

“No. I should be a mechanic,” he corrected. “If I were a doctor, I’d have to keep everything sterile all the time. That’s not my style, even if I did spend eighteen idyllic months training with Glissade.”

“Glissade is your adopted House?” I asked, walking with him towards the door even if I hadn’t quite decided to leave.

“They used me until I’d learned all I needed from them. I’ll walk with you.”

I shook my head, but he slid his arm in mine, his warmth penetrating my jacket.

“You don’t have to. It’s really close and…” His gaze made me forget why I didn’t want him walking me. I did, except that I didn’t want to leave at all, but if I stayed, he’d cut his veins open, and I’d faint, or we’d complete the bond some other way. Hadn’t I told him that’s what I wanted? What were we doing outside of the garage, walking down a dark and icy alley with a distant streetlight that glowed rosily?

When he slipped on the ice, I laughed then clapped a hand over my mouth because you shouldn’t laugh at someone for nearly falling. He laughed with me, an unexpected sound that made my heart constrict and ridiculous tears well up in my eyes. I blinked away the moisture, focusing on the walls, the smell of fast food and not on the creature beside me, arm still firmly linked with mine.

“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice low as he leaned down, brushing my hair away from my face, forcing me to look up at him.

“I have no idea what I am. I think that I needed to see you, even if I have no idea what to do with Lewis Axel Nialls, worldclass everything.”

He grinned. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out sooner than is good for me. Just don’t lean me again.”

“Did I lean you?”

“You could have died back there in the warehouse when you tried to lean me. I’ve drained a few Hollows and took their skills. You might lose your mind trying to lean me. I wouldn’t like that.”

I gasped and stopped walking. He’d drained Hollows? I stared up at him, feeling my stomach twist. I knew that he’d killed people, that he’d done Bloodworking like Jason my brother’s murderer, but the way he said it, like an aside made me feel like I was drowning.

“Dari,” he said, leaning down with concern etched on his face. “They were not good people. They were the kinds of Hollows that started the war.”

“My father started the war,” I said, trying to sound calm.

“Your father, Woods, of course. He lifted the protection Cools gave Hollows, but I believe that he only personally killed one of them. The Hollow One.”

He shook his head and started walking, looking thoughtfully at the street in front of us, dragging me along with him when my feet took too much time to move.

“Have you killed anyone since the last time I saw you?” I asked.

He shook his head then shrugged. “No. Not really.”

“Not really? What does that mean?”

“I’ve been in the presence of death, seen others kill, but I haven’t personally inflicted death on anyone. I’ve hunted of course. We should go hunting together sometime.”

I shivered as I remembered the thrill of the chase, the taste of death, the drowning in Nether.

“Yeah, after the concert we can get ice cream and death.”

He didn’t answer me. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t be judging him. He lived in a world of violence that I couldn’t begin to comprehend. He’d watched his family die when he was ten, killed the person who had destroyed them, become more animal than human, a Tarzan in the woods with a monster, drowning in death and mists every day.

I squeezed his arm. “I’m struggling with ethics. I don’t understand why life has to be so hard.”

“’Life is the jailor. Death is the angel that draws back the unwilling bolts and sets us free.’ That’s what Glissade told me as they sent me on my first mission as an angel of death. It’s funny what you remember.” He touched my face, the barest brush of his fingers, but it sent fire chasing across my skin. “I don’t know very much about ethics. I don’t know very much about life, either. Death. I know death. I know art. I know pain. You have taught me more about life, about love, than anything else I’ve experienced. Thank you, for that.”

I struggled to swallow down the sudden lump in my throat. I ducked my head and studied my boots, unable to speak for the rest of the walk to Grim’s house. I found his hand, squeezing his fingers as tight as I could.