Page 82 of The Witch They Fear

The bell rings. Class is over.

Chapter 15

The third floor of the library, I’ve just discovered, is the only place on this campus I can pretend nobody is watching me.

I scratch out the sentence I just wrote in my notebook. Try it again. Scratch that one out too. The pen is starting to tear the page.

I sit back. Roll my shoulder. Drink the rest of my coffee, which has been cold for an hour.

The amber light is doing the long slow slide across the desk that means it is almost five and the lobby downstairs is starting to empty toward the dining hall. Nobody comes up to the third floor at this hour. Nobody comes up to the third floor at any hour, really, which is the entire reason I am up here. The first two floors are for the partner-pairs and the first-years and the desperate energy of people pretending they understand directed channeling theory. The third is for whoever is willing to climb the stairs. Dust. Old paper. The soft, sleepy hum of wards that have been settling into the walls for a century.

Lazy magic. The closest thing to privacy I have had in twelve years.

I tap the pen against my teeth and look at the stack of books I am supposed to be reading.

It's Professor Malloy's recommended list—containment cases, biographies of witches who lost their magic, a handful of essays on the theoretical limits of channeling. The midterm prompt: Containment versus Rehabilitation. I know which side I am supposed to argue. I know which side argued for me.

I have been very, very productive.

I have also been very, very still.

Four days of being a model prisoner. I draw the counter-rune every night before bed, light the candle, hold my palm over the flame until the blue catches. I show up to training every other morning at seven sharp, sit on Aamon's couch, channel through the resonance stone, and listen to him call me Miss Dellaby in the voice of a man reading off a tax form. Magic Theory. Combat. Lunch with Nellie. Reading. Sleep. Repeat. I have performed the tidy, compliant rhythm of an academy student so thoroughly that even I almost believe it.

The Voice has not come back since Malloy's classroom.

I told myself I wouldn't reach. Told myself that thinking Emric? into the silence one more time would be the witch-girl-with-no-friends version of leaving someone on read all weekend and double-texting on Monday. I'm not doing it. If it's him, he can find me. If it isn't, the not-knowing is its own kind of company.

I haven't talked to Emric in person either. He hasn't brought up the beignets again, and I have not, somehow, mustered the spine to bring them up myself. Which is the part that is news. The blush on his ears the last time I waved at him in Malloy's class did something to my chest I am not equipped to interrogate, and the result is that I am now apparently the kind of woman who blushes back and forgets her own name. I have been a lot of things in my life. Shy has not been one of them.

Down. Not out. Into the riverbed.

I close the book in front of me—a 1934 monograph about a witch in Belgium who cracked a cathedral wide open during her own wedding and spent the next forty years in chemically-induced silence—and rub my eyes. The amber on my desk has gone gold-orange.

Zeva is in the lobby. At least that’s where I told her to wait for me, parked against a wall with a paperback she isn't really reading.

The third floor is mine. I will not have it be sullied by enforcers and tails.

I open the next book. Studies in Magical Catastrophe: A Historical Survey. The cover is split along the spine and it smells like every neglected book I have ever loved. I flip to the chapter on cascade events—the technical name for what happened to me at the hotel, the technical name for what happens when a witch's magic and her emotional state hit critical pressure at the same time. Eleven case studies. Eleven women's lives reduced to clinical paragraphs and footnoted body counts.

I am three sentences in when I hear it.

A sound. Wrong.

Not the creak of an old building settling. Not a chair. Something muffled and scared, high in the throat, choked off too fast.

A whimper.

I lift my head. The library breathes around me. Dust motes drifting through the gold light. The hum of the wards. The distant susurrus of a building full of stone and old paper. And underneath it, behind it, two stacks down and somewhere to my right—

There. Again.

Quieter. Like someone is trying very hard not to make a sound, and failing.

And again. Like an almost scream that got cut off too soon.

My pulse goes still in my throat.

Don't be dumb Dellaby, I tell myself, the thought lands fully formed. Don't go. Don't be the witch who steps into something she can't fix. Whatever it is, it's bigger than you. You don't even know how to shield. You just put down a book about a woman who blew up a cathedral on her wedding day. Go downstairs. Get Zeva. Let the people with weapons handle it.