Chapter 16
I'm dreaming, and I know I'm dreaming, and I can't wake up.
There's a door in front of me. Dark wood. Brass handle worn bright at the grip. A number screwed into it at eye level, and I don't want to read it but I read it anyway.
Seven. One. Four.
I know that door. The hotel. My family…I've spent twelve years not thinking about that door.
A hand closes over the handle. Not mine—my mother's.
Her thin gold wedding band. The freckle below her ring finger knuckle.
The hand that braided my hair and put me to bed every night, and it's turning the handle, and I try to say don't but nothing comes out.
In the dream I'm thirteen. In the dream I've already learned my magic is the most dangerous thing in any room.
Open it, someone says behind me.
Not my mother. A man. Smooth, patient, close to my ear, and the wrongness of it is that I almost know the voice—almost, the way you almost catch a word in another room.
Open it, Calypso. You know how.
"I don't want to."
You never want to. And you always do.
The handle turns. The door swings in.
It isn't the hotel room on the other side.
It's the cottage—warm, gold-lit, full of people.
And I know them. Nellie's on the couch with her legs tucked under her.
Kage is leaning in the kitchen with that scarred smirk.
Aamon's near the window, hands in his pockets, watching me the way he does.
Everyone I have. Everyone I can't afford to lose.
All of them in one room, turning to look at me as the door opens, all of them starting to smile.
The pull starts behind my sternum. Low, dragging up from the deepest hottest part of me, like a struck match scraped along the inside of my spine.
I try to close it. I can't. It's already climbing, already reaching, already filling my hands the way it did that day in the hallway when I was thirteen—
"No," I say. "No, not them, please—"
Now, Calypso, the voice says, warm, patient, close to my ear. Let it go. Give them to me.
"I can't—I won't—"
You always do.
And the power leaves my hands, and Nellie's mouth opens, and the gold room goes white—
I wake up screaming.
The sound tears out of me before my eyes are open, before I know where I am, and the magic tears out right behind it—
I scramble backward until my spine hits the headboard.
Knees up, hands up, like I can hold the magic in with my arms—but it's already out, already everywhere, pouring off my skin in a flood I can't dam.
My heart slams so hard it hurts. The power fills the room and keeps coming, and I can't find the edges of my own body, can't tell where I stop and the air starts.
They were smiling. They were right there and they were smiling and I—
"No." Out loud, to the empty room, to no one. "No, no, no—"
I can't breathe right. The air's too thick, too hot, and every time I try to pull the power back in it slips through my hands like something greased and my hands are shaking, my whole body is shaking, and the only thought that will hold still is get out, get away from them, before it happens again, before you do it again—
The door to my room bursts inward.
Aamon. Shirt half-buttoned, hair wild, bare feet. Wrong—he's never wrong, never rumpled, never anything but pressed and still—and for one lurching second I don't know if he's real or if the dream followed me out.
He takes one step in and stops. His eyes move—fast, cataloguing—and I follow them without wanting to.
The water on my nightstand is at a rolling boil. The air shimmers with heat I can see. And the plants—Leopold's mansion is full of them, and every single one has turned toward the bed, stems bent past where stems are supposed to bend, leaves spread and straining.
The whole room leaning toward me like a congregation.
I hadn't even seen it. I was too busy trying not to come apart.
"Calypso." His voice cuts through. Low, even, certain. "Look at me. Not the room. Me."
"I-I can't stop it—" It comes out wrecked. "Aamon, I can't stop it, it won't go back—"
"You can." He crosses to me, no hesitation now. "You've done it before. Where are my hands?"
"What?"
"My hands. Where are they? Tell me."
"Up—" I gasp it. "Where I can see them—"
"Good." He drops to his knees on the edge of the bed, bringing us level, hands open and slow, the way you approach something that might go off. "Give me your hand."
I can't. If I touch him. If it's still pouring out of me and I touch him—
"I'll hurt you," I whisper.
"You won't. Give me your hand."
I put my hand out. He takes it and presses it flat against his bare chest, over the sternum, the way he taught me weeks ago—find something that isn't on fire and hold onto it.
His heart isn't beating. It never is. The stillness of him under my palm is its own kind of anchor, cold and certain, a stone in a flood.
"Breathe with me," he says. "In. Slow. You know how this goes."
He breathes—that deliberate, unhurried in-and-out he doesn't need and does anyway, for me—and without deciding to, my breath starts reaching for the shape of his.
In on his in. Out on his out.
"Now look at it," he says. "Not away from it. At the magic. It's just light, Calypso. It's not doing anything but pouring off your skin. Look at how much of it is just sitting there, waiting for you to tell it where to go."
I look. It's the hardest thing—every instinct says shut your eyes, curl around it, contain it—but I make myself look at the heat shimmering off my own arms, and he's right, it isn't doing anything, it's just there, and slowly, breath by breath, matched to his, the room stops leaning.
The boiling water on the nightstand goes still.
The heat draws back down into me where it belongs.
The plants stay turned toward me, every one, but they stop straining.
I let out a breath that comes apart in the middle.
"There," Aamon says, very softly. "There you are."
And the terror goes out of me all at once, the way water leaves a tub—one second I'm rigid with it and the next there's nothing holding me up.
I sway. Aamon catches me before I tip, gathering me in against his chest, and I let him, because I don't have anything left to hold myself with.
I curl into him there on the bed, my face pressed to his shoulder, my knees drawn up against his.
He's cool and solid and still, and he just holds on.
"I've got you," he says, into my hair. "I have you. You're awake. It's over."
I'm shaking. I hate that I'm shaking. I stay in his arms until it slows, until the room is just a room again, and I can breathe without it hitching.
"It was him," I say, finally, into his collarbone. "The dream. It's because of him."
He goes still under me. "Who?"
"Leopold." Saying it out loud makes it real, makes the whole night real, and it comes up out of me in a rush.
"Tonight wasn't a date. He took me to some old property. There was a vault under it, sealed with witchwork so old his telekinesis couldn’t touch it.
He needed a witch. He needed… me." My hands ball into fists against his muscled chest. "I told him no. And he—Aamon, he threatened everyone. My friends. He threatened Kage. And he threatened you. He listed everyone I have, one at a time.”
Aamon holds me tighter.
“I didn’t have a choice…” I trail off, the shaking coming back. “I opened the door for him. And on the way back, when I pushed him—when I asked what I'd helped him do—he put his hand around my throat."
He goes rigid against me.
I keep going, because if I stop I won't get through it. "He didn't hurt me. He just—held me. Dropped his fangs an inch from my face and basically told me I didn’t have a choice in the matter."
For a long moment Aamon says nothing at all. When he does, his voice has dropped somewhere low and even and terrible.
"He put his fangs to your throat." Not a question. His hand has come up to that exact place on my neck, careful, like he's checking for a mark that isn't there. "To frighten you. After he used everyone you love to make you bleed your magic dry for him."
"Aamon—"
"Where is he?" He's already shifting, already moving to set me aside, to rise off the bed. "He's in the house. He's one wing over. I'll—"
"No!" I grab a fistful of his shirt with everything I have and don't let go. "No! You can't. If you go in there furious in the middle of the night, you give him a reason to get rid of you. You hand him exactly what he wants. Don't you dare give him a reason."
He stops. I can feel the war in him, the want to go put his hands on Leopold Vassard straining against the sense of what I'm saying.
"Stay," I say, quieter. My hand flattens over his unbeating heart. "Please. Don't go. Just—stay with me. Don't leave me alone in this room tonight."
That's what does it. Not the logic. The last part.
I know he’ll stay.
He lets his weight back down. Gathers me in again, slower this time, deliberate, and I feel the fury bank itself down into something contained—not gone, just controlled, for me.
"I'm not going anywhere, Cal," he says. "I'm here."
He shifts us both back against the headboard and I go with him, tucked into his side, my legs folded under me, and his arm stays around me like it belongs there.
I'm aware, distantly, of what I'm wearing—a thin cami, sleep shorts, not much between his cool hand and my skin where it rests at my waist. He's aware of it too.
I can tell by how tense his shoulder is.
His thumb moves. Just once. A slow pass along my hipbone through the cotton, like he didn't decide to do it. The gentle touch warms me up inside and softens everything a little.