Chapter 17
Combat class is the worst place to think.
I'm sitting on the low stone wall at the south end of the training field, sling off but my arm still cradled in the elastic compression sleeve the infirmary sent me home with, my legs crossed at the ankle, my hair scraped back into the lowest ponytail my left hand could manage on its own.
Midus is forty feet away running paired sparring drills in the grass, and every fifteen seconds he glances at me on the wall like the sight of me sitting still personally offends him.
It is not, technically, personal, but it sure feels that way
My dislocated shoulder has thrown off Midus's pair rotation, and he has solved the problem the laziest way available: dragging Zeva off her post to even out the numbers. She's been pulled into drills twice this week. I can see her glaring at the back of his head between rounds.
"Dellaby!" he barks across the field, and I startle. "Watch her footwork. She's compensating. You see it?"
I do. Zeva is favoring her right side because the second-year vampire she's paired with keeps reaching for her left.
"I see it, sir." I lift my left hand and give Professor Midus a thumbs up. He’s not impressed.
"Good. Next time you can move that arm I want you running that drill. With me."
"Uh, yes, sir."
"And don't think I forgot you've been on the bench for a week."
"Sorry, sir. I’d be out there if the infirmary told me I could."
He gives me a look like I am the worst thing that has ever happened to his day and goes back to shouting at somebody about hip rotation.
I let my eyes drift.
Emric isn't on the field.
I clocked it within thirty seconds of sitting down. His usual stretch spot on the west side is empty grass. His usual drill cluster is one body short. He's been at every class since I’ve been at Devenir, and today—the first class I've been back at since the library—he's not here.
I let my eyes drift the other direction.
Across the field, Kage is doing his thing.
Midus barks his name every ninety seconds and Kage goes, fluid and unhurried, to whatever corner of the field needs him.
He has a long wooden staff in one hand. He has not used it yet to hit anybody but he has used it, twice, to tap the back of a second-year's knee and reposition a stance, and once to lift the chin of a fae student who was dropping her guard.
He swaps weapons in and out of the gear shed as soon as Midus requests.
Kage, sticks. He fetches sticks. Kage, padded gloves, four sets.
He fetches the gloves. Kage, take Aldrich's drill, I need to talk to Zeva.
He steps in. He runs the drill for one round. He steps back out.
He has not looked at me directly since I sat down.
I have watched him not look at me for the better part of an hour. The not-looking is so deliberate I could measure it with a ruler. Every fifteen seconds his eyes touch the stones beside me, the grass past my shoes, the path behind me—never me. And every fifteen seconds my body knows.
Aamon does the same infuriating thing.
They are both very good at it. They both move through a room with their attention pointedly arranged around me like a perimeter they have agreed not to cross, and they both expect me to act like I don’t notice. Maybe it's a quirk of frustrating men in general. Maybe somebody hands out a manual.
It's the blood. It has to be.
That's the other thing I'm trying to think about.
I drank Kage’s blood eleven days ago—behind my cottage, in the dark with his wrist in my mouth and my own panic still running hot—and ever since, my body has been doing this.
The compass-needle thing. The drag in my sternum whenever he moves across a room.
The way I sat on a wet patch of grass last night and let a man I have known three weeks ask me what it felt like to kill my own family, and I fucking told him.
That's not normal.
That's not who I am.
I haven’t had a meaningful conversation about my parents with anyone in twelve years and last night I gave the entire monologue to a man whose actual name I apparently don’t know because he sat next to me and waited.
And the whole time my chest was warm in the specific direction of him, and the warmth wasn't fear and it wasn't trust, and that is the part I am trying to figure out.
It has to be the blood.
If it's the blood, it's just a chemical thing. It's some kind of pull his vampire body opened in mine without asking, and it'll fade as the magic of the exchange dilutes, and the angle of my spine toward him will loosen until I can sit in a room without it. That’s a useful explanation. That’s an explanation I can live with. That’s an explanation that doesn’t require me to look directly at the alternative, which is that I told the truth about my sister because I wanted to, because something in him cracked open the part of me that has been closed since I was thirteen, and the cracking is not just about chemistry.
I look at my hands.
The compression sleeve on my right arm is the bright clinical purple of medical supply company aesthetics, and the bandage on my neck has been swapped out by the infirmary for something smaller and lower-profile but is still very much there. I can feel the gauze move when I swallow.
Across the field Kage steps in to correct a second-year's grip on a staff. My sternum follows him.
The blood. I make my brain say it. It's the blood.
Calypso.
I go very still.
The voice arrives in the warm low place behind my sternum where it always arrives, unhurried and entirely uninvited, and my breath catches before my brain catches up.
It's been—how long? Two weeks? Long enough that I had moved into the calm grief of accepting it might never come back.
Long enough that the sound of it now lands with all the weight of an absence ending.
Are you well?
I don't answer.
I can't tell if I'm furious or relieved.
Both.
Both at once. The way a kid is when a parent walks back in after disappearing for a weekend.
Calypso.
Where have you been?
I make my brain say it as flatly as I can.
Away.
That's it?
Yes.
I stare at the dirt between my feet. Midus is shouting somebody's name. Somewhere on the field a vampire is laughing at something. The not-thereness of this conversation makes me dizzy.
You don't get to come and go.
That's also true.
The dryness of it's so familiar my chest does something complicated. That's also true. That's the same voice that told me trust is expensive. The same voice that told me I am strong. The same voice that went territorial when Kage's blood was in my mouth. Stay away from him.
Are you well, Calypso?
My shoulder hurts.
I know.
You know?
A pause.
I've heard.
I don't know what to do with that information. Whoever is attached to the voice heard about what happened to me. Or maybe they’ve been paying attention.
I haven’t spoken to Emric in a while, but I guess my accident wasn’t exactly a secret. But Emric isn’t here and today the Voice definitely doesn’t sound like him.
Heard from who?
Does it matter, Calypso?
Yes.
A longer pause this time. I can almost feel the Voice deciding how much to give me and where to set the cut-off. When it speaks again it doesn't answer.
You went into the trees last night.
So that's where we are. So this is what brought him back.
I did.
You shouldn't have.
Mm.
Calypso.
You haven't spoken to me in twelve days. You don't get to tell me where I shouldn't go.
That's also true.
We sit with it. The Voice is very good at sitting with things. He has a way of letting silence press without pushing, and it always makes me want to fill it, and I have learned not to.
Are you safe right now?
I'm sitting on a wall in a sanctioned class with a man with a stopwatch in front of me. By every measurable definition I am safe.
That's not the definition I was using.
I close my eyes. Behind them, the field fades. The thud of feet on packed grass goes quieter. There's just the warm uninvited presence in my chest and the slow steady thing it does when it asks me a question.
I'm fine, I say.
That's not an answer I believe.
Then stop asking me questions you've already decided about.
A breath of something that might be amusement, on his end. Or sympathy. Or both.
Forgive me.
Don't apologize. Just say what you want to say.
A longer pause.
I am glad you're alive.
The words land in my sternum like a hand laid flat.
I open my eyes. The field is still there. Midus is still shouting. Kage is across the field running a drill, staff balanced across his shoulders, eyes anywhere but on me. Nothing has changed.
I'm glad too, I manage. I think.
That's the most honest sentence you've given me in two weeks.
He fades.
I feel the warm uninvited place behind my sternum cool by a small but specific degree, and the Voice is gone again—not abruptly, but the way he always goes, like a person who is choosing his exit at the door rather than slamming it.
I sit there for a long time.
When I look up, Kage is fetching staffs from the gear shed.
The Emric-shaped gap on the west side of the field is still there. I haven't stopped tracking it; I just stopped looking at it directly. Where are you, Vane?
Midus claps once. The class winds down. Sparring partners separate and bow. Padded gloves come off and get tossed into the equipment trunk by the gear shed. I uncross my ankles and bend to retrieve my bag from the grass by my feet, and when I look up to scan for Kage one more time before standing—
He's already gone.
The place where he'd just been—at the center drill, mid-correction—is empty. The staff he was using is propped against the gear-shed wall. The path past the shed is empty too, but the gate at its far end is just swinging shut.
He left before Midus dismissed us.
I stand. My shoulder twinges. I sling my bag onto my left shoulder and walk out without looking back.
∞∞∞