Page 14 of The Witch They Fear

I crouch down. The skirt rides up and I tug it back toward my knees. The stone floor is cold against my shins. I can feel Aamon's gaze on the top of my head, and behind him, the scratch-scratch-scratch of Balcour's pen.

I reach for my magic. Carefully. Gently. The way I reached for it in the kitchen, before the—

Don't.

I find the warmth. Guide it down my arm. Into my hand. Toward the seed on the floor.

Gently. Gently. Just a little. Just enough.

The seed cracks.

Not sprouts—cracks. Splits clean in half with a sound like a knuckle popping, and then crumbles. The two halves collapse into dust on the stone floor. The faintest wisp of green—a root tip, maybe, trying to emerge—withers and curls in on itself.

Shit.

I killed it. I poured too much in and the seed couldn't hold it and I killed it. The simplest thing. The thing children do. And I turned it to ash.

My face is hot. Not magic-hot—shame-hot. The kind of heat that starts in the chest and climbs to the ears and sits there, pulsing. I don't look at Aamon. I don't look at Balcour. I look at the dust on the floor that used to be a living thing before I touched it and my jaw clenches.

Story of my life.

Across from me, Balcour's pen: scratch, scratch.

One test down, two to go, and that sound is already making me want to commit a felony.

"It's all right," Aamon says. His voice hasn't changed. Same low, level tone. He could be commenting on the weather. "Second exercise. Stand up."

I stand. My knees are stiff. My hands are fists at my sides.

"I'm going to activate a training ward," he says. "It will send a controlled burst of energy toward you. Your task is to block it. Shield yourself. That's all."

He moves to a stone pedestal I hadn't noticed against the wall—knee-high, carved with the same silver ward-lines as the floor. A focus stone sits on top, dark and smooth, about the size of a fist.

Aamon places his hand on the stone. Rolls his sleeves first—a fluid, unhurried motion, forearm tattoos surfacing beneath the bunched fabric—and then his fingers close around the focus stone and the room changes. The air pressure shifts. The ward-lines in the floor pulse once, twice, and something gathers in the stone beneath his hand—a buildup, a coiling, energy being drawn from the wards and compressed into a single point.

He looks at me. "Ready?"

I'm not. "Sure."

He activates the stone.

The burst crosses the room fast—a ripple of compressed force that races along the ward-lines and hits my chest like a flat palm. Not hard. I can tell even mid-impact that it was calibrated, measured, exactly enough to test and not enough to harm.

My magic doesn't shield.

My magic detonates.

The response is instant, involuntary, and catastrophic. The power behind my sternum rips outward—not a shield, not a wall, a blast. A concussive wave that erupts from my body in every direction. Aamon's controlled burst doesn't just get blocked. It gets annihilated. Swallowed by something ten times its size and obliterated.

The ward-lines in the floor blaze white. The stone cracks—a spiderweb of fractures racing outward from where I'm standing, just like the countertop, just like the—

The hotel. The seventh floor. The hallway collapsing.

My stomach drops through the floor. I didn't block. I didn't defend. I annihilated. The exact same response my magic had twelve years ago when it killed eleven people—threatened, so it destroyed everything in every direction without asking me first. That's my body's only answer to danger: more danger.

The containment wards scream—a high, keening frequency that vibrates in my teeth—and then the wave hits the magic-made protective ring and rebounds.

Dust falls from the ceiling. A chunk of stone the size of my fist dislodges and crashes to the floor.