Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

Ophelia led me to the middle of her backyard and told me to hold out my palm the way you’d hold it out to catch rain.

"Spirit light isn’t complicated to call," she said. "It’s complicated to control. Calling it is the easy part, once you understand what you’re actually doing."

She nodded at my hand. "Try it. Bring the light."

I closed my eyes, because it felt like the sort of thing that needed concentration, and I thought back to the moment in the hall when the light had poured out of me and stopped Prim in her Wraith form mid-lunge. I reached for that feeling the way you’d reach for a memory, chasing the exact shape of it.

Nothing happened.

I opened my eyes. My palm sat there, unchanged, entirely unremarkable, and something close to embarrassment crawled up the back of my neck.

"Nothing," I said.

"I noticed."

"Helpful."

"You were reaching," Ophelia said.

"What does that mean?"

"Give me your hand," Ophelia said.

"For what?"

"I am not going to hold it," she said, sounding faintly amused. "I want you to look at it. Really look."

I handed it to her and looked at hers and mine as well.

Nothing about her palm seemed remarkable. Lines, a faint callus near the base of her thumb, skin a shade darker than mine from years of sun I assumed she got wandering around gardens like the one out front.

"I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be seeing."

"That’s the point." She lowered her hand. "You keep looking for something external. A source. A switch. Something you can point to and say, there, that is where the power comes from." She tapped two fingers against her own sternum. "It isn’t out there. It’s in here. You are not reaching for the light. You are the light. Your body is not a vessel carrying something separate from itself."

"That’s a lot of words for something I still do not know how to do yet."

She smiled like I’d said exactly what she expected me to say.

"Hold out your palm."

I did.

"Now like I said, bring the light."

I looked at my palm again.

I thought about what she’d said, tried to let it settle instead of analyzing it apart the way I usually did with everything, and instead of reaching the way I had the first time, I simply existed in my own skin for a moment. I let myself feel the small, restless hum that had lived under my ribs for weeks now, the one I usually mistook for anxiety or exhaustion or the general chaos of my life falling apart in new and creative ways daily.

It wasn’t anxiety.

It was mine.

Warmth gathered in my palm.

I almost lost it out of sheer surprise, but I kept my eyes down and watched gold light bloom slowly across my skin, brighter than the first flicker I remembered producing weeks ago, steady in a way that felt less like an accident and more like something I had actually done.

"There it is," Ophelia said quietly.

I looked up at her, grinning despite myself.

"I did it."

"You did." Her voice carried genuine approval, which felt strange coming from someone who’d barely known me for an afternoon. "Now kill it."

The grin fell right off my face.

"Kill it? I was doing so well."

"Which is precisely why you need to kill it now, before you get comfortable holding onto it." She crossed her arms. "I already told you. That light is drawn from your life force. You do not get to enjoy it like a party trick. Every second you keep it burning without purpose is a second you are spending yourself for nothing."

"I wasn’t going to keep it burning forever."

"You were going to keep it burning long enough to feel pleased with yourself," she said, "and that is exactly the impulse that gets whisperers killed. Kill it."

I exhaled and let it go.

The warmth dissolved from my palm as quickly as it had come, and the loss of it left a small, strange emptiness behind, like closing a window that had let in a breeze I hadn’t realized I liked.

"Happy?" I asked.

"Satisfied," Ophelia corrected. "There’s a difference."

I rolled my eyes, though there wasn’t any real irritation behind it.

"Why are you even teaching me this," I asked, "if you don’t want me using it?"

"I want you to know how to use it," she said. "Deliberately. On purpose. When you actually need it, rather than leaving it up to whatever instinct decides to take over in a crisis. The first time you used it, from what you told me, you weren’t reaching for anything. It simply happened because your body decided the moment called for it." She studied me. "That is not control. That is luck. I am teaching you so the next time it isn’t luck. So you are not relying on autopilot to save your own life."

That landed somewhere uncomfortable, mostly because she was right, and I hated how easily she’d diagnosed something about me that I hadn’t fully admitted to myself yet.

"Let’s do it again," she said. "Once could still be a fluke."

"It wasn’t a fluke."

"Prove it."

I huffed, but I held my palm out again anyway, because some competitive part of me refused to let that comment sit unanswered.

"Were you ever a teacher?" I asked, while I let the feeling settle back into my chest, the same quiet awareness of myself as something whole rather than something searching. "Before all this. Before the wellness clinic and the fae companion and the general air of having your life together in a way that makes the rest of us look like disasters."

Ophelia’s mouth curved faintly.

"When I was in Valcourt, yes." She said it simply, without any of the weight I expected to be attached to the mention of the place she’d apparently sworn off entirely.

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