Page 48 of The Witch They Fear

The magic flows. Uneven at first—stuttering, lurching—but I find the rhythm. The stone hums. Twenty seconds. Thirty. My arms are burning but I hold on. Forty seconds. The flow is starting to smooth out and for a second I think I'm actually going to—

My wrist throbs. Kage's phantom grip closing around the bone.

The channel collapses. The stone goes cold. Dead weight in my hands.

"Shit." I open my eyes. The herbs on the table have gone still. The room smells like ozone and failure.

Aamon is watching me from across the table. He hasn't moved, hasn't reacted, but his head has tilted—a fraction to the left, the way it does when he's filing something away.

"Again," he says.

"I just—"

"Again."

I grit my teeth. Close my eyes. Reach for the warmth. Push it down into—

It collapses at nine seconds. The stone doesn't even hum. Just sits there like a rock, which is technically what it is, and I want to throw it across the room.

"You're overthinking it," Aamon says.

"I'm under-thinking it. That's the problem. My brain won't shut up long enough for—"

"What happened?"

The question is quiet. Direct. No warmth, no softness—as if he already knows something happened and he’s sick of us dancing around it.

"Nothing happened."

"Something happened between Thursday and today. Your control regressed significantly. Your flow is fragmented. Your emotional baseline is elevated." He says it clinically, reading me like a chart. "What changed?"

"Nothing changed. I'm just having an off day."

"Off days aren’t a thing. Patterns are." He leans forward. Elbows on his knees. Those hazel eyes steady and unblinking and aimed at me like headlights. "You're hiding something. Whatever it is, it's sitting between you and your magic and neither of us can work around it if you won't tell me what it is."

My jaw clenches so hard my teeth ache. He's right. He's right and I hate it but I’m definitely not telling him what happened last night. I'm not telling the man with the kill switch that another man made my magic go haywire and I sort of… maybe… liked it? That my body responded to the threat like it was an invitation. That somewhere between the terror and the fury, heat pooled in my belly and I'm still sick about it.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

"It's personal," I say. Flat. Final.

"Your magic doesn't have a personal life, Calypso. It has triggers. If something triggered you, I need to know so I can adjust the training parameters."

"You need to know so you can write it down and hand it to Balcour."

The words land harder than I intended. His jaw does the centimeter shift. Something moves behind his eyes—something I can’t read.

"I don't report the content of our sessions to Balcour," he says. Quiet. Level. "I report progress metrics. What happens in this room stays in this room."

I stare at him. Looking for the lie. Looking for the institutional doublespeak, the careful phrasing that means one thing and delivers another.

I don't find it.

But I still don’t believe him.

"Fine," I say. "Something rattled me. Yesterday. I don't want to talk about it. Can we just—try again?"

A beat. He holds my gaze. Then nods.