Page 47 of The Witch They Crave

I keep walking. That's the trick—you keep your feet moving and your eyes on a fixed point past everyone's heads and you don't let the quiet turn you to stone in the doorway. Chin level, shoulders down, hands open and loose at my sides so nobody sees them shake.

My magic wants out though. I feel it push up under my sternum, hot, reaching for the fear, and I hold it—breathe in, count, breathe out—and take another step.

A vamp in the back says something. Somebody else laughs and swallows it.

Nellie's down on the left, already half out of her chair, that look on her face that means she's about to make my problem the whole room's problem and go down swinging for the privilege. I catch her eye. Shake my head. Don't. She sits, but she doesn’t look happy about it.

She jerks her chin at the saved seat next to her. Get over here.

I don't make it three steps.

Leopold's hand settles at the small of my back.

I flinch.

He walked beside me the whole walk over, close, but I didn't think he'd touch me in front of the room. His palm spreads warm and certain against my spine, and then he steers—not a grip, not a push, just a pressure I can't argue with, turning me off my path to Nellie and toward the back rows. Old-blood territory. His territory.

The whole room watches him do it.

Watches House Vassard walk the murderer to the best seat in the room with his hand on her back like I truly belong to him. That's the message after all. He doesn't need a word for it. Not the council's. Not yours to whisper about. Mine. Anyone who wants to throw an apple core at me now can explain themselves to him first, and nobody in this room is that brave.

He pulls out the chair. Two fingers, courtly, like a waiter. Waits.

"There," he says, at my ear, warm as the breakfast he watched me eat. "Now they know."

I sit. The only other option is a scene, and a scene is a spark, and I'm not handing him one in front of thirty witnesses. I fold my hands. I face front. I stare at a board I can't read a word of.

Below us, the whispering starts back up—lower now, busier, retooled.

Same room. Same whispers. New subject.

Wonderful.

Chapter 13

Professor Malloy clears her throat and the room settles.

The attention doesn’t fully shift off of me. The looks just change—go from overt to peripheral, thirty people deciding staring is impolite but not actually stopping. I can feel the eyes on me like hands on the back of my neck.

Focus. I’m back in class and none of the noise matters.

I’m only here to learn to control my powers.

I open my notebook and write the date.

"House patronage." Malloy doesn't look up from the demonstration floor as she pulls up the projected diagram—family crests fanning out around a single central figure, arrows going in, arrows going out. "Who can define it for me? Someone who did the reading."

Silence. It grows until it fills the room and Professor Malloy’s face drops a centimeter.

"A formal arrangement," a vampire in the third row offers finally, "between a noble house and a magic practitioner. The house provides resources and protection. The practitioner provides—" A pause. "Services."

"Services." Malloy says it back to him without inflection. "Yes. That's the polished version." She picks up a marker. "Let's start with the language, since the language is doing a great deal of work in this unit. What did the founding documents actually call these practitioners?"

Nothing.

"Hearth witches," she says, and writes it on the board. "The term appears in house charters as early as the fourteenth century. It suggests—what? Someone tell me what that term is designed to make you feel."

"Domestic," someone says. "Safe."