He said it with the utmost confidence, which made the shock on his face when I lunged at him that much sweeter. For once, he hadn’t predicted my response, hadn’t pulled me under his sway. I slashed across his face, heard him grunt as my nails bit into his cheek.

The connection was instant and powerful. It seemed that some part of what he had said was true, after all. I needed to want to use my abilities. I had to want to have control over them. And God, did I want to. I wanted to tear his brain to shreds.

The images that churned up from the dark waters of his head were so unlike what I had seen before. Instead of the bright glare and the sharp, controlled edges, they were sketched in a kind of watery charcoal. Unfocused, fuzzy. I saw faces, bloated and distorted, rise up from the murky surface. His mind had gone limp; I felt like I could reach both hands up and reshape him.

“Let her go,” I said, my grip on his throat tightening. I threw the image of him sending Lizzie away, and a moment later he was mumbling the words, “Lizzie, go…outside.”

She bolted for the door, and I felt a thrill run through me. He was shaking under my hands, his eyes blinking, but I held on to him.

“Now,” I said. “Now you’re going to let us go, too.”

But even as the words left my mouth, I felt the unraveling. I gripped harder, my fingers digging into his skin. Not yet, I begged, not yet, I need—I need to—

As quickly as I had slipped in, I was thrown out, and that damn white curtain swept between us. I tried to throw myself at it again, but Clancy’s hand lashed out to snatch my wrist, and I felt every muscle in my body thicken to stone.

“Nice try.” Clancy let me fall to the ground like a board, and actually stepped over me to examine his scratched cheek in a pot’s reflective surface. “Didn’t even draw blood.”

I couldn’t even move my jaw to tell him off.

“Good to see my lessons were of some benefit to you,” Clancy snarled, raking a hand through his disheveled hair. He turned back to face the shelves, hiding his face, but I saw his hands clench at his side, bunching up the fabric of his pants. I hadn’t ruined him, but I had rattled him. “I like to see my students applying themselves, but don’t mistake a few weeks of practice for years of it.”

I focused on trying to untangle whatever mental block he had thrown on me. I started with my toes, imagining them moving one by one. And…nothing.

Maybe I could erase memories, but he could turn people into living stone.

The first scream came only a second after I heard the first whirring engines. An unnatural wind stirred up the trees outside. Their branches scratched against the side of the building, insistent, as if to get our attention. I saw Clancy cringe at the high-pitched shriek of sirens, too, but he straightened himself up from his core. His face was lit with eagerness, and that’s what frightened me most of all.