Chapter 18 #2
Up in the back, Leopold Vassard has his chair tipped onto two legs and his attention on the room instead of the board. He isn't taking notes.
He never does.
Professor Malloy lets us go with three chapters of reading and a flat look at the same white-haired boy in the back who hasn't turned anything in since the term started. The room breaks for the door.
Emric's waiting in the crush at the door, hands shoved in his pockets, rocking once on his heels like he's holding himself in place by force. He swallows as I approach, his throat flexing as he looks me up and down. "So," he says.
"So." My hand goes to the bandage on my neck like a new bad habit.
"I had a plan. It was smooth." He brings a hand out of his jacket, and there's a beignet in it—one, in a wax-paper sleeve gone see-through with grease, near enough the size of my head, powdered sugar already shedding onto the floor between us. "The plan got a little greasy.”
I smile and take his offering. I know my cheeks are burning, I can feel the warmth there and through the rest of my body.
“Come get these with me Saturday. There's a place by the river that does them right and has no atmosphere whatsoever. I'll buy."
I like him. He's got sugar on his cuff and his ears are still red and he's holding that ridiculous beignet out to me like it's a question he isn't sure he's allowed to ask—and I like him, and for once I let myself have it without running the math.
I take it. I take what I want.
"Saturday," I say. "And I'm holding you to the no atmosphere."
His whole face opens like a window in a shut room. "Yeah? Okay. Yeah." He drags a hand through his hair, grinning, and I'd put money on him walking into a doorframe the second he turns around. "Try to contain your enthusiasm, Dellaby."
"Doing my best."
Then the grin eases down into something more careful.
His eyes flick to the bandage at my throat and away again, fast, like he's been working the words up the whole time.
"Hey—by the way. I heard what happened. The...
" He makes a vague gesture at his own neck, his shoulder, not sure which one to land on. "Are you okay?"
Nobody's asked me that. Not the council, not Aamon, not the two people who file reports on the state of me twice a day. Are you okay? Like my answer might change something.
"I'm fine," I say. The reflex. Then, because it's him: "Better than I was. I keep the dramatic parts to myself I guess."
He doesn't laugh. "You can tell me if you're not. Fine, I mean." No agenda in it, ears still pink. "I'm good at carrying things and bad at advice. But I'm around."
Something in my chest does a slow, dangerous thing. But for some reason, things don’t feel so dangerous around him.
"I could walk you back," he offers. "I know you've got—" his eyes cut toward the hall, where one of my shadows is no doubt parked "—company. But I'd rather it was me."
It would be easy to say yes, but I shake my head. "I've got it," I tell him. "Save the walking-me-places for Saturday."
He huffs a laugh and lets me have it, no push. "Saturday."
We go opposite ways down the hall. I make it out into the open air before I let the smile happen, sugar on my fingers, and for one whole minute I’m lost in a world imagining what my first date will be like.
It lasts until the courtyard.
I see his white hair first. I always see the white hair first—it pulls every available scrap of light toward it the way water finds a drain, and even in the flat noon glare Leopold Vassard catches it and holds it.
He's by the fountain, tall and pressed and unhurried, three students arranged around him like he set them there, all of them laughing at something he said. He isn't laughing. He never quite does. He watches them do it with a smug, satisfied look on his face.
He sees me at the same moment. The warmth comes up over his face like a sunrise—generous, easy, the smile that makes strangers trust him. "Calypso." Every syllable laid out clean, a formality so polished it should be a kindness and never is. "We were just talking about you."
I roll my eyes. Fucking great. Just what I need. I keep walking and shout back over my shoulder, "I doubt that improved the conversation."
The students laugh, charmed, because they think this is banter, because they can't feel the temperature of it.
Leopold laughs too—and then he's beside me, no transition, vampire-fast and lazy about showing it, falling into step like we're old friends, like he hasn't spent weeks fucking with me under the guise of being cordial.
He doesn't fidget the way the living do. No shifting weight, no idle hands. He moves when he's decided to and not before, and the rest of the time he holds as still as the stone figure at the center of the fountain, which is somehow worse.
"You seem well," he says, loud enough that to the courtyard it lands like a compliment.
"Lighter. It suits you." Then, lower, just for the two of us: "I hear you've been keeping company with the Marchand girl and her little coven.
And"—he tips his head, slow, and the light slides off the white of his hair, and for half a second there's nothing behind his eyes at all, just something flat and old and patient—"young Vane, of course. Sweet boy. Soft, but sweet."
Has he been watching me?
"Keeping a list?" I make my voice bored. "I'd hate to think I take up this much room in your day, Leopold."
"You take up a great deal of it." He says it like he's handing me a gift. His hand rises—unhurried, the nails clean crescents—and for one bad second I'm certain he means to touch me, but he only smooths the fall of his own sleeve. "It's difficult not to watch a thing that might go off."
My thumb finds the bead on the cord that Nellie gave me last night. Three breaths. I'm here. The rising magic behind my sternum settles. I hold on to it.
"I think it's wonderful," he goes on, the public smile still bolted on for the witnesses passing behind us, the voice under it dropping low and gentle and only for me.
"Truly. After everything, you've collected yourself a whole little set of people who matter to you.
" He lets it land. Lets me feel the shape of it.
"I'd just hate for you to forget what happens to the things you let yourself care about, Calypso.
You of all people know the body count goes up when you start to feel something.
" He stops, and turns to face me, and the stopping is so total—that bottomless, patient stillness—that I stop too, because I can't make my legs do otherwise.
He's close now. Close enough to see there's no heat in him at all, that the sunrise was only ever weather he chose to put on. But I can’t seem to look away either.
"Be careful with them. The soft ones. They have a way of stepping in front of you."
My thumb keeps working the bead. It doesn't help—not when he’s smiling, explaining that everyone I've let in is just one more person I can get killed.
As if I needed a single reminder.
So I give him the smile I learned from men exactly like him. "Do you rehearse this? The voice, the manicure, the little speech about my friends." I tip my head the way he did, give it back to him. "It's good. It almost sounds like you think it frightens me more than I already frighten myself."
Something drops behind his eyes—there and gone, a stone down a well I don't get to see the bottom of. Then the smile seals back over, seamless, and I know I've handed him something instead of the other way around, and I hate it.
"I'd hate," Leopold says, warm as a hearth, soft as a verdict, "for anything to happen."
He straightens his cuffs, inclines his head a precise half-inch like we've concluded a piece of pleasant business, and smiles at someone over my shoulder.
Then he walks back to the fountain at a human's pace—slow, unhurried, every step at a speed he's choosing on purpose, so I won't forget the other one is always right there.