Page 56 of The Witch They Fear

My magic ignites. But wrong—wrong direction, wrong texture. Instead of the spike or the spiral, a warmth blooms in my gut and radiates outward through my veins like liquid sunlight, flooding my arms, my hands, my fingertips. I can feel the burns responding. The damaged tissue waking up. The blisters deflating as new cells multiply underneath them, pushing the dead skin aside, and the pain—the constant, throbbing, four-day companion—drains away like water through a sieve.

I look down. Past his wrist at my mouth, past the arm banded around my stomach, to my own forearms pinned against my body. I can see it happening. The angry red fading to pink. The blistered edges smoothing flat. The handprint pattern—my handprint pattern, my fingers, my choice, the thing I kept—dissolving. Disappearing. My skin knitting itself whole and unblemished like the burns never existed.

He's erasing them. His chest is a slab of cold marble against my spine and his blood is in my throat and my scars are gone and I can't breathe.

He lets go.

I pitch forward. Catch myself against the shed wall, both palms flat on the wood, and retch—hard, convulsive, my body trying to purge what it already absorbed. His blood comes up in strings of dark red that splatter the dirt between my boots. I spit. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and the smear is obscene against my skin—dark, wet, still warm.

I can taste him. In the back of my throat, in the gaps between my teeth, in the lining of my esophagus. He's in me now. Different from the voice—that's a presence between thoughts, warm and uninvited. This is biological. Chemical. His blood in my veins, rewriting my tissue, claiming my cells one by one.

I look at my forearms. Smooth. Pink. New.

The handprints are gone. The scars I chose, the reminder I wanted, the proof that I could hurt myself instead of someone else—gone. Replaced by blank, unmarked skin that has no memory of what I did in Aamon's basement two days ago.

I run my fingers along the soft, fresh skin.

He took them from me.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" My voice is wrecked. Shredded. I'm still hunched over, still spitting blood, and my eyes are burning and I can't tell if it's rage or tears.

"What's wrong with you?" He's standing three feet away, wrist already healing, the bite mark closing. His eyes are blazing—storm-blue gone electric, stripped of every layer of charm and bravado and teasing. This is Kage without the mask. Raw. Angry. "You can heal in a second. One mouthful and it's gone. And you choose to wrap yourself in gauze and suffer?" His voice cracks. "Do you dream of it too? Ending it? Is that what this is?"

The question lands in my chest and detonates. I straighten up. Wipe my mouth again.

"No. That's not—I kept them because I wanted to remember—"

"Remember what? That you're dangerous? You think you need a reminder?" He steps forward. "You think you're going to forget what you are if your skin heals?"

"Stay away from me." I hold up my hands. "Forever. Don't come near my cottage. Don't touch me. Don't even—"

"If I were free…"

He says it like a confession. Like a prayer. Like a man uncorking something that's been fermenting for centuries and watching it spill across the floor. The anger is still there but something else is rising through it, raw and aching and exposed.

"If I were free—if I could take a witch—I would bind you to me for eternity and never let you go."

The words hang between us. My chest rises and falls as I try desperately to catch my breath. I wish I could walk away, but…

"If you were free?" I say it carefully. Testing the weight. "What does that mean—if you were free?"

His jaw locks. The storm-blue eyes go flat.

No… it makes sense now. The correction from my first training session. The way he’s compelled to take orders like some kind of slave.

"Why does Midus treat you like that?" I push. Because I can't help it. Because a part of me has been wondering and I can’t make out what any of this means. "You're not a student. You're not staff. He hits you with a staff in front of forty people and calls you like a dog and you go. Why?"

Nothing. His body is rigid. A vein pulses in his neck.

"What are you to him, Kage?"

Nothing.

"You're some brow-beaten beast of burden?" The words taste cruel coming out of my mouth but I can't stop them because he forced his blood down my throat and ripped off my bandages and took my scars without asking and I'm so angry I could burn this shed to the ground. "You've been tamed? Midus whistles and you heel. He points and you fetch. He hits you and you take it and then you come find me in the dark because I'm the one person on this campus lower on the food chain than you are, and that makes you feel like a man again?"

His anger doesn't flare. It erupts.

He seems to grow—shoulders broadening, the muscles in his arms and chest straining against his shirt, the tattoos standing out like black fire against his skin. Something ancient rises behind his eyes. Something chained and enormous and barely, barely contained. The air pressure around him changes. The temperature drops. The shadows under the oaks lean toward him like they're being pulled.