The pressure of Lena's hand was a stark contrast to the indifferent cold of the Blackwood rain. Elias didn't pull away immediately. He couldn't. He was too busy running a complex diagnostic on her.
He could feel the energy emanating from her—it was sharp, earthy, and smelled faintly of woodsmoke and iron in his sensory perception. It was not the cold, ethereal shimmer of celestial power, nor the dense, humid weight of the infernal. It was something that belonged here, woven into the dirt and the stone.
"You're not a demon," Elias stated, his voice flat.
Lena's smile widened, the corners of her green eyes crinkling with genuine amusement. "Disappointed? No wings, no pitchfork, no fine print. I'm just local. Call me a witch, if you need a label. I tend to the wiring of this little reality, and you just plugged yourself in like a massive, unstable reactor."
She finally let go of his hand, leaving a residual warmth on his palm that felt strangely grounding.
"What you did to that locker, the way the light choked—that's a beautiful piece of raw coercion. You bent the local field, Elias. That takes power. Power attracts attention." She tilted her head, red hair falling over one shoulder. "Mine, obviously. But possibly worse."
Elias frowned, scanning the empty street beyond the school gate. His amplified senses picked up only the standard urban hum: traffic, distant sirens, the rhythmic dripping of water from a broken gutter. "I see no one else."
"That's because they're good at blending, too," Lena scoffed. "And right now, they're probably deciding if you're a threat to be eliminated or a tool to be leveraged. We need to talk, and not where your chaotic little echo is listening in on every word." She jerked her chin toward the school.
Elias understood. His power was still humming in the school's infrastructure, a parasitic intelligence absorbing data. If he spoke his secrets here, the building itself would know.
"Where do we go?" he asked.
"My place. It's... shielded."
Lena's "place" was a small, two-story house wedged between a greasy-smelling laundromat and a perpetually boarded-up antique store. It looked utterly ordinary, but as soon as Elias crossed the threshold, his senses screamed the opposite.
The air inside was heavy. It was the first time since the Fall that the ceaseless, chaotic mental static of humanity had been silenced. The room was dark, lit only by an oversized lava lamp and several beeswax candles that smelled of honey and dust. Bookshelves lined the walls, crammed with old leather-bound tomes and dusty instruments—astrolabes, crystal shards, and bundles of dried herbs.
"See?" Lena said, shrugging out of her jacket. "The warding is heavy. The plaster walls are laced with salt and iron filings, and the copper pipes are run in a Lesser Pentagram array. Nothing in here talks to the outside world. Not physically, not psychically. We're off the grid, and off the spectrum."
Elias ran a hand over a wall. The energy he sensed here was tight, deliberately constrained. It was an elegant piece of applied reality manipulation—a localized void of information.
"It's impressive," he admitted. "You contained the natural flow."
"I like clean boundaries," she replied, throwing him a damp, threadbare towel. "Now, dry off, Angel. And tell me why someone who glows purple when he's mad is slumming it in Blackwood."
Elias took a deep breath, the clean, contained air a relief to his overstimulated nerves. He sat on a worn armchair that smelled of old dog and cinnamon.
"I was ejected," he explained, choosing his words carefully. "I didn't fall as an act of rebellion, but as an act of disagreement. The mandate… it became impossible to execute."
"The mandate? You mean God's list of chores?" Lena snorted, lighting a new candle with a practiced flick of her wrist and a small, green spark that didn't touch the wick.
"The Harmony of Intent. The balance. When the scale tipped, and the weight of the celestial plan became unsustainable, I spoke up. My dissent wasn't tolerated. There was no battle, just… excision. I woke up here, stripped of everything but the most basic shell of my true self."
"So you're a fugitive," Lena concluded, leaning back against a cluttered workbench. "And a teenager. That's rough."
"The teenager part is the most confusing," Elias confessed, looking down at his lanky legs. "My purpose was order. Now I have homework and a burgeoning ability to bend reality with a touch. I don't know the rules here."
Lena pointed to the ceiling with her chin. "The rules are simple: Don't get caught by the locals, and don't get caught by the brass that kicked you out. What you call 'coercion'—that power that infected your school—you need to learn to control it. Now."
"Why the urgency?"
Lena stepped away from the bench, her expression suddenly serious. "Because you are radiating. That flicker, that violet energy—it leaves a wake. I see it, and I'm just a local maintenance girl. The ones that police the supernatural borders—the Inquisitors, or whatever they call themselves these days—they'll see it too. They don't care about your philosophy, Elias. They only care about unauthorized power. They'll cage you or destroy you."
She walked over to the bookshelves and pulled out a worn, thick volume bound in blue velvet.
"You need to master the Equations of the Void," she said, flipping through the pages until she found a complex, hand-drawn geometric diagram. "When you touched that locker, you inadvertently opened a micro-portal to your raw self. The key to closing it—to making yourself quiet and invisible—is to stop thinking in terms of objects and start thinking in terms of geometry."
She thrust the book toward him. The diagram looked like a complex knot of stars and lines.
"The universe runs on math, Angel," she said. "If you can calculate the exact shape of the space you want to affect, you can fold the reality back on itself and silence your presence. That's how I built this room. Your homework isn't Mrs. Davies's Roman Empire. It's this. Figure out the equation for a perfect sphere of non-existence."
Elias stared at the incomprehensible diagram, then back at Lena, her green eyes bright and challenging. He was a fugitive, a teenager, and his salvation lay in a geometry lesson from a witch in a static-free room. It was absurd. It was perfectly logical.
"Why are you helping me?" he asked. "This is a risk for you."
Lena smiled again, a flash of red and green in the dim light. "Because you're new, you're strong, and you're a disruption. I've been maintaining the same dull, predictable reality for too long. Plus," she added, her voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial murmur, "I need an anchor to help me unbalance a few things around here. I can teach you control, Elias. You can teach me how to break the rules that matter."