Page 91 of The Witch They Fear

The truth would have made mine and Kage’s fucked up relationship everyone's. I lied because it is mine.

This weird, uncomfortable and electric connection between us that I can’t deny.

But really, this was a lesson. And I’m paying attention.

Because I have been at this academy for three weeks and I had stopped—somewhere along the way I had stopped—thinking of vampires the way I should have been thinking of them.

I started thinking of Aamon as my trainer, as my ally. Of Kage as the rough one, the bully. Of Leopold as the threat I'm still tracking and trying to figure out. And perhaps worst of all, Emric as a possible friend and even date, and Nellie's third-year vampire partners as classmates, and the whole ambient mass of fanged students in the dining hall as just students. I started using their names. I started saying hi. I started—somewhere—letting my body believe that the rules of this place were the rules they had told me they were.

These are not my classmates. These are predators who eat. Some of them have manners. Some of them have history. Some of them have turned out to be men I cannot stop watching in low light. None of them—none of them—stop being what they are because I want them to.

I almost forgot.

I almost let myself forget.

I close my eyes.

I won’t forget that again.

Chapter 16

Three days out of the infirmary and I have figured out exactly two things.

One: my shoulder is healing faster than I expected, which is a witch's body for you—faster than a human's, slower than a vampire's. I have been in this sling long enough to fantasize about taking it off and not long enough to do anything about it.

Two: the bandage on my neck itches.

I am in the kitchen scratching around the edge of the gauze with the tip of my left pinky—because the nurse said no scratching and I am compromising—when the knocking starts.

Not knocking. Pounding.

I freeze. The pounding at the door doesn't stop. Whoever is out there is going to come through the wood if I don't open the door, and the only people authorized to be at my door right now are my enforcers, my training supervisor, and one headmistress who I have not seen since the infirmary and who would not pound. So that leaves my enforcers, who do not pound, and Aamon, who does not pound, and—

"Calypso Dellaby!"

—Nellie.

I make it to the door faster than I have moved in three days. By the time I get the latch turned she has hit it twice more, hard enough to rattle the frame.

She is on my porch in her grey academy uniform with her arms crossed and her brown curls pulled up in a knot that suggests she did it angrily, and the moment she sees me she grabs my one good arm and yanks me into a hug.

"You absolute maniac."

"Nellie—"

"You took too damn long to open the door."

"I sent you a message twenty minutes ago. I told you I was getting dressed."

"Twenty minutes is enough time for a person to lose consciousness if they were going to lose consciousness, Calypso. That is basic—"

"That is not basic anything—"

"It is now. New rule." She pulls back and holds me at arm's length and her dark eyes do a sweep—the sling, the bandage, the bruise above my eyebrow that has gone the color of a bad sunset. Her mouth does something complicated. "I thought you'd passed out."

"Nellie."

"I thought you'd passed out and I was going to find you face down on the floor, Calypso, and I was going to have to tell my mother that you died on my watch, do you understand? Do you have a conception?"