Chapter Forty-Seven Viola
For one century, Death asked every soul that crossed into the Underworld about the first Mortemagi. But no one knew her, as if she were erased from history.
forty-seven | viola
If I am to die young, let it be somewhere beautiful.
Not in this filthy place that stinks like rotten wood and blood.
I force my eyes open, and they shut immediately, blinded by the sun.
Or perhaps it’s a light. My throat is scratchy, my mouth feels like it’s filled with sand, and my head is splitting in two.
“Darling Viola, finally awake…”
That voice. I would recognize that wicked, silvery voice anywhere.
Lorne.
Gods, I should have known. He was praising Grimm. What was I thinking?
“I don’t need her alive. I don’t know why you insist on letting her live,” says another voice. Overseer Delaney. It has the same rasp, the same stress at the end of her words.
My eyes are fighting a battle to stay closed, but I push through. I want to look at Lorne when I tell him to eat a dead rat.
“You should’ve killed her like her sister,” Delaney scoffs.
Lorne killed Olivia? Impossible. Delaney told me…
she never told me she killed Olivia. I jerk my hands apart, but they lock against something rough behind my back.
My stomach churns, threatening to spill over myself.
If they kill me and take my cuff before we find Grimm and Ysenia takes over my body…
I bite my lips, forcing my mind to stop spiraling. And I do the only thing within my control. I breathe.
One. Two. There must be a misunderstanding. Lorne is overbearing, but he loved Olivia. He has to have loved Olivia. He was devastated at her funeral; no one pretends like that.
Three. Four. She wrote about him. She was in love with him. She was an excellent judge of character, and I have to trust her judgment. He wouldn’t do that to her.
Five. Six. My eyes peel open, and the single, bright bulb in the middle of the room assaults me. I blink hard. Where am I?
There are desks, large stained glass windows that look hundreds of years old, torn curtains, broken chairs, a door in the back to the left behind Delaney and Lorne, stairs in the right corner, and another door to my right. It reeks of stale wood and decaying leaves, of old blood and tears.
How long have I been here? I try to gather my wits. If they bothered to shackle me instead of killing me, they must want something from me. Did Grimm tell them to hold me?
“Why not just kill me and end this?” My hoarse voice catches me off guard.
Lorne scoffs, shaking his head, and Delaney places The Founder’s Book of Relics on the desk behind her. “Sweet child, ignorance is bliss. Rhea’s relic is wasted on you. All that magic, all that power, in a foolish girl who wasted her lifeblood over what?”
“If you wanted the relic, why did you kill Olivia?” I already know the answer, but I need to stall until Ysenia comes back and Grimm appears.
Delaney’s lips twitch, and her jaw clenches. She lifts her nose, nostrils flaring at my question. I’ve wounded her pride. She didn’t know Olivia’s relic was a fake until they killed her.
“It was an accident.” Lorne steps in front of me, and I want to crawl into myself.
“Olivia did slip on that boardwalk, and I don’t know how to swim,” he says coolly, as if Olivia’s death was a minor, unfortunate event.
“I liked your sister, Viola. Maybe I didn’t love her, but I did like her.
I was going to ask to borrow her cuff that night… alas…”
I want to punch Olivia’s name out of his lips. He doesn’t deserve the privilege of having known her, of having had a modicum of her love.
Lorne looks at me expectantly, and I nearly spit in his face, but I’m too weak for that, and retaliation might muddle my and Ysenia’s plan. Sure, I wasn’t planning on waking up shackled to a chair, but the idea was always for them to take me in as bait.
“I don’t want the cuff.” The words tumble out of my lips like the river of lies I’m preparing to unleash. Anything to buy me time. “I never wanted my magic—”
As I speak, I realize how much has changed.
It started off that way, but knowing how many people died so I could exist, it would be a stain on their memory.
Along with the heartbreak, this magic brought me friends; it brought me a home.
And now, I have to leave them all behind: Beau, Lyria, Sylas, the aspiers.
Lorne cocks his head, a light frown pulling his eyebrows together.
Gone is the overbearing Magister, reeking of desperation.
Now, his moss-green eyes look at me with precision, as if he’s searching my face for a long-lost answer.
“Our hearing and sight of the dead are a gift. Our corpse control, a weapon. Centuries of magic cultivated in a single relic, the most powerful relic after the Founder’s. And what do you make of it all?”
I press my lips together in defiance. Gods, give me the strength to punch him square in the mouth. Instead, I laugh. Nothing is funny, but I’m hoping my laughter is distracting enough to keep him from hearing the soft scrape of rope as I try to loosen my bindings.
He watches me with interest. “Do you, darling Viola, know the history of our people?” His voice is the same, but the inflection of his tone sounds ancient. “Do you think Gorhail is a sanctuary for us?”
No, of course not. If Gorhail had no trouble harboring scum like Lorne and Delaney, it doesn’t care for any student, not just Mortemagi. Gorhail’s sanctity has been desecrated since the moment it decided to heed DOTS guidelines and cover up the murders as regular poacher attacks.
“No!” he exclaims. I jump, and his voice lowers to a hiss. “No, it’s a prison. Gorhail keeps us under control. It watches our every move. It uses our magic to further its purpose.”
“Isn’t that all institutions?” I need to keep him talking, long enough so I can work my wrists out of this binding.
“Yes!” he exclaims, his face lighting up with a sinister grin, as though I’ve just said something profound.
“Grimm was the only one with the right idea, and look at what they did to him. We deserve the freedom to practice magic at will. We deserve both the good and the ugly. After all, it is how we learn.”
“But you can’t kill innocent people in the name of magical freedom.
” I hold his gaze as he approaches; it chokes me with doubt.
DOTS cares about no one but its own ideologies.
Despite all the stability it provides, DOTS sends people to their deaths with no remorse and an inflated sense of duty—poacher kill counts are barbaric.
But Grimm is volatile; he kills on a whim.
Even at its height, DOTS still folds to the law.
Grimm, on the other hand, makes his own law.
“Magic has no master, my darling.” He runs a long finger along the edge of my face, stopping at my chin. “If even the God of Death bowed away from the magic he bestowed upon us, what makes DOTS think it can control us?” He jerks my jaw up in one quick motion.
I bite my scream.
“It doesn’t seek control…” I don’t finish my thought, because even I know it does.
Lorne gives me a knowing look, and Delaney laughs under her breath.
“Do you know how much magic it takes to resurrect someone? How much expertise?” His voice drops to a thorny caress. He pulls back, stretching like a cat.
“A lot,” I rasp, a faint copper tang filling my mouth. The inner lining of my throat is on fire. He doesn’t know about Ysenia. He thinks I resurrected Victor and Beau by myself.
Lorne frowns, kissing his teeth. He glances at Delaney and sighs. “I haven’t seen magic this raw in years, and you want to kill her?”
“I—” Delaney begins.
“Quiet.” Lorne drags his stare back to me, and I swallow, flinching as my saliva scrapes against my throat. I wonder why Delaney listens to him, how he seems to be in control here. “Now tell me, Viola. How did you manage to stitch two bodies together with no training?”
“Victor and Lyria helped me through it,” I say, my heart tearing through my throat. If he finds out that I’m anchored to a ghost—worse, that I’m anchored to one of the founders of Gorhail—who knows what he’ll do?
“Yet it was your lifeblood they used, my darling.” He reaches for my face again, brushing my hair away.
I wince.
The chill of his touch digs into my soul, freezing me in place.
When our eyes meet, his flash with chagrin.
I frown, taken aback by the emotion. He rubs his thumb over my left temple.
“Your little friends’ treachery cost you so much,” he says.
“The other Houses are always ready to bury us, yet they have no qualms using us when they want their dead back.”
“They didn’t trick me.” The words come out on their own, but they’re untrue. Victor did trick me. He had his reasons, but he didn’t hesitate to sacrifice my life for his… and Beau’s. In the end, Sylas was right; most people are driven by selfishness.
“You’re extraordinary, Viola Corvi,” he murmurs, studying my face for a pause. “It’s a pity you chose the enemy.”
“The enemy?” I scoff, snapping away from his touch. “No one but you is murdering people, Lorne.”
“Darling…” He kneels in front of me, brings his fingers around my chin, and jerks it toward him so I have no choice but to look at him.
“You remind me of a girl I once loved. A girl with hair as red as fire and eyes as black as coal. A Mortemagi who defied me to save the world, the same world who was ready to sacrifice her for my downfall. Do you know what it’s like to watch your heart shatter against the cliffs? ”
I gasp.
“A necessary sacrifice,” he whines. “I mourn her to this day, the only woman I’ve ever loved and the only one I will ever love.”
Ysenia.
Young Ysenia, who laments her death in the catacombs. Sweet Ysenia, who cannot move on to the Underworld because of him. Brilliant Ysenia, whose life was cut short because he saw her as a weakness.
Gods have mercy.
Lorne is Rafael Grimm.