Chapter 15
The third floor of the library, I’ve just discovered, is the only place on this campus I can pretend nobody is watching me.
I scratch out the sentence I just wrote in my notebook. Try it again. Scratch that one out too. The pen is starting to tear the page.
I sit back. Roll my shoulder. Drink the rest of my coffee, which has been cold for an hour.
The amber light is doing the long slow slide across the desk that means it is almost five and the lobby downstairs is starting to empty toward the dining hall.
Nobody comes up to the third floor at this hour.
Nobody comes up to the third floor at any hour, really, which is the entire reason I am up here.
The first two floors are for the partner-pairs and the first-years and the desperate energy of people pretending they understand directed channeling theory.
The third is for whoever is willing to climb the stairs.
Dust. Old paper. The soft, sleepy hum of wards that have been settling into the walls for a century.
Lazy magic. The closest thing to privacy I have had in twelve years.
I tap the pen against my teeth and look at the stack of books I am supposed to be reading.
It's Professor Malloy's recommended list—containment cases, biographies of witches who lost their magic, a handful of essays on the theoretical limits of channeling. The midterm prompt: Containment versus Rehabilitation. I know which side I am supposed to argue. I know which side argued for me.
I have been very, very productive.
I have also been very, very still.
Four days of being a model prisoner. I draw the counter-rune every night before bed, light the candle, hold my palm over the flame until the blue catches.
I show up to training every other morning at seven sharp, sit on Aamon's couch, channel through the resonance stone, and listen to him call me Miss Dellaby in the voice of a man reading off a tax form.
Magic Theory. Combat. Lunch with Nellie.
Reading. Sleep. Repeat. I have performed the tidy, compliant rhythm of an academy student so thoroughly that even I almost believe it.
The Voice has not come back since Malloy's classroom.
I told myself I wouldn't reach. Told myself that thinking Emric?
into the silence one more time would be the witch-girl-with-no-friends version of leaving someone on read all weekend and double-texting on Monday.
I'm not doing it. If it's him, he can find me.
If it isn't, the not-knowing is its own kind of company.
I haven't talked to Emric in person either.
He hasn't brought up the beignets again, and I have not, somehow, mustered the spine to bring them up myself.
Which is the part that is news. The blush on his ears the last time I waved at him in Malloy's class did something to my chest I am not equipped to interrogate, and the result is that I am now apparently the kind of woman who blushes back and forgets her own name.
I have been a lot of things in my life. Shy has not been one of them.
Down. Not out. Into the riverbed.
I close the book in front of me—a 1934 monograph about a witch in Belgium who cracked a cathedral wide open during her own wedding and spent the next forty years in chemically-induced silence—and rub my eyes. The amber on my desk has gone gold-orange.
Zeva is in the lobby. At least that’s where I told her to wait for me, parked against a wall with a paperback she isn't really reading.
The third floor is mine. I will not have it be sullied by enforcers and tails.
I open the next book. Studies in Magical Catastrophe: A Historical Survey.
The cover is split along the spine and it smells like every neglected book I have ever loved.
I flip to the chapter on cascade events—the technical name for what happened to me at the hotel, the technical name for what happens when a witch's magic and her emotional state hit critical pressure at the same time.
Eleven case studies. Eleven women's lives reduced to clinical paragraphs and footnoted body counts.
I am three sentences in when I hear it.
A sound. Wrong.
Not the creak of an old building settling. Not a chair. Something muffled and scared, high in the throat, choked off too fast.
A whimper.
I lift my head. The library breathes around me. Dust motes drifting through the gold light. The hum of the wards. The distant susurrus of a building full of stone and old paper. And underneath it, behind it, two stacks down and somewhere to my right—
There. Again.
Quieter. Like someone is trying very hard not to make a sound, and failing.
And again. Like an almost scream that got cut off too soon.
My pulse goes still in my throat.
Don't be dumb Dellaby, I tell myself, the thought lands fully formed.
Don't go. Don't be the witch who steps into something she can't fix.
Whatever it is, it's bigger than you. You don't even know how to shield.
You just put down a book about a woman who blew up a cathedral on her wedding day.
Go downstairs. Get Zeva. Let the people with weapons handle it.
The whimper breaks again.
Smaller. Wetter.
I stand up. I can’t ignore it any longer.
My chair scrapes and I freeze, listening to see if it carries. The whimper doesn't change. Whoever they are, they aren't tracking me. They're occupied.
I leave my books on the carrel. Somebody up here needs help, and there isn't anybody else to do it.
I move down a row of books. My weight forward, my shoulders low. The third floor narrows the further you push from the windows. Stack after stack of denser, darker books, the light fading the deeper I go, the air cooling.
The whimper breaks again. Closer.
Shit. Someone is definitely in danger.
I round the corner of the second-to-last stack and stop.
My brain takes it in piece by piece because it's the only way to take it in.
A vampire. Standing. Six feet from me. His back half-turned, his body angled into the corner where the stacks meet the wall.
A fae girl. Pinned against his chest. Her feet barely touching the floor.
Her eyes wide and silver-streaked with tears.
Pale green-gold hair coming loose from a braid.
Her uniform shirt half-undone at the collar.
One of his hands is across her mouth. The other arm is around her waist holding her up.
His face is buried in the side of her neck.
She whimpers as he adjusts his bite.
Fuck, he’s feeding on her.
I can see the line of his jaw working. The slow, deliberate, rhythmic draw.
The way he is holding her—not violent, exactly.
Absolute. She is not allowed to move. She is allowed to feel everything.
Her tears are leaking down over the back of his hand and onto his wrist and he hasn't noticed, because he's busy.
Her eyes find mine over his shoulder.
She is whimpering into his palm. Small, wet, broken sounds his hand turns down but cannot turn off.
Her eyes are huge—silver-streaked, blown wide, swimming with tears—and they do not let go of mine.
They beg. They beg without language, the way a body begs when language has been taken from it. Please. Please. Please.
Fuck.
I move.
There isn't a plan. There's just my body crossing the distance and my hand coming up and the half-second before I touch him where I think don't push, don't push, don't push—
My palm meets the back of his shoulder.
Light.
Not heat. Light. The flare behind my eyes is so bright the inside of my skull goes white, and the sound that comes out of him isn't a vampire sound.
Not a hiss. Not a snarl. A scream—the kind a body makes when its nerve endings are being burned in real time.
The kind I have only ever heard in one place in my life.
My own voice. Twelve years ago. In a hotel hallway.
He releases the fae girl. His knees buckle.
His arm comes up to slap at his shoulder where my palm is, and he yanks free with a wet sound I will think about later, and the smell—god, the smell—is meat on a grill and old paper catching fire, and underneath it something chemical and wrong, the smell of something its species was never designed to survive.
His shoulder is blackening.
Not red. Black. The fabric of his blazer has gone to ash in the shape of my handprint and the skin underneath it is char, cracking open in lines like dry earth, and the air around the wound is shimmering the way air shimmers above hot pavement in July.
That wasn't right.
The thought drifts through with the calm of a thing that has been waiting a long time to be acknowledged. That was not fire. I have never made fire that color. I have never made fire that did THAT.
The fae girl is on the floor. Crawling. Her fingers find a stack and she hauls herself up using the shelf, and her eyes meet mine again—wider this time, terrified in a different direction now—and she is gone.
Feet slamming on hardwood. The thud of her shoulder hitting a corner as she ducks past. She does not look back.
I don't blame her.
"Wait—" My voice comes out thin. "Wait—"
I take a step after her.
The vampire's hand closes on my wrist.
Char is wisping off his shoulder. The skin of his face is going grey at the edges where the smoke is licking past it. His eyes are red and blown wide and he is looking at me with the focused attention of a thing that has just been hurt and would like to hurt back.
I know him.
Upper rows of Magic Theory. The bored kind of beautiful that noble vampires wear like uniform. He sits near Leopold's orbit but not in it. I never caught his name. I caught his sneer once, second day, when I walked in late and he tracked me to my seat like he was evaluating livestock.
Has he been doing this the entire time? Bringing victims into the library to hurt? Eat?
"You little cunt," he says.
He yanks.