17. Chapter 17 #3
When he finally set me down, my feet slid over wet soot.
“You,” I harshly whispered, drained and stumbling on my feet. “You! It is true?” I cried, not wanting to believe my own words. Why was it so hard to believe it? “It was true. Oh, Goddess. It was true.”
I shook my head.
“Willow—”
“Did you kill your sister for being a witch, too? Will you kill Piper, too?”
“Careful now.”
“Or what!” I screamed. “You’ll burn me, too?”
He shook his head, laughing under his breath. The amusement was dry, bitter. It was mocking me. “How about you take a little look around?”
I didn’t understand what he’d said until I got a lungful of charred smoke caught in my ribcage.
We stood on the scorched ruins of a building.
The massacre under my feet registered a moment too late.
The new smell of the charred paper and flesh hit me first. The screams came after—young, small voices pleading in agony overlapping each other.
The darkness clinging to each sooted brick peeled back a moment later.
I saw then, the coloured pieces of paper, the many toys and colourful books.
And the pale young spirits hiding beneath the rubble.
It was a school—we were standing in the middle of a burnt school.
“Your sworn sister,” Logan said, wiping his brow with the back of his gloved hand. “Twenty-three children. Two were her own.”
The scent of dark magic nearly punctured through my lungs.
I shook my head, backing away from him. “No.”
“I suppose it is hard to imagine when you were raised to believe your kind can do no wrong.”
Crouching down, I reached for a charred blue block. Anguish burning through my fingertips when a small, young spirit slipped from beneath a wall and shyly walked to me. My chest shook with a sob as I lowered it down before him. “Why would she do this?”
Logan’s head dropped back as he sighed for a moment. “My guess is as good as yours.”
I swallowed.
I knew it, and so did he.
Agnes had ordered her. Just like she had ordered me.
He went on, “We know she trains the red maidens herself for years before they graduate on Sunstead and are married off into Mortdale. Since she took over from Milota twenty-seven years ago, Agnes has been planting weapons of mass destruction within my people. If a trade goes wrong, if she does not get her way, no one gets their way. They’re bombs that keep ticking and ticking and no one knows if or when they will go off.
” He took the metallic tin out of his pocket, picking a cigarette.
“This was a warning for me. Piper comes here for her dancing lessons. Agnes must have not liked the fact that I refuse to partake in any deal that involves her.” His eyes drew shut as he threw the cigarette to the ground.
“If I had not sent Piper to her grandmother’s last night, she—” He breathed in a deep inhale. “Who knows.”
No.
No.
No, Agnes couldn’t have ordered this.
He stared at the small memorial set up by the corner of the school.
White flowers, lit candles, a mother sobbing there on her knees.
“She has planted more spies all over Mortdale with each passing year. The only reason she won’t break the Blood Pact is because we have an army and she doesn’t.
Meridian will not fight for her. She knows we will not break it either, especially now with the Madness all over our feet.
So, she’s started playing dirty a little more openly.
She’s never been so brave before. The news of the Madness must have reached her already despite our best efforts.
Our borders aren’t as secure as they used to be. ”
It still didn’t make sense. Why had she sent me here to investigate the deaths of the Crimson Weaver witches if she was ordering them to die for her?
He wouldn’t look at me as he said, “I didn’t want you to see that.
Or this. There’s fear growing within my people,” he said.
“They want reassurance. And the Basilica has been promising them salvation, the eradication of the impure—those who have not been re-born by the ewer. I have to give them a show or the exarch will give them a spectacle of his own. I cannot protect them from what is coming. The least I can do is make them think they have a chance. Convince them to stay human even in their last hours. If we lose our humanity, what is there left of us?” He looked away.
“How different would we be from animals?”
Tears still clung to my lashes as I turned my trembling gaze on him. There was an ache growing between my ribs and sour betrayal sat wrong in my stomach. “I’m not a red maiden,” I told him.
“I know,” he said. “I’ve always known.”
“But you knew she’d sent me here with a mission.”
His jaw was set tightly as he looked away from me. “I had a feeling she wouldn’t miss the opportunity given.”
“What happened to the rest of my coven sisters, Logan?”
He did not answer.
A tear slid down my face. “Will it happen to me, too?”
“It won’t. I won’t allow it,” he said, brushing my wet cheek as he went past me.