Page 2 of The Witch They Crave

Aamon.

Aamon did this to me.

"Don't." My voice comes out flat and dead. Good. I want it flat. I want him to hear the nothing left inside me. "Don't touch me."

"Calypso—"

"You were the one who always searched for another way." It scrapes out of me. "You always tried to find another way to help me. That was the whole—" My throat closes and I force it back open. "Every time. Every single time I spiraled, you came around the table and you took it out of me with your hands, and you looked at me like I wasn't a—" The word won't come. I make it come. "Like I wasn't a weapon you had to switch off. And then you switched me off instead."

His face does something terrible. A crack running the length of it.

"There was a second wave." His voice is barely holding. "You were going to—"

I close my eyes and tune him out. I don't have any energy to spend on whatever he’s about to say, and even if I did, I can see it wouldn't land—he's already built the defense, already decided this was a thing that had to be done and he was the one who had to do it. There's no sentence I could say that gets in past all that.

So I try to get up instead.

I press my palm flat to the cold stone and push, and my body barely responds. Everything below my sternum has been hollowed out. My arm shakes, my elbow buckles, and a sound comes out of me before I can stop it—thin, cracked, a whimper I'd never let anyone hear if I had anything left to hold it back with. The pain of it whites out the edges of the room.

"Calypso—" He moves fast, that hand coming toward me, reaching to take my weight, to help, as if it’s the most natural thing he could do.

I flinch away from it.

Hard. My whole ruined body throwing itself sideways out of his reach, away from the hand, away from him, a full-body no that costs me the last of what I have. My shoulder hits the stone. I don't care. I would rather lie in the glass than let those fingers close around my arm.

He goes still. Whatever's on his face, I don't look at it. I can't. I've spent a month learning the geography of this man and I can’t afford a single inch of it right now.

"Nellie." My voice cracks on her name. "Get me out of here."

She's under my arm before I finish saying it. "Yeah. Yeah, come on. Up. I've got you."

I get one leg under me and the room tips hard to the left. Everything below my sternum has been hollowed out—the fail-safe didn't just suppress the magic, it ate it, and the place behind my ribs where the sun usually sits is a cold scraped socket. My knees have opinions about holding weight and none of them are yes. Nellie takes more of me than she can carry and does it anyway, her arm a bar across my back, her whole small body a wall I lean into.

"Don't look," she says into my ear, steering me toward the doors, through the ruin. "Eyes on me. Just walk."

I look anyway. I can't not.

The crowd parts for us. Two hundred beautiful monsters in their funeral finery, stepping back, giving us a wide clean lane to the doors like I'm still lit, still going off, like the ash on my shoes and dress might jump to them. Some of them have their masks still on—bone-white half-faces, gilded skulls—and I can't tell the horror on the bare faces from the theater on the covered ones. A fae girl is crying into someone's shoulder. An old woman is crossing herself.

And at the far end of the hall, up on the dais, one bright thing in all that black.

Leopold.

He hasn't moved. The file is still open at his feet where he dropped it, pages fanned across the stone, my whole ruined history spilling out under the candlelight for anyone to read. His white coat is streaked grey with the fallout. His hands hang at his sides, empty for once, not tapping, not folded, just open. And his face—

His face isn't wearing his usual smug, taunting smile.

I catch it for half a second across the length of the wrecked hall, and it isn't triumph and it isn't the warm public mask and it isn't even the cold thing I've watched move underneath it for a month. It’s an expression I never thought a selfish, arrogant vamp like Leopold would be capable of. As if he just saw, for the first time, the realtime ruins of the damage he set in motion.

Then Nellie hauls me through the doors and the night takes us and I don't have to look at him anymore.

The air outside is wet and warm and smells like crushed marigold and smoke and, under it, the sweet-rot of a party thrown for the dead. The blue lanterns along the path still burn their cold false blue. The tombs in the old cemetery still have their little candles lit, a whole glowing city of the gone, and I have just added to the population and I can’t breathe past it—

A rush of air hits the back of my neck.

One second Nellie is under my arm and the path is empty ahead of us. The next, there's a body in front of me, dense and rough and radiating that blunt kinetic wrongness that my own magic keeps trying to tune toward, and a voice that lands like a fist.

"I've got her."