Page 89 of The Witch They Crave

I’m halfway around the desk in the middle of the room when Leopold’s figure blurs from my view. I have to get the fuck out of this room. I bolt for the door.

It's already broken, already ajar—I tore the knob out myself—and for half a second I think I might make it into the hall. Then reality catches up: he's a vampire, and there is no version of this where I outrun him to the front door and out into a night with no one in it.

Speed won't save me. Nothing I have will save me.

What do I do? What do I do?

I reach the door and tear it open, throwing myself into the hallway on shaky legs. My shoulder crashes into the opposite wall but it helps to send me in the right direction–away from Leopold.

But his footsteps are right behind me, and getting closer by the second.

So I do the only thing left. My last ditch effort. I can’t outrun him. My only option is that someone will save me.

Aamon isn’t here. Kage is MIA.

I reach for the voice in my head and I scream for it.

Help me—please—he's going to put me under, I need you, whoever you are, please, HELP—

Leopold catches me before I've cleared the hallway. One arm bands across my chest and pins both of mine, my back to his front, and he isn't even straining. He holds me the way you'd hold a child mid-tantrum—a patience worse than violence.

"Shh," he breathes against my hair. I thrash and scream so hard my throat burns. I claw for the fire behind my sternum—

He jams the needle into the side of my neck.

I scream at the cold push of it—the specific wrongness of a foreign thing sliding into a vein—and twelve years come down on me at once. White walls. The groove worn into a mattress by my own sedated body. Graph-paper light crawling the floor at three in the afternoon. Tracing the room inside my skull because my hands were too heavy to lift. The drug goes in like water and I'm thirteen and I'm twenty-five and I'm nothing at all, the witch girl with the body count, going flat and quiet on someone else's schedule, and the last clear thought I've got is furious and useless: not again not again not again.

Numbness radiates out from the spot as the last of my scream drains out.

My knees give.

I exhale. “Leo–”

He catches me. Gathers me up against him and lowers us both down slow, careful, like we're settling into a dance—exactly the way he held that woman by the fire, like something precious he doesn't want to spill. He brushes the hair back off my face with two fingers.

"There," he murmurs. "There. I've got you. I've got you."

I can't say anything. My mouth won't make the shapes. The gray is coming up over me from the floor like water over a stone and he's the only warm solid thing left and I hate that, I hate that the last thing I feel is him holding me gently.

"You're wondering why," he says, from very far off now. Almost kind. "Why the trouble? Why not simply end it here, quietly? You're worth more than that, Calypso. So much more than that." A pause—or maybe the drug is just eating the seconds between his words. "I'm not afraid of them coming for you. Your warden. Your dog. The Council and all its little rules." Something like a smile in his voice. "I'm counting on it. I need them to come. That's rather the entire point."

Bait, I think, from the bottom of the gray. I'm bait. He wants them to—

The thought doesn't finish. Nothing finishes. The gray closes over the top of me, and the last thing I know is being lifted, the world tilting as he stands with me in his arms—

and then not even that.

Then nothing at all.

Chapter 21

I come back the way you come up from deep water—slow, wrong, my body reporting in before my mind does.

Cold first. A hard surface under me. The chemical thickness in my mouth that I know from twelve years of mornings, the drug still silting out of my blood. My wrists are bound in front of me, something biting into them when I test it. My body is sluggish and my muscles don’t want to work right. I keep my eyes closed and I inventory, because that's what you do, that's what I've always done: hands bound, ankles free, lying on my side, floor not bed, cold air, a smell—

The smell.

Old carpet and dust and something floral gone stale, a perfume that stopped being made a long time ago. Mildew under it. And under that, so faint it might be memory, a burnt smell that never fully leaves a place where something terrible once cooked the air.