Chapter 11
Nellie drives like she does everything else—fast, fearless, and with a running commentary that doesn't require participation.
"So the shop is technically an apothecary but Mom also sells books and does card readings for tourists.
Like, actual tarot, not the fake stuff. She's got a real gift for it, which is hilarious because she uses it primarily to upsell people on overpriced herbal tea blends.
" She downshifts around a curve. The car—a beat-up hatchback that smells like dried lavender and spilled coffee—rattles in protest. "She doesn't know you're coming.
I told her I was bringing a friend from school but I didn't say who because if I told her I was bringing a witch with a council file and a vampire tail, she'd have stress-baked three pies by the time we got there and I cannot eat another one of her nervous pies. "
"Nervous pies?"
"She bakes when she's anxious. Last time I brought someone home it was a shifter boy from my herbology class—just a friend, very platonic—and she made a four-layer chocolate cake and two dozen beignets before we got through the front door.
If she knew about your situation?" Nellie shakes her head.
"We'd be looking at a full Thanksgiving spread minimum. "
I smile. The evening light is golden and fading through the windshield, the highway unspooling through flat Louisiana green going dark at the edges, and for a few minutes I let myself pretend this is normal.
Two girls on a road trip. Friday evening. No agenda except someone's mom and some old books.
Except for why we’re really going to see her mom.
And that there's a black Aston Martin in the rearview mirror.
Aamon is following us at a precise, consistent distance—close enough to intervene, far enough to maintain the fiction that we're unsupervised.
The car is absurd. Sleek, dark, gleaming, drawing in all kinds of attention.
It looks like a panther stalking a rabbit through a field, except the rabbit is a 2009 Honda Civic with a cracked taillight and the panther is a five-hundred-year-old vampire who apparently has car money.
He probably has millions upon millions. Freaking immortality perks.
"Of course he drives that," I mutter, watching the Aston Martin take the same curve we just took, smooth and effortless where we rattled.
Nellie glances in the rearview. "Compensation?"
"For what? The man's already immortal, terrifying, and has cheekbones that could cut glass. What's left to compensate for?"
Nellie grins. I realize what I just said and stare very hard at the road ahead.
We still haven't spoken. Aamon and I. Not since I ran from his training room. I have now skipped two sessions and things are feeling more and more complicated. I didn't show up, didn't send a message, didn't explain. But he didn't come find me either.
Didn't send a formal reprimand through Balcour. Nothing.
Two skipped sessions and complete silence.
Either he's respecting my space or he's washed his hands of me, and I can't tell which one is worse because both of them mean I'm alone with this thing inside me and the one person who possibly knows how to help is three car-lengths back in a sports car, sealed behind tinted glass.
I can feel the tension like a physical thing—a wire strung between his car and mine, humming with everything we haven't said. I don't know if he feels it too or if the wire only runs in one direction and I'm vibrating against silence.
Stop thinking about him. You're on a trip. With your friend. Enjoy something for once in your life, Dellaby.
I push Aamon out of my head the way I push everything uncomfortable out of my head—violently and with limited success—and turn to Nellie.
"Tell me about growing up in Thibodaux," I say. Because I want to know and because I need to stop staring at the rearview mirror.
Nellie lights up. She talks the way she drives—in bursts and swerves, jumping between topics with a logic that only makes sense if you stop trying to follow it linearly.
She tells me about the bayou behind her mom's shop, how she used to catch frogs and accidentally enchant them so they glowed.
The time she tried to grow a garden at age nine and every plant turned carnivorous.
Her dad—still human, still teaching biology, still pretending the glowing frogs were "bioluminescent anomalies" when his colleagues asked.
"He knows," she says. "Obviously he knows.
He married a witch. But he's got this whole thing where he maintains plausible deniability in his professional life.
Like, 'I'm a scientist, Nell, I can't just go around acknowledging that your mother made the neighbor's cat talk that one time.
'" She does the voice—deeper, exasperated, profoundly Cajun. "He's ridiculous. I love him."
The ache hits me somewhere soft. The part that remembers what it felt like to have parents who were ridiculous.
Who were alive.
I push that away too. Not tonight. Tonight I'm just a girl in a car with her friend and the last light is fading over the bayou and the road is open and I'm going to enjoy this if it kills me.
"What made you pick Devenir?" I ask. "With the whole—" I gesture vaguely. "Vampire-run institution thing. Your mom doesn't strike me as someone who'd love that."
"Oh, she hated it. She wanted me at Merveille—it's a witch-only academy up in Vermont, way smaller, no species politics.
But Devenir has the best herbology program in the country and I'm stubborn and Mom eventually decided that if she couldn't stop me, she'd at least make sure I knew how to spot a predator before it spotted me.
" She downshifts around a pothole. "Also the weather in Vermont is a crime against humanity and I'm a bayou girl.
I'd rather deal with vampires than snow. "
"Fair."
"Devenir's actually not bad once you learn the rhythms. The first year is the hardest—you're figuring out who's who, which faculty actually care and which ones are just vampire puppets pushing council curriculum.
By second year you've got your people. By third year you know which hallways to avoid on a full moon and which bathrooms have the best acoustics for crying. "
"That's... specific."
"Third floor, east wing. The tiles make the sobs echo in a way that's actually kind of cathartic. I'm not ashamed." She grins. "Oh—you should know about the Revel. It's coming up in a few weeks."
"The what?"
"The Revel. It's Devenir's big mid- fall semester event.
Part formal, part absolute chaos. The noble houses host it—rotating every year—and it's technically a 'celebration of cross-species unity' but really it's an excuse for everyone to get dressed up and drink too much and make terrible decisions in dark corners.
" She waggles her eyebrows. "Attendance is mandatory for all students. And I do mean all."
"Even the witch with the armed escort?"
"Especially her. You think anyone's going to miss the chance to stare at you in a formal dress? The gossip mill would implode." She glances at me sideways. "Plus I need a date. Platonically. Someone to stand next to while the noble-born vampires circle the room like sharks at a feeding."
I actually laugh at that. The image of me and Nellie in formal wear, backed against a wall with drinks, watching ancient vampires network—it's so absurd and so inevitable that the laughter bubbles up before I can question it.
"Which house is hosting this year?"
Nellie's grin fades by a degree. "Vassard."
I roll my eyes so hard I think they’re going to fall out of my head. Of course.
"So Leopold's basically throwing the party."
"Leopold's family is bankrolling the party.
He'll be the golden host in the center of the room with his perfect hair and his perfect smile and every witch in the building will be calculating how close they can get without getting burned.
" She pauses. "Speaking of which—has he bothered you again? Since the... classroom thing?"
"Actually—well not since then. But–" I chew my lip. "After you left the classroom. He offered me his witch slot. I said no. Then he bit his own finger and smeared his blood on my bag strap. Said he'd always know where to find me."
Nellie's hands tighten on the steering wheel. "He what?"
"Blood-tracked me. I think. I don't fully understand how it works but I ditched the bag."
"Smart." Her jaw is set. The breezy Nellie energy has gone sharp and focused.
"Okay. So. Leopold Vassard. Here's what you need to know.
" She downshifts harder than necessary. "He's a collector.
That's what the noble-born ones do—they find a witch, pour on the charm, make her feel special, make her feel chosen.
And for a while it's great. He's attentive, he's generous, he opens doors that don't open for anyone else.
Every witch who partners with him thinks she's different. "
"And then?"
"And then he gets what he wants. Access to her magic, her connections, whatever she can do for him politically.
He uses her up—not cruelly, not obviously, just...
thoroughly. And when he's bored or when someone shinier comes along, he moves on.
The witch is left with a year of her life spent boosting a vampire's career and nothing to show for it except the education she would've gotten anyway.
" She glances at me. "He's been through three witch partners since I've been at Devenir.
Three in three years. All of them brilliant. None of them talk about it."
"None of them?"
"That's the other thing. Whatever happens in a Vassard partnership stays in a Vassard partnership. Whether that's loyalty or shame or something else—" She shrugs. "I've never been able to figure out which."
I think about his smile. The warmth that reached his eyes while his index finger tapped three times against his thigh. The way the door closed behind his expression when he looked at me.
"Thanks for telling me."