Page 8 of The Diamond in the Rough

Death magic isn’t something to take lightly.

I hadn’tmeantto kill my uncle. Not exactly.

I’d wanted to stop him.

Killing him was just how the magic had accomplished that.

I’d learned to control it essentially alone, practicing on roaches, spiders, and the unfortunate mice who’d made their way into my room over the long, lonely years at Tranquil Brook.

I felt bad about having ended their lives—especially the mice—but I’d been trying to learn how to stop someone without killing them. How to feel their lives in their bodies, to pull at them, but not to destroy them.

But when you’re learning, your magic is like a spiked bat when what you want it to be is a scalpel—capable of cutting, but as capable of cutting to heal as to harm. You could use a scalpel to do surgery, after all, even though you could also use one to kill.

I hadn’t wanted to hurt the few people I’d actually liked there, after all. The occasional orderly or nurse who came and went, driven out, usually sooner rather than later, by the oppressive atmosphere at Tranquil Brook if they actually cared about their patients.

“What,” Parikh asked, interrupting my thoughts, “is Tranquil Brook?”

“Explainto me againhowthis was supposed to work?” Parikh asked.

Ward sighed. Mason had called him in to provide further information about the hellish nightmare that had been the institution where I’d spent most of my life. “We don’t actuallyknowhow it worked,” he replied. “We know that they were stripping witchcraft magic from the people being held there, we have a sense of what the machinery looked like and the fact that they used it, but we don’t actually know the specifics of the ritual.”

“But they did this to you?” Parikh asked, turning his attention on me.

“Yes,” I answered.

“But you don’t remember the specifics?”

Those amber-gold-brown eyes were so intense it felt like he was stripping off my skin. “N-no. Not really.”

“Rayn,” he said, his voice serious, my name sounding different on his lips than it did on anyone else’s, making me wish he didn’t dislike me so much. “Will you tell me what you do remember?”

I swallowed, then nodded. “I—I don’t know how often they did it,” I said, the words hard to push out of my throat because it had suddenly constricted. I swallowed again, trying to clear it. “They had a box—wires and electronics.”

“What kind of box?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Square. Plastic, maybe. Or metal. I don’t know what was inside it. I don’t know how any of it was connected.”

“Okay. What did they do with it?”

“The connection points were like electrodes.”

“Like an electroshock therapy device?” he asked.

“Like that, yes,” I replied.

“Do you know that it wasn’t actually electroshock therapy?”

I frowned. “Electroshock therapy wouldn’t affect magic.”

“Are you sure?”

I didn’t understand why he was asking me this. “You don’t believe me?” I didn’t understand why I wanted him to. Why I cared whether he believed me or not.

It wasn’t like I wasn’t used to people assuming I wasn’t to be believed. That I was mad. Delusional. At the very least, not trustworthy.

“I believe you believe it,” came his response, even and calm. Professional. Clinical.

“Jesus, Raj,” Ward snapped. “The Antiquus Ordo Arcanum was using Tranquil Brook to siphon magic from the people inside, using it to charge magical artifacts so that they could transfer that power from people they thought of as unworthy to themselves. Because they were fucking warlocks and the patients weren’t.”