Page 1 of The Witch They Fear

Chapter 1

Everything I own fits in a canvas duffel bag the color of nothing.

I pull open the top drawer of the dresser—the one that's always stuck, the one you have to lift and jiggle at the same time—and take out the last of it. One pair of jeans, soft from years of washing by hands that weren't mine. Two t-shirts. Underwear, socks, a sports bra with a stretched-out band. I fold them tight and flat and line them up next to the toothbrush and the hair tie and the dog-eared paperback with no cover. Some romance novel a night-shift orderly left in the common room six years ago. I kept it because no one asked for it back. That's the closest I've come to stealing in twelve years.

I pull the zipper closed. It doesn't even strain.

Twenty-five years of life. One bag. And now, I have one year—twelve months, starting today—to convince a council of vampires who've never met me that the witch they've kept drugged since childhood deserves to be a person again. That's the deal. Attend Devenir Academy. Learn to control the thing inside me that I've never been taught to control because they were too busy suppressing it. Prove I'm not dangerous—to the satisfaction of people who decided I was dangerous when I was thirteen and have never once reconsidered.

And if I fail? Back to this room. This bed. This groove in the mattress. Permanent sedation. No appeals, no second chances, no version of this where anyone advocates for the witch girl with the body count.

They didn't say forever. They didn't have to. I know what permanent means when the council says it. It means until I'm not their problem anymore. It means until I'm nothing at all.

So I'm packing.

I check under the bed—nothing, same as always. Check the bathroom: bare counter, bare shelf, the same industrial soap dispenser bolted to the wall that's been there since I arrived. I run my fingers along the underside of the windowsill where the wire mesh meets the frame, a habit I picked up around year six. Checking for what, I don't know. Some small proof that a person lived here for over a decade.

My fingers press too hard. Something flares behind my sternum—a brief, hot pulse—and the wire mesh shudders under my hand. A fine vibration that hums up through the frame and into the glass. The window gives a faint, high whine, like a tuning fork struck too close to the ear.

I pull my hand back. The whine dies.

The dampeners are supposed to prevent that. Two hundred milligrams of Veritane every seventy-two hours, and my magic still bleeds through at the edges. Still finds the cracks. The wean started three weeks ago—each dose a little lighter, the fog a little thinner—and every day the thing behind my sternum presses harder against the walls they built around it.

Nothing. The room gives me back exactly what I put into it. Except for the faint crack in the windowpane that wasn't there yesterday.

White walls. White bed, stripped now, the mattress sagging slightly left of center where my body wore a groove into it. White tile, white ceiling, the single window casting its grid of shadow across the floor like graph paper. I know which square the light hits at 3 p.m. in November. I could map this room with my eyes closed, and I have. Hundreds of times. Thousands. Lying in that bed with the sedatives pulling me down like water, tracing the walls inside my skull because my hands were too heavy to lift.

I hoist the bag higher on my shoulder and I don't look back.

The hallway smells like industrial cleaner and magic suppressants. Staff pass me and most of them don't make eye contact. That's fine. That's normal. I am a file number and a set of vitals and a medication schedule, and today I am being transferred, and the hallway doesn't care.

My sneakers squeak against the floor. I count the steps to the intake desk because I've always counted. Forty-seven from my door to the corner. Twelve more to the security checkpoint. Twenty-two to the front desk, where—

Marion is waiting.

She's standing the way she always stands: feet shoulder-width, hands clasped in front of her scrubs, her ID badge clipped to the pocket over her heart. She's been my primary care nurse since I was fourteen. She has a birthmark on the inside of her left wrist shaped like a crescent moon, and she hums under her breath when she thinks I'm asleep—always the same song, something old and slow I never learned the name of.

"All packed?" she asks.

I hold up the duffel. "Didn't need the second bag."

She almost laughs. It dies somewhere in her chest and comes out as a sharp exhale. Her eyes go bright. Her jaw sets. She's trying not to cry, and she's losing.

I should feel something. I'm supposed to feel something. But the dampeners keep Marion's sadness on the other side of the glass—I can see it, I just can't reach it. Twelve years of chemical distance between me and every feeling worth having.

"Come here," she says, and opens her arms.

I step into them because she's earned it. Because she's the only person in this building who ever touched me like I was a person and not a biohazard. Her arms close around me and she's warm. She's always warm. Her scrubs smell like lavender hand soap and the break room coffee she drinks too much of, and her chin presses against the top of my head, and for a moment—just a moment—the glass thins.

Something in my chest aches. Distant. Muffled. Like hearing someone scream from three rooms away.

"You're going to be fine," she says into my hair.

I don't believe her. But I let her say it, because people need to say things like that when they're letting go, and I've taken enough from people. I can give her this.

She pulls back. Wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. Sniffs once, hard, and squares her shoulders, and I watch the nurse slide back into place over the woman—professional, capable, here to do a job.

"Sit down," she says. "One more thing before you go."