Page 127 of The Witch They Fear

Chapter 21

Calypso, are you okay?

The question reaches me through a wall of my own noise. Both hands flat on his coffee table, the wood hot under my palms, the herbs shivering in their bundles. The sconces on the wall are burning too bright, flaring and then dimming and then flaring again. I came down here so the answer wouldn't matter—so the only things in range when it let go would be stone and roots.

He hasn't moved.

"You need to leave." My voice scrapes. "Now. Before I—"

"No."

I look up. Aamon's at the bottom of the stairs, sleeves shoved to the elbow, the script on his forearms standing out dark in the low light. A strand of his hair has come loose from its precision and fallen across his forehead, which means he came fast, which means he followed me down here. His face gives me nothing. But his eyes are moving—the herbs, the sconces, my hands, the white sparks spitting off my knuckles—and his jaw shifts a centimeter to the left, and that centimeter is a building on fire.

"The stone won't hold this." The words tumble. "It's the testing room. It's the hotel. You're standing in the blast radius like an idiot, so go, please, I am begging you—"

"I'm aware of where I'm standing." He steps into the room.

He's doing the thing he did kneeling on this exact floor the day I cracked the resonance stone, the thing he did on Odette's porch with the whole town watching—coming toward the danger instead of away from it, slow, like I'm something he doesn't want to spook. The cold of him reaches me before he does, pushing against the heat rolling off my skin.

"You came down here so you wouldn't hurt anyone," he says. "You're already doing the work. Do the next part."

I shake my head. "There is no next part. I left the stone at the cottage, I don't even know how—"

"You don't need the stone." He stops an arm's length away. "You have me."

He won't move. He never does—never once put a wall between himself and the blast the way any creature with a survival instinct would. I want to grab him by his perfect collar and shake him. Go. Be stubborn somewhere I can't kill you. Listen to me, for once, and run.

I’m gritting my teeth, doing everything I can to hold onto my magic. "Last time it was a trickle through the stone. This is the whole river."

"Then it'll take me a moment longer to catch it." He holds his hands out between us, palms up, fingers open. The thin white scar across the left one I catalogued weeks ago. "Give me your hands."

"No." My fingers curl, my nails dragging into the wood of the table. "I'll take yours off at the wrist and not even feel it happen. I'm not putting these on you when they're like—"

He doesn't wait for the rest of the sentence. He closes the last of the space and takes them—folds his cool fingers over my burning ones and grips, and before I can rip free the current reverses.

The whole river turns. Out of my chest, down my arms, through my palms, into him, the flood rerouted in a single breath. He takes it—steady, endless—and the heat drains out of me so fast my knees give. I sag into him. I don't decide to; my body just stops bracing, lists forward, and his chest is there and his hands are the only thing holding me up. For the first time since the cemetery there's nothing in me clawing to get out.

It's the most wrong, most intimate thing I know—my own power, the thing that's only ever been mine, gone quiet inside someone else's body. And it's the first full breath I've taken in hours.

The herbs go still. Then they lean. Toward me, not away—stems angling in, the way they did the first time I fed my power into something instead of out.

The sconces settle to a gentle gold. My pulse comes down out of my ears.

He doesn't let go.

Neither do I.

I should step back. The flood's handled, the danger's gone, and I'm pressed into the line of him with my hands caught warm between us and no reason left to be this close. I should right myself, stitch myself back together in this new calm.

I don't move.

Neither does he.

His breathing has changed—slower, manual, like he’s keeping himself very measured. That loose strand of hair has fallen forward, and when he tips his head down it grazes my temple.

And my magic is climbing again.

Not a flood. Something worse.