Chapter 15 #4
"The girl. The fae girl. You're certain you didn't recognize her?"
"No."
"And you don't know how Mr. Vasreaux died."
I swallow against the pain in my throat. "No."
"Mm." She pats the bed-rail once. The bracelet flashes. "Rest. We'll speak again tomorrow. Officer Vance—" Zeva straightens—"you'll remain on the door."
"Yes, ma'am."
Leyonna leaves. Her footsteps recede. The door clicks shut.
The silence she leaves is enormous.
Zeva exhales. "I'll be outside," she says. To Aamon, not to me. Aamon's head tilts the half-degree he uses for acknowledgment. She crosses to the door. The door clicks a second time.
It is just us.
He pushes off the wall. He doesn’t come all the way to the bed. He stops a few steps short of it.
"How bad is it?"
"It's fine."
"Calypso."
He has not used my first name in three days. The way he says it now is so quiet I almost miss it, and the quiet of it cracks the answer I was about to give him.
"It… hurts," I say.
"All of it?"
"Yes."
He nods, once. His jaw works.
"Is there anything I can do for you?"
I think about it. I think about it longer than I should. Honestly this man is confusing and kind of infuriating but something about his presence calms me down a fraction more than usual. I could tell him to stay, to stick around, but just the thought has my insides internally cringing.
"No. Thank you."
He does not push.
"I will be outside."
"You don't have to—"
"I am going to be outside, Calypso."Not up for debate. "If you need me, say my name. I will hear you through the door."
He crosses to the bed, cutting the last of the distance between us.
His hand finds mine on the blanket. Just the back of my left hand—his fingers curling around the side of mine for a second, maybe two. The pressure is light. The tension between us is not.
"Nothing is getting through that door, Calypso."
He pulls back. He goes. The door closes behind him.
I lie there. The bandage on my neck pulses with my heartbeat. The throbbing in my shoulder is a deep, far-away ache. The IV drips. The wards hum. Outside the window the sky is going purple.
Kage.
I have been working very hard not to think about him. The minute the door closes, the work quits.
Why did I lie?
I run it through, plain and slow, because if I don't make myself look at it now I will spend the next week pretending I don't know.
I lied because Vasreaux attacked me in a place where I had every right to be, and Kage killed him to keep me alive, and the academy would not have heard it that way.
The academy would have heard whatever was easiest to hear.
The Vasreaux family is old enough that someone is going to be punished for this, and that someone will be whoever the academy can most cheaply spare.
Kage is not a student. He is not faculty.
He is whatever the academy calls the man Midus snaps his fingers at and Kage's body answers—the way it answered yesterday in combat training and the times before, and probably for a very long time before I got here. I have watched it twice and I have no idea what it is. But I’m not dumb enough to ignore that he would be an easy scapegoat for the Academy. For the Council.
I… I lied because telling the truth would have killed him.
That's the version I can live with.
The other version is a bit more complicated.
The other version is that I lied because nobody else on this campus knows what’s between us, and I wanted to keep it that way.
He came for me. He felt my fear from three buildings away because he put his blood in me without asking, and then he killed a man with his bare hands to protect me.
He knocked me out, and somewhere in the middle of all that, something settled in my chest that I am not ready to name.
The truth would have made mine and Kage’s fucked up relationship everyone's. I lied because it is mine.
This weird, uncomfortable and electric connection between us that I can’t deny.
But really, this was a lesson. And I’m paying attention.
Because I have been at this academy for three weeks and I had stopped—somewhere along the way I had stopped—thinking of vampires the way I should have been thinking of them.
I started thinking of Aamon as my trainer, as my ally.
Of Kage as the rough one, the bully. Of Leopold as the threat I'm still tracking and trying to figure out.
And perhaps worst of all, Emric as a possible friend and even date, and Nellie's third-year vampire partners as classmates, and the whole ambient mass of fanged students in the dining hall as just students.
I started using their names. I started saying hi.
I started—somewhere—letting my body believe that the rules of this place were the rules they had told me they were.
These are not my classmates. These are predators who eat. Some of them have manners. Some of them have history. Some of them have turned out to be men I cannot stop watching in low light. None of them—none of them—stop being what they are because I want them to.
I almost forgot.
I almost let myself forget.
I close my eyes.
I won’t forget that again.