“You’re in it bad now, kiddo.” Harry smirked at me from across the infirmary.
“As if I don’t know it.” I scratched at the bandages wrapped around my body. “How much longer is this even supposed to take?”
Harry shrugged. “It’s different for everyone. We all have different magical refraction levels, you know that.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” I tried to stretch, and Harry’s hand was on my shoulder pushing me back into the cot. He tried to look down at me with a stern face, but he was holding back laughter. I rolled my eyes. “Fine, fine. No stretching.”
The doctor came back into the room and brushed Harry off of me. They started fussing over my bandages without a word. I could never get a read on them. Like the rest of the manor’s staff, they wore a plain wooden mask covering their entire face, but they were technically one of the Adepts. I didn’t understand what their official status was. Whatever the case, once they were satisfied that my blood was still on the inside, they pressed their hands over my wounds and a green glow emanated from my body.
I wouldn’t say that the process of magical healing hurt. I also wouldn’t call it the most comfortable thing in the world. It felt more like my insides were being twisted and massaged. It wasn’t exactly painful, but it was a sensation that those body parts were unused to. It always made me queasy. The doctor repositioned their hands over my gut and started using their magic there — at that, I spasmed and retched to the side of the bed. Harry, the superspeed-having bastard that he was, zipped over to position a wastebasket in my line of fire without a word. When I was done puking, the doctor repositioned me and started twisting my insides again. They gave me a bitter tonic to drink down, and pat me on the shoulder. I took that as a dismissal.
“Was that so bad?” Harry asked while handing me a roll of paper towels.
I snatched the paper towels from him and started wiping my mouth and chin. “Yes. Yes it was.” I elbowed Harry and we laughed together, walking back from the infirmary to my room. “Have you ever gotten beaten up enough to warrant this kind of treatment?”
“Two or three times, yeah. I wasn’t as much of a wuss about it as you are, though.” He opened the door and waved me inside. I walked in and fell onto my bed. Harry laughed again. “Having a good time over there?”
“I’m just savoring the fact that my insides are staying still and not contorting themselves into balloon animals.” I grumbled into my pillow. I rolled over onto my back and looked at the ceiling. “You’re sure this is really okay? Lily ordering me to recover and ditch training and all. I was assuming it was going to be overruled by the family.”
“They’re not as heartless as you seem to think, you know.” Harry sat on the edge of my bed and sighed. “It’s true that they’re willing to go to extreme measures to get results. But they won’t invest years of training into an Adept and then just let them burn themselves out for no reason. We’re no good to them dead. You’ve really only seen the darker side of the family since you came here. I promise that there’s another side to them, and I do hope you’ll see it.”
“A side more like Lily?”
Harry smiled. “Yeah. She has a good head on her shoulders.”
I rubbed my temple. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“You’re going to need to learn how to control your emotions, you know.” Harry leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “Right now, you try to bottle everything up. That’s not going to work in the long term.”
“I know.” I sighed. “Adept magic is emotional, and requires the right frame of mind to make anything work. It just never feels like I’m able to tap into it on command, and instead it just all comes out at once when I’m running on adrenaline.”
“That’s true, but that’s not what I meant. You’d probably do good to actually think about how you feel more often, instead of always trying to move on to the next obstacle. With your powers, with the family, with Lily.” Harry looked at me with no trace of a smile on his face. “It’ll eat you up inside, both figuratively and literally, when it comes to magic.”
“What are you getting at? Is this about getting caught by the Helk out there?” I asked.
Harry sighed. “That name is never going to stick. And no. I’m talking about you. How you go through this meat grinder of training, watching over Lily, and serving the family, and you just hunch your shoulders and try to bear all those burdens. It’s got you tangled up in knots. I don’t need any fancy magic to see that much.” He sat on the bed next to me. “You gotta have people you trust, people to talk to. Otherwise all those emotions will keep building up and the tension gets tighter inside of you, until it all comes out at once.”
I chewed on that thought for a while. Talking things out wasn’t really my forte. I eventually broke the silence. “Do you ever have moments where it does just…all comes out at once?”
“Yeah. Once.” Harry’s eyes went distant and he fell quiet.
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“What happened?” I prodded him.
Harry shifted back and faced me again. “It was a long time ago, kiddo. My…well, I’m still not really sure what we were. ‘Friend’ doesn’t quite cover it, but we weren’t…well, you know.” I didn’t know, but I nodded along and let him talk. “He was another Adept. Things on a mission went bad. Really bad. And when push came to shove, he took a bullet for me.” Harry winced and put a hand over his chest. “I don’t know why he did it. By all rights he should have let it happen to me instead. And when I realized what he did, and that he’d traded his own life for mine…yeah, it all came out, kiddo.”
Harry stood up and started walking out of the room. I reached up to grab his sleeve. “What was it like?” I couldn’t just let this drop here.
“Like a truckload of anguish and grief hitting me all at once, and then everything else felt crystal clear.” Harry shrugged off my hand. I could see tears trickling down the sides of his face. “Like all the problems I had in the world suddenly didn’t matter anymore, and a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Like suddenly, I had all the power in the world to make things right. And in that moment of understanding, of feeling like I had the whole universe at my fingertips, I killed them all. But it wasn’t enough. I was moving faster than their bullets, I was flinging bodies around like ragdolls, but none of it could bring him back.”
Harry walked towards the door. He put a hand on the frame and took a deep breath. “When that happens, it changes you. Tasting that kind of power can feel good in the moment, but it does a number, on both your body and mind. It’s never been quite the same since then.”
“Your powers?” I guessed.
He turned back and stared at me with the same distant eyes. “Everything. That much emotional energy pouring through me fueled my powers, and it left its mark. It’s why we train to temper our emotions, to let them out in controlled amounts, instead of opening the floodgates in a crisis. It hurts now, Aster. Any time I tap into those feelings, it all comes back to me, and it’s like it’s going to tear me apart. And when I look at you, I see someone on the road to making the same mistake. You’ve gotten lucky so far, but every time you get pushed into a corner and you let it all out, you’re running the same risk that I did. I don’t want that to happen to you.”
We sat in silence for a moment, Harry hanging by the door. I broke the silence again.
“When Rowan came after me, I think I felt something similar.” The memories came flooding back to me, and the runes in my arms started glowing red. “I barely knew who he was. He was faster than me, and stronger than me, and he was using powers that I didn’t want to believe were real at the time. When I killed him, it was like all of that sudden stress and fear exploded inside of me and left my body. It felt like something pounded itself through me in a burst of violent energy to reach out and destroy him, and everything else in the vicinity.” Tears welled in my eyes as I remembered standing amidst the fire and rubble that used to be my home, blown away by the awakening of my power. “I haven’t felt anything like that since.”
“I hope that you don’t. That trauma’s going to stick with you forever Aster, but now it’s about how you deal with it. So far you’ve kept quiet and shoved it to the back of your mind. All that’s going to do is wind you up for an eventual disaster later down the road. All it takes is one trigger, one catalyst to set you off, and then it’s a one-way trip. There’s no recovery from that.” I could see Harry shaking while he talked. He turned to leave.
“Hey, Harry?” I called after him, and he stopped to turn back to me. “Thanks. For all this. Checking up on me, and then this whole talk.”
Harry’s eyes softened and he cracked a smile. “Anytime, kiddo. I’ll always be here for you.”
Harry stepped out of my room and shut the door. I leaned back in my bed. I wasn’t sure what kind of trigger would set me off like Harry. Still, it made me wonder about the power flowing through our veins. Adeptal magic was fueled by emotions, but it was always drilled into us that we had to make use of our powers with a clear head. It always seemed contradictory to me. What Harry had just described sounded like the perfect union of the two: clarity brought about by overpowering emotions. I wasn’t sure I was capable of feeling something like that.
I stared at the wall for a while wondering what to make of all that when someone knocked at the door. Before waiting for my reply, Lily threw it open and walked into my room. She scrunched up her nose at the sight of me. “What’s got you so gloomy?”
I smiled at her. “Harry and I were just talking about some heavy stuff. What’s going on?”
“It’s about the blood.” Lily sat on the floor and looked at me.
I straightened up. “Did they find something?”
Lily scratched her chin like she wasn’t sure what to say. “It’s complicated. The magical resonance of the blood is refracting all over the arcane lattice around the manor—yes, Aster?”
“Can I get that in English please?” I widened my eyes and did my best to imitate a puppy begging. Lily giggled.
“Come on, Aster. You know basic arcane theory. This is the easy part! Just wait until you hear about the different tonal measurements from the blood, it’s wild.” She produced a ream of papers with illegible markings scrawled over top of them. I recognized it as Lily’s handwriting, but I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.
I scratched my head. “I think you and I had very different experiences learning the basics of magic. Adepts don’t get that technical.”
“Okay, fine.” Lily stuck out her lip in a pout. “But you’re getting the full lecture later. The short version is: we can’t track the Helk. The blood is tracking its position, but its position is registering as a million different points at the same time. It almost just looks like random static interference, but the signals are all coming through crystal clear. It’s like there are so many Helks that all share the same blood or something. My parents are going mad racking their brains trying to figure it out.”
“Okay, okay. So that’s pretty bad.” I put my head in my hands. This was going to be harder than I thought. “Is that why they wouldn’t tell anyone what was up with the blood for so long?”
“That’s what Jane and I think.” Lily replied, straightening her papers out.
“I guess that makes sense. We should probably—wait, you’ve been talking to Jane?” I blurted out.
Lily grinned at me. “Of course! We’ve been having planning meetings every day to talk about what to do with the Helk. We were hoping to track it down with the blood, but that’s a no-go, so it’s going to be a good old fashioned manhunt. Monsterhunt. Helkhunt. Whatever.”
Another headache was forming. “Shouldn’t I have been part of those meetings?”
“Nope! Your orders are to recover, not plan. We’ll fill you in with all the details later.” Lily stood up and dropped her papers on my desk. “Make sure to read through these, there will be a test later!”