Page 94 of The Witch They Fear

"It's cider, Cal."

"Nellie. I just got out of the infirmary. My magic is one bad thought away from punching a hole in the ground. I'm not—"

"Hold it. Don't drink it. Be a person who is holding a glass. For me."

I take the glass to make it look like I’m indulging in the reverie. I don’t drink it.

We walk a slow loop of the perimeter.

I see things I do not want to see–or rather, really didn’t expect to see.

Two vampires in evening blacks at the edge of the firelight, a witch between them, her head tipped back against the shoulder of the one feeding from her, her eyes half-shut and her mouth open in something that is definitely not pain. Her hand is wound into the lapel of his jacket. The other vampire is watching. Waiting. Her free hand reaches for him, blind, and he steps in.

I stop walking.

Nellie sees what I am looking at and her face goes gentle.

"Cal."

"They're—"

"Yeah."

"In public."

"Mm." She steers me a step further, away from a clutch of older vampires nearby. "That is the point. If it's in public, it's consensual. That's the rule. Anybody feeding privately, behind closed doors, with somebody they're not in a partnership with—that's the gray area. People doing it where everybody can see them are doing it because they want everybody to see them."

"Why would anybody—"

"Status. Pleasure. Devotion. All three." She glances at me, careful. "And the venom. The venom is the high. People do this for what it feels like. They line up for it."

"For—"

"For what it feels like. There are seventh-years who have been feeding the same vamps since they were freshmen, and they will tell you it's the best thing in their lives. Not all of them are wrong about it, exactly. But."

She lets the but hang.

"But," I say.

"But you can get into something at sixteen and not know how to get out of it at twenty-two, and you can’t always tell from outside which of those people is which. Some of them are happy. Some of them stopped being able to tell."

I touch the bandage at my neck.

I do it without deciding to. My fingers find the gauze and stop there. Three days ago a vamp put his teeth into me and tore. It hurt like hell and there certainly wasn’t any pleasure or devotion in the act. Honestly, it was traumatizing and not something I ever want to repeat.

The witch by the fire turns her face into the second vampire's neck.

"Never me," I say, very quietly. "Never."

"I know, Cal."

We keep walking. The music changes.

A bell—single, clean, struck once—and the strings cut. The crowd quiets and everyone’s attention narrows to the man who has stepped into the light.

Leopold.

He is wearing all white. Not cream—white, the kind that catches firelight and throws it back, a high-collared coat and a fitted vest and a white shirt at the throat with no tie, his pale hair pushed back from his forehead and his hands in his pockets. He looks like a candle. The fire is behind him and around him and his face is in shadow except for one firelit line down his cheekbone, and the entire quad has stopped speaking.