Page 26 of The Witch They Fear

My magic lurches toward him. The pulling, the reversal, the full-current switch that nearly sent me stumbling yesterday. I clench my jaw, lock my knees, and ride it out. The pull is strong, disorienting, and aimed directly at him like a damn compass again.

He feels me looking. Has to—because his eyes slide from the assembling students to me with a lazy snap like he was already keeping track of where I was. Those storm-blue eyes land on mine and hold, and the half-smirk that the scar pulls his mouth into deepens by a fraction.

I don't look away. He didn't flinch yesterday. I won't flinch today.

Something passes between us. I don't know what to call it—not recognition, not challenge, something more animal than that. A frequency. Two things that are dangerous occupying the same space and taking each other's measure. My magic is pulling toward him and his gaze is sitting on me like a physical weight and neither of us blinks.

Then he tilts his chin. Up, not down. The universal shorthand for I see you from someone who doesn't waste gestures.

I tilt mine back.

The corner of his mouth does something complicated. Then a whistle cuts the air.

"Line up." Midus. Tall, broad, old-world posture. Vampire—the cold, sharp signature cuts through the fog from here. Silver-grey hair cropped close, a face carved from granite, eyes that sweep the assembled students with the warmth of a tax audit.

"Standard drills today. Pair up. Staves." Then, louder, aimed at the weapons rack: "You. Demonstrate."

The scarred vampire pushes off the rack. Picks up a staff the way you'd pick up something you've held ten thousand times. Walks to the center of the field.

I can't stop watching him. I tell myself it's tactical—studying the way a body moves when it knows how to fight, learning something before I have to do it myself. But tactical doesn't explain why my eyes track the shift of his shoulders as he rolls his neck, or the way his fingers adjust on the staff casually, even though the weapon look like it grew out of his hand.

Midus gestures to a student—a tall vampire, well-built. The vampire steps up. Takes a staff. Sets his stance.

"Standard sequence," Midus calls out. "High block, lateral strike, pivot, reset. Begin."

What follows is surgical.

The scarred vampire executes the sequence like someone speaking a language fluently—high block, lateral strike, pivot, reset. Each movement flows into the next with a kind of brutal grace that makes the fog swirl around him. The vampire student mirrors the sequence from the opposite side, and together they cycle through it—block, strike, pivot, reset—clean, controlled, exactly as called.

"Low sequence," Midus orders. "Sweep, reverse grip, thrust, disengage."

They shift. The new sequence is faster, lower to the ground. The scarred vampire drops his center of gravity and the staff whips through the air in tight arcs. Every movement is precise. Economical. The kind of muscle memory that takes years to build and centuries to refine.

I'm staring. I know I'm staring. My notebook is in my bag and I should be taking mental notes on technique but what I'm actually doing is cataloguing the way he breathes—steady, unhurried, like this is resting heart rate for him.

Like his body is so accustomed to violence that performing it is closer to meditation than exertion.

Then it changes.

Mid-sequence, mid-exchange, his eyes find me across the field. Lock on. And the next strike comes off-script. Instead of the called disengage, he redirects—a sharp, lateral crack that has nothing to do with the drill and everything to do with the fact that I'm watching. The vampire student blocks on instinct, barely. The scarred vampire hits again—harder, faster, abandoning the sequence entirely now. A raw, improvised combination that's less demonstration and more statement.

The vampire student stumbles backward. Another hit. The staff cracks against his guard so hard it echoes off the stone buildings around us. A third strike catches him across the ribs and he goes down—hitting the dirt with a grunt, staff rolling away.

The scarred vampire stands over him. Breathing easy. He looks at me across the field and the expression on his face isn't anger or aggression. It's a question.

See?

I squint at him. Tilt my head. Give him the most eloquent what the hell was that face I can muster from thirty feet away.

His smirk widens. Just a fraction.

Crack.

The sound is sharp and ugly—wood on flesh. Midus is on the field. He's picked up a staff of his own and brought it down across the scarred vampire's back in a single, vicious stroke. A correction. The kind you'd give a dog that snapped at someone.

I jump as the current of magic inside me lurches to a halt.

"Kage." Midus says the name like a leash yanked tight. "What was the called sequence?"