Chapter 130 Katy

Chapter 130 Katy
POV: Katy

She had been putting this off for three days.

Not because she did not know what she was going to say. She had known what she was going to say since the night Whitney knocked on their door and said the thing she had never said to anyone and Katy had sat on the end of her bed and made herself look at the thing she had been not examining and then looked away again because the timing was wrong.

The timing was wrong for three more days.

On Monday she had a reason. On Tuesday she had a different reason. On Wednesday she ran out of reasons and still did not do it and recognized that for what it was.

On Thursday she knocked on Carly's door.

Carly answered.

"Can I borrow you." Katy said.

Carly looked at her face.

"Yes." She said immediately.

They went to the small courtyard off the east path, the one that was usually empty in the evenings. They sat on the bench. The fog was doing its thing around the campus. The Black River Falls cold was present but not severe.

Katy looked at the path.

She thought about how to start.

She started.

"I have been carrying things all semester." She said. "Things I have been watching and not saying because I did not have the full picture yet and I did not want to say half a picture to someone who was already navigating enough."

Carly waited.

"I have the full picture now." Katy said. "Or close enough to it."

She told her.

Not in the careful managed version she had been planning. Just the real one, in order.

The faction review notice on the headmistress board that had appeared in October and disappeared in November. She had read it. It had referenced a formal inquiry into the covenant obligations of the founding bloodlines and whether Black River Academy as an institution bore any responsibility for the imbalance.

The headmistress knew.

She had known since at least October.

Carly went very still.

Katy kept going.

The Zdravei Katerina moment in the corridor. Niko knowing her full name and Bulgarian origins before they had been formally introduced. She had been trying to work out why since it happened. She had a theory now.

The Monroeson family had connections to the Bulgarian supernatural community that went back centuries. The specific community her mother had come from. The community that had, when she was turned, been the place where the information about what had happened to her had been contained.

The Monroeson family might know what she was.

Not Niko specifically. He had not been at the family home in four years. But Victor. Possibly Isabel.

They might have known since before the semester started.

Carly looked at her.

"Katy." She said carefully. "What are you."

Katy looked at the path.

She thought about Whitney on the end of her bed saying I am not fully a witch.

She thought about carrying things alone for a very long time.

She thought about you are not alone in it said to a window in a Degrassi Hall room on a Friday evening.

She thought about how she had said that to someone else without being willing to say it to herself.

"My mother was human." She said. "My father was a vampire. Not like Whitney's situation. It was not violence. They were together, genuinely, for almost a decade." She paused. "But vampires are not supposed to be able to have children. The fact that I exist at all is something that was kept very quiet by the community my mother came from." She looked at the fog. "I am a vampire. Fully turned, fully functional. I am also something slightly more than that because of what I came from. My abilities run at a higher register than a standard vampire in certain contexts. My senses. My control." She stopped. "My awareness of magic. Of witch power specifically."

Carly was completely still.

"That's why you felt Whitney differently." She said.

"Yes." Katy said. "And why I felt the covenant imbalance before I knew what it was. It registered in my senses as a specific kind of wrongness the first week of the semester. I did not know what I was feeling until I started putting the other pieces together."

Carly looked at her.

"The faction review notice." She said. "The headmistress. Does she know about you."

"I don't know." Katy said. "Possibly. The notice disappeared and I have not seen it referenced since. I do not know if it was connected to me or to the covenant or to both."

Carly pressed her lips together.

She was thinking. Katy could see it. The specific quality of Carly processing in real time, laying pieces next to each other and looking at the shape.

"Why didn't you tell me." Carly said. Not accusatory. Just the question.

"Because I have not told anyone." Katy said. "In my entire existence. My mother is gone. The people from her community who knew are gone. I have been the only person who knew this for over a century and I had become." She stopped. "Comfortable with that. Or accustomed to it. I am not sure they are the same thing."

Carly looked at her.

"What changed." She said.

Katy looked at the path.

She thought about what changed.

She thought about a semester of watching a person navigate the most complicated version of her life with the specific courage of someone who kept choosing the real thing over the easier thing. Who kept saying the hard true version instead of the soft performed one.

She thought about you are not alone in it.

She thought about Whitney's crackers.

"You." She said simply. "This semester. All of it."

Carly was quiet for a moment.

Then she reached over and put her hand over Katy's.

Katy looked at it.

She was not accustomed to this. She had been not accustomed to it for a very long time. She did not know what to do with it except let it be there.

She let it be there.

"Victor might know." Carly said. Gently but directly. "About what you are. We need to think about what that means."

"I know." Katy said.

"And the headmistress." Carly said. "If she knows something we need to know what she knows."

"I know." Katy said.

"Not tonight." Carly said. "But soon."

"Soon." Katy agreed.

They sat on the bench in the Black River Falls cold with the fog around them and the campus quiet.

"Kat." Carly said.

"Mm." Katy said.

"Thank you for telling me." She said. "I know what it costs."

Katy looked at the path.

She thought about cost.

She thought about what it had cost Whitney and what it had taken for her to knock on that door anyway.

She thought about what it cost to keep things alone for so long that the weight of them stopped feeling like weight and started feeling like just the way things were.

She thought about this being different.

"Yeah." She said. Her voice came out with more texture than she intended. She cleared it. "Don't make a thing of it."

Carly squeezed her hand.

She did not make a thing of it.

They sat there a while longer.

The fog moved across the campus in its slow usual way.

The Black River Falls evening settled around them.

Katy thought about the faction review notice and the headmistress and Victor and all the things still waiting to be resolved and all the conversations still waiting to be had.

She thought about the thing she had been not examining and Whitney on the end of her bed and crackers and you are not alone in it.

She thought that for the first time in a very long time she was not operating alone.

She was not sure what to do with that yet.

She was going to figure it out.

POV: Carly

She sat on the bench after Katy went back inside.

She sat there for a while in the fog and the cold and let everything sit around her without trying to organize it yet.

Whitney.

Katy.

The covenant.

Leona.

The dagger.

Victor playing things long.

The headmistress who had known since October.

The founding families and the four centuries of history they were all standing in the middle of.

She thought about being eighteen years old and senior class president and cheer captain and coven supreme and all the ways she had been walking around this campus for four years in the center of something much larger than she had been told.

She thought about Niko in a corridor at one in the morning saying I'm not giving up on her into the empty air.

She thought about the covenant just requiring presence.

Just choosing to stay.

She looked at the Black River Academy buildings through the fog. Familiar and functional and completely ordinary.

She thought that extraordinary things were very often ordinary from the inside.

She picked up her phone.

Carly: Are you up.

The response came in under ten seconds.

Niko: Always.

Carly: Meet me at the east bench.

She put her phone in her pocket.

She waited.

He appeared from the Silas Hall direction two minutes later. Dark jacket. Hands in his pockets. Curls pushed back. Moving through the fog of the campus with the specific ease of someone who had stopped bracing against the spaces he occupied.

He sat beside her.

He looked at her face.

He waited.

She told him about Katy.

All of it. In order. The way she always told him things now.

He listened without interrupting. He processed without performing. When she finished he was quiet for a moment.

"Victor knows." He said. "About what Katy is. Or suspects."

"That's what I think." She said.

He looked at the path. "Zdravei Katerina." He said quietly. Almost to himself.

"He greeted her by name in the corridor." Carly said. "In Bulgarian. Before you had been formally introduced."

"I know." He said. "I did not know why at the time." He pressed his lips together. "I should have pushed on it."

"You didn't know what you were looking for." She said. "Neither did I."

He nodded.

"The headmistress." He said.

"Yes." She said.

"The faction review notice." He said.

"Yes." She said.

He looked at the Black River Academy buildings.

She looked at them with him.

"This is bigger than the two of us." He said.

"It always was." She said. "We just did not know how big."

He turned to look at her.

She turned to look at him.

"What do you want to do." He said.

She thought about it.

She thought about presence and intention.

She thought about choosing to stay.

She thought about Katy and Whitney and the room in Degrassi Hall where things had been said and weight had been put down and the crackers and you are not alone in it.

She thought about June and the rose garden and Freida and Harrison and Edinburgh and Reba in her pajamas saying don't mess it up.

She thought about the drawing that had said I'm sorry in his handwriting.

She thought about one dance. About the corridor at one in the morning. About the courtyard and the library and the east bench and every place they had been honest with each other.

She thought about the agreement they had made.

Together.

"I want to figure it out." She said. "All of it. Properly and on our terms." She held his gaze. "But not tonight."

He almost smiled. "What do you want tonight."

She leaned against him.

He put his arm around her.

The fog moved across the campus.

"This." She said.

He held on.

The Black River Falls evening settled around them and the semester had one month left and everything that was coming was significant and complicated and real and she was not afraid of any of it.

Not from here.

Not with him.