Page 16 of The Witch They Crave

"That was good."

Jesus. What an asshole.

"That was not good. That was me almost—" I press my fists against my thighs. "That was enough."

"You put it out." He says it like it’s obvious. "It started to climb and you closed it down before it got away from you. Four days ago that would've taken the roof off. Just now it took you a breath."

"Barely." I shake out my hands like I can shake the memory of the light off them. "I barely cracked the channel open. That's not control, that's me being too scared to turn the tap the rest of the way."

"That's still you deciding where it stops. You never give yourself an inch of credit for the part you actually do."

"Yeah, well." I release my hands and shake them a bit, letting the rest of my fear shake off with it. "No one was reading the file of my pre-teen murder scene. Congratulate me when I can do it without picturing a funeral."

He lets me go. But when I'm nearly to the doorway of my room he says, low, "Don't practice on your own."

I stop.

"Not yet. Not down here by yourself in the middle of the night when you can't sleep and you get an idea." His voice is firm. "Reaching for it takes you somewhere close to the dreams. If it slips while you're alone, there's no one to pull it back but you, and you're not there yet. Wait for me. That's all."

I don’t answer him. He’s right. I know it. But I hate that I’m weak and I hate that I can’t snap my fingers and get my powers under control. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy but now things are just too fucking complicated.

I all but slam the steel door behind me as an answer. Fine, I’ll do what you say but not because I like it.

But I show up the next morning ready to train again. And the one after that.

By the sixth day I can hold the light for a slow count of thirty without wanting to put my back to a wall or descend into a full on panic. It’s reminiscent of the progress we were making before…

Before everything went to shit.

I don't call it progress out loud. Out loud, mainly to annoy Aamon, I complain about the cold and the food and the fact that his idea of feedback is a nod so small you'd need instruments to detect it. But my hands have stopped shaking when I reach, and the terror comes slower now, and once—once—I held the gold power steady through a full breath after picturing the chapel, and did not flare.

We don't talk about the night he practically tore the door off to get to me. We don't talk about any of it—his arms, the crying, the thing my body did that I've decided never happened. He keeps the drain in the middle of the room between us. He never touches me. He is so scrupulously careful about the space between us that I could almost forget the shape of being held, if my skin were the forgetting kind.

It’s not.

On the seventh morning I've got the light up in my hands and I'm not focused on anything else. That's the only way I can maintain any sort of progress—narrow down to the current of power, count the flames as they surge from the deepest part of me, the pull of it against my ribs, tune everything else out. Aamon's a low steady voice somewhere to my left, counting with me. Everything else fades away until my entire existence is the living, breathing swell of power within me.

So I don't hear her until she's already at the bottom.

"Cal—"

The light gutters in my hands. I look up and Nellie's just there, three feet away at the foot of the stair, chest heaving like she took the steps at a run. The second she sees me her whole face breaks open with relief, and then it crumples, and she's already coming toward me with her hands out and tears standing in her eyes.

"They wouldn't tell me where you were. For a week, Cal. I've been going out of my mind. Odette had to—there was a whole—" She drops to her knees in front of me and grabs my face in both hands and just looks at me, checking. "Are you okay? Don't you dare say fine. Are you okay?"

And the thing is, I'm not, and she knows I'm not. So I don't try. I just let her hold my face and I put my hand over one of hers, and my eyes sting, because she came. A week of nobody down here but a warden and a damn voice inside my head, and Nellie clawed her way through whatever they put between her and me, and she came.

"Five minutes," Aamon says from the doorway of his room. Quiet. "That's what I could get her."

I'd forgotten he was there. I glance at him, and he's already looking away, giving us what privacy a room this size allows.

“You did this?”

Aamon stops, nods. Then he’s closing the steel door to his room before I can even thank him.

Nellie talks fast, because… five minutes.

She tells me the academy's a wreck of rumor. Half the school thinks I'm a monster the council should've put down at thirteen. The other half thinks the whole Revel was a setup and I'm a girl who got triggered on purpose in a room full of people who should've known better.