Page 30 of Sonnets and Serpents
No matter how much she trembled next to the memory of those red eyes, she wasn’t about to stab a person in their sleep.
Silas’s voice rang an accusation in her mind.You don’t even consider me a person.
The minutes passed in agony as her mind chased itself in circles. All she could do was listen to Silas’s breathing and wait for dawn, ready to defend herself if he broke the farce.
At some point during her vigil, Eliza had fallen asleep. When she woke, the first rays of dawn streamed through the dorm’s only window, and she scowled at the light before realizing that wasn’t what had woken her.
The ground was shaking.
Eliza gasped, pressing herself against the wall, heart hammering—or perhaps it was merely the earth shaking every part of her.
“Silas,” she rasped. “Silas!”
He was sprawled out on the bed, head pillowed on his arm, fingers dangling over the side of the mattress. And he was, apparently, immune to earthquakes.
Another rumble creaked the floorboards and jittered Eliza’s heart. She threw her pillow at the sleeping snake, and he finally lifted his head, squinting at her, his black hair tousled and hanging in his eyes.
“There’s an earthquake!” she cried out. “What do we do? Should we leave? Should we—”
He waved a dismissive hand, tucking the pillow under his head and settling again, even as the bed rocked along with therest of the room. Perhaps shapeshifters could not be killed by earthquakes, but Eliza was only human, and she could not help imagining the ceiling coming down, reducing her to one more piece of rubble beneath it. The dresser had scooted a few inches away from the wall. If it had been tall instead of wide, it would have toppled on her already.
Another tremor rocked the room, and she tipped, barely catching herself on her hands before her face met the floor. In a split second, she made a decision born of self-preservation. She crawled over to the edge of the bed and heaved herself onto it.
Unfortunately, she moved just as another tremor hit, so the ground bucked, and she lost her balance.
Falling directly onto Silas, her elbow jabbing his stomach.
“Ow!” He sat up, glaring at her. For a moment, a line of gray scales rippled across the edge of his cheekbones, and she held her breath, but they vanished, and then he was a grumpy human again. “What is the matter with you?”
It felt too pathetic to say,I’m scared. Instead, she returned his glare.
“You wouldn’t communicate, so I was forced to take matters into my own hands. Now, use your words, Silas Bennett, and tell me what’s happening!”
He rolled his eyes, as if she were more bothersome to him than the room-shaking tremors. Then he grumbled, “It’s Stone Caster training. They tear up the ground and put it back together. Give it an hour.”
“Anhour?”
Eliza struggled to sit up, extracting her limbs from where they’d tangled with his. Meanwhile, he sighed and scooted to press his back against the wall, leaving her a paltry space.
“I’m sure it feels worse on the floor,” he admitted, which was more than she’d expected.
He wasn’t wrong. The mattress absorbed some vibration,and the presence of another person—even an enemy—brought a sense of security as well. When the next tremor hit, Eliza abandoned her attempts to sit up straight and instead curled tightly into the abandoned bed space, still warm from his body heat. By necessity, she was lying over his arm, and her knees bumped into his. She darted a glance up to see if her proximity annoyed him.
But that wasn’t what she saw.
Up close, he was more handsome than she’d realized. Perhaps that was because he was still groggy with sleep, blinking his dark lashes lethargically. His ink-black hair fell in strands across his eyes, and his jawline carried a shadow of growing stubble against his honeyed skin, which accentuated his lips. Eliza had never knowndisheveledto look so attractive on anyone.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she mumbled, cheeks flushing. “This doesn’t mean anything.”
He yawned. “You’re the type to assign meaning to things,apta, not me.”
When he lowered his head again, it knocked softly into hers on the shared pillow. She pulled hers back to the far edge.
The tremors still shook the bed, and no matter how stiffly Eliza held herself, they seemed determined to roll her directly into Silas. Her arms bumped his chest, though she held them tightly against her own. Her heart pounded with each rumble of the earth, but now it also pounded at the thought of the boy beside her, because she was close enough to smell the soap he must have bathed with—almond and spice—and to feel his warm breath coursing down her cheek.
Did he have to breathe so forcefully?
She peeked up at him through her lashes only to realize he had fallen asleep again. His eyes were closed, and that breathing rhythm was too deep, too even.
