Chapter 22
I wake up warm, and for one disoriented second I don't know where I am, which means for one disoriented second I'm thirteen and the white is coming for me—
Then I breathe in.
Cedar. Old paper. Woodsmoke and Aamon–pure Aamon.
It takes me a second to place the low ceiling and the wall of books and the give of old leather under my hip.
The lair. Aamon's underground library, where I apparently fell asleep on the couch and never made it home.
There's a blanket over me I didn't pull all the way up.
The sconces are burning low and gold. My cheek is stuck to the leather, my mouth tastes like sleep, and last night unspools behind my eyes all at once—
The cemetery. Leopold's voice, whose would you start with.
Kage in the dark and the char handprint on his shirt.
The run across campus with the magic clawing up my throat.
The wards closing over my skin as I went down the stairs.
The flood pouring out of me and into Aamon, his hands folded over mine.
And then the wall coming down.
His mouth. His hands in my hair. Centuries of that immovable composure cracking open against me and it felt so fucking good.
I press my face into the leather and make a sound that is not dignified.
Okay. Sit up. Be a person.
I sit up. The blanket pools in my lap. My hair is a disaster, my dress from the Veillée has wrinkled itself into permanent topography, and somewhere in the night I lost a shoe. The room is quiet in that dense, warded way it always is—sealed, safe, mine for as long as I'm in it.
And my magic is calm.
Banked down to a coal. I reach for it the way Aamon taught me, gentle, braced for the lurch, and instead it comes to my hand soft and obedient, a thread fine enough to put through a needle.
On the coffee table, the bundles of dried herbs have leaned in toward me on their stems, leaves reaching, the way a whole room turns to catch a sound it's been waiting on.
I let the warmth settle. Hold it. Let it go.
Nothing breaks.
Margo was right. The thought lands soft and a little dangerous.
The healing-track lecture from the dorm—the control you're looking for is on the other side of letting yourself feel things, not the other side of refusing to.
I let myself feel something last night. I let myself be touched on purpose.
And my magic woke up truly quiet for the first time in twelve years.
It should scare me more than it does.
"You're awake."
I startle—just enough that the herbs shiver—and there he is.
Across the room, by the bookshelf, sleeves rolled to the elbow, that ancient script standing dark on his forearms. His hair's come loose again, one strand fallen across his forehead, and he's looking at me so intensely my heart skips a beat.
"Did you stay up there all night?" My voice comes out gravel.
"I wasn't going to leave you alone." Simple. No performance. "You went under fast. You needed it."
But he wasn’t even down here. “How do you–”
“I can hear your heartbeat, Calypso.”
“Oh,” I murmur.
I look at his hands before I can stop myself—the same hands that were in my hair a few hours ago, that have held my whole interior cupped in his palms more than once, that wrapped around mine on this exact table and reversed the river before it could drown someone. Careful with everything, those hands.
I drag my eyes up. He's already watching me look.
"So," I say.
"So," he says.
And then the door starts to close.
I watch it happen in real time, the way I've watched it happen a dozen times—on the porch in Thibodaux, in the doorway after the ward, every other day across this coffee table.
The jaw resetting. The shoulders squaring.
The warmth banking back down behind the hazel until he's the professor again, composed and unreadable and six feet away without having moved an inch.
"Calypso." His voice goes level. Measured. Each word chosen like everything he does. "Last night—"
"Don't." It's out before I mean it. "If the next words are was a mistake, I'll set this couch on fire, and I'm finally good enough to do it on purpose."
Something moves at the corner of his mouth—the ghost of where a smile would go, if he ever let one finish.
"It wasn't a mistake." A pause. His thumb presses into the center of his opposite palm, that tell I catalogued the first day in Leyonna's office. "A mistake is something you do without meaning to. I knew exactly what I was doing. That's the part you should be afraid of."
"Afraid of you," I say, "or afraid of me?"
He doesn't answer that. He looks at me like he's standing at the edge of something, and for one suspended second I think he's going to step off it—tell me the thing, whatever the thing is, the locked room behind the locked room.
I want so badly to know. I’m leaning slightly forward, ready to know whatever he wants to tell me.
"There's something I—" he starts.
And stops.
The crack I just saw goes quiet and flat and shut, water closing over a dropped stone like it was never there.
"You should eat," he says instead. "And you have your first Revel to get ready for."
The whiplash nearly makes me laugh.
Cool. Great. We're doing this.
I shove the blanket off my lap and stand, and the room tilts only a little, and I find my missing shoe under the coffee table where it has no business being.
"Right. The Revel. Mandatory fun. Memento mori. Can't wait to watch Leopold give another speech about how the dead really, deeply want us to drink wine and look hot."
"Calypso."
I turn at the bottom of the stairs.
He hasn't moved from the bookshelf. The sconce light catches his face, and for half a second he isn't a professor or a warden—just a man looking at someone he wishes he could keep.
"Be careful tonight," he says.
It isn't what he almost said. But it's what he's giving me, and his voice has gone rough at the edges, and I take it.
"I'm always careful," I lie.
"You're never careful."
"Okay, well I’ll try harder." I climb two stairs. "I have to go. I'm meeting Nellie—I need to run home first, I bet I look like a mess, and if I show up to her dorm like this she'll have a fit."
The corner of his mouth twitches.
My belly warms when I see it.
"Go," he says.
I go. Through the warded door, the magic humming once over my skin in recognition before it lets me pass—and I don't look back.
At some point, I will have to face all the feelings in my chest for Aamon–but not today.
Today is the Revel.
And I’m determined to have a good time.
∞∞∞
Caillot House smells like stagnant water and hairspray and somebody's curling iron set one degree too hot, and the second I come through the door of Nellie's suite four women look up and lose their minds.
"There she is." Nellie's across the room before I've got my shoes off, grabbing my good arm, holding me out at arm's length for the sweep.
"You showered. Bless. You've also got bags under your eyes you could pack for a trip—where have you—you know what, don't tell me.
Tell me later. Today, we're getting you ready. "
"I don't need much," I say. "I have a black dress. I'll put on the black dress."
The room makes a collective sound like I've suggested attending in a trash bag.
"Absolutely not," Tess says from the floor, where she's surrounded by what appears to be the entire contents of three closets.
"It's the Revel, Cal. It's the one night a year the noble houses let everybody into the good rooms specifically so they can look down on us in them.
So you're going to walk in there looking like the thing they're scared of, and you're going to look expensive doing it. "
"That's the spirit," Margo says mildly, not looking up from the row of little pots she's lining along the coffee table.
Healing track, apparently, includes cosmetics.
"Sit. I'm doing your face. You've got cheekbones people pay surgeons for—this'll be the easiest job I've had all week. We'll glow you up. Gently."
"Gently," I repeat.
"Clinically gently. I’m a pro."
Shandy's already holding something up against me—a length of fabric that drinks the lamplight and gives almost nothing back. Darker than black, somehow. The color the bayou goes at the dock at night when it's the new moon.
"This one," she says. Quiet. Certain, in the way I'm learning means I'm not really asking. "It wants to be yours tonight."
"You're doing the spooky divination thing."
"I'm doing the fashion thing." A beat. Her grey eyes glitter. "The spooky thing happens to agree with the fashion thing. Put it on."
So, after Margo has had her way with me, and Nellie pins my hair half up, leaving the rest down and tugging out a piece at my temple that won’t curl just right, I put it on.
And the girl in the long mirror on the back of Nellie's door is nobody I recognize. The dress falls like water—dark and long and cut to give me edges I forgot I had.
And through all of it they talk—over me, around me, to me—the whole bright clatter of four women who have accepted me into the fold without a second thought.
Tess narrates a feud with a girl from her water seminar.
Margo cuts a peach into precise halves and makes everyone eat it.
Shandy hums something under her breath in that low unexpected voice that puts chills up my arms.
And at no point am I forced to answer what happened to me last night, why I disappeared from the cemetery, and why the bags under my eyes are nearly permanent at this point.
They just let me be a girl getting ready with her friends.
I keep waiting to feel like I'm in a costume–like none of this is real life. At least not my real life.
But the acceptance and embrace is so total it sinks into my soul and changes a bit of my DNA. These girls are healing me one cheesy joke and attention to detail at a time.
"Wrist," Nellie says.