Chapter 1 #3
I looked up at him then, his intense golden-brown eyes focused on me, studying me. Judging me. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“She was confused,” Mason said shortly.
“Confused?” I asked, a knot forming in my stomach.
Mason looked uncomfortable.
The knot tightened.
I’m sure it’s not the same thing, Sylvia said, clearly trying to be soothing.
It didn’t work.
The only thing I knew of that would cause a ghost to become confused if they hadn’t been in life—and this woman hadn’t seemed particularly confused—was if someone had tried to strip her magic from her.
Like they’d done to me at Tranquil Brook.
The people who’d died there, their magic stolen from them, had been ‘confused,’ their minds twisted and warped by the process of stealing their magic.
I looked back at Parikh. The frustration on his face. Then I looked back at Mason. “Give it back to me.”
The orc’s facial expression told me he didn’t want to. But he dropped the necklace back into my hand.
She was gasping for air—
I had to go earlier. Before what I’d already read.
There were words in a strange language that twisted his tongue, words spoken with anger and disgust. Words that were cold and icy. Thick with power.
Words that tasted bitter and acrid.
But there was glee underneath the anger and hate. Pleasure as the words twisted his tongue. He enjoyed imagining what this would do to her.
His fingers moved over the links of chain and gems, red and green glinting amid gold and chips of shimmering rainbow in pearlescent white.
How it would drink up her strength and leave her weak and spent.
Vulnerable.
His.
I brought myself out of that one, still gasping, although not because I felt like my chest was being crushed, but because sucking in air would keep me from vomiting.
What the woman had felt was horrifying, but what the man had felt while planning her death—because that was unquestionably what he’d been doing—left me feeling dirty in a way that I didn’t think I’d be able to clean off with a hundred showers, although I now desperately wanted one.
“What else do you have for me?” Parikh wanted to know.
“Give him a minute, Raj,” Mason snapped.
I shuddered, my body trying to somehow rid itself of the thick, oily feeling left behind by having shared thoughts, however briefly, with the man.
“He was doing magic on it,” I managed, finally, my hands back to pressing against my thighs, the muscles trembling, although I wasn’t sure whether it was from exertion or disgust.
“What kind of magic?” Parikh wanted to know.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“What was he doing?” Mason asked me.
“Chanting. Doing something with his fingers.”
“Were there sigils?”
I frowned. “I—don’t think so? But I mostly just saw his hands.”
“What does—” Parikh began.
“Probably warlock magic, then,” Mason told him. “Which would make sense if—”
Nobody seemed to want to say it.
“If what?” Parikh asked.
Mason looked at me, clearly not wanting to say it.
I was sick of people trying to avoid saying things they thought I would be sensitive about.
I didn’t like thinking about Tranquil Brook—of course I didn’t—but if there were still people doing what had been done to me and everyone else there, then I wanted them to be stopped, whether I enjoyed the process of helping or not.
“If they’re draining magic from people,” I finished for him.
“If they’re what?” Parikh sounded shocked.
I frowned. I’d assumed that, since he worked with Hart, and Hart had been at Tranquil Brook, Parikh would know about what had happened there.
“Hart didn’t… tell you?” Mason asked.
Parikh let out a long sigh, long fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. “Tell me what?”
“About Tranquil Brook,” I said.
Out of the corner of one eye I saw Mason look at me, assessing. He did that a lot when he thought I was likely to be upset by something.
I try not to get upset.
When I get upset, people get hurt. Or die. It doesn’t seem worth it.
That wasn’t a problem with my Arcana-induced psychic ability. That particular ‘gift,’ to borrow Sylvia’s term, I’d been born with.
Death magic isn’t something to take lightly.
I hadn’t meant to kill my uncle. Not exactly.
I’d wanted to stop him.
Killing him was just how the magic had accomplished that.
I’d learned to control it essentially alone, practicing on roaches, spiders, and the unfortunate mice who’d made their way into my room over the long, lonely years at Tranquil Brook.
I felt bad about having ended their lives—especially the mice—but I’d been trying to learn how to stop someone without killing them. How to feel their lives in their bodies, to pull at them, but not to destroy them.
But when you’re learning, your magic is like a spiked bat when what you want it to be is a scalpel—capable of cutting, but as capable of cutting to heal as to harm. You could use a scalpel to do surgery, after all, even though you could also use one to kill.
I hadn’t wanted to hurt the few people I’d actually liked there, after all. The occasional orderly or nurse who came and went, driven out, usually sooner rather than later, by the oppressive atmosphere at Tranquil Brook if they actually cared about their patients.
“What,” Parikh asked, interrupting my thoughts, “is Tranquil Brook?”
“Explain to me again how this was supposed to work?” Parikh asked.
Ward sighed. Mason had called him in to provide further information about the hellish nightmare that had been the institution where I’d spent most of my life.
“We don’t actually know how it worked,” he replied.
“We know that they were stripping witchcraft magic from the people being held there, we have a sense of what the machinery looked like and the fact that they used it, but we don’t actually know the specifics of the ritual. ”
“But they did this to you?” Parikh asked, turning his attention on me.
“Yes,” I answered.
“But you don’t remember the specifics?”
Those amber-gold-brown eyes were so intense it felt like he was stripping off my skin. “N-no. Not really.”
“Rayn,” he said, his voice serious, my name sounding different on his lips than it did on anyone else’s, making me wish he didn’t dislike me so much. “Will you tell me what you do remember?”
I swallowed, then nodded. “I—I don’t know how often they did it,” I said, the words hard to push out of my throat because it had suddenly constricted. I swallowed again, trying to clear it. “They had a box—wires and electronics.”
“What kind of box?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Square. Plastic, maybe. Or metal. I don’t know what was inside it. I don’t know how any of it was connected.”
“Okay. What did they do with it?”
“The connection points were like electrodes.”
“Like an electroshock therapy device?” he asked.
“Like that, yes,” I replied.
“Do you know that it wasn’t actually electroshock therapy?”
I frowned. “Electroshock therapy wouldn’t affect magic.”
“Are you sure?”
I didn’t understand why he was asking me this. “You don’t believe me?” I didn’t understand why I wanted him to. Why I cared whether he believed me or not.
It wasn’t like I wasn’t used to people assuming I wasn’t to be believed. That I was mad. Delusional. At the very least, not trustworthy.
“I believe you believe it,” came his response, even and calm. Professional. Clinical.
“Jesus, Raj,” Ward snapped. “The Antiquus Ordo Arcanum was using Tranquil Brook to siphon magic from the people inside, using it to charge magical artifacts so that they could transfer that power from people they thought of as unworthy to themselves. Because they were fucking warlocks and the patients weren’t. ”
He pulled those eyes off me and looked at Ward. “Then help me prove it.”
Ward’s expression was grim. “How many dead people will it take, Agent Parikh?” he asked, his voice cold. “Because I can get you more.”
She was gasping for air—
I had to go earlier.
Hate and glee—
Even earlier.
Pride. A lot of it. He was so proud that he’d been able to create this work of art, this magical talisman using stones from more than one older artifact. From families with old blood and older magic.
The emeralds were from an old family in France. The rubies from India. And opals from Ethiopia. The large, central diamond from South Africa. All the stones had been collected and imbued with power by the old families, and then he’d recast them, resetting them in gold worked through with magic.
It was the perfect vessel.
He closed the box.
I shuddered, not liking that man any more than the later one who had possessed the necklace. I still felt like I needed a shower, although the necklace’s third-previous owner hadn’t seemed as actively violent as the second. But there was still something about him that felt wrong. Malicious.
I didn’t know how to explain that to Agent Parikh, though.
“Well?” He sounded impatient.
“Its… creator? Re-creator?” I grimaced. The words were all wrong. “He thought of it as the perfect vessel.”
“Vessel for what?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He let out an irritated breath, then flipped back through the notebook he had with him. “So this man makes a vessel, the next one made it into something designed to sap her magic, and then…” He trailed off. “Did it? Is that why she passed out?”
“I don’t know,” I said again. I only knew that she had been losing consciousness, I couldn’t tell why.
Parikh let out a grumbling sound, although I wasn’t sure whether it was anger, frustration, or some other emotion that I couldn’t identify. “What do you know?” he asked. Irritation, then. With me. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it.
I also didn’t know how to answer the question, or whether I was even supposed to. People sometimes asked questions they didn’t actually want answered. So I said nothing.
Parikh ran a hand through his hair, the thick, dark waves becoming tousled. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen him with his hair out of place. Or, now that I looked at him more closely, with such deep wrinkles in the rolled-up sleeves of his cream-colored shirt.