Chapter XIX
XIX
The Acheron Order is the final remnant of what was once a global network of witches working in collaboration against the problem of Orcans and Orcan magic.
The Order, having outlived all its brethren, is forced to make difficult choices about how to expend finite resources.
As a result, the Order focuses almost entirely on the United States, only occasionally venturing out into Western Europe and other parts of North America.
For the time being, the rest of the world is, however unfortunately, on its own.
Vic nearly lost her nerve in the corridor. She’d found a murdered woman last week. She was attacked by the creature that did it the next morning. Why it seemed a good idea to do this alone, at night, Vic couldn’t explain.
All she knew was that she needed to try.
Sarah and May had walked her through the process of removing a ward, and—though she felt a guilty twinge at the prospect of pulling on the bind, of intentionally using Aren Mann’s abilities—she had no choice.
It was her mother’s apartment, her mother’s life, her mother’s secrets, and she needed to get inside.
The strix was dead, anyway. She’d seen Xan break its neck with his bare hands, watched the creature fall as he stood over it, staring impassively at the corpse. It was gone, the castle was on high alert, and the Order was loath to be taken by surprise again.
Yet she still listened hard as she crept through the darkness.
The shadowed creature she’d last seen outside her and Henry’s door was probably still in the castle.
She’d encountered it so many times she’d become almost desensitized to its presence.
Vic even found herself wondering if it was an Orcan at all.
Perhaps it was another mark of the castle’s magic, rather than a being of its own. Maybe someone was messing with her.
It hardly mattered. Tonight, she was willing to take the chance.
If Vic was stuck, as Sarah had said, suspended in time by the death of her mother, by the secrets that swirled in Meredith’s wake, upending Vic’s world—then tonight she would become unstuck.
She would face whatever lay inside Meredith’s sordid second life and emerge free from the past. If Vic knew what had happened, she could move on. She had to.
Though Vic thought she’d grown used to the eerie atmosphere of the castle at night, the portraits threw sinister smiles down at her as she passed, and she began to feel the familiar fear inching up the small of her back.
She knew Sarah had wanted to come along.
Vic saw the eagerness in the Sentinel’s eyes and the disappointment when she left Sarah and May without asking them to accompany her.
But Sarah should have known Vic was never going to ask.
She would not invite anyone else into the messy business of her memories.
Not when she couldn’t untangle the knot of her feelings about her mother.
To pluck one out and explain it to a stranger was impossible when she couldn’t understand it herself.
As Vic climbed a staircase in the Northwest Wing, the air around her shifted. A familiar and not entirely unpleasant sensation—a brush of breath against the crook where her neck met her shoulder, as if a lover sighed against her skin. Her head fell back without thinking and she exhaled.
Catching herself, Vic scanned the hallway for movement.
It had felt like someone was next to her, breathing her in, as gentle as a kiss.
Her mind flashed to the shadow, and Vic wondered if it stood eye to eye with her right now.
There was no shape, no change in the darkness, but Vic told herself she saw it in front of her face, staring.
Her heart raced. Vic considered returning to her room, but she cast the idea aside out of hand. The shadow didn’t feel menacing. She perceived no threat hidden in the darkness.
And she’d prepared for this. The strix was dead, the shadow had never tried to hurt her, and she’d pilfered another dagger before leaving the training area that evening.
Sarah had watched her do it with a half-amused, half-exasperated expression, and Vic had smiled, bashful, and tucked the new dagger into her pants.
She kept moving.
She was ready. She would do it this time, whatever it took.
Vic made one more turn before she started to notice apartment numbers.
There: 481.
Vic took a deep breath and shot a nervous glance in either direction. Nothing in the hallway save moonlight and shadow.
She pulled the brass key from her pocket, and it stuck as she turned it in the ancient lock. Vic pushed against the heavy door and felt the unseen hand holding it shut. As expected. She sighed.
Vic knelt in front of the door. She ignored the sting in her knees from the bruises she’d given herself during the Rite.
Her eyes locked on the air around the knob, as Sarah had told her.
She slowed her breathing and relaxed the muscles in her shoulders.
In her mind’s eye, she tugged on a string hidden within her arm, under the bind-mark, where the magic lay dormant, and ignored the flash of shame at where—or whom—the magic came from.
No time for regret right now; Vic had to focus.
It might have been minutes, or an hour, before the air began to move.
Something like a web wrapped around the handle, knotted and old like thick tree roots had grown one over the other. It was a tangled mess, and Vic fought to keep her breathing under control. If she got too excited, she could lose focus, and she’d have to start over.
But there it was, magic hanging in the air, just like Sarah said.
Vic suppressed the urge to rip it away, to force the tendrils aside and wrench the door open. Instead she imagined, in vivid detail, what it would look like if she could reach a hand forward and brush away a strand.
As she did, a single limp thread of dull silver fell from the mass and dissolved in the air.
Vic gasped.
She could do it. She might not be able to make magic of her own, but she could pull it apart. Vic didn’t even care if Aren Mann was helping her open the door as long as she got to see the other side of it.
It took ages.
When Vic finally cleared the last strand, she stood with shaking hands.
She grasped the knob again and twisted.
The door creaked open on aged hinges, beckoning Vic inside.
Meredith’s apartment had the same floor plan as the one her children shared on the opposite side of the castle, only flipped. Vic imagined that she crossed the threshold into a parallel dimension—a mirror that mimicked her movements an instant too late.
Vic jumped when the door swung shut behind her, and she felt a force like a whisper cover the handle. Like a cold zipper crunching closed up her spine, and Vic knew the ward had resealed itself.
It was dark inside, lit by nothing but a strip of moonlight from a window across the room.
Vic flicked the switch in the entry hall, but no lights came on.
Stacks of books lay scattered over every flat surface in the room, each covered by a coat of dust. The spines were worn like they’d been read slowly, held aloft in the palm of Meredith’s hand.
The walls were crowded with framed artwork Meredith must have selected and hung.
Even years after its owner abandoned it, the apartment had a lived-in, well-loved atmosphere that Vic could not remember in any of the temporary homes she’d had as a child.
Max had said that Meredith had this apartment for decades, and it stood to reason that this—more than anywhere Vic remembered—was her home.
Vic didn’t believe in ghosts, and she hadn’t seen anything at Avalon Castle to convince her otherwise.
But this place felt haunted the way real places felt haunted.
There was life here, once, and now there wasn’t.
Meredith’s absence hung in the air like a specter.
Vic saw it in the dust atop her beloved books, in the way one chair sat slightly farther from the table, as if Meredith would return and sit at any moment.
She saw it in the bottle of wine half-drunk on the counter, the same varietal Vic favored now.
The open door on the left led to a bedroom, with a wooden bed frame just like Vic’s on the other side of the castle, and floral sheets under a layer of dust. Whoever last made the bed had been sloppy.
On the bedside table sat a photograph within a wooden frame, and Vic reached for it. She cleared the dust with her sleeve, expecting to see her own or her brother’s face.
Not the three people smiling up at her.
Her mother beamed from the center of the frame, seated on the floor in front of the red couch on the other side of the wall.
Meredith, her hair light and smooth, smiled a big, toothy grin at the camera like she’d been caught mid-laugh when the flash went off.
She was young, maybe Vic’s age, maybe a little older, but it was hard to tell with Meredith, who never lost her youthful glow.
Behind her sat two men, flanking her in relaxed poses on the couch.
To Meredith’s left, Max Shepherd. His hair was solid black, without a hint of the white he would develop, and he wore large wire-rimmed glasses as he smiled a sardonic half grin at the camera. His legs were crossed in front of him, and Meredith had one hand wrapped around his calf.
But Vic was stricken, staring at the man on Meredith’s opposite side. A man who barely seemed to have aged at all.
Aren Mann was the only one not looking at the camera. He had both legs up on the couch and he was looking at the other two with unabashed joy on his face.
Dread clogged Vic’s throat.
The three of them had been friends.
Close friends, by the look of it. Close enough for Meredith to keep a photo on her bedside table, when Vic hadn’t seen another photograph of anyone else in the apartment. And now Max and Aren led opposite sides of what was about to become a war, and Meredith had been dead for almost a decade.