19. Chapter 19 #3
“Just like the corpse in Alfred’s work room.
The entire tunnels of the Basilica were covered in them.
Despite the fact that the tunnels let in no amount of light to make that happen.
That’s what they had been burning down there.
So, I considered it might be the soil. That it produced a form of chaos as some minerals often do, to cause this.
But I don’t think it’s the soil, Logan. The walls were damp and the roots of these flowers were well hydrated. And I had Liam ask around.”
His eyes narrowed on the young guard who gave him a shaky, fangy smile.
“Before you pin him up on your fireplace by his bat wings, look at this,” I said, rolling out the plumbing schematic in front of him.
It was my turn to be glared at. “He stole this for you, too? Are you turning my soldiers into thieves, wife?”
“What? No, don’t be silly. I stole that myself. Liam was distracting the city hall people and Thomas was just running around—” I stopped myself, quickly shaking my head. “Details don’t matter.”
I tapped a finger on the schematic. “The plumbing passes over the tunnels. It’s a very old system. Older than the actual Basilica. A pipe must have burst somewhere and the water leaked down the tunnels. But that’s beside the point.”
He watched me move my finger along to the pipe drawings to the water source. “The Basilica well. That’s where the water comes from.”
He leaned forward, probably already piecing everything together, even before I said, “It all makes sense. The well water is used for the Cleansing, baptising baby vampires, sprinkled and dusted all over on the Tuesday masses.”
Liam, who'd heard me jibber-jabber the whole entire thing to myself multiple times around my room, stepped forward, “Every Mortdale citizen visits the Basilica at least once a year for pilgrimage. I have. My ma has. My sister has. Everyone, Logan. Everyone in Mortdale has come in contact with the saintly water at least once in their lifetimes.”
Colour had leeched from Logan’s face, entirely drained from his eyes as he stared at me.
“It had to be too easy of a guess, right? So, I ran one last test with Alfred.” I lowered the sample bottle in front of him.
The red-soaked soil from the tunnels had turned a vivid green.
“Something in that well water is poisoning the chaos in a vampire’s body when it is consumed or comes in contact with them, leading to the Madness.
It has most definitely spread from there.
” The perspective of the scheme had doubled, tripled, grown into an uncontrollable mass of cancer.
If whatever was in this well had already been in contact with the entirety of Mortdale, then it was only a matter of time before something triggered it.
A ticking time bomb, with no set time—the catalyst. What was this catalyst?
He put a hand over his face, shaking his head. The gold of his eyes had almost flattened against the limbal ring, making them seem entirely black. He just stared at the schematic for a long, long time. “What exactly is this poison?”
“A substance of sorts that is denaturing chaos when it enters a vampire’s body. I need to go back to the Basilica. I need to understand how this is happening—why this is happening only to certain people.” Particularly vampires married to witches.
What if…what if I’d been putting Logan in danger all this time?
Maybe that’s why Cassandra had wanted to kill me that day. She’d known something about the Madness.
He ran a hand through the stubble growing on his jaw as he shook his head.
“Absolutely not. The Basilica is already aware we’re up to something.
Specifically you. The exarch’s spies have been trailing after you since that day, and Sybil is probably already facing the repercussions of talking to you.
They will not hold back from killing you at first sight. I’ll deal with it.”
“You wouldn’t know what you’d be looking for. We’re not talking about magic here, Logan. This is far more complicated. We’re talking about prima materia. This is manufactured by someone who is well aware of the alchemical process of chaos to achieve a magnum opus of this much consequence.”
“I’ll set it all on fire if I have to.” He knocked on the carriage walls, and the carriage rolled to a stop. Just before he stepped out, he leaned forward to cup the back of my head and press a kiss on my neck. “Behave until I’m back.”
Liam’s face hit the carriage wall with a thud when Logan slapped the side of his head and left.
The poor young soldier winced. “Deserved that.”
My face scrunched up in a grimace. “I’m sure you’ll forgive me.”
“Yeah, yeah. By the way,” he groaned, peeling his face off the broken carriage wall and handing me a folded piece of cloth. “She left this.”
“Who?”
“The Sybil woman.” He rubbed his cheek. “I mean witch. Just before she left, she put this between the rolls of fabric.”
I grabbed it off his hand. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I thought you maybe didn’t want Logan to know about it.”
Pausing, I looked up at him. “You must have a thing for punishment.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he murmured, nursing his broken jaw.
In red lipstick, Sybil had written: Crimson Weaver has an army of undead.
It hit me all at once.
The Bloodletting was a ploy, a distraction, a weak facade witches had built to shield themselves—all this time, the Crimson Weaver had been using it to disguise the fact that we’d been harvesting an army, creating new undead by using the chalice.
This wasn’t just Agnes’s work. It had started before her.