Page 3 of The Witch They Crave

"Kage—" Nellie's grip tightens on me. "She can barely—"

"I said I've got her." He's already moving. He doesn't ask. He never asks. Kage decides and then lets you catch up, and by the time I understand what's happening his arm is under my knees and the other is a bar across my back and the world lurches as he takes my weight off Nellie like I don't weigh anything at all.

"Go home, witch," he tells Nellie—not cruel, just final. "I'll get her somewhere with fewer teeth."

"If you hurt her—"

"Yeah." A short, ugly sound that isn't a laugh. "Get in line."

And then the entire world is a blur.

I've felt vampire speed twice before and hated it both times—the world smearing sideways, the stomach left three feet behind. This is worse and better. Worse because everything in me is broken glass and the motion rattles all of it. Better because his chest is against my cheek, cold and solid and real, and the night rips past us in a blur of oak and moss and gaslight and I don't have to see a single face while it does. He runs like he's angry at the distance. He runs like something is chasing us. Buildings blur. The clock tower. The dark bulk of the academic wing. The path narrows and the oaks close overhead and the apothecary garden's green smell washes over me for half a breath and then—

Stone under his boots. The porch. Mine.

He stops so fast the moss is still settling around us, and he doesn't put me down. He takes the steps and lowers us both onto the little porch instead, his back against the wall of the cottage, me sideways across his lap with my shoulder tucked under his chin, one arm still banded across me like he thinks I'll come apart if he lets go. Maybe I will. My own front door is an arm's length to the left of us, shut, its ugly little anchor rune carved into the outside of the wood and the counter-rune I scratched into the inside where no one can see it.

Beyond it, dark, is the one room in the world with a lock on my side of it.

The enforcers' half of the duplex is black. No light in the window. Nobody on the step. Thank God they were given the night off.

Kage doesn't say anything for a long moment. His breathing is rough against my shoulder. He smells like cedar and iron and, under it tonight, smoke—everyone smells like smoke tonight, the whole world does. His arm across my waist is shaking, very faintly, and I don't think he knows it.

"You felt it, didn’t you," I ask. My voice comes out wrecked. "The fail-safe."

"From what's left of the bond, yeah." Flat. Bitten off. "You went out like a light. One second you're a bonfire in the back of my skull and the next there's just—" His jaw works. "Nothing. Somebody reached in and switched you off, and I felt the exact second you stopped being there."

There's something under the flatness. Something I've heard exactly once before, the night I asked him who he was and he told me he'd been somebody's tool for longer than I'd been alive.

He knows what it is to get switched off. To get cut down.

"I'm fine," I tell him.

"You're not."

"I'm fine, Kage."

"You've got a dead vampire's ash in your fist and you won't open your hand, Hex." His voice drops, rough and low, right against my ear. "You are the furthest thing from fine I've ever held. Stop lying to me. You're bad at it and I'm too tired to pretend I believe you."

And that's the thing that almost breaks me. Not softness. Not don't cry, it's not your fault, you couldn't help it—if he'd said any of that I could've stayed iron. He doesn't. He just tells me I'm a wreck and holds on anyway, and the not-fixing of it is somehow the only thing that makes the pressure behind my eyes give an inch.

I let my head fall back against his chest. Just for a second. Just this once. His arm tightens, and he doesn't say anything, and he doesn't make me say anything, and we sit on the step of my cage in the dark with the marigold smell drifting up off the garden and the last of the ash going cold in my hand.

"They're going to send me back," I say.

He goes still.

"That's what happens now. That's the deal. Prove I'm not dangerous or back to the room and the tray and the fog, forever, no appeals." A sound comes out of me, thin and terrible. "I proved it. In front of all of them. I proved it as loud as it gets. I’m a monster and I deserve to be locked up."

"Nobody's putting you anywhere." His arm is iron.

"You don't get a say. Neither do I. That was always the whole point." I turn my head, and up close his storm-blue eyes are doing something raw and furious and helpless, the scar pulling his mouth crooked, and I have to look away because I can’t hold one more person's grief tonight on top of my own. "Put me down. I need to go inside."

"Hex—"

"Put me down, Kage."

I need to face reality. I can’t do that in Kage’s arms, feeling like I might actually be protected. Like he might actually stand in the way of anything that would try to take me away.