Chapter 20
The night before the Revel, Devenir lights its dead.
They call it the Veillée—the vigil, the wake, the held breath before All Hallows lets it out.
The whole academy processes past the academic buildings to the old cemetery, where the tombs stand above ground the way they do in this city, stacked stone and rusting gates and Spanish moss hanging off the oaks.
Every house carries lanterns. Witches leave offerings at the ancestor stones—salt, marigolds, a finger of rum poured into the dirt.
Vampires light candles for their long dead, who are very long and very many.
By full dark the whole graveyard is breathing with flame, hundreds of small lights swimming in the fog, and it is, I'll admit, the most beautiful thing I've seen since arriving at Devenir.
It would be perfect if I had a single person here I was allowed to mourn.
That's the trouble with a vigil when your dead are dead because of you.
Everyone else came to grieve. I came because attendance is mandatory and absence gets noted in a file, and I've spent the last hour drifting at the edge of other people's sorrow with an unlit candle in my hand and nowhere honest to put it.
Nellie's across the cemetery with Margo and Tess and Shandy, gathered around the old Caillot stone, heads bent together, their candles pooling gold on their faces. She offered to keep me with her. I told her to go be with her people.
Mine aren't the kind you visit.
So I find a low tomb at the quiet end of the row and I'm pretending to read the worn-off name on it when the air changes—that particular density that means one of the old ones is close.
Aamon.
He doesn't see me, or pretends not to. He stops three stones down, in front of a small weathered marker I'd have walked past, and lowers himself to one knee in the wet grass like he’s done it a thousand times.
Sets a candle at the base of the stone. Lights it with a touch—no match, just his fingers and a breath of will—and then he just stays there.
Head bowed. One hand flat on the cold face of the stone.
He grieves the way he does everything—quietly, all the way through, with no audience in mind.
Whatever's under that stone, he isn't doing it for me.
For a second the careful distance he keeps just isn't there, and I catch myself trying to picture him from before all this: some man at a graveside centuries ago, when the grief was new and he was still the kind of thing that might one day end up under a stone of his own.
I almost get there–see in my head what he must have been like as a human.
Then his hand lifts off the marble in that weightless, not-quite-human way, and the picture won't hold. Whatever he was is buried too deep to reach. We don't even grieve the same dead.
I'm not sure we have a single thing in common.
He rises. Smooths his trousers. And when he turns, his eyes find me across the dark with no searching in them at all, like he knew where I was standing the whole time.
He doesn't speak. He inclines his head—small, grave, one mourner to another—and walks back toward the lights.
I can’t light my candle for anyone in particular, and I should leave now—my time served, my face seen by whoever keeps track of these things.
But I don't. I stay at the dark edge of it and watch the others: the whole academy bent over its dead, hundreds of people who get to miss someone out loud.
A girl a few stones over has her forehead pressed to the marble, her shoulders hitching as she cries.
An old vampire murmurs down a list of names in a language I don't know, one finger to each one.
Whole families folded around whole histories of grief, all of it permitted, all of it clean.
I have a list of names too. I'm just not allowed to say them, it wouldn’t be right.
And the longer I stand here the heavier it gets—the grief, the candles, the centuries of loss pressing down on my chest like a palm—because everyone here came to mourn someone, and I'm the reason places like this fill up.
Then the air behind me changes—a prickle up the back of my neck, a wrongness, something close that wasn't close a breath ago—and I whirl around.
Leopold Vassard. Close enough to touch, white hair pulling in every candle within reach, hands clasped behind his back, watching me like he’s been standing there long enough to enjoy the second I felt him.
I make myself go still. The flinch already got out. He won't get more.
"You came alone," he says.
I don't answer.
"Most people bring someone to a thing like this." He steps past me to consider the tomb I've been hiding behind, easy, like we're sharing a pew at Sunday service. "Someone to share the grief with. But yours doesn't divide, does it. It only ever multiplies."
"I didn't take you for sentimental, Leopold."
"I'm not. I find these evenings clarifying.
All these candles. All these names." He turns to look at me, and the light does nothing kind to his face.
"If they let you light one tonight—if they let you say the names out loud, here, in front of everyone—whose would you start with?
" A pause, delicate as a blade going in.
"Your father? Or the little one first. Your sister, right?
She was smallest, and went easiest, and you've never quite decided whether that's a mercy you get to keep, have you?”
Rage curls in my gut. I don't answer. I can't. The candle shakes in my hand as I try to tamp down the emotions bubbling up inside me.
He studies me, unhurried. "I make it my business to know the dangerous things on this campus. And whatever the assessments say, you're the most dangerous thing on it." His eyes don't leave mine. "Right down to the door you lock every night, like the lock means something."
The cold goes all the way through me. I narrow my eyes, searching for the truth in his face. Is he the one who put that rune on my door?
Or is he just that much of an asshole?
He watches me put it together, and he enjoys it. "It's a small campus, Calypso. Doors get noticed." A beat. "Especially yours."
Something in me snaps clean through. "What the fuck is your problem with me?" It comes out low and furious, weeks of his speeches and his watching and his endless patience all giving way at once. "What do you actually want?"
The polish drops.
He's in my space before I can track it—vampire-fast, the courtly stillness gone—close enough that the candlelight around us catches on the points of his fangs where his lip's pulled back, and there's nothing warm left anywhere on his face.
"My problem," he says, soft and arctic, "is that they let things like you walk these halls and call it progress.
A witch with a body count, handed a clean uniform and a second chance, seated among us like she's earned the air.
" His gaze drags down me like I'm something scraped off a shoe.
"Better creatures than you have been put down for less.
You're not a student. You're a mess nobody's finished cleaning up. "
And there it is. The real thing, under all the manners.
My heart is slamming but my voice goes flat.
"So you just hate witches, then. All of this, and it's that simple.
" I tilt my head. "Then explain something.
If I'm so far beneath you—a mess you can't stand the sight of—why did you offer me your witch slot?
Why open your own vein over my bag so you'd always know where I was?
" I step into him, into the cold and the fangs, done giving ground.
"Is that what this is, Leopold? You hate me so much you want to keep me close? "
Something shifts at the back of his eyes—pleased, almost, that I got there on my own. "Enemies closer," he murmurs. "You've heard the saying."
The rage drags my magic up with it—heat flooding behind my sternum, my fingertips lighting under the skin, sparks snapping off the ends of them into the dark between us.
So I open my hand and let the candle drop. It bounces off the toe of one very expensive shoe and rolls into the wet grass. I don't wait to see whether he bothers to look down.
I walk away first. Fingers sparking, heart a war drum, because if I have to look at Leopold’s face for one more fucking second I’m going to lose my mind.
I don't stop walking until I'm clear of the iron gate at the back of the cemetery, where the grounds go wild and dark and the vigil shrinks to a glow through the trees and the air finally stops tasting like wax and other people's grief.
My hands won't stop shaking. The heat under my ribs is still climbing—Leopold lit it and it hasn't come back down—rib by rib, pressing up under my sternum, looking for a way out.
I drag in a breath and it comes back warm and useless.
The grass is going brown in a ring around my boots.
I need air, I need space, I need to be nowhere near a living thing when this thing building inside me goes off.
Breathe, the voice says, soft, from the warm low place where it lives. He wants you to come apart out here where he can watch. Don't give it to him.
And it helps. Of course it helps. Emric being sweet to me like always—that he probably felt the whole night curdle from wherever he is and reached across the dark to find me.
The way he always seems to. I've got you.
The voice doesn't say that part. I hear it anyway.
My breathing drops. The heat banks to a simmer.
It's the only comfort I've had all night. I take it with both hands.
"Talking to yourself, Hex. Never a great sign."
I don't have to turn. My magic already turned for me—that sick, involuntary lurch, the current reversing, the whole compass of me swinging toward him the way it has since the night he made sure it would.
The simmer ramps back up.