Page 126 of The Witch They Fear

"No. It's not."

I slap him. Or I mean to—my hand comes up fast and aimed at that scarred, smug, beautiful face—

—and he catches my wrist out of the air without looking, the way he caught it the first time, cool fingers closing absolute around the bone. Then he pulls, and the trees blur, and my palm lands flat against his chest with no space left between us at all.

He goes still. Dips his head. And I feel him breathe me in, slow, his nose grazing the side of my throat just next to the bandage, and the sound he makes is low and wrecked and not on purpose.

"Fuck," he breathes against my skin. "You smell—" His hand spreads warm across my lower back. "Holy fuck, Hex. You smell divine. Like a storm about to break."

And for one second—one stupid, traitorous second—I let it happen. The pull inside me wins. I lean into the cool press of him, into the cedar and the iron, into the way my whole restless body sings against his like it found the thing it was looking for.

His breath catches. My eyes fall shut.

And the fist still pressed to his chest curls into his shirt and drags, pulls him down toward me like I want—

Then my magic flares.

Not a spark. A surge—white-hot, all at once, roaring up out of me, and the air between us cracks with heat and a candle-bright light blooms under my skin where my hand fists his shirt and I feel the scorch of it start—

I shove back so hard I nearly go down.

We stare at each other, both breathing like we ran here. There's a handprint of pale char on his shirt where my fist was. He's grinning—of course he's grinning, the lunatic, like I just handed him a gift—but I'm not, because the heat hasn't gone anywhere. The surge didn't spend itself. It liked that. I can feel it pacing the inside of my ribs, hunting the next way out.

"No," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine. "No. I can't—I can't do this."

"Hex—"

"I can't do this."

And I run.

The magic runs with me, hot and bright and wanting, and the whole way I'm doing the math I always do—where are the people, where are the walls, how far to somewhere I can come apart without taking anyone down with me.

I have to get somewhere safe. I don’t know what my magic is capable of doing when it detonates and I can’t–I won’t–hurt anyone else.

That’s when I remember. Aamon’s office… his lair.

I change directions and sprint like my life depends on it.

The academic building is dark and locked, emptied by the vigil, and I don't slow down. I get a hand on the side door, find it locked, and I don't have the steadiness to be careful—I put my shoulder and a thread of the thing clawing up my throat into it, and the lock gives with a sound like a snapped bone. Then I'm inside, in the hush of the empty corridor, taking the stairs to his office two at a time.

His door isn't even the hard part. I've stood outside it a dozen mornings; I know the give of it. I break the lock the way I broke the last one and I'm through—across the office, to the narrow stair behind the bookcase that drops through the warded door into the dark, warm underground where he taught me to put this surge of magic somewhere it can't kill anyone.

The wards close over my skin as I go down, dense and humming, and the room at the bottom takes me in the way it always does: low ceiling, sconces guttering to life, the wall of books, the sagging couch, the table with its crystals and its stones, the smell of him in all of it—old paper and cedar and woodsmoke. I drop to my knees at the table and slam my hands down flat and shut my eyes and push—down, down, the way he showed me, take the weight, take it, take it before it takes someone—

Too much. Too fast. The wooden table warps in my hands and the wards flare and the heat keeps climbing and for one terrible second I'm thirteen again, hands full of fire, people I love in the room—

The warded door at the top of the stairs opens.

I don't have to look. The air goes dense and certain, and his voice comes down the stairwell quiet and unhurried and somehow already here, like he's been on his way to me the whole time.

"Calypso."

Not Miss Dellaby. Not tonight.

I look up to see Aamon with his eyes blazing.

“Calypso, are you okay?”