"Your childhood best friend. So he was some guy named The One."

After Marine had "fixed" him, Kaden and Hawk set off back towards their dorms. It was now 8:45PM, and the campus's nightlife was starting. Now that he was once again right in the head, he felt aware enough and awake enough to actually ask Hawk questions about the weirdness of his interaction with the "nurse", Marine, who was, apparently, a legitimate demon. 

Amazing.

"Har har. His name was actually Quinnel Richardvarne Senteniel von Lostren," Hawk replied as they walked across the lawn. The sky was starting to grow darker as the sun had just begun to set, and Kaden shivered because of a sudden harsh gust of wind. 

"Quentin Rich--" he stopped trying to pronounce the name, knowing he was already botching it. It was better to do that than to keep humiliating himself. "Whatever. That name is impossible."

"Maybe for someone who speaks a language as easy as English. But trust me, where I come from, there are some really impossible names. Hawk is actually short for something, you know. And Downing is a simplification."

They passed by a group of friends sitting on a picnic blanket, talking and laughing. There were people going to and from the dining hall to the dorms and even some late nighters going downtown. He saw a few of the stoners smoking by what was called the "stoner tree", trying to make it look like they were doing something else. 

Kaden hurriedly looked away from there, embarrassed. 

"Are you a rule follower, Kaden?" The question was surprising. 

"Yeah, I guess so," Kaden replied. Well, he'd never smoked, he'd never had a sip of alcohol, and he'd never broken the law. He'd never skipped a day of school aside from being sick, and he made it a point to be on time to class. So yes, you could say he was a rule follower, as Hawk put it.

"Magicians break all the rules. Just a warning." 

When he thought they were going to go right back to the dorms, Hawk had a sudden change of heart.

"Where are you going?" Kaden asked him. It looked like he was headed over to the so called stoner tree, and Kaden wasn't about to join him. But he felt strangely like going. Maybe it's because he wanted to hear more about this Quinnel person, about what Hawk was short for, and more about the demon girl Marine. Or maybe he just wanted to spend time with the walking sex god he had somehow befriended.

Hawk wasn't the first guy Kaden had ever crushed on, so he definitely knew what it felt like, and what it meant for him to like a guy. This was why he was so casual about liking a guy; he hadn't been his first time around. That's when the questioning had started. But he'd also liked girls before, too, so he'd decided he was bisexual.

So to him, accepting that he liked Hawk was easy. If not easy, it was simpler than it could have been, that's for sure.

"Errand. Also, I want to try something. There's this place in the woods I want to show you," Hawk said, and stopped beside Kaden. He grabbed Kaden's arm and smirked at him. "Come on. Just trust me. And no, it is absolutely not the stoner tree." Hawk rolled his eyes.

Kaden felt himself blush. Again.

Great. Just wow. This was going to be an experience. 

And so Hawk dragged him by the arm into the woods. 

The temperature changed suddenly. Where it had been slightly chilly before, it now felt way colder than that. It definitely felt strange and off, and not natural at all. 

Kaden shivered and wrapped hiss arms around himself, bracing himself against the cold. 

"Did you just do something?" He eyed Hawk suspiciously. He remembered what the so-called Magician had said about "not playing by the rules,"  so it's not like he could really trust Hawk in this scenario. Or any scenario where something weird happened and the laws of physics or thermodynamics got turned upside down. 

"Perhaps." Hawk's eyes gleamed in the growing darkness. Strangely enough, he didn't seem at all affected by the shift in the weather. Definitely fishy. 

"You don't seem phased at all. You definitely did something." Hawk kicked the ground and Kaden heard a rustle of leaves. He flinched. 

"Relax. I did absolutely nothing," Hawk told him. That tone told him that he'd obviously done something. "Oh, and have you ever heard of geocaching? There's this one location around here I wanted to check out." 

"Geocaching?" Of course Kaden had heard about geocaching. One summer, he'd taken Kaden out all around the state looking for random boxes and containers buried in trees, random holes and other odd places, trying to see how many he could find and beat some sort of record that Kaden couldn't really remember. 

"Yeah. There's something in that box that's kind of important. It used to belong to Quinnel," Hawk replied. Whenever Hawk talked about Quinnel, he got really weird. Kaden assumed that he either really looked up to the guy, or had some kind of a crush on him, but he was obviously too afraid to ask that question. 

"Oh-kay," Kaden stressed, taking a deep breath. His teeth were chattering, and he only wore a thin long sleeved shirt, so it's not like he was the most prepared against the elements. "Can you turn this weird weather thing off? It feels like a New England winter, not California in autumn. Jesus Christ." 

At that, Hawk snapped his fingers and the weather suddenly felt normal again. 

Kaden sighed with relief at the weather being back to normal.

"What's this item that supposedly belonged to Quinnel?" 

"A compass," Hawk said simply. "Family heirloom. Got lost when Quinnel and I snuck into this world one time on accident." 

And that's when Kaden had a sinking suspicion that he'd been to this very woods before.