Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  She paused, as though listening to something, but whatever it was, I couldn’t hear it.

  “I love you both,” she said, baring a watery smile. “Give ‘em hell.”

  Then she turned and was gone.

  Trev and I just stood there, silent and unmoving, for a long, long time, and then one more long time, just for good measure. One of us was shaking, but I wasn’t sure which one. Maybe it was both of us.

  “How did they know we would find each other?” I asked eventually, still standing with my hand awkwardly against the hull, Trevor beside me, matching my pose.

  “How did they know we would find the boat?” Trev asked.

  “How did they make that recording? That felt like they were here. I felt like I could have touched them.”

  “Ghosts,” Trevor said.

  “What? You’re telling me those were their spirits? Are they haunting the boat?”

  “No. Well, sort of. They’re not haunting it. It was just a message. And it’s not their spirits, or not the whole of their spirits anyway. They left remnants of themselves here to deliver the message.”

  “Remnants? Do you mean they left a portion of their souls here? How does that work? Wouldn’t that kill you? Or fundamentally change you? How can anyone do that?”

  “It’s not recommended, but if you’re about to die anyway…”

  Right. Intentionally shear off a portion of your soul to deliver a message, instead of risk dying with something important unsaid. Fair enough, I could imagine a few scenarios dire enough to warrant that, and this one certainly counted, but…

  “I may be clinging to my Potter lore a little too hard here, but wouldn’t that be the kind of thing the bad guys teach you?”

  Trev shrugged.

  “Maybe. If the bad guys are MOME? Probably. They’re more about practicality, and you have to admit it has its uses. Even some old failing countess or whatever could use it to will stuff to people if she needed to, right? I mean, it’s not like you’re shearing off a part of someone else’s soul.”

  “But wouldn’t the principle be the same? I mean if you can shear off some of your own soul, couldn’t you shear off someone else’s… fuck, why am I clinging to this? It doesn’t matter.” I took a deep breath. “Was that really our parents, Trev?”

  “I think so, Vic. That kind of thing is pretty hard to fake.”

  And that was when I started to cry.

  I think Trev joined me, but I never was sure.

  The boat burst into flames before I had a chance to get a good look.

  “WOULD IT BE too much to ask that you NOT immolate the last vestige of our dead parents?” I asked, jumping back from the now-flaming wreckage.

  “That is not me,” Trev said. He was looking frantic, and also seemed to be straining, like he was trying to do advanced calculus while taking a shit. “It’s not responding to any of my magic!”

  I looked all around us, desperate to find a way to stop the flames. The ocean was only a few meters away, but it might as well have been a thousand miles, for all the good it did us without even a bucket to move it.

  “Rhelia!” Trev shouted, and I could hear the call inside my mind as well.

  She must have been close by; I heard the wingbeats before I saw the dragon herself, and she lay down on top of the boat as though hoping to smother the flames.

  Then she hissed and shot skyward again.

  It will not bend to my will and is too hot for my scales, she sent, before flapping the short distance to the ocean and squelching whatever bits of fire had adhered to her.

  And before we could even look for another method of putting out the flames, the conflagration roared even higher, then suddenly stopped.

  Apparently it had run out of fuel.

  There was nothing left of my parents’ old boat but a few charred coals.

  “Gwendamnit! Can’t a few hours pass without something completely shitty happening to us?!” I shouted at the cloudless sky.

  Sol must have walked over while I was too preoccupied with putting out an impossible fire for me to notice, because suddenly she was right next to my shoulder, saying, “Well, we did have a handful of not-shitty hours yesterday.”

  Her voice was practically purring, and the reminder of how good things had been that day sent warm shivers coursing over my body.

  “Hey, Gatita,” she whispered, wrapping me in a hug that left me warm in more ways than one. “Te echaba de menos.”

  I smiled and breathed in the sun-soaked scent of her skin.

  “I missed you too,” I murmured, realizing that it was true even as I said it. It was strange to think of how much closer Sol, Seamus, and I were than even a few days ago.

  “Rowan and Alexandra were just regaling us with tales of your heroics,” she said, not letting me go. “I hope you don’t feel too bad about shooting that asshat.”

  I laughed a little bit, and probably cried a bit too, I don’t really remember, but it felt good to be held by someone I was intimate with and not feel rejected for all that I’d done today.

  “Now,” she said, looking between Trev and me, while still holding me close, “Why exactly did you set your old boat on fire?”

  ~~~

  One hour, and a whole lot of fruitless searching of our tiny island oasis, found us no closer to figuring out why the boat had ignited, except that maybe it was set to self-destruct like a secret message in a cheesy spy movie. Which, the way my life had been going lately, seemed just as likely as anything else. Especially when you considered the contents of our parents’ final message to us. It wasn’t the kind of thing that they’d have wanted MOME to know they knew about. Then again, why was MOME after them to begin with, if not because they knew things they shouldn’t? Maybe they were more concerned with MOME finding out that we now knew more about their evil schemes.

  Sadly, Sol had no answers for us.

  “I’ve only been at MOME for about two years, so I’m not privy to any information about secret armies or secret weapons. I worked my ass off to make it into the special services department just to get higher security clearance, but I still haven’t been granted access to anything more than the personal files of people I’ve been charged with tracking down. You and Trev being prime examples. But even then, I was only given partial access to your file. It’s the file you rescued from MOME that has all of the real details, and that was something I never had access to.”

  “Fuck,” I said, just barely restraining myself from slapping my own forehead.

  “What?” asked Trev and Sol at once.

  “The file. It was in my pack when we left Sol’s cabin to go to Unterberg…. I never got it back from the council after they took us.”

  “Shit. So the Unterberg council is in possession of our family’s file?” Trev asked, looking a bit paler than usual.

  “Yep.”

  “What are the chances that they haven’t taken a look at it?” Trev asked.

  “Not good,” Sol replied. “They would be looking for anything they could to incriminate you.”

  “But they can’t touch us now, can they?” I asked. “And besides, what about Mom and Dad’s file would they find incriminating, I mean it’s not like they—”

  “They trained with Albert, Vic. Voluntarily. They sought out instruction from a MOME researcher when they were teenagers. The Unterberg council won’t find that very reassuring. They’ll assume that they were MOME sympathizers.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense. They all seemed bummed when I made that joke about Dad being dead, which made it seem like they respected him.”

  “Maybe they hadn’t found the file yet when they were talking with us, or maybe they respected him anyway, but regardless it’s not a good thing that they have that file in their hands.”

  “Fine. How do you even know that about Mom and Dad? That they trained with Albert by choice, I mean.”

  “I must have gotten farther into their file than you did. Plus, I talked to Albert afterwards.”

/>   “Talked? More like shouted-at-a-whole-bunch,” Sol scoffed.

  Trev smiled a bit sheepishly.

  “Yeah, well, I was a bit mad at our parents for keeping certain secrets from us, and I may or may not have taken my anger out on Albert.”

  That made me chuckle.

  “Well, as the principal to a public high school, I imagine he’s fairly used to that by now. So, what do we do now? I think it’s pretty important that we figure out what MOME is up to. The idea that they’re training an army,” I glanced at Trev, wondering if he knew more about that part than he was letting on, “or building some secret weapon… I mean, it sounds like something out of a Bond movie, but Mom and Dad weren’t prone to conspiracy theories… I think.”

  Trev looked me straight in the eyes, as if he knew what I’d been thinking, and who knows, maybe he did.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the kids that were taken by MOME were being trained, or brainwashed or whatever, to be used as an army, and it wouldn’t be hard to imagine how powerful an army of kids like us would be, but don’t worry Vic, if MOME was trying to make me sympathetic to their side, they failed every time they threatened you or our parents.”

  Sol looked between us both, shaking her head.

  “Twins creep me out sometimes. I feel like you two just had a conversation I couldn’t hear.”

  I laughed.

  “That was nothing compared to the actual conversations we have that you can’t hear,” I said, giving her an exaggerated wink.

  “Alright you three,” Seamus called from a hundred meters down the beach. He had crossed half the distance between us and where his moms and Rhelia were sitting around a small fire doing… who knew what. “Come talk to the rest of us. We need a plan.”

  When we made our way to the rest of the group, Seamus smiled at the three of us, and the fact that he included me in the gesture went a long way to easing the hurt I’d felt when we’d first shifted back here.

  “We have a very important issue that needs resolving immediately,” he said, shifting his face to a more somber expression. “I’m hungry.”

  MY HOUSE WAS untouched since the last time I’d been there, and it felt a bit surreal to be back within its walls. Somehow, traveling between countries and realms in the blink of an eye, learning that dark matter coursed through my veins, giving me access to a snow leopard form and teleportation, and learning that the world was full of what was still best described as magic, (in my mind at least), had made me feel more out of place than I’d ever felt before. Yet, even so, arriving at the house my parents had left me in their will didn’t feel like a homecoming at all. I felt as out of place here now as I had anywhere else. It felt like these walls couldn’t contain all that had happened to me in the past two weeks.

  In the end, we had decided to send Rowan and Alexandra to Unterberg with Rhelia, since they were all unquestionably welcome there still, to see if they could convince the Unterberg council to hand over my family’s file and provide a safe place for Rowan and Alexandra to stay until we could be sure that MOME wasn’t going to try to kill them in their own home. Unfortunately, at the moment, that seemed likely to be a permanent arrangement. I felt awful that they'd had to leave their home so suddenly, but at least we could be sure that they would have a safe, MOME-free place to hide.

  Sol, Seamus, Trev, and I, on the other hand, had decided to listen to Seamus’ stomach and head someplace we knew was well-stocked with snacks, not to mention also a potential hiding place for the mysterious journals that my mom had mentioned.

  Sol, the self-appointed sandwich-maker-in-chief, had taken on the task of preparing food for us all, while Trev worked on checking the house for sensors, tracking devices, spells, or any other ugly surprises that MOME might have left for us. Since we weren't useful to either of those tasks, Seamus and I, grumbling stomachs and all, started to search the house.

  “Hey,” Seamus said, after we walked into one of the storage cupboards on the main floor and started opening boxes that looked like they had been here since before I was born, “I just wanted to thank you… for saving my moms.”

  “Seamus, you know I never would have left you to do that alone, right?”

  I turned, still wary of what I might see in Seamus’ eyes, but finally willing to face whatever it was… but he was staring determinedly at a half-opened box full of cookbooks.

  “That’s not what I mean, Vic. I mean… it was really hard for me to see you shoot someone, but… but not harder than it must have been for you to actually do it, and if you hadn’t…”

  He turned to look at me, finally, and I saw the unshed tears in his eyes.

  “He was going to kill them, Vic. I saw it in my visions, over and over again. Every time I had that vision and you weren’t there, they died. I thought I would be ok with… with what you had to do, because I’d seen it probably a dozen times in my head by the time it really happened, but… it still shocked me.”

  He was silent for a long moment, and when I finally reached for him and he didn’t flinch at all, I wrapped him in the biggest bear hug I could manage.

  “It’s ok, Seamus. It was a damned ugly thing. If our situations had been reversed, it would probably take me a little while to get over the shock of it too.”

  Seamus started to object, but I couldn’t bear to hear him contradict me, because I didn’t want to know what I already suspected: that if he had been holding the gun, he never would have pulled the trigger, or only would have pulled it too late. So I kissed him, partially to stop him from saying anything, and partially to prove to us both that we were still human. That we were still capable of something as normal and life-affirming as a kiss. I probably should have asked first, but with the way he leaned into it and pulled me closer, I figured my lapse was forgivable.

  Of course, it was in that moment that Sol burst through the door to the cupboard that we’d been searching through.

  “Oh! Sorry to interrupt. I figured you’d want your sandwiches.”

  Seamus and I both laughed as we pulled apart.

  “Sandwiches sound like a great idea,” I said, while Seamus simply replied by taking a giant bite out of the slab of bread and meat offered to him.

  I had just taken a bite of mine, and was opening my mouth to exclaim that Sol was officially the one and only sandwich-maker-in-chief as far as I was concerned, when Gwen popped into existence right behind Sol’s back and shouted, “They’re coming! Hurry up! Get Seamus out of here!”

  “Gwen, what!? Who’s coming? What the hell is—”

  But she was already gone, as were Sol and Trev, as Seamus and I realized as soon as we stepped out of the cupboard and into the kitchen.

  Seamus ran to the door to check the lock and look out the window.

  “What the fuck?” he asked, taking the words right out of my mouth.

  “Did Gwen just nab Sol and Trev?” I asked.

  He nodded, crossing towards the living room window, probably to see if MOME was within sight.

  I started to follow, in case we needed to make a quick exit.

  “I guess we’d better get out of he—”

  Then the door exploded in a rain of fire and wood, and I was leaping behind the kitchen island, screaming Seamus’ name. I could hear boots hitting the floor and shouts filling the air, so I shifted to where I’d last seen Seamus before the door exploded, hoping that I could shift us out, but Seamus wasn’t near the window, he was on the floor next to the couch (which was only reasonable as the air was filled with ricocheting spells of every variety). I reached down to grab him so we could get the fuck out of Dodge, but then something hot hit my back and I was screaming in pain, and Seamus was screaming something, and then the world went black.

  “OW. FUCK.”

  “Thank gods, you’re awake.”

  “Seamus?”

  I had to ask, because it was pitch black in… wherever the hell we were. I could feel a hard surface underneath my shoulder and leg, and I seemed to be lying on
my left side. Other than that, I had no clue what was going on, except that I could hear Seamus’ voice, and half my body felt like it was on fire and/or had been hit by a truck—mostly and.

  “Are you ok?” Seamus' voice asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m afraid to try to move, because just lying here hurts enough as it is. What the fuck happened?”

  “MOME got us.”

  “Yeah, I guessed that much. But what happened? How did they find us? Why aren’t we dead? And where the seven fucks are we?”

  “Do you mean before or after you killed a MOME agent?”

  “After. I remember that part. And we aren’t sure that I killed him. He could have lived if they got him help soon enough.”

  I wasn’t happy about the reminder of how I had shot a man in the chest at point-blank range, but I was in too much pain to notice the nausea that rose when I thought about it, so that was something… I guess.

  “I don’t know how they found us, except that we were at your house, so I suppose they must have known where to look. Do you remember Gwen coming and grabbing Sol and Trev?”

  “Yeah, it’s the stuff after that part that’s… fuzzy.”

  “Well, after that you jumped behind the kitchen island and I dove to the floor, then you shifted to me, I assume to take us somewhere else, but they were waiting for that, or else they had just decided to start firing everywhere at once, and you got hit, and… I don’t know why they didn’t kill us, but they threw us in the back of a truck and… then they dropped us here. They put bags on both our heads. Not sure why they bothered with yours, since you've been out cold from the moment they hit you with that spell, but all I saw was when they put the hood on your scorched, unconscious form, and since then I have literally been in the dark.”

  “How long have I been out?” I asked, trying to think past the pain all down the right side of my body, as well as the headache that was quickly taking up residence inside my skull.

  “I’m not sure. It’s not like they’ve been coming in to tell me the time and date, but… a few days, at any rate.”