Chapter XVIII
XVIII
Most practitioners employ conduits in some form.
They ease the manipulation of magic and allow the witch to focus their energy on more complex tasks.
Most common among them are the raw elements, which borrow the organizational structure of the natural world.
Innovative Mages have succeeded in creating conduits in the form of most weapons, and some may even be inked into the skin.
Vic woke up angry. The second her eyes peeled open, she picked up where she’d left off the night before. Only now her head hurt.
She’d stumbled back from Lethe with Sarah and May, although they found their drunken amble out of the forest far more pleasant than their sober walk into it. Vic’s interaction with Xan stuck in her brain like a rock in her shoe. She wanted to kick him. She wanted to shoot him.
Vic couldn’t believe his audacity. Playing with her feelings, mocking her attraction to him. Insisting that he knew her feelings better than she did, that he knew what she ought to do better than she did.
Xan was a perfect example of everything wrong with the Order.
They held power over a group of people they had no desire to understand, whose lives they knew nothing of and cared little to learn about.
Though the Order pretended their obsession with balance originated in altruism, they didn’t use this power to improve the world around them.
No, it was all about rules and structure and what everyone else could and could not do.
You’d have to be obsessed with control, Vic reasoned, to hide in a castle in the middle of nowhere and think you understood the world better than those who lived in it.
He thought all Vic needed was closure. That learning more about her mom would be enough to send Vic on her merry way.
Was he right?
Vic remembered the Meredith she knew. Honey-haired and bursting with energy, Meredith would have been out of place roaming the cold stone halls of Avalon.
Her laughter bounced off the walls of each apartment they lived in, earthy and infectious and slightly louder than it ought to be.
Meredith put her whole body into projecting joy, and the sound made sense in their home.
Vic tried to picture that laugh cutting through Avalon’s emptiness, bringing life to a desolate place.
The two images could not coexist, and the inconsistency made Vic’s teeth hurt. The divergent threads gnawed at her. One, she reasoned, must lead somewhere.
When Vic met Sarah and May at breakfast, Sarah looked as hungover as Vic felt.
Sarah had pulled her hair up, badly, and her eyes, usually a rich brown, were dim, and Vic knew she looked about the same.
May, by contrast, was as neat as ever. She sat with her back dancer-straight like she held court at the table, and Vic scowled at her.
“Good morning to you, too,” May said.
Vic groaned as she burned her tongue on her coffee. Behind her, Henry walked by on the way to his usual table, tousling Vic’s hair as he passed. She shot him a grouchy look and patted her hair back into place.
“You jinxed us, Vic,” Sarah said. “This doesn’t usually happen.”
“I think it may have been the shots’ fault,” May said as she buttered a piece of toast from Sarah’s plate.
“Vic’s the one who suggested shots.”
Had she? “I forgot we did shots,” Vic said.
Lethe Castle indeed provided an excellent venue for losing memories.
Now that Vic thought about it, she had suggested shots. After Xan left, she wanted something to pick her mood up off the floor. If the flashes she retained from the rest of the evening were any indication, tequila had done the trick.
Sarah put her head atop her stacked forearms with a pitiful moan. May patted her shoulder and nudged the toast toward her face.
“You wanna beat the shit out of each other?” Vic asked.
“I’m not sure that’s a healthy way to deal with our emotions,” Sarah said, looking to May for backup.
But May said, “Sure,” at the same time, and Sarah sighed.
After a breakfast of fat and protein soaked up the worst of their headaches, the trio entered the training area and stepped into a room Vic had used before with the Sentinels.
In the middle were the routine elements of training: mats and weights and the like.
A series of laden shelves spanned the side wall, each lined with a sprawling collection of items. Vic assumed most of them were conduits—objects that allowed a witch to manipulate the shape of energy in the air.
Others, she had no clue. Vic stared into the empty eye sockets of a large animal skull and came up with exactly zero guesses as to what purpose it served.
“As far as I know,” May said, “no one’s made use of the elk skull yet.”
Vic approached the mat, pulling off layers until she wore only a sports bra and athletic pants. She’d put a bandage over the mark on her wrist, though Xan’s words played in her mind whenever it caught the corner of her eye.
Sarah climbed atop a stack of mats and sat cross-legged with her chin in her hands, still visibly ruffled.
“What are we doing here on a Saturday, you guys?” Sarah asked. “It’s not right. We’re supposed to be relaxing.”
“Relaxing?” May asked. “What’s ‘relaxing’?”
Sarah just shook her head.
Vic was, she thought, coming to understand the prickly Sentinel.
What if May’s hostility toward Vic had nothing to do with her?
What if it was about Sarah instead? May seemed protective of the other woman, and Vic knew from experience that people could do wild things to protect those they cared about. She was here, wasn’t she?
“I haven’t had a chance to fight Vic since the first day,” May said. “I’ve been feeling excluded.”
“I think Xan keeps you two apart for a reason,” Sarah said, her voice muffled by the hand holding up her head.
“The groups you’ve been working with have gotten a lot better,” May told Vic. “I’m curious what the fuss is about.”
Vic stifled the urge to preen at the compliment, putting her hands on her hips.
“How’s about we make a deal?” she said to May, who looked at her with eyebrows raised. “You need to work on your grappling,” Vic said, and May frowned. “As I’m sure you remember, I just so happen to be great at grappling. I can help you out.”
“In exchange for?”
“I’ve got a magic problem,” Vic said, and both witches shot her shrewd looks. “There’s a door I can’t figure out how to open.”
May nodded with her eyes narrowed. When Sarah began to ask for more information, May cut her off. “Let’s do it.”
Two minutes later, Vic had May flat on the floor. “How did you do that?” May groaned as she rolled over and pushed herself up.
Vic hadn’t broken a sweat. “You use too much power on high-energy moves. It doesn’t matter how fast you are, spinning for a kick is a waste of resources. You’re slowing yourself down, leaving yourself open to attack.”
“Where did you learn all this, anyway?” May grumbled, looking peeved but evidently not with Vic.
“Lots of places,” Vic said. “I used to switch gyms every few months, so I learned a little of everything.”
“Why would you do that?” May asked, and Vic wondered if May realized they were having an actual conversation for the first time, almost like friends.
“When my mom disappeared, my brother was convinced people were coming to get him. So we lay low. I thought getting well known in any one spot was a bad idea.”
“Didn’t you have the same job for that whole time?” Sarah asked.
“Most of it, yeah. But I worked in food service,” Vic said with an ironic smile. “Who’s the last waitress you remember?”
“Do you have people back home who miss you being gone for so long?” Sarah asked. “Friends, family? A boyfriend?”
Vic paused, then said, “No. It’s just me and Henry.”
And it was true. She had always kept her romantic entanglements strictly casual, never knowing when she might need to pick up her life with Henry and flee.
Her co-workers had tried inviting her out over the years, but she always declined.
Henry was her best friend and her only family.
The only person she had ever allowed herself to need.
Sarah and May looked at her like they saw too much, and Vic’s throat tightened.
“Let’s go again,” Vic said.
May and Vic went at each other, and out of the corner of her eye Vic saw Sarah climb on tiptoe atop the stack of mats and pluck a glittering stone the size of her palm from an upper shelf.
A blue light emanated from the rock and took the shape of a dove in front of Sarah like the inverse of a shadow puppet.
It flapped its wings and hovered until—with a grunt—Vic flipped May onto the floor.
Sarah peered down at her. “You heard Vic. Stop trying to roundhouse her.”
“What is that?” Vic asked, staring as the bird took flight and arced overhead.
“I’m trying to hold up May’s end of the bargain,” Sarah said, shooting a pointed look at May, who stood hunched with her hands on her knees, breathing hard.
“You can think of magic as a bunch of threads hanging in the air. When you want to make something happen, you weave the threads into the shape you want them to take.”
“Elder Thompson explained all of this,” Vic said, impatient. “But I’ve been staring at rocks the whole time I’ve been here, and I haven’t seen shit.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Sarah said, plopping back to a seat. “Maybe the stones are too simple. They don’t have magic already formed, just energy waiting to be made into something.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Rite,” Sarah said. “Maybe you could withstand it because the magic was already there.”
Hadn’t Xan suggested Vic could have had help? That the mark on her wrist, the bind she’d entered unwittingly, had given her abilities she didn’t understand?
“Let’s test it—make something,” Vic said.