Page 39 of The Witch They Fear

"Excellent question, Miss Dellaby. The honest answer is: we don't fully understand. Historical accounts describe a blurring of magical boundaries between the bonded parties. Shared sensations. Residual power traces appearing in the non-originating party. In extreme cases—" She pauses. Chooses her words the way Aamon chooses his. "In extreme cases, the debt creates something resembling a bond. Involuntary. Persistent. Difficult to sever."

The room is quiet. I write it down. Blurring of boundaries. Shared sensations. Involuntary bond.

"Which is precisely why the council monitors partnership arrangements," Malloy adds. "And why any sustained magical contact between species should be undertaken with full awareness of the accumulative effects."

She moves on—into the formal mechanics of how partnerships are registered, the legal protections (minimal), the oversight framework (largely performative). I'm still stuck three paragraphs back.

Repeated, intensive magical exchange between the same two individuals creates a compounding debt.

Every other day. For twelve months. His hands on mine unless I can keep my magic under control on my own.

I have to keep practicing.

Nellie glances at my notebook. Reads what I've written. Her eyebrows lift. She scribbles something in the margin of her own notes and tilts it toward me.

Is this about ur training sessions??

I angle my notebook away from her. She grins.

The lecture winds down. Malloy assigns reading—chapters twelve and thirteen, a short essay on the ethical implications of cross-species magical debt, due next week. Emric packs up slowly and gives me a smile and nod on his way past. I watch him go and notice, in my peripheral vision, that Leopold hasn't moved from his seat in the upper rows. He's leaning back, one arm draped over the chair beside him, watching the room empty.

I'm still writing—finishing the last of my notes on magical debt, the pen moving faster than my thoughts—when I notice Nellie hasn't packed up. She's sitting beside me, bag on the desk, chewing her lip in a way I'm learning means she's holding something back.

"Okay," I say, capping my pen. "You've been making that face since you sat down. What is it?"

She exhales. Glances around—Malloy is erasing the board, a few students are still filtering through the door. She drops her voice.

"Nothing. That's the problem." She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. "I went through the entire second level of the restricted section searching for a record of that rune. Historical inscription practices, pre-council ward systems, obsolete notation guides—the kind of stuff that hasn't been checked out since before I was born, based on the dust situation. Yuck." She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. "Whatever that symbol is, it's not in any book this academy owns."

I pull the rubbing from my skirt pocket. Unfold it on the desk between us. The angular lines stare up at me, grey graphite on white paper, still humming faintly against my fingertips.

"So what does that mean?"

"It means one of two things." Nellie drops her voice even though the room is nearly empty. "Either it's dark magic—forbidden stuff that was purged from the collection when the council standardized ward practices three hundred years ago. Or it's older than the council's records entirely. Pre-standardization. The kind of magic that existed before anyone was writing things down in neat categories."

"Both options sound bad."

"Both options are bad." She looks at the rubbing. Then at me. "I want to go visit my mom. She's got collections that make the restricted section look like a bookshelf at a dentist's office. If anyone can identify this, it's her."

I fold the rubbing back up. Slip it into my pocket. The hum settles against my thigh.

"I don't want this getting out," I say, my voice low. "If the administration finds out someone's carving unknown runes into my door, it becomes a situation. Reports. Investigations. Balcour writing it up in his portfolio and adding it to my file like it's somehow my fault. I want to know who did this before anyone official gets involved."

"Just my mom. Nobody else. I promise." She pauses. Chews her lip. Then: "Actually—do you want to come with me? To Thibodaux. See the books yourself. My mom would love to meet you, and she's way better at explaining this stuff than I am at relaying it."

The offer catches me off guard.

Off campus. An hour away. Someone's home.

We've known each other for, what? Like two days? Two. And this girl is inviting me to her mother's house like it's nothing—like bringing home a stray witch with a body count and armed escorts is a perfectly reasonable plan. Who does that? Who looks at someone like me and thinks yes, I want this person in my kitchen, meeting my family, touching my mother's books?

Nellie Marchand, apparently.

Something twists in my chest—not pain, not quite. Envy, maybe. The sharp, bittersweet kind that comes from watching someone be exactly the person you might have been if the world had let you. Open. Generous. The kind of person who throws doors wide instead of checking what's behind them first. I used to be a kid who trusted people. I think. The memory is so old and so buried under facility sedation that I can't be sure anymore, but I think I was.

Before the hotel. Before everything.

Nellie just is that. Effortlessly. And I want to resent her for it but I can't, because she's aiming all that reckless generosity directly at me and I'm too starved for it to push it away.