Chapter 19
It turns out Nellie owns a whole wardrobe of clothes that aren't grey or a Devenir uniform, and she has opinions about every one of them.
"Not that one, you’re not going to a funeral.
Not that one, you'll sweat through it before you hit the river.
" She's buried to the shoulder in her closet, flinging fabric onto the bed where I'm sitting in disgrace, having presented her with the contents of my own wardrobe—four grey uniforms and the black sweats I traveled in—and watched her face fall like I'd shown her a wound.
"Aha." She turns around with something yellow.
"This. Pale enough you won't cook, soft enough you'll feel like a person. Try it."
It's a sundress. Cotton, faded to the color of butter, little buttons up the front, a neckline lower than anything I've worn ever.
I put it on in her bathroom, and the girl in the mirror has bare arms and her collarbones out and her hair down and looks, for once, like she's allowed to have a Saturday night.
I keep waiting to feel like I'm in a costume.
I don't, quite.
I tug the neckline up. The bandage peeks anyway, white against my throat.
"Leave it." Nellie's in the doorway with her arms crossed and her whole face gone warm.
"He's seen worse and didn't run. He's not going to flinch at gauze.
" She steps in, fixes one shoulder strap that didn't need fixing, and looks at me in the glass.
"You officially look like you’re going on a date, Cal. "
"That's the idea, allegedly."
"That's the whole idea." She squeezes my shoulder—the good one, she's learned which—and grins. "Go feel like a person. Bring me back a beignet or don't come back at all."
So I go, and Zeva goes with me, fifty feet back and pretending to be a tourist. I'll give her this: she's keeping her word. Last night I cornered her on the shared step and did something I've never once done in a month of being watched—I asked. Not for the moon. Just for room.
I'm going off-campus tomorrow. With a person. A nice one. And I am begging you, as one human being to whatever you are, not to stand close enough to count his teeth.
She looked at me a long flat moment, then said, "I'll take the long lens," like that was a kindness—and maybe it was, because here she is, a dark smudge half a block back, sunglasses on, doing an insulting impression of a woman admiring a praline shop.
Close enough to intervene. Far enough that for whole minutes at a stretch I can pretend she isn't there.
It's the most privacy I've had in public since I got here. I'll take it.
The place Emric picked is exactly as advertised: a tin-roofed shack on the levee, six mismatched tables, a hand-lettered sign, no atmosphere whatsoever.
The Mississippi slides by behind it, brown and enormous, slow as something thinking.
He's already at the table farthest from the road, and when he sees me he stands up so fast he nearly takes the table with him.
"You came," he says, and then looks like he'd pay to take it back. "I mean—obviously, you said you would, I just—" He stops. Starts over. "You look really nice."
"You sound really surprised."
"I'm really surprised you came," he admits, and it's so artless that I laugh, and something in his face lets go all at once, and we sit down before either of us can ruin it.
The beignets are the size of my head like the one he offered me a couple of days ago, and there is no dignified way to eat one. We establish this early. By the time we're two in there's powdered sugar on the table, on my hands, on the knee of his trousers, and a white handprint on his shoulder.
I decide not to tell him about it because it's funny.
"You said your family came in for the unveiling," I say. I've been wanting to ask since the note. "How'd that go?"
He huffs, not quite a laugh. "About how you'd expect, if you'd met my father.
" He turns his cup on the table. "He flew the whole house in—aunts, cousins, the lot—and spent three days showing me off to every old name at the unveiling like a horse he was thinking of selling.
My son. Thirty-one. Vane blood, naturally. "
"Thirty-one?" I'd had him pegged older—not in the face, in the way he carries himself. Although he blushes like he’s younger.
"Practically an infant." The smile's rueful.
"Barely past the age they still expect you to turn into something.
My father's two hundred and forty. To him I'm a draft he hasn't finished correcting.
" He picks at the wax paper. "He had a whole list of what I'd be by now.
I'm not currently any of it, so the visit was three days of him being disappointed in flawless manners. "
And the voice in my chest comes back.
It's been gone for days—since the afternoon it surfaced to ask, in its sideways way, whether I was healing, and didn't, that day, sound a thing like Emric. I'd half let the theory go.
Filed it under wanting something too much to trust it.
You don't have to perform, it says now. Soft. Pulled tight at the edges. You could just tell the truth.
I go still, because it's right—I'm not going to say the true thing.
It's been sitting in my throat since he called himself a draft his father hasn't finished correcting, and already I can feel myself reaching for something lighter to set in its place.
The voice knew I'd dodge before I did. And across the table, Emric is watching me like he knows it too—like he can see the exact sentence I'm swallowing.
The same read, from inside my skull and from across a table, in the same breath.
Only him.
The theory I'd shelved comes straight back down, and I do the math, and land where I always land: the same impossible sum.
Then I do exactly the thing it said I would. I go sideways, into him.
"Can I tell you what I think your father actually is?"
He sets down his beignet. "Bold. But go on."
"I think he'd rather have a sharp son than a happy one.
And the part that actually costs you isn't the showing-off.
" I turn my cup on the table. "It's that somewhere under all of it he probably does love you, in his own wrecked way—and that's so much harder to carry than if he didn't. You don't even get to hate him cleanly. "
Emric goes quiet for a long moment. The easy expression slides off his face, and something bare shows under it. "Most people," he says, careful, "tell me I'm lucky. Old house, old name."
"Most people aren't the son."
"No." Barely a sound. "They're not." He looks at me like I've reached in and shifted something that's been stuck for years. "How do you know that?"
"Lucky guess." It's a lie, and we both feel it land as one.
"What about you?" he says—gentle now, like he caught the back half of the sentence I didn't say. "You've met my whole catastrophe. Where's yours from?"
I could give him a small one. I'm good at small catastrophes and lying to get out of the big hurt. Instead I hear myself say, "This is the first date I've ever been on."
He doesn't make it a thing. "Then I'm glad I picked somewhere with no dress code."
"It's not by choice." I turn my cup in my hands.
The river keeps current. "They kept me sedated.
Since I was thirteen. No school, no friends, no—" I gesture at the table, the sugar, him.
"This. They basically woke me up a month ago and gave me a year to prove I can exist without breaking something.
" I make myself look at him. "I've broken things, Emric.
People. I should say that out loud at least once to your face.
So you know what you're sitting across from. "
He doesn't pull back. He doesn't do the recalculation behind the eyes. He just sits with it, and I understand he already knew the shape of it—felt it the second I said broken—and let me say the words anyway because I needed to.
"I'm not sitting across from a list of things you've done," he says quietly.
"I'm sitting across from you." A small, careful smile.
"And for what it's worth, I can feel you right now, sitting there waiting for me to be afraid.
You're a lot of things, Calypso Dellaby. Frightening isn't the one I'm getting."
The river goes blurry. I blink it clear and call it the wind.
Let yourself have it, the voice says—gentle, with something raw under the gentleness—and it lands the same second his words do, the two of them stacked so close I can't find the seam between them.
And that's the thing. Nobody knows the exact shape of a moment except the person sitting inside it with you, and the person sitting inside this one is Emric Vane, who's read me like a page all afternoon and is looking at me like I'm the best thing that's happened to his whole week.
I'm suddenly, stupidly certain.
"Can I ask you something weird?" I say.
"Always."
I open my mouth. What's queued up behind my teeth is the actual question—are you the voice that lives behind my sternum, the one that's been narrating my life for months, because the timing is genuinely unhinged and you just said you could feel me and I think it might be you—and I hear it the way it would sound out loud.
Insane.
"...Nope," I say. "Lost it. Gone."
His mouth twitches. He felt me veer off—I can tell—and lets it go, because Emric is kind and lets me have the exit. "You can tell me the weird thing whenever," he says. "I'm hard to scare off. Ask my father."
Eventually the kid behind the counter starts flipping chairs onto tabletops, and we take the hint. Emric stands and offers a hand to pull me up; I take it, which a month ago I wouldn't have.
We head back the long way, in no hurry, the light gone long and gold and Zeva drifting ahead to give us the path.
The conversation doesn't stop so much as wander—lighter now, the worst of it said and survived.
And when it lapses, the quiet doesn't itch the way quiet always has with me; I keep bracing to fill it and never have to.
It's the best couple of hours I've had in years.
At the cottage he stops at the bottom of the step, hands back in his pockets, and the easy thing between us goes shy.
"So," he says.
"So."
"Can I see you again? Not a fixed-it date. A real one. As many as you'll let me."
"Yeah." The word comes out before I can even think. "Yeah, you can."
He reaches up—slow, telegraphed, giving me a whole second to step back—and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, his thumb just barely grazing the edge of my jaw, and then he steps back himself, because he is a better person than the situation strictly requires.
"Goodnight, Cal," he says, and walks off into the gold with the sugar handprint still on his shoulder, and I stand there like an idiot until he's out of sight.
I get inside. Shut the door. Lean against it with my heart going like a kicked drum and my face hot, grinning at nothing, grinning, twenty-five years old and undone by a boy tucking my hair back.
Then I open my eyes, and I'm looking at the inside of my own door, and the giddy thing in my chest curdles into a long, tired groan.
Right. The ritual.
Whoever carved that damn rune into my door is here to ruin the moment.
Again.
Because no matter how the day goes, the door still has a summoning anchor carved into the other side of it, and a vampire's blood worked into the grooves, and a standing appointment with me every single night until I find out whose.
I get the kit—the tin of ward chalk Odette ground for me, the candle stub, the matches—and crouch and start drawing the counter-rune on the inside of the wood, same height as theirs, every angular line reversed, a mirror thrown up against whatever's trying to come through.
I light the candle. Hold my palm flat over the flame.
Reach down into the place behind my sternum and start to channel.
And it fights me tonight.
It's loud—too much left over from the river, from the hair, from being wrapped up in the way Emric made me feel—and the magic comes up fast and bright and wanting, and I have to stop, breathe, find the bead at my wrist, drag myself down to something steady before I push it through the heat.
Easy. Easy. The chalk drinks it in. The flame stretches, gutters, goes blue—one clean blue second—then settles back to gold, locked, holding till dawn.
I sit back on my heels, sweating, the high of the day wrung out of me and the old weight settling back into its seat.
And that's when I feel it. The anchor on the other side of the door, through the wood, through my fresh counter-rune. The hum of it.
It's stronger than it was yesterday.
Fresher.
Someone came back to my door today. Refreshed it.
Pressed their blood into the wood and walked away—while I was sitting on a levee getting powdered sugar on a boy who can feel me from across a table, somebody stood right here, on the sweetest afternoon of my life, and quietly sharpened the thing they're going to use to get in.
I press my palm flat over the counter-rune and let the fear have its minute.
Then, soft, from the warm place behind my sternum where it always arrives:
I know. I felt it too.
And the fear loosens its grip, because of course he does. Of course he felt it. He’s paying attention. Emric is watching out for me, I know it.
I'm not as alone as the thing on my door wants me to be.