Page 43 of The Witch They Crave

My jaw clenches and my body locks up.

What he means is: go to their homes at night, knock on their doors, and use whatever combination of intimidation and compulsion it takes to get them back into a chair with a needle in their arm. And if they won't come willingly—if they've decided that the money isn't worth the bruises, or the dizziness, or the look in their children's eyes when a vampire shows up at the door—then remind them that the contract they signed has enforcement clauses, and the enforcement clause is me.

I am the enforcement clause.

Three hundred years of this. Blood collections are the easy nights. The siring bond doesn't care what the job is—whoever holds it can invoke me for anything, and the academy has held it for three centuries. I've collected blood. I've broken bones. I've stood in rooms while people begged and done what I was told to do anyway. I've killed for them. Twice that I remember clearly, more that I've buried deep enough that the details are gone but the weight isn't. Every one of those nights lives in my hands like a stain I can feel but can't see, and three hundred years of being made to do it has never once made the next time easier.

I don't feed from humans. That's my line. The one thing I chose. And then they send me to drag humans into rooms where other vampires feed from them, and the distinction I draw between those two things is the thinnest, most pathetic wall I've ever built.

"Three addresses," Midus repeats. "Start with the woman in Kenner. She's the flight risk."

He pulls a folded paper from the clipboard and holds it out. Doesn't extend his arm—makes me cross the room to take it. A small thing that proves his dominance and superiority over me.

I take it.

"And Kage?" He bites the apple again. Chews. Swallows. "I heard about the tribunal. Your little witch got herself a new owner." His eyes come to mine for the first time—flat, amused, the way you'd look at a dog that keeps trying to jump a fence. "Shame. I know you liked that one. But Leopold's got deep pockets and you've got—" He gestures at me with the apple core. All of me. The scars, the clothes, the three centuries of nothing. "Well."

My hands stay at my sides. My jaw stays closed.

"Go," he says. "Fetch."

I leave.

The hallway is long and lit and empty. I stop three doors down and put my back against the wall and close my eyes.

Fetch.

Three hundred years. Three hundred years of fetch and heel and back on the rack and every other leash-snap a man like Midus has in his vocabulary. Three hundred years of swallowing it because the alternative is dying—the bond doesn't bluff. Fight it hard enough, long enough, and it kills you. Not metaphorically. The blood stops. The heart quits. I watched it happen once, to another turned vampire, decades before I ended up here. She fought a compulsion for eleven seconds. Eleven. Her body shut down like someone pulled a plug, and she was dead before she hit the floor.

So I swallow it. Every fucking time. I let a man who couldn't beat me in a fair fight on the best day of his life talk to me like an animal, and I walk away, and the anger sits in my chest like a coal that never goes out. It's about the only thing I feel anymore—the anger. A low, constant burn that I've carried so long it's less an emotion and more an organ. Anger and numbness, numbness and anger, the two modes I toggle between like channels on a dead TV.

Until her.

Calypso broke the dial. She walked onto this campus and something in me that I thought was scar tissue turned out to be a nerve, and now I feel things I don't have names for and can't afford. The smell of her blood still in my head. Her wrists in the tribunal, the puncture wounds weeping through her sleeves. It reached me across a room of two hundred people and my fangs dropped before I could stop them and nobody saw but I felt it—the want, bone-deep, the kind of hunger that has nothing to do with feeding and everything to do with her.

I open my eyes. Unfold the paper in my fist. Three names. Three addresses. One has a note in Midus's handwriting: kids in the house—be clean.

“Jesus,” I mumble.

I refold it. Put it in my pocket.

I go do my job.

Calypso's in Leopold's house right now. First night of her new jail cell with a brand new tormenter.

If I were free.

I said that to her once. In the shed. Meant it then. Mean it now. But the sentence starts with if, and I still haven’t found the way to break my sire bond.

I get in the car. Start the engine.

Somewhere behind the campus lights, past the north lawn and the oaks and the iron gate of a white stone house, Calypso is learning the shape of her new cage.

I'm driving toward mine.

Chapter 12

I wake up in a bed I could get lost in, and for one blurred second I forget where I am.