The Witch They Crave (Devenir Academy #2)

Chapter 1

My fist is closed so tight my nails have gone through the skin of my palm, and I won't open it, because I know what's inside.

His ashes. The remnants of Emric.

I come up out of the dark in the wrong order.

Taste first—ash and copper, thick enough to chew, the flat clinical nothing that means the fail-safe burned through my body just like it was meant to.

The chip they put in the base of my skull and a man's thumb on the trigger, my magic getting ripped out by the root so that all I can taste is the scorched place where it used to be.

Then the ringing, high and thin and everywhere. Then the cold of stone against my cheek, the wet heat of blood drying in my hairline, and, last of all, the weight in my right hand.

A fistful of something soft. Something that used to be warm and is going cold.

Don't open it. Whatever you do. Don't open your hand.

The room swims back into focus in pieces. Stone. Arched and vaulted and hung with black iron. The old chapel at the heart of Devenir Academy, where they dressed the whole hall up for the Revel, the festival for the dead—marigolds and sugar skulls and blue witchfire floating in the dark.

The last thing I remember is Leopold on the dais. White hair, easy smile, a folder open in his hands, reading my dead family's names out into a room full of strangers like he was reading a menu. After that it's all heat and noise and Emric and the floor coming up to meet me.

I went down.

I don't know how long I was under. Long enough that the smoke has thinned. Long enough that the screaming has stopped and reality has set in.

The tall windows are gone now—just black iron frames, teeth in an empty mouth, the glass a glittering ruin across the floor.

The marigolds are torn loose from their ropes, orange petals scattered through broken crystal and spilled wine gone dark.

The witchfire has guttered down to almost nothing.

Two hundred of the oldest, deadliest things on the Gulf Coast are pressed flat to the walls of a wrecked chapel, and every single one of them is looking at me.

I did it again.

I can’t believe it happened again…

It's right in front of me–a scorch mark that I can’t ignore. A perfect black ring seared into the stone, the edges still smoking, and at the center—where a boy stood three heartbeats ago with his hands on my arms and my name half-out of his mouth—there is a soft grey drift of ash.

Emric.

Emric Vane, who was kind to me for no reason anyone here is ever kind, who partnered with me in combat class and bought me beignets and put his body between me and the room when my magic came off its leash.

Some of the ash has already scattered. Some of it is on my dress.

Some of it is in my fist, because I reached for him before the fail-safe took me under, and I closed my hand around what was left, and I have not let go.

The name arrives fully–Emric–and my whole body tries to fold around it. My chest caves. A sound comes up my throat that I don't authorize, cracked and small, barely a sound at all, because the fail-safe scraped me down to nothing and there isn't enough of me left to make a bigger one.

"Cal." Nellie. Somewhere to my left, close, her voice shredded. "Cal, look at me. I'm right here. Look at me, baby."

I don't look at her. I can't stop looking at the ash.

Emric put himself between me and the room.

That's the part my mind keeps hitting, over and over, like a tongue going back to a broken tooth.

Two hundred immortals threw up their arms and their power and each other, every last one of them ducking behind something, taking cover from me the way you take cover from a bomb.

And Emric walked toward the bomb. Emric got as close as a body can get.

Because that was the whole shape of him, and I let my magic put its hands through him like he was made of paper.

A shadow drops over me. Cold rolls off it, the specific marble cold I recognize and wish I didn’t, and a pair of black boots I know stops six inches from my face.

"Calypso." Low. Careful. Wrecked at the edges in a way I've never heard from him. "I need you to let me help you up."

And every soft, ruined thing in me turns to iron.

I lift my head. It costs me everything I have.

He's on one knee in the glass, sleeves down for once, that loose strand of dark red hair fallen across his forehead the way it only falls when he's come apart at the seams. His hazel eyes are doing something I've never seen them do—blown open, every door he’s built between us off its hinges, the composure I've been chipping at for a month just gone, scattered across his face like the glass across the floor.

He looks like the most honest thing in the room.

He's holding his hand out to me. And in the other hand, loose at his side, half-hidden against his thigh like he thinks I won't see it, is the device.

The device. Matte black. The size of a pen. His thumb still resting where the button is.

The same hand. The exact same hand that held my face down in his lair with candlelight on it.

That laced through mine and cupped my whole burning interior inside his own body and gave it back to me slow, like it was something precious.

That hand reached into his pocket in a room full of people and pushed the button and put me on the floor.

Aamon.

Aamon did this to me.

"Don't." My voice comes out flat and dead. Good. I want it flat. I want him to hear the nothing left inside me. "Don't touch me."

"Calypso—"

"You were the one who always searched for another way.

" It scrapes out of me. "You always tried to find another way to help me.

That was the whole—" My throat closes and I force it back open.

"Every time. Every single time I spiraled, you came around the table and you took it out of me with your hands, and you looked at me like I wasn't a—" The word won't come.

I make it come. "Like I wasn't a weapon you had to switch off. And then you switched me off instead."

His face does something terrible. A crack running the length of it.

"There was a second wave." His voice is barely holding. "You were going to—"

I close my eyes and tune him out. I don't have any energy to spend on whatever he’s about to say, and even if I did, I can see it wouldn't land—he's already built the defense, already decided this was a thing that had to be done and he was the one who had to do it.

There's no sentence I could say that gets in past all that.

So I try to get up instead.

I press my palm flat to the cold stone and push, and my body barely responds.

Everything below my sternum has been hollowed out.

My arm shakes, my elbow buckles, and a sound comes out of me before I can stop it—thin, cracked, a whimper I'd never let anyone hear if I had anything left to hold it back with.

The pain of it whites out the edges of the room.

"Calypso—" He moves fast, that hand coming toward me, reaching to take my weight, to help, as if it’s the most natural thing he could do.

I flinch away from it.

Hard. My whole ruined body throwing itself sideways out of his reach, away from the hand, away from him, a full-body no that costs me the last of what I have. My shoulder hits the stone. I don't care. I would rather lie in the glass than let those fingers close around my arm.

He goes still. Whatever's on his face, I don't look at it. I can't. I've spent a month learning the geography of this man and I can’t afford a single inch of it right now.

"Nellie." My voice cracks on her name. "Get me out of here."

She's under my arm before I finish saying it. "Yeah. Yeah, come on. Up. I've got you."

I get one leg under me and the room tips hard to the left.

Everything below my sternum has been hollowed out—the fail-safe didn't just suppress the magic, it ate it, and the place behind my ribs where the sun usually sits is a cold scraped socket.

My knees have opinions about holding weight and none of them are yes.

Nellie takes more of me than she can carry and does it anyway, her arm a bar across my back, her whole small body a wall I lean into.

"Don't look," she says into my ear, steering me toward the doors, through the ruin. "Eyes on me. Just walk."

I look anyway. I can't not.

The crowd parts for us. Two hundred beautiful monsters in their funeral finery, stepping back, giving us a wide clean lane to the doors like I'm still lit, still going off, like the ash on my shoes and dress might jump to them.

Some of them have their masks still on—bone-white half-faces, gilded skulls—and I can't tell the horror on the bare faces from the theater on the covered ones.

A fae girl is crying into someone's shoulder. An old woman is crossing herself.

And at the far end of the hall, up on the dais, one bright thing in all that black.

Leopold.

He hasn't moved. The file is still open at his feet where he dropped it, pages fanned across the stone, my whole ruined history spilling out under the candlelight for anyone to read.

His white coat is streaked grey with the fallout.

His hands hang at his sides, empty for once, not tapping, not folded, just open. And his face—

His face isn't wearing his usual smug, taunting smile.

I catch it for half a second across the length of the wrecked hall, and it isn't triumph and it isn't the warm public mask and it isn't even the cold thing I've watched move underneath it for a month. It’s an expression I never thought a selfish, arrogant vamp like Leopold would be capable of.

As if he just saw, for the first time, the realtime ruins of the damage he set in motion.

Then Nellie hauls me through the doors and the night takes us and I don't have to look at him anymore.