Page 62 of The Witch They Crave

But when the car turns the wrong direction, I twist to the window, my eyes narrowing to watch the buzzing ward that protects Devenir Academy from prying eyes fade into the distance.

My magic shifts under my sternum. So much for behaving.

"This isn't the way back," I say. “Where are we going?”

"One more stop." Leopold doesn't look up from whatever he's reading in the dark. "Won't take long."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agrees. "It isn't."

I face front and watch the city change through the windshield. The Quarter gives way to something older, narrower, the buildings pressed low like they've been leaned on for a couple hundred years. The driver slows in front of a converted warehouse—federal brick gone soft at the edges, windows tall and dark and blind.

"Vassard property," Leopold says, when I look at him. "An old one."

He's out of the car before the driver reaches the door.

We go in through a side entrance, into a dark that smells like dust and disuse and standing water. No lights. Leopold flips an old switch and a cluster of candles along the wall catch at once, throwing enough glow to show me the shape of the place—plaster gone to ruin, a staircase with half its banister missing, a chandelier collapsed on the floor in a heap of crystal and cobweb. Nobody has lived here in a long time. Nobody's kept it. Whatever this building is to him, it isn't a Vassard property the way the mansion is. This one's feels like a secret.

"Does anyone know we're here?" I ask. Other than his driver, I think we’re here alone.

"No." He says it easily, like it hadn't occurred to him to lie. "Watch the third stair. It's rotted through."

A narrow staircase drops away into the dark at the back of the hall. He takes it without slowing. I follow, because the alternative is standing alone in a dead building and that gives me the chills.

Below street level the air changes—cool, dry, carrying the smell of stone and something underneath it that presses against my sinuses before I've placed it. Old magic. My magic goes alert, rattling inside me like the engine is starting up.

"Where are we?" I ask again.

Leopold keeps walking. "Somewhere I don’t usually take guests."

We keep walking and at the end of the passage: a door.

It's a slab of stone banded in iron, and there's no handle on it. No lock, no seam, nothing to grip. I've seen warded doors before—the school is full of them, blue lines humming just under the surface where you can catch them at the right angle. This isn't like that. Whatever's holding this door shut is old enough that it's stopped bothering to announce itself.

It just sits there, quiet, part of the stone.

I get within six feet and my magic pulls sideways, hard, like a horse balking at a jump. I suck in a breath.

Leopold stops beside me.

"The family that owned this house fell in 1943," he says. "The family sealed this before they went. Witchwork—the kind that can only be undone from inside, or by the magic that placed it. My telekinesis can't touch it. I've had two practitioners here in the last ten years. Neither made it past the threshold warmth."

I look at the door wondering what the hell this has to do with me.

"Open it for me, Calypso."

There it is. The whole night—the dress, the dinner, the hand at the small of my back—folding shut around one sentence like it was always the plan.

I laugh. I can't help it. "You're joking."

He isn't. His face makes that very clear.

"Leopold, you just told me two trained practitioners couldn't get near this thing. I've had my magic back for two months. I burned down a chapel by accident. You are wildly overestimating what I can do here." I look at the door, then back at him. "Whatever you think I am, I'm going to disappoint you."

"I don't think so."

"You don't think so?" I fold my arms. "That's what this is built on? A hunch?"