Chapter 44
Harrisford
When I next come to, I’m tied to a chair, my hands bound behind its back.
My eyesight is blurry, as are my memories. At some point, when Danny was dragging me through the portal, I’d woken. He’d looked at me for half a second before whacking me on the side of the head. Lights had exploded in the outer corners of my vision before my consciousness slid back into blackness.
I shake my head, trying to clear it. And as my eyes begin to focus, I realize: My vision isn’t hazy because my eyesight is poor. Everything is hazy because I’m in the Void.
I’m ensconced in what appears to be a cavern, entirely clad in stone. There’s a small steel table set up beside me; an unopened autoclave bag, presumably filled with surgical instruments, sits atop its surface. The air is opaque with curling spirals of mist that choke my throat and nostrils.
I raise my head when I hear footsteps. Danny Wong, my oldest friend, bends over me, frowning.
“Sorry about the hit, Briggs.” He touches his hand to the side of my head. “And the little whiff of ketamine. But you were struggling pretty bad.”
I bare my teeth at him, chafing against my bindings. “Can you blame me? You sedate me, kidnap me, drag me into the Void, then fucking knock me out, and you want me to accept your apology?” I shake my head, incensed. “Unbelievable!”
“Listen, Briggs.” Danny sighs, then straightens, crossing his muscular arms over his chest. “This isn’t what you think it is. We haven’t kidnapped you—”
A second voice sounds in my head. Pudding’s voice, slightly echoey, as though she’s speaking to me from a distance. We’ve saved you.
I gulp, my mouth all dry. “Puds.” The word sounds choked in my head. Pudding is involved, somehow? What the fuck is actually happening?
She’s still in my dorm room, I assume. I clearly remember my last view of her on her perch. It’s hard to believe that she and I can still communicate so clearly across the Void.
I struggle against my restraints again, to no avail. “What do you mean ‘we’? Who is ‘we’?”
Danny looks away from me before sliding his gaze back. “The Magical Liberation Organization.”
I gape at him. “You’re in the MLO?” Something dawns in my drug-hazed mind. “Wait. You’re opening portals. Are you behind the surges? You’re trying to bring down Magecorp?”
Both of us are, Pudding cuts in.
“Both of you?” My mind is buckling, not comprehending that my childhood friend and my familiar are behind the Magecorp sabotage. Can familiars even be part of the MLO? I had no idea.
Calm down, Pudding says. Let me explain…
I let out a roar and thrash, the ropes rubbing raw lines in my skin. “Explain what? That you’re trying to destroy my father’s company? The one he’s devoted his whole life to? That you’ve been lying to me this whole time?”
How the hell did I not know? I thought Pudding and I knew everything about each other. But now it just feels like, all this time, I’ve had a stranger living inside my head. The betrayal is a punch to the gut.
Harry, please. Pudding’s voice is pleading.
I stop. My mouth drops open.
I am…gobsmacked.
Harry. She called me Harry.
All my anger bleeds out of me as I slump into the chair, completely shell-shocked. There’s only one person who has called me Harry. Ever.
When I next speak, my voice tremors. I hardly dare ask. “Who are you?”
Pudding is quiet for so long that I can almost hear static buzzing inside my head. But then she speaks, and when she does, all she says are three words. Her name.
Theodora Finlay-Briggs.
Everything inside me freezes.
At first, I’m unable to talk. Unable to wrap my head around it. A shudder runs through me, so violent I almost convulse. And then I choke out, in an almost inaudible whisper, “Mother?”
Oh, darling. Pudding—my mother—is talking to me, but I barely register. Her voice is just a droning noise whirring inside my mind. I wanted to tell you so many times, I really did, but if you’d known, it would’ve put you at risk…
Fury expands, tearing through my chest, and I explode. “You. Pudding. Are my mother?”
“She’s not just your mum, Briggs.” Danny rubs at the back of his neck, his face all red. “She’s the leader of the MLO.”
“She…she what?” I sag, folding into myself. Feeling small. Feeling four years old again. I shake my head. “No. No!”
I’d learned about it all, of course, during history lessons at school.
About how, around twenty-five years ago, a series of high-profile murders targeting civilian witches had rocked the magical community.
At the time, the media and the general public had pinned the blame on the MLO.
A media frenzy had ensued, and some underhanded political maneuverings led to the MLO being classified as a terrorist organization—even though none of the murders could be directly traced to the MLO itself.
Under duress, and in response to public pressure, the Ministry had formed an Anti-Terrorist Task Force, headed up by a group of particularly vocal anti-MLO individuals—one of whom was my own father.
The task force, in conjunction with the British Magical Police Force, had been dispatched to round up all of the MLO leaders and get them arrested, tried, and summarily executed, or else thrown into jail.
Over the ensuing years, the task force had rooted out most of the main suspects—all except one. The big boss, the anonymous head honcho, who had gone into hiding and never been found…
And Danny expects me to believe that’s my mother?
My heart beats out an erratic rhythm, the pain like a brand in my chest.
I was four when my mother disappeared.
I was four when I got Pudding.
And I’d never put the two together.
“Mum.” My voice cracks on the word. I slump forward, weak against my bindings. “Come in here. Let me see you. I need to see you.”
I can’t, Harrisford, Pudding says gently. I’m acting as the tether, on the other side.
The space behind my eyes has grown hot, so I squeeze my eyelids shut. “Father made you a tether too?”
No, Harry. Your father never got to me. I’ve been in hiding for twenty-one years. Am I imagining it, or is my mother’s voice sounding choked? But…you’re my son. I volunteered to do this. I swallowed some Source so I could be here for you.
My familiar—my own mother—became a tether to what…kidnap me? And even worse: She lied to me. For twenty-one fucking years.
“So you could be here for me?” I spit the words out. “That is…dragonshit.” I try, and fail, to clutch my head, my arms still bound to the chair. “I protected you!”
I’d stopped Gwendolynne from going to the police to prevent her from becoming a target, yes.
But it was also because my mother’s disappearance had given me a healthy hatred for the police.
I still remember being a kid, clutching Pudding in my lap, glaring at the officers who returned day after day to question me about my mum.
At the time, I’d regarded them suspiciously.
I had despised them. I was four years old, barely out of nappies, saddled with responsibilities no child of that age should have to deal with.
“Your mum has been working behind the scenes this whole time, Briggs, trying to take down Magecorp,” Danny says defensively. “It was them, not us, who were behind those deaths.”
Harry, my mother says. I’m sorry it had to come to this. But your father—
“Father is in a coma,” I grit out. In a coma, and, like me, completely oblivious to the fact that his wife—and my mother—leads the very organization he’d been ordered to hunt down.
“This is…highly unnecessary.” The revelation hits me: Barnabus the centaur had been telling the truth.
The person I most care about—my mother—has betrayed me.
Looking back, did I ever have the slightest inkling? That Pudding was my mother? Even just a tiny bit? Perhaps…perhaps the thought had flitted through my mind once or twice: the times when Pudding seemed to know more about me and my past than I even knew myself.
But I’d always quickly quashed those feelings, putting it down to the human-familiar bond.
It was easier not to think too hard, easier not to know.
All I’d done was cling to Pudding tighter, because she was all I had left in the world, and I couldn’t stand to lose someone else I loved, the way I’d lost my mum.
“Listen, you dolt.” Danny gives an exasperated huff. “We’re not trying to hurt you. We’re trying to help you. Our intelligence told us that Nathaniel Price was making plans with your father to recruit you into Magecorp as a tether. Even before the explosion.”
Danny’s words bring me back to why I’m here, in the Void, in the first place, and my entire body flushes cold as my unburied memories rush back. It’s like an incoming tide, engulfing me, pulling at me, threatening to drag me back to their deep and fathomless depths…
My mother continues. And now that they’re running out of Source, we’re assuming Nathaniel will speed those plans up. Especially since you’re about to graduate. We’re trying to hide you in here, where he can’t find you.
“So, what?” I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head.
“You’re just expecting me to accept this?
And stay here, stuck in the Void forever?
” Immediately, my mind jumps to Gwendolynne.
Was it only yesterday we’d finished exams?
Only last night that I slept with her? Just one day ago that I foolishly believed I had everything I’d ever wanted?
It’s just temporary, my mother says. We’ll conceal you in here until everyone assumes you’re dead. Then, once they’re off your trail, we’ll release you back into the real world under a new identity.
A new identity. No. No!
With my reputation, Gwendolynne will probably assume I tricked her into sleeping with me. That I deceived and then abandoned her. When she wakes in the hotel room to find me gone…What will she think?