Chapter XII
XII
Familiars are created when a witch elects to transfer their soul, and with it their power, into a vessel that will outlive them.
This vessel, often in the form of an animal, then binds to a living witch, combining the power of the former with that of the latter.
This power can grow over the centuries, as the familiar continues to select bond-partners from among living witches.
The practice of soul transfer—the art of creating a familiar—had fallen into decline even before the Order banned it.
The process kills the witch’s mortal body, and creating a familiar capable of passing on their essence is not guaranteed.
Rooted as it is in forbidden practice, the creation of familiars was prohibited by mandate during the Second Council of Elders.
Soul transfer has been all but eradicated in recent centuries, and only a rare few familiars remain.
“Wendigo.”
Xan turned his spectacled gaze on Vic, frowning.
“Am I right?” she asked.
“Let me finish,” he grumbled. “Their bodies were found a week later, completely devoid of fluid.”
“So I was right,” Vic said.
Xan raised an eyebrow in silent invitation for Vic to explain.
She sighed.
Nothing had happened in the week since her encounter with the laetite in Limbo.
Not a single goddamn thing. Vic hadn’t gotten any better at any of the tasks Max thought she could figure out how to do.
Training with the Sentinels was going fine, but Vic was as magic-less as ever.
Plus, she was exhausted. She hadn’t slept the night before, and she was bone-tired.
Tired of being useless, tired of being surrounded by people who could do what she couldn’t. Tired of doors closing in her face.
The whole thing made her fractious and angry, and Vic sank back in her seat with her arms crossed over her chest. She waved a grumpy hand. Someone else could explain.
A Sentinel named Ellie raised her hand. Xan nodded for her to speak.
Class that morning had been shit, too, just like always. Elder Thompson droned like he always did, and the rest of the class ignored the two shrouded figures guarding the back of the lecture hall. The young woman was missing today.
Vic played with the twin cuts on her fingers.
She hadn’t said a word to anyone about the cuts or last night’s dream or the man who was definitely real.
Aren Mann. Vic didn’t know anything for sure, and she was not so desperate for answers that she’d jeopardize her place in the castle to find out about him.
It might be nothing, she told herself.
“I have a case study,” Vic said, raising her hand. Xan faced her, lowering his notebook. When he said nothing, Vic began.
“Baton Rouge, 2006,” Vic said in a low, supercilious voice that only halfway mocked Xan’s.
“A Sentinel is dispatched to an abandoned building by the water. No reports of missing persons or any injuries, but there’s an Orcan inside.
” Vic reached deep into her memory to find the right words.
“She doesn’t see the creature, but she hears it.
It sounds like…wet footsteps, and it’s large. It growls. What is it?”
Xan frowned at Vic as she spoke, his face pensive, but Sarah spoke beside her.
“Parlangua,” she said. “I can’t be sure without a visual or more behavioral evidence, but it sounds right. Parlangua used to stick around the bayou banks, but in the last few decades they’ve been roaming into more populated areas.”
Xan took off his reading glasses and folded them in his hands.
“How would you kill it?” Vic asked, facing Sarah.
“Wooden stake to the liver.”
“Only the liver?” Vic asked.
Sarah nodded. “And it’s gotta be wood. Preferably from a local gum tree.”
Xan was watching Vic when she turned to face him. She raised her eyebrows at him to carry on.
“Get out,” he said. Vic stared at him in surprise. “I’ll speak to you in the hallway.”
“What the fuck?” Vic demanded.
Xan pointed to the door at the back of the room. “Hallway,” he repeated, an edge to his tone.
Vic glared at Xan as she shouldered her bag in a huff and stormed out of the room. Sarah shot her an apologetic look. From the back row, May waved with her fingers as Vic passed. Vic flipped her off.
In the hallway, Vic paced, fuming. She heard Xan dismiss the Sentinels, followed by dozens of chairs scraping the floor as they stood.
The crowd shuffled out through the front doors, into the training area, with their assignments, and Vic was alone in the opposite hallway.
Keeping her away from training was just cruel.
Had Vic ever wanted to hit something so badly in her life?
When Xan closed the classroom door behind him and stood facing her, she rounded on him.
“Are you sending me to the principal’s office?” Vic sneered. “We were discussing Orcans—I brought up an Orcan. Tell me how that’s inappropriate.”
Xan watched her without speaking, his arms folded in front of his chest. He looked huge and imposing and, honestly, hot as hell, and it made Vic even angrier.
“Is your ego really so fragile you can’t take a little bit of back talk?” Vic spat. “Is that what’s going on here? I sassed you in front of the class, and now you have to remind me who’s boss.”
Xan watched her like an adult waiting for a screaming child to run out of steam.
“You don’t get to—”
“You need rest,” he said.
Vic stopped short. Her anger fell out of her in a rush.
“You look like you haven’t slept in a week,” Xan said.
“It’s rude to tell a woman she looks tired,” Vic said, confused at the direction the conversation had taken.
“You look like shit,” Xan said, and Vic knew he was right. Her hair was messy and the lines under her eyes had grown dark and thick. “You’re going to hurt yourself if you go into training like this. I won’t let that happen.”
Vic stared at him, sure that a combination of wonder and plain old shock covered her face. Was he worried about her?
“If a Sentinel kills you by accident, Max will blame me.”
Ah. Vic sighed.
“Take the day off,” Xan said. With a massive hand, he gestured at Vic’s face with an expression of disquiet. “Deal with this. That’s an order.”
Vic hadn’t shut her mouth by the time Xan left her alone in the hallway.
She should be offended, but Vic knew he was right.
She was tired. That dream had woken her in the middle of the night, and then she had been convinced there was someone in her room, and after all of that she knew better than to try to sleep.
Sleepless nights were nothing new to her, but this was something different.
Vic was well and truly drained, like all the life had been sapped from her.
Vic wandered back to the apartment in a daze.
She needed rest. She needed sleep.
But the castle was empty. The Sentinels were all in training, and most of the recruits were likely practicing on their own in the training wing. It was Vic’s best chance to do what she had known she needed to since she saw the wounds on her fingers this morning.
Research.
She needed to find the man from her dream, and she needed no one to see her doing it.
If Aren Mann was real, and if he really was exiled for some crime against the Order, perhaps some of the living Elders mentioned him in their archives.
Vic found the castle’s main library opposite the dining hall.
She’d visited a few times in an abortive attempt to find out what kind of magic held Meredith’s door shut, although she’d spent the last few visits obsessing over Orcans.
After the encounter in Limbo, Vic was determined to learn everything she could about the creatures, and that meant studying on her own.
Some evenings a few recruits worked in the library, and Sarah told her the Order employed Historians, though Vic hadn’t seen any of them in the massive space.
Inscriptions above the door either warned her to flee or welcomed her inside. They were runes, she knew, spells borrowed from people long dead. More magic she didn’t understand.
High, segmented windows peeked through the maze of bookshelves. The room was packed with rows of books huddled so tight she had to squeeze between the stacks. An unimaginable amount of knowledge hid here in the mountains.
Vic’s fingers danced along leather spines as she wound into the thicket, pulling books at random. They screeched protests at her opening them, speaking for the first time in years, if not decades.
She found Max’s archives atop a high shelf.
His were more organized than the other Elders’.
He structured them like journals, with each volume corresponding to a month of the year.
But the collection was incomplete. Dark spaces sat where months should have been, and no new entries had been added for nearly two years.
The volume belonging to the month Meredith died was missing.
Vic thought about the key Max had given her last week, and the apartment door that would not admit her.
Vic swallowed against a tide of emotion, frustration first and foremost, and resolved to try again with the apartment as soon as she’d had a good night’s sleep.
She found what she was looking for at the end of January 2016.
A full page had been dedicated to Aren Mann. Beneath a photo, it read:
Aren Mann was born January 2, 1973, to Samuel and Rebecca Mann, outside Laurel, Mississippi.
He began his training with the Order in 1993 and worked as a Mage from 1995 until his appointment to the Elder Council in 2010.
Following Mann’s departure from the Order in 2014, he formed the Brotherhood of Mann, an extremist organization headquartered west of Mount Katahdin in northern Maine.
Since the Brotherhood’s creation in 2014, nearly a third of the Order’s active members have defected.
Vic had to read the text twice to make sure she understood.
He was real, she realized, though Vic had suspected as much since she saw the twin marks he left.
The man in her dream was real, and he had been an Elder.
He left the Order and took a huge chunk of its ranks with him.
A mass exodus explained the castle’s present emptiness. Why had no one told her?
No one had mentioned him at all.
Except Xan had told her about a rival faction threatening the Order. A rival faction that didn’t care about casualties or harm, that didn’t care about keeping witches a secret from the rest of the world. He was talking about Mann, wasn’t he?
A trembling panic in her fingers, Vic tore through the shelves around her in search of archives bearing Aren’s name. If he’d been an Elder for four years, he must have written archives. Vic knew it was one of their core responsibilities.
She scanned every row in the vicinity but found nothing. A mark of his exile, perhaps, erasing his memories from the collective history.
Returning to Max’s writing, Vic couldn’t find another mention of Aren’s Brotherhood. She skimmed as many of the archives as she could, but the Elders seemed to ignore the organization, even as it ate away at the Order’s membership.
It seemed only a short time later that Vic noticed the shadows had grown long and the torches flared to life.
Soon it grew frigid in the expansive space.
When Vic saw condensation in her breath, she took it as a less than subtle sign to stop.
She did need rest, after all. She could keep looking tomorrow.
When Vic turned to leave, she noticed a book on the floor in front of her. She found the empty space on the shelf and replaced the book where it belonged.
Vic saw more books on the floor as she turned the corner. Someone had knocked over a stack on a nearby table. Books lay scattered on the scarlet rug.
The library took on an eerie quality as Vic studied the silence for signs of life. Inert shelves loomed overhead, shadows stretching from dim torches between them. Vic held her breath and listened for the quiet hints of something lurking nearby.
But the library was dead silent. Her mind flashed to the shadowed creature she’d seen darting toward the castle. Vic doubted it made any sound when it moved, and all the shadows around her came alive with potential threat.
It was time to go. If she stayed any longer, her mind would force the shadows to shift. She would see movement on the edge of her vision and convince herself that, whatever that thing was, it was closing in on her.
But she noticed another pile of books strewn on the side of the alcove, some face down, their pages bent and torn.
Searching the shelves, Vic saw a dark section high above her head.
An entire shelf’s worth had fallen onto the floor, as if someone had hooked their arm behind a row of books and swept them down in a fit of rage. But it was much too high to reach.
More books had been wrenched down the deeper Vic went, until they crowded the floor, and she took pains to avoid crunching their spines underfoot. Hardly any books remained on the shelves, and messy heaps filled the aisles.
As she approached another narrow aisle, Vic heard a faint buzz.
It was almost unnoticeable, but she was listening hard.
Vic knew then, in a dim, almost subconscious corner of her mind, what she would see around the bend.
Flies.
Hundreds of them.
Crawling over the face and exposed innards of a corpse.
It lay across the middle of the aisle, its head propped up on the shelf.
The head and torso were surrounded by books, knocked down by the body as it fell.
The abdomen was torn open, split wide in a tangled seam.
A mass of red and purple and black blood and viscera spilled onto the library floor.
Ribs stuck out at odd angles, flashes of white jutting from the mess like broken piano keys.
Patches of burgundy, shiny skin mottled the neck and arms in dark blisters where the blood had settled.
A length of black cloth, torn and bloodied, blended with the gore.
Almost in a trance, Vic stepped forward to look into the corpse’s face.
At her approach, the flies scattered. They lifted off the curdled skin like a sheet wriggling in the wind.
Clouded eyes sat in the sockets, staring resolute into the void.
Vic’s stomach lurched when she recognized the face staring beyond her.
It was the female servant. Still shrouded, now dead.
For the second time since arriving at Avalon Castle, Vic turned and ran.