Chapter 10 #2
Someone is pretending Tranquil Brook still exists, I told her. Someone told a lawyer that I was still being held. Took money, probably.
We need to tell Ward.
Yes, I agreed. And Hart.
She left, and I saw that Violette was rubbing her arms. “You felt her,” I said.
“What?”
“The chill,” I replied, gesturing toward her hands. “You felt her.”
“Her?”
“Sylvia,” I replied. “She’s a ghost.”
Violette’s eyes went wide again. “You can see ghosts?”
I nodded. “You can’t.” It wasn’t a question. But she could feel them, or she wouldn’t have been cold. It was warm—early April and nearly seventy outside, and Ward and Mason tried not to overextend the AC by turning it on below about seventy-five degrees.
Violette shook her head, her expression troubled.
“What can you do?” I asked her.
She drew in a long breath. “Nothing I want to do,” she replied, and her tone was deeply bitter. “I wish I couldn’t see it,” she blurted, then. “The magic around people.”
“What color is mine?” I asked her. I wanted to know if she was a witch like me, or a warlock like Ward. Like my uncle had probably been.
She flicked her gaze up. “Red,” she whispered, fear crossing her features.
Death magic was a part of me—Ward said he could always see it, even if I wasn’t using it.
He said the same was true of Mason’s magic, although his was green for healing and nature.
Fire was orange, water a bright cerulean blue, air white, and earth magic a darker green than Mason’s.
Arcane magic—like Hart’s or a shifter’s like Raj—was gold.
Spirit, which Ward and Beck both used, was royal blue.
Apparently mine was pale, pale blue, almost white, when I was experiencing someone’s memories.
I nodded. “That’s why they sent me away,” I said softly. “Because I’m a death witch.”
“And a psychic?”
I nodded again. I decided not to mention being a dreamwalker. It felt like that might overwhelm her. “They wanted to… make me not a death witch,” I told her.
“Can you do that?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No, but that didn’t stop them from trying.”
She dropped her gaze. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s not your fault,” I told her, even though her existence was, in fact, part of why I’d ended up there. She hadn’t made the decision to be conceived—even if I had been protecting both her and my mother, Violette bore no responsibility either for my actions or for their consequences.
“I know but—” She bit her lip. “I… should have known. I think maybe part of me always did.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, my heart rate picking up.
“I mean… I always felt like I wasn’t alone.
Like someone was looking out for me. Keeping me safe.
” She swallowed. “The ring I showed you,” she said.
“Mother gave it to me when I was younger and told me my uncle was watching over me in death.” She frowned.
“I believed her at first, but I started to wonder. Things I found, papers, pictures, some of the books of magic in the library… It didn’t add up.
He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would protect. ”
“He wasn’t.”
“But you are,” she said, and she didn’t make it seem like a question.
I shrugged. “I tried, when I was still at home,” I half-whispered.
“Did… were you there when I was born?”
I shook my head. “No. Our mother was pregnant with you, though.”
Violette swallowed. “He tried to hurt Mother, didn’t he?” she asked. “And me.”
I nodded.
“So you hurt him.” That also wasn’t a question.
I nodded again.
“Good,” she rasped.
“May I—” I hesitated.
“What?” she asked, leaning forward almost eagerly.
“Ask how they died?” She’d said they both died, and in a way that made it sound like they’d died at the same time.
Violette let out a long breath. “Car accident,” she answered. “They were coming home late from some stupid ritual, it was raining, and a pickup crossed the center line.”
I nodded, feeling nothing for the two people whose genetics had made up my DNA. Who had given me the magic they despised. Who had sent me to have that magic stripped from me again and again.
Who apparently had never known that the ‘treatment’ they paid for had ended and the facility shut down.
Which meant that someone out there was still pretending to be Tranquil Brook.
Maybe still wanted to revive it.
I looked at Violette. “Would your lawyer give me the number he called to make sure my ‘care’ continued?” I asked her.
“Um. Probably. Why?”
“Because it doesn’t exist,” I replied. “So I want to know who’s pretending it still does.”
She blinked. “Oh, holy shit.”
After Violette had left—throwing her arms around me in a hug that had startled me, although I’d hugged her back after a few seconds, grateful I was wearing gloves—Ward had immediately dragged me into the conference room, where Mason and Sylvia were already waiting.
“Hart’s on the way,” Ward told me. “Because this is not okay.”
I assumed he meant the fact that someone was pretending that Tranquil Brook was still in operation. Violette had promised to send me whatever she had from the lawyers that was supposedly about me—including the contact information they had used to communicate with ‘Tranquil Brook.’
I wondered if they’d somehow revived it. Moved back in after everyone had been evacuated and started up the facility again in the same place. “You don’t think they reopened it?” I asked him, voicing my worry.
“Absolutely not,” Ward replied immediately, his brow furrowed. “That’s…” He trailed off, then ran a hand over his face. “Fuck,” he muttered. “I don’t know, Rayn,” he said, then. “I can’t imagine they would, or that it would be legal, but I don’t know how any of this could make any sense.”
I shivered, not really cold, wrapping my arms around my middle. “I hate this,” I blurted.
“Me, too,” he agreed. “Although I bet not as much as you do.”
“We don’t know much of anything,” Mason said softly. “But,” he added, turning his laptop around so that we could see it. “It does seem from the website that they’re still in operation.” He frowned. “Or in operation again.”
I’m going to check, Sylvia announced suddenly, then disappeared.
“Shit,” Ward said out loud. “Goddammit, Sylvia.”
Mason raised his eyebrows.
“I think she just… went there,” I told him.
“Which is incredibly stupid,” Ward grumbled. “Because she has no idea what she’s getting into—”
And then she returned just as abruptly as she’d left, this time making herself fully substantial. “They are not there,” she announced to the whole room, Mason included. “And the state of the place suggests that they have not been there since we last were.”
Mason’s frown deepened. “Which leaves us with several very obvious questions,” he said.
“Who the fuck are they?” Ward began, ticking them off on his fingers. “Where the fuck are they? Why the fuck are they doing this? And what the fuck are they actually doing?”
“That would be the essence of it, yes,” Mason confirmed.
“But they are not at Tranquil Brook,” Sylvia put in. “That is a positive, at least.”
Mason grunted. “Is it?” he asked. “If they were there we would at least know how to find them, whoever they are.”
They kept talking, but I’d lost the ability to focus on the conversation, staring down at my gloved hands, fingers pressed together, studying the weave of the fabric, the stitching along the side of the fingers, the place where the seam was starting to wear through, one tiny thread dangling like a fallen eyelash.
“Rayn, are you alright?”
I started at the sound of his voice, low and soft and utterly unexpected. “Raj?” I’d known Hart was coming, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Raj might come with him.
“Jesus fuck, Tony, don’t scare the kid.”
Raj glared up over his shoulder at Hart. “I’m not scaring him,” he grumbled.
“He jumped like three inches,” the elf argued.
“Because he’s shutting down,” Raj snapped back. “Not that I blame him, given what’s happened.”
“Rayn.” This time the voice was Ward’s. “Are you okay?”
I looked up at him, seeing concern in his features. Then I looked at Raj, crouched beside me, elbows on his thighs. He hadn’t touched me, but he was close enough that I could feel a slight warmth from his body. Shifters ran warm, I remembered someone saying once.
“I—I don’t know,” I admitted.
“You want a drink?” Hart asked.
“Jesus, Hart,” Ward snapped.
“What? I want a goddamn drink, and I wasn’t even a patient there.”
“Not helpful, Keebler,” Raj put in.
“You got a better idea?” Hart retorted.
“We have hot chocolate,” Mason suggested.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, not everything is made better by hot chocolate,” Hart grumbled, throwing his hands up.
“There is nothing that can’t be improved by hot chocolate,” Ward replied. “So we’re all going to have some before things get seriously ugly.” He gripped the wheels of his chair to head to the kitchen.
“I’ll do it,” Mason said quickly, standing and walking out of the room. Ward looked annoyed.
“Jesus fucking Christ on a cracker,” Hart grumbled.
I swallowed, wishing I could somehow sink into my chair and disappear.
“Rayn?” I sucked in a sharp breath when Raj put a hand on my knee, staring at his long, strong fingers spread across the khaki of my slacks. “Sorry,” he said softly, pulling his hand back.
“No, it’s okay—I—” I swallowed. I wanted him to put his hand back, but asking that seemed extremely inappropriate.
“Do you need something?” he asked.
I shook my head. It was a lie. I needed for this whole thing to stop.
For Tranquil Brook to not still be doing…
anything. For the world around me to not have been shifted and thrown off-kilter, as though someone had put a filter over the world that muted the colors and sounds so that I felt as though everything were blanketed in fog.
Raj shifted his weight slightly, then pulled out a small tin from one pocket, then opened it. “Anise mint?”