Page 104 of The Witch They Fear

It is not, technically, personal, but it sure feels that way

My dislocated shoulder has thrown off Midus's pair rotation, and he has solved the problem the laziest way available: dragging Zeva off her post to even out the numbers. She's been pulled into drills twice this week. I can see her glaring at the back of his head between rounds.

"Dellaby!" he barks across the field, and I startle. "Watch her footwork. She's compensating. You see it?"

I do. Zeva is favoring her right side because the second-year vampire she's paired with keeps reaching for her left.

"I see it, sir." I lift my left hand and give Professor Midus a thumbs up. He’s not impressed.

"Good. Next time you can move that arm I want you running that drill. With me."

"Uh, yes, sir."

"And don't think I forgot you've been on the bench for a week."

"Sorry, sir. I’d be out there if the infirmary told me I could."

He gives me a look like I am the worst thing that has ever happened to his day and goes back to shouting at somebody about hip rotation.

I let my eyes drift.

Emric isn't on the field.

I clocked it within thirty seconds of sitting down. His usual stretch spot on the west side is empty grass. His usual drill cluster is one body short. He's been at every class since I’ve been at Devenir, and today—the first class I've been back at since the library—he's not here.

I let my eyes drift the other direction.

Across the field, Kage is doing his thing.

Midus barks his name every ninety seconds and Kage goes, fluid and unhurried, to whatever corner of the field needs him. He has a long wooden staff in one hand. He has not used it yet to hit anybody but he has used it, twice, to tap the back of a second-year's knee and reposition a stance, and once to lift the chin of a fae student who was dropping her guard. He swaps weapons in and out of the gear shed as soon as Midus requests. Kage, sticks. He fetches sticks. Kage, padded gloves, four sets. He fetches the gloves. Kage, take Aldrich's drill, I need to talk to Zeva. He steps in. He runs the drill for one round. He steps back out.

He has not looked at me directly since I sat down.

I have watched him not look at me for the better part of an hour. The not-looking is so deliberate I could measure it with a ruler. Every fifteen seconds his eyes touch the stones beside me, the grass past my shoes, the path behind me—never me. And every fifteen seconds my body knows.

Aamon does the same infuriating thing.

They are both very good at it. They both move through a room with their attention pointedly arranged around me like a perimeter they have agreed not to cross, and they both expect me to act like I don’t notice. Maybe it's a quirk of frustrating men in general. Maybe somebody hands out a manual.

It's the blood. It has to be.

That's the other thing I'm trying to think about.

I drank Kage’s blood eleven days ago—behind my cottage, in the dark with his wrist in my mouth and my own panic still running hot—and ever since, my body has been doing this. The compass-needle thing. The drag in my sternum whenever he moves across a room. The way I sat on a wet patch of grass last night and let a man I have known three weeks ask me what it felt like to kill my own family, and I fucking told him.

That's not normal.

That's not who I am.

I haven’t had a meaningful conversation about my parents with anyone in twelve years and last night I gave the entire monologue to a man whose actual name I apparently don’t know because he sat next to me and waited. And the whole time my chest was warm in the specific direction of him, and the warmth wasn't fear and it wasn't trust, and that is the part I am trying to figure out.

It has to be the blood.

If it's the blood, it's just a chemical thing. It's some kind of pull his vampire body opened in mine without asking, and it'll fade as the magic of the exchange dilutes, and the angle of my spine toward him will loosen until I can sit in a room without it. That’s a useful explanation. That’s an explanation I can live with. That’s an explanation that doesn’t require me to look directly at the alternative, which is that I told the truth about my sister because I wanted to, because something in him cracked open the part of me that has been closed since I was thirteen, and the cracking is not just about chemistry.

I look at my hands.

The compression sleeve on my right arm is the bright clinical purple of medical supply company aesthetics, and the bandage on my neck has been swapped out by the infirmary for something smaller and lower-profile but is still very much there. I can feel the gauze move when I swallow.