Page 26 of Strength of Desire

“Commence,” she called, and her voice rang out in the room.

The rocks on the table began to vibrate, and a golden thread of lightning connected each one to one of my fingertips. The gold lightning then wound around each finger and across my palm, and the tingling there turned to pain.

The lightning continued up my wrist and arm in jagged steps and angles, darting this way, then breaking hard in the other direction. The tingling was definitely unpleasant now, but it wasn’t until the lightning reached my shoulder, disappearing under the sleeve of my T-shirt, that the real pain began.

I couldn’t see the lightning anymore, but I could feel it jet across my collarbones. My heart skipped a beat as pain lanced up my arm and into my chest. Fire flared down my nerves, a sharp, crippling pain that made my right hand contract and my chest squeeze tight. My heart beat rapidly, and I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs.

Fire flared down my left arm as the gold lightning reemerged on that side. When it reached the fingertips of my left hand, still extended into the blue and purple fire, my entire body lit up gold. It probably looked pretty cool, but I was too busy trying not to yell to really notice.

The pain was excruciating. It felt like flames lacerating my skin. I didn’t understand why I didn’t see blisters, or hear the hiss of my skin breaking and burning away.

I looked at Professor Jefferson in consternation. “This. Is. A. Bit?” I gritted out through my teeth.

She ignored me, moving her hand again and calling, “Connect.”

Suddenly, the lumps of stone on the table weren’t just vibrating. They were shifting form, melting and swirling into something fluid. Sea green, silver, and sparkling black liquid turned into thread, and the threads of stone reached forward, touching my fingertips and following the path of the lightning.

This pain was different, but no less awful. It felt like knives stabbing my skin, then digging in deep, burrowing into my veins. I watched in horror as the stone traveled up my arm. It twined around the outside, but I could feel it moving through my muscles as well.

My heart almost stopped when the liquid stone reached my chest. I couldn’t breathe. For a long moment, my lungs felt encased in stone, my heart entombed, throbbing weakly but unable to fully beat. It didn’t start beating normally again until the stone began traveling down my other arm. I sucked in a ragged breath and tried hard not to cry out.

The stone kept moving down my arm, swirling along the outside until it reached my wrist, where the stone that had movedthroughmy body broke my skin and oozed out, still liquid and alive. I wondered why blood didn’t spurt out with it. It felt like I’d been carved up.

The threads of stone separated again, the pale blue-green of the aquamarine, the silver of the hematite, the jet and rainbow fire of the black opal. They danced around my wrist in curlicues too fast for me to follow.

“Set,” Jefferson called.

The threads flashed the same gold as my skin, and the very air in the room seemed to flash in response. I yelled in pain as my skin burned even hotter.

Jefferson waved her hands a final time. The threads flashed once more, then returned to a solid state, a web of stonework encircling my wrist. The instant the stone set, the pain disappeared. I wheezed and gasped, my throat hoarse, and stumbled forward in the sudden absence of hurt.

I caught myself on my knees, struggling to get my breath back. I looked at my arms in wonder. From the way the spell had felt, they should have been blackened to a crisp, but they were completely unharmed. I didn’t feel any after-effects or lingering ache. The pain was completely and totally gone.

“You could have warned me,” I told Professor Jefferson. “That hurt for more than just ‘a moment.’”

“And what would that warning have done, except make you more nervous?” she said, smiling warmly. “Now come here. Let’s take a look at you.”

She drew me over to the table where the three stones still sat. They looked slightly smaller than before. For all that it had felt like the entirety of each rock had entered my body, only a tiny bit actually had.

Jefferson placed my wrist on the tabletop and snapped her fingers. “Light.”

It was a little different from the way Kazansky had been teaching our class to make light, but it had the same effect. A globe of light appeared over our heads, and I pushed back the sleeve of my gray hoodie to see the vocator on my wrist in sharp relief.

I stared at it in wonder. Ropes of hematite braided and twisted together as they knotted around my arm. Aquamarine ran through the hematite here and there like veins of pale blue. And on four of the knots, black opal erupted from the hematite like a tiny star.

It was beautiful, and not something I had any right to wear. It was too nice for me.

“Interesting,” Jefferson said again. “Yours is more intricate than many designs I’ve seen. But again, the stone responds to you and your needs.”

I wondered what the intricacy meant. I suppressed a shudder, imagining what my dad would have said about me wearing something so, well, pretty. I stifled the urge to cover it with my hand.

Professor Jefferson pointed out a tiny depression in the hematite that was just the right size for a fingertip.

“You’ll press there to activate it, either to speak a message to someone, or to read one sent to you. Then you press it again when you’re done.”

“Okay,” I said softly, still reeling from the experience. I felt strangely exhausted, and I didn’t know if it was from the spell, the fact that I’d missed lunch, or because I had another lesson with Romero tonight.

“Alright.” Jefferson picked up the basket of rocks and added the three I’d removed to it. Then she turned back to the fire, which had threads of gold running through the indigo flames now. She frowned slightly, then looked over her shoulder at me. “Are you able to get back to the manor on your own? I need to deal with this fire before Third Hour starts.”

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