Page 19 of The Witch They Fear

And then we're walking.

My body goes rigid for a full second—every muscle locking, every nerve screaming contact, contact, unknown contact—because the last person who touched me without clinical intent was Marion yesterday and before that the answer is nobody, not in twelve years, and my skin doesn't know what to do with an arm that isn't drawing blood or inserting a needle or pushing me into a chair.

But the girl attached to the arm is already moving, already steering me down the hallway with the breezy certainty of someone who has never once questioned whether she belongs somewhere, and my survival instincts kick in before my panic does. Play along. Move your feet. Don't fall apart in front of everyone.

I move my feet.

The whispers don't stop, but they... shift. Recalibrate. The arm through mine changes the calculation—I'm not a lone, dangerous spectacle anymore. I'm a girl walking with another girl, and the image is just ordinary enough to take the edge off the staring. A few heads turn back to their conversations. Someone unsticks themselves from the wall.

"I'm Nellie," the girl says, still walking, still steering, her voice pitched low enough for just us. "Nellie Marchand. Witch. Third-year. Terrible at wards, great at herbology, and an absolute disaster at anything involving fire, so if you're looking for someone to make you feel better about your skill set, I'm your girl."

I glance sideways at her. She's maybe my height, maybe an inch shorter—brown skin, dark curly hair pulled up in a twist that's half-intentional and half-chaos, wide brown eyes that are doing something complicated. She's smiling. But underneath the smile, those eyes are sharp. Alert. She saw me standing in that hallway and she made a choice, and it wasn't an accident.

"Calypso," I manage. My voice is still wrecked—the raw-gravel aftermath of screaming on a stone floor. I clear my throat. "Calypso Dellaby."

"Calypso." She rolls it around like she's tasting it. "That's a hell of a name. Greek, right? The nymph who trapped Odysseus on an island for seven years?" A grin. "Your parents have range."

Something twinges in my chest. Had. But she doesn't know that, and I don't correct her.

"You've got the look of someone heading to Magic Theory," she continues, glancing at the school bag on my shoulder. "Room 204? That's where I'm headed too. Lucky you—you get the tour."

She's playing it casual—the name compliment, the class guess, the breezy lucky you. But I've spent twelve years reading people with nothing else to do, and casual doesn't hook your arm through a bloody stranger's in front of a hundred witnesses. She knew exactly what she was doing when she walked over. She saw the girl standing frozen in the middle of a hostile hallway and she chose to wade in.

Something in my chest does a thing I don't have a name for. Too hollowed out from the fail-safe for warmth—something quieter than that. Something closer to recognition.

Like a lock clicking open that I didn't know was shut.

"You've got a little—" She gestures at her own cheek. "Here. And here. And kind of... everywhere."

"I'm aware."

"Cool. Just checking." She digs into the pocket of her blazer—she's actually wearing hers, which means she's either more heat-tolerant than I am or more committed to the dress code—and produces a crumpled tissue. Holds it out.

I take it. Wipe the dried blood off my face as we walk, the tissue coming away rust-red. My hands are still trembling but they're doing it less, or maybe I'm just not paying attention to them anymore because Nellie is talking and her arm is through mine and for the first time since I stepped onto this campus, I'm not the loneliest person in the room.

A shadow falls into step behind us. I don't have to look. Corvin or Zeva—doesn't matter which. The constant tail, the ever-present reminder that I'm not just a student walking to class with a friend.

I'm a package under surveillance.

Nellie doesn't so much as glance over her shoulder. She clocks it—I can tell by the way her eyes flick to the side for a half-second—and then she keeps walking, keeps talking, keeps her arm through mine like the vampire enforcer trailing us is about as interesting as the wallpaper.

I decide I like this girl. It's a small, cautious thing—more relief than affection—but I hold onto it anyway.

Room 204 is on the second floor of the academic wing. Nellie pushes the door open and the hum of conversation dies by about forty percent when I walk in. These students are seated, settled, comfortable in their routine. They've heard about me but they haven't seen me up close, and the difference between rumor and reality makes a few of them do double takes.

The enforcer takes position outside the door. Visible through the window to anyone looking.

Which is everyone.

The classroom is tiered—curved rows of desks rising from a central demonstration area, like a small amphitheater. About thirty students, mixed. I can feel the species split without seeing it: the cold, sharp signatures of vampires clustered toward the back and upper rows, the warmer, earthier hum of the handful of witches scattered lower. A few signatures I can't categorize—fae, maybe, or something else. The vampires outnumber everyone else by a comfortable margin.

Shocking.

Nellie steers me toward the middle rows. "Not too high, not too low. The back is vampire royalty territory and the front is where Professor Malloy puts the people she wants to keep an eye on. Middle is Switzerland."

I sit. Put the school bag on the desk. My hands feeling a little restless.

I do what I always do: I scan the room.