Hotblood by Juliann Whicker Page B

proceeded to take the needle out of my arm. He put a bandage on me and pressed the cut for a moment. He was close to me, and I could smell his blood, different from Satan’s.
    “ What is Cool and what is Nether?” I asked him keeping my voice low.
    He finished fussing over my arm and stood back with his arms across his chest. He cocked his head to the side and then fished around in a drawer beside my bed.
    “ This,” he said drawing a horizontal line across the page, “divides the body from the soul. This,” he said drawing a line vertically so there was a cross on the page, “divides the mental from the emotional. Top left we have the body and mind, those are the Wilds; top right is body and emotion, that’s Hotbloods; bottom right, soul and emotion, those are Cools; bottom left, soul and mind, the Hollows.”
    I stared at the paper seeing Satan’s face on the top left, mine on the top right, my dad’s on the bottom right, and the bottom left empty. “So, Wilds are mental and physical…”
    “ They are obsessive planners and have power over the physical world,” my dad interrupted nodding.
    “ All right, so they’re super paranoid and can control blood and fire. Hotbloods like me are more physical and emotional. When I get really angry I’m physically strong and fast, but instead of planning it, it all comes out in kind of mindless emotion.” He nodded and didn’t add anything. “Cools are emotional and soul? I don’t know what that means.”
    “ Cools can manipulate the emotions and desires of those around them if they are centered enough. That is how I encouraged you to be as calm as you were yesterday. It’s unique that in the grip of your fury I had no power to lean you.” He frowned then shrugged. “It could be I’m out of practice.”
    “ Oh.” I stared at him. “You can make me feel things I don’t really feel?” He nodded. “Great.”
    He frowned and shook his head. “I don’t do that. Cools don’t as a rule, use their gifts for selfish gain. Cools have soul. They are about peace, tranquility, and respect for all living things.”
    I stared at him and bit my lip wishing we weren’t having this conversation. I didn’t want to talk about souls. I didn’t want to think about Devlin, about my dad, about the things he’d told me that had made me so angry. “Hollows are mental and soul which means that…” I trailed off all out of ideas.
    “ Hollows can manipulate souls, take a soul and absorb its energy. Of course a Hollow would never do such a thing unless he was insane.” My dad got quiet again. “Not every Hollow goes mad, really, not one in a million, but when they do, it’s very bad. Wilds would have you think that the danger is far greater. After all, they blame the Hollows for wiping out Wilds, and any breed that could do that must be destroyed.”
    “ But the Wilds aren’t gone; the Hollows are. What happens when a Wild goes crazy?”
    My dad looked at me and shrugged. “The same thing that happens to the rest of them. They can only have a certain amount of power. Satan is as dangerous as any Wild will ever be. That’s quite dangerous enough, but Hollows, while they aren’t aggressive and brutal the way Wilds are, can cause more damage than a thousand Wilds if they’ve…” He trailed off and looked at me like he’d forgotten who he was talking to. “Never mind. The only reason to tell you about the Hollows and their extinction is to show you how necessary caution is when dealing with Wilds. Some of them have decided that hybrids are the next great threat. That would be you, Dari. You, with a Wild mother and a Cool father, are what we call a hybrid. Under the treaties and laws that were created after the Hollow wars, hybrids became illegal. Marriage between the different breeds was something you could be killed over. Your mother’s House is a merciful House compared to most of the others. They only disowned her. Of course,” he said with a slight smile,