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.

Tristan had never been a brave person, and he didn’t want to die. So he’d obeyed.

“Do you know why that didn’t work?” the hag said. Shivering, Tristan shook his head. “The hounds are only as strong as their master,” she said. “It didn’t fail. You did.”

This was what passed for festive in Aziza’s world: corralling dangerous magical beings while “Blue Christmas” warbled in the background.

Strangers always wanted to know whether she was all right, and if she was lost, and why was she bleeding? It was exhausting.

Aziza loved magic, but she loved it like you’d love a pet boa constrictor: with cautionary measures, a healthy respect for its dangers, and a full awareness of the fact that the thing you loved could turn on you at any moment.

You think America doesn’t have monsters? That was what she’d said. You think there’s less evil here than anywhere else in the world?

Not knowing what—who—he was grieving only made it harder to let go.

“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.

He was nothing but a conduit, a glorified rain gutter.

Unwillingly done was still done.

It didn’t make him feel powerful, though. It made him feel possessed.

His parents used to insist on his going to church every week, so he was able to mumble a few remembered lines. But those memories were bad ones, and filled him not with grace but with hurt and resentment and something approaching hate.

He shook his head to dismiss those feelings, abandoned the remembered prayers, and made up his own. He didn’t apologize. It wouldn’t have felt honest.

Her roots weren’t there; they were here in Blackthorn, not only because she’d been born here, not only because her parents had chosen it, but because it had chosen her.

but, in his own defense, he’d been six years old and frogs had ranked above grown-up yelling on his priority list.

In the last year, he had learned that absence was unmistakable, even if you couldn’t name what was missing.

He didn’t miss this house or the way he’d felt when he lived here, but the simple notion of a bed and a roof and a door you could lock … the presence of unnecessary things, like tailored curtains and the landscape painting on the wall … it all seemed unbearably luxurious to him now.

The first thing he’d learned about being homeless was that it was time-consuming. If he wanted a bed or a shower at one of the shelters he used to cycle through, he had to wait in line for hours, so he mostly slept outside.

The second thing he’d learned was that being homeless was humiliating. He’d huddled on street corners and begged for change. He’d pissed in dark alleys after three shops in a row had kicked him out before he could use their customers-only restrooms. He’d watched people’s eyes skate right over him as if he were invisible.

This, though? Coming back to his parents’ house after they’d sent him away? This was the most humiliating of all.

He walked the halls of this house like a stranger. Like he hadn’t sat at that dinner table biting his tongue at age fifteen because he never knew what innocuous comment would trigger one of his father’s towering rages. Like he hadn’t hidden in that bathroom and pretended to be sick to avoid getting dragged to church at age thirteen, when the sermons had started to make him hate himself. Like he hadn’t stood frozen around that corner listening to screaming arguments at age eight, when he’d first become conscious of the fact that marriage didn’t have to mean liking each other.

the coats hung at the end, untouched. He took his heavy down coat along with a lighter one. He could give away the former once it got too warm to wear, or hide it someplace until next winter rolled around. Still planning on being homeless next year? he thought, and then: I might not even be alive next year.

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

she’d never felt like she needed any other parent. She wondered about them, though. They were a mystery, and sometimes she felt—irrationally—that there were parts of herself she couldn’t understand without understanding them.

“Meryl,” she said, “I’m an antisocial virgin who’s obsessed with witchcraft. How much trouble can I really get into?”

It was hard to make friends and even harder to keep them when strange accidents always seemed to happen around you—things knocked over or stolen, trees uprooted. That one time with the wasps.

“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.”

So I started looking for magic instead of ghosts. I found a Wiccan group online—” Aziza stifled a laugh. He gave her an exasperated look. “They’re very nice people!” “I’m not laughing at the Wiccans.”

She felt compelled to stop this fool from getting himself killed,

And it would be nice not to stake her life on the trains being on time.

Tonight, though, nothing was louder than Leo’s thoughts.

“Things that belong to us have value. The belonging is what gives them value.”

They’d done everything short of killing him; they couldn’t kill him, not with his powers and his bond to the hag. But they’d fought him for every last shred of dominance. He’d won that fight, though. His will had been stronger than their hunger. Too bad willpower doesn’t stop you from bleeding.

She’d grabbed it without her gloves, and the goddamn oversized magical worm had bitten her, and Aziza had just clasped her hands tighter and squeezed like she meant to throttle it. She couldn’t, of course. Shadows didn’t suffocate. If she’d really wanted to hurt it, she would’ve pinned it to a tree with her silver pocketknife. But she didn’t, and did the shade have the decency to thank her for it? Of course not.

He’d learned that her pop culture knowledge was abysmal, and he’d made it his personal mission to fix that. Because it wasn’t enough to be cursed. He was just desperate for another hopeless cause.

Leo’s car was a bucket of rust held together with duct tape and hope. It whined, it groaned, it sputtered threateningly every time Leo turned left—but as Leo put what must have been all his weight on the pedal and the car lurched into motion, it was a chariot of the fucking gods.

That was his clearest memory of being eleven: learning what it was like to feel completely winded by the sight of another boy.

Leo guiding his hands into signs when he’d started teaching him ASL and they had still needed excuses to touch each other: Hello. Yes. No. Thank you. Please.

Isolation and grief became anger and recklessness, and in a rebellious fit—convinced that nothing mattered, anyway, and he had nothing else to lose—he came out to his parents. Just blurted it out in the middle of a fight. Turned out he still had a lot to lose, like a place to sleep at night.

It was like waking up into a nightmare instead of waking up out of it:

“What would you have done if I was dating her?” “Sabotage,” she said, without hesitation.

Lol fuck yes, Hazel’s ready to protect Leo x Tristan at ALL costs NO hesitation

Forget the hounds. If Maria Merritt found her son going through her drawers, she would end him.

the hound, being not only a literal monster but also an absolute asshole, had left him in Elphame.

It took him a second to process the words. How was there any question? Of course he was afraid. “Afraid” was a permanent part of his being, fused into his body like an extra limb.

the night sky gaped down like an audience, silent and breathless.

even now the gaps in his memory felt so real he could’ve walked into them and disappeared.

the four of them were sitting awkwardly around the table over half-unwrapped breakfast sandwiches: Tristan, his ex-boyfriend, a librarian, and a witch. Somehow, the librarian was the most unsettling part of the equation,

He had nothing but this secret. He was keeping it.

Jiddo was so quick to give things up, to sacrifice. But sometimes she just wanted him to talk to her.