Chapter 12 #2
"Professor." Leopold rises, all warmth, crossing to him like a host who's been waiting all morning.
"On time. The council's watchdog, delivered to my door.
Come. I'll show you your rooms myself—I insist. Least I can do for the man who's going to live in my walls.
" He turns back, generous, expansive. "Calypso.
Eat, then go change. We're leaving for Theory in twenty minutes and I'd rather we weren't late on your first day back. It sends a message."
We. Like he and I are a set.
And under the dread, some starved animal part of me lifts its head at the plain word: class. A room, a bell, a thing to do that isn't sitting around or training with Aamon. Two weeks in the dark and I got sick of having no routine.
Then I remember what class will be like. Thirty vampires, witches, and fae who watched me walk to a tribunal in irons yesterday.
Jesus Christ.
"Twenty minutes," Leopold says again, already steering Aamon toward the stairs, a hand hovering near his shoulder without landing. "Dress the part. You'll be representing this house from now on."
I make myself finish eating—a few more bites, enough to quiet my stomach—and I listen. Footsteps overhead. Leopold's voice, then a door, then Leopold's voice again, lighter, moving away. It's another minute before I hear him come back down the far stairs and out, humming, gone.
On my way to the stairs I take a wrong turn on purpose, just to explore. The main hall runs east into a corridor that's darker than the rest, colder, the sconces unlit. I get three steps down it before a woman in grey staff uniform materializes at my elbow like she grew out of the wallpaper.
"The east rooms aren't aired, Miss Dellaby." A smile, smooth and total. "There's nothing down there for you."
"Just stretching my legs."
"Of course." She doesn't move until I do. She walks me back to the stairs the way you'd walk a guest away from whatever you didn’t want them to see.
Dammit. So much for learning this place.
She nods and only then do I go up.
Aamon's door is the one beside mine, open a crack. I knock once and step in.
"You shouldn't—" he starts, but I'm already across the room, and his hands come up to catch my shoulders and hold me at arm's length. He looks me over. Face, throat, down my arms—checking me for damage. He looks scared.
"Are you all right?" Low and fast, pitched to die inside these four walls. "Last night. Did he do anything to you—say anything, touch you? I couldn't get to you, and I have been running every version of your first night in this house through my head since. Tell me the real one."
"Nothing happened." I get my hands around his wrists.
"Aamon. Look at me. I'm fine. He fed me an obscene amount of food and showed off his silver and told me about six times how generous he is.
That's it. He didn't touch me." I breathe out.
"This whole place is a velvet glove with a fist inside it.
He keeps opening his hand, real slow, just so I don't forget the fist is there. But I'm fine. I promise."
His shoulders come down. Half an inch. Never the whole way—I've never once seen them come down the whole way—but half, and I feel the give of his tension under my hands.
"You're clear." His lips twitch in what might be a soft smile. "The Vanes are settled. The claim's paid. Balcour got his liability off the books and backed off. For the first time since the Revel, nobody's coming for you."
I turn the words over. They don't fit anywhere at first. I've been braced for a blow for so long that the absence of one feels like a trick.
"You've got a month until your next review," he goes on, softer. "That's runway. Go to class. We’ll continue training." His thumb moves once against my shoulder, barely. "It's not about surviving the week anymore. Now it's just work."
A month. It's the first thing anyone's said to me in weeks that sounds like a floor instead of a ledge, and I stand on it for a second, just to remember what solid ground feels like.
Then I remember what isn't accounted for.
"Have you heard from Kage?"
The change in him is Aamon and I only catch it because I'm this close. A tightening at the jaw. A half-second where his eyes go somewhere else. "No."
"Nothing at all? It's been days, Aamon, he doesn't just—"
"Nothing." Flat. Then his hand tightens on my shoulder and his voice drops under the house. "There's something I have to tell you. Something I should have told you weeks—"
"Ca-lyp-so," Leopold says from somewhere down the hall. My name broken into three sing-song pieces, warm and lilting and horrible, a man calling a pet in from the yard.
I jerk back from Aamon like I've been caught—because I have—and whatever he was about to say folds shut behind his teeth.
"Later," I breathe. "Tell me later, I swear. I have to go."
"Go." The warden slides back over his face, slow, snagging on the way. Whatever he almost said is still in his eyes. "Go."
I slip out, down the hall, into my own room, and shut the door and lean my whole weight against it for exactly one second. One. Then I push off it and get to work, because a second is all I get.
I shrug out of the robe and the soft, expensive pajamas somebody folded into the wardrobe for me and pull on the grey instead.
Pleated skirt, the button-down with the little silver crest over the heart.
I leave the blazer on the bed. It's still Louisiana, and even if it’s November, I'm not dying of heatstroke.
In the mirror, I see a girl in a school uniform.
I fix my hair, tuck the worst of it back, and catch sight of my wrists as I do—the punctures from the witch irons already scabbed and closing on their own.
Last night the Vassard physician had wanted to speed it along.
Offered me a small glass of something dark and told me it would knit the skin clean by morning.
Leopold's blood. I said absolutely the fuck not.
I'd rather wear the marks than owe him a single drop.
I turn side to side. Not great—but I look like a girl with her feet under her, and that's most of the fight. Good enough. It's as good as it's going to get.
I set my jaw and head downstairs, where Leopold is already waiting to walk me to class.
∞∞∞
Room 204 hasn't changed. I have.
Same tiered rows climbing up from the demonstration floor where Professor Malloy holds court.
Same sorting I learned my first week—vampires high and back in the good cold seats, witches scattered low, everyone else in the middle, Switzerland, where Nellie parked me on day one.
Thirty students and the easy hum of a class three weeks into its rhythm.
The hum dies when I walk in.
Not all at once. In a wave—the door rows, then the middle, then the whole room, the noise draining out of it as heads turn and find me.
I keep walking. That's the trick—you keep your feet moving and your eyes on a fixed point past everyone's heads and you don't let the quiet turn you to stone in the doorway. Chin level, shoulders down, hands open and loose at my sides so nobody sees them shake.
My magic wants out though. I feel it push up under my sternum, hot, reaching for the fear, and I hold it—breathe in, count, breathe out—and take another step.
A vamp in the back says something. Somebody else laughs and swallows it.
Nellie's down on the left, already half out of her chair, that look on her face that means she's about to make my problem the whole room's problem and go down swinging for the privilege. I catch her eye. Shake my head. Don't. She sits, but she doesn’t look happy about it.
She jerks her chin at the saved seat next to her. Get over here.
I don't make it three steps.
Leopold's hand settles at the small of my back.
I flinch.
He walked beside me the whole walk over, close, but I didn't think he'd touch me in front of the room.
His palm spreads warm and certain against my spine, and then he steers—not a grip, not a push, just a pressure I can't argue with, turning me off my path to Nellie and toward the back rows. Old-blood territory. His territory.
The whole room watches him do it.
Watches House Vassard walk the murderer to the best seat in the room with his hand on her back like I truly belong to him.
That's the message after all. He doesn't need a word for it.
Not the council's. Not yours to whisper about.
Mine. Anyone who wants to throw an apple core at me now can explain themselves to him first, and nobody in this room is that brave.
He pulls out the chair. Two fingers, courtly, like a waiter. Waits.
"There," he says, at my ear, warm as the breakfast he watched me eat. "Now they know."
I sit. The only other option is a scene, and a scene is a spark, and I'm not handing him one in front of thirty witnesses. I fold my hands. I face front. I stare at a board I can't read a word of.
Below us, the whispering starts back up—lower now, busier, retooled.
Same room. Same whispers. New subject.
Wonderful.