Page 75 of The Witch They Crave

"You're definitely not making it up."

"I keep hoping I am." She wraps both hands around her cup, my nervous habit borrowed onto her fingers. "Every time I try to actually ask, she goes smooth on me. You know Shandy—worst liar alive, you can always feel it coming off her. Now there's nothing. Flat. A wall." A beat. "That's the part that scares me. If it's what we think it is, she's not going to walk up and tell us. People in those arrangements don't. They protect the thing that's hurting them."

I think of Shandy at our slumber party, sprawled across the whole mattress like she owned it, taking up exactly as much room as she pleased. Loud. Warm. The furthest thing from a wall.

∞∞∞

I find Kage in the equipment shed off the combat yard, and by "find" I mean he's arranged himself to be found—leaning against the weapons rack with his arms crossed and one boot kicked back against the wall, like he's holding the building up, like he knew I was coming.

"There she is," he says. "My favorite disaster."

"Do you sleep in here?"

"Only when the company's good." His eyes do a slow inventory of me, head to boots, and it's not the once-over other people give me—the is she going to detonate scan. It's the other kind. The kind that makes my skin prickle and my sentences get short. "You've been avoiding me, Hex."

"I've been busy being kept."

The grin flickers. There and gone. We haven't talked—not really, not since the last time we were in here getting cozy, not since my finger opened on the stone and the smell of my blood turned him into something I didn't recognize. He shoved me into a wall hard enough to bruise and told me to go in a voice that came up out of three hundred years. I ran and the distance between us has stayed just that…

But I don’t like it.

Something about Kage keeps me coming back. I feel like I know nothing about him and at the same time, like we’re the same. He looks at me like… like he might die if he isn’t near me. For as messed up as it might be–I enjoy it.

"About the other day," I start.

"Don't." It's fast. The lazy's gone out of it.

"Kage—"

"I mean it, Hex. Leave it." He turns half away, jaw set. He’s tuning me out, trying to change the subject.

But I've been turning this over for days, and I'm not letting it go with a leave it.

"I've seen vampires around blood," I say. "The whole school runs on it. Someone nicks themselves in combat drills twice a week and nobody so much as looks up. You didn't just look up. You looked like something out of a nightmare." I keep my voice level, careful, the way you'd approach a spooked animal. "That's not normal. That's not how the others are. So either there's something wrong with you specifically, or there's something about—"

"Don't say you."

"—about my blood. Which is it?"

He's quiet long enough that I think he won't answer. Then, to the middle of the shed, not to me:

"Both."

The jaw works.

"You cut your hand and I nearly lost it. You saw it." He pushes off the rack, restless. "Most of them, they've fed enough that they've got calluses on the want. It's routine. A cut hand's a Tuesday." A beat. "I don't have calluses. Three hundred years, Hex. I've never fed from a living person."

I go still. "Wait, what?"

"Not once. Not a donor, not a willing anybody. Never."

"Oh." I turn that over. "Is that... not normal? I kind of assumed most of you just drank from bags. Isn't that the whole point of the dispensary?"

He looks at me then, and something almost like a laugh crosses his face. "God, you're new, aren't you?"

"I've been a vampire's problem for one semester. Cut me some slack."

"The bags keep us fed. They don't really satisfy anything." He shakes his head. "Difference between a nutrient shake and a meal you actually wanted. Every vampire you've met drinks bags to get by and drinks from a vein when they can. Donors, arrangements, someone willing at a party." A beat. "I don't do the vein part. Ever."