Royals of Villain Academy 7: Grim Witchery

by Eva Chase

  At the edge of my vision, my mother’s body stiffened with a sharp inhalation. I looked up at her, willing my lips into a frown. “Did you find something?”

  She had the burnt scrap of paper pinched between her fingers. “There’s magic in this,” she said, with an urgent but eager tremor in her voice. Her brow knit. “That looks like… No.”

  She couldn’t be all that familiar with Baron Stormhurst’s signature in the few weeks they’d had to work together. It would take more than that for her to draw conclusions. I stood up. “Can you tell who cast the magic in it—if it’s someone you know like Declan, at least?”

  “I should be able to. It’s a contract of some sort, obviously magically enforced. A little of the mage’s identity will be twined with the spell.” Her fingers tightened around the paper. Her casting words came out tightly. Then for a second, her eyes glazed. When they cleared again, her jaw had clenched. Her hand jerked down to tuck the evidence into her purse.

  “What?” I said, resisting the urge to fidget. “What did you sense? Was it him?”

  “No,” she said. There was a hollowness to her tone. Then her hands balled at her side, and she snapped, “It’s treachery of another sort. Pretending to share the same goals, and then— We can’t let this stand. Not when there’s a snake right in our midst.”

  She swung around, tossing the envelope on the shelf. “We have to go to her, quickly, to see if there’s any more proof she hasn’t yet destroyed. As soon as the others see— The fucking traitor.”

  Her entire demeanor had gone icily vicious. I stuffed the bits I’d taken out of my envelope back in, did the same with hers, and shoved them into their box, not wanting the cops to realize their evidence had been tampered with even if my mother no longer cared. She’d already marched all the way to the door before I caught up with her.

  “Who’s the traitor?” I whispered as we burst out into the hall. She didn’t seem to care whether the cops in this place noticed us now either. I cast a hasty distraction spell around us to deflect the notice of anyone we passed as much as I could.

  “You’ll see. You’ll be able to hear it from her own mouth—if she’s even got the backbone to own up to it.”

  She didn’t say much more on the way out to the car or after we’d jumped inside. The Lexus tore down the highway, weaving around the other cars so swiftly my stomach lurched to the bottom of my throat more than once. My mother muttered to herself here and there—sometimes what sounded like castings, sometimes fragments of sentences that made me think she was going back through her memories: “That time when—” “She never said it wasn’t—”

  In between, she lapsed into stretches of silence punctuated by periodic shivers that made me even more nervous about her driving. Her face pinched with a wince of pain. The encounter with the joymancers must have stirred up even more awful aftereffects from her imprisonment, even more so with the thought that one of her colleagues had called them to our doorstep all over again.

  I kept my mouth shut, wary of interrupting her stream of thought, braced to leap in with a spell if her erratic behavior was about to put us in danger. Despite her shakes and her anger, she kept the car on the road and didn’t so much as clip any of the other vehicles, although a few times it looked like a near thing.

  This was all going as well as I could have hoped when I’d suggested the vague shape of this plan to Connar. If she discovered the phone he’d doctored at the Stormhurst residence, I didn’t think there’d be any room left for doubt, no matter what Baron Stormhurst said. But watching my mother, a chill crept through my gut that I couldn’t will away.

  I might have set in motion more than I’d realized. I wasn’t sure where it would lead.

  I still had my part to play. When we roared up to the gate outside the Stormhurst residence, I widened my eyes. I had been here once before for the gala.

  “Isn’t this…” I started, trailing off when my mother motioned to the gate with a harsh sound. I couldn’t tell whether she’d convinced someone on the other end to open up or shattered the gate’s protections just like that. Either way, it yawned open to admit us.

  “This is why we never completely trust anyone, Persephone,” the baron said through gritted teeth. “And this is how we deal with treason.”

  The car screeched to a stop a few feet from the front steps. The engine had barely cut out when my mother was throwing open her door. I scrambled after her as she hurtled up the steps.

  Someone inside had clearly alerted the residents. Baron Stormhurst yanked open the door just before we reached it. Her face was sallow and drawn as if she hadn’t gotten much sleep—which I supposed she might not have. How long had it taken her to discover her other son’s absence after she’d returned home in the early hours of the morning?

  Strength still rippled through her sinewy frame. She eyed my mother with a flex of her square jaw. “What the hell are you doing here, barging onto my property like this, Bloodstone? A little advance notice would be appreciated.”

  “I’m sure it would,” my mother said tartly, and added a casting word that shoved the other baron to the side so she could step into the hall. “Then you’d have more time to conjure up your excuses. I’m not giving you the chance.”

  Confusion flickered through Stormhurst’s expression. “Excuses?” she repeated, grabbing my mother’s arm. “I think you’d better watch yourself and remember whose—”

  “I know perfectly well who I’m dealing with,” my mother shot back. “A woman who’d murder her way through her family for a chance at power. If you’re willing to do that, we certainly can’t expect you to have any concern for the rest of us, can we?”

  Any bewilderment Stormhurst had felt over the intrusion fell away behind a surge of anger. “Get the hell out of my house!”

  “Not until I see what you have holed away here.” My mother’s eyes narrowed. “You were awfully eager to sneak off to the basement with your husband the other night.”

  She spun on her feet with a quick casting word that broke Stormhurst’s hold on her wrist and sent the other baron skidding a few feet backward. With a curse, Stormhurst barreled after my mother, but whatever spell she cast at her crackled into nothingness against a protective shield.

  My stomach twisting, I forced myself to follow them. I’d made this happen—I had to see it through, even if watching the confrontation was making me queasy.

  Even if I wasn’t sure I could avoid getting caught in the crossfire.

  I kept a careful distance back from the barons as they charged down the stairs to the basement. My mother fended Stormhurst off with another casting and then swept her arm toward the hall with what I guessed was a seeking spell. She took several steps forward and then cast it again.

  “You have no right to intrude on our home like this,” Stormhurst sputtered. “You’re insane. The other barons will hear about this.”

  My mother glanced back over her shoulder, her face turned so hard and gaunt in the thin light that she looked almost like the skeletal woman she’d been when we’d first rescued her from the joymancers. “You’d like to be able to simply call me crazy, wouldn’t you? You wanted to send me right back where I was. I will never let that happen again—not to me or my daughter. If you’ve got nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter to you how much I go looking.”

  “I can expect my own home to stay mine!” Stormhurst retorted. Her stance went rigid when my mother’s next spell blasted through an illusion farther down the wall to reveal the door to a safe. “Get the hell away from that!”

  What did she have in there that she knew would be incriminating? What would it incriminate her of? Nothing Connar had recognized, obviously.

  My mother was already wrenching open the safe with a shock of magic. Connar had left the phone right at the front. She snatched it up and tapped it on.

  “That won’t even—” Stormhurst started, and lost her words when the screen lit up.

  My mother’s thumb skimmed over the screen
. Her mouth curved into a grimace. Her shoulders tightened. When she looked up at the other baron, the force of her rage blazed from her eyes. She hadn’t said another word, but the thrum of her magic rose, potent enough that I could feel it even from several feet away.

  “I don’t know what’s on there,” Stormhurst said quickly, “but I swear, I haven’t—”

  “More fucking lies,” my mother rasped.

  Stormhurst stepped toward her, and my mother let out a hissing sound. She dropped the phone and whipped her hand toward the other woman with a blast of magic that rattled my eardrums and blanked my vision.

  I stumbled backward with a flinch. There was a fractured cry and a thump. When I looked again, my mother was standing with a heaving chest over Baron Stormhurst’s slumped body.

  Stormhurst’s mouth hung open, and her eyes stared blankly. Her limbs sprawled limp against the floor. Her entire chest had become a blackened crater.

  Oh, God.

  For one stunned moment, my mind stumbled back to the session at the shooting range. To the honed bolts of energy my mother and I had flung at the targets. Even for a fatal blow, she’d put ten times more force into this than she could possibly have needed.

  She’d murdered a baron.

  “You—you killed her,” I mumbled in my shock. That wasn’t what—I hadn’t meant—

  My mother’s fathomless gaze raised to meet mine. “And justice is served.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Rory

  After the driver my mother had called in dropped me off back on campus, I didn’t know what to do with myself. She was still back at the Stormhurst residence, showing the blacksuits the evidence of Baron Stormhurst’s supposed treachery and maybe spinning a story about how her fatal blow had been as much self-defense as she’d claimed her murder of Professor Viceport’s sister had been way back when. The other barons, I assumed, had been informed, but no one else.

  I’d reached for my phone at least a dozen times during the drive, wanting to say something to Connar, but texting or even calling him didn’t feel like the right way to deliver the news. The news that I’d been responsible, if indirectly, for his mother’s death. When I owned up to that horrible fact, it should be face to face.

  But as far as I knew, he was still off discussing his brother’s treatment plan with Viceport’s doctor friend. None of the students wandering by me on the green had any idea their pentacle of leaders had been broken. Nausea kept churning through me from gut to throat.

  The worst part, though, was the whisper of a thought in the back of my head. Maybe this was the only way we could have won, for us and the Naries and a fearmancer society that wasn’t totally villainous. How could we hope to change anything in the right direction when the pentacle was made up of barons who ruled through brutality and massive superiority complexes?

  That question led to all sorts of other places I didn’t want to consider.

  On the threshold of Ashgrave Hall, I wavered on my feet and decided to head down to the scion lounge. The thought of facing my unknowing dormmates made me feel even sicker. At least in the lounge I’d have the space to sort through the whirling emotions inside me and figure out what I was going to say to Connar.

  I opened the lounge door and discovered I wasn’t alone in seeking refuge there. At the squeak of the hinges, Malcolm turned where he was standing by the bar cabinet. He was holding a glass, but it was empty, not even a ring of liquid at the bottom to suggest he’d already finished off his drink.

  I got a hold of myself enough to acknowledge his own concerns. “Did you get your sister settled in okay?” I asked. He must have gotten back while I was out with my mother.

  I could have sworn he flinched, just slightly, at the question. Before I could worry about what that meant, he gave me a smile. “Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her happier. Apparently being a fugitive agrees with her.”

  He set down the glass on the counter area and walked over to meet me, stopping a few feet away. His smile faded. There was something so unusually uncertain in his stance and his expression that my stomach balled even tighter. His gaze bore into me as if he were searching for something vital in my face.

  “Malcolm?” I said, my voice coming out rough. Did he already know—had it tainted his opinion of me?

  Whatever he’d been looking for, he seemed to find it. He touched my cheek, just as intent as before but with all the confidence I’d usually expect from him, and leaned in so his forehead grazed mine.

  “I love you,” he said—almost defiantly, as if I’d accused him of the opposite. “Nothing anyone says or thinks is ever going to change that.”

  Despite the turmoil inside me, my heart lit up at his words. “I love you too.”

  My fingers curled into his shirt of their own accord, brushing the solid muscles of his chest beneath, and he crossed the last short distance to claim my mouth. His kisses had always been passionate, even when the passion had been partly fueled by resentment, but this one seared through me in an instant. The press of his lips marked me and offered himself up both at the same time.

  “You’re mine,” he added when he drew back. “Mine.”

  I couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at him, even though my voice came out breathless. “Not just yours.”

  One corner of his mouth curled upward. “No. But still mine.”

  Something still felt off about the moment. Did he already know what had happened to Baron Stormhurst? I peered up at him, trying to understand what had come over him. “What’s this about, Malcolm?”

  He opened his mouth and closed it again, a hint of his earlier uncertainty flickering in his eyes. Then he set his jaw. “I—”

  The swing of the door cut him off. Declan strode in, with an approving nod when he saw the two of us there. “Connar’s just gotten back. He and Jude are on their way down. I think we should discuss right away how we’re going to handle the situation going forward.” He caught my eyes. “Did your mother pick up the trail you meant her to?”

  The older barons hadn’t even looped him in. My previous horror came rushing back. My grip on Malcolm’s shirt tightened as if I needed it to hold me up. “I—I think I’d better wait to get into that until Connar’s here.”

  Malcolm’s face darkened with concern. He guided me over to the sofa and sat me down with his arm around me. I couldn’t relax quite enough to lean into him and enjoy the comfort he was trying to offer. Declan glanced from us to the door and back, his mouth tightening.

  Jude and Connar came in together a minute later. Jude was chuckling about something, and relief showed all through Connar’s posture. “The doctor made progress just in the first session,” he announced the second the door had closed behind them. “Holden was able to get out some complete sentences—he even moved his legs. His control isn’t good enough for him to try standing yet, but the doctor said that should only take a couple more treatments.”

  He beamed at us—at me, the one who’d arranged through Viceport to get that doctor in the first place—and my heart sank with the knowledge that I was going to have to snuff out that joyful light. I couldn’t put this off, though.

  “Connar,” I said. “There’s something I have to tell you. My mother—and your mother— I—"

  I grappled with the words for a few seconds before the story came tumbling out: the evidence room, the drive to his house, the confrontation with his mother, my own mother’s raging outburst when she’d discovered the second piece of proof. By the end, my throat was raw. I looked down at my hands. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know—I never would have suggested it if I’d thought she’d go that far…”

  Stunned silence filled the room as my voice fell away. Then a firm hand clasped my shoulder. Connar tugged me up and into his arms, embracing me so wholeheartedly that my eyes teared up.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said, a little raggedly himself. “I’m the one who set everything up. I know what the barons are like, and I still thought your mother woul
d just call for her arrest.”

  “It isn’t either of your faults,” Declan broke in, his voice taut. “Baron Bloodstone should have brought the matter to the pentacle, or the blacksuits, or both. She made the decision to take matters into her own hands—and that violently.”

  “I knew how messed up she was about the joymancers,” I mumbled. “Maybe I should have realized she wouldn’t be thinking totally straight.”

  “Rory.” Connar eased me back so he could look straight at me. His light blue eyes were serious now, but there was only sympathy in them, nothing remotely accusing. “We’re talking about a woman who tormented my brother and me for our whole lives, who forced Holden to live as a prisoner in his own body and her house for years when she could have had him cured in a matter of days… I wasn’t out to see her dead, and I’m sorry you had to be part of it, but I’m not going to grieve her either.”

  I let out a shaky breath. The other guys had gathered around us.

  “So,” Jude said after a suitable pause, “does this mean Connar is Baron Stormhurst now? It’s not as if your mom left anyone else in the family alive to stand in as regent until you graduate.”

  I blinked at him, and then Malcolm let out a sputter of laughter. Connar’s mouth twitched as if he couldn’t quite allow himself to smile just yet. “I guess… once Holden is recovered, he and I will have to hash that out. He’s missed his whole schooling, but that shouldn’t mean—if Rory could be allowed to catch up—”

  He looked to Declan, our expert on political policy, who rubbed his mouth. “Most likely the spot on the table will stay vacant until you graduate, the way the Bloodstone point did before Rory’s mother returned. You’d be first qualified, of course, but if you and Holden decided he should take the position, you could simply hold it until he’s ready.”

  For the first time since I’d stared at Baron Stormhurst’s blasted body this afternoon, the anguish in my chest loosened. “The barons can’t make any more policy changes, then, can they? Not while they’re missing one. Even if they manage to work around you again, they can’t make some huge shift in approach with only the three of them and your aunt.”