My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 163: The Square They Made Me Win Started Breathing

The closing reception opened at dusk, and Soren spent the first hour of it standing on a grave he’d fought to keep.

That was Dani’s read and it hadn’t left him since she gave it. He’d planted the whole pack on the one spot where the buried thing could touch all of them through him, and tonight the academy had dressed the spot in lights and invited everyone it wanted to impress.

The floor was the fullest it had been all festival.

Delegation gray in the good seats. Council pins on half the jackets.

Faculty in the clothes they only wore when someone above them was watching, and above them, tonight, everyone was.

Selah’s ice display stood at the center of the hall, taller than the festival version, columns of clean frost coming up off her own bare hands while she rebuilt a melting arch one touch at a time.

Maren ran the demonstration corner with the flame held at hearth-orange and not one shade past it.

Dani had the booth.

Joan had the door.

And Grimm lay at the edge of the exhibition square with her shut eyes aimed at the floor.

She’d been aiming them at the floor since the doors opened.

◆◆◆◆

The wolf did not sleep at events. She performed sleeping, long body folded, breathing slow, and under the performance she tracked every gray jacket in the hall.

Tonight she wasn’t tracking the jackets.

Soren stood beside her with a drink he wasn’t drinking and read her the way he’d learned to, off the ears, off the set of her spine, and everything about her pointed down and slightly east.

Same heading as the pull.

Same heading as the phantom draw in the dark.

Same heading Mona’s blunt face had picked out of the ground a season ago.

He didn’t ask through the bond.

Asking would make her answer, and her answer would make it real before he’d finished counting what he already had.

The count was long enough.

◆◆◆◆

Mona came out from under the booth at the second toast.

She wasn’t supposed to be out.

The hall lights were the bright kind, the kind her eyes couldn’t take even behind the tinted lenses, and she’d been stowed in the dark under Dani’s terminal since setup with a blanket and a bowl.

She crossed the open floor anyway.

Nobody in the crowd clocked a mole the size of a loaf moving between dress shoes because nobody at a reception looks at the floor.

She reached the middle of the exhibition square, pressed herself flat against the tile, and put her nose to the seam between two stones.

"Augh," she said, to the ground.

Soren crouched next to her, casual, a man checking on his beast in front of guests.

Her whole body was doing the thing it did when she homed. The single-minded lean, everything in her aimed one direction, and the direction was down.

Not down and slightly east.

Down. Directly under the square. Under his shoes.

The heading had moved.

◆◆◆◆

He didn’t stand up right away.

He stayed crouched with one hand on Mona’s back, on the fur beside the cold patch, and he ran it.

The thing under the east yard had spent a season in one place.

Every read, every pull, every device that pointed, all of it had agreed on the same buried address.

Things that stayed in one place were problems you could schedule.

The address had changed.

The address was now the six feet of dirt and stone under a reception with three hundred people on it.

Things that moved were not problems you scheduled. They were problems that scheduled you.

"Augh," Mona said again, quieter.

"I know," Soren said. "Go back under the booth."

She went.

She didn’t want to, the lean in her body kept trying to swing back around to the square, but she went, and that cost her something to do, and he noted the cost.

◆◆◆◆

The first tremor came during the chair’s speech.

It was nothing.

A shiver through the tile and it landed in the exact second the hall was applauding, so the sound and the shake arrived together and three hundred people felt their own clapping in the floor and thought nothing.

Soren wasn’t clapping.

He felt it come up through his shoes, through the wire, through the place in him the pull had been drinking from all season, and this one didn’t drink.

This one pushed.

A season of one-way tugs, the buried thing taking a degree of him and giving nothing back, and now the direction had flipped for half a second and something down there had pressed up against the underside of the world to feel what was standing on it.

He set his glass on the booth counter, next to Dani’s terminal.

"Log it," he said.

"Logged before you finished the sentence." Dani’s eyes stayed on the crowd. "That wasn’t the pull."

"No."

"The pull takes. That knocked."

◆◆◆◆

The second tremor came eleven minutes later by Dani’s clock, and it was smaller, and it was worse.

Smaller because almost nothing moved.

Worse because Soren was watching the floor when it happened, and the floor did a thing floors don’t do.

The exhibition square sank.

Not collapsed. Sank.

The whole gridded slab of it eased downward the width of a finger, smooth, even, the motion of something underneath adjusting its shoulders, and the tile seam at the edge of the square opened a lip that hadn’t been there since the festival was built.

The chair kept talking. The delegates kept their glasses up.

Selah’s arch stood, Maren’s flame held its shape, and the band came in under the speech right on time, covering the sound of a hall settling onto the roof of something.

Three hundred people, and the finger of drop went through all of them, and not one of them caught it.

Soren caught it.

He stood on the lowered square and looked at the lip in the seam, and the lip looked back the way evidence looks back, plain and patient and impossible to unread.

He didn’t clear the square.

Clearing it would put three hundred people between the doors and whatever came next, and he’d read enough crowd disasters in his first life to know the crush at the doors killed more than the cause ever did.

He moved people instead.

A word to Joan at the door, and the greeters started walking guests toward the far hall for the dessert service that wasn’t scheduled yet.

A look to Maren, and her demonstration drifted twenty feet west without ever stopping.

Dani sent the booth’s queue to the raffle table with a sign she printed on the spot.

Small moves. Quiet moves.

A room draining off the square one polite excuse at a time while the band played.

Grimm rose off the floor.

She didn’t growl.

She put herself between the square and the nearest cluster of guests, shut eyes on the seam, and her hackles came up slow, one line of fur at a time.

Under Soren’s feet, the third tremor started.

It didn’t stop.

It rolled, low and even, and it had a rhythm to it now, a swell and an ease, a swell and an ease, and Soren stood on the sinking square with the count going cold in his head because he finally had a word for the rhythm and the word was breathing.

The thing under the festival had woken up.