Page 83 of The Witch They Fear

The whimper breaks again.

Smaller. Wetter.

I stand up. I can’t ignore it any longer.

My chair scrapes and I freeze, listening to see if it carries. The whimper doesn't change. Whoever they are, they aren't tracking me. They're occupied.

I leave my books on the carrel. Somebody up here needs help, and there isn't anybody else to do it.

I move down a row of books. My weight forward, my shoulders low. The third floor narrows the further you push from the windows. Stack after stack of denser, darker books, the light fading the deeper I go, the air cooling.

The whimper breaks again. Closer.

Shit. Someone is definitely in danger.

I round the corner of the second-to-last stack and stop.

My brain takes it in piece by piece because it's the only way to take it in.

A vampire. Standing. Six feet from me. His back half-turned, his body angled into the corner where the stacks meet the wall.

A fae girl. Pinned against his chest. Her feet barely touching the floor. Her eyes wide and silver-streaked with tears. Pale green-gold hair coming loose from a braid. Her uniform shirt half-undone at the collar. One of his hands is across her mouth. The other arm is around her waist holding her up. His face is buried in the side of her neck.

She whimpers as he adjusts his bite.

Fuck, he’s feeding on her.

I can see the line of his jaw working. The slow, deliberate, rhythmic draw. The way he is holding her—not violent, exactly. Absolute. She is not allowed to move. She is allowed to feel everything. Her tears are leaking down over the back of his hand and onto his wrist and he hasn't noticed, because he's busy.

Her eyes find mine over his shoulder.

She is whimpering into his palm. Small, wet, broken sounds his hand turns down but cannot turn off. Her eyes are huge—silver-streaked, blown wide, swimming with tears—and they do not let go of mine. They beg. They beg without language, the way a body begs when language has been taken from it. Please. Please. Please.

Fuck.

I move.

There isn't a plan. There's just my body crossing the distance and my hand coming up and the half-second before I touch him where I think don't push, don't push, don't push—

My palm meets the back of his shoulder.

Light.

Not heat. Light. The flare behind my eyes is so bright the inside of my skull goes white, and the sound that comes out of him isn't a vampire sound. Not a hiss. Not a snarl. A scream—the kind a body makes when its nerve endings are being burned in real time. The kind I have only ever heard in one place in my life.

My own voice. Twelve years ago. In a hotel hallway.

He releases the fae girl. His knees buckle. His arm comes up to slap at his shoulder where my palm is, and he yanks free with a wet sound I will think about later, and the smell—god, the smell—is meat on a grill and old paper catching fire, and underneath it something chemical and wrong, the smell of something its species was never designed to survive.

His shoulder is blackening.

Not red. Black. The fabric of his blazer has gone to ash in the shape of my handprint and the skin underneath it is char, cracking open in lines like dry earth, and the air around the wound is shimmering the way air shimmers above hot pavement in July.

That wasn't right.

The thought drifts through with the calm of a thing that has been waiting a long time to be acknowledged. That was not fire. I have never made fire that color. I have never made fire that did THAT.

The fae girl is on the floor. Crawling. Her fingers find a stack and she hauls herself up using the shelf, and her eyes meet mine again—wider this time, terrified in a different direction now—and she is gone. Feet slamming on hardwood. The thud of her shoulder hitting a corner as she ducks past. She does not look back.