Chapter 31
“ C am, stop and think about this,” Shar said as I stormed down the corridor toward the tutors’ quarters exit. “These are administrators of the academy. You can’t just accuse them of murder.”
“Why not? You think Melanie is lying?”
“Of course not, but we need to think about this. About what it could mean.”
“She’s right,” Curi said. “We can’t show our hand so quickly. For all we know, this could somehow be connected to Prasan. What if they’re working with whoever Prasan was working for?”
“Then we interrogate them and find out who.” Yarrow joined us, dressed now in dark denim and a dark turtleneck that brought out the gold flecks in his eyes.
Flora was close behind, her mouth turned down in disgust. “They can’t be allowed to get away with this. We can make them talk.”
“How?” Sharniza asked.
Yarrow and Flora exchanged a secretive smile, but it was Yarrow who answered. “We’re witches.”
Carter looked up from her paperwork as we entered her office. Her gaze flicked between us and then settled in a frown. “Is everything okay for the trial?”
“This isn’t about the trial,” Yarrow said.
Behind us, Flora closed the door, muttering something under her breath, and a shiver of energy washed over my skin, pricking and plucking, almost uncomfortable.
Behind the desk, Carter sucked in a sharp breath. “What was that? What are you doing?”
The side door to the office, a small washroom, opened, and Travani stepped out. Her eyes narrowed and a low hiss slithered from between her lips. “Magic.” Her voice was a rasp. “What is the meaning of this?”
“We just restored Melanie’s memories.” I studied their faces, noting every tick, every jump of muscle. “She told us who killed her and who messed with her head in the filing room.”
Carter’s breath quickened, and her face drained of color, but Travani reacted the opposite, her features rearranging themselves, smoothing out like glass.
“Oh?” Travani said. “Her death has been a mystery to us all for some time. I’m interested to know who she thinks is responsible.”
I allowed the corner of my mouth to tip up slightly. “You. Both of you.”
Carter made a soft sound of distress, but Travani covered it with a bark of laughter, recovering quickly to stare at me with a frown. “Wait, you’re serious?”
“Don’t play games,” Yarrow said. “You killed Melanie, took her baby, and attacked my sister in the filing room a few weeks ago. You messed with her mind.”
“Listen to yourself, Blake. How could I have messed with a witch’s mind? I’m not a mageri.”
“No, you’re a child of the ancients,” Yarrow said.
Travani sucked in a sharp breath. “How…how can you know that?”
“You hide your mark well, but not well enough. Last summer when it was sweltering, a little of the makeup you use to mask it rubbed off.”
Markings? “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Travani said quickly before she turned her attention back to Yarrow. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and if you expect the word of a specter to hold up against mine when it comes to the council, then you’re delusional.”
I stepped forward. “Oh, we have no intention of getting the council involved. For all we know, they’re in on it.
No. If you refuse to tell us the truth, then we’ll let Melanie have her way with you.
She’s on the verge of going malevolent, and I’m sure you both know what a malevolent can do to a person, supernatural or human. So what do you say now?”
A little of Travani’s bravado slipped, but it was Carter who replied.
“I say it’s time we told the truth, Remi.”
Travani balked. “Regina, what are you?—”
“Enough!” Carter said. “I’ve had enough. What we did has been eating away at me for two decades, and I can’t…I won’t let it claim another minute of my life.” She pushed back her chair and stood. “Sit and I’ll tell you everything, and then you can judge us as you wish.”
“No,” Travani said. “I should do it. This is, after all, my fault.”
“Remi, no it?—”
“Hush, love.” Travani smiled softly at Carter, leaving us in no doubt as to the truth of their relationship. “Let me.”
Carter slipped back into her seat with a nod. “Okay.”
“There are rules for my kind. Many rules where I come from,” Travani said. “But the only one that matters in this case is the one that I broke. I fell in love with a human, and I shared my life force with her, rendering her as ageless as me without the need to consume blood.”
My gaze flew to Carter. “Wait…how is that possible?”
“My people have special…abilities. Ones that we are forbidden to exercise and yet…yet I did so.”
“To save my life,” Carter said.
“The reason doesn’t matter, not to the conclave.
We were hunted,” Travani said. “Mercilessly for decades. For us, the graynites were a blessing. They allowed us to vanish, to become different people. They allowed us to find a home here at the academy. To be safe. Things were good—until they weren’t. ”
“We received a letter,” Carter said. “Unmarked, unsigned. Inside was an address and instructions.” She rolled her lips into her mouth for a beat. “Instructions to kidnap and bring Melanie Thornton to the academy and hold her here until further instructions.”
“The person who sent the letter knew about us,” Travani said. “Who I was, what I’d done, and they threatened to reveal our location to the conclave if we didn’t comply.”
“We should have run,” Carter said. “Run that night.”
“And have them track us?” Travani shook her head. “No. There was nowhere to run. We had to preserve what we’d built here.”
“So you kidnapped Melanie?” Sharniza prompted.
“Yes. She let us into her home when we arrived. She knew us. We’d worked together. She even came back to the academy with us willingly. We told her there was a function to open a new wing and that it wouldn’t be the same without her.”
“She was our friend,” Carter said, biting back a sob.
Travani continued, her tone unwavering and without emotion.
“Once we had her here, we gave her a room in the new dorm that was still under construction and locked her there. We kept her there for three months. I was forced to make her forget most of it to keep her calm. I may have…have broken her a little.”
“But the letters came, every week. Reminders,” Carter said. “Threats. To keep her there and wait for the baby to be born. And then…”
“Then to drop it off at a specific location,” Travani said. “We were told that once we left the baby at the church, we’d be free of our obligation. That all we had to do was administer a tincture to Melanie which would heal her body and wipe her memory of the last few months.”
“You’d already wiped her memory, though,” Curi said. “Over and over.”
“No, I’d altered them to calm her, made her believe she was on a retreat and that we were taking care of her, that it was all willing.”
“But then you killed her,” Derek said flatly.
Carter let out a sob. “It was supposed to make her forget. I didn’t like the idea, but…but we agreed to do it. To end the threats.”
“But it was a lie,” Travani said. “The tincture killed her.”
The room fell into silence as we all absorbed this.
I could empathize with their fear. Their desire to protect each other, to be safe, but I couldn’t justify the cost. “Melanie paid the price for your safety with her life, and what if this blackmailer had come back and asked you to do more nefarious stuff?”
“He didn’t,” Travani said. “He or she kept their word.”
“But they could have,” Carter said. “We always knew it was a possibility, but we took the risk anyway. Remi, we were selfish.”
“Maybe,” Travani said. “But I would do it all again to save you. To keep this. Us. I regret Melanie’s death, but I do not regret saving our lives.”
“And the baby?” Yarrow asked. “Did you not want to know what happened to her? Why this nameless, faceless, blackmailer wanted it?”
“No.” Travani lifted her chin. “I did what was needed to keep the woman I love safe, and if you want to punish me for that, then so be it. I don’t care, just leave Regina be. Please.”
“And the filing room? Why did you attack Flora?”
Travani sighed. “When I stumbled upon Melanie in the filing room, I panicked. She was going through Romi’s file, and the information in there was classified, so I wiped her mind, but to do that, I needed to show my true face.
” She looked to Flora. “You happened along at that moment and saw it, and if I hadn’t wiped it from your mind, it would have driven you insane.
My kind can manipulate memories, but wiping them is much harder, and we don’t do it often because it can render the subject insane, but with a specter… ”
“You broke her.” How could she think that was okay? “You messed with her memories, you killed her, then you broke what was left of her mind over a fucking file. You make me sick.” My lip curled. “How do you sleep at night?”
“I don’t…not well,” Travani said. “I went back to the church that same night to look for the baby, but it was gone, and not a day has passed when I haven’t wondered what happened to her.”
“What are you going to do now?” Carter asked. “Now that you know what we did.”
Yarrow met my gaze with bright golden eyes and gave me a nod, leaving the decision to me. “We’re not going to do anything. You are. You’re going to make amends with Melanie. You’re going to tell her the truth, and then you’re going to do everything in your power to find that baby.”
“Don’t you think we’ve tried?” Travani said. “It’s been decades; the baby could be anywhere.”
“Do you have the blackmail letters?” Flora asked.
“Yes, why?”
Once again, she and Yarrow exchanged glances.
“Give them to us. We might be able to use them to locate this blackmailer.”
“There are no postmarks, no blood, nothing. Not even fingerprints,” Carter said. “We checked.”
“We don’t need any of those things,” Flora said. “Just the whiff of an essence.”
“Give us the letters,” Yarrow said. “And if there’s anything to find, we will find it.”
We’d solved one mystery only to be saddled with another, but my gut told me that the identity of the baby and its father were vital, and I had faith that Yarrow and Flora would succeed in finding her and reuniting her with her mother.
I had an elite trial to mentally prepare for, and that required some serious decompression time and maybe a caramel latte or two with my buddies.