Chapter XV #2
“This is a weird energy,” May noted in a velvet voice. “What did I miss?”
“Play nice, May,” Sarah said. “Vic’s had a hard night.”
“I’ll say,” May said. “You barely made it out of there, by the look of it.”
Xan shot Vic a scalding look. “I’m not done with you.” He pointed at her arm before storming out of the apartment—leaving Vic and Sarah alone with a witch who, last Vic checked, wanted her dead.
“Vic, you’ve met May Lin,” Sarah said with forced congeniality. “She’s going to behave.”
May shot Vic a smile that looked more like baring her teeth.
Vic was still shaken by her conversation with Xan. Concerns ran through her mind at double speed, not least that May might attack her again. Her eyes jumped to the dagger, sheathed on the side table and a hair out of reach.
Sarah, seemingly unaware of the tension filling the room, went into the kitchen to grab another drink.
Vic watched May with her arms crossed. Sarah hummed under her breath as she opened and closed cabinet doors.
When Sarah flounced back with the whiskey bottle and another mug, she barely registered the two women staring each other down.
“Sit, sit,” she said to Vic, patting the couch beside her. “We have lots to discuss.”
Vic walked over to her, stopping to pick up the knife on her way.
Once she had the weapon in hand, she cast a deliberate look at May, who raised an eyebrow.
Vic took the armchair across from Sarah again and held out her mug for a refill.
May leaned against the wall on the other side of the room and accepted a cup from Sarah.
“How did you do it?” May asked, suspicion thick in her voice. “The test is supposed to kill you if you don’t have magic. You shouldn’t have been able to last as long as you did, let alone get up on your own.”
Vic looked at Sarah. “Why is she here?”
May kicked off of the wall like she wanted to fight Vic again, but Sarah stopped her with a wave. “May’s a Sentinel. She probably just wanted to make sure I was okay.”
“You were okay?” Vic asked. “Nobody tried to kill you tonight.”
“Look, you—” May began, but Sarah threw her hands up.
“Cool it, May, or I’m kicking you out of my apartment,” she said with a sharp look at the Sentinel, who fell back into silence against the wall with a furious look on her face. “Back to business,” Sarah said. “During the Rite, did you…see anything?”
“Like threads?” Vic remembered Nathaniel calling success the Unthreading.
“Yes!”
“No.”
Sarah’s face fell into a confused frown. “So you didn’t use magic to pull yourself out of it?”
Vic shrugged again. “What could you see?”
“The magic is old as hell,” Sarah said. “It looked like a big knotted cloud. I’ve never actually seen them perform the Rite before.”
“And when I got up?” Vic asked, wondering if the threads had gotten more organized. Maybe she’d done something subconsciously, used magic without knowing it.
“It looked the same,” Sarah said, “except you were kneeling, and you had blood coming out of your eyes.”
Vic slumped back in her seat. She cast a wary glance at May, who was watching Vic and Sarah through narrowed eyes.
“Nathaniel wants me silenced. Is there any chance I’m wrong about what that means?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Sarah said. “He could go the humane route and try to get the Elders on board with changing your memory of the castle. Convince you it was a dream or something. But spells like that are hard to execute and faulty. More likely, he’d opt to kill you and have done with it.”
“Lovely.” Vic emptied her mug. The whiskey burned less now that her murder was up for discussion.
“Nathaniel knows that the Elders wouldn’t agree to that, even if you failed the Rite. That’s why he insisted on doing it with the alums and professionals there. None of the Elders would stand against Max, unless there was pressure from the members.”
“Would Max do anything to the others if they opposed him?” Vic asked. She couldn’t imagine him vengeful.
“They’re not worried he’ll retaliate,” Sarah said. “They’re worried he’ll leave. The Order is too fragile to risk losing Max’s support.”
Vic struggled to pair the reality of the Order’s vulnerability with the front they put forward—stone and antiquity, a sacred institution too powerful to fail.
“Enough about Max,” Sarah said. “Tell us what happened before the meeting.”
Vic shot a questioning look at May, but Sarah nodded for her to go on.
It didn’t take long for Vic to recount the evening’s events, though she left out the details that felt most pressing to her. The thick white of Rachel’s eyes, how the flies made her entrails look like they wriggled of their own accord.
Sarah shivered.
“You’re a Sentinel,” May said behind Sarah, her face scrunched in a concerned frown. “How does that gross you out?”
Sarah rolled her eyes and waved for Vic to continue.
“Max lied about finding the body himself,” Vic said.
“You saw how the members reacted to you,” Sarah said. “He probably wanted to make sure their attention stayed where it should—we’ve been attacked.”
“Max thinks the Brotherhood of Mann is responsible.”
Sarah made a face as though she were considering something unpleasant. “The Brotherhood couldn’t have broken the wards from the outside. If the Brotherhood was behind it, they’ve infiltrated the castle.”
Of course they had infiltrated the castle. Aren had come to Vic in her dream—surely he could do the same to others here.
“Could it have been Nathaniel?” Vic asked. “Maybe he’s working with the Brotherhood.”
“Nathaniel is a piece of shit,” Sarah said. “But he’s loyal to the Order. I don’t think he’d do something so against the mission unless he was desperate.”
But Vic knew he was willing to break the rules. He’d brought the Level One recruits to Limbo, after all, to prove a point. He’d lied to Henry to get him here as quickly as possible. How much of a reach was it to think he’d set an Orcan loose in the castle?
“Besides, the Elders have been postponing war with the Brotherhood for years,” Sarah said. “They’ve even made concessions, offering the Brotherhood their places back in the Order if they abandon their more radical positions.”
Sarah’s tone made her disapproval of this strategy obvious.
“If I remember right, Nathaniel was in charge of that effort. He acted as the Order’s emissary with Aren Mann until negotiations fell apart.”
So Nathaniel had a means of contacting Aren? And he’d asked Max about who found the body, so he likely knew it had been Vic. It seemed clear to her that he was worth suspecting, at the very least.
“All of this has left the Brotherhood and the Order in a kind of stalemate. Members of the two groups rarely interact, but we kill the Orcans they spawn whenever we get the chance.”
I can keep putting them down easy enough. But this is only going to get worse if we don’t address the source of the problem.
“The main ideological disagreement between the Order and the Brotherhood is whether or not to use Orcan magic?” Vic asked.
“Not exactly,” Sarah said. “You might have noticed the Order doesn’t care much for us Mades.
We’re hard to find, harder to train, and almost impossible to control.
” Sarah paused to down the rest of her drink.
“The Brotherhood takes it a step further. They think of Mades as…like they’re diseased.
Like it’s something wrong, a mutant kind of magic. ”
“But Aren Mann is Made,” Vic said. She remembered that part of her dream. He’d done it to himself while working as a Mage for the Order.
Sarah made a disdainful sound. “Like prejudice needs to make sense,” she grumbled.
“But I don’t understand,” Vic said. “Can’t they see he’s a hypocrite?”
“He’s both Born and Made,” Sarah said, sounding tired. “Which he says gives him credibility to speak on Mades. He says most of us are cosmic accidents, missteps in evolution. He would know best, since he pursued it on purpose.”
Vic had a hard time squaring this worldview with the man she’d met. “So he wants to cast Mades out of the Order?” she asked.
This time, it was May who replied, and her voice was ice-cold.
“He wants to kill them.”