Page 18 of The Witch They Crave

That's the part I can't get past. What did I ever do to a man I'd never met that he'd spend weeks, favors, blood, on getting his hooks into me? He doesn't want me dead—he had a hundred cleaner ways for that. He wants something. From me, specifically.

And I have no fucking clue what.

More than that, even worse: he got my file. The sealed one. The one only the council is supposed to touch. Which means somebody handed it to him, or he had it all along, and either way the line between the people keeping me caged and Leopold is getting thinner and thinner.

Who can I trust here?

Behind my sternum, in the dark, the voice stirs for the first time in days. Not words. Just a low pull of attention, coming awake at the exact moment I do, like it heard the question form.

I close my fist around the paper and I don't ask it anything. I've learned that much.

But I don't sleep, either.

Chapter 5

"I have to go up for a few hours."

Aamon says it out of nowhere, from my doorway, on the fourth night since Nellie's visit. There's a tightness in the way he stands that he's keeping out of his voice, and it's enough to make me look up from the wall I've been staring holes in.

"Am I supposed to be sad about it?"

"I have to… feed." Flat. He doesn't dress it up, and I hate that I notice the restraint it takes him not to. "It's been longer than it should be. If I leave it much later I'm no use to you or anyone. Zeva's coming down to sit the post while I'm gone. You won't be alone."

"Lucky me."

"Calypso." He waits until I glance back up at him, and there's something in his face I can’t quite crack. Like maybe he’s afraid to leave my down here alone? "A few hours. That's all."

"Go feed, Aamon. I'm not going anywhere. Kind of the whole point."

He goes. And a little while later the stair brings me a different set of footsteps—heavier, unhurried, bored before they arrive—and Zeva drops onto the slab in the common room with the exact enthusiasm I’ve come to expect from her.

"So," I say, because the silence is worse than she is. "Do you draw the short straw for this, or—"

"I had a whole quiet post up by the watchtower." She doesn't look at me. She tips her head back against the shelving, and shuts her eyes. "Nice and relaxed. Nobody talks to me. Wind, mostly. Then somebody decides I'd be better spent babysitting the doomsday device, and here I am, forty feet underground, and it wants to chat." A beat. "It really was peaceful up there."

"You could go back to imagining the wind. I won't tell."

"Don't talk to me and I might."

So we don't talk. She stares at the wall. I pace the common room a while, run out of common room, and give up. There's nothing to do down here and no one who wants to do it with me, and after long enough of that even my own cot starts to look like an activity.

"I'm going to lie down," I tell her. She doesn't answer, which I take as her preferred kind of goodbye.

I go into my room and stretch out and listen to my own breathing, and somewhere in the long nothing I finally start to drift.

I'm most of the way under when the temperature drops.

Not the even cold of the store. A different cold, sharp and sudden, like a rush of air. My eyes open. And from the common room, no scuffle, no shout, just a short surprised breath and then the soft, boneless sound of a body folding onto stone.

I'm on my feet in a second, my heart pounding in my chest.

What the fuck was that?

"Zeva?"

Nothing. Then a shadow fills my doorway, too big, too still, and the smell reaches me before anything else does—cedar and iron and cold night air off the surface, and under it something that sends a chill up the back of my neck.

"Hey, Hex."