Page 81 of The Witch They Crave

I pull my bag up onto the bench and dig for my notebook, changing lanes as smoothly as I can. "Okay, please tell me you did the Advanced Theory reading, because I got about four pages into the ley-line cartography chapter before it turned into another language, and Malloy wants the problem set Monday."

Nellie groans, and just like that we're two students complaining about homework, and everything else—the broken ward, the thing tangling my magic up with Aamon's—slides back under the surface where I keep it. She digs out her own notebook. We compare answers. She finally eats.

I keep my face easy and my voice light, and underneath it I file one more thing in the folder marked things I can't tell Nellie, and I notice, distantly, that the folder is getting full.

I can’t keep this up.

Chapter 19

Someone has laid out a feast, but I'm the only one here to eat it.

The dining room glows with candles nobody lit for me specifically—they light them every night, the whole staffed ritual of it, whether I come down or not. Tonight the long table is covered end to end: roast something under a silver dome, bread still warm enough to fog the platter, figs and cheese and a wine I won't drink because I don't drink anything in this house I didn't watch get poured. At my seat, propped against a glass, a card with loopy handwriting.

Enjoy, Calypso. I regret I can't join you—house business keeps me out late. The kitchen is yours. —L.V.

House business. At night. I file it with all the other things I file, and I sit. I pick at food I have no appetite for, alone at a table set for what feels like a thousand.

I get half a fig down before something hits me.

Warmth. Out of nowhere, flooding up under my sternum—not the slow build of my magic but something softer, worse, an ache with a shape to it. An intense feeling of loneliness. Of missing someone. Of yearning.

I'm sitting alone in Leopold's dining room missing someone so hard my chest hurts, and I have no idea who.

I put the fig down. Go still. Run the check I've run a hundred times this week. What lit this feeling? Where’s the source of it?

Is it my emotion?

I wrack my brain but nothing makes sense. There's no reason for me to feel this way, here, now. Nothing in this room is worth aching over, but my body's aching anyway, pointed like a compass needle at the wing across the house, at a locked door, at Aamon—wanting him with a want I never switched on.

Not mine.

It’s been happening for days—catching feelings as they surface out of nowhere, running them down like escaped current. Half trace back clean. Like the dread when Leopold's step comes down the hall is mine, earned, no mystery. The other half lead nowhere I can point to.

Not mine. Not mine. Source unknown.

It’s eerie. Feeling someone else’s emotions. Yearning because someone else is yearning.

But this emotion is so strong that I can’t stop my guilt from joining it.

Emric. The empty chairs around me, any empty chair, and the boy who should still be filling one. Now I'm sitting at a table built for a hundred, in a dead man's silence, three men tangled around my life like wire—and the one who was easiest to care for is the one gone.

I press my thumb hard into the tines of the fork until it hurts, until the ache in my chest has somewhere else to go.

That one's mine. At least I still have that. At least grief, of everything I feel in this house, I don't have to wonder whose it is.

I push back from the feast nobody's eating, and I go find the source of the other thing—the yearning that isn't mine.

Aamon’s room is the one beside mine. Close enough that most nights I lie awake on my side of the wall, too aware of the man on the other. He’s like whiplash. Sometimes he’s holding me like he might fade away if he lets go, others he seems almost indifferent.

When I get to his door, I lift my hand and knock before I talk myself out of it.

Nothing.

I knock again. “Aamon?”

The door gives under my knuckles—not latched, swinging inward at the first touch—and momentum carries me a step over the threshold before I can stop it.

"Aamon?"