The Buried and the Bound (The Buried and the Bound Trilogy Book 1)

by Rochelle Hassan

For those of you fighting battles and facing monsters of your own. May you be victorious.

him with an emptiness beyond anything he had ever known. It was the insatiable hunger of an immortal devourer, and her way of telling him, wordlessly, what she had not the energy or inclination to say aloud: My patience is not without limit. And I am starving.

“The hounds are only as strong as their master,” she said. “It didn’t fail. You did.”

Okay girl…

“Who has a true love at sixteen?” “I did. I do.” He didn’t say: I had to have been in love, to miss a ghost this badly.

Son of the wicked, your curse is this: My heart was stolen from me, and so shall I steal yours. You will know true love, but when the clock strikes midnight on your sixteenth year, you will forget. Let no word, no touch, no day or night linger in your memory. Let reminders go unseen and unheard. Let your love be lost to you in name and in being, and let each passing moment take your love farther from your reach.

God why do you have to be such a bitch?

The person in his head that he could only refer to as you was familiar in that exact same way, even when Leo couldn’t see them. He knew them without knowing them.

The idea that he might have endangered someone just by falling in love with them made him sick.

He wouldn’t have put himself or anyone else through this if he’d had a choice. Would he?

No hunny I know u wouldn’t

It kind of made him uneasy, that he’d missed something like that. Because what else was he missing?

and others would threaten to charge him with vagrancy or loitering for, essentially, daring to exist in front of them.

Bitch

because he never knew what innocuous comment would trigger one of his father’s towering rages.

:(

when the sermons had started to make him hate himself.

He’d liked the idea of having a son. Just not the reality of who Tristan became.

No, they hadn’t loved him. They hadn’t even liked him.

So what? a part of him thought. Maybe the hounds can scare a little decency into Mom. Let her be afraid, like I am. Why should I protect her? She never protected me.

At least in part because if something cornered you in the woods, you could run away; but if you were caught in the sea, there was nowhere to go but down.

Makes sense u just drown instead

the kelpie couldn’t bewitch her into climbing on its back—and a hedgewitch was immune to such magical compulsions—it would happily rip her apart on dry land.

Oh! Great!

woods, and

Fucking liars

A taxi parked on the corner of a dark road. A hand reaching for an ivory mane. The taste of sea salt mingling with the iron tang of kelpie magic. Aziza blinked, and the images were gone.

Girl what the hell

“I’m an antisocial virgin who’s obsessed with witchcraft. How much trouble can I really get into?” Meryl did not seem comforted by that sentiment.

Shes not wrong tho

Aziza battled with herself. She had work to do. But he was so … sad. And pathetic.

My favorite quote So far

And it wasn’t because he looked cold and she wasn’t about to let someone whose life she had personally saved die of pneumonia.

Ofc ofc not

“I lost it. I didn’t recognize the inside of my own head. I would know things and not remember how I knew them. I’d have opinions about things and not remember why. Something funny would happen, and I’d think, I should tell … and then I’d feel the name slipping away from me.”

My poor baby

“For, like … six months after my sixteenth birthday, I barely spoke to anyone,”

My poor child

When I came home, there were reminders everywhere. Like, everywhere. Whoever my true love is, we must have been attached at the hip,

Second fav quote

“But you won’t like it at all, will you, when I come for precious, forgetful Leo Merritt—”

Third favorite quote. Also glad we got the confirmation they were gay for each other. Slow burn now until the third book!!! YAay i will go crazy before then bc leo wont know and also Tristan will go crazy when he finds out leo is hanging out with aziza.

“One of us has to be positive, and we both know it’s not going to be you.”

I love leo so much hes my baby

But Leo gave her such an exasperated look—and was such a sorry sight, between the blanket pulled up to his nose and the clumps of damp hair half obscuring his eyes—that she decided not to finish that sentence.

Ik hes pathetic

AT ELEVEN YEARS old, Leo was all curls and awkwardly long limbs and oversized glasses, because back then he only wore his contacts on the soccer field. You could hear his laugh from across the room. He was the most mesmerizing thing Tristan had ever seen.

learning what it was like to feel completely winded by the sight of another boy.

What had he done to earn that? What had he said? If he could somehow recreate those conversations, would the rest of it follow as naturally, as effortlessly as it had the first time?

walking Hazel around the neighborhood on Halloween, dropping her off at home,

My only question is did leos family forget tristain too? If not tey fuckin suck

Leo guiding his hands into signs when he’d started teaching him ASL and they had still needed excuses to touch each other: Hello.

But he was always on the same wavelength as Leo.

And still Tristan managed to convince himself that Leo only saw him as a friend, all the way up until he was fourteen and Leo was leaning over the homework they’d spread out on the floor to kiss him. This was how he remembered being fourteen, fifteen: learning what it felt like to bury his fingers in the soft curls at the nape of Leo’s neck;

and Leo turned to Tristan with a look of utter dismay, as though his worst nightmare had come true. There was no way for Tristan to believe all that was anything but real. But he couldn’t believe in Leo’s curse, not in the same way. Leo’s and Tristan’s lives were so completely intertwined that for Leo to forget Tristan would mean losing most of his memories of the past four years or so. How could that be possible?

No magic could be stronger than what he and Leo had.

He never said it out loud, but deep down, that was how he felt—that love could conquer anything.

Leo thought Tristan was his “true love,” in his own words.

To hear Leo talk about the two of them with the same hopeless intensity that Tristan had always felt was kind of a revelation.

“Promise?” Leo had asked, holding on to Tristan a little too tightly. “I promise,” Tristan had said, and he didn’t move until Leo was ready to let him go.

Would the curse make Leo forget him over and over? And could Tristan survive that—watching himself be forgotten, over and over, by the only person who really knew him? He was afraid to find out. So he didn’t.

Inside, grief poisoned him. No one had known he’d been dating Leo, so there was no one he could talk to about what had happened,

He was falling apart right before Tristan’s eyes, and Tristan could do nothing to help him. Because Tristan was nothing to him.

My poor baay

Ten years of service in exchange for the thing he wanted most in the world: a broken curse.

Ahh makes senne as to why he agreed more so now

It had seemed like a bargain. What was ten years compared to the rest of his life? A life he could spend with Leo? And this, Tristan knew, was how he would one day remember being seventeen:

The love he’d given to the only person he had ever loved. These were the marks he had made in the world, and they were all of them signals.

What would Leo do? he asked himself, but it was a pointless question. Leo would never have put himself in this situation in the first place. Leo was good, and Tristan— Tristan was bound.

As the line between consciousness and sleep blurred, a name rose in his mind like foam on the crest of a wave—a name closely guarded in his heart, haunting him as effectively as any poltergeist.

Who did those belong to? Why had Leo thought they looked familiar? Could it have something to do with …

Yes. They are tristians