Page 130 of The Witch They Fear

Banked down to a coal. I reach for it the way Aamon taught me, gentle, braced for the lurch, and instead it comes to my hand soft and obedient, a thread fine enough to put through a needle.

On the coffee table, the bundles of dried herbs have leaned in toward me on their stems, leaves reaching, the way a whole room turns to catch a sound it's been waiting on.

I let the warmth settle. Hold it. Let it go.

Nothing breaks.

Margo was right. The thought lands soft and a little dangerous. The healing-track lecture from the dorm—the control you're looking for is on the other side of letting yourself feel things, not the other side of refusing to. I let myself feel something last night. I let myself be touched on purpose. And my magic woke up truly quiet for the first time in twelve years.

It should scare me more than it does.

"You're awake."

I startle—just enough that the herbs shiver—and there he is. Across the room, by the bookshelf, sleeves rolled to the elbow, that ancient script standing dark on his forearms. His hair's come loose again, one strand fallen across his forehead, and he's looking at me so intensely my heart skips a beat.

"Did you stay up there all night?" My voice comes out gravel.

"I wasn't going to leave you alone." Simple. No performance. "You went under fast. You needed it."

But he wasn’t even down here. “How do you–”

“I can hear your heartbeat, Calypso.”

“Oh,” I murmur.

I look at his hands before I can stop myself—the same hands that were in my hair a few hours ago, that have held my whole interior cupped in his palms more than once, that wrapped around mine on this exact table and reversed the river before it could drown someone. Careful with everything, those hands.

I drag my eyes up. He's already watching me look.

"So," I say.

"So," he says.

And then the door starts to close.

I watch it happen in real time, the way I've watched it happen a dozen times—on the porch in Thibodaux, in the doorway after the ward, every other day across this coffee table. The jaw resetting. The shoulders squaring. The warmth banking back down behind the hazel until he's the professor again, composed and unreadable and six feet away without having moved an inch.

"Calypso." His voice goes level. Measured. Each word chosen like everything he does. "Last night—"

"Don't." It's out before I mean it. "If the next words are was a mistake, I'll set this couch on fire, and I'm finally good enough to do it on purpose."

Something moves at the corner of his mouth—the ghost of where a smile would go, if he ever let one finish.

"It wasn't a mistake." A pause. His thumb presses into the center of his opposite palm, that tell I catalogued the first day in Leyonna's office. "A mistake is something you do without meaning to. I knew exactly what I was doing. That's the part you should be afraid of."

"Afraid of you," I say, "or afraid of me?"

He doesn't answer that. He looks at me like he's standing at the edge of something, and for one suspended second I think he's going to step off it—tell me the thing, whatever the thing is, the locked room behind the locked room.

I want so badly to know. I’m leaning slightly forward, ready to know whatever he wants to tell me.

"There's something I—" he starts.

And stops.

The crack I just saw goes quiet and flat and shut, water closing over a dropped stone like it was never there.

"You should eat," he says instead. "And you have your first Revel to get ready for."