Mystic Wonderful : A Hell Theory Novella by Lauren Gilley

Author:Lauren Gilley [Gilley, Lauren & Gilley, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HP Press
Published: 2020-10-18T18:30:00+00:00

iv.

Tris had never claimed to be a genius. But he wasn’t an idiot.

Except for when he was.

His whole life had been soldiering; born an army brat before the First Rift, both his parents had already been in the military, had been part of the first scramble of armed forces who’d responded to the heavenly chaos that had ensued. His father had died in combat, then.

He’d joined up at eighteen, and proved alarmingly good at killing people for a living. The Rift Walkers had seemed a natural fit. His mother had cried at his graduation ceremony.

He’d been told he was made of stone, as an insult more often than a joke, but he was a man, same as any other, on the most basic levels. He got hungry, and thirsty, and tired, and horny. In the post-Rift world, the military stopped caring so much about certain regulations: about hair, and fraternization, and which direction a person’s attractions lay. It wasn’t hard to find someone with an equal itch; to steal a few minutes in a stairwell or behind a locked dorm door, standing, or crowded together on a narrow bunk. All of it perfunctory, no-strings, and effortless.

Tris had seen all manner of terrible things as a Walker. Had watched fellow Knights die again and again, until their names, and faces, and personalities all blended together. Until it was just a role within each company: there were leaders, and steadfast rocks, like himself, clowns like Gavin, and then there was the One Who Died. Always, always, the cannon fodder, the first to fall, the weak link.

He’d taken one look at Sir Francis Gallo and known him for what he was: the One Who Died. He hadn’t understood how someone with such soft hair and such a sweet face could have been made a Knight in the first place. Though smaller, the girl, Rose, had radiating a prickly aggression that would stand her in good stead in the company.

Gallo, though…Gallo was soft.

Even more damning: Gallo made Tris feel soft.

If asked, he would have told anyone curious that he didn’t have finer feelings, an assertion that would have been taken for truth after one look at his cold, hard face. But the actual truth was that, like any other man, those finer feelings could exist, could be crippling, and so he’d packed all capacity for them away, locked them up tight, deep inside, because they had no place in a life such as his.

He took one look at that stupid, doomed to die, curly-headed boy Knight, though, and he wasn’t thinking about a quick tug in a closet. It wasn’t a faint itch on the back of his tongue that unsettled him – but a hunger. Instant, and deep, yawning painfully wide inside him, unearthing urges best left buried. He wanted to know the texture of his skin, and watch his eyes dilate up close, right before he tasted his mouth – and then every other part of him.

It was such an immediate, devastating

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