Chapter Thirty-Seven
The day of Vikrant Khatri’s funeral was sunny.
This, Silas registered from some faraway place, was antithetical.
It was New York in November—gray bleakness was standard, a match for the colorless existence Silas had been living in since his father’s death.
That he would keep living in, forever, thanks to what he did.
But instead, the sun shone, beating down on the back of Silas’ neck.
He shifted his father’s casket on his white-clad shoulder. He didn’t look at the others sharing the weight with him as they walked toward the crematorium. Didn’t look at the hundreds of gathered mourners, witches and ordinaries alike, all here to celebrate a great man.
A great man who couldn’t even have a proper funeral. Whose family hadn’t been able to wash and prepare his body, because the official story that he died of a tragic and unexpected heart attack would be undercut if people saw his bashed-in skull.
Silas walked.
He tried to grasp at observations. Basic things—seagulls are loud; you just passed Anika on your left; your shoe is coming untied—but none of them would take.
They eddied away, chased off by static. Drowned in the crashing waves of the last twenty-four hours.
Burned away by the sheer exhaustion that crushed his soul down, down, down.
Noise. It was all noise.
Noise, and that one single memory. The memory of that … that thing surging out of him. The pain of it, and then the sudden freedom of that pressure dissipating. That momentary feeling of a win, of a sickness fought off.
The devastation when he saw the consequences of his victory.
He knew right away. Knew that Sylvia had forced that power into him.
It had to have happened during the mapping spell.
He’d been so distracted staring at those shiny new wards, thinking about what they meant for him and Katherine.
Worrying about her hating him, when he should’ve been thinking about the fact that he had opened his magic to an unhinged, powerful witch with a lifelong grudge against his family.
Sharing power was a dangerous thing, predicated on the assumption of trust and respect—two concepts he should have known would be foreign to Sylvia Page.
He had opened his magic to her, and she had given him death in return.
He didn’t know how she had unsettled magic to curse him with. Maybe there was still some lingering in the blood of every witch who had been born that way. Maybe she’d somehow used that girl he saw at the coven meeting.
Maybe Katherine helped.
Noise. Just noise in his head.
One foot in front of the other.
A keening wail sounded over the low hum of the mourners’ prayers. Silas’ neck pinched from the effort to resist turning toward the source of the sound. His mother had made that sound in that office too. Screamed her sadness to the heavens when she realized what happened. What Silas did.
Even then, confronted with the greatest grief she’d ever known, Nina was better than him.
His mother had still been able to gather herself enough to tell her shell-shocked son that they needed to clean this up.
She forced him to look at her, to listen past that noise in his head while she told him what their story would be.
Stilled his shaking hands as he made cut after cut in his palm, spell after spell to try to undo what he’d done to the study.
They managed everything except the body.
Ten more steps and they’d be there. Ten more steps and he could be done with this. Ten more steps and he could go home, lie in his bed, and let the wave drown him.
His mother cried again, and this time he looked.
The pain on her face knocked his legs from under him.
He heard the collective inhale of the crowd as he tripped, and a part of him wanted to laugh. Because of course he would cap this all off with one more reminder to his father that his son had never been able to do even the most basic things asked of him.
The hands of the other pallbearers caught him before he or the casket could tumble to the ground. Silas mumbled a thank-you. Forced himself to take the remaining steps. Laid the casket down inside the door. Tried to block out the wailing that continued from outside.
Watched his father’s body be taken away. Stepped back out into that still-shining sun.
Just noise. Everything was noise.
Later.
He was at his parents’ house, his back pressed to the hard wood of the wall, hundreds of people streaming by him, a mix of faces he couldn’t make out. Someone had put a drink in one hand, a plate of appetizers in the other. They tasted like dust in his mouth.
He couldn’t count how many times he thanked people for their sympathy. How many half-hearted hugs he gave and took. He was a robot of grief, programmed to repeat the same motions over and over until his battery ran out.
A hand landed on his shoulder, and he went for another empty embrace, not even seeing the person in front of him.
“No way are you getting away with an auntie hug with me, Silas.”
Silas blinked until his eyes cleared enough to see that it was Anika.
She’d called him as soon as the news broke, but he hadn’t answered.
She was crying in the voicemail she left, begging him to call her back.
Apologizing profusely for the things she’d said to him, even though there was nothing to be sorry for.
Everything she said about him was true. That she still cared about his feelings at all when he so clearly didn’t deserve her sympathy was a gift he didn’t know how to thank her for.
He had the sudden urge to cry.
She must have read that in his face, because she took the plate and cup out of his hand and set them on a nearby table before giving him a gentle pat on the shoulder, her face lined with concern. “Come on. Let’s find somewhere to talk.”
She pulled him through the crowd until they reached the stairs. Luckily, the mourners cleared as they made it to the second floor, giving him a moment of blessed quiet before they reached his bedroom.
He hadn’t lived here for years—his parents had bought him his own penthouse apartment when he graduated college, after instantly spotting a host of code violations in the Brooklyn walk-up he’d signed a lease for.
(“Come on, Silas. We raised you to be more responsible than this.”) They’d left his childhood bedroom untouched.
Of course, there were no posters or Little League trophies lining the walls.
No, he’d lived in a dignified, wood-paneled room since his early teens, surrounded by shiny mahogany furniture he couldn’t leave a scratch on and decorations he didn’t pick.
The room was elegant, minimalist, colored in deep browns and reds that were meant to convey a clear message to him from that young an age: It was time for him to grow up.
Looking at it now … it looked, Silas realized, a lot like his father’s study.
Bile surged in his throat.
Anika navigated him to the bed, pushing him down to sit before pulling over the chair from his desk and sitting across from him.
“I’m so sorry, Silas. For your dad, and for the things I said the other night. I was out of line.”
“Don’t apologize. You were right.”
“Can I get that in writing?” she said, a stilted attempt at a joke. Silas gave her a half-hearted smile, then turned his eyes back to the line of skin he’d been picking at along his thumb.
“Please don’t do that,” she said.
He pulled his hands apart and looked up at her.
“Not the finger thing. The closing-yourself-off-to-me thing. Just tell me what’s going on.”
Silas let out a bitter laugh. “You don’t want to know.”
Anika stood and then knelt in front of him. Her hand raised, and Silas expected it to rest on his leg or his shoulder, a gesture of comfort.
Instead, she slapped him across the face.
Not hard, but hard enough.
“Anika, what the fuck?”
“Snap out of the brooding weirdo thing and talk to me like a normal person.”
A laugh bubbled out of him—a real one, this time.
Once the sound was free, it wouldn’t stop, cackles racking his body.
He didn’t stop until there was nothing left in him, until he was so exhausted that he fell backward onto the bed, running his hands over his face as he gathered his breath back.
The bed shifted as Anika lay down next to him, and they both stared for a few silent moments at the high ceiling above them.
“I killed him.” His words were quiet, pings of sound in the empty air.
He felt her head shift toward him, but he didn’t look.
Didn’t turn his eyes away from the ceiling as he told her everything.
The agony of the unsettled magic as it burned through his veins, shattering all his inhibitions until he was only raw emotion.
The devastation of seeing his father’s broken body on the floor.
The realization of how that murderous power had found its way to him.
The betrayal as he pieced together all the ways his good intentions had been twisted against him.
Anika was quiet through most of it, letting him talk.
And by the time he was done, the static was gone.
The world wasn’t gray anymore.
The world was red.
And he was really, really fucking angry.
Silas shot off the bed, pulling his phone out of his pocket. Anika stood, grabbing his arm. “Dude, what are you doing?”
“I need to go to LA.”
It took only a few seconds for him to book a ticket on a flight that left in an hour out of LaGuardia.
He shot a text to his family’s driver to get the car ready.
He didn’t plan on being in LA long enough to need anything, but he stuffed some clothes and a phone charger in a bag anyway, then moved for the door, only to find Anika blocking his path.
“Silas, this isn’t a good idea.”
She reached for his arm, but he stepped to the side, aiming for the door. She moved with him, stepping in his path again.
“You don’t want to do this. Anger isn’t a healthy thing for you right now.”
He looked down at her, his nails digging into the raw, picked-off skin of his thumb. “Anger is the only thing I have left.”
“It’s not.” Anika pointed at her own heart. “You have me. You have your mom. You have your coven. We all need you right now.”
“No one needs me for anything.”
“You know that’s not true.”
Silas ignored her as he pushed for the door, but Anika stayed firmly in his path.
“Get out of my way.”
“No.”
They stood there, glaring at each other, and for a brief, horrible moment, the rage in Silas told him to throw her aside.
To take out every obstacle in his path and find a way to achieve his goal.
It was so strong that he had to clench his fists to stop himself, had to grind his teeth to get out a single word.
“Please.”
Anika cursed under her breath. “Fine,” she said, stepping out of the way of the door and grabbing her purse. “But I’m coming with you.”