Page 137 of The Witch They Fear

"There's no down," I tell her, and my voice doesn't sound like mine. “There’s no fucking down, Nellie!” It sounds like the air before lightning. "Nellie. Get back."

She doesn't get back. Of course she doesn't. She grips harder, and I feel the heat reaching for her too, indiscriminate, hungry, and I wrench it away from her with everything I have left and it costs me the last of the holding.

And now I can feel it the way you feel a scream you can't swallow—rising, doubling, boiling up the back of my throat with a will of its own, mine to contain a breath ago and already wearing me like a glove.

The pressure crests.

White licks in at the edges of everything. The heat under my skin has gone past bearing, every nerve in me lit white at once. The hall goes far and bright and roaring, my pulse a drum the size of the room, and I am back in a hotel in Baton Rouge with my hand still warm from Lila's, watching the world tip into light, and I can't stop it, I have never once been able to stop it, I am the thing that cannot be stopped—

Calypso.

The voice arrives the way it always arrives. Down through the roar, into the warm low place that isn't on fire yet, steady and close and here.

Calypso. I've got you. Breathe. Come back to me—follow my voice, just my voice, nothing else. You can do this. You've done it before. Come back.

I can't, I tell him, and I'm crying, I think, somewhere far away my body is crying. It's too much, it's the hotel, it's happening again, I can't hold it—

You don't have to hold it. Give it to me. Reach for me and give it to me. I'm right—

And I reach. With everything left in me I reach for that voice in the dark, for Emric, for the one presence that has ever found me in here where I can't be guarded, and I think please, and I think help me, and I think don't let me—

Hands close on my arms.

Real hands. Warm, solid, here—and I open my eyes and it's him. Of course it's him. Emric, his face inches from mine, dark eyes wide and certain and unafraid, his mouth already shaping my name, his hands closing over my arms the way you'd grab someone at the edge of a cliff. He felt it. He felt me go under and he came, the way he came on the levee, the way he came every time the night went wrong. He’s put himself between me and the rest of the room and he’s reaching for me with both hands and his face isn’t afraid.

His face is kind.

No—

I see it the way you see the half-second before a car hits. My father's hand on Lila's shoulder, pulling her behind him, his body a wall against a thing no wall could stop. The heat of my power went through him like he was made of paper.

Emric is reaching for me.

The heat goes out of me all at once.

And the world ends.

There's no gentler word for what it does—it detonates, everything I've swallowed for twelve years blowing out of me in every direction at once, a wall of white fire and force that leaves my body like a bomb. The sound comes a half-beat behind it, one enormous concussive crack that I feel in my teeth and the marrow of my ribs, that I will go on hearing in the quiet for the rest of my life. The tall windows blow outward in a single sheet of glittering ruin. The candelabra tear from their chains. The whole hall heaves.

And the room full of immortals—the oldest, fastest, deadliest things on the Gulf Coast—moves on instinct quicker than thought. They throw up arms. They throw up power. They throw themselves behind overturned tables and each other, shielding, scattering, every last one of them taking cover from me the way you take cover from an explosion.

Every one of them but Emric.

Emric doesn't take cover. Emric is still holding onto me.

“No, no, no,” I scream.

He's the closest living thing to the heart of it—he put himself there, between me and all of them, both hands wrapped around my arms—and when the fire comes out of me there is nothing between us at all. He doesn't shield. He doesn't run. He never came to save himself; he came to catch me. So my magic slams into him at point-blank range, with his hands still on my arms and my name still in his mouth and his face still unafraid.

—Calypso, I'm right h—

The voice stops.

And he burns.

I watch it.

God help me, I will have watched it every day for the rest of my life. The fire catches him the way it catches paper—instant, greedy, total—and it climbs him in a roaring column of white-gold light, and for one unbearable breath he is still there inside it: the dark eyes, the red ears, the mouth still shaping the first soft sound of my name. Then there isn't enough of him left to hold a shape. He doesn't fall. There's no time to fall, nothing left to do the falling—he comes apart, burns through, the way my power burned through my father, except this time I am close enough to feel the heat of him break across my face, close enough to watch the gentlest person I have ever known go to fire, and then to light, and then to nothing, in the space of three heartbeats.