Page 22 of The Witch They Fear

"What's the incantation for basic shielding?" I whisper during a lull.

"Aegis verat. But it's mostly about the intent behind it. The words are training wheels." She demonstrates a hand position—palm out, fingers spread. "Malloy says the incantation gives your magic a shape to follow until your body learns the shape on its own."

Training wheels. I've never even been on the bike.

The boy who nodded—lower-middle rows, kind eyes—is working with a girl whose magic sparks amber every time she channels. He's patient with her, adjusting her hand position, murmuring something I can't hear. He glances up and catches me watching.

Another nod. Smaller this time, almost private.

Leopold—the white-haired latecomer—has gathered a cluster of students around him in the upper rows. He's demonstrating something, hands moving with easy confidence, explaining a technique to people who are watching him with the attentiveness of an audience, not classmates. Someone asks a question and he answers with a grin that makes the whole group laugh. His charisma is running the room.

I catch myself watching him and stop. Whatever I felt when his eyes found mine—that subtle door-closing, that cold thing moving beneath the surface—I can't reconcile it with the boy laughing in the upper rows. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I'm so used to people hating me that I'm manufacturing it where it doesn't exist.

Or maybe he's just very, very good at smiling.

I go back to my textbook. The words swim a little. The fail-safe is a dull ache at the base of my skull. My magic is still muted, still recovering. But I'm sitting in a classroom and nobody is reading my file aloud and nobody is pressing a button and for right now, for this forty minutes, it’s not total hell.

Class ends. Malloy dismisses us with a reminder about next class’s reading and a pointed look at a boy in the back row who apparently hasn't turned in last week's assignment. Nellie materializes beside me while I'm packing my notebook into the bag.

"First one's always the worst," she says, bumping her shoulder against mine. "Give it a week. You'll have the theory down cold and then once Malloy lets you loose on practicals?" She grins. "I have a feeling you're going to make the rest of us look bad."

"I wouldn't bet on that."

"I would. Witch's intuition." She taps her temple. "Never wrong. Frequently ignored."

I glance toward the upper rows where Leopold is taking his time leaving—still talking, still laughing, still orbited by a cluster of people who seem reluctant to let him go. The cold flash I felt earlier has been nagging at me like a splinter.

"What's his deal?" I ask, keeping my voice low. "The latecomer."

Nellie follows my gaze. Something flickers across her face—amusement, maybe, with a thin edge of warning underneath.

"Leopold Vassard. Noble-born. Old blood. Family that has a wing named after them in three different institutions." She slides her textbook into her bag. "He's basically the prince of this classroom. Twice the charm, triple the connections, and a smile that could talk a nun out of her habit."

"Sounds like a lot."

"He is a lot." She zips her bag and slings it over her shoulder. "He's also smart, which makes him dangerous, and everyone loves him, which makes him untouchable. My advice? Don't get pulled into his orbit. It's warm in there but the gravity will crush you."

I think about the door-closing behind his smile. The cold thing moving underneath. "You sound like you speak from experience."

"God, no." She wrinkles her nose. "I'm not a vamp girl. No offense if that's your thing—I know some witches go for the whole brooding-immortal-with-cheekbones situation, and honestly, I get the appeal on paper. But in practice?" She shakes her head. "Too much politics. Too much history. Too many centuries of someone thinking they know better than you because they were alive when the printing press was invented."

A surprised laugh escapes me. Small, hoarse, barely a sound—but real. Nellie grins like she just won something.

"What about you?" I ask. "You said third-year. Herbology. Terrible at wards."

"Terrible is generous. I once tried to ward my dorm room and accidentally sealed my roommate inside for six hours." She says this with zero shame. "I'm from Thibodaux—small town, about an hour southwest. Witch family going back five generations, none of them particularly powerful, all of them extremely opinionated. My mom runs an apothecary out of our garage. My dad teaches high school biology and pretends he doesn't know his wife sells enchanted tea to the neighbors."

The picture she paints is so specific, so ordinary, so achingly normal that something in my chest clenches. Five generations of witches. A mom who makes enchanted tea. A dad who pretends not to notice. A family that's still intact, still together, still making each other crazy around a kitchen table somewhere an hour southwest of here.

"That sounds nice," I say. And I mean it in a way that probably shows more than I want it to.

Nellie looks at me. Those sharp brown eyes soften for a half-second—just a flicker, quickly covered. She heard what I didn't say.

"It's chaotic," she says gently. "But yeah. It's nice."

We walk toward the door together. She bumps my shoulder again—it's becoming a thing, apparently, the Nellie shoulder-bump, and I'm surprised by how much I don't mind it.

"Lunch? The dining hall food is exactly as terrible as you'd expect from a place funded by people who drink blood for a living, but the bread rolls are decent and there's always coffee."