Chapter 22 #3
We move in. Heads turn—they always do—but the whispers tonight land differently than they did my first day.
Back then it was that's her, the one who killed her family—fear with pity folded into it, the kind you feel for a tragedy that happened to someone else.
Tonight the pity's gone. Tonight it's that's her, the one who was attacked by Vasreaux and survived.
They were always afraid of me. Now they're afraid of me the way you're afraid of a thing that could reach across the room and touch you.
So let them look.
I lift my chin, I don't shrink, the dark dress drinks the witchlight, and I walk further into the most dangerous room I've ever stood in like I was invited. Because I was.
And then I feel him.
It isn't the pull—that's a separate problem, and it's already started swinging its slow compass needle toward the far side of the room, where I don't have to look to know Kage is folded into some shadow with his arms crossed and his eyes on me.
That one I clamp down. This is warmer, and it reaches straight past my magic and takes me by the chest.
Emric.
He's coming toward us through the crowd in formal black that fits him like a glove, dark curls pushed back, and he's looking at me like the whole room went quiet. He stops a respectful pace away, his eyes do a helpless trip down the dress and back to my face, and his ears go red.
"Wow. Okay. Hi. You look—" He stops. Resets. "I had a whole sentence. It's gone."
"Smooth, Vane."
"I peaked at the beignet. Been downhill since.
" He grins, and it crinkles his eyes, and my own face goes warm and traitorous.
Then the grin softens into something more careful, his head tilts, and those dark eyes search my face with that uncanny accuracy of his.
"You okay? You came in glowing, but there's something under it. You're wound tight."
There it is. He felt it. Across a crowded hall, through two hundred bodies and the smoke and the brass, he read the dread I tucked under the glow before I said a single word—the same thing the Voice does from inside my skull. I have something to ask him. I almost ask it now.
"I'm okay," I say instead. "Big room. Lot of teeth."
"Yeah." He doesn't push—he never pushes—but he shifts half a step closer, putting himself a little between me and the bulk of the room, the way he did on the training field the first day. Easy on the surface, weight set like he might have to move.
"I'll be around," he says. "All night. The teeth get to be too much, you find me."
"I might," I say, and mean it, and watch his ears get redder.
Nellie's making a face at me over his shoulder that I'm choosing not to acknowledge.
Across the room, near the dais, a flash of dark red hair I know.
Aamon, in black, sleeves down for once, standing with two faculty I don't recognize and a glass he isn't drinking.
Mandatory faculty presence. Doing his job.
And he is, with enormous care, not looking at me—the same level, regulated not-looking from the unveiling.
Except now I know what's under it. Now I've got his mouth and his hands and the way he tastes sitting in my chest, and the not-looking just feels childish at this point.
Be careful tonight, both of them said. The boy in front of me with the red ears and the man across the room with the locked jaw.
The night sneaks up on me the way good things do when I forget to brace.
The girls fold Emric into our little knot like he's always belonged there—Tess grilling him about the combat track, Shandy seizing his hand to read his palm uninvited and informing him gravely that he'll die rich and annoying, until he's laughing hard enough that he has to set his glass down.
Margo produces a plate from somewhere and makes everyone eat, the way she does, and the food is the kind I've only read about.
I take a bite of something dark and spiced, and my whole body remembers all at once that it's allowed to want.
So I eat. étouffée and cornbread and something with crawfish I go back for twice, and all of it better than it has any right to be—which is its own small mystery, a kitchen this good hired by people who live on blood and won't touch a bite of it.
I enjoy the hell out of it anyway. Emric watches me eat like it's the best show in the room.
The band's been climbing out of the dirge by inches, and somewhere in the last hour it lifts into something slow and warm and gold—still short of the second-line everyone's waiting on, just the in-between, the part where the grief loosens its grip on your sleeve.
Couples drift onto the floor. The conjure-flowers turn their heads to watch.
Emric holds out his hand.
"No," I say. "Absolutely not. I don't dance."
"You've never danced." Not a question—that uncanny read of his. "Which isn't the same thing."
"Emric—"
"One song. I'll do all the work. You just have to not set me on fire."
I have never danced. Not once. There were no dances in a white room with a medication tray.
And across the floor I catch a flash of dark red hair—Aamon, a glass he isn't drinking in his hand, this morning still unspoken between us—and for one complicated second I almost don't. Then Emric's hand stays out, steady and patient and expecting nothing, and I hear Margo in my head, the control you want lives on the other side of letting yourself feel things, and I take it.
He pulls me out under the witchlight, settles one hand light at my waist, folds the other around mine, and we move. Terribly, at first—I have no idea where my feet are supposed to go, and I tell him so, and he just says don't think about your feet, think about mine, and slows down until I find it.
And then I find it.
The simple animal math of two people moving to the same sound.
When I finally let my head drop to his shoulder it's solid under my cheek, and he smells like clean cotton and something green, and his hand at my waist is warm, and I have not been held like this—held to be held, for no reason but the holding—since before the hotel.
Since I was a kid with a family that was still breathing.
My eyes burn. It isn't the spice this time.
“I’m having a really good time,” I murmur against his shoulder.
He chuckles low. “Me too. I really didn’t think you’d dance.”
I pull back, unable to hide my smile. “What can I say? You’re really convincing.”
He winks and I lay my head back against him.
The song rolls into another one and he spins me before pulling me closer than before.
"Can I ask you something weird," I say into his shoulder—the same words I tried on the levee and lost my nerve on.
"Always."
And this time I mean to ask it. The thing in my head.
The warmth behind my sternum, the presence that's narrated my whole strange life for over a month and reached all the way into my skull tonight.
I'm so sure it's him. I want to hear him say it out loud.
I lift my head off his shoulder and open my mouth—