Chapter 3 #2
"Let's begin." Balcour flips to a new page in his portfolio.
For once, he's addressing me directly—or at least addressing the space slightly above my left ear, which for him is practically eye contact.
"Historically, witch competency is measured across three foundational pillars: creation, defense, and emotional regulation.
These are the benchmarks the council uses to assess magical stability in all registered witches.
Under normal circumstances, formal testing isn't required—most witches demonstrate baseline proficiency through standard coursework. "
He pauses. Lets that land. Under normal circumstances. Most witches.
"Your circumstances," he continues, "are not normal.
The facility's clinical team recommended these three pillars as particularly suited to your specific...
profile. Your magic is emotion-triggered, disproportionately destructive, and has historically bypassed conscious control.
These exercises will test whether that pattern has changed. "
"And if it hasn't?"
Balcour looks at me. Actually looks at me—grey eyes, flat, the kind of patience that has nothing to do with kindness.
"Then we document that and try again next month."
Monthly. Every month for a year. Twelve rounds of being put in a room and asked to prove I'm not the thing my file says I am.
"The assessments are cumulative," Aamon says. His voice cuts through Balcour's bureaucratic drone like something sharper. "Each month builds on the last. What matters isn't where you start." A pause—deliberate, weighted. "It's the trajectory."
I don't know if that's supposed to be reassuring. Coming from the man with the remote in his pocket, it lands somewhere between encouragement and warning.
"There is no pass or fail threshold today," Aamon adds. "This is a baseline. We need to see where you are before we can build a path forward."
Balcour's pen scratches from across the stone room. The sound says otherwise.
"First exercise. Creation." Aamon opens his hand. In his palm: a seed. Small, dark, unremarkable. He sets it on the stone floor between us. "Grow it."
I stare at the seed.
Okay. Think this through. Growing a seed is kinetic energy—a push of warmth into something dormant, coaxing the potential that's already there into motion. In theory, it's the same type of energy output as warming water. Channel heat, direct it, let the target do the rest.
The glass from this morning flashes through my head. The crack in the counter. The shards.
Don't think about the glass.
I'm thinking about the glass.
"Can I know what this particular seed is supposed to blossom into," I say, "or are we going for the surprise?"
Aamon's expression doesn't change. "Lavender."
Simple. Common. The kind of thing growing in the garden outside my window right now. The garden that flinched from me yesterday. I swallow.
"Miss Dellaby," Balcour says from behind me. "The clock is running."
Right. Okay. Here we go.
I crouch down. The skirt rides up and I tug it back toward my knees. The stone floor is cold against my shins. I can feel Aamon's gaze on the top of my head, and behind him, the scratch-scratch-scratch of Balcour's pen.
I reach for my magic. Carefully. Gently. The way I reached for it in the kitchen, before the—
Don't.
I find the warmth. Guide it down my arm. Into my hand. Toward the seed on the floor.
Gently. Gently. Just a little. Just enough.
The seed cracks.
Not sprouts—cracks. Splits clean in half with a sound like a knuckle popping, and then crumbles. The two halves collapse into dust on the stone floor. The faintest wisp of green—a root tip, maybe, trying to emerge—withers and curls in on itself.
Shit.
I killed it. I poured too much in and the seed couldn't hold it and I killed it. The simplest thing. The thing children do. And I turned it to ash.
My face is hot. Not magic-hot—shame-hot. The kind of heat that starts in the chest and climbs to the ears and sits there, pulsing. I don't look at Aamon. I don't look at Balcour. I look at the dust on the floor that used to be a living thing before I touched it and my jaw clenches.
Story of my life.
Across from me, Balcour's pen: scratch, scratch.
One test down, two to go, and that sound is already making me want to commit a felony.
"It's all right," Aamon says. His voice hasn't changed. Same low, level tone. He could be commenting on the weather. "Second exercise. Stand up."
I stand. My knees are stiff. My hands are fists at my sides.
"I'm going to activate a training ward," he says. "It will send a controlled burst of energy toward you. Your task is to block it. Shield yourself. That's all."
He moves to a stone pedestal I hadn't noticed against the wall—knee-high, carved with the same silver ward-lines as the floor. A focus stone sits on top, dark and smooth, about the size of a fist.
Aamon places his hand on the stone. Rolls his sleeves first—a fluid, unhurried motion, forearm tattoos surfacing beneath the bunched fabric—and then his fingers close around the focus stone and the room changes.
The air pressure shifts. The ward-lines in the floor pulse once, twice, and something gathers in the stone beneath his hand—a buildup, a coiling, energy being drawn from the wards and compressed into a single point.
He looks at me. "Ready?"
I'm not. "Sure."
He activates the stone.
The burst crosses the room fast—a ripple of compressed force that races along the ward-lines and hits my chest like a flat palm. Not hard. I can tell even mid-impact that it was calibrated, measured, exactly enough to test and not enough to harm.
My magic doesn't shield.
My magic detonates.
The response is instant, involuntary, and catastrophic.
The power behind my sternum rips outward—not a shield, not a wall, a blast. A concussive wave that erupts from my body in every direction.
Aamon's controlled burst doesn't just get blocked.
It gets annihilated. Swallowed by something ten times its size and obliterated.
The ward-lines in the floor blaze white. The stone cracks—a spiderweb of fractures racing outward from where I'm standing, just like the countertop, just like the—
The hotel. The seventh floor. The hallway collapsing.
My stomach drops through the floor. I didn't block.
I didn't defend. I annihilated. The exact same response my magic had twelve years ago when it killed eleven people—threatened, so it destroyed everything in every direction without asking me first. That's my body's only answer to danger: more danger.
The containment wards scream—a high, keening frequency that vibrates in my teeth—and then the wave hits the magic-made protective ring and rebounds.
Dust falls from the ceiling. A chunk of stone the size of my fist dislodges and crashes to the floor.
Silence.
I'm standing in the center of a circle of cracked stone, hands outstretched and shaking. The ward-lines are still glowing—dimmer now, absorbing the residual energy, pulling it out of the air like poison from a wound.
Aamon hasn't moved.
He’s standing on the other side of the ward-circle, hand still resting on the focus stone.
The blast hit the containment line and held—I can see the ward glowing white-hot where my magic slammed against it, the silver inlay burning like a brand in the stone floor.
Everything inside the circle is wrecked.
Everything outside it is untouched. He's three feet from the line.
Didn't step back. Didn't flinch. Just stood there and watched the wards do their job, trusting centuries-old enchantment to hold against whatever I threw at it.
And it did hold. Barely. The ward-line nearest him is still smoking.
Except his eyes. His eyes are different.
Something behind the hazel has shifted—a crack in the stillness, brief and deep, like catching a glimpse of fire through a shuttered window.
Not fear. Not satisfaction. Something I don't have a word for and can't stop staring at.
I catalogue it, hoard it, file it alongside the jaw-flex and the finger-tighten and every other micro-fracture in his composure, because I am building a map of this man whether I want to or not.
Then it's gone. Shuttered. Still water, no expression again.
"Defense response: retaliatory," Balcour says from behind his table, which has been shoved back six inches by the blast energy that leaked out of the ward. His voice is entirely unchanged. His pen is moving. "Noted."
I want to scream. I want to put my fist through his portfolio. I want to ask Aamon what that look in his eyes means and why he didn't flinch and how he's standing there like he just watched something interesting instead of something terrifying.
"Third exercise," Aamon says. Quiet. "Emotional regulation."
The temperature in the room changes. Not physically—emotionally. I can feel the shift before anyone speaks.
Something is about to happen that I'm not going to like.
Balcour closes his portfolio. Opens a different folder—thicker, older, with a red tab I recognize from the facility. My file. My actual file, the one with the incident report and the body count and the names.
I swallow the lump growing in my throat.
"Standard protocol for the emotional regulation assessment requires the subject to maintain control under escalating psychological stress," he says. Clinical. Reading from a script, probably. "I'm going to read a series of statements from your file. Your task is to remain calm."
"No." The word comes out before I can stop it. "No, you're not doing that."
"This is a mandatory component of the assessment, Miss Dellaby."
"I don't care." My voice is climbing. I can feel it—the heat behind my sternum rising in response, the power pressing outward. "You are not going to stand there and read my—"
"On the night of June fourteenth," Balcour begins, his voice as flat and unbothered as if he were reading a weather report, "a catastrophic magical event occurred at the Royal Crescent Hotel in Baton Rouge, Louisiana."