Chapter 13 #2
“He was a villain. Evil. Like one of the monsters you’d play against in your games. Twenty years ago, he pretended to be some rich asshole giving away free shit. He drew a small crowd of people and used Reaper magic, the same magic that I inherited, to make them kill each other.”
Maxim had frozen, his lips drifting apart and his green-gold eyes fixed on her. His anger had dissipated, but seeing his shocked expression only fueled her own.
“He did it for absolutely no reason. He wasn’t trying to make a point, he wasn’t trying to accomplish anything, he did it just because he could.
Most of them didn’t even have anything sharp.
He made them use their house keys, or branches, or the own fucking fingernails.
The Ash Coven was . . .” She cleared her throat.
“They were able to take him down. From what my mother tells me, they made sure nothing was left of him. Even came up with some story about drug overdoses to cover it. There’s nothing left. ”
A breeze tickled her skin, and she realized her cheeks were wet. How awful it was to still be capable of mourning.
She clenched her jaw and swiped the sleeve of her sweater over her tears. “That’s why I want to be part of this club, Maxim. If I can be something else, why wouldn’t I take that opportunity?”
“Because he isn’t who you are!” He wasn’t yelling, but entreating.
This was the voice of the lawyer coming through, the one who used his silver wordplay to twist opinions like she twisted magic.
“I’m so sorry you had to go through all of that.
But just because you have that same magic, it doesn’t mean you’re the same person.
It doesn’t—” He broke off and stepped closer to her, and when he spoke again, he was softer.
No longer the lawyer, but the man who had helped her, who had made her laugh as he stitched up her leg so she wouldn’t feel quite so terrified.
“He may have been evil,” Maxim said, “but that doesn’t mean the magic was.”
A short laugh burst out of Pippa, so bitter that she was a little surprised it hadn’t blistered her throat on its way up. “Were you listening to what I said? Do you think magic capable of . . . of that would ever be anything but evil?”
The last word barely made it out. Her neck felt tight, her hands hot. How could he even think that? He had no idea what that magic felt like. He had no idea what it could do. It was manipulation and destruction, death and horror.
Maxim stepped forward again and he rested his hands on her upper arms. “You told me that any magic can be evil, depending on how it’s used. Doesn’t that mean any magic can be good?”
The sunshine was too bright, the air too thick.
It dawned on Pippa then that no matter how hard she argued or shared horrible stories or tried to show him that the world she inhabited was nothing like the idealistic and adventurous one he’d painted in his mind, he would never understand.
All of her frustration and anger bubbled higher and filled her ears with a shrill, sharp whine.
There was no way to make him understand.
Yes, the power inside whispered. Yes, there is.
The air grew quiet and Pippa’s thoughts slowed into a cool stillness. He had to understand.
Pippa closed her eyes and let the Reaper magic rise to the surface.
It thrilled and surged within her like some excited thing finally leaving a kennel, and it brushed against her fingers with the gentle softness of velvet.
She felt its giddiness as if it were her own.
Giving into it was a blissful release. The sun grew less blinding and all of the tension in her limbs eased.
Pippa looked at Maxim, and through the lens of the magic, she saw him as he might have appeared to the Coven: weak, human, so very, very malleable. He could be clay in her hands.
“Do you really believe this could be good?” When she spoke, she heard an echo of her own voice, lower and softer, and it lingered on her tongue like honey after she spoke.
Maxim took a step back as his expression turned into one of confusion.
A wooden fence lined the alley. With the barest push on the magic, she forced Maxim’s legs to stagger backward.
Another push, and his body hurled itself against the slats.
The entire structure shook with the impact.
Maxim’s eyes were wide and panicked; his chest heaved and sweat beaded at his hairline.
Satisfaction nestled warm and sticky within Pippa. Good. Let him see. Let him know. This was who she was. She’d warned him, and he hadn’t believed her, and here he was, wholly helpless.
Without taking a step closer to him, she pinned his arms to his sides. “This magic can make you do anything, Maxim,” she said. “It can tell you to walk into traffic. I can twitch my fingers and stop your heart.”
She could feel it within him. Warm, red, and galloping beneath his sternum. Each of his heartbeats seemed to pulse within her, along her veins, under her skin.
“What do you think?” Pippa spoke louder, and the words rang in her own ears and resonated through her bones. “Is this good?”
The magic was as heady and thick as syrup, and just as sweet. She felt strong. She felt unstoppable. A roar was growing in her head, like a windstorm, or a crowd shouting in one, unbroken chant.
She could dive within him and submerse herself in his thoughts until he wouldn’t know what was his own mind and what was hers.
Through the gooey haze of her own power, she felt Maxim’s heart lurch into a frantic, rabbiting pace.
He was terrified. Of her.
The power instantly soured in her mouth. Pippa wrenched on the magic and tugged it back inside her, shoving it down hard to where it had sat patiently all these years.
That deafening roar stopped. After the chaos, the silence was unbearable. A wave of nausea passed over her and she staggered backward, biting back the urge to vomit.
What had she done?
What the fuck had she just done?
Maxim was standing still against the fence. His shoulders rose as he sucked in quick, shaking breaths.
Every time Pippa had thought about using that magic, she realized she’d assumed something horrible would happen afterward: a Coven member would pop out of the air in front of her with a screaming proclamation, or her skin would explode, or the ground would fracture beneath her shoes and she’d drop hundreds of feet into a fiery, sucking chasm.
But as she stood in the dirt, nothing around her hinted at what she’d just done. Birds chirped above her head and a squirrel chittered in a backyard. The sounds of steady traffic made a leisurely journey down the alley. Everything was back to being bright and lovely and perfectly suburban.
It was terrible.
Because of a brief moment of frustration, everything she had worked so hard to maintain had crumbled.
Her one solid defense against the Coven’s hesitation to let her join them had just vanished.
How could they let her in now, if she’d been so eager to let the magic swarm through her and control someone else’s soul?
But it wasn’t just someone. It had been the man she’d come to care for, who had trusted her, and believed in her, and wanted to follow her into a coven’s home so she wouldn’t feel so alone.
Pippa would have preferred the screaming Coven member. She would have preferred the chasm.
When Maxim finally moved, he brought a hand to his chest, over his heart, as if assuring himself that it was still beating.
“Was that to show me?” he said. There was a bitter snap to his words, like he’d broken them off just to slice at her. “Prove that I’m too weak, that I’ll never fit in with what you are or what you do?”
Pippa was too stunned to respond. That hadn’t been it at all, and she started to respond only for Maxim to interrupt.
“I already know.” He adjusted his tie, though she could see that his hands shook. “I’m already very well aware that this is just fun for you. Nothing more. You didn’t need to give me a demonstration to reiterate it.”
A thousand arguments spun around in Pippa’s head, and instead of being able to pick out a single good answer, she just felt dizzy.
Maxim began to walk toward his car.
Wait, no, wait, shit, fuck.
Pippa’s head spun faster. “This is who I am!” she shouted after him. “You didn’t . . . This is what haunts me. Every day. You told me to tell you. And I did.”
He stopped and sent an incredulous expression over his shoulder. “You didn’t fucking tell me.”
No, she’d shown him, and somehow, she’d thought that would be better.
“Wait, Maxim . . .” she called after him.
He turned back to her, his face stony.
He was leaving, she knew this. And after what she’d done, there was nothing she could say that would convince him not to go.
“Be careful,” she said, her voice far more meek than she’d have liked. “Please.”
Maxim worked his closed mouth. That little muscle pulsed in his jaw, the one she’d never had the opportunity to kiss away.
“Why?” he said, his voice cold and sharp. “Everything is after you.”
She stood in the alley after he left, and watched as the dust settled on her scuffed shoes.
The Ash Coven’s entry hall had creaking wooden floors and thick rugs that looked older than the house. Behind a reception desk, two arcing staircases curved along the wall and joined at the second level, their balustrades carved like lions’ feet.
Every time Pippa walked into this damned building, she expected it to smell like an old attic, but there was only a sterile bland scent that wouldn’t have felt out of place in a hospital.
She’d wiped her face to the best of her ability on the short walk over and managed to get her breath steady so she wasn’t shuddering with the will to hold herself together and not melt into a puddle of tears and snot in the middle of the crosswalk.
The man behind the reception desk looked up as she approached. His expression soured.