Chapter 12
Odette kicks us out at nine in the morning.
"Go," she says, shooing us toward the door with a dish towel.
The grimoire is open on the kitchen table behind her—thick, leather-bound, the pages yellowed and covered in handwriting so cramped it looks like someone tried to fit an encyclopedia onto a napkin.
She's been up all night. Her eyes are red-rimmed and her headwrap is slightly crooked and there are three empty coffee cups stacked on the counter. "Show Calypso the town. Eat something. Don’t come back until I call. You two’ll just slow me down. "
"Mama, you look—"
"I look like a woman who's been reading dead-language spell theory since midnight. I'm aware." She flips a page with the careful reverence of someone handling explosives. "Not until I call, you hear? Now go."
So, giggling, we go.
The Saturday market fills Main Street like a party that started without us.
Folding tables and striped canopies line both sides of the road, and the whole town seems to be here—families with strollers, old men in lawn chairs, kids chasing each other between the booths.
The smell hits me first: frying batter, fresh herbs, something smoky and sweet that has my mouth watering.
Music is coming from somewhere—accordion and fiddle again, a live duo set up near the hardware store.
And the magic is everywhere. If you know how to feel it.
To the humans browsing tomatoes and arguing over hot sauce, this is just a farmer's market.
But I can feel what they can't—the witch vendor three tables down whose sachets of "dried lavender" hum with enchantment under the ordinary packaging.
The shifter running the crawfish booth whose warm, restless signature presses against my awareness every time he laughs too loud.
The woman selling candles whose eyes flash amber for a half-second when the sunlight hits them wrong.
They're all here, tucked into the fabric of a Saturday morning, hiding in plain sight the way supernaturals have always hidden—behind normal jobs and normal smiles and the comfortable assumption that humans don't look too closely.
I stop walking. Nellie stops with me.
"You okay?"
"Yeah, I just—" I look around. At the witch selling enchanted lavender as aromatherapy.
At the shifter whose handshake with a human customer lingers a beat too long, like he's reading something through the contact.
At the candle woman adjusting her sunglasses to cover the amber flash.
"They're everywhere. We’re… everywhere."
"Welcome to small-town Louisiana." Nellie links her arm through mine. "The ratio's different out here. Less segregation, more... cohabitation. With a deep history of spiritualism and spooky vibes," she says it as she waggles her fingers, “the people sort of lean into eccentricity.”
"That's wild."
"That's Thibodaux." She shrugs.
We drift through the market. Nellie knows everyone—she's stopped every ten feet by someone who knew her as a kid, went to school with her mom, sold her dad fishing bait in 2003.
She introduces me as "my friend Calypso from school" and nobody asks follow-up questions and nobody flinches and I realize, with a slow, aching clarity, that this is the first time since I was thirteen that I've been in a crowd of people who don't know what I've done.
I'm just a girl. Nellie's friend. Browsing tomatoes on a Saturday morning.
We stop at a booth selling potted herbs—the witch with the enchanted lavender. Up close she's got silver dreads and rings on every finger, and she clocks me the second I step into her space.
Witch recognizing witch. A small nod.
"Go ahead," she says. "They don't bite."
I reach out. My fingers brush the leaves of the nearest rosemary plant.
It shrivels.
The green dulls under my fingertips. The leaves curl inward, edges going brown and brittle, the stem drooping like something vital just got pulled out of it.
The rosemary plant that was vibrant and humming three seconds ago sags in its pot, half-dead, looking like it's been sitting in a drought for a month.
I yank my hand back. Shit.
The vendor's eyebrows climb. She looks at the plant. Looks at me. Her mouth opens.
"I'm so sorry—I didn't mean to—"
Nellie's hand reaches past me. Her fingers close gently around the wilted stem and I feel her magic pulse—warm, green, earthy, the opposite of whatever I just did.
The rosemary shudders. The brown recedes.
The leaves uncurl, plumping with color, and tiny white flowers bud along the stem, opening one by one until the plant is fuller and more alive than it was before I touched it.
Nellie pulls her hand back. Gives the vendor a sheepish grin.
"Light and dark," the vendor says quietly, looking between the two of us. She angles her body so the humans at the next booth can't see the plant that just died and resurrected in thirty seconds. "Hand in hand. That's how it's always been."
Nellie bumps my shoulder. "Don't look like that. You didn't hurt it—you just... overwhelmed it. Your magic runs hot. Plants aren't used to that kind of intensity."
"I killed a rosemary bush by touching it."
"And I brought it back. That's what friends are for." She links her arm through mine and steers me away from the booth before I can spiral. "Also, you owe that woman a rosemary plant. We'll come back later."
My eyes burn. I blink it back.
"Thanks," I manage. My voice comes out rough.
Nellie bumps my shoulder. Says nothing. Doesn't need to.
Aamon is somewhere behind us. I catch glimpses—the dark silhouette between the canopies, the glint of the Aston Martin parked at the end of the block.
He's trailing at a distance that's meant to look casual but isn't, because nothing about a six-foot-something vampire in all black browsing a Cajun farmer's market is casual.
An old woman at the praline booth watched him walk past and crossed herself.
"Your shadow's attracting attention," Nellie murmurs.
"I know. It's annoying." I glance back. He's pretending to examine a display of homemade soap. The image of Aamon holding a bar of lavender goat milk soap with his composed, unreadable expression is almost enough to make me laugh.
Almost.
"So what's the deal with you two?" Nellie asks. Casual. Too casual. "Like, is he nice to you? Is it strictly professional? Does he actually talk or does he just lurk and smolder?"
"He doesn't smolder—"
"He's literally smoldering next to the soap display right now."
I look. He's... okay, he might be smoldering. Unintentionally. The jawline and the cheekbones and the all-black in the Louisiana sun are doing something whether he means them to or not.
"It's complicated," I say.
"Complicated how?"
"Complicated like... he can literally turn me off with a button in his pocket.” I cringe as Nellie shoots me a look. “No, not like that.”
She chuckles.
"He's my trainer. He's my warden, basically. We were training and then things got a little tense. I distanced myself and now we haven’t really talked in like a week. I’m not really sure where that leaves us. But it’s not like I can completely ignore him.
" I stop. Nellie is staring at me with her mouth slightly open. "Complicated."
"Girl," she says slowly. "That is not complicated. That is a mess."
"Thanks, Nell."
"I'm here for you."
“You’re hear for the tea, be for real.”
She smiles, can’t help herself. “Yeah, I mean that’s just a lovely bonus of being your friend.”
After the market, Nellie takes me to the water.
There's a dock behind the main strip—wooden, weathered, jutting out over the bayou like an afterthought.
The water is dark and still, reflecting the oak canopy in a way that makes it look like there are two skies.
Spanish moss hangs low enough to brush the surface.
Everything smells green and old and alive.
We sit on the edge, her bag of purchases behind us. Feet dangling. The wood is warm from the sun.
"I used to come here after school," Nellie says.
"Every day, freshman year. Before I figured out the social stuff.
I'd just sit here and let the water do its thing.
" She leans back on her palms. "The bayou doesn't care what species you are.
Doesn't care if you're powerful or broke or if your last name opens doors.
It just sits there being ancient and wet and completely unbothered. "
I close my eyes. Feel.
The ambient magic here is enormous. Old in a way that makes the academy's wards feel like a fresh coat of paint on a cathedral.
This isn't manufactured power—nobody channeled this, nobody inscribed it, nobody built it into a curriculum.
It grew. It seeped up from the water table and the root systems and the centuries of things living and dying in the mud, and it's everywhere, humming through the dock boards and the water and the air.
My magic reaches for it. Not the spike, not the surge—a reach. An open hand. And the bayou reaches back.
The water around the dock goes still. Not frozen—still. The gentle current that's been lapping at the pilings stops. The surface goes flat and glassy and the reflected sky becomes so clear it looks like you could step into it. The moss stops swaying. The insects go quiet.
The whole bayou is holding its breath. And I'm at the center of it, sitting on a dock with my feet over the water, feeling my magic and the earth talk to each other in a language I don't speak but somehow understand.
"Cal," Nellie whispers. "Look at the water."
I open my eyes. The bayou is a mirror. Perfect, undisturbed, reflecting the sky and the oaks and the two of us sitting on the dock like a painting. My magic is the stillest it's ever been—not suppressed, not dampened, just calm. In conversation with something bigger than itself.
Then a fish jumps somewhere upstream and the moment breaks. The current resumes. The moss sways. The insects start up again.