Page 121 of The Witch They Fear

Has he been watching me?

"Keeping a list?" I make my voice bored. "I'd hate to think I take up this much room in your day, Leopold."

"You take up a great deal of it." He says it like he's handing me a gift. His hand rises—unhurried, the nails clean crescents—and for one bad second I'm certain he means to touch me, but he only smooths the fall of his own sleeve. "It's difficult not to watch a thing that might go off."

My thumb finds the bead on the cord that Nellie gave me last night. Three breaths. I'm here. The rising magic behind my sternum settles. I hold on to it.

"I think it's wonderful," he goes on, the public smile still bolted on for the witnesses passing behind us, the voice under it dropping low and gentle and only for me. "Truly. After everything, you've collected yourself a whole little set of people who matter to you." He lets it land. Lets me feel the shape of it. "I'd just hate for you to forget what happens to the things you let yourself care about, Calypso. You of all people know the body count goes up when you start to feel something." He stops, and turns to face me, and the stopping is so total—that bottomless, patient stillness—that I stop too, because I can't make my legs do otherwise.

He's close now. Close enough to see there's no heat in him at all, that the sunrise was only ever weather he chose to put on. But I can’t seem to look away either.

"Be careful with them. The soft ones. They have a way of stepping in front of you."

My thumb keeps working the bead. It doesn't help—not when he’s smiling, explaining that everyone I've let in is just one more person I can get killed.

As if I needed a single reminder.

So I give him the smile I learned from men exactly like him. "Do you rehearse this? The voice, the manicure, the little speech about my friends." I tip my head the way he did, give it back to him. "It's good. It almost sounds like you think it frightens me more than I already frighten myself."

Something drops behind his eyes—there and gone, a stone down a well I don't get to see the bottom of. Then the smile seals back over, seamless, and I know I've handed him something instead of the other way around, and I hate it.

"I'd hate," Leopold says, warm as a hearth, soft as a verdict, "for anything to happen."

He straightens his cuffs, inclines his head a precise half-inch like we've concluded a piece of pleasant business, and smiles at someone over my shoulder. Then he walks back to the fountain at a human's pace—slow, unhurried, every step at a speed he's choosing on purpose, so I won't forget the other one is always right there.

Chapter 19

It turns out Nellie owns a whole wardrobe of clothes that aren't grey or a Devenir uniform, and she has opinions about every one of them.

"Not that one, you’re not going to a funeral. Not that one, you'll sweat through it before you hit the river." She's buried to the shoulder in her closet, flinging fabric onto the bed where I'm sitting in disgrace, having presented her with the contents of my own wardrobe—four grey uniforms and the black sweats I traveled in—and watched her face fall like I'd shown her a wound. "Aha." She turns around with something yellow. "This. Pale enough you won't cook, soft enough you'll feel like a person. Try it."

It's a sundress. Cotton, faded to the color of butter, little buttons up the front, a neckline lower than anything I've worn ever. I put it on in her bathroom, and the girl in the mirror has bare arms and her collarbones out and her hair down and looks, for once, like she's allowed to have a Saturday night.

I keep waiting to feel like I'm in a costume.

I don't, quite.

I tug the neckline up. The bandage peeks anyway, white against my throat.

"Leave it." Nellie's in the doorway with her arms crossed and her whole face gone warm. "He's seen worse and didn't run. He's not going to flinch at gauze." She steps in, fixes one shoulder strap that didn't need fixing, and looks at me in the glass. "You officially look like you’re going on a date, Cal."

"That's the idea, allegedly."

"That's the whole idea." She squeezes my shoulder—the good one, she's learned which—and grins. "Go feel like a person. Bring me back a beignet or don't come back at all."

So I go, and Zeva goes with me, fifty feet back and pretending to be a tourist. I'll give her this: she's keeping her word. Last night I cornered her on the shared step and did something I've never once done in a month of being watched—I asked. Not for the moon. Just for room.

I'm going off-campus tomorrow. With a person. A nice one. And I am begging you, as one human being to whatever you are, not to stand close enough to count his teeth.

She looked at me a long flat moment, then said, "I'll take the long lens," like that was a kindness—and maybe it was, because here she is, a dark smudge half a block back, sunglasses on, doing an insulting impression of a woman admiring a praline shop. Close enough to intervene. Far enough that for whole minutes at a stretch I can pretend she isn't there.

It's the most privacy I've had in public since I got here. I'll take it.

The place Emric picked is exactly as advertised: a tin-roofed shack on the levee, six mismatched tables, a hand-lettered sign, no atmosphere whatsoever. The Mississippi slides by behind it, brown and enormous, slow as something thinking. He's already at the table farthest from the road, and when he sees me he stands up so fast he nearly takes the table with him.

"You came," he says, and then looks like he'd pay to take it back. "I mean—obviously, you said you would, I just—" He stops. Starts over. "You look really nice."

"You sound really surprised."