Page 21 of The Witch They Crave

"Hmm, struck a nerve, didn’t I?" Kage asks, soft, delighted, cruel. "You don't get to have her. She’s not yours. That's the leash they put on you. I bet you stand at her wall every night close enough to breathe her in and you call it the job—"

Aamon moves.

I don't see the start of it. Vampires move too damn fast for my eyes to keep up. I get the after—Kage and Aamon surging into the little common room and then Kage slamming into the shelving hard enough to split the old wood. An iron rack comes down in a shriek, and then Kage laughs, breathless, thrilled, because this is what he wanted.

Then they blur.

I've seen Kage fight in the ring during class. Half-cocked, loose, grinning at Professor Midus while he dodges, the whole thing a show he's putting on to be a pain in someone's ass. This is nothing like that. There's no audience in it now.

He means every bit of it.

And Aamon—I've never seen Aamon fight at all. A month of him standing perfectly still on the far side of a training room, correcting my guard in that flat even voice, and I had no idea this was under there. He snarls. I suck in a sharp breath as I hear it—a low, ugly sound I didn't know he could make, teeth bared, the careful mask he always wears completely torn off his face.

It turns my stomach, the sound of them. Bodies cracking together too fast to track. Stone splitting. A grunt punched out of someone. The slate slab going over with a boom that sifts grit from the ceiling. Zeva’s unconscious form is completely forgotten in the corner. Kage takes a hit that folds him at the middle and comes up with his teeth gone pink, still grinning, because he must have known this was coming.

Hell, he must have been ready to fight his way out of here with me in tow.

I can’t watch this. My stomach lurches as I hear another crack–marble against marble. Two hard bodies punishing each other in absolute hatred and not one of them is holding back.

"Stop!" I'm off the wall, into the doorway. Neither of them registers me. "Both of you—stop—"

They don't stop. They can't hear me, or I can't make the words loud enough, and the two of them slam together again and someone's blood goes across the wall. I feel the whole thing crest in me at once—the fear, the noise, the picture of one of them not getting up—and it pours down into the place the light lives with nowhere to go.

I feel it churning inside me–my magic. As if the floor tilts a half-second before you fall, and there's nothing under my feet, too much of me rising too fast—

"STOP—"

They don’t. Suddenly, I can’t breathe. My magic is swirling, heating up inside me and surging down my arms, legs, trying to get out of me. I can’t let them continue to fight like this because what if Kage hurts Aamon… What if Aamon hurts Kage…

I’m gulping in breaths, stepping toward the fight hoping one of them might see me and slow down but nothing gives. And my magic, it’s–

I can’t–

The current ripping through me from my sternum burns the rest of it’s way out until I can’t stop it, I can’t hold it in…

Boom.

The spark inside me detonates—white, floor to ceiling, the way a struck match fills a dark house—all at once, no shape to it, a wave slamming out in every direction. My body's only answer to danger… more danger.

The energy blast of my magic sends me flying.

My feet leave the floor. Half a second of nothing. Then the back of my skull finds the wall, and the sound of it is inside my teeth. The room slides sideways and the light dies and I'm down. Everything slows down until my heartbeat is like a gunshot going off in my ears.

Something warm spreads through my hair. Nothing down here is warm.

"—lypso. Calypso." A voice at the wrong speed, stretched long. Hands on my face—cool, dry, precise. "Open your eyes. Look at me."

I get them open. The room won't hold still. Two shapes over me, both gone rigid in the way that means something's badly wrong, and I understand from a long way off that the wet in my hair is mine. It must be blood. I must have hit the wall too hard and now there’s grey creeping in at the edges of my vision.

"Her head." Kage, and I've never heard him like this—everything stripped off it. "There's too much. That's too much, she needs—"

"I know what she needs." Aamon lifts his hand to his mouth. He tears open his flesh and then his wrist is at my lips. "Drink. Now. Don't argue, just drink—"

And I'm too far gone for sense. What surfaces instead is want, the oldest part of me, the part with no guard left on the door. It turns my head away from the wrist. It says, slurred and certain:

"No. Not you." My eyes drag to the other shape. To the storm. "Him."

Silence.