Chapter 7 #2
Repeated, intensive magical exchange between the same two individuals creates a compounding debt.
Every other day. For twelve months. His hands on mine unless I can keep my magic under control on my own.
I have to keep practicing.
Nellie glances at my notebook. Reads what I've written. Her eyebrows lift. She scribbles something in the margin of her own notes and tilts it toward me.
Is this about ur training sessions??
I angle my notebook away from her. She grins.
The lecture winds down. Malloy assigns reading—chapters twelve and thirteen, a short essay on the ethical implications of cross-species magical debt, due next week.
Emric packs up slowly and gives me a smile and nod on his way past. I watch him go and notice, in my peripheral vision, that Leopold hasn't moved from his seat in the upper rows.
He's leaning back, one arm draped over the chair beside him, watching the room empty.
I'm still writing—finishing the last of my notes on magical debt, the pen moving faster than my thoughts—when I notice Nellie hasn't packed up. She's sitting beside me, bag on the desk, chewing her lip in a way I'm learning means she's holding something back.
"Okay," I say, capping my pen. "You've been making that face since you sat down. What is it?"
She exhales. Glances around—Malloy is erasing the board, a few students are still filtering through the door. She drops her voice.
"Nothing. That's the problem." She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. "I went through the entire second level of the restricted section searching for a record of that rune.
Historical inscription practices, pre-council ward systems, obsolete notation guides—the kind of stuff that hasn't been checked out since before I was born, based on the dust situation.
Yuck." She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. "Whatever that symbol is, it's not in any book this academy owns. "
I pull the rubbing from my skirt pocket. Unfold it on the desk between us. The angular lines stare up at me, grey graphite on white paper, still humming faintly against my fingertips.
"So what does that mean?"
"It means one of two things." Nellie drops her voice even though the room is nearly empty.
"Either it's dark magic—forbidden stuff that was purged from the collection when the council standardized ward practices three hundred years ago.
Or it's older than the council's records entirely.
Pre-standardization. The kind of magic that existed before anyone was writing things down in neat categories. "
"Both options sound bad."
"Both options are bad." She looks at the rubbing. Then at me. "I want to go visit my mom. She's got collections that make the restricted section look like a bookshelf at a dentist's office. If anyone can identify this, it's her."
I fold the rubbing back up. Slip it into my pocket. The hum settles against my thigh.
"I don't want this getting out," I say, my voice low.
"If the administration finds out someone's carving unknown runes into my door, it becomes a situation.
Reports. Investigations. Balcour writing it up in his portfolio and adding it to my file like it's somehow my fault.
I want to know who did this before anyone official gets involved. "
"Just my mom. Nobody else. I promise." She pauses. Chews her lip. Then: "Actually—do you want to come with me? To Thibodaux. See the books yourself. My mom would love to meet you, and she's way better at explaining this stuff than I am at relaying it."
The offer catches me off guard.
Off campus. An hour away. Someone's home.
We've known each other for, what? Like two days?
Two. And this girl is inviting me to her mother's house like it's nothing—like bringing home a stray witch with a body count and armed escorts is a perfectly reasonable plan.
Who does that? Who looks at someone like me and thinks yes, I want this person in my kitchen, meeting my family, touching my mother's books?
Nellie Marchand, apparently.
Something twists in my chest—not pain, not quite.
Envy, maybe. The sharp, bittersweet kind that comes from watching someone be exactly the person you might have been if the world had let you.
Open. Generous. The kind of person who throws doors wide instead of checking what's behind them first. I used to be a kid who trusted people.
I think. The memory is so old and so buried under facility sedation that I can't be sure anymore, but I think I was.
Before the hotel. Before everything.
Nellie just is that. Effortlessly. And I want to resent her for it but I can't, because she's aiming all that reckless generosity directly at me and I'm too starved for it to push it away.
My brain starts running logistics instead—Corvin and Zeva would have to approve it or at least be informed, and probably Balcour, the council tracks my movements, I'm on a twelve-month leash with zero slack—
"Just think about it," Nellie says, reading my face. "We'd figure out the whole enforcer situation. My mom has dealt with worse than two vampires with bad attitudes."
I almost laugh. "I'll think about it."
"That's all I—"
"Ladies."
I jump.
The voice drifts down from the upper rows. Warm. Easy. Carrying the particular resonance of someone who knows exactly how good they sound and has been weaponizing it since birth.
Leopold is out of his seat, descending the aisle with that unhurried, long-legged stride. Blazer still on—unbuttoned, sleeves pushed up, uniform worn carelessly because he knows he looks better disheveled than most people look dressed up. He must have been waiting. And listening…
The whole conversation with Nellie, the rune, the Thibodaux invitation—he's been sitting up there, watching, biding his time until the room was empty enough.
"I was hoping to catch you," he says. To me. His eyes pass over Nellie like he’s acknowledging a piece of furniture. "If you have a minute."
Nellie stiffens beside me. I can feel it—the shift in her posture, the protective instinct kicking in. She opens her mouth.
"It's okay," I say, rolling my lips between my teeth. "We'll catch up later."
She looks at me. Those sharp brown eyes say twelve things at once, most of them variations on are you sure and I don't trust him and I'll be right outside. But she nods. Gathers her bag. Bumps my shoulder on the way past—the Nellie shoulder-bump, our thing now—and walks out.
Leopold watches her go. Then he drops into Nellie's vacated seat like he was invited.
"Calypso Dellaby." He says my full name the way you'd say the title of a book you've been meaning to read. "I'm Leopold Vassard. Officially. Since we haven't been properly introduced."
"I know who you are." I start packing my bag. Notebook in. Textbook in. Pens gathered from where they rolled across the desk. I'm not going to give him my full attention. Something tells me that's what he's used to, and I don't feel like being what he's used to.
"Do you." He stretches one long leg out under the desk in front of him, settling in. "What have you heard?"
"That you're late to everything, your family has buildings named after them, and you could charm a nun out of her habit."
"That last one's an exaggeration." He grins. Fangs. He's not hiding them—two sharp canines glinting in the classroom light, casually displayed the way another man might flash an expensive watch. "It was a priestess, and she came willingly."
I stop packing. Look at him.
He's watching me with those warm brown eyes, and up close the warmth is more complex than it looked from across the room.
It's not simple. It's not accidental. It's the warmth of a fire that knows exactly how much oxygen it needs to keep burning and adjusts accordingly. Every degree of it is managed.
He’s cocky as fuck with a jawline to back it up.
"What do you want, Vassard?"
"Leopold." He corrects it gently. Like he's being generous. "And I want to talk to you. Is that so unusual? New student. Historic circumstances. I'd be a poor representative of my house if I didn't extend a welcome."
"Your house."
"Vassard. Noble blood. One of the founding families of this institution.
" He says it without arrogance—or rather, with an arrogance so total and so comfortable that it's circled all the way back around to sounding like humility.
"We've been part of Devenir's governance since its inception.
My family helped establish the council's educational mandate.
We take the academy's mission seriously. "
"The mission of..." I zip the smaller pocket of my bag. "Managing dangerous supernaturals?"
"Nurturing exceptional ones." His head tilts. The white hair shifts. "You're exceptional, Calypso. Everyone on this campus knows it. The question is whether you know it."
I look at him. He looks back. The smile is still there—warm, generous, practically magnetic. But his index finger is tapping against his thigh. Three quick taps, rhythmic, almost unconscious.
I don't know what it means. But I notice it.
"I think," I say, zipping up the rest of my bag, "that 'exceptional' is a very polite word for what most people on this campus call me."
"Most people on this campus are afraid of things they don't understand. That's not a character flaw—it's a species limitation." He leans forward. The movement is slow, deliberate, closing the distance between us by inches. "I'm not most people. And I'm not afraid of you."
"Congratulations. Want a medal?"
Something flickers behind his eyes. The cold flash—the one from the first day, the door closing behind the smile. There and gone. He wasn't expecting pushback. Or at least not pushback with this particular flavor.
Good.
"I like you," he says. And the way he says it—measured, evaluative—makes it sound less like a compliment and more like a decision he's just made. A categorization. You are now filed under: interesting.
"Thanks. I'll add it to my file. Right next to 'provisional enrollment' and 'compliance benchmarks.'"