Page 138 of The Witch They Fear

The flame collapses.

And what's left of Emric Vane sits in a pile of ash—soft and grey and weightless, on the floor, on my shoes, on the hem of the dress the girls zipped me into a few hours and a whole life ago.

Emric…

No.

He was kind.

He was so fucking kind.

That's what my mind keeps crashing into, even now, even with the ash of him still drifting down onto my shoes—he was kind. In a building full of old cruelty and ancient appetite, full of people who looked at me like a problem to be contained, Emric Vane looked at me like a person every single time. He wanted to know me, spend time with me, make me feel accepted.

And I liked him.

Carefully, the way I've learned to let myself like anything—a little at a time, braced the whole while to lose it—but I did. I had my head on his shoulder and I was happy, stupidly, for the length of a few songs. I will never get to ask the question. I will never get anything back from him again, because there is nothing left of him to give it.

I killed him.

I… murdered him.

The grief that comes for me rivals the worst thing I have ever felt.

It doesn't eclipse the hotel—nothing will ever eclipse the hotel—but it reaches down into the exact same place, the pit they kept me sedated flat for twelve years to keep me out of, and tears the lid clean off. All of it comes up at once: the guilt, the shame, the black bottomless fear, and worst of all the one thing I've been more afraid of than anything in the world, finally, actually true.

I did it again.

I reached for the gentlest person I have ever known and I turned him to ash.

My single worst nightmare, made real, with my own two hands.

And my magic does what it always does—it drinks every drop of it. Grief, horror, shame, terror, all of it pouring down into the place behind my sternum, and the heat comes roaring back up to meet it, higher than the first time, so much higher. The white floods back in at the edges of the world, sparks jumping off my hands, arms, shoulders.

The pressure stacks and stacks. A second wave is building, bigger than the one that just killed him, swelling with nowhere left to break but out—and it won’t stop at one person this time.

Nellie, three feet away on her knees.

The girls.

Every soul pressed to the walls. The whole hall about to become a whole new column of names in my file—

—and then something switches on.

A hum starts at the base of my skull, low and electric, a thing waking that was always there, injected in, sleeping, waiting. It spreads—a fine buzzing down my spine and out along every nerve, like a current somebody just sent through me—and the back of my mouth floods with a taste I'd know anywhere, blind, dead, a hundred years from now: flat and metallic and clinical, the taste of a white room and a paper cup and a hand strapping my wrist to a rail.

My body knows it before my mind can catch up. My body has twelve years of mornings that started exactly like this.

The fail-safe. The leash.

And my magic feels it coming. The hum, the wrongness, the leash powering up inside me—and instead of shrinking from it, it bucks. Surges higher. Claws harder. Twelve years of the thing throwing itself at my walls, and now it can feel the box swinging shut again, and it would sooner take the whole hall down than go back inside—so it climbs, faster, hotter, the second wave doubling on itself, racing the device to see which of them reaches me first.

No. Not this. Not this, anything but this. I'm not going back, you can't put me back—

I search around the room and finally, I find him.

Aamon.

Across the hall, where he's always been, one hand out toward me and the other—the other holding the small dark device, his thumb still pressed to it, the device the council put in my body and the key in his.