Page 91 of The Witch They Crave

"Then fight through it. Listen to me." He drops his voice, low and even—the same register he used in the shed when I couldn't breathe—and it steadies me now the way it did then. "The drug's heavy but it's already burning off. You said it's slipping—so don't grab for the whole thing. Reach for a spark. One thread, enough to burn what's on your wrists. Nothing more." His eyes hold mine, fierce. "You've clawed your magic back from worse than a needle. You can find one spark."

I stare at him for a beat longer, everything in me wanting to be in his arms. Wanting to save us both from this nightmare.

But he’s right. I just need a spark.

I close my eyes. I press my bound hands flat together and reach down through the fog, past the heavy dead-battery drag of the drug, groping for the coal I know is buried somewhere down there—

—and I catch the edge of it. Faint. A candleflame at the bottom of a well. Not enough yet, but there, and the breath shakes out of me.

"That's it," Kage breathes, and there's something proud in it. "That's my girl. Slow. Bring it up slow—"

The door opens.

The spark scatters—I lose it the instant my head snaps up, the fragile thread of concentration gone the second Leopold crosses the threshold. He takes in the room—me on my knees straining at the chain, Kage against the wall, the effort still bright on both our faces—and sighs, like a disappointed tutor.

"Already? I did dose you rather carefully." He says it almost fondly. "You truly never stop, do you?"

He looks rested. Clean shirt, sleeves turned back, not a single blonde hair out of place—the only person in the worst room of my life who isn't bleeding or bound or coming apart at the chemical seams. He's carrying a folding chair, which he unfolds and settles into like we've got all day to play. There’s something small in his other hand that he keeps under his palm on his knee where I can't see it.

"Where are we?" I already know. I want to hear if he'll say it.

"You know where we are." His eyes hold mine, and there's something almost gentle in them, almost sorry. I don’t fall for it. "I brought you home, Calypso."

Home. The word lands like a slap and I flinch away from him, tears welling up in my eyes. "This isn't—"

"It's the last place you were whole," he says. "The last place before the facility, before the leash, before you became the thing they filed and sedated and handed to me. I've thought for a long time that if you were ever going to understand what you are, it would have to be here. Where you did it." He tilts his head. "Where you made me."

The tears fall. I can’t stop them. But he makes no sense…

"I've never done anything to you!" But my voice doesn't come out as steady as I want it, because made me has a weight to it. Like this is all personal to him. I understand even less now.

"No." He looks at me a moment longer, and then he does something I've never seen him do. He stops performing. What's underneath isn't tired now. It's grief—old, total, a grief that's been holding this man up so long it's become his skeleton. "I'm going to tell you a story," he says, "and I need you to listen to all of it, because I have waited twelve years to say it in this room, and I'll only say it once."

Across the wall, Kage has gone very still. Then, low and urgent: "Hex. Don't listen to him. Whatever he's about to say, it's a story he tells himself so he can sleep—"

"Quiet." Leopold doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't look at Kage. "Or I'll wrap the silver around your throat and you can listen without the commentary."

Kage's jaw works. He pulls once against the restraints—hard, deliberate, testing—and the silver bites and the blood runs and he holds Leopold's eyes the whole time like he's daring him to make good on it. He doesn't stop straining. He won't stop straining. But he goes quiet.

"I had a sister," Leopold says. His eyes slide to mine.

Had?

"She was younger than me by a century—for our kind, that's nothing, a little sister stays a little sister no matter how old you both get. But she was born into the decline, after everything went wrong for my family, and I raised her more than my parents did." His gaze has gone distant, fixed on something I can't see. "I was her protector. That was my whole self. Before I was anything else—before I was any of the things you've watched me be this year—I was the thing that stood between my sister and the world."

I shake my head, a part of me seeing where this is going. The other part terrified about what Leopold might say next. Another tear falls down my cheek.

"There was an errand." His voice is very even. "Small. Beneath telling, almost. A thing I wanted—a foolish young man's want—and I brought her along because I didn't want to go alone."

His hand, on his knee, has gone white at the knuckle.

"I tucked her somewhere safe while I saw to it. High up, away from the business I'd come for. A quiet room on the seventh floor. I told her to wait. I told her she'd be safe there." A pause.

The seventh floor.

Oh God… no…

"From the lobby," he goes on, "I felt the building break. The air turned to fire and glass. A power I had no name for tore through the bones of the place, and the whole seventh floor came down into the sixth." His eyes come up to mine. Wet. Steady. The worst thing I've ever looked at. "By the time I clawed my way up to where I'd left her, there was no seventh floor left to find. There was no her. There was only the room it started in, and a witch child sitting alive and untouched at the center of it, in a ring of everything she'd unmade."