Page 64 of The Witch They Crave

I reach for the core of me, the way Aamon's been teaching me. The supernova I keep crammed behind my ribs. It answers fast—too fast, always too fast, heat blooming up under my sternum and pushing outward toward my palms like it's been waiting all night for permission.

I do my best to send it right to the door.

Nothing pushes back.

I don't know what I expected—resistance, something to shove against—but the ward just sits there, dense as packed earth, and where my magic touches it a cold spreads back into me. It climbs my wrists and settles into my teeth until they ache.

I’ve never felt anything this old. It doesn't know me. It has no interest in knowing me.

I exhale and push harder. The heat in my chest ratchets up. Pressure behind my eyes, the beginning of the ring in my ears that means I'm getting close to the edge of what I can truly hold without losing control.

The ward gives a fraction. The door swells slightly in its frame.

Then whatever the magic is pushes back. The heat in me gutters out like a flame under a glass.

I push harder and the cold pushes back into me and my magic starts to go flat.

And I know this feeling.

God, I know it.

The gray nothing. The chemical flatness they poured into my veins for twelve years, the specific helplessness of my own power being turned down like a dial in someone else's hand. That's what this ward must be. Whoever sealed this door built it out of the same thing the facility built my whole childhood out of—a leash for witches, a way to make our fire lie down.

It should be working. According to Leopold, two witches stood where I'm standing and must have felt their power go quiet and walked away, because that's what you do when the flatness takes you—you fold.

But I know this feeling too well to fold under it.

And underneath the fear of my past, fast and mean and rising, comes something I wasn't expecting. Something hot.

Anger.

Because I clawed my way out of this. Twelve years under, and I fought for every inch of getting my magic back, learned to reach for the fire while my blood still remembered the leash, and I swore—somewhere in that cellar, somewhere in the gray—that nothing would ever put me back under again. And now here's a dead man's ward in the ground trying to do the exact thing the facility did. Trying to turn me down. Like I'm a lamp. Like I'm a problem to be managed.

No.

Not again. Not ever again. Not by them and not by this damn door and not by the man standing behind me who thinks he already knows how this ends.

The ward wants me flat.

I would rather burn this whole building down.

My hands are shaking. I press them flat to the door, grit my teeth, and pour—heat flooding out of me faster than I've ever let it, past the cold, past the flatness, past the thing that's supposed to make me lie down. The ring climbs in my ears toward a scream. I don't stop.

Then something steadies.

No warning. My magic is fraying at the edges, spilling past the shape I'm trying to hold it in, and then something slides in underneath it and holds. Not more force—control. Something outside me closing over the surge and folding it precise, like a second pair of hands guiding mine on the wheel. Aiming what I've already broken loose.

It should feel like relief. It feels like being touched somewhere I didn't know was open.

The heat stops scattering. It drives forward in a single clean line, straight through the guttering cold, and the ward—

Breaks.

Not gently. It dies all at once, the flatness snapping off like a current cut, and the sound the door makes is low and enormous, more felt than heard, a groan that comes up through my feet. Then it swings open slowly, grinding on the old concrete of the room beyond.

Behind me, Leopold lets out a breath.

"It worked," he says, low, like he doesn't quite believe it even as he watches it happen. "I thought—" He stops. Starts again, quieter. "I hoped. I never let myself be sure."