Chapter 16 #2
Dark curls pushed back, glass in hand, laughing at something a tall fae girl in dark green has just said to him. His hand lands on her shoulder. Light. Friendly. The way people touch when they have known each other a long time.
He has not seen me.
I really don’t have the standing to feel anything about seeing him talk with another girl.
I’m the one who asked for a rain-check–even though besides Nellie he’s been the kindest face on campus.
And not hard on the eyes either. He is allowed to have friends who aren’t me, I remind myself.
The small twist in my stomach can shut its mouth.
I look past him.
A flash of pale green-gold hair, near the far end of the quad.
I look harder.
She is in a clutch of fae students I haven’t seen before, laughing at something one of them said.
Her hair is loose around her shoulders. Her uniform is intact.
Her eyes catch mine across the distance and her laugh stops for one half-second, and she nods at me—small, quick, thank you—and then she turns back to her friends and the laughter starts up again.
She is alive.
I did that.
Something in my chest goes warm. I focus on that feeling.
Nellie comes back with two flutes of something that looks like champagne.
"It's sparkling cider," she says when I look at her. "Don't insult me. Drink it."
"I'm not drinking anything tonight."
"It's cider, Cal."
"Nellie. I just got out of the infirmary. My magic is one bad thought away from punching a hole in the ground. I'm not—"
"Hold it. Don't drink it. Be a person who is holding a glass. For me."
I take the glass to make it look like I’m indulging in the reverie. I don’t drink it.
We walk a slow loop of the perimeter.
I see things I do not want to see–or rather, really didn’t expect to see.
Two vampires in evening blacks at the edge of the firelight, a witch between them, her head tipped back against the shoulder of the one feeding from her, her eyes half-shut and her mouth open in something that is definitely not pain.
Her hand is wound into the lapel of his jacket.
The other vampire is watching. Waiting. Her free hand reaches for him, blind, and he steps in.
I stop walking.
Nellie sees what I am looking at and her face goes gentle.
"Cal."
"They're—"
"Yeah."
"In public."
"Mm." She steers me a step further, away from a clutch of older vampires nearby.
"That is the point. If it's in public, it's consensual.
That's the rule. Anybody feeding privately, behind closed doors, with somebody they're not in a partnership with—that's the gray area.
People doing it where everybody can see them are doing it because they want everybody to see them. "
"Why would anybody—"
"Status. Pleasure. Devotion. All three." She glances at me, careful. "And the venom. The venom is the high. People do this for what it feels like. They line up for it."
"For—"
"For what it feels like. There are seventh-years who have been feeding the same vamps since they were freshmen, and they will tell you it's the best thing in their lives. Not all of them are wrong about it, exactly. But."
She lets the but hang.
"But," I say.
"But you can get into something at sixteen and not know how to get out of it at twenty-two, and you can’t always tell from outside which of those people is which. Some of them are happy. Some of them stopped being able to tell."
I touch the bandage at my neck.
I do it without deciding to. My fingers find the gauze and stop there. Three days ago a vamp put his teeth into me and tore. It hurt like hell and there certainly wasn’t any pleasure or devotion in the act. Honestly, it was traumatizing and not something I ever want to repeat.
The witch by the fire turns her face into the second vampire's neck.
"Never me," I say, very quietly. "Never."
"I know, Cal."
We keep walking. The music changes.
A bell—single, clean, struck once—and the strings cut. The crowd quiets and everyone’s attention narrows to the man who has stepped into the light.
Leopold.
He is wearing all white. Not cream—white, the kind that catches firelight and throws it back, a high-collared coat and a fitted vest and a white shirt at the throat with no tie, his pale hair pushed back from his forehead and his hands in his pockets.
He looks like a candle. The fire is behind him and around him and his face is in shadow except for one firelit line down his cheekbone, and the entire quad has stopped speaking.
He smiles.
It is the easiest, warmest smile in the world. The smile that makes other people relax.
It’s fake as fuck.
"Friends. Welcome. To my family's bonfire. To my family's fire on my family's stone. On a night, by my count, that is three hundred and one years to the evening since the first one of these was lit."
A murmur—warm, well-bred. Like the entire crowd is taking in a deep breath, ready for the excitement to begin.
"Three hundred Octobers," he says, and he begins to walk.
Slow, easy, hands loose at his sides, pacing the inside of the fire ring.
"Three hundred years of our noble houses gathering this academy and these friends and these old, beloved enemies into the same circle of light.
To do what?" He stops. He smiles. "To remember. "
He lets it sit. The crowd is leaning in.
"My ancestors did not invent grief. They invented something better. They looked at their dead and they said—not silence. Not whispering in halls. Not the long thin face we wear in mourning rooms." His arms spread wide. "This."
He gestures at the fire. The linens. The wine. The hundred-and-fifty bodies in their finery.
"Light. Heat. Music. The best wine in three states. The most beautiful people in five. Not in spite of the dead. For them. The Vassards have always understood that the dead are not honored by quiet. The dead are honored by living so loudly they can hear us."
A swell of agreement. Someone in the front whoops, low and delighted. The older vampires are smiling, an approval for the prince of a new generation.
"This year's theme."
He pauses. Long. Theatrical. The crowd holds.
"Memento mori."
He says it like a benediction. A breath of approval moves through the quad. Some of the older vampires close their eyes. A few raise their glasses.
"Remember that you must die." Leopold's voice has gone quieter.
Every word is a coin he is laying into a palm.
"An old phrase. An honest phrase. Some hear it and feel chilled.
My family hears it and feels grateful. Because the only people in this world who know what the wine actually tastes like are the ones who remember it has an end. "
He lets that sit.
"For the next month, we will remember the people we have lost. We will set their places at every table.
We will pour their cups. We will tell their stories—we will laugh at the parts that should be laughed at, and we will weep at the parts that should be wept at.
" His mouth tilts. A small, conspiratorial smile.
"And then. Because this is a Vassard month, my friends, and the Vassards do not do quiet—"
A laugh from the front row. Somebody in the back claps once.
"—we will eat the meals they would have wanted to eat.
We will drink the wines they would have raised a glass to.
We will dance the dances they cannot dance anymore.
We will take the pleasures they no longer can.
" His eyes begin to travel the crowd. Easy.
Generous. They find me for half a heartbeat.
They keep moving. "We will live. In their honor.
Loud and full and well. As only a body can live. "
The roar that goes up is the kind that fills your chest whether you wanted it to or not. It’s overwhelming and chills pop up on my bare arms.
"And on the night of the Revel—" he gathers them with a hand "—on All Hallows', when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest and our dead can hear us best, we will speak the toast my house has spoken for three centuries.
" He raises his glass. The fire catches the white of his coat and turns him into something half-alive, half-saint.
"Memento mori. Remember that you must die.
" A beat. The smile breaks across his face. "And so, my friends— live."
The crowd loses it. He holds the glass higher.
"To absent friends."
The quad answers him in one voice.
"To absent friends."
Nellie's hand is at my elbow.
I have not raised my glass. I am holding it because Nellie put it in my hand and told me to hold it, and the cheering is still going around me, and I will admit—privately, and only because nobody is going to ever ask me about it—that the speech was good.
Half the crowd is in love with him. The older half is remembering being in love with those like him.
The younger half is calculating how to get into a room with him before midnight.
His eyes touched mine once. Half a heartbeat. Probably crowd-work. Probably nothing.
I file it anyway.
The crowd absorbs back into its earlier shape—clusters and conversations, the strings starting up again—and I exhale a breath into the thick heat. Nellie tightens her grip on my elbow once and lets it go.
"Drink the cider. Just a sip. Color back into your face."
"I'm fine."
"You look a little pale. Sip."
I sip. The cider is fine. Apple. Cinnamon. Something in it that bites the back of my tongue and does not, as far as I can tell, alter my consciousness. I keep the glass.
"Calypso."
I freeze.
"Hi, Nellie." Leopold has crossed the quad. He is standing at my left shoulder with the warm smile still on his face and his hands still in the pockets of his white coat. "Forgive me. May I borrow her for one moment?"
Nellie looks at me. Both of us spend the next three seconds trying to think of something, anything, that gets me out of a conversation with the Academy’s golden boy. Neither of us says anything.
I tip my head a centimeter. Yes.
"Thank you." Leopold's smile does not slip. "I won't keep her long."