Chapter 16 #4
It lands in my stomach like a stone. I look at his face—the scar, the storm-blue eyes, the careful hold of his shoulders—and I think of every dry throwaway line he's tossed at me in three weeks, the casual Witch, the casual Hex, the night I threw him across my lawn and he laughed up at me from the grass like I'd given him a Christmas present, and somewhere underneath all of that is a man who has been somebody's tool for longer than I have been a person.
I close my eyes and the world tilts. I'm suddenly very tired.
I put my left hand against the trunk of the tree. The bark scratches my palm.
He's in front of me before I see him move.
His hand is at my low back. The other hovers near my elbow, not quite touching the sling. The contact is light and very firm and very, very fast.
"Sit," he says. "Down. Against the tree. Now, Hex, sit."
I sit. I half-fall into it. The bark catches my back, the wet grass goes through my dress, and Kage crouches on his haunches with his elbows on his knees and his face level with mine. He hasn't let go of my low back yet.
"Hands," he says. "Show me."
I show him my left hand. He holds it. His palm is hot.
"Are you breathing?"
"I think so."
"Breathe deeper. You stood up too long. Are you light-headed, do you need water, do you need food, what, tell me."
"Just—give me a second."
He gives me a second. He moves to sit beside me—back against the tree, shoulder almost against mine, careful with the sling between us. His hand is no longer on my back. I notice when it goes.
I close my eyes. The dizzy passes. My pulse settles. The fire rumbles in the distance through the quad. A cluster of laughter goes up somewhere.
"Thank you."
"Don't do that either."
"Sorry."
"Stop apologizing. Stop thanking me and stop apologizing. Just tell me how you are."
"Better."
"Mm."
We sit. We're quiet. The smoke smells like burnt oak and rain coming. He's half a hand-span from me and I am hyperaware of him in a way that's not new and isn't getting better.
"Hex."
"Yeah?"
"I want to ask you something."
"Okay."
"You don't have to answer."
"Okay."
A long pause.
"How did it feel?"
I open my eyes.
He's looking at the ground. His forearm is on his knee, his other hand is loose, his face careful. The same careful he's been using all night.
"How did what feel?"
"When it came out of you. The first time–” He clears his throat. “The hotel."
I go still.
"Don't," I say, and it's quieter than I want it to be.
"I'm asking the same way you asked me, Hex."
"You're asking me about killing—"
"I'm asking you what your magic feels like when it's yours.
" He turns his head to look at me. "I'm asking what it is to be the thing the academy is afraid of.
I'm the only person in this building who is going to ask you that without writing it down somewhere.
So if you want to never tell me, never tell me.
But don't tell me I'm not allowed to ask.
You asked who I am. I'm asking who you are. "
The fire pops in the distance.
I look at my left hand on my knee. The hand that put light through Thierry Vasreaux's shoulder. The hand that did, by my own strong suspicion, the same thing twelve years ago to a hotel hallway. I have never described any of it to anyone.
I can’t believe I’m about to.
"It feels like coming up for air," I say.
He's silent.
"You know when you've been holding your breath for a long time and you didn't realize you were holding it, and then you exhale and your whole body unclenches?
" I'm not looking at him. I'm looking at my hand.
"It's that. When the magic goes out of me cleanly.
When I'm not fighting it. It's the most whole I'm ever going to feel.
It's the only time in my life I've ever felt like I was the right size for the body I'm inside. "
A pause.
"And the consequences," he says.
I close my eyes.
"And the consequences."
I have to stop talking for a second. The bandage on my neck is very loud against my skin.
"My sister was nine. We were sharing a bed in the hotel. She was reading me a picture book. The next thing I knew I was eleven floors down on the street with my mother's blood on my forearm."
He doesn't say anything.
"They drugged me. They told me what I'd done. They kept me in a room for twelve years. I'm twenty-five and I've read more books than I've had conversations. I've killed eleven people I didn't know I was going to kill. I miss my sister so much I catch myself seeing her face in strangers. I—"
I stop.
A single tear has gotten out, and it's sliding down toward my jaw, and I lift my left hand to wipe it before he can see it.
He sees it.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't reach for me. He doesn't offer comfort. He just sits there next to me with his shoulder almost against mine and lets me have it, and the fact that he doesn't try to make me feel better is kind of nice.
He just lets me feel it.
"That's," I say, dry, "the consequences."
"Yeah."
"It's a poor trade."
"Sounds like it."
We sit.
After a while he says, "I can heal you, you know."
I close my eyes.
"My blood. Like before. Faster than the body alone—it would close the bite, it would ease the shoulder. By morning you'd be functional."
"No."
"Hex—"
"No, Kage."
"Why not"
"Because I want to remember it."
He's quiet.
"All of it. Every part. I want to feel the bandage and I want to feel the sling and I want to wake up tomorrow with the bruise above my eyebrow and the throb in my neck and I want my body to know what happened to it.
I don't want to be smooth-skinned by the time classes start.
I want everybody on this campus to look at me and see what their library lets happen on a Wednesday afternoon. "
A pause.
"I could make you take it."
I open my eyes. I turn my head. He's looking at the trees in front of us, not at me, and his profile is something out of an old painting against the firelight in the distance, and his jaw is working.
"You could," I say.
"Last time I did."
"I remember."
"What's stopping me from doing it again?"
I look at him. I look at him for a long time before I answer.
"Nothing's stopping you," I say. "I just don't think you would."
His head turns. His eyes find mine. The blue is very dark.
"Why?"
"Because of this."
I lift my left hand between us. I don't touch him.
I just hold it there in the air, palm open.
Whatever this is. Whatever it is between him and me that pulled my head around when he stepped under a tree fifty feet away and put his hand on my back before I could fall and let me sit here and cry about my sister without saying don't cry.
I'm not going to name it. I don't have a name for it.
But it's there. And I'm betting he can feel it as clearly as I can.
His face changes.
For half a second something cracks in his face. Half a second, less. The careful goes.
Hunger. Grief. Something that almost looks like hope, that he kills before it can finish forming.
Then it's gone. The careful slides back over it, smooth as glass.
He pulls back.
He gets to his feet.
"Don't do that," he says.
"Kage—"
"Don't do that, Hex." He's not looking at me now. He's looking at the dark between the trees. His hands are back in his pockets. "Don't put a name on it. Don't decide what I would and wouldn't do for you. You don't know me. Whatever you think you know about me, you're wrong."
"Kage."
"You're an idiot to trust me. You hear me?
A fucking idiot to think I won't hurt you.
I'm a predator, Witch. I'm the thing this whole party is built to remind you exists.
And one day—when whatever it is between us inconveniences whoever it inconveniences, when the man who owns me snaps his fingers and points me at you—I'm going to hurt you.
And you're going to look at me and remember this conversation.
And you're going to wish you had stayed at the fire. "
"Kage—"
"Calypso!"
Nellie's voice. Two trees over. Searching.
I turn my head to see where she’s at.
When I turn back he's gone.
The shadow under the elm is empty. There's no sound of footsteps. There's no movement in the underbrush. There's just me sitting on wet grass with my back against a tree and a breath of wind coming up through the gap in the trunks, and Nellie's voice calling my name a second time, closer now.
"Cal? Cal, where are you?"
I push off the tree. I stand. My shoulder twinges. The night blurs at the edges for a moment and resettles.
"Here," I call back. "I'm here, Nell. I'm coming."
I lift my left hand to my cheek. There's a tear there I didn't notice falling. I wipe it on the back of my wrist before I step out from under the elm, and by the time Nellie's eyes find me I am exactly the version of myself she came looking for.