Page 18 of The Witch They Fear

Something crosses his face. Fast—blink-and-you'd-miss-it fast. Not guilt. Not anger. A fracture, hairline-thin, running through the composure like a crack through marble. His jaw shifts. His eyes flicker—not away from me, never away, but inward, like something behind them flinched even if nothing on the surface did.

Then it's gone. Sealed over. Still water.

"Seven a.m. tomorrow," he says. "Training room B."

He turns and walks back toward the staircase. Unhurried. Controlled. Every step a decision, like everything else about him. I stand in the corridor and toss the bag over my shoulder, a rage in my belly so big it's the only thing keeping me vertical.

I turn toward Room 204. Start walking.

The hallway is full.

Students—dozens of them, between classes or heading to them, filling the corridor with bodies and noise and movement. The noise dies the second they see me.

I know what I look like. Blood on my face, smeared across my lips. Dust in my hair. Uniform wrinkled, hands trembling, eyes probably red-rimmed and feral. And everyone in this hallway probably felt what just happened below their feet—the shudder in the wards, the vibration in the floor, the lights flickering in classrooms above.

That was her. The witch. The one who—

Yeah. That one. Again.

Silence spreads. The same current as the courtyard yesterday, but worse. Yesterday they were curious. Today they're scared. A girl presses herself against the wall as I pass. A boy grabs his friend's arm. Someone whispers something I can't hear and don't need to.

I keep walking. Spine straight. Eyes forward. I wipe the last of the blood off my lips and rub it off on my skirt.

Fuck this place. I’m already exhausted.

And then my magic does something it's never done before.

The power behind my sternum—still faint, still recovering from the fail-safe's grip—shifts. Not outward, not the familiar press-and-surge I've been fighting all morning. The opposite. It pulls. A full reversal of current, like every river inside me suddenly decided to flow upstream. The sensation is so disorienting I stumble mid-step—a hitch in my stride that I cover by adjusting the bag on my shoulder, but my pulse is hammering and something deep in my chest is reaching, straining toward a point twenty feet down the corridor like a compass needle swinging toward north.

I look.

He's the source. He has to be. Because the pull leads straight to him.

He's leaning against the wall about twenty feet ahead. Dark hair falling in his face, arms crossed, one boot propped against the stone behind him. A scar cuts from above his left eyebrow, down through his cheek and upper lip, pulling his mouth into a permanent half-smirk even at rest. His eyes are blue—the deep, shifting blue of a storm system rolling in off the Gulf.

He's watching me the way you watch a fire. Not flinching from it. Not running from it.

Just watching.

Everyone else in this hallway is performing some version of fear—stepping back, whispering, pressing against walls, calculating distance. He's doing none of it. He's just there, in the middle of all that panic, completely still, those storm-blue eyes tracking me down the corridor with something that isn't fear and isn't pity and isn't anything I have a name for.

I'm too wrecked to process him. Too emptied out, too raw, too busy trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do next. Room 204. Magic Theory. Forty minutes, Balcour said, and I don't know how many of those I've burned standing in a stairwell while a man with classified abilities watched me bleed.

The hallway stretches in both directions and I don't know which way to go. I'm standing in the middle of it with a school bag I didn't ask for and a room full of strangers waiting somewhere ahead of me, and my legs have decided this is as far as they're willing to carry me without a better reason to keep moving.

The one who didn't flinch is still watching. Everyone else is still whispering. And I'm standing here like a deer in headlights with a nosebleed, which is exactly the kind of first impression that gets you through a year of vampire academy alive.

Move, Dellaby. Move.

I can't.

Chapter 4

An arm hooks through mine.

Casual, confident, the way a friend links arms with another friend on the way to brunch. Warm skin against mine, the weight of someone leaning in close, and a voice in my ear that's all honeyed Southern drawl and zero hesitation:

"You look like you could use a buddy. I'm your buddy. Don't argue, just walk. Ready? Walking."