Page 4 of The Witch They Crave

It isn’t real.

None of this is.

He let’s me go. Slow. Like it costs him. He sets me on my feet on the top step and stands with me, one hand hovering at my elbow in case my knees quit. I slowly amble to the door and unlock it, stepping inside. Kage follows me to the door—

And stops.

Right at the threshold. Because he has to—the old rule holds him at the line the way it holds all vampires, and I haven't said the words, and I'm not going to. He looks down at the six inches of dark doorway he can't cross, and something moves across his face, there and gone, that I'd call hurt on anyone else.

"Invite me in," he says. Quiet. Not a demand. For once in his life, not a demand.

I can’t do that. Even if some part of me…

No.

"No."

His jaw flexes. He doesn't push. He acts, always, and then deals with the fallout, but he does not push this, and I understand that's its own kind of restraint from a man who has none.

"Fine. I'll be out here," he says.

"You don't have to—"

"I'll be out here, Hex." He shoves his hands in his pockets and leans back against the porch post like he's holding the whole cottage up, settling in, and on the inside of his wrist where his sleeve rides back I catch the edge of that tattoo I've caught before—a compass, inked in black, with no needle in it. Pointing nowhere. "Go on. I'm not going anywhere."

We stare at each other for a minute, so many words unsaid between us. But I don’t have room in my mind for whatever there is between me and this enigmatic, frustratingly alluring mess of a vampire–not when I just murdered someone.

Again.

I shut the door on him, and stand in the dark with my back against the wood and my fist still closed, and for the first time since I came up out of that hall, nobody is looking at me.

The relief lasts about four seconds.

Then the walls start closing in and I am alone, and everything I've been holding at the surface starts to sink.

They're going to lock me away–the council, Aamon, the Academy. Everyone. They're going to fill me back up with fog until I can't feel the difference between morning and night, until Nellie's a name I used to know, until Odette's kitchen is a bittersweet dream that haunts me. I'll go back under and this time there won't be a wean and there won't be a year and there will be no hope. No more opportunities, no more life. Nothing.

There’ll be a white room and a tray and the groove my body wears into a bed while the world goes on without me, and this—all of this—will have been the dream you get to have right before they take everything.

And Emric will still be dead. Whatever they do to me, that doesn't get undone.

My chest is filling up with it. The pressure. The exact awful curve I know better than my own name, guilt and grief pouring down into the place behind my sternum where my magic lives, and the heat rising up to meet it, and no, no… not again, I can't, I'll bring the cottage down, I'll take Kage off the porch and Nellie down the path and the whole old campus with me—

"You absolute idiot," I say to the empty room. I say to Emric.

My voice comes out shredded and mean and I don't care, because it's the only thing holding the rest of me off the floor. My fist won't open. I know what opening it means—if I open it he's dust I brush off my palm and lose into the floorboards, so I keep him closed up tight even as my nails drive deeper into the raw crescents already there.

"You could have run in the opposite direction. You could have used your stupid vamp speed to clear out." My throat knots. I shove through it. "And you—of course you didn't. Of course you walked toward me, watch me coming apart at the seams, because you're the only person in that entire rotting school with the survival instincts of a moth."

I reach for him the way I've reached for the voice I’ve become comfortable with. The one I yearn for. I reach down into the low dark place under my ribs, that private channel nobody else gets, the one that always answered.

Emric. I nearly shout his name in my head.

Nothing answers. The channel's a scraped-out hole and I already know it and I do it anyway.

Emric, I swear to God, if you can hear me—

My thumb finds the bead on Nellie's cord and rolls it. Around. Around.