Chapter 5: Disconnection

"He's starting to believe you," Luc affirmed after Nos told him of his progress with Cal. "That's wonderful news. Treat him with respect, and his faith in you will continue to grow. Nicely done, son."

"I hope he trusts me enough to come over so I can introduce the two of you soon."

"Don't rush or pressure him," Luc warned. "Though I do look forward to meeting my new son."

"On second thought," Nos teased. "I don't know what I'd do if he ends up liking you more than he likes me. The danger of having a dad that's too good-looking."

"Don't be cheeky." Luc flicked the tip of one of Nos's round ears in response.

Fawn then drew Luc's attention as she tugged her hair in frustration while trying to decipher what was written in Sven's cookbook.

"It seems like Fawn needs assistance," Luc stated as he headed her way.

To give Sven's chosen replacement time to adjust, Luc had Fawn make them simple sandwiches. Nos didn't care if they had sandwiches for the next several weeks, but he had a feeling Luc had some complex plan to train her, and he already pitied her for the challenges she'd have to face.

Nos had neither the courage nor the chance to tell Luc about what happened to his bike. So, he saved that conversation for another night. By the time his head hit the pillow, Nos hoped that his dreams would go easy on him.

What ultimately featured in his nightmares were intense feelings of being left behind. One moment, it was Sven who walked away, then his back changed and shifted, and suddenly it was his biological father, Norris, walking away.

Next, Nos witnessed an image of Luc walking towards his mother as if hypnotized. His mother latched onto Luc's neck like a violent snake, pausing to cackle as blood spewed from the gaping wound.

For the second day in a row, Nos bolted upright, gasping for air.

The nightmares clung to him: blood on his hands, his mother’s laughter twisting through the dark, faces of the people he loved morphing into her victims, then into him. He always startled awake when he was on the verge of becoming her. The fear was so thick it threatened to choke him. Was he doomed to repeat her cycle, to destroy what he cared about most?

Nos rubbed desperately at the center of his chest as he tried to calm his racing, half-human heart. He blindly felt around for his phone and lifted it to his face, ignoring the cracked glass to read the time.

Nos had jolted awake ten minutes before his alarm went off.

With a shuddering huff, Nos turned the alarm off and got ready for class. As he was heading out of the mansion, he saw Luc talking with Fawn, who was hunched over the massive book of notes that Sven had left behind. Not wanting to interrupt them, Nos left as quietly as he could.

As he approached the school, Nos decided to park his defaced bike a few blocks away from the campus for safety and used his vampire speed to reach his locker.

Just as he closed his locker, one of Orion's lackeys bumped into him so hard that he smacked his shoulder against the cold material. Their lockers were made of plastic instead of metal because some alloys contained silver, but it still hurt. By the time Nos regained his balance, the brown-haired vampire who'd knocked into him flipped him off as he turned the corner.

Nos wondered if he was the same asshole who keyed his beloved bike or was ordered by Orion to trash his desk.

With his mood soggier than cornflakes soaked in milk for an hour, Nos went to Professor Runo's class. When he sat down, he noticed his phone wasn't digging into him from his pockets. With wide eyes, he patted himself down and realized that the mobile device was nowhere to be found. Had he accidentally left it back at his locker?

Professor Runo began the lecture before Nos could dwell on those thoughts for much longer. As the professor's voice droned on, undercurrents of nervousness made his leg bounce rhythmically. Why did he feel so unsettled?

Nos glanced around the room and noticed Orion and his friends were missing from their seats. Anxiety immediately balled up in his stomach. Orion never skipped Runo’s class.

Nos’s nerves only got worse as the lecture dragged on. The fear kept rising. Why did this class feel endless?

As soon as they were dismissed, Nos bolted. Something told him to head straight for Hemingway’s room. His anxiety flipped to full-blown panic when he saw Blake and Emon rushing over. Emon wasn’t even in Hemingway’s class. What was he doing on this side of campus?

"Nos! Fuck!" Blake gasped, just as freaked out as he was. "Orion found your match. Emon came to get you. Go with him! Hurry!"

Suddenly, everything Nos had been feeling clicked into place.

His bond with Cal meant their feelings just bled into each other. No wonder he’d been feeling all this distress. It wasn’t even his own. Why hadn’t he realized that sooner?

Emon grabbed Nos’s wrist and practically dragged him down the hallway, moving so fast that Nos almost tripped. Normally, he’d be suspicious of any help from the purple-eyed vampire, but if Blake trusted Emon, that was good enough for Nos.

They burst into the school’s indoor basketball court and found Cal, who was bruised and hog-tied on the ground. Orion was straddling him, gleefully filming Cal’s swollen face with Nos’s own phone. For the first time, Nos regretted ever using such a simple lock screen.

"CAL!" Nos yelled. Orion’s friends, who’d just been standing around watching, finally turned to look at him.

Then everything happened at once. Orion yelped as the cracked glass of Nos’s phone sliced his thumb. Cal passed out, and his horns started to glow. Before Nos could get there, even with vampire speed, both Cal and Orion vanished in a flash of incubus light.

The second his connection with Cal was severed, it felt like Nos’s heart hit the floor. He collapsed on all fours, slapping the ground as if he could somehow follow them through. A heavy emptiness started swallowing him from the inside out.

"Oh shit!" Emon shouted. "Where’d they go?"

Nos’s heart pounded so hard it hurt. The floor felt like a spinning carnival ride beneath him. He gasped for air, but it never seemed like enough. He wanted, needed, to move, but fear kept him glued to the spot.

Is that what it felt like when a fated pair got torn apart? Was this what his mother felt?

"They're gone!" Emon explained when Blake finally caught up to them.

Some of Orion's friends immediately ran off to avoid getting in trouble. The ones that stayed were recovering from shock. None of them made any move to help Nos off the ground, so Emon reached down to take hold of Nos's elbow to try to help him up.

"Then we gotta freaking find them!" Blake concluded after catching his breath.

Unable to fight against the dizziness any longer, Nos's body dropped back to the ground limblessly, his elbow slipping out of Emon's grasp. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Orion's remaining friends scattered as if they'd been caught at a crime scene.

Emon and Blake stared at one another before reaching down to pick him up together.

Everything after that was a blur.

Nos barely registered the journey, just flashes of movement, the press of hands helping him up, the feeling of being carried, and a faint sense of the world tilting beneath him.

The next thing he knew, he was on a couch, trying to make sense of Luc’s voice cutting through the fog.

"Forgive me, I wasn't aware my son had friends," Luc mused as his silver eyes narrowed on the two young men seated across from him on the couch.

Blake and Emon looked at one another with stark fear in their eyes. They had taken it upon themselves to bring Nos home. Nos was a sullen, unresponsive mess, and they had to carry him into Emon's expensive car.

When the mansion's door opened, they thought they'd stepped into the fiery depths of what humans believed the underworld looked like, because the incubus seemed like he'd murder everyone first and ask questions later after seeing the vacant state Nos was in.

"I'm Blake, and this is my fated match, Emon," Blake responded, pushing past a slight squeak of trepidation. His voice leveled out as he regained his confidence. "I've shared a bunch of classes with Nos over the years since I'm also a dhampir. He might not have mentioned me, but I'm sure he considers me a close friend just like I do him."

"I-I'm just here to help," Emon added.

"What, exactly, happened to him?" Luc questioned.

Emon gulped loudly and began to rub his knees with his sweaty palms. "Uh, you see-"

"Nos's-match-was-getting-a-pounding-from-Nos's-bully-and-they-both-disappeared-in-a-flash-of-light!" Blake's run-on sentence ran out of steam. He threw his hands out and added, "We tried to help, but none of us could get there in time."

"Care to repeat that and maybe enunciate this time?" Luc urged.

Blake's Adam's apple bobbed, and he repeated his words slower this time.

Nos saw and heard what was happening around him, but he had no energy to respond. Physically, he felt as if his body wasn't even his, as if his spirit hovered above it, leaving it merely an empty shell. Emotionally, he knew this emptiness stemmed from being fully disconnected from his fated match.

Luc gasped and stood so suddenly that Nos's friends jumped in their seats and clung to one another. "He's experiencing the void of a separated bond for the first time! Oh, my poor boy! How could this have happened?"

"Orion. That's how," Blake replied. "According to Emon, Orion beat the poor guy black and blue."

"You said they disappeared in a flash of light." Luc turned his attention to Emon, who somehow turned a paler shade of white than he already was. "Can you elaborate? Were there any symbols on the ground? Were Caliber's horns alight with energy?"

"Caliber?" Emon whimpered.

"His match, young Emon!" Luc snapped his fingers. "Stay with me! Nostriano's match. Were his horns glowing?"

"Y-yeah," Emon responded. "And I th-think there was some kind of symbol on the floor that also lit up."

Luc closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. "I know where they went, at least which plane of existence they're currently in."

"Plane of existence," Blake repeated, blinking rapidly. "Are they with the incubi right now?"

"Oh shit, what do we tell the Dean?" Emon mumbled.

"The Dean?" Blake questioned. "What does he have anything to do with this?"

"O-Orion is the Dean's n-nephew."

Blake's green eyes widened before he nodded. "That makes so much sense now, how he kept getting away with shit left and right."

"I can take everything over from here," Luc declared. "You two can go home."

"Thank y-" Emon began, only to be interrupted by Blake.

"Fuck that!"

"Huh?" Emon turned towards the blond.

"I'm not leaving Nos looking like a zombie," Blake declared.

Nos would have taken offense if he didn't actually feel like a dissociative zombie just then. He didn’t even need to look above his hip to know that his marking was gone. No trace of Cal meant no trace of the markings that bonded them.

"He was barely able to give us his address to bring him over here," Blake insisted. "How can we help?"

Luc's shoulders relaxed, and he smiled at Blake. "You really are his friend to react that way." He motioned towards Nos's room. "If you want to help, you can keep an eye on him while I make a few phone calls."

"We're on it." Blake took hold of Emon's hand and tugged him in the direction of the stairs. The two of them then took one of Nos's arms each and slowly helped him up to his room. They didn't need to ask which room was his because a plate hanging on one of the doors had "Nostriano" printed on it.