It even looked the way fancy train stations did.
The floor was something that seemed like marble and here most likely was. A million heels and heavy shoes clicked and clattered over it, before disappearing into a warren of dim passageways branching off from the central space. And the central space was round, and domed, and dominated by a staircase.
She followed it up with her eyes, until it too dissolved into whatever was up there. More halls, she imagined. More doorways to who knew what.It is very easy to take a wrong turn in Harrowhall, she remembered reading, and vowed to move slowly. To take careful steps and always pay attention to where she was going.
But that mass of seething bodies had other ideas.
She took one step, and they just swept her along, like some great flesh and fashionably clothed river, until she was somehow past the staircase and down the left-hand hallway. Then someone knocked her suitcase out of her hand, as careless as only the incredibly rich could be, and she stooped to retrieve it. She buried herself among people’s backs and bags, reaching for the handle. Almost suffocated for a second, sure it was going to get kicked away.
But she managed to snag it.
She straightened, pleased with herself.
And it was then that she saw him again.
He was just there, in the center of the hall. Impossible to miss—and not just because he stood a head taller than almost everybody else. There was also the fact that all around him, absolutely everyone bustled and ran and doubled back. They called out names and tossed cases, jostled and pushed and darted down halls.
While he remained so unnervingly still it seemed impossible. She couldn’t make out an expression on his face, or a hint of him breathing. Like he had been turned to stone by some spell she didn’t yet know. She even took a step toward him, thinking maybe he wasn’t a threat.
Then his gaze flicked down, switchblade quick.
And suddenly their eyes were locked. Tightly, to the point where she couldn’t immediately pull herself away. She tried to, and it was like running through treacle, through mud, through glue. She couldn’t get any traction. She was stuck fast and getting more so by the moment.Maybe this is the assessment, she found herself thinking frantically.Trying to extricate yourself from the gaze of horrible men.
Though of course she knew it wasn’t just his horribleness that held her.
It was finally seeing his hideously handsome face. Because now that there was nothing to obscure her view of him, she couldn’t pretend he might possibly be anything else. There was no more hope for something plain or made repulsive by centuries of inbreeding, courtesy of a probable upper class family.
Every part of his face was perfect.
Eyes the color of spilled ink, wide set enough to almost be unsettling, turned down at the corners like something from a painting by Rossetti. Then there were those brows, thick and dark and just a little untidy, toward the middle, stark against that pale skin. The bone structure hinted at before but so clear to her now. That jaw like something carved from stone, those cheekbones broad and high.
Almost everything heavy, heavy, heavy.
Until you got to that dimple. The one that looked as if a ghost had pressed a finger over his lips and left a faint imprint behind. Part of it above his mean mouth, just underneath his firm nose. Part of it below, down the middle of that strong chin. And every bit of that image so oddly familiar she got a little flash of something.
Like a memory, of being laid down in long grass. Sunlight making patterns on tanned skin. For some reason, her nails were painted blue—they looked dark against the pink of someone’s lips, as she hovered one finger over an indentation very like his. Almostexactlylike his.
Though she couldn’t remember who it could have possibly belonged to. She didn’t know any handsome men, didn’t like them, didn’t trust them. And even if she had, she couldn’t recall doing anything of the kind.
She was an indoor girl. A lover of evening, midnight, the witching hour. Of curling up in wintertime with a mug of something dark and sweet, a book open in her lap. She would have never laid out like that, in heat so fierce she could almost feel it now. She could almost taste it, almost smell it.
And it was this that helped her finally wrench away.
It was just too real, too weird. Like he was doing somethingto her mind somehow.Here that’s completely possible, she told herself, then stumbled through a sudden break in the crowd, without thinking. She pushed against the seething river of bodies, intent on nothing but getting away. No thought of where she was going, just escape, escape, escape. There was one of the passageways—she took it gladly. She kept going until she was far from his cruel gaze.
Too far, really.
She looked back the way she had come, but somehow that Grand Central Station mess was no longer there. There was just a pinprick of darkness at the end of an endless hall. And the hall itself was no less disturbing. Portraits lined the wall in front of her and the wall at her back. Heavy, dark portraits of men with pale, somber faces and steely disapproving eyes.
Like older versions of the boy who thought she didn’t belong.
Which explained a lot. He was probably a legacy, who’d never had to crest that hill and pray. Most likely he lived in one of those gated magical communities and policed those boundaries like a wolf. Always lying in wait for trespassers, always ready to pounce when they set foot where they didn’t belong.
They turn a corner, and there he would be.
Though, god, it was a shock when that exact thing happened. She got to the end of the hall and tried to turn in a direction she hoped would bring her back to the entrance, and there he was. Somehow, there he was.
“That’s not possible, you were just—” she started to say and pointed back toward the entrance. But his expression told her the mistake she’d made immediately. His lip curled, his eyes suddenly lit with a kind of amused contempt. Like he couldn’t believe shewas thinking something that preposterous. How could she not understand that this wasn’t an ordinary place, with pedestrian things like passageways that went in normal directions?You may find that the laws of physics are not strictly obeyed at Harrowhall, the welcome guide had said.
