Page 102 of The Witch They Fear

"My sister was nine. We were sharing a bed in the hotel. She was reading me a picture book. The next thing I knew I was eleven floors down on the street with my mother's blood on my forearm."

He doesn't say anything.

"They drugged me. They told me what I'd done. They kept me in a room for twelve years. I'm twenty-five and I've read more books than I've had conversations. I've killed eleven people I didn't know I was going to kill. I miss my sister so much I catch myself seeing her face in strangers. I—"

I stop.

A single tear has gotten out, and it's sliding down toward my jaw, and I lift my left hand to wipe it before he can see it.

He sees it.

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't reach for me. He doesn't offer comfort. He just sits there next to me with his shoulder almost against mine and lets me have it, and the fact that he doesn't try to make me feel better is kind of nice.

He just lets me feel it.

"That's," I say, dry, "the consequences."

"Yeah."

"It's a poor trade."

"Sounds like it."

We sit.

After a while he says, "I can heal you, you know."

I close my eyes.

"My blood. Like before. Faster than the body alone—it would close the bite, it would ease the shoulder. By morning you'd be functional."

"No."

"Hex—"

"No, Kage."

"Why not"

"Because I want to remember it."

He's quiet.

"All of it. Every part. I want to feel the bandage and I want to feel the sling and I want to wake up tomorrow with the bruise above my eyebrow and the throb in my neck and I want my body to know what happened to it. I don't want to be smooth-skinned by the time classes start. I want everybody on this campus to look at me and see what their library lets happen on a Wednesday afternoon."

A pause.

"I could make you take it."

I open my eyes. I turn my head. He's looking at the trees in front of us, not at me, and his profile is something out of an old painting against the firelight in the distance, and his jaw is working.

"You could," I say.

"Last time I did."

"I remember."

"What's stopping me from doing it again?"