Chapter 17 #4
God, this is all too much. I knew the blood had something to do with it, but a bond? A blood bond? Kage is certified insane if he thinks I’ll drink his blood again. “All this and I didn't even, technically, choose to drink it," I mumble.
The room goes very still.
"…what?" I don’t even catch who asks the question.
"I didn't exactly—he sort of—"
"Excuse me?" Nellie leans forward, forcing my eyes to meet hers.
"I was hurt and he—he pinned me and put his wrist over my mouth and made me drink–
"Calypso Marie Dellaby,” Margo barks.
“That’s not my middle name.”
“It is now!” She shakes her head like she’s disgusted. “CAL."
Tess has stood up. Margo is no longer in her armchair. She’s standing also.
Shandy, this time, doesn't move. She has gone very still in a different way. Watching me. Listening.
"He forced a blood-bond on you."
"He—I mean—"
"He forced a blood-bond on you, Cal,” Nellie says.
"I—when you put it like that—"
"There's no other way to put it. He held you down and put his blood in your mouth."
"Margo—" I say, trying to think of anything to make the situation sound less horrible.
"That is a reportable offense, Cal. That is a council matter. You can have him removed from campus, you can have him brought up on charges, you can—"
"Margo,” I snap. I realize it’s insane that some part of me is trying to protect him. Again, by the way… What’s wrong with me? Maybe that’s exactly what having a vamp’s blood in your system does. It makes you sympathize with them. Gives you fucked up supernatural stockholm syndrome.
"What?" Margo sticks out her neck like she’d be delighted to hear what kind of battered-woman excuse I’m about to give.
I blow out a breath. "Look, he's not—he's not a student. He's not faculty either. He's—it's complicated."
Margo: "Complicated." Her eyes narrow.
“I don’t think he’s in a position where any of those things would happen to him, Margo, they would happen to me.
I bring it to the council, I’m the one who gets evaluated.
I’m the one who gets asked why I let it happen.
I am the one whose parole gets reconsidered.
He gets a write-up at worst. A slap on the wrist."
The room digests this.
"Ok," Nellie says, finally. Quietly. Nodding."Ok. Then we just—we just get it neutralized. Quietly. No paperwork. Margo can do it. Margo, you can do it, right?"
Margo: "I can. I have not. But I can."
"Ok. That's the plan. This week."
"Ok," I say.
I look at my hands. The throbbing in my healing neck is louder than it was a minute ago and I swear my heart is pounding out of my chest.
"And the more scary alternative for why you’re drawn to Kage," Nellie says, gently, returning us to what I was really afraid of. "The one you were going to say before we had a small vamp blood-bond crisis? What was it?"
I close my eyes.
"That it isn't the blood. That he—just gets me somehow. Sees me? And I him. And I really don't know what to do with that either."
The room lets it sit.
"Okay…" Nellie says, gentler. "Emric?
I shrug. "He's just nice."
Four pairs of eyes on me.
"He's kind. He's funny. He’s sweet."
The girls nod in unison. The shift is so visible it's almost funny—the we have been bracing for the worst posture dropping out of all four of them at once, replaced by the oh, thank god, a normal one expression.
Tess: "Yeah."
Margo: "Yeah."
Shandy: "He's a good one."
"Checks out," Tess says. "He's a Vane."
"But you haven't scheduled the beignet date," Nellie asks, watching me.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because if I sit across from him in a coffee shop in the French Quarter and we have a normal conversation about normal things, I don't know how to be that person yet.
I don't know how to want a normal thing and actually have it.
I'm here for one year. I have a deadline.
He's so kind to me and I can't afford him. "
Silence.
Nellie tucks her shoulder against mine. The throw blanket has slid off my knees and I haven't bothered to pull it back up.
"Where," she says, very gently, "does Leopold Vassard fit on this list?”
I shoot her the nastiest what the actual fuck are you talking about look. "Be so for real, Nellie."
She's grinning into the throw blanket—the kind of grin she has perfected for moments when she knows she's being a menace.
"I had to ask."
"Be. So. For. Real."
"He looked at you with such intent last night at the unveiling."
All three of the girls have leaned in. If there was popcorn, they’d be eating popcorn.
"He looked at me like a man considering a sandwich, Nell. I’m food to him."
"It's a kind of intent."
I shake my head. "It's the kind of intent I've already declined three times."
"I love that you've kept count."
Jesus Christ, Nellie is going to kill me.
"Three," Tess says, loudly, from the rug.
"Tess," the room says, in chorus.
She buries her face back in her phone, snickering. Margo's shoulders are shaking. Shandy's grey eyes are glittering at me from over the top of her book; she's still not reading.
The laugh in my chest is the kind that comes out as breath, not sound. I close my eyes for a second. The room is loud and warm and full and for as ridiculous as this all was, it feels good to have opened up. To have put all these feelings into words at least once.
Even if it’s all a fairy tale.
When I open them, Nellie has stopped grinning. She's looking at me with a face I can't quite read.
"You're allowed to feel things, Cal."
I look at my hands. "I'm not, though."
She waits.
"I'm here to dominate my magic, Nell. That's all I'm here for.
Like I said, I have a year. The council put me on a track and the track says: pass the evaluations, earn your freedom back, walk out of here as the kind of witch nobody has to sedate.
That's the deal. I can't afford to be distracted.
I can't afford to be opened up. I can't afford to want—I can't want anything that lives outside of getting through this year.
Relationships are for people who have futures.
I don't know if I'm a person with a future yet. "
Margo crosses to the couch, and sits down on the arm by my feet.
"Your magic responds to who you are, Cal.
Suppression hurts witches. We learn this in healing in our first year.
A witch who closes herself off from feeling—from joy, from grief, from desire, from anger—closes off the channel her power runs through.
Witches who try to live small to make their magic safer end up making their magic more dangerous.
The control you're looking for is on the other side of letting yourself feel things, not on the other side of refusing to. "
I don't know what to say to that.
"I'm not saying date all three," Margo says, mildly.
“Or four if you include Leopold!” Nellie adds.
Margo laughs. "I'm saying—be careful with the thesis that not feeling is going to make you safer. It worked for twelve years isn't the argument you think it is. You were sedated for twelve years. That's not the same thing."
I look at my left hand.
I can't argue with her. I don't have the will.
"Okay," I say.
"Good," Margo says. She bumps my foot with her knuckle. "End of unsolicited healing lecture. Returning to my anatomy text."
She goes back to the armchair and opens the book again like she didn't just dismantle a sentence of mine I've been telling myself for weeks.
Shandy, from the rug as if she read my mind–or my cards: "She does that. You will get used to it."
I laugh. It's wetter than I want it to be. I wipe my left eye with the back of my hand and Nellie shoulder-bumps me again without looking, and the room settles back into its weather.
After a while—fifteen minutes, twenty—Nellie says, in her ordinary voice:
"Want me to show you something?"
I look at her. "Yes."
"It's a little thing. My mother taught it to me when I was twelve.
I was—I had just lost my grandfather, and my magic was doing some things it wasn't supposed to be doing, and I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't eat, and Mom sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me this and told me to use it whenever I felt myself getting big in a way I couldn't put back down. "
"Okay..."
She gets up and disappears into her bedroom. When she comes back she has a small wooden box in her hand. She sits cross-legged in front of me on the couch.