Born To Kill The Alpha King

CH.3 - Pandora's world

Pandora's P.O.V

Awake before the bell again, facing the window that faces northwest.

There was never a decision in it. Some people wake into hunger or thirst. I wake into a direction. Something sits northwest of here and has sat there my whole life, a low steady pull behind my sternum like a second pulse, and in twenty one years not one person in this coven has been able to tell me what it is.

Asking stopped being worth it a long time ago.

Outside the sky has gone the grey that comes before dawn commits to itself. The stone of the sill is cold under my hands. Below me the coven is beginning to stir, footsteps in the lower halls, the clatter of the kitchen waking, and underneath all of it that particular hush of a place built to keep things out, settling into another morning of keeping me in.

My palm flattens against the glass.

The pull answers.

It always answers. That is the part no one believes when I try to explain it. This is not a feeling I have about a direction. It is a direction that has a feeling about me, that reaches back when I reach toward it, that has waited on the far end of itself for as long as I have been alive.

My hand comes off the glass before the wanting can sharpen into the thing it becomes on the bad mornings, the ache so clean it feels like grief for something I have never had.

The bell rings.

Down I go, to be made into something controlled.

---

The training hall is the oldest room in the coven and smells like it, cold stone and tallow and the faint metal scent that lives in places where magic is worked often. Maren is already there. She is always already there. Fifteen years she has trained me, and in all that time I have never once arrived before her or watched anything I do catch her by surprise.

This morning I am going to surprise her.

I do not know that yet.

We begin the way we always begin. Controlled draws. Small workings. Light pulled into the hollow of my cupped hands and held there, steady, while Maren watches for the thing she is always watching for, the wrongness in my magic none of them will name to my face.

My power does not come up like theirs.

The other practitioners draw clean and clear and obedient, water from a well. Mine comes up from somewhere deeper than a well, darker, a current running through it that answers my temper and my grief before I have finished feeling either one. Unstable, the elders call it. They have called it unstable for fifteen years.

Lately I have started to wonder whether unstable is only the word they use for a thing they cannot understand.

Hold it, Maren says.

The light sits in my hands, steady, and there is pride in how steady it is, and then she says the next thing she always says.

Now let it go without losing the shape.

This is the part I fail. Every time. The release is where my magic turns, where the current underneath surges up and takes the working somewhere I never sent it, and fifteen years Maren has spent trying to teach me a gentleness my power simply does not contain.

I let it go.

And the room goes wrong.

Faster than it has ever happened. The light does not scatter the way it should. It collapses inward, folds down into something dense and dark, and the cold in the room drops so suddenly the tallow lamps gutter and the shadows in the corners stretch toward me like they have been called by name.

Behind my sternum the pull flares.

Not the gentle morning pull. Something enormous. Something that surges up to meet the dark in my hands as though the two recognize each other, as though the thing northwest of me has waited twenty one years for exactly this and has only now, this moment, felt me. Truly felt me. For the first time.

Maren steps back.

There is no missing it. The woman who has never once been surprised by me takes a full step backward, away, her hand rising halfway to a ward she does not finish.

The dark does not want to come back.

Dragging it down into myself is the hardest thing I have ever done. It wants to keep reaching northwest toward the thing reaching back, and I haul it in through nothing but refusal, jaw clenched until my teeth ache, until the room warms and the lamps steady and the shadows are only shadows again.

My breath is ragged. My hands will not stop shaking.

Maren has not come any closer.

Neither of us speaks. The silence does the talking. She is looking at me the way the elders have always looked at me, the careful look, fear in it and something underneath the fear I have never been able to read.

This morning, for the first time, I think I can read it.

It is not only fear of what my magic might do.

It is fear of what I might be.

That will be enough for today, Maren says.

Her voice stays even. Her hand stays steady. But she gathers her things faster than she ever does, and on her way out she does not turn her back on me until she reaches the door.

---

Breakfast can wait.

Back in my room I face northwest and let the pull run at full strength, which I never do, because feeling it changes nothing and only shrinks the walls.

This morning something has shifted.

This morning the dark in my hands reached for it and it reached back, and here I stand with my heart still going too hard and a certainty settling into me that whatever waits on the far end of this is not a feeling and not a flaw and not a thing fifteen more years of controlled draws will train out of me.

It is real. It is northwest. And for the first time in my life it knows I am here.

My hand finds the glass.

The pull presses back, steady and patient and certain, a thing that has waited a very long time and has just been told it will not wait much longer.

This morning my hand stays.

I hold it there while the dawn comes up grey and reluctant over the walls that have kept me my whole life, and I look northwest into the distance where my answer is, and a thought arrives that I have never once let myself think.

One day I am going to find out what you are.