Chapter 4: Brother
POV: Raven
Who was this mysterious teacher who knew my name and everyone around me?
He also knew I was human just by scent.
I walked absent mindedly toward the dining hall. Raiden must be worried now since I'm not there yet. He'd be pissed if I missed dinner.
The dining hall was loud and full and I stood at the entrance longer than I should have.
I found Raiden halfway across the room. He was already watching the door. When he saw me he didn't wave, just pulled out the chair beside him and looked back down at his plate.
I walked over. Past Virella's table in the corner, where the conversation dipped for exactly two seconds as I passed, then picked back up. A boy stepped into my path without looking and bumped my shoulder and said sorry and kept moving.
I sat down next to Raiden.
No flinching. No twitching noses. No one tracking me across the room with that particular stillness vampires got when something didn't smell right. I pressed my wrist to my side and felt the faint warmth of the concealment blend still sitting on my skin.
It was working.
I exhaled for what felt like the first time since morning.
Raiden put food on my plate without asking. Cooked food. He talked about his orientation group while he did it, names I didn't know, a trainer who apparently threw a desk during a demonstration, a girl from the Ashford house who'd produced a mark so powerful it cracked the table. He talked and I ate and neither of us addressed the fact that I was forty minutes late.
That was Raiden. He gave you the room first.
I watched him refill my glass and felt the particular weight of owing someone more than you could ever say out loud.
When the noise around us swelled again he leaned in. "I heard something."
I kept eating. "About what."
"The marking. First years." He kept his voice low. "Someone said a light came up that nobody could classify. That the device stopped working."
"Equipment malfunction," I said. "The woman filed it and moved on."
I held on to my cutlery like it was the only thing keeping me together. He probably already noticed.
He looked at me the way he always did when he was deciding whether to push. Quiet, careful, reading my face like a map.
He didn't push. He picked up his fork.
That was almost worse.
"Ahem!"
Virella stopped at our table on her way out. She didn't sit. She stood with one hand resting on the back of an empty chair and looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen from her before.
"I heard about your marking," she said.
"Equipment error," I said. "Boring story."
She smiled. Thin. "Right." She tapped the chair once with her finger and walked away.
Raiden watched her go. Then he looked at me and said nothing, which meant he was saying everything.
I knew that look on Virella. I'd seen it twice before. Once before she'd dismantled a girl's reputation in three days flat. Once before she'd found the thing Raiden was hiding and used it against him for a month. That look meant she'd caught the scent of something and she wasn't going to stop until she had the whole shape of it.
I pushed the rest of my food around my plate and didn't taste any of it.
Raiden walked me back. The corridor outside our apartments was quiet, most students still at dinner. He stopped at my door and didn't move to leave.
"Raven."
That was his serious voice.
"I'm fine," I said.
"I didn't ask." He leaned against the wall. "I'm saying you can tell me. Whatever it is. I'm not going to our parents, I'm not going to Virella, I'm not going anywhere with it." He paused. "I picked you a long time ago. That's not something I change based on new information."
I looked at him. He meant it. That was the thing about Raiden, he always meant it, and it made everything harder rather than easier because there was no armor against sincerity.
I opened my mouth.
Thought about Kai's voice in the storage room. He noticed you. That's not the same as helping you.
Closed it.
"It was a malfunction," I said. "I promise."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he pushed off the wall and kissed the top of my head, the way he had since we were small, and stepped back toward his own door.
"Get some sleep," he said.
"You too."
He stopped with his hand on his door. Didn't turn around.
"Raven." His voice was quiet. Like he'd been sitting on it all evening and had decided, finally, to put it down. "Whatever that light was."
He paused.
"It didn't look like a malfunction to me."
He went inside. The door clicked shut.
I stood in the corridor alone and stared at the space where he'd been, the concealment blend warm on my wrists, Virella's patient smile still sitting behind my eyes.
I went inside and locked my door.