“But you said you resurrected the dead after I was gone.”
“You’re so gullible. Sometimes it isn’t even fun toying with you. It’s like playing a trick on a five-year-old.” She gave me the annoyed look she always gave me when I was irritating her. “Hurry up with the necromancy. I haven’t got all night.”
I inched away. “You told me it’s forbidden.”
“Yeah? Well, so is using lightning and electricity, but that doesn’t stop you.”
“I don’t try to use it. I try not to.” I took another step back.
“Fine. Don’t do it. We won’t get the information we need. You’re going to be the one stuck popping out Elric’s babies. Or at least you’ll try to. The entire Witchkin population, which is already in decline, is going to suffer the same fate as the Fae. We will cease to be able to produce offspring. The Fae are already a dying race. Unicorns will become extinct because Witchkin won’t be around to ensure some of those puritanical snobs breed. Without magic, this realm will shrivel up and disappear.” She leaned in closer. “All magic will be gone from the world. Is that what you want?”
I shook my head. The burden of those words sank heavily into my soul. I didn’t want Witchkin to die out. It was debatable whether I wanted Fae to be around or not with the way they behaved toward Morties and Witchkin—snatching, draining, and killing for their amusement.
One thing was certain. I didn’t want magic to die. I couldn’t imagine a world without unicorns—even if they had filthy mouths.
Vega jabbed a finger at me. “Then get a grip on yourself and show me exactly how to resurrect the dead so we can question her about the books.”
I nodded. I didn’t like showing off my affinity like this, but I didn’t see what other choice I had.
I took a couple of deep breaths of apple-scented air and placed myself behind the Witchkin.
“Maybe you should stand in front of her so she can see you. It might startle her less.” I remembered how confused Sebastian Reade had been when we’d woken him.
Vega strode into the librarian’s line of sight. She squared her shoulders. Something about the gesture made me wonder if Vega might be nervous.
I inched closer to the corpse. I didn’t want to stand too close in case she decided to grab me again. Vega tapped her foot in impatience. I placed my hands on the dead Witchkin’s shoulders. Nothing happened.
Maybe I was supposed to think of something sensual when I touched the corpse, to recharge my affinity. I didn’t remember doing that before. I’d accidentally touched the arm, trying to get the book out from under her.
Suddenly, the shoulders convulsed, and the librarian lifted her head. She wheezed and coughed, apple-scented dust clouding the air. I held my breath, not wanting to breathe in five-hundred-year-old decaying lung matter.
“Who has my book?” The woman’s voice came out a wheezing hiss. I thought I detected an accent but wasn’t sure. She repeated herself.
Vega looked the woman up and down. “You’re Galswintha the Wise, aren’t you?”
I couldn’t see the woman’s expression from my angle behind her, but I could take in Vega’s smug expression. I wondered how she knew. Maybe she’d divined it.
“Who are you?” The woman looked Vega up and down. “And why aren’t you wearing more clothes, young lady?”
Vega snorted. “This is the twenty-first century. Women don’t need to dress like nuns.”
Galswintha gasped. “It’s true, then. I’m in the future. That must mean I’m . . . dead.” She lifted her hand and examined the leathery brown skin.
When she raised her other arm, the sleeve fell back, revealing her lack of hand. It had broken at the wrist when she’d grabbed onto me.
Galswintha coughed again before resuming. “That young lady with the pink hair came down here and asked me a sundry of upsetting questions and stole it. Who has my hand now?”
Vega shrugged. “No idea.”
The liar! She had the mummified hand. She’d wanted it, no questions asked.
“Who wanted you dead?” Vega asked.
The corpse picked up the empty goblet and stared into it.
“Tell us, and I will do my best to bring justice to you and avenge your death.” There was unexpected fierceness in Vega’s eyes.
“The assistant librarian. He wanted my books. He wanted my position.”
“Are you certain that’s why he killed you? It wasn’t someone who wanted to stop you from translating that book?”
“He left the book here.” She turned her head from side to side as if searching for the book.
“Yes, and he locked you up down here,” Vega said. “With all these books.” She gestured at the shelves along the walls. “It doesn’t seem like he was that interested in books for an assistant librarian if he sealed off this vault of knowledge and lost the key.”
“Where are my books?” Galswintha repeated.
“I have the book and the translation in my possession. It’s in safe keeping from anyone who would destroy it,” Vega said. “Tell us about the assistant librarian. Why would he want to kill you for knowledge and power, but leave this room and all these . . . useful books?”
“He didn’t lose the key.” Galswintha cackled, the sound a raspy hiss. “It only opens at the touch of a Red affinity. Once my assistant left, he never was able to return.”
My eyes went wide. That was how it worked. So much for Harry Potter spells being the answer to getting into the chamber of secrets. I waited for Vega to look at me and make some comment about how she knew all my secrets, but she didn’t react. Probably from all the information she knew about me already, she’d put together that I was a Red.
“Who was he?” Vega asked. “Your murderer?”
“His name was Ludomil Hummeln Ba’Izabul. He wanted knowledge. He thought he could harness my affinity to be used against the Fae. After I refused him, he poisoned me.”
Vega tapped her nails against her chin. “That’s an unusual name, Ludomil Hummeln Ba’Izabul. The surname could be Arabic for ‘the devil,’ while the middle name would be German for ‘humble.’ His first name was Polish or Slavic but means ‘people’ and ‘dear,’ a strange combination. He was eclectic.”
Vega was far too focused on insignificant details to see the obvious. Everyone in the Unseen Realm had weird names. Not everyone was named Ludomil.
“The custodian’s name is Ludomil,” I said, trying to be helpful.
Galswintha tried to turn, but she was too stiff to shift far in her chair. “Who’s that? Who else is here?”
“No one important,” Vega said. “Just my assistant.”
“She’s a Red?” Galswintha asked. “That’s how you were able to resurrect me?”
“Something like that.” Vega made eye contact with me. “Don’t get it into your head the school’s custodian was behind this murder. The culprit would have used this death to climb the ladder of power in the school—not to demote himself. And he’s probably long gone by now.”
“Right,” I said. Both those details actually made sense.
Vega asked a few more questions about the murder, but Galswintha grew impatient.
“My work. I must finish my work. Bring me my books. I will complete my legacy.”
“What was your work? The original text doesn’t explain what the spell was for, and the translation was incomplete.”
“My spell could turn anyone into a Red affinity.”
“In theory,” Vega said. “But putting such a thing into practice wouldn’t have been so easy.”
“My spell was flawless, as clean and precise as any Celestor’s.”
Vega sighed. “That’s the problem with you Reds. You always think you have a practical spell, but I read your drivel. Those ingredients were redundant. The dragon’s egg was unnecessary.”
I shook my head at Vega. Her arrogance would inevitably insult Galswintha and set her off, just like she’d upset Sebastian Re
ade. Great. Maybe this corpse would try to eat her brain this time and teach Vega a lesson. That was what dead people liked to do, right?
Galswintha raised a leathery finger, pointing accusatorily at Vega. “I am quite certain that spell was superior to anything you’ve studied. It was used by the ancients to perform miracles. It was used by the Lost Red Court to initiate members into the fold. My court could raise the dead and make life from nothing.”
Vega smirked. “Your spell could power anything. It could heal a rainforest or make a volcano erupt. But it wouldn’t do what it said it would do. Even with all those powerful ingredients and the incantation, it didn’t work.”
Vega had tried it? And I hadn’t known? How had she gotten a hold of a dragon’s egg?
“Of course it wouldn’t. It was incomplete.”
“Do you mean to say you left out the magic ingredient?” Vega raised an eyebrow. “Lightning?”
I thought back to the incident with the lightning on the roof, wondering if Vega had somehow been behind it. This wouldn’t have been the first time Vega had been the culprit trying to kill me.
Galswintha rose on shaking feet. “How did you find out? You read the other texts recorded in the secret languages of the Lost Red Court? I hid them. Where did you find them?”
I was forced to scoot forward to keep my hold on her.
Vega strolled over to a shelf of books, eyeing them with casual interest. “I didn’t need to read any books to tell me your supposedly secret ingredient. Any Celestor with two brain cells to rub together would have figured it out.”
“When did you try out this spell?” I asked Vega.
The only time I’d witnessed lightning recently had been on the roof.
Vega went on, ignoring me. “I performed your insipid spell. It didn’t work.”
“Yes, it did. You just don’t know it yet.”
“I don’t exhibit any of the symptoms associated with being a Red affinity. If this spell supposedly worked, why can’t I shoot lightning out my eyes yet? Huh?”
“That was only the first inoculation. You’ll need more electricity.”
“You don’t know that. You’ve never tried it,” Vega said. “This is all theoretical magic you’ve read about in books.”
I thought back to the experiments in my mother’s book. She had exposed subjects to multiple doses of electricity given through a Red affinity, increasing the voltage slowly. Many had died off. Then she’d thought she discovered the answer when she found the spell, probably in this very room.
Galswintha had claimed the Lost Red Court used this to create new members. “The spell requires electricity from a Red affinity, not nature,” I said. “Is that right?”
Galswintha didn’t answer.
Vega eyed me curiously. “How do you know that?”
I wasn’t as complete of a moron as Vega thought.
I pushed on, taking Galswintha’s silence for concession. “And it needs to be multiple doses. It’s that spell you were writing out, but it has to be in combination with electrical magic from a Red, not from nature.”
How had my mother figured out the person trying to conceive needed multiple doses? I had taken her interest in giving the same subject electricity multiple times as a kind of sadistic revelry. She had killed people doing this. I didn’t know if they were willing subjects or prisoners. But at least I understood what she had been doing hadn’t been repeated torture. There had been a purpose.
Alouette Loraline had been interested in Thatch’s lineage, but what about her own? Was she orphaned, a descendent of the Lost Red Court? Or had she been created? It would make sense how she would have known about multiple inoculations if someone had created her.
“Do you know of a Red affinity by the name of Alouette Loraline?” I asked.
Galswintha sucked in a breath. She jerked away so quickly, we broke contact. I tried to touch her shoulders, but my fingertips only brushed the fabric of her collar as she fell forward. Vega lunged forward and caught her with the grace of a ballerina.
“Hold off a minute,” Vega said, easing Galswintha back toward the chair.
She cradled the corpse as gently as a newborn mother holding her child. If there was any Red affinity in Vega, it hadn’t brought out an ability to raise the dead like it did in me.
Which wasn’t to say the magic worked the same in everyone it encountered. Not every Amni Plandai was a werewolf. Some harnessed rabbits or deer, but they weren’t shifters. Grandmother Bluehorse’s strength was plant magic. Josie Kimura’s last name meant ‘tree’ in Japanese, and she was an Amni Plandai, but I had always suspected her affinity was more than just a general plant connection. If nothing else, she had a way with spiders.
My thoughts were torn from the spiders that had swarmed the roof by Vega snapping her fingers in my face.
Vega eased the corpse into the chair. “Touch her again.”
I placed my hands on Galswintha’s shoulders. She exhaled a cloud of apple-scented air. I turned my face away, not wanting to inhale her mummified lung dust.
“You know that name? Alouette Loraline?” Vega asked. “Who is she?”
“We called her Lark. It wasn’t her real name, but it was the name she called herself.”
Vega lifted her nose at me in her superior way. She eyed me like I was a complete dolt at languages, which I wasn’t. “Alouette is ‘Lark’ in French.”
“I know,” I said. I’d studied French since coming to Womby’s, though I had forgotten what bird she’d been named after.
“Who was Alouette Loraline?” I asked.
Galswintha’s voice came out a reedy croak. “She was my student, my prodigy, and my adopted daughter. I turned her into a Red affinity using that spell.”
Shivers stole over me. Finally, someone knew where I had come from!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Eat Your Heart Out, Kid
Galswintha the Wise knew my mother—and she had known her when she’d been young.
Galswintha held on to the table to ease her weathered bones into the chair. For a corpse who had been dead for a couple of hundred years, she was actually pretty spry. Maybe that had something to do with the spell Vega had performed earlier when she’d healed Galswintha’s jaw and made her skin pliable.
“Well, that’s nice,” Vega said. “But it’s irrelevant. Thanks for the information about the spell. We’ll call if we need assistance.”
I ignored Vega. “Alouette Loraline was my biological mother!”
“TMFI,” Vega said with a warning look. Too much f-ing information? I didn’t think so! More like just enough information to tempt me.
“Was she now?” Galswintha asked.
“What was she like? What was her affinity before she became a Red? Was she an orphan?” I burned to know everything that people kept me in the dark about.
“You never met your mother, I take it?” Galswintha swiveled in her seat, attempting to look at me, but she couldn’t manage it.
“She died when I was a baby,” I said. “Tell me about her.”
Vega watched, eyes narrowing.
“She was Celestor with a strong Amni Plandai side to her. She could call snakes and use fertility magic to make plants grow. It was no wonder her sexuality became amplified when she became a Red affinity.”
Her words made me think about the painting of my mother in the hallway with the green snakes coiled around her sleeves. “People think I’m a fertility nymph or vila or a succubus. That’s how I’ve hidden myself. To pretend to be something I’m not.”
“Clarissa,” Vega said, steel in her voice. “If you must do this, less talking, more listening.”
I laughed at her stern teacher voice. She was right, of course. What did Galswintha need to know about me? “Was my mother a good person? Everyone says—well—tell me about who she was.”
“Your mother was a sweet woman. She would have done anything for her mama. If she had known what had happe
ned to me, I’m certain she would have found my killer and made him pay for his crimes. If she had known I was here, dead, I’m certain she would have . . . resurrected me.” She coughed. “Permanently.”
I crept around the chair, so I could take in her expression. I kept one arm on her shoulder as I did so, keeping me in proximity to her. Galswintha’s face was so stiff and mummified it reminded me of a mask stretched tight over her bones. It was a wonder she could actually make her mouth form words. Only her hair was still lustrous, long silver waves that remained attached to her head.
“Isn’t it serendipity I found you?” I stared into the face of this woman who had known Alouette Loraline. “You were my mother’s teacher and a Red, just like me. You can tell me about my affinity and all the things I don’t know. All the things she would have taught me if she had lived.” Perhaps she understood how to control our magic so that it didn’t consume us.
“Just so.” She hesitated. “I can tell you secrets about your nature that no other living soul knows.”
“Right. Like you’re the last Red affinity in the world.” Vega snorted in derision. She selected a book from the shelf.
“For a time, I was the last Red. Hundreds of years ago, my sister and I escaped the destruction of the Lost Red Court. Only, poor Brunhilda was captured by the Raven Court, never to be heard of again, while I survived . . . for a time, anyway. Now all my knowledge is lost.”
She was like Anastasia, the lost princess of Russia. If Galswintha and her sister had been the only ones left and there weren’t others who had survived, that meant there was a good chance Thatch and his sisters were related to one of them. Unless Galswintha had created his mother too.
“Did you have any children of your own?” I couldn’t directly ask about Thatch without giving his lineage away in front of Vega. I didn’t even know his mother’s or father’s names. “Did you create any others?”
Galswintha went on. “You can help me. I need to complete my legacy. I must finish my life’s work.”
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