Page 19

And the wood had been warm.

I hadn’t thought about it at the time because too much else had been happening, but now I remembered it clearly. Not the faint warmth of a room or the heat left behind by another hand. The carving had felt warm beneath my palm in a way that wood shouldn’t have.

When I looked toward the high-backed chair at the edge of the dais, Oda Brannock still hadn’t moved.

Her enormous round eyes had followed me all the way down the steps.

She wasn’t looking at my face.

She was looking at my hand.

Whatever Hollow meant, it didn’t explain why the carving had been warm, and the way Oda watched me made me wonder whether she already knew that.

Later, while the registrar finished working through his list and the Houses came down from the gallery to collect their new members, I slipped outside. I needed somewhere quieter, preferably somewhere that didn’t contain several hundred people who had just watched me get publicly classified as whatever the hell a Hollow was.

The courtyard was enclosed on all four sides by black stone walls, with an old well standing in the center and wet flagstones shining under the dull morning sky. Students had spilled out of the hall after the sorting, filling the space with loud conversations and nervous excitement. The new Fenhall wolves were already being slapped on the shoulders by older students, while the new Solace lynx had been surrounded by friends who seemed determined to inspect her from every angle.

Tamsin came out a minute after me. Her new sea-green Saltmere scarf was already tied around her neck, and she looked painfully guilty about how pleased she was to be wearing it.

“It’s a mistake,” she said before I could speak. “That glass is a thousand years old. It’s probably broken. You’re probably something completely normal that it just didn’t know how to recognize. A very shy hedgehog, maybe.”

A laugh escaped me, though there wasn’t much behind it.

“A shy hedgehog.”

“It could happen. Probably.” She stepped closer. “Look, Wren—”

She stopped in the middle of the sentence.

Her expression changed as she looked past me.

The courtyard began to quiet in patches. One conversation stopped, then another. Shoes scraped against the wet stones as people moved aside, and within seconds a path had opened through the crowd behind me.

I turned around.

Kaelen Vance was walking toward me.

He crossed the courtyard with the same controlled, unhurried stride I remembered from the night before. He was dressed in black again, and his hair looked almost as dark as his coat in the gray morning light. Nobody asked him where he was going. They simply got out of his way.

He was looking directly at me.

My heart gave one hard, ridiculous jump.

For a second, I actually thought he had come to apologize. Maybe for the night before, or for the staring, or for whatever strange thing had happened between us at dinner. I even opened my mouth, already preparing to tell him it was fine and he didn’t need to worry about it.

He stopped an arm’s length away.

Up close, he looked younger than I had first thought, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. There was a faint shadow along his jaw and a small patch near his chin where he had missed shaving. The skin around his eyes was red, as though he hadn’t slept much either.

Then I caught his scent again, cedar and cold air, and my body reacted before I had any chance to stop it. My nipples tightened beneath my clothes, and a sudden pulse of heat clenched low between my legs, sharp enough to make embarrassment rush straight up my neck.

Nobody could possibly know.

Then I saw his nostrils flare.

A muscle moved once in his jaw.

For half a second, his gaze shifted away from me toward the tall windows of the east wing. When he looked back, whatever had been in his face was gone.