Chapter 17 #2
"I'm won’t use your name. I'll say it's for a friend, she won't push." She's already scrolling to Odette's contact, that stubborn set in her jaw. "Cal. If something's happening to your magic, you want to know what it is. You of all people want to know what's in your own head."
She's right. I've survived this long by always knowing exactly what I'm feeling and why. If I can't trust that anymore, I've lost the one thing that keeps everyone around me safe.
And "a friend" won't fool Odette for a second. That woman reads between lines for a living. She'll know exactly who Nellie's asking for.
But I don’t really have a choice.
"Okay," I say. "Ask her."
"Okay." She sets the phone face-down on the table—she'll call after, when it's quieter, not here in the middle of the lunch rush—then her face shifts into a different kind of worried, and I know before she opens her mouth that we're not done.
"While we're on hard things. Has Shandy said anything to you?
Or done anything that—" She stops. "You've been around her more than I have this week. "
Something in my stomach tightens. We've both been circling this since the night at her place—since she said the words venom dependency out loud and I couldn’t even wrap my head around the idea.
"Nothing she'd let me hear." I turn my glass.
"But she flinched when Tess grabbed her arm in the corridor Monday—hard, like it hurt, then covered it.
Sleeves down to her knuckles the whole time, and we're past the point where it's about the cold.
" I hesitate. "And she does the thing where she's warm and present for about ten minutes and then she's just—gone.
Behind her eyes. Somewhere else. Then she comes back and pretends she never left. "
Nellie's face does something complicated. "So I'm not making it up."
"You're definitely not making it up."
"I keep hoping I am." She wraps both hands around her cup, my nervous habit borrowed onto her fingers.
"Every time I try to actually ask, she goes smooth on me.
You know Shandy—worst liar alive, you can always feel it coming off her.
Now there's nothing. Flat. A wall." A beat.
"That's the part that scares me. If it's what we think it is, she's not going to walk up and tell us.
People in those arrangements don't. They protect the thing that's hurting them. "
I think of Shandy at our slumber party, sprawled across the whole mattress like she owned it, taking up exactly as much room as she pleased. Loud. Warm. The furthest thing from a wall.
∞∞∞
I find Kage in the equipment shed off the combat yard, and by "find" I mean he's arranged himself to be found—leaning against the weapons rack with his arms crossed and one boot kicked back against the wall, like he's holding the building up, like he knew I was coming.
"There she is," he says. "My favorite disaster."
"Do you sleep in here?"
"Only when the company's good." His eyes do a slow inventory of me, head to boots, and it's not the once-over other people give me—the is she going to detonate scan. It's the other kind. The kind that makes my skin prickle and my sentences get short. "You've been avoiding me, Hex."
"I've been busy being kept."
The grin flickers. There and gone. We haven't talked—not really, not since the last time we were in here getting cozy, not since my finger opened on the stone and the smell of my blood turned him into something I didn't recognize.
He shoved me into a wall hard enough to bruise and told me to go in a voice that came up out of three hundred years.
I ran and the distance between us has stayed just that…
But I don’t like it.
Something about Kage keeps me coming back. I feel like I know nothing about him and at the same time, like we’re the same. He looks at me like… like he might die if he isn’t near me. For as messed up as it might be–I enjoy it.
"About the other day," I start.
"Don't." It's fast. The lazy's gone out of it.
"Kage—"
"I mean it, Hex. Leave it." He turns half away, jaw set. He’s tuning me out, trying to change the subject.
But I've been turning this over for days, and I'm not letting it go with a leave it.
"I've seen vampires around blood," I say.
"The whole school runs on it. Someone nicks themselves in combat drills twice a week and nobody so much as looks up.
You didn't just look up. You looked like something out of a nightmare.
" I keep my voice level, careful, the way you'd approach a spooked animal.
"That's not normal. That's not how the others are.
So either there's something wrong with you specifically, or there's something about—"
"Don't say you."
"—about my blood. Which is it?"
He's quiet long enough that I think he won't answer. Then, to the middle of the shed, not to me:
"Both."
The jaw works.
"You cut your hand and I nearly lost it. You saw it." He pushes off the rack, restless. "Most of them, they've fed enough that they've got calluses on the want. It's routine. A cut hand's a Tuesday." A beat. "I don't have calluses. Three hundred years, Hex. I've never fed from a living person."
I go still. "Wait, what?"
"Not once. Not a donor, not a willing anybody. Never."
"Oh." I turn that over. "Is that... not normal? I kind of assumed most of you just drank from bags. Isn't that the whole point of the dispensary?"
He looks at me then, and something almost like a laugh crosses his face. "God, you're new, aren't you?"
"I've been a vampire's problem for one semester. Cut me some slack."
"The bags keep us fed. They don't really satisfy anything.
" He shakes his head. "Difference between a nutrient shake and a meal you actually wanted.
Every vampire you've met drinks bags to get by and drinks from a vein when they can.
Donors, arrangements, someone willing at a party.
" A beat. "I don't do the vein part. Ever. "
"Why not?"
The question lands harder than I meant it to. He goes still, and for a second I think he's going to deflect—but I've already gotten this far, and he knows it.
"Because somebody used my body once without asking me," he says, flat, all the performance gone out of it.
"Decided what I'd be and did it to me while I couldn't stop them.
That's how I got made." He meets my eyes.
"So I won't put my mouth on a living person and take.
Not even when they're begging me to. It's the one line I've got.
The only thing about this whole cursed existence I actually chose. "
I don't say anything. There's nothing that wouldn't cheapen it.
There's a familiar tug low in my sternum—the pull toward him that his blood left in me, the one I’m still not used to. And with it comes understanding. I know now what I walked into.
"And my blood," I say slowly. "My blood is different?"
"Your blood." He laughs, short and without any humor in it.
"Your blood makes three hundred years of that line feel like a suggestion I could take or leave.
Close range, you bleeding, all of it screaming at me to just—" His eyes roll back in ecstasy and then he shakes his head hard, once.
"So yeah. I put you into a wall and told you to run.
That was me holding the line. That was the best version of me you were getting, and it still scared the hell out of you. It should have."
I cross the shed.
I take his hand—the right one, the knuckles still faintly scarred from where he split them open against the stone because his own blood was the only smell strong enough to drown mine. He goes still when I do it. His whole body registers the contact like a struck note.
"I'm not going to tell you it's okay," I say. "It's not a thing that needs forgiving. There's nothing to forgive. You held a line most people don't even have." I run my thumb over the ridge of scar on his knuckle. "Thank you. For telling me. I know you didn't want to."
"Hex—"
"I mean it. It's—" I search for it, and land on the true thing. "It's nice. Knowing more of you. You keep so much of yourself behind the jokes and bravado that half the time I feel like I'm talking to a locked door. This was you, unlocked. I liked it."
He looks at our hands. Then at me. And for one second the grin's nowhere, the teeth are nowhere, there's just the storm-blue and something underneath it that's been alone a very long time.
"Careful, Hex," he says, but it comes out soft, without the usual armor. "Say things like that and I'll start thinking you like me."
"Maybe I do.” I bite the inside of my cheek and blink up at him. “Terrible judgment. I'm working on it."
That gets a real laugh out of him—short, surprised—and then he closes the space between us and kisses me, and it's nothing like the storm in his eyes.
It's slow. Careful. His lips brush against mine, teasing me to open up for him and I do.
He slides his tongue against mine and my magic switches directions in my body, yearning to get closer to him, yearning for more.
I exhale into him, melting a bit, and he holds me up, drinking me in.
"I have to tell you something," he says. "And you're not going to like where it puts me."
I groan, wishing we could go back to kissing and forget everything else. "When do I ever?"
"I’m still digging into Leopold." His voice drops, the play gone out of it.
"Tailing his couriers, mostly. Learning the schedule—who he sends where, which drop-offs he keeps off the books.
I've been pulling threads for weeks and I finally caught one that's going somewhere.
Something about his family, before the house fell.
Something he's spent a long time keeping buried.
" He pulls back enough to look at me. "I'm close, Hex. Closer than I've been to anything."
And I think about the vault. About the drive out to that dead building, the cold coming off the stone, the door with no handle that only I could open.