Chapter 20 #2
"Long enough." He steps in and pushes the ruined door closed behind him as far as it'll go, which isn't all the way, not anymore.
"Long enough to watch you go straight for the one drawer that matters.
No hesitation. Straight to it." He tilts his head.
"I keep making the same mistake with you.
I keep expecting you to be boring like the others.
A weapon points where it's aimed. It doesn't go looking. "
I clear my throat, my heart pounding in my throat. "What's in the drawer, Leopold?"
"You already know, or you wouldn't have skipped dessert to destroy my door.
" His eyes drop to my hands—still, not shaking, and something in his face flickers at that.
Almost approval. "Your friend. The little Seer.
Yes. She comes here. She has an arrangement, like the rest of them, and it's entirely voluntary, and it's killing her by degrees.
I could have told you that, if you'd asked.
Instead of this." A pause. "But you don't ask. You break in."
"You're feeding on her."
"I’m not." He says it flat, and the awful part is I believe him.
"I don't share. But I have associates, and they have appetites, and a house like this runs on the quiet accommodation of appetites.
Your friend made a bargain with one of them.
A foolish one. They're always foolish." He moves deeper into the room, unhurried.
I hold my ground, because backing up is what prey does.
"And when she'd been used up—when she stopped being worth the upkeep—I'd have helped him make her disappear.
Cleanly. No body, no questions, no grieving little coven asking where their Seer went.
That's how it's done. That's how it's been done, quietly, for centuries, in houses exactly like this one. "
The floor drops out of me. "You'd have killed her."
"I'd have solved her." He says it without heat, and that's the horror of it—the total absence of cruelty, like I'm the strange one for flinching.
"You look at me like that's monstrous. It's natural, Calypso.
Not every witch is worth the trouble of keeping.
" His eyes settle on me, and something in them shifts, goes almost soft, and it's so much worse than the coldness. "Not all of them are you."
"Then why do you look like you’re about to do something ugly to me?"
The performance drops. The face underneath isn't a monster's. It's tired. Ancient. Done. He’s out of patience and he’s done pretending.
"Because you forced my hand," he says.
My eyes narrow as I look at him. For the first time, I take a step back. My shoulders hit the filing cabinet and I flinch. "I–I didn't force you to do anything."
"No?" Something moves behind his eyes. "I had time.
A plan that ran for months, that accounted for every variable—the Council, the tribunal, your inconvenient guardians, all of it.
And then you started pulling threads. The vault.
Now this. You can't leave anything alone, can you?
" His hand lifts, and I see it—a small glass vial, a syringe, tucked against his palm.
I swallow hard, my stomach dropping.
"I'd have given you a gentler version of tonight. I want you to know that. But you've made gentle impossible. So."
Everything in me goes cold. I can already feel the sensation–another needle prick. A thousand needle pricks. They never get old.
"No." I'm sliding against the filing cabinet, trying to put distance between us, prey be damned. "Not that. Anything but that."
"I know what this is to you." He shakes the syringe.
"I’ve read every single page of your file, Calypso.
I know exactly what this does to you—which is why it has to be this, and not—" he tips his head, and I understand he means his teeth, means the faster way, the kinder way, "—the alternative.
I need you to understand I know precisely what I'm choosing.
I'm choosing the thing you fear most, on purpose.
" A breath. "You did this. Remember you did this. "
I run.
I’m halfway around the desk in the middle of the room when Leopold’s figure blurs from my view. I have to get the fuck out of this room. I bolt for the door.
It's already broken, already ajar—I tore the knob out myself—and for half a second I think I might make it into the hall. Then reality catches up: he's a vampire, and there is no version of this where I outrun him to the front door and out into a night with no one in it.
Speed won't save me. Nothing I have will save me.
What do I do? What do I do?
I reach the door and tear it open, throwing myself into the hallway on shaky legs. My shoulder crashes into the opposite wall but it helps to send me in the right direction–away from Leopold.
But his footsteps are right behind me, and getting closer by the second.
So I do the only thing left. My last ditch effort. I can’t outrun him. My only option is that someone will save me.
Aamon isn’t here. Kage is MIA.
I reach for the voice in my head and I scream for it.
Help me—please—he's going to put me under, I need you, whoever you are, please, HELP—
Leopold catches me before I've cleared the hallway. One arm bands across my chest and pins both of mine, my back to his front, and he isn't even straining. He holds me the way you'd hold a child mid-tantrum—a patience worse than violence.
"Shh," he breathes against my hair. I thrash and scream so hard my throat burns. I claw for the fire behind my sternum—
He jams the needle into the side of my neck.
I scream at the cold push of it—the specific wrongness of a foreign thing sliding into a vein—and twelve years come down on me at once.
White walls. The groove worn into a mattress by my own sedated body.
Graph-paper light crawling the floor at three in the afternoon.
Tracing the room inside my skull because my hands were too heavy to lift.
The drug goes in like water and I'm thirteen and I'm twenty-five and I'm nothing at all, the witch girl with the body count, going flat and quiet on someone else's schedule, and the last clear thought I've got is furious and useless: not again not again not again.
Numbness radiates out from the spot as the last of my scream drains out.
My knees give.
I exhale. “Leo–”
He catches me. Gathers me up against him and lowers us both down slow, careful, like we're settling into a dance—exactly the way he held that woman by the fire, like something precious he doesn't want to spill. He brushes the hair back off my face with two fingers.
"There," he murmurs. "There. I've got you. I've got you."
I can't say anything. My mouth won't make the shapes. The gray is coming up over me from the floor like water over a stone and he's the only warm solid thing left and I hate that, I hate that the last thing I feel is him holding me gently.
"You're wondering why," he says, from very far off now.
Almost kind. "Why the trouble? Why not simply end it here, quietly?
You're worth more than that, Calypso. So much more than that.
" A pause—or maybe the drug is just eating the seconds between his words.
"I'm not afraid of them coming for you. Your warden.
Your dog. The Council and all its little rules.
" Something like a smile in his voice. "I'm counting on it.
I need them to come. That's rather the entire point. "
Bait, I think, from the bottom of the gray. I'm bait. He wants them to—
The thought doesn't finish. Nothing finishes. The gray closes over the top of me, and the last thing I know is being lifted, the world tilting as he stands with me in his arms—
and then not even that.
Then nothing at all.