Page 132 of The Witch They Fear

"You're doing the spooky divination thing."

"I'm doing the fashion thing." A beat. Her grey eyes glitter. "The spooky thing happens to agree with the fashion thing. Put it on."

So, after Margo has had her way with me, and Nellie pins my hair half up, leaving the rest down and tugging out a piece at my temple that won’t curl just right, I put it on.

And the girl in the long mirror on the back of Nellie's door is nobody I recognize. The dress falls like water—dark and long and cut to give me edges I forgot I had.

And through all of it they talk—over me, around me, to me—the whole bright clatter of four women who have accepted me into the fold without a second thought. Tess narrates a feud with a girl from her water seminar. Margo cuts a peach into precise halves and makes everyone eat it. Shandy hums something under her breath in that low unexpected voice that puts chills up my arms.

And at no point am I forced to answer what happened to me last night, why I disappeared from the cemetery, and why the bags under my eyes are nearly permanent at this point.

They just let me be a girl getting ready with her friends.

I keep waiting to feel like I'm in a costume–like none of this is real life. At least not my real life.

But the acceptance and embrace is so total it sinks into my soul and changes a bit of my DNA. These girls are healing me one cheesy joke and attention to detail at a time.

"Wrist," Nellie says.

I hold it out. The cord she gave me is already there—it never comes off—the little wooden bead worn smooth now against the inside of my wrist, against the pulse. She turns it once with her thumb, checks the working knot, nods like a woman signing off on a load-bearing wall.

"Three breaths if it gets to be too much," she says, low, just for me, under the noise. "Take it out, breathe, remind your body there's a down. Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"You're gonna walk in there and ruin some bloodlines, Cal."

I laugh—the kind that comes out as breath instead of sound—and that's when the Voice arrives.

Look at you.

It settles into the warm low place behind my sternum the way it always does, unhurried, like it never left. There's no edge on it tonight—none of the territorial blade from the night Kage's blood was in my mouth, none of the trust is expensive. Just warmth, and something under the warmth that aches.

You let them in, it says. You let yourself have this. I told you that you were strong. I don't think I ever told you that you were brave.

I go still in front of Nellie's mirror, my fingers tangled in my hair, the bright room talking on without me.

Where have you been? I think at it. You vanish for days at a time.

A pause. The warmth deepens, the way someone leans closer.

Closer than you think. Always closer than you think.

And there it is—the click. The thing I've been refusing to total for weeks because totaling it felt like double-texting someone who left me on read. I can feel you right now, Emric said across the table on the levee, sugar on his cuff, sitting there waiting for me to be afraid. The same read, from inside my skull and from across a table, in the same breath, again. All the coincidences I've stacked and refused to add tip over into a number.

It's him. It's been him the whole time. Emric Vane, with his kind eyes and his witch grandmother and his red ears, who reaches across the dark to find me whenever the night goes wrong.

Emric, I think, careful, hopeful. Is that you—

Be careful tonight, Calypso.

The warning lands and it makes me smile—helpless, warm—because he reached all the way into my head, on the busiest night of the year, just to tell me to look out for myself. Because he cares enough to drop in and say it. My whole stupid heart has decided tonight's the night I finally ask him to his face.

I will, I think. I'm going to find you tonight. I have something to ask you.

Silence. The warmth holds a beat longer than usual—holds like a held breath—then fades to the edges. Present. Watching. Choosing not to speak.

"You good?" Nellie's watching me in the mirror, an expensive bottle of perfume in her hand.