Page 77 of The Witch They Crave

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By the time I get back to the mansion the light's gone amber and I'm starving. It’s been a long day. I want a snack and my own bed, in that order.

One of the staff takes my bag at the door with a small nod. The hall is warm with candlelight, the long table way too extravagant for the amount of people actually living in this house looks like a ghost town. I cut toward the kitchen instead, because if I'm going to be a prisoner in a museum I'm at least going to be a fed one.

My mind wanders as I scrounge around and make a sandwich.

Three men. Aamon, who I play a stranger with every morning and come apart with in stolen moments. Kage, who I'm tied to by a mouthful of his blood and am inexplicably drawn to. Leopold, whose house I sleep in, whose bed the whole school thinks I share, whose I am on paper while every real thing I have lives in the dark.

Three secrets. Three lives that can't touch, because the second any two of them cross, someone I love pays for it. So I keep them apart. Separate boxes, separate rules, and I don't let the walls between them slip.

Keep them separate, Dellaby.

It’s like a mantra–I have to remind myself the stakes.

And then there's the thing I can't box at all. Not a person… a question. Every time I want something now—want Aamon, want to be near Kage, want the specific weight of Leopold’s sick attention—I don't know if the wanting is mine or if it bled in through whatever weird thing is happening to me.

After spending half a life being disconnected from my magic and my emotions–now it’s getting hard to distinguish between the two. I might be falling for him–Kage and Aamon. Or I might be feeling them fall, and calling the echo my own heart. I can't tell. That's the part that scares me more than Leopold does—not that someone's controlling me, but that I've lost the ability to tell when I'm controlling myself.

I finish the sandwich and step out of the kitchen, still lost in thought when I almost stumble right into her.

Shandy’s coming from the direction of the east wing, the part of the house I've never been shown, and she stops short a foot from my face. Sleeves pulled down to her knuckles. Eyes not quite focused, a little fuzzy. It takes me a full second to place her here, in this house, so far outside where she belongs that my brain refuses it.

“Shandy?”

She sees me and something crosses her face—surprise, then something scrambling to cover the surprise.

"Cal." Her voice is warm and a half-second too slow. "Hey. What are you—" She stops. Glances back the way she came like she's lost the thread of it. "I was just heading out."

"Shandy." I keep my voice level, keep the alarm off my face. "What–what are you doing here?"

"Nothing. An errand." A smile, vague and soft at the edges. "It's good to see you. You look good. I've gotta—" She's already moving past me toward the front hall, that same careful precision, like her body knows the way even if the rest of her is somewhere else. "It was good to see you."

And she's gone, the front door easing shut behind her, and I'm standing in the candlelit corridor with my chest gone cold and my appetite gone with it.

Long sleeves. Not eating. That vacant look in her eye.

And now: coming down the stairs of the one house on this earth I already know is a museum of quiet, willing donors—Leopold's house, Leopold's staff with their scarred wrists, Leopold with his fireplace eyes and his aristocrat's appetite.

I stand very still and let the pieces fit together

Whatever's happening to Shandy, whoever she’s entangled with–the same thing is happening at this house. Maybe she’s even…

Maybe I sleep down the hall from the vampire at the center of it.

Chapter 18

I'm not supposed to be in the east halls of the Vassard Mansion at night.

It's not a written rule. Nothing here is written. But the mansion has a rhythm—when the staff withdraw, when the lights bank low, which corridors go dark and stay that way.

Tonight I'm three hours past when a good little captive should be asleep, barefoot on cold parquet, because I can't sleep and my room has started to feel like the salt cellar and I'd rather risk the halls than lie there counting my own pulse.

Aamon had to go feed. He beat around the bush before leaving, seemingly uncomfortable telling me about his needs. I held up a hand and told him not to worry about it.

So I’m all alone.

No, says the warm low place behind my sternum, mild as anything. You're not.