Chapter 1 #2
The air outside is wet and warm and smells like crushed marigold and smoke and, under it, the sweet-rot of a party thrown for the dead.
The blue lanterns along the path still burn their cold false blue.
The tombs in the old cemetery still have their little candles lit, a whole glowing city of the gone, and I have just added to the population and I can’t breathe past it—
A rush of air hits the back of my neck.
One second Nellie is under my arm and the path is empty ahead of us. The next, there's a body in front of me, dense and rough and radiating that blunt kinetic wrongness that my own magic keeps trying to tune toward, and a voice that lands like a fist.
"I've got her."
"Kage—" Nellie's grip tightens on me. "She can barely—"
"I said I've got her." He's already moving.
He doesn't ask. He never asks. Kage decides and then lets you catch up, and by the time I understand what's happening his arm is under my knees and the other is a bar across my back and the world lurches as he takes my weight off Nellie like I don't weigh anything at all.
"Go home, witch," he tells Nellie—not cruel, just final. "I'll get her somewhere with fewer teeth."
"If you hurt her—"
"Yeah." A short, ugly sound that isn't a laugh. "Get in line."
And then the entire world is a blur.
I've felt vampire speed twice before and hated it both times—the world smearing sideways, the stomach left three feet behind.
This is worse and better. Worse because everything in me is broken glass and the motion rattles all of it.
Better because his chest is against my cheek, cold and solid and real, and the night rips past us in a blur of oak and moss and gaslight and I don't have to see a single face while it does.
He runs like he's angry at the distance.
He runs like something is chasing us. Buildings blur.
The clock tower. The dark bulk of the academic wing.
The path narrows and the oaks close overhead and the apothecary garden's green smell washes over me for half a breath and then—
Stone under his boots. The porch. Mine.
He stops so fast the moss is still settling around us, and he doesn't put me down.
He takes the steps and lowers us both onto the little porch instead, his back against the wall of the cottage, me sideways across his lap with my shoulder tucked under his chin, one arm still banded across me like he thinks I'll come apart if he lets go.
Maybe I will. My own front door is an arm's length to the left of us, shut, its ugly little anchor rune carved into the outside of the wood and the counter-rune I scratched into the inside where no one can see it.
Beyond it, dark, is the one room in the world with a lock on my side of it.
The enforcers' half of the duplex is black. No light in the window. Nobody on the step. Thank God they were given the night off.
Kage doesn't say anything for a long moment. His breathing is rough against my shoulder. He smells like cedar and iron and, under it tonight, smoke—everyone smells like smoke tonight, the whole world does. His arm across my waist is shaking, very faintly, and I don't think he knows it.
"You felt it, didn’t you," I ask. My voice comes out wrecked. "The fail-safe."
"From what's left of the bond, yeah." Flat. Bitten off. "You went out like a light. One second you're a bonfire in the back of my skull and the next there's just—" His jaw works. "Nothing. Somebody reached in and switched you off, and I felt the exact second you stopped being there."
There's something under the flatness. Something I've heard exactly once before, the night I asked him who he was and he told me he'd been somebody's tool for longer than I'd been alive.
He knows what it is to get switched off. To get cut down.
"I'm fine," I tell him.
"You're not."
"I'm fine, Kage."
"You've got a dead vampire's ash in your fist and you won't open your hand, Hex." His voice drops, rough and low, right against my ear. "You are the furthest thing from fine I've ever held. Stop lying to me. You're bad at it and I'm too tired to pretend I believe you."
And that's the thing that almost breaks me.
Not softness. Not don't cry, it's not your fault, you couldn't help it—if he'd said any of that I could've stayed iron.
He doesn't. He just tells me I'm a wreck and holds on anyway, and the not-fixing of it is somehow the only thing that makes the pressure behind my eyes give an inch.
I let my head fall back against his chest. Just for a second.
Just this once. His arm tightens, and he doesn't say anything, and he doesn't make me say anything, and we sit on the step of my cage in the dark with the marigold smell drifting up off the garden and the last of the ash going cold in my hand.
"They're going to send me back," I say.
He goes still.
"That's what happens now. That's the deal. Prove I'm not dangerous or back to the room and the tray and the fog, forever, no appeals." A sound comes out of me, thin and terrible. "I proved it. In front of all of them. I proved it as loud as it gets. I’m a monster and I deserve to be locked up."
"Nobody's putting you anywhere." His arm is iron.
"You don't get a say. Neither do I. That was always the whole point.
" I turn my head, and up close his storm-blue eyes are doing something raw and furious and helpless, the scar pulling his mouth crooked, and I have to look away because I can’t hold one more person's grief tonight on top of my own. "Put me down. I need to go inside."
"Hex—"
"Put me down, Kage."
I need to face reality. I can’t do that in Kage’s arms, feeling like I might actually be protected. Like he might actually stand in the way of anything that would try to take me away.
It isn’t real.
None of this is.
He let’s me go. Slow. Like it costs him. He sets me on my feet on the top step and stands with me, one hand hovering at my elbow in case my knees quit. I slowly amble to the door and unlock it, stepping inside. Kage follows me to the door—
And stops.
Right at the threshold. Because he has to—the old rule holds him at the line the way it holds all vampires, and I haven't said the words, and I'm not going to.
He looks down at the six inches of dark doorway he can't cross, and something moves across his face, there and gone, that I'd call hurt on anyone else.
"Invite me in," he says. Quiet. Not a demand. For once in his life, not a demand.
I can’t do that. Even if some part of me…
No.
"No."
His jaw flexes. He doesn't push. He acts, always, and then deals with the fallout, but he does not push this, and I understand that's its own kind of restraint from a man who has none.
"Fine. I'll be out here," he says.
"You don't have to—"
"I'll be out here, Hex." He shoves his hands in his pockets and leans back against the porch post like he's holding the whole cottage up, settling in, and on the inside of his wrist where his sleeve rides back I catch the edge of that tattoo I've caught before—a compass, inked in black, with no needle in it.
Pointing nowhere. "Go on. I'm not going anywhere. "
We stare at each other for a minute, so many words unsaid between us. But I don’t have room in my mind for whatever there is between me and this enigmatic, frustratingly alluring mess of a vampire–not when I just murdered someone.
Again.
I shut the door on him, and stand in the dark with my back against the wood and my fist still closed, and for the first time since I came up out of that hall, nobody is looking at me.
The relief lasts about four seconds.
Then the walls start closing in and I am alone, and everything I've been holding at the surface starts to sink.
They're going to lock me away–the council, Aamon, the Academy.
Everyone. They're going to fill me back up with fog until I can't feel the difference between morning and night, until Nellie's a name I used to know, until Odette's kitchen is a bittersweet dream that haunts me.
I'll go back under and this time there won't be a wean and there won't be a year and there will be no hope.
No more opportunities, no more life. Nothing.
There’ll be a white room and a tray and the groove my body wears into a bed while the world goes on without me, and this—all of this—will have been the dream you get to have right before they take everything.
And Emric will still be dead. Whatever they do to me, that doesn't get undone.
My chest is filling up with it. The pressure.
The exact awful curve I know better than my own name, guilt and grief pouring down into the place behind my sternum where my magic lives, and the heat rising up to meet it, and no, no…
not again, I can't, I'll bring the cottage down, I'll take Kage off the porch and Nellie down the path and the whole old campus with me—
"You absolute idiot," I say to the empty room. I say to Emric.
My voice comes out shredded and mean and I don't care, because it's the only thing holding the rest of me off the floor.
My fist won't open. I know what opening it means—if I open it he's dust I brush off my palm and lose into the floorboards, so I keep him closed up tight even as my nails drive deeper into the raw crescents already there.
"You could have run in the opposite direction.
You could have used your stupid vamp speed to clear out.
" My throat knots. I shove through it. "And you—of course you didn't. Of course you walked toward me, watch me coming apart at the seams, because you're the only person in that entire rotting school with the survival instincts of a moth. "