Page 54 of The Witch They Fear

I don't look at him. I look for Emric.

He's in the lower-middle of the field, stretching, two staffs already laid out on the ground beside him. When he spots me, his whole expression lifts—eyebrows up, mouth pulling into a grin he doesn't try to hide. He picks up the second staff and holds it out.

"Was hoping you'd show," he says. Easy. No pressure. Just honest.

"Where else would I be?" I take the staff. My grip is different today—the gauze makes my fingers clumsy, and the pressure against the burns sends a pulse of pain up both forearms. I adjust. Hide the wince. Mostly.

Emric's eyes drop to the bandages. He takes them in—the careful wrapping, the way the gauze extends from my wrists to just below my elbows, the slight discoloration where the blisters have bled through—and his face goes carefully neutral. The decision not to ask written across his features in real time.

I appreciate it more than I can say.

We spar. He goes easy—not patronizingly easy, but the adjusted-for-injury easy of a training partner who pays attention.

Not to mention he’s toned down his vamp speed–a mercy I hadn’t fully realized our first sparring session. If he was going full out, I’d be dead.

He targets my upper body instead of my arms, telegraphs his strikes a beat longer than usual, calls out the sequence so I can anticipate instead of react. My burns scream every time I block but I block anyway and neither of us mentions it.

Between drills, in the gap where we'd normally talk about Midus or the weather or class drama, he says:

"Hey. So. This weekend."

I reset my stance. "Yeah?"

"There's this place in the Quarter. Not fancy—more like, aggressively casual. They do beignets the size of your head and the coffee is strong enough to kill a human." He adjusts his grip on his staff. Studies the wood like it's suddenly fascinating. "I was wondering if you'd want to go. With me. Saturday, maybe."

His ears are red. The blush spreads down his neck and disappears under his collar, and I let myself look at him—really look, for once, without cataloguing him as a threat or a suspect or a data point. The dark curls at his temples. The strong jaw, softened by that perpetual almost-smile. The way his shoulders fill out his uniform without trying. He's handsome. Genuinely, disarmingly handsome, and if I'd met him at a coffee shop instead of a vampire academy, he's exactly the kind of guy I'd stare at too long over my cup and then be embarrassed about.

He could rip me apart. Every vampire in this school could. But Emric Vane stands two feet away with red ears and a staff he brought for me and not a single sharp edge showing, and the warmth of it hits me somewhere soft.

Somewhere I forgot I had.

I feel my own cheeks flush. Great. We're both standing here turning colors like a pair of idiots.

"I actually can't this weekend," I say. And I mean the regret. "I'm going to Thibodaux with Nellie. Her mom has some books we need to look at."

"Right. Yeah. Of course." The blush deepens. He nods too many times. "Another time, then. Rain check."

Rain checks. I'm collecting them like currency at this point—Nellie's, Emric's, a growing stack of IOUs for a normal life I keep being too damaged or too busy to live.

"Rain check," I say. And I smile at him, and it's real, and his ears are still red when Midus blows his whistle and the drills resume.

Class winds down the way I’m realizing it always does—Midus barking final instructions, students racking staves, Kage being dispatched to clean up with a word and a gesture that makes my jaw tighten every time.

Emric racks our staffs while I roll my shoulders out. His hair is damp at the temples from the workout and he looks, annoyingly, even better slightly sweaty than he does dry.

"See you next class?" he says, slinging his bag over his shoulder.

"Yeah. I'll be here."

He bumps his fist gently against my upper arm and heads toward the main campus. I watch him go. The easy stride. The way two students fall into step beside him without effort because Emric Vane is the kind of person people just want to be near.

I want to be near him too. That's the problem.

I turn back to the field. Kage is collecting equipment, moving across the dirt with that mechanical compliance, the body obeying while the mind is somewhere else.

What is his deal?

I'm untying my shoes at the edge of the field—killing time, letting the crowd thin—when his shadow falls over me.