Page 35 of The Witch They Fear

"Calypso."

I’m losing it. I’m about to blow. I can feel it.

"Calypso,” Aamon repeats.

So can he.

I brace for the fail-safe. My shoulders lock. My jaw clenches. Every muscle in my body prepares for the white, the erasure, the hand pushing me under—

He's around the coffee table in one stride, dropping to his knees beside me. His hand closes over mine.

Both of them. His palms press flat against the backs of my hands where they're wrapped around the stone, his fingers curling over my knuckles. The contact is sudden and total—skin on skin, his hands large enough to cover mine completely, cool and firm.

And then I feel something impossible.

My magic—the flood, the surge, the uncontrolled torrent pouring down my arms—reverses. Flows backward. Out of the stone, through my hands, up my arms, and into him. Not ripped away like the fail-safe. Not severed. Drawn. Like he opened a door inside himself and my magic walked through it willingly.

The sensation is—

Wrong. Intimate. Devastating.

It's hearing your own voice played back to you from someone else's mouth. It's seeing your reflection move independently of your body. My magic, my power, the thing that lives behind my sternum and has only ever been mine—is inside him. I can feel it there, the way you feel a word on the tip of your tongue. He's holding it. Not squeezing, not suppressing. Holding. The way the fail-safe holds it but gentler—infinitely gentler—the difference between a squeezing fist and a cupped palm.

The spike recedes. The stone's whine drops back to a hum. The sconces steady. The wards settle.

His hands stay on mine. Three seconds. Four. The cool of his palms, the pressure of his fingers against my knuckles, the impossible sensation of my own magic resting inside another person's body.

Then he lets go.

Stands.

My heart is pounding in my chest.

He moves back to his chair on the other side of the coffee table and clasps his hands behind him—a deliberate gesture, putting his hands somewhere I can see them, somewhere neutral.

Professional.

His sleeves have ridden up and I can see his forearms clearly for the first time—the tattoos I've only caught glimpses of before. Up close, they're not what I expected. Not decorative. Not artistic. They're script. Characters from a language I've never seen, angular and precise, running in lines down the inside of both forearms like text on a page. Some of the ink is dark and sharp—recent, or at least newer. Other lines are softer, slightly blurred with age, the way tattoos get after decades. Centuries, maybe. Like he's been writing on himself for a very long time, and the older entries are fading into his skin while new ones are still being added.

I stare at them for a beat too long. He turns and pulls his sleeves down. Smooth. Unhurried. A door closed as quietly as it was opened.

"What was that?" My voice comes out rougher than I want. "What did you just do?"

"I redirected the excess energy through physical contact." He says it so casually.

My pulse is still running hot—I can feel it in my wrists, my throat, the hollow behind my ears. My hands are still buzzing where his fingers pressed against my knuckles, a residual pressure.

"It's a form of channeled absorption. Your magic was overloading the anchor, so I provided an alternative conduit until the flow stabilized."

"That's what your classified ability is? You can... absorb magic?"

"I can mirror it." He says this carefully. Choosing words the way he chooses everything—deliberately. "Temporarily reflect a practitioner's energy back to them in a regulated form. It allows me to modulate output without suppressing the source."

"Without the fail-safe."

"Without the fail-safe."

I stare at him. He stands there, hands clasped behind his back, hazel eyes steady, face composed, posture textbook—everything about him screaming professional distance while the ghost of his palms is still on my knuckles.