Page 129 of Ashen Souls

“Then we make them.”

36

Harper scrutinized my face, as if making certain I was still present in the room and not drifting somewhere between centuries and dimensions.

“Right,” she announced to the ceiling. “That is officially enough demon kings, cursed matrimony, and cosmic emotional manipulation for one evening.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but she cut me off with a sharp look.

“No,” she insisted. “For tonight, we are done dissecting it. We are done letting this supernatural bullshit dictate the shape of our moods. We have lost an entire spring break to this mess, and I refuse to let it ruin the rest of the semester.”

That was Harper’s unapologetic protectiveness, like she was carving a chalk boundary around the coffee table and daring anything outside it to step across the line.

I closed the journal and pushed it away.

Harper reached for the bottle again and topped off both our glasses.

“We’ll research,” she said, more evenly now. “We’ll analyze. We’ll hunt down every obscure text in this city if we have to. But not tonight.”

I leaned my head back against the sofa base. “You’re unusually decisive.”

“I am choosing survival,” she replied. “Yours, specifically.”

She shifted, tucking her knees up to her chest. “Now. I require compensation in the form of normal, human gossip, preferably about something that does not involve an apocalypse.”

I smiled. “I’ve been hiding out in a coastal town with seagulls and existential dread. I don't exactly have any.”

“I am aware,” Harper said dryly. “Which is why I'm going first. You missed today’s mythology lecture.”

I ran a finger along the rim of my glass. “Yes. I know.”

“Professor Hale was not himself,” she stated. “And before you roll your eyes, I don’t mean the usual tired-academic routine.”

I waited.

“He kept losing his place,” she continued. “And he wasn’t scanning the room like he usually does to see who’s scrolling under the desk. It was more targeted than that.”

“Searching,” I guessed.

“Yes.” She nodded. “Every time his eyes swept the room, they snagged on the back corner. Your seat. There was a flicker. It wasn’t dramatic, he’s way too guarded for that, but it was there.”

The image of Ethan standing at the lectern, looking for my empty chair, made my pulse jump.

“And he looked tired,” she added. “Not physically. Just… disappointed. Like he kept waiting for the door to open, and it never did.”

Harper suddenly sat up straighter, raking a hand through her hair. “God, with all the demonic marriage lore, I completely forgot to tell you the rest.”

I blinked. “The rest of what?”

“Tuesday night,” she said. “When you went off the grid and ignored my messages, I came over here to make sure you hadn't drowned in your own bathtub. But I didn't even make it up the stairs.”

“Why?”

“Because Professor Hale was standing outside your building.”

“Ethan was here?”

“Yeah. And by the look of it, he’d been waiting in the cold for a while,” Harper said. “He told me he saw you earlier that day, at the intersection near the bridge. He said you seemed shaken, and he was worried about you.”