Chapter 3 #3
The heat spikes. I grab it. Clamp down. In for four. Out for four. Count the points of contact. Boots on the floor. Hands at my sides. Fingers—curl them. Feel the nails against the palms.
"The event originated from Room 714, occupied by the Dellaby family: Titus Dellaby, age forty-one. Catherine Dellaby, age thirty-eight. Lila Dellaby, age nine."
Mom. Dad. Lila.
Their names in his mouth. In this room. Read off a piece of paper by a man who hardly dares to look me in the eye.
In for four. Out for four. Hold it. Hold it. You are not thirteen. You are not in that hotel. You are standing in a stone room and the floor is cold and your name is Calypso and you are here, you are HERE—
"And Calypso Dellaby, age thirteen. The source of the event."
The floor is vibrating. I can feel it through my boots—a low tremor that starts where I'm standing and radiates outward. The cracked stone groans. The ward-lines are glowing again, brighter this time, the containment working harder.
I'm losing. The grounding is slipping—the counting, the contact points, all of it sliding away like a rope through wet hands. The heat in my chest isn't listening to me. It's listening to Balcour's voice and the names he's reading and the number he's about to say.
"Stop," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like something underwater. "Please."
He doesn't stop.
"The resulting energy discharge caused structural collapse across the seventh floor and partial collapse of the sixth. Eleven fatalities confirmed, including all three members of—"
"Stop."
The room shakes. Not a tremor—a convulsion.
The ward-lines blaze so bright they leave afterimages—and then one of them cracks.
The containment circle that held during the second test, that kept my blast locked inside like a cage—it fractures.
My magic pours through the gap like water through a broken dam.
Something in the ceiling gives way. Dust and stone chips rain down.
Balcour's table slides a foot across the floor.
The lights flicker and die and come back wrong, buzzing and spitting.
The rope is gone. The counting is gone. I'm thirteen and the hallway is collapsing and my hands are white-hot and someone is screaming and it's me, it's always been me—
Through the chaos, through the dust and the blazing wards and the sound of stone splitting, I see Aamon's hand move.
Slow. Deliberate. Into his pocket.
No—
The back of my neck detonates.
Not hums. Not pulses. Detonates—a white-hot explosion at the base of my skull that rips down my spine like a lit fuse and sinks its teeth into the power in my chest. The fail-safe doesn't suppress my magic.
It devours it. I can feel it feeding—pulling the heat out of my sternum in great, greedy gulps, and every inch of power it swallows is replaced by pain.
Not the sharp, clean pain of impact. The deep kind.
The bone kind. The kind that locks every muscle and turns every nerve ending into a live wire and makes the air in my lungs feel like glass.
I hear myself scream.
Not a choice. Not a word. A sound ripped from somewhere animal and involuntary—the sound a body makes when it's being unmade from the inside out.
My legs go first. Then my arms. I hit the stone floor and my teeth crack together and I can't stop screaming because the fail-safe is still going, still eating, still reaching deeper—
And then the images come.
Mom's face. Not the way I remember it—laughing, rolling her eyes at the dinner table—but the way I last saw it. The way it looked in the half-second between the power leaving my hands and the wall behind her ceasing to exist. Mouth open. Eyes wide. Not with fear. With something worse.
Recognition.
She knew it was me. In that last instant, she knew.
Dad reaching for Lila. His hand on her shoulder, pulling her behind him, like his body could stop what was coming. It couldn't. Nothing could. The heat of my power went through him like he was made of paper.
Lila.
Lila.
Nine years old and looking at me—looking right at me—and I can't tell if the expression on her face is terror or confusion because the memory burns white at the edges and then burns white everywhere and I'm gone, I'm nowhere, I'm—
Floor. Cold.
My cheek is on the stone. My throat is raw.
The screaming has stopped but only because my voice gave out, not because the pain did.
Every muscle in my body is firing—twitching, seizing, my fingers clawing against the floor without my permission, my breath coming in short, hitching gasps that sound like drowning.
The fail-safe hums at the base of my skull. Satisfied. Settling back into dormancy like something fed.
Slowly—too slowly—the pain recedes. Not gone.
Banked. I realize each exhale out of my mouth sounds like a pathetic groan as my body labors through the last of the pain.
Pulled back to a low, throbbing ache that sits in my joints and the backs of my eyes and the hollow place behind my sternum where my magic used to be.
It's still there—I can feel it, faint and distant, like a heartbeat heard through a wall.
But the connection is severed. The sun is gone. There's just the hole.
And shoes. Black boots, scuffed at the toe, three feet from my face.
Aamon.
He's crouched beside me. Not touching me—his hands are on his own knees, held carefully away from my body.
Close enough that I can see the individual threads of copper and green in his hazel eyes, and the thin white scar on his left hand, and the way his jaw is set—tight, controlled, holding something back.
He's just... watching me.
Some broken, desperate part of me—the part that's still on the floor of a hotel hallway at thirteen, the part that waited for someone to come and hold her and tell her it would be okay and nobody ever did—wants him to say something.
Ask if I'm all right. Put a hand on my shoulder.
Anything. Any small, human acknowledgment that what just happened to me was wrong and that he sees it and that he's sorry.
He doesn't.
He just watches. Those hazel eyes, steady and patient and giving me absolutely nothing, and the realization lands like a second detonation—
He did this.
His hand. His pocket. His thumb on the button. He watched Balcour read my family's names off a piece of paper and then he reached into his pocket and he pressed the button and I screamed and hit the floor and relived the worst night of my life and he's crouching here like he's waiting for a bus.
The rage comes so fast it nearly blacks me out.
It rises through the emptiness the fail-safe left behind—hot and jagged and ugly, filling the hole where my magic was with something just as dangerous. My hands stop twitching. My jaw locks.
Every broken, yearning thing inside me turns to iron.
"Was that fun for you?" I spit blood onto the stone. My voice is a wreck—hoarse, shaking, barely held together. "Watching the witch break on command? Big moment for you—must feel good to remind everyone what a vampire can do to someone like me with the push of a button."
He doesn't flinch. He doesn't stiffen.
I push harder. I want him to crack. I want to see something real on that face, even if it's ugly—especially if it's ugly.
"You didn't even blink when I walked in, did you?
Not scared. Not impressed. Just another witch to manage.
" I drag myself upright, wiping blood from my lip with the back of my hand.
"Tell me, Professor—is this what you signed up for?
Putting witches on the floor so the council can feel safe?
Or did you actually have to audition for the job? "
Nothing. He gives me nothing. His jaw is still set.
His eyes are still on me—hazel, steady, patient, ancient—and his hands are still on his own knees, and he doesn't defend himself.
The restraint is so total, so absolute, that it's louder than anything he could say.
And I hate it. I hate it more than I would hate anger, because anger I could fight.
This—this stillness—I can't even find the wall to throw myself against.
"The assessment is complete," he says. Quiet. Level. Like I didn't just try to flay him alive with my mouth.
I get to my feet. My knees almost buckle and I lock them as I stand there, swaying, blood on my face and dust in my hair and the fail-safe purring at the base of my skull.
The room is wrecked. Cracks in the floor, cracks in the walls, cracks in the ceiling.
A chunk of stone the size of a textbook lying in the middle of the ward-circle. The lights still buzzing wrong.
I did this. I always do this.
Balcour closes his folder. Caps his pen.
"Well," he says, with the energy of a man wrapping up a quarterly report, "that's approximately what we expected.
" He tucks the folder under his arm. "The results will be included in my first monthly submission to the council.
Miss Dellaby, you're free to attend your first class.
Magic Theory, Room 204, in—" he checks his watch—"forty minutes. "
I stare at him.
That's what we expected.
The test was never about whether I'd succeed.
It was about documenting how I'd fail. Three exercises designed to prove what my file already said—that I can't create without destroying, can't defend without detonating, can't feel without breaking.
They brought me down here, poked every wound I have, and wrote down what happened.
This wasn't an exam. It was a ledger entry.
"Forty minutes," I repeat. My voice is flat. Dead. The sharpness that's been carrying me since yesterday is gone, burned out, replaced by something grey and heavy.
"Professor Aamon will escort you upstairs," Balcour says. Already leaving.
I don't look at Aamon. I walk toward the door.