by Bell, A. C.
Peter snorted in disgust. “Of course, you’ll say that now.”
“Think whatever you want. The Hunters took me out of prison weeks ago. If freedom was what I wanted, I’d have gotten it. They gave me the rest of my father’s journals, all the ones that were taken as evidence after his arrest.” His lips pulled together and he breathed heavily for a moment, his nose and cheeks turning pink. He took a deep breath to calm himself and I looked away, embarrassed to see him cry. “He was a horrible person. I was young when he went away. I’d remembered what I’d wanted to and I wanted him to be innocent, to be the father I’d known him to—” he stopped short, eyes going wide as some thought occurred to him. “Nicole, did I hear in prison that you’re actually the daughter of the paragon?”
She wilted a little under his gaze. “Yes, why?”
“I need to talk to you. You may not want others to hear.”
Peter straightened from the wall to stand behind Nikki’s chair. “Why would we leave you alone with her?”
Nikki narrowed her eyes at Ian, but the pursing of her lips suggested she was considering. After a few moments, her hazel eyes flitted to mine in question. I lifted my shoulders in a shrug and nodded. “Okay, but Adeline stays.”
“Yeah, okay,” Ian conceded.
Raiden and Slade filed out the door, but Peter stooped to argue with Nikki. They muttered amongst themselves and Nikki gestured to me. Peter sent a displeased scowl my way, but straightened and marched from the room in a huff. I sunk in my chair. I hated fighting with him, especially after everything we’d all just gone through. It was pointless for him to leave anyway. He would only listen through the door.
Now that we were at least relatively alone, Nikki turned back to Ian. “What?”
“In one of my father’s early journals, he talked about a rival of his, another Paragon. My father was never one to fight fair, so he kept a surveillance team on Paragon Alden. He found out your father was in love with a waitress, so he used her to get to him. He put her under a fear curse and focused it on magic. Then all he had to do was tell her about Alden.”
“What?” I leaned forward, gripping the armrests of my chair in tight fists. Nikki’s face went slack.
“Your father did that to us?” she asked, barely above a whisper. He hesitated on whatever he’d been about to add and Nikki stood and spun for the door. I caught a glimpse of her mask fall before her hair blocked it from view, of her eyes turning red and her bottom lip quivering. I hurried after her.
“Wait! I can break it!” Ian cried.
We both stopped. Nikki reached up to wipe her sleeves across her cheeks before turning back around. I rubbed her back and she clutched my other hand with shaking fingers.
Now that we were done trying to flee, he continued. “To break a curse, all you need is the blood of the person who enacted the curse and a simple counti-curse potion. Fortunately, my father was a narcissistic man. He kept vials of his own blood to make enhancement potions. I can get some of it.
“You can heal her?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
She clamped a hand to her mouth, her eyes welling anew. I felt myself well up also and tugged her into a hug. Someone abruptly knocked on the door and we both jumped.
“You’re so nosy, Peter,” Nikki scolded through a teary laugh.
“Uhh,” came a confused feminine voice through the door. “Actually, this is Michelle.”
I perked up, my earlier nerves crawling their way back into my gut. “We’ll be back later, I said distractedly over my shoulder to Ian. Nikki and I joined Michelle in the hallway. If Michelle was nervous at all, it wasn’t obvious. Behind her, the boys were leaning against the wall. Raiden and Slade had their arms crossed, neither looking all-too pleased. Peter’s hands were stuffed into his pocket as he pretended to be oblivious to what Ian had shared, but his red eyes gave him away. He’d gotten just as emotional.
“Alright, what’s this ‘meeting’ you two have organized about?” Slade demanded.
I glanced uncomfortably at Michelle, who straightened her shoulders before turning to him. “Whether you meant to or not, you all have been pulled into something dangerous. Things need to be explained, so I brought someone to help me.” She waved us after her and we trailed down the hall toward one of the lounges. “Before we go in, I have something to give back to you, Adeline.”
She slipped slender fingers into her jacket pocket and withdrew a tiny plastic bag. Inside was my father’s signet ring. Elation swelled in my chest, causing a fluttering of heartbeats. I savored the feeling of the pulse, as brief as it lasted. She opened the bag and tipped it to let the ring plop into my palm.
“I took it when the Hunters first captured you, so they couldn’t steal it,” She said with a wink.
“Thanks,” I answered with a broad grin as she opened the lounge door.
I stepped inside and found Mercer and Bradley seated at a couch. I gaped in shock, not because I hadn’t expected them to be there, but because I hadn’t expected Mercer to be in a wheelchair.
“What happened?!” I exclaimed.
He turned the chair to face me and I saw that his legs were frail and emaciated. It had certainly not happened in the past few weeks since I’d seen him. He had been in this chair for a very long time. He noticed my observation, eyes squinting slightly, but said nothing until everyone was in the room and the door was shut. He then lifted his hand in a wave, muttering an incantation. A shimmer ran up the walls to provide what I assumed was soundproofing.
“Since it seems I cannot keep you out of my affairs, I’ve agreed to include you,” He said in his abrasive Scottish accent. “Until now, I have only shown you what I wanted you to see. However, many of you will not trust me, so I have come to you in full honesty.”
“Why won’t we trust you?” Raiden demanded.
Michelle answered before Mercer could give a snide reply. “Donnan Mercer.”
“Mercer?” Peter muttered pensively, trying to place the name. It must have dawned on him because his chocolate eyes widened to saucers and his lips pulled back into a furious snarl. “The terrorist?”
“He’s not a terrorist!” Bradley shouted, rising to his feet in a huff, shoulders square and fists clenched at his sides.
“That’s enough, Bradley,” Mercer scolded, lifting a dismissive hand. I bristled at his treatment of what appeared to be his only friend. Bradley settled for folding his arms stiffly over his chest and glaring at Peter.
“What would you call it? ‘Aggressive negotiations’?” Slade quipped.
Mercer crossed his arms, mirroring Bradley. “I did not set that bomb.”
“Why should we believe that?”
“Because my wife was inside,” the sorcerer hissed between his teeth. That hushed everyone up. “It was too late when I got there. The bomb went off. A piece of metal shrapnel caught me and I, well…” He gestured to his legs.
A loud thumping knock came at the door then, catching us all by surprise. “Adeline?” I faintly heard Kendra call out. “Open the door! I found your information.”
I winced. “Can we let her in?
“Well we can’t very well have her shouting out there, can we?” Mercer gave me a pointed glare and unsealed the door.
Kendra looked more upset than I expected. Had she not been able to corroborate everything? Mercer sealed the door again and recast the soundproofing spell.
“What did you check on?” Slade asked.
Kendra turned on me, face flushed with anger and tone full of accusation. “I wanted to prove Adeline wrong and show her that Rurik Tanikov really was behind the Purge before I would listen to anything his daughter had to say.”
“His daught—” Slade cut off, his gaze shifting from Kendra to Raiden and then Michelle.
Unexpected fury contorted his face and he moved toward her. Raiden stepped into his friend’s path and Nikki put a barrier in front of Michelle to keep Slade away from her if Raiden couldn’t hold him. Michelle, I noticed, did
nothing but look shamefully down at her lap.
“LET GO!” Slade roared
“No!”
“You know what her father did! Tell me where he is!” Slade shouted, struggling to get Raiden off of him.
“It wasn’t him!” Kendra barked. Her lips pulled back over her teeth and she breathed heavily in frustration before turning and slamming her fist into the wall. “I broke into one of the SAU’s databases. They really are working with the Hunters, so I tailed some of the higher members of the Magisterium. This ‘Maleficarum’ nonsense isn’t nonsense. The entire government is saturated with them.”
“Surprise, surprise,” Mercer drolled. “They’re called the ‘Magisterium’. Didn’t you find it odd that the highest ranking members of our government are all Sorcerers or Sorceresses? Not a single drop of diversity. Did you ever even think about it?”
Kendra’s brows shot down, her expression darkening. “Mock me again and I will dump you from that chair.”
He blanched but wove Bradley down before he could defend him.
“But why do they keep opening the portals if it just keeps bringing more creatures through?” Nikki asked. “That book said they’ve kept trying.”
“Because they want to send everything back. Whenever they opened the portal, it didn’t just pull things through. It forced magic out. The magic that they use to open the portal goes through it as the creatures come through, almost like a trade. They’re hoping the trade will work the same in reverse. And they’ve done it many times over the centuries, hoping they’ll figure out what they’re doing wrong.”
I gasped. “That’s why so many supernaturals have lost their abilities!”
“Precisely. But they haven’t opened it in some time before this last try. I was able to discern that they were looking for someone specific.”
“My mom, Octavia,” Michelle cut in. “My dad says that she was doing research about Purgatory before she went missing. She was one of the foremost knowledgeable Sorceresses of her time. Somehow, they found out about her and my father and threatened to harm the Viesci unless she agreed to help them. So, she did. After a few years, she cracked it. Found a way in. She somehow used herself as a magical conduit. Any reports I’ve found of the event say only that they had to use sacrifices. But it worked. The portal opened and that thing came through and caught her. As they struggled, she fell through. With the conduit lost, the portal closed. Michelle frowned morosely down at her hands, which were clasped tightly together in her lap.
I thought back to the night I’d first seen Octavia and the other Hohl. She’d looked so furious and was definitely violent. “If that Hohl woman is your mother, why did she attack me when she first saw me?” I asked.
“She didn’t. Whatever that thing inside her is did. She hadn’t seen me since I was a child 500 years ago, so she sensed the blood of a Viesci dhampir and mistook you for me.”
“Until the festival.”
“Yeah,” she muttered sadly.
“How did you end up on my farm?” Raiden asked suddenly. None of the anger that he had directed at her for the past week was in his tone now.
She glanced up in surprise, her eyes pink from the emotion of her story. “After mom disappeared, my father came by the house. I hadn’t actually met him in person before, though he visited mom and me in our dreams every night. He told me she was gone and needed to hide me somewhere the Maleficarum couldn’t find so they couldn’t use me against him like they’d used him against her. He gave me her grimoire. In it, I found the spell that allows me to transfigure my face rather than use an exhausting illusion spell all the time. Next, my father picked a place where no one would look and brought me to rural England. He found a nice family and I used one of my mother’s spells to add myself to their memories.”
“How old were you?” Peter asked disbelievingly.
“Eight.”
Everyone gaped. Something Rurik had said when he’d pulled me into that dream came to mind. My daughter was walking dreams as a small child, flitting into the minds of strangers, full of curiosity. She’d always had an uncanny knack for magic, too, it seemed.
Raiden put a hand on his forehead, green eyes wide as something dawned on him. “That’s what the Russian accent was about when we were kids! I thought it had been some weird phase.”
Michelle let out a tinkling laugh at the memory. “It was so hard to learn a new accent.”
“Learning a new accent was difficult, but wielding memory-altering magic was a pinch?” Raiden mocked.
“I never said it was easy,” she argued, getting flustered.
I laughed to myself.
Slade abruptly interrupted the conversation. “Do you know who actually orchestrated the attack on the Viesci?”
Michelle’s eyes bugged and she looked down at her lap again. “Yes. It was the Grand Magister at the time. He was a Maleficar working with the Hunters. They were trying to replicate my mom’s formula and they’d been pressuring him for her Grimoire. They couldn’t figure out how she’d come up with her formula, so they wanted to find it instead. They recruited members of the Viesci into their ranks by promising them that the Viesci would be able to stay here if they helped. They were even more willing to betray my father when they found out that he’s a dhampir. Some of these Viesci were the ones who were killed, the ones Xavier was looking into, Adeline. They were the ones he couldn’t convince to change their minds. They were looking into his movements over the past few years to find where he may have hidden my mom’s book.”
“He killed them to protect you,” I said, filling in her thought.
“It was still murder,” Slade barked. He turned away and paced back and forth in front of the door a few times, digging his fingers through his hair. Then he took a deep breath and stopped. “Is that why they sent the Hunters in? They figured out that their inside people were dying?”
Michelle nodded. “They didn’t want to risk word getting out about their plans, so they turned to radicals to clean up their mess.”
“What about the Viesci who’ve gone missing?” Slade demanded.
“They were our spies,” Michelle explained. “Warren Heinrich’s father was one of the Viesci recruited by the Maleficarum. He must have told Warren something about it because Warren spent the next century or so tracking down my father to offer his help against the Maleficarum. Unfortunately, one of the Viesci Warren asked for help turned on him. Ilyse Voss. She wanted a payout from the Maleficarum for the information. They killed her, too.”
“Tch, idiot,” Kendra muttered.
No one spoke right away after that, but Peter eventually broke the silence. “So, you’re the one who wrote in those books, right?” He asked, turning to Mercer. Mercer nodded. “What’s up with the Solstice book? It’s just a fable.”
“No. Something in that book is how Octavia figured out how to open Purgatory properly.”
“There were no notes in it.” Peter mused.
I crossed my arms over my chest and shot Mercer a smug smile. “You couldn’t crack it either, could you?”
Mercer visibly bristled, his mouth becoming a thin line of annoyance. “I have theories, I just didn’t want to commit them to paper until I—”
“You’re right, he doesn’t have a clue,” Nikki chimed in.
Mercer scoffed incredulously and started wheeling himself toward the door. “If we’re done, I’d like to be going now.”
“One more thing, Mercer,” Michelle said as Bradley joined him. Mercer turned his chair until he could look at her over his shoulder. She fixed him with a stare. “You didn’t tell me about your meeting with Adeline before. No more secrets.”
Mercer scoffed at her scolding tone. With that, he unsealed the room and Bradley wheeled him out. Slade moved to the door as well, with a tempest of thoughts brewing behind his grey eyes.
I hurried after him. “Slade, how are you—”
He turned a baleful glare on me that stopped me dead. “You couldn’t warn me ahead of time?
You can’t even stand Kendra, but her you told.”
I flushed in embarrassment at the accusation, especially with Kendra standing right there, though it wasn’t as if she didn’t already know I didn’t like her. He was just worked up from the maelstrom of emotion. “I only told her because I knew she would need to find the proof herself in order to believe it.”
“For half a millennium, I’ve thought Tanikov was responsible for the slaughter of my people only to find out our entire government was involved instead. Did you really think I would believe that coming from Tanikov’s daughter?”
“Slade,” Raiden warned, but I held up a hand to stop him.
I wilted in remorse. “Please, Slade, I didn’t know how to tell you something like that. I…” I trailed off, unsure what to say or how to explain myself better. I’d hoped Kendra would return sooner and tell him herself. But I couldn’t just throw the blame at her for something that wasn’t her fault just because I’d been too cowardly to have a difficult conversation with someone I cared about.
Slade took a deep breath and his anger ebbed. Guilt echoed from his eyes to match my own. He shoved his fingers anxiously into his hair again and spun around, stalking from the room.
“I’ll talk to him.” Raiden looked upset as he passed me, so I grabbed his hand.
“Wait. I don’t need him to be scolded, I need him to be okay.”
Kendra surprisingly pushed past us into the hall. “I’ll talk to him then. I understand how he’s feeling and it’s not really about you.”
I folded my arms over my chest, ignoring the tingling in my nose and the salt burning my eyes as they welled up. I hadn’t meant to hurt him.
***
Shin-deep snow had piled up in the grassy areas around the building. More fell from the grey, slumbering trees where too much had piled up. The sun made a lazy effort of trying to burn through the grey clouds above, so cold air nipped at our faces as Nikki and I sat on a bench along a walkway up to Norwich’s Mental Health Institute. I could even feel the hairs in my nose freezing between breaths. My impatient gaze shot to the front doors, eager to go in already.
