Chapter 9
The stone isn't cooperating. Or I'm not cooperating. Hard to tell the difference when your magic feels like a dog on a leash that keeps lunging at squirrels.
I'm on the couch in Aamon's underground library, the resonance stone in my palms, eyes closed, trying to channel.
Down, not out. Into the stone. The riverbed.
But the river keeps jumping its banks.
Every time I reach for the warmth behind my sternum, my brain throws me images I didn't request. Kage's hand on my wrist. The wall against my back.
Cedar and iron and his breath on my neck and God, you smell like a lit fuse and the blast and the laugh and his face looking up at me from the grass like I'd just given him a gift.
Jesus Christ I’m losing my mind.
The stone whines. I clamp down. Pull the flow back. Too hard—the channel collapses and the stone goes cold in my hands.
"Again," Aamon says. He's in his chair on the other side of the coffee table, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, watching me with that steady patience that should be reassuring and instead makes me feel like a bug under glass.
I try again. Find the warmth. Push it down. The stone hums—
Kage's voice: There she is. There's the fire.
The hum spikes. I grit my teeth and wrestle it back.
"You're distracted," Aamon says. Not a question.
"I'm fine."
"Your flow pattern is erratic. You were holding clean channels for forty-five seconds on Thursday. Right now you're losing cohesion at twelve."
"I said I'm fine."
He doesn't push. Just uncrosses his legs, leans forward slightly, and adjusts the crystal arrangement on the table—a subtle shift that changes the ambient magic in the room. I can feel it: the wards tightening, the air pressure increasing.
He's raising the difficulty.
"Extended channel," he says. "Hold for sixty seconds. Focus on the stone's resonance, not your own. Let it pull from you instead of you pushing into it."
Sixty seconds. I was struggling with twelve.
"That's—"
"You can do it. You've been building to this."
I close my eyes. Find the warmth. Hold the stone. And push.
The magic flows. Uneven at first—stuttering, lurching—but I find the rhythm. The stone hums. Twenty seconds. Thirty. My arms are burning but I hold on. Forty seconds. The flow is starting to smooth out and for a second I think I'm actually going to—
My wrist throbs. Kage's phantom grip closing around the bone.
The channel collapses. The stone goes cold. Dead weight in my hands.
"Shit." I open my eyes. The herbs on the table have gone still. The room smells like ozone and failure.
Aamon is watching me from across the table. He hasn't moved, hasn't reacted, but his head has tilted—a fraction to the left, the way it does when he's filing something away.
"Again," he says.
"I just—"
"Again."
I grit my teeth. Close my eyes. Reach for the warmth. Push it down into—
It collapses at nine seconds. The stone doesn't even hum. Just sits there like a rock, which is technically what it is, and I want to throw it across the room.
"You're overthinking it," Aamon says.
"I'm under-thinking it. That's the problem. My brain won't shut up long enough for—"
"What happened?"
The question is quiet. Direct. No warmth, no softness—as if he already knows something happened and he’s sick of us dancing around it.
"Nothing happened."
"Something happened between Thursday and today. Your control regressed significantly. Your flow is fragmented. Your emotional baseline is elevated." He says it clinically, reading me like a chart. "What changed?"
"Nothing changed. I'm just having an off day."
"Off days aren’t a thing. Patterns are." He leans forward.
Elbows on his knees. Those hazel eyes steady and unblinking and aimed at me like headlights.
"You're hiding something. Whatever it is, it's sitting between you and your magic and neither of us can work around it if you won't tell me what it is. "
My jaw clenches so hard my teeth ache. He's right.
He's right and I hate it but I’m definitely not telling him what happened last night.
I'm not telling the man with the kill switch that another man made my magic go haywire and I sort of…
maybe… liked it? That my body responded to the threat like it was an invitation.
That somewhere between the terror and the fury, heat pooled in my belly and I'm still sick about it.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
"It's personal," I say. Flat. Final.
"Your magic doesn't have a personal life, Calypso. It has triggers. If something triggered you, I need to know so I can adjust the training parameters."
"You need to know so you can write it down and hand it to Balcour."
The words land harder than I intended. His jaw does the centimeter shift. Something moves behind his eyes—something I can’t read.
"I don't report the content of our sessions to Balcour," he says. Quiet. Level. "I report progress metrics. What happens in this room stays in this room."
I stare at him. Looking for the lie. Looking for the institutional doublespeak, the careful phrasing that means one thing and delivers another.
I don't find it.
But I still don’t believe him.
"Fine," I say. "Something rattled me. Yesterday. I don't want to talk about it. Can we just—try again?"
A beat. He holds my gaze. Then nods.
"Again. Sixty seconds."
I close my eyes. Find the warmth. Push it down into the stone.
The flow starts. Uneven, shaky, but there. Ten seconds. Fifteen. The stone hums. Twenty. Twenty-five. I'm holding it together with my fingernails and my stubbornness and the very last thread of my concentration—
My wrist throbs again.
The phantom grip.
Kage's fingers, cool and hard, closing around the bone.
The memory is so vivid my body reacts before my brain can intercept—a spike of adrenaline, a flash of heat, and my magic lurches sideways.
The stone screams. The copper veins blaze white-hot. The herbs on the table start shaking—stalks rattling against the wood—and the sconces flare so bright the room goes orange.
"Calypso—" Aamon is out of his chair. Around the table in two strides, his hand reaching for mine—
"Don't touch me."
I wrench away from him. My shoulder hits the armrest of the couch. The stone tumbles from my hands and hits the floor with a crack that echoes through the room like a gunshot.
He reaches for me again.
“Don’t!”
He stops. Hand still extended. Hazel eyes locked on mine. I watch him decide—press or retreat, help or let go. His fingers flex once. Then he pulls his hand back.
"Okay," he says. Quiet. "Okay. Breathe. Find another—"
But there is no other anchor. The stone is on the floor. My magic is still spiking—building in my chest with nowhere to go, no channel, no riverbed, just a flood ripping through me with no direction and no exit and I can't do this again, I can't break another room, I can't kill again, I can’t—
The sparks increase, my palms are burning hot, the room is closing in.
I grab my own forearms.
Both hands. Fingers wrapping around skin, gripping hard, and I squeeze. Force the magic down, into my arms, through my palms, into the only surface I can reach.
My own body.
The magic obeys. It floods through my palms and into my forearms and—
“Calypso, NO!”
I scream.
The pain is immediate. White-hot and blinding and everywhere—my magic burning through my own skin, searing into muscle, and I can feel it, I can smell it, the sick-sweet char of burning flesh, and I'm screaming and I can't stop and my hands won't let go because if I let go the magic goes back to looking for something else to destroy—
The pain is blinding and it’s all I can focus on until finally, finally…
It dims. Flickers.
Goes out.
Like blowing out a candle. One second the inferno is roaring through my forearms and the next it's gone—just gone—leaving behind a silence so total it has weight.
I let go.
My hands fall away from my arms. I look down.
Burns. Deep, red, raw, already blistering. The skin is peeling at the edges, angry and wet, and the pattern is unmistakable. Handprints. My own handprints, ten fingers seared into the flesh of my forearms like a brand. Like someone grabbed me and held on while I cooked from the inside out.
Except the someone was me.
My vision blurs. Tears—hot, immediate, unstoppable.
My hands shake in front of me as I see what I’ve done…
I'm a monster.
It's not even a thought. It's older than that—a truth that's been living in my marrow since I was thirteen, since I woke up in rubble with eleven bodies and the understanding that I would never be safe to love, safe to hold, safe to stand next to in a crowded room.
I just set myself on fire because the alternative was setting him on fire—Aamon, three feet away, reaching for me to help—and the fact that I consider self-immolation a win tells me everything.
I don't want to be this.
I don't want to be the girl with the body count, the witch who kills everything she touches.
I want a life. I want to sit in a classroom and argue about theory and eat bad bread rolls and have a friend who bumps my shoulder.
But wanting doesn't change what I am, and what I am is a loaded gun that keeps going off in rooms full of people I don't want to hurt.
I bolt for the door.
Aamon is already there.
Vampire speed—one second he's by the couch, the next he's at the exit, filling the doorframe with his shoulders, one hand flat against the wall.
His composure is different. The usual stillness has something underneath it—tight, strained, a cable being pulled taut.
His jaw is set so hard I can see the muscle jumping beneath his skin.
"Show me your arms," he says. Low. Controlled. But his voice has an edge I haven't heard before—something raw pressing against the professional surface.
"Move."
"Show me your arms, Calypso."
"Move." My voice breaks on the word. The tears are falling now and I can't stop them and I refuse to stand here crying in front of this man with my own handprints burned into my skin. "Get out of my way."