Page 84 of The Witch They Fear

I don't blame her.

"Wait—" My voice comes out thin. "Wait—"

I take a step after her.

The vampire's hand closes on my wrist.

Char is wisping off his shoulder. The skin of his face is going grey at the edges where the smoke is licking past it. His eyes are red and blown wide and he is looking at me with the focused attention of a thing that has just been hurt and would like to hurt back.

I know him.

Upper rows of Magic Theory. The bored kind of beautiful that noble vampires wear like uniform. He sits near Leopold's orbit but not in it. I never caught his name. I caught his sneer once, second day, when I walked in late and he tracked me to my seat like he was evaluating livestock.

Has he been doing this the entire time? Bringing victims into the library to hurt? Eat?

"You little cunt," he says.

He yanks.

My feet leave the ground for half a second. My shoulder takes my whole body weight against the socket, and I hear it before I feel it—a wet, internal pop, the sound a joint makes when something inside it gives up. The pain is white. White through my whole body, white at the back of my eyes, white in the hollow of my jaw. I open my mouth to scream and what comes out is air.

He lifts me by the wrist and my body dangles painfully.

"You think you get to touch me?" His voice is wrecked and there is blood still dripping from his lips, teeth, tongue. "You think they let you in here so you could put your witch hands on a Vasreaux?"

He throws me.

It isn't a throw, exactly. It's a shove sideways, hard, and my back slams into the end-cap of the stack and my head connects with the wood and my skull rings like a struck bell. The impact knocks the wind from my lungs. The world shears. I taste copper. I taste my own pulse. Something warm runs into my eyebrow and then into my eye and I blink and the blink comes back red.

His hand is over my mouth before I can scream.

His other hand wraps around my neck—careful, almost—and he leans in and I see his teeth and I understand, in the half-second before he closes the gap, that I have never properly understood what a vampire can do until this moment.

He is hungry. My magic was somehow able to hurt him. He is going to take that hurt out on me, and he is going to do it as cruelly as possible.

His fangs go in.

Sharp. Deep. Wrong. Then he starts to draw, and the draw is worse. He pulls. I feel my blood leaving me in the rhythm of his throat working against my skin. My legs are going useless. My free hand pounds at his shoulder and the pounding is weaker every time. My screams smother in his palm. He doesn't stop. He has done this before. He is good at it.

And it hurts. It hurts too fucking much for anything to make sense.

My magic detonates inside me and finds nowhere to go.

His hand on my mouth seals me. His teeth in my neck seal me. The wall behind me seals me. Every direction my power lashes out it slams into a closed door—into the meat of the man feeding on me, into the stone of the wall, into the architecture of my own body which is not built to be a furnace this many degrees hotter than the room. I feel the magic curl back. I feel it spiral. I feel the awful curve of pressure-building-toward-release that has only ever ended one way, and I think, with terrible clarity:

I'm going to bring the library down.

I'm going to do it again.

Lila.

A blur.

I don't see it. My vision is going dim at the edges. There is just—motion. Air. Something arrives in the space behind the vampire's body fast enough that the displacement actually pulls at my hair, and his fangs yank out of my neck. Not gently. Torn. There is a sound like a wet branch breaking and the suction-seal on my throat ruptures and I am sliding down the wall because the thing holding me up is no longer there.

I hit the floor in pieces. Hip first. Then elbow. Then my head a second time, less hard. The wood is cool against my cheek. I can’t catch my breath.

Above me, somewhere very far away, behind a wall of static and the roaring in my ears, there is a sound I will never un-hear.