Page 136 of The Witch They Fear

The incident report.

The body count.

The names.

That's my file in his hand—the real one, the sealed one, the one that doesn’t leave the council, doesn’t get handed across a room, doesn’t end up in a white coat on a dais on All Hallows' night.

And it's in Leopold Vassard's hands.

He looks up.

Right at me.

And the blood goes out of me all at once—out of my face, out of my fingers, draining toward the floor like the tide hauling back from a beach in the breath of a tsunami.

Because I understand exactly what he's about to do.

And behind my sternum, where the cold can't reach, the warmth that's been so gentle all night opens its eyes.

Chapter 23

"The event originated from Room 714," Leopold reads, gentle as a hymn, "occupied by the Dellaby family."

No.

I reach for the cord at my wrist without deciding to. Find the bead. Three breaths. In for four. There's a down. There's a down. The whole hall has gone still around me, two hundred beautiful monsters leaning in for the remembrance, not one of them understanding yet that the name in his mouth is mine.

"Titus Dellaby. Age forty-one."

Dad.

The heat behind my sternum sits up.

"Catherine Dellaby. Age thirty-eight."

Mom.

In for four. Out for four. Don't. Don't give it to him. He wants this, he wants you to come apart in front of all of them, don't—

"Lila Dellaby." Leopold lifts his eyes off the page, finds mine across the gold and the candlelight, and holds them while he says it. "Age nine."

Lila.

And something in me that has been holding for twelve years lets go of the rope.

It's not a decision. It was never a decision—that's the thing none of them ever understood, not the council, not Balcour, not the men who kept me flat for a decade because flat was the only safe shape. The heat doesn't ask. It floods up out of the place I keep it, up my throat, out along my arms—filling me past the brim, pressing against the backs of my eyes and the undersides of my fingernails, more of it than my body was ever built to hold—and the bead is just a bead, and the breaths are just air, and there is no down. There was never a down.

There was only ever this, waiting.

"And Calypso Dellaby," Leopold says, and now his voice has the smallest curl of warmth in it, the satisfaction of a man watching a long plan arrive exactly on schedule. "Age thirteen. The source of the event."

The candles gutter.

All of them, at once, the whole hall lurching darker—and then the witchfire in the iron candelabra flares the wrong way, too bright, too blue, straining toward me like the herbs in his lair, like everything magic does when I lose control. Glass starts to sing. Somewhere a coupe shivers off a tray and bursts on the floor. The conjure-flowers have all turned their heads to me and frozen.

The crowd understands now. I feel the understanding move through them like a current—it's her, the source, the one who, she's going to—and they begin, all of them, to pull back. Two hundred immortals, the apex of everything, stepping away from one twenty-five-year-old witch with the names of her dead family hanging in the air.

"Cal." Nellie, at my elbow, her hand closing over the cord, over my wrist, her face white. "Cal, look at me, three breaths, baby, find the down—"