Grimm stopped talking at dawn.
Soren felt it happen, not as a sound cutting off but as a pressure leaving his skull, and the silence she left behind was the loudest thing he had ever heard.
She was still there on the bed, still warm against his side, still breathing with her chin on his ribs.
But the voice was gone.
He put his hand on her head, she pushed into his palm and that was the whole conversation now.
[DING!] — Obsession Index: Grimm 49/50. Communication channel suspended by bonded beast to prevent soul erosion. Tamer is advised to limit emotional stimuli.]
He read it twice and then got out of bed.
Selah was already awake on her side of the room with her back to him and her blanket pulled up to her ears, neither of them mentioned what happened last night because there was no version of that conversation that ended well for anyone.
"I'm going out," Soren said.
"Where? It's the weekend"
"Troy's room."
Selah turned over. "You know that's a terrible idea, right?"
"I know."
She sat up, the blanket fell and she was still wearing his shirt.
"Why?" she said.
"Because he came to me on day one and I played defense. I let him set the tempo, every time I've reacted to someone in this building instead of acting first, I've lost ground." He pulled on his boots.
"Troy is going to keep watching me until he finds something he can use, or until I give him a reason to stop. Waiting doesn't fix either of those."
Selah looked at him for a few seconds and her expression shifted from skeptical to something he couldn't read.
"What are you going to say to him?"
"The truth, or some of it."
Soren walked to the door.
Grimm jumped off the bed and followed him without a sound.
Her white fur was flat against her body and her blind face tracked the hallway both directions before she let him step through.
She couldn't talk, but she could still work.
◆◆◆◆
Troy's room was on the fourth floor of the east wing and Soren knew the number from chapter eight of the book.
He knocked three times, the same pattern Troy had used on his door.
The door opened in four seconds.
Troy was dressed and armed, which meant he either slept with the sword on or he had been expecting company.
"Soren Kane?" Troy said.
"We need to talk."
Troy looked down at the wolf.
Grimm looked up at Troy.
Nothing happened for about three seconds and then Troy stepped aside.
Soren walked in.
The room was exactly the kind of room the protagonist of a novel would have.
Clean, organized, the sword on a wall mount next to the window, a desk with three books stacked in order of size.
Soren pulled the desk chair out and sat in it backwards because standing in Troy Minden's room while Troy had a sword felt like a negotiation he didn't want to have from below.
"I'm going to tell you three things," Soren said. "Then I'm going to ask you one question and I'm going to leave."
Troy leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.
"Go ahead."
"Thing one. Your Spectral Knight flagged me as an anomaly on day one because my signature doesn't match anything in the standard database, I don't have an explanation for it that would satisfy you, and I'm not going to insult you by making one up."
Troy's jaw did the small thing.
"Thing two. I am not a threat to you. I know you don't believe that because your knight is telling you otherwise right now, but I'm telling you anyway because I'd rather you heard it from me than from a disciplinary report."
"You know about the knight's private warnings?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"That's not one of the three things."
Troy's hand moved half an inch toward his sword and stopped.
"Thing three," Soren said, and he leaned forward on the chair back.
"There is something coming to this academy that is bigger than both of us. Bigger than the Council, bigger than the rankings, bigger than whatever you little mind is thinking, when it arrives, and it will, you are going to need allies who know what they're looking at. I am offering to be that ally."
The room was quiet.
Grimm sat at Soren's feet with her blind face pointed at Troy's sword hand and her tail completely still.
"Your question," Troy said.
"Are you going to keep coming to my door, or are you going to let me work?"
Troy looked at him for a long time.
Soren held it.
He had practiced holding Troy's gaze in his head for about a hundred hours over three rereads of this novel, and the real thing was exactly as uncomfortable as he had imagined, but looking away in front of Troy Minden meant losing.
"I'll let you work," Troy said. "For now."
"That's all I needed."
Soren stood up, pushed the chair in, and walked to the door.
"Kane."
He stopped.
"The wolf," Troy said. "She's not F-rank, am I right?"
"She's whatever she needs to be."
He left.
In the hallway his hands shook, he jammed them in his pockets and walked fast until he made the stairs.
Grimm pressed her flank against his leg the whole way down.
She couldn't tell him he'd done well, so she told him with her body, and that was enough.
◆◆◆◆
He found Selah in the cafeteria eating rice with one hand and reading a theory manual with the other.
He sat across from her.
"How'd it go?" she said without looking up.
"He's going to leave me alone."
"For how long?"
"Long enough."
She turned a page and a small blue shape flickered at her collar.
Soren saw it and pretended he didn't.
The Frostbite Sprite was hiding in her jacket the same way Dani's moth hid in her collar, and Selah had not mentioned it once since she moved in.
He knew it was there because he had read the novel.
He also knew that the sprite was dying.
The illegal early bonding had damaged both of them, and the sprite's mana was eating itself in a feedback loop that would kill it within the next ten chapters unless something changed.
In the book, the something that changed was Troy bonding with Selah and stabilizing the sprite through his S-rank resonance.
That wasn't happening now because Soren had already pulled the timeline sideways.
Which meant Selah's sprite was going to die unless Soren found another way to stabilize it, and he was sitting at 49/50 obsession with one beast, his soul was already cracked from the last transfer.
He looked at the small blue flicker at her collar and thought about what it would cost.
Then he started eating, he just had twenty-nine days left.
◆◆◆◆
That night Soren woke up because the temperature in the room had dropped below freezing and Selah was screaming.
Not screaming out loud.
Screaming in the way a person screams when their mouth is closed and their body is locked rigid, the sound comes out as a vibration through the mattress springs.
He crossed the room in three steps.
She was convulsing on the bed and the Frostbite Sprite was on her chest, glowing bright blue all while was pulsing wrong.
Frost was climbing the walls from her body outward in a pattern that Soren recognized from the book.
Rejection cascade.
The sprite was trying to stabilize itself by pulling mana from Selah, but her body was rejecting the pull, and the rejection was freezing her from the inside.
Grimm was on her feet with her hackles up and the shadow under the bed had spread across half the floor.
She wanted this, Soren thought, and he didn't know if the thought was his, Grimm's or something else entirely. She wants the ice girl to break.
He ignored it.
He put his hands on Selah's shoulders and the cold hit him so hard his fingers went numb in two seconds.
"Selah, wake up! Your sprite is cascading."
Her eyes opened and they were completely blue, no white, no pupil, just blue from edge to edge, the frost on the walls cracked and advanced another inch.
"I can't stop it," she said, her voice was very small and very calm, that meant she had been through this before.
[DING!] — Unregistered entity [Frostbite Sprite] entering terminal rejection cascade. Bonded host will suffer cryogenic organ failure in approximately 4 minutes.]
[DING!] — Tamer intervention possible. Method: Soul Transfer (partial). Cost: approximately 8% soul integrity. Current soul integrity: 84%. Post-transfer estimate: 76%.]
[DING!] — WARNING: Tamer has already performed one unauthorized soul transfer. A second transfer may trigger permanent soul scarring.]
Four minutes.
Soren looked at the notifications and did the math.
Then he looked at Selah's face, blue-eyed and freezing, and he stopped doing math.
"I'm going to do something stupid," he said.
Then Soren put one hand on the sprite, one hand on Selah's chest where the cold was worst and he pushed.