Chapter 6 #3
"You could have used it," I say. "The fail-safe. I was spiking. The wards were straining. By every rule in whatever protocol manual Balcour sleeps with, you should have pressed the button."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you?"
The silence that follows isn't empty. It's the kind of silence that has furniture in it—things he's not saying arranged in the space between us like obstacles he's choosing not to move.
"Because you didn't need it," he says. "Your magic responded to the redirect. The spike was containable through alternative means." A pause. "The fail-safe is a last resort, not a first response. It should have been explained to you that way from the beginning."
It should have been explained to you that way from the beginning.
I turn that over. Examine it from every angle. Looking for the trap, the caveat, the institutional double-speak. But his voice was level and his eyes were steady and the words landed with the particular weight of something a person has been thinking for a while and finally said out loud.
I look at the stone in my hands. Still humming. Still warm. The copper veins have dimmed to a faint glow.
"The herbs moved," I say. Quietly. "Before the spike. The herbs on the table leaned toward me."
"I saw."
"They usually lean away."
"I know." He crosses to the bookshelf. Straightens a row of books that didn't need straightening—putting distance between us, putting his hands on something that isn't me. Business. Order. The room being put back to rights. "That's worth noting. We'll explore it next session."
And that's it. No praise, no explanation, no elaboration.
That's worth noting. Filed, categorized, slotted into whatever mental architecture he uses to track my progress.
The fact that my magic just made something grow instead of die gets the same professional acknowledgment as a satisfactory test score.
"Same time Thursday," he says, turning from the bookshelf. "Bring the stone. It's yours now."
I look down at the rough dark rock in my hands. "Mine?"
"The resonance stone. Keep it. Practice the grounding exercise in your room—ten minutes a day, no more. If you feel the flow accelerating beyond what you can manage, set the stone down and step away." He moves toward the stairs. "I'll walk you out."
He leads the way up. I follow, the stone heavy in my palm, his scent lifting off my clothes where I sat in his couch. Cedar and old paper. I'll carry it back to the cottage with me. Sleep in it, probably.
Wake up tomorrow with the smell of him on my pillow.
Aggressively ignoring that.
We climb the stairs in silence. Through the warded door, back into his office. He crosses the room and opens the door to the corridor for me. A small gesture. The kind a person does without thinking—or the kind this man does with absolute precision disguised as not thinking.
I step through. Turn.
He's standing in the doorway of his office.
Hands at his sides. The hallway light catches his eyes and fractures the hazel into copper and green, and he looks at me for a beat.
Then another. His tongue darts out—quick, barely there—wetting his lower lip.
The gesture is small and unconscious and so completely human that it catches me off guard, because nothing about this man has ever read as unconscious–or human–before.
Everything is calculated. Everything is chosen.
That wasn't chosen. That was something else.
"Thursday, Miss Dellaby," he says. The voice perfectly steady, betraying nothing.
"Thursday," I say.
He nods once. Steps back. The door closes between us.
I stand in the corridor for a moment. The academic building hums around me—distant footsteps, the murmur of a lecture filtering through a closed door somewhere, the wards layered into every surface.
Normal. Mundane. A regular afternoon at a regular academy, if you don't count the species of supernatural creatures, the underground library, or the vampire who can somehow hijack my magic while touching me like—
Like what, Dellaby? Like nothing. It was nothing. He was being polite. Move.
I head downstairs and push through the main doors into the afternoon light. The campus is bright and busy and completely indifferent to the fact that something just shifted inside me—small, tectonic, the kind of shift you don't feel until the furniture starts sliding.
Maybe Aamon isn't what I decided he was. The power hungry, ready to use the dog-collar monster I’d imagined. Or maybe he's exactly what I decided he was, just with better hands.
Either way, the coin is in the air.
I look down at the stone in my hand. Dark and rough and warm, the copper veins catching the afternoon light. I squeeze it against my palm—feel the weight, the hum, the residual connection from the grounding exercise still thrumming faintly through the rock.
Then… my fingertips spark again.
Bright little arcs of light crackling across my knuckles, dancing over the surface of the stone, and I stop dead in the middle of the path and stare at my own hand like it's betrayed me.
Again? Seriously?
I curl my fingers into a fist around the stone. The sparks die. My pulse is doing something stupid.
This is going to be a problem.