Page 14 of The Witch They Crave

I forgot what it does. I forgot that a body can put its arms around another body for no reason but to say you don't have to hold this by yourself, and that it undoes something. That it reaches all the way down into the oldest locked-up part of you and turns a key you didn't know was still in the door. His hand is on the back of my head. His chin is against my hair. The magic has gone quiet and the tears are slowing and I could stay here. That's the thought that surfaces, clear and horrifying through the wreckage: I could stay right here. I could let him hold me and I could stay.

Which is exactly when I understand what's happening.

Who is holding me. And why I can’t feel that way about him.

I go rigid.

Because the warmth pouring through me, the loosening, the safe—it came from him. And I can’t trust him. I thought I could. I thought he wanted to help me, no matter the cost. I thought he’d rather take the pain of my magic ripping through him over pressing the fail-safe and electrocuting me any day. But I was wrong.

He’s just like the others.

He’s an extension of the Council.

I get my hands up between us and I push back.

He lets me go at once. I stumble back until the stone's at my spine and I wrap my arms around myself where his were. All I can do is stand there in the dark, empty-handed, magic spent, face wet, more frightened than the nightmare made me.

"Don't," I say. My voice has nothing left in it. "Don't ever do that again."

His eyes go dull, the light snuffed out. His shoulders fall and for a second I could imagine him hurt–crushed by my words. As if he wanted the warmth of that embrace just as much as I did.

“W–” A vein jumps beneath his eye and he steels himself. “Whatever you want.”

He doesn't mean it. I can tell he doesn't mean it. But he says it, and he steps back over the threshold into the little common area and leaves me alone.

I slide back down the wall to the floor.

I don't take the cot. I don't drink the water. I still can’t do it.

But this time, when I put my head down on my knees, my skin still remembers the shape of being held, warm where his arms were, and I lie to myself that I'm shaking from the cold.

Behind my sternum, in the dark, the voice doesn't say a word.

For once, I'm grateful. I don't think I could stand for one more thing down here to be kind to me tonight.

Chapter 4

My defiance and iron will make it to the fourth day before the walls win.

It’s just math. There's nothing down here but stone and grey light and the trays I finally started eating from. A person can only study the water stains for so many hours before the inside of her own head becomes the most dangerous room in the building. I've catalogued the ceiling. I've counted the empty racks twice and gotten a different number both times.

Mostly I pace. The common room's the only stretch long enough to move in, so I've made it mine—prowling the length of it, poking through the empty shelving, running my thumb along the brass tags of a hundred bottles that aren't there. When I want it to myself I tell Aamon to get out, and he goes, folds back into the little room next to mine without a word. He's never far. The wall between us is one stone thick. But he gives me the room when I ask, and there's a bitter kind of power in that, in being able to move eight feet of vampire around with a look, so I use it, because it's the only lever I've got.

He's out there when I come to the doorway of my room on the fourth morning. Sitting on the edge of the slab, forearms on his knees, a book he isn't reading open in one hand. He looks up.

"The water down here tastes like a penny," I say.

It's not what I meant to say. It's just the first thing out. I feel like a puppy with a tucked tail but how the fuck am I supposed to make regular conversation with him after what happened the other night?

"It's the iron in the stone." He doesn't move. "There's better in the jug they bring down. The tap's for washing."

"Good to know." I lean on the door frame. Pick at the torn edge of the ward with my thumbnail. "Has this place ever actually been used? For someone like me, I mean. Or did they just dust it off special."

"It's been used." A pause. "Not in a long time. You're not the first thing they've kept down here that frightened them—you're just the first one in a while. They didn't build a room like this on a hunch."

"I thought it was a pantry." I nod at the racks. "For the—for you lot."

"It was, first. Back when the academy fed its faculty out of a common store instead of pretending it doesn't." Something dry moves through his voice, there and gone. "Then the world got squeamish, the store moved somewhere cleaner, and this ended up the kind of room you use when you need thick walls and a door that bars from outside. A cellar's a cellar. You fill it with whatever you're ashamed of."