Page 16 of The Witch They Fear

"Stop."

The room shakes. Not a tremor—a convulsion. The ward-lines blaze so bright they leave afterimages—and then one of them cracks. The containment circle that held during the second test, that kept my blast locked inside like a cage—it fractures. My magic pours through the gap like water through a broken dam. Something in the ceiling gives way. Dust and stone chips rain down. Balcour's table slides a foot across the floor. The lights flicker and die and come back wrong, buzzing and spitting.

The rope is gone. The counting is gone. I'm thirteen and the hallway is collapsing and my hands are white-hot and someone is screaming and it's me, it's always been me—

Through the chaos, through the dust and the blazing wards and the sound of stone splitting, I see Aamon's hand move.

Slow. Deliberate. Into his pocket.

No—

The back of my neck detonates.

Not hums. Not pulses. Detonates—a white-hot explosion at the base of my skull that rips down my spine like a lit fuse and sinks its teeth into the power in my chest. The fail-safe doesn't suppress my magic. It devours it. I can feel it feeding—pulling the heat out of my sternum in great, greedy gulps, and every inch of power it swallows is replaced by pain. Not the sharp, clean pain of impact. The deep kind. The bone kind. The kind that locks every muscle and turns every nerve ending into a live wire and makes the air in my lungs feel like glass.

I hear myself scream.

Not a choice. Not a word. A sound ripped from somewhere animal and involuntary—the sound a body makes when it's being unmade from the inside out. My legs go first. Then my arms. I hit the stone floor and my teeth crack together and I can't stop screaming because the fail-safe is still going, still eating, still reaching deeper—

And then the images come.

Mom's face. Not the way I remember it—laughing, rolling her eyes at the dinner table—but the way I last saw it. The way it looked in the half-second between the power leaving my hands and the wall behind her ceasing to exist. Mouth open. Eyes wide. Not with fear. With something worse.

Recognition.

She knew it was me. In that last instant, she knew.

Dad reaching for Lila. His hand on her shoulder, pulling her behind him, like his body could stop what was coming. It couldn't. Nothing could. The heat of my power went through him like he was made of paper.

Lila.

Lila.

Nine years old and looking at me—looking right at me—and I can't tell if the expression on her face is terror or confusion because the memory burns white at the edges and then burns white everywhere and I'm gone, I'm nowhere, I'm—

Floor. Cold.

My cheek is on the stone. My throat is raw. The screaming has stopped but only because my voice gave out, not because the pain did. Every muscle in my body is firing—twitching, seizing, my fingers clawing against the floor without my permission, my breath coming in short, hitching gasps that sound like drowning.

The fail-safe hums at the base of my skull. Satisfied. Settling back into dormancy like something fed.

Slowly—too slowly—the pain recedes. Not gone. Banked. I realize each exhale out of my mouth sounds like a pathetic groan as my body labors through the last of the pain. Pulled back to a low, throbbing ache that sits in my joints and the backs of my eyes and the hollow place behind my sternum where my magic used to be. It's still there—I can feel it, faint and distant, like a heartbeat heard through a wall. But the connection is severed. The sun is gone. There's just the hole.

And shoes. Black boots, scuffed at the toe, three feet from my face.

Aamon.

He's crouched beside me. Not touching me—his hands are on his own knees, held carefully away from my body. Close enough that I can see the individual threads of copper and green in his hazel eyes, and the thin white scar on his left hand, and the way his jaw is set—tight, controlled, holding something back.

He's just... watching me.

Some broken, desperate part of me—the part that's still on the floor of a hotel hallway at thirteen, the part that waited for someone to come and hold her and tell her it would be okay and nobody ever did—wants him to say something. Ask if I'm all right. Put a hand on my shoulder. Anything. Any small, human acknowledgment that what just happened to me was wrong and that he sees it and that he's sorry.

He doesn't.

He just watches. Those hazel eyes, steady and patient and giving me absolutely nothing, and the realization lands like a second detonation—

He did this.