Page 107 of The Witch They Fear

When I look up, Kage is fetching staffs from the gear shed.

The Emric-shaped gap on the west side of the field is still there. I haven't stopped tracking it; I just stopped looking at it directly. Where are you, Vane?

Midus claps once. The class winds down. Sparring partners separate and bow. Padded gloves come off and get tossed into the equipment trunk by the gear shed. I uncross my ankles and bend to retrieve my bag from the grass by my feet, and when I look up to scan for Kage one more time before standing—

He's already gone.

The place where he'd just been—at the center drill, mid-correction—is empty. The staff he was using is propped against the gear-shed wall. The path past the shed is empty too, but the gate at its far end is just swinging shut.

He left before Midus dismissed us.

I stand. My shoulder twinges. I sling my bag onto my left shoulder and walk out without looking back.

∞∞∞

Nellie's dorm is on the second floor of Caillot House, which is the witches' only building on the north end of campus—a former Greek revival mansion the academy bought a hundred years ago when the local family ran out of cousins. Three floors. White columns. Wisteria climbing the porch in a way that looks like an accident and isn't. I've walked past Caillot a dozen times but I've never been inside.

Nellie is waiting on the porch when I come up the path. She's in cutoff jeans and an oversized t-shirt that says LSU AGRICULTURAL CENTER, her curls piled on top of her head with what looks like a chopstick, and she's barefoot on the slightly stripped wood.

"Took you long enough."

"It's a fifteen-minute walk."

"You took twenty."

"I had things to think about."

"No more thinking now that you’re here. We don't allow it."

Corvin is twenty paces behind me on the path. He stops at the edge of the lawn. Nellie waves him off without looking, the way she'd shoo a dog she happened to like, and the gesture is so casual and assumed that I see the corner of Corvin's mouth tighten before he settles into his standard waiting posture against the trunk of a magnolia.

"Come on." Nellie reaches for my left hand. "I want you to meet everybody."

The inside of Caillot smells like nag champa and laundry detergent and something herbal. There's a foyer with a wide curving staircase, and a common room off to the right with mismatched couches and a fireplace, and a coffee station along one wall that suggests a culture of people who study late and recover with caffeine. My kind of people.

Two witches I've never met are at the coffee station and they look up when we come in. They smile at Nellie. They look at me a beat longer than they look at her. Then they smile at me too.

"Hi," I say, automatic, and we're past them and up the stairs.

Nellie's room is at the end of the second-floor hall. The door is half open. She kicks it the rest of the way.

"Behold."

The door opens into the suite's common room.

It's a big square space carved out of what must have been the upper parlor of the original house, with a fireplace on one wall and four doors set into the others—one bedroom for each of them. There's a low couch and two armchairs gathered around a coffee table covered in books and tea mugs, a kitchenette tucked into the far corner, a record player on a side table, and the kind of well-loved clutter that neither Nellie nor her roommates apologize for. Posters and string lights. A wall of dried herbs in glass jars hanging by twine over the kitchenette. A tarot deck face-down on the coffee table, mid-spread. A pair of running shoes kicked off by the door I almost trip over.

Three people are in the room. They all look up at once.

"Everybody," Nellie says, "Cal."

She points her arms at me as if presenting me.

A round of hellos.

"Cal, the inhabitants. Marguerite—Margo—second-year, healing track, she'll fix your problems and your blood sugar simultaneously." A woman tucked into one end of the couch with an anatomy textbook open on her lap, glasses, a high bun, lifts a hand from her book, smiles, goes back to reading. "Tess. Third-year, water magic, what you've heard about her is mostly true."

"Mostly?" The woman folded sideways in the armchair lifts her teacup at me. She's in a tank top and sweatpants and her dark hair is in two French braids that look defensive. Her grin is enormous.