Chapter 9
Keane
THE CONTAINMENT WAS THREE LEVELS below ground in a secure facility. The air smelled like ozone and old stone—the scent of magic held under pressure for too long.
Captain Parker had approved my visit without comment, but her expression had said enough. Are you sure about this?
I wasn’t, but I needed answers only one person could provide.
The guards at the checkpoint nodded as I passed, professional but wary. They’d been briefed on Lord Alstone’s condition—the black eyes, the fragmented speech, the way the master’s corruption had eaten through whatever humanity remained.
He was not my uncle anymore. Something else was wearing his face.
The dimensional barriers flickered at the cell’s entrance—my own portal magic, ironically, repurposed to contain him. I’d designed the containment grid myself with clean geometry and efficiency. I could focus on that kind of work without thinking about what it was holding.
Or who.
Lord Alstone sat perfectly still in the center of the cell, his hands folded in his lap. When he looked up, his eyes were completely black. No iris. No white. Just obsidian darkness reflecting the barrier’s shimmer.
Keane. His voice held multiple tones layered over each other, like someone speaking through water. The prodigal nephew visits his fallen mentor.
You were never my mentor, I said, my voice coming out steady. You were my jailer.
He laughed—too many voices at once, harmonizing in ways that made my dimensional sense ache. Such anger. The master showed me how to move beyond petty emotion. How to see the patterns underneath.
I pulled out my tablet, already recording. Whatever information I could extract from the madness might help us later.
I want the truth about my parents.
The black eyes fixed on me with unnatural stillness. Wisp pressed against my legs, grounding me.
Truth. He tasted the word like it was foreign. Truth is such a limited concept when you’re bound by linear causality. But, yes. Foster and Sophia, your parents. The multiple voices resolved briefly into something that sounded almost human. They chose poorly.
They discovered the first corrupted wellspring. I was repeating the information I’d gotten from Levon. He hadn’t been sure who killed them, but I continued, And you had them killed for it.
I saved the family legacy, my uncle admitted. Old fury broke through the master’s overlay. This was Lazlo Alstone’s voice, bitter and sharp. Foster would have exposed everything. Destroyed centuries of Alstone influence for the sake of truth and morality. He was weak.
My hands clenched. He was your brother.
He was an obstacle. The black eyes gleamed with something that might have been pride or might have been the master speaking through him. The third seat should have been mine by right. I was older, stronger, more willing to do what was necessary for our family’s power.
But the wellspring chose him instead.
Silence. Then that multilayered laugh again.
The wellspring. Venom now, centuries old. The wellspring rejected me. Wouldn’t acknowledge my claim. I couldn’t even enter the royal tower suite. The bloodline wards recognized his magic, not mine. Do you know what that feels like? To be judged unworthy by sentient rock?
I filed that away. The wellspring’s judgment. Its ability to distinguish between brothers based on character, not just blood.
So you killed them both, I said. Made it look like an accident.
Car accident was cleaner than vampire attack. Fewer questions. Less investigation. His head tilted at an angle no human neck should allow. Sophia would have supported him. She always did. They were a unit. Removing one meant removing both.
And then you took me.
And then I prepared you. The master’s influence surged forward again, drowning Alstone’s voice. Made you compatible with the network. Corruption isn’t destruction, dear nephew. It’s evolution. Transformation. Becoming part of something eternal.
My stomach turned. You tortured me for months.
I tried to save you from their weakness, he said, but you rejected perfection. Chose these… children. Chose the cleaning girl who doesn’t even understand what she is.
I kept my expression neutral.
Where are the Lightfords? I asked, steering toward tactical intelligence.
His attention fractured, pulled in multiple directions at once. Following the old paths. The ley line convergences. His fingers traced shapes in the air—complex patterns I recognized from dimensional mathematics but twisted somehow. Wrong.
They’re building the network, he continued, his voice shifting between coherent and fragmented. Or maintaining it? No… completing it.
What kind? I asked carefully.
The master’s design transcends space and time… His voice trailed off but then sharpened suddenly. The Lightfords are investigating the resonance. Why heir magic harmonizes. Why the cleaning girl’s necromancy syncs with yours specifically. They want to know if it can be replicated. Weaponized.
My blood chilled. Heir resonance. Our magic working together naturally—something the council had feared from the beginning. We’d known they were looking into it, trying to eradicate it, but weaponized?
And can it?
The black eyes locked on to me. The master thinks so. That’s why he took Raven. Not just to hurt the necromancer but to study the bond, the ties that make witches stronger together. His lips twisted into something too wide to be a smile. He’s learning how to corrupt connection itself.
I thought of Marigold standing in front of hostile students, enforcing orders with authority she’d earned but not yet proven. Of Raven—alive but damaged, her consciousness fighting through months of corruption. Of what four more months might do.
What does long-term corruption look like? I asked. Though I was afraid I was staring right at it. Would Raven become this?
He smiled, the expression weird and alien on his face.
The necromancer should kill her friend, Alstone said, reading something in my expression.
Mercy. Before the girl realizes how much of herself is already gone.
Before she understands that recovery is an illusion, and she’ll spend the rest of her life fighting to remember who she used to be.
Marigold won’t—
Of course she won’t. She’s loyal. Sentimental.
She’ll hold on to hope long past the point where hope makes sense.
She’ll watch her friend struggle and pretend it’s temporary.
Pretend love can fix what the master broke.
He tilted his head again, studying me. You understand, though.
Don’t you? You lived it. Felt corruption eating through your sense of self.
Wondered which thoughts were yours and which were mine.
I had. For months, I’d doubted every impulse, questioned every decision, tried to map the boundary between Keane Alstone and whatever my uncle was making me become.
The difference, I said quietly, is that I had people who fought for me anyway. Who believed I was still worth saving even when I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.
Sentiment. Alstone waved a hand dismissively.
The cleaning girl will learn. When her friend wakes screaming from nightmares she can’t explain.
When simple conversations require effort she used to manage effortlessly.
When the girl they saved looks at them with eyes that recognize but don’t quite remember why she should care.
I thought of Marigold’s face when she talked about Raven—the guilt, the determination, the refusal to give up, even when the evidence suggested she should.
Is there anything else useful you can tell me? I asked. About the network. The convergence points. What the master is actually building.
But Alstone’s coherence had fractured entirely. His gaze went distant, unfocused, seeing something beyond the cell walls.
Guards, I said.
The dimensional barriers reinforced. The black eyes tracked me as I turned to leave.
Keane. In one last moment of lucidity, Alstone’s voice cut through the master’s overlay.
The wellspring chose you over me, just like it chose Foster.
It sees something I never could. He paused.
But I wonder… when the master completes his work and all magic bends to his will… will your worthiness matter then?
I walked out without answering.
I made it to the observation room before my hands started shaking.
Parker was waiting, reviewing the security footage with clinical assessment. She looked up as I entered.
Get what you needed? she asked.
Some of it. My voice stayed level, professional, like I was filing a tactical report instead of processing the fact that my uncle had admitted to murdering his own brother for power.
Parker studied me for a long moment. You okay?
No, I said honestly, but I will be.
She nodded, understanding without pushing. Even here, even under all these wards, he’s still connected to the master somehow.
I nodded.
I’ll let Lord Raynoff know, she said.
And the stuff about Raven? I asked quietly.
That’s for you to decide how to share, she said. Or if.
I thought of Marigold, dealing with hostile students and movement restrictions and the weight of leadership she’d never asked for. Did she need to know that her best friend might never fully recover? That Raven’s consciousness could be permanently fractured?
Or would that knowledge just add another burden to the ones she was already barely managing?
I’ll think about it, I said finally.
Parker was quiet for a moment, still looking at the footage. When she spoke, her voice had shifted into the register she used when she was thinking through a problem rather than managing a person.
I’ve cleared forty-seven guards in the past two weeks, she said. Thirty more still waiting. Every session, I’m in a room with someone who may or may not be compromised, making a call based on what my gut tells me. What I recognize. She paused. What I survived.
I understood the problem without her saying it.
Her method worked because she’d been on the inside of corruption.
She knew how it moved through a person, what it left behind, the specific quality of someone fighting it versus someone fully taken.
But that knowledge lived in her body, not in any protocol anyone else could use.
If she got it wrong once, or got sick, or simply ran out of time…
I can put something together, I said. Corruption has signatures that don’t require necromancy to catch, like the way it alters how a witch draws on local ley lines, and small differences in how their magic interacts with containment wards.
It tests them differently once it’s embedded, even early-stage.
Portal traces, if they’ve moved through corrupted space recently.
I paused. It’s not foolproof. Early-stage is harder than advanced.
But it would give your people observable markers.
Something you could train from instead of something only you can feel.
Parker looked up from the footage. How long?
A few days. I’d want Marigold to review it. Her necromantic read on corruption would help me translate what I understand dimensionally into terms that don’t require either of our specific magic to apply.
Do that. Not a request. I have guards I trust to run the remaining sessions. Once you have a written protocol, I’ll use it to train them—give them a framework instead of just instinct. She closed her tablet. Anything that scales beyond one person in a room.