Page 9 of The Witch They Crave

He won't. That's the one thing in the room I'm sure of.

I get my head back up.

"Is this real," I say.

It's not the question I meant to ask. It just falls out, quiet, and it's aimed at no one. "Any of it. This? You, in here, with your little book. Am I—" I press the heel of my hand hard against my sternum, over the cold scraped place, like I can feel for the edges of the fail-safe and figure out which side of it I'm on. "Because it doesn't feel real. It feels like the thing I dream in the fog. And I would really like one of you to tell me I'm awake."

Balcour looks at me for the first time since he came in.

"You're awake, Miss Dellaby," he says. Not unkind. Somehow that's worse. "I'd suggest you use the fourteen days accordingly."

And that—the small, reasonable courtesy of it, the helpfulness—is what finally lands the whole thing in my body at once.

I reach behind my neck and get my fingers under the edge of the gauze I placed over the healing wound on my neck and I tear it off. It stings and I don't care. Then I wrap my hair up around my hand and turn slightly so Balcour can see the spot where the fail-safe is lodged.

"You want my leash shorter?" I say to the wall, to the room, to all of them behind me. "Take it. Shorten it. Wire the thing straight into his hand, put a guard on my door, put me in the salt cellar, put me in the ground. I'm not fighting you." My eyes are burning and my voice doesn’t break. "You think I want to be walking around loose? I don’t. So lock the door. Turn the key twice. If it means I don't do that again to somebody else's friend, I'll carry the bag down there myself."

I let my hair drop and turn back around.

Nobody says anything.

Aamon is looking at me the way he looked at me on the chapel stone, wrecked all the way through, and I have to put my eyes somewhere else immediately.

"Well." Balcour tucks the portfolio under his arm. "That will simplify the transfer, I suppose. We were prepared to sedate for transfer."

My chest nearly caves in.

They give me four minutes to finish packing.

I don't need four. I fold the last shirt and leave the uniforms hanging in the closet. I put Nellie's cord back on my wrist because they didn't say I couldn't, and after a second, standing over the nightstand, I take the resonance stone too and drop it in the outside pocket where I don't have to look at it.

Corvin picks up my bag before I can. Zeva opens the door.

Outside, the night has gone cold, wet and heavy, the marigold smell from the garden gone sour. The path is lit blue. Somewhere off past the oaks a shutter bangs once against a wall, and Zeva's head turns toward the treeline and stays there a moment before she follows us down the steps.

I don't ask what that might have been.

Leyonna falls into step beside me for twenty yards. Her sleeve nearly brushes mine. She doesn't say a word, and the anger's coming off her in waves—not at me. At the men behind us. At a council that walked into her school and let this chaos happen. For a split second, I realize she may be the closest thing to an ally I've got, and it isn't comfortable. It's fury with nowhere to go.

At the head of the path she stops. "Miss Dellaby."

I turn. Balcour is the last to slip out of my cottage and then he’s gone in a wisp.

"Fourteen days," she says. "Sleep, if you can."

Then she's gone up the hill using her vamp speed and it's just me and two enforcers. No, not just the three of us… there’s one more vampire walking eight feet behind my left shoulder. Aamon–at his new fixed maximum distance, for the rest of my life or the rest of the year, whichever the council decides ends first.

My stomach flips over.

My new prison is under the old watch tower at the northeast corner of campus, and it's a long way underground. Four flights of a tight spiral stair, the stone treads dished in the middle from centuries of boots, a rope for a handrail that's worn soft as cloth. Then a low passage where I have to duck, then a second stair, shorter, steeper. The temperature drops the whole way. By the bottom my breath is showing white and the walls have gone slick with it.

I know what this place used to be before Zeva gets the last door open, because I can smell the ghost of it. Cold stone, old iron, and under that a faint coppery staleness soaked so far into the walls that no amount of scrubbing will ever pull it out. Blood. This is where the academy used to keep blood, back before whatever newer, cleaner room they moved it to. The racks are still here, iron, bolted floor to ceiling down both walls—but they're bare. The bottles are long gone. All that's left is their dust-outlines on the shelves and a few dead brass tags still wired where they hung, the ink on them faded to nothing. A slate counting-slab runs down the center of the floor, its surface scored and stained black in the grain. A trough drain runs the length of the room to carry off whatever used to spill.

They've turned out one of the store-rooms at the end. Bare stone, a drain in the middle of a floor that slopes toward it. Someone's carried a cot down and shoved it against the wall. It looks ridiculous in here, too soft, too human, a bed in a pantry. There's an iron hook still set in the ceiling where a carcass or a cask used to hang. And above the door, freshly carved into the stone—the raw pale cuts still bright against the old dark rock—is a ward. New. Put here for me. When I step under it the air goes tight and the hair on my arms stands up, the way it does near something with a current running through it.

Corvin sets my bag down inside the door. Aamon stops at the threshold and doesn't come in. He says something low to Zeva—I don't catch it—and then he's gone, just gone, a cold rush of air where he was standing and the sound of him taking the stairs faster than a human can take stairs.

I look at Zeva. "Where's he going?"