Page 7 of The Witch They Crave

I can't do that.

"Get out—"

I'm not somewhere you can put me out of. No edge to it. Just fact, the way you'd tell someone it's raining. I'm where your magic is. I've always been where your magic is.

I stand in the middle of my dark room with my hand on the bedpost and I go through everything. Every night. Every time the world tipped and I reached down into that warm low place and let it hold me up. The things I said. The things I only thought and never said out loud to Nellie, never to Odette, never to Aamon in a hundred hours across a training-room table. All of it, poured down a channel into something with no name and no face, and it took every word.

And it's still here. And it's pleased. I can feel that, the way you feel someone smiling behind you.

"You're not him," I say. "You were never him."

No.

"Then what are you? Who are you?"

The warmth deepens. Comes closer. Wraps around the cold scraped place under my sternum like a coat being put over my shoulders.

Someone who has never once lied to you, it says. Which is more than you can say for the rest of them.

I pick up the duffel.

I don't know what else to do with my hands, my body, the roaring in my chest, the exhaustion from the explosion of my magic, so I pick up the bag and I go back to folding. I put the second shirt in flat and hard like I'm packing a wound.

You're not going anywhere, Calypso.

"Watch me."

Calypso—

"You don't get to say my name." I zip the side pocket. "You've had a month of me. You had every ugly thing I've ever thought. That's it. That's all you get. So sit in there and be quiet, because in about six hours a man in a starched collar is going to walk in here and put me back in a white room, and you can find out what twelve years of nothing sounds like too."

It doesn't answer.

“Good. Stay that way.”

I don't get the chance to find out if it will, because the ones coming for me don't wait six hours. They don't even knock.

The front door to the cottage blasts open and I realize I never locked it—and Aamon comes through first with four people behind him.

I knew it was coming, I just didn’t expect he’d be leading the charge.

Corvin peels off to the left of the room, Zeva to the right, both of them settling into the corners like furniture that can kill you. Leyonna comes in after them still in the deep-green gown she must have worn to the Revel, the hem grey with fallout, a long tear up one side. No mask, no jewelry—she's stripped off whatever was for show. Her hair's come half down. Her eyes go to the open duffel on my bed and something in her face gets very still.

And last, Balcour.

Same starched collar at three in the morning. Same manicured hands. Same leather portfolio, and the pen already out.

"Miss Dellaby." He turns a page. "You're conscious. Good. That simplifies scheduling."

"Balcour—" Aamon says.

"Professor." Balcour doesn't look up. "You requested to be present. That was the extent of the accommodation."

Aamon’s jaw clenches. Balcour clicks the pen.

"Pursuant to Council Directive 14-7, subsection B, and the emergency review convened at zero-one hundred this morning, the following determinations have been entered." Another page. "One. The containment device functioned within design parameters. Activation occurred, suppression achieved, secondary escalation prevented. The protocol performed as designed."

The room is very quiet. I can barely breathe as I process his words.