Chapter 52 The Shadow In The Corridor
I do not tell Rhydan about the presence outside the Witch common room door.
Not immediately.
Not because I am hiding it but because Sera is walking beside me and whatever I felt in that corridor was cold and deliberate and specific and I need to understand it better before I hand it to anyone, including him.
There are so many things I need to understand, actually. Like Sera, for one. She is a puzzle I'm not sure through what angle I should manage or try to crack. She only lets out what she wants you to see and the way she masks everything else is almost extraordinary.
We find Rhydan coming out of Supernatural Combat, a class that meets Friday mornings in the lower training hall and leaves him looking the way he always looks after physical sessions... focused and slightly dangerous and carrying that particular heat that comes from an hour of doing something his body was genuinely built for.
He sees Sera beside me and everything in his posture tightens by one controlled degree.
Not hostility. The specific wariness of someone who has not forgotten what she did and is not performing forgiveness he does not feel.
That is one of the things about him I am still learning to hold without flinching.
He does not pretend.
"Rhydan," Sera says, before he can speak.
He looks at her steadily and he waits what whatever it may be she clearly has to say.
She tells him everything.
Everything she told me in the corridor, Elder Valecrest's real plan, the transfer rather than the binding, the timeline tightening because of the anchoring, the third party who approached her six weeks ago with information they should not have had.
She delivers it evenly, and without softening it and without the warmth she usually wears like a second skin, just the information, bare plain and direct, and I watch Rhydan's face move through it and the thing that crosses him when she finishes is not the tight jaw or the controlled fury I expected.
It is something quieter and considerably colder.
"He wants it for himself," he says.
"Yes," Sera replies.
"My grandfather." It is obviously not a question. Just the word sitting there being turned over slowly ok the least disbelief and belief.
"Yes."
He looks at the floor for a moment.
When he looks up his eyes are grey and very clear, the silver nowhere in them, which I have learned means he has pushed both natures down deliberately, choosing to think from the purely human part of himself, the part that is not dragon and not wolf and is just a nineteen year old boy standing in a corridor finding out his grandfather wants to pull something ancient out of him and keep it for himself.
"Why are you telling us this?" he asks Sera quietly.
She holds his gaze. "Because it changes what you need to do and when."
"That is not why," he says.
A beat of silence.
"No," she agrees. "It is not only why."
She does not elaborate and he does not push it and I stand between them watching the space where the rest of that sentence lives and thinking about all the things Sera Vance has decided not to say and all the reasons she might have for keeping them, and none of those reasons are simple and none of them are finished.
"I need to find Bram," Rhydan says finally, looking at me. "The residue from the working at the game. If we can match the signature chain to my grandfather before he files the transfer attempt with whoever is facilitating it..."
"We have evidence before he files anything," I finish.
"Yes." He looks at Sera one more time, something unreadable in his eyes. "Thank you," he says flatly. "For the information."
Not for anything else.
Just the information.
Sera's chin lifts slightly. "You're welcome," she replies, equally flat.
He walks away and I fall into step beside him and we are three corridors from the Witch wing before he speaks.
"She is not done," he says quietly.
"No," I agree.
"Whatever she wants from this situation," he says, "she has not shown us the shape of it yet."
"I know."
"Does that concern you?"
I think about the cold presence outside the corridor door. About the card in my bag with my mother's name on it. About Elder Valecrest wanting to pull something ancient and enormous out of his grandson and put it in himself...
Wanting to crack open his supposedly beloved grandson and take what lives inside him.
"Everything concerns me," I reply. "I have learned to work with that."
He glances sideways at me and the corner of his mouth moves, just barely, and I feel it through the bond like the first note of something that doesn't have a name yet.
We go find Bram.