Chapter XX
XX
While magic for transportation purposes is possible, the expense of such all-encompassing practice precludes its use in all but the most urgent circumstances.
With this in mind, some practitioners excel at giving the illusion of transport by means of disguising their form, elaborate camouflage, or outright manipulation of another’s senses.
But this is, like much magic, deception.
Max didn’t spare a look for Xan as he left the room. The older man’s eyes ran the length of Vic as he faced her.
Vic’s will to fight fled the room with the Chief Sentinel.
“I went to Meredith’s apartment.”
Max’s eyes widened.
“Something was in her office.” Vic shuddered at the memory. “An Orcan. I thought it was a woman at first. I thought it was…” Vic shook her head.
Max’s voice was low when he asked, “What was it?”
“Manananggal.”
Vic had recognized the Orcan once it rose from behind the desk, though she hadn’t recalled the name in her panicked state. Of all the creatures she’d learned about at Avalon, the manananggal left a distinct impression.
“It attacked me.”
The words did little to convey the depth of Vic’s terror. They fell far short of how it felt when the monster’s claws sank into her skin, or the way its tongue crawled toward her lips. Vic suppressed a gag and wiped her sleeve across her face.
“I tried to fight it off,” Vic said around a building lump in her throat.
“But it was too strong, and when I tried to run away, it caught me.” She closed her eyes to the sight of Max’s sympathetic face.
She hated the way these words sounded coming out of her mouth—a dry description of a most vivid memory.
Boiled down to its component parts, the story sounded almost boring.
Vic couldn’t stop her hands from shaking.
“That’s when Xan showed up. Or materialized, is more accurate. ”
“You’ve finally witnessed his abilities in action, I see.”
She supposed she’d witnessed them a number of times.
“What is he?”
“Some of the strongest Born witches show a special aptitude for certain kinds of magic,” Max said. “That form comes naturally to him.”
“He came out of nowhere, killed the thing that attacked me, and brought me here.”
“He was able to enter the apartment?”
Vic remembered the sound of banging against the door from the outside.
“No,” she said. “I had to let him in.” She hadn’t undone the entire ward, but she’d started on it, and Xan must have been able to do the rest.
They fell silent as Max considered this, and Vic’s head throbbed. She put a hand to her forehead and waited for the pulsing to abate. Max seemed to remember something and crossed the room quickly.
“A doctor will be here soon,” he assured Vic when he returned to the seat in front of her.
She nodded. Her head still hurt, but the worst of the pounding receded.
“Max?” Vic asked in a small voice. “Is someone trying to kill me?”
Max thought hard before replying.
“I do not think so,” he said.
“First the strix and then the Rite and now this,” Vic said. “I can admit a fair amount of coincidence, but this is past the point of plausibility.”
“I’m not sure that it is,” he said quietly.
“Nathaniel wants me dead,” Vic said. “I can see it in his eyes—he’s got to be behind this, Max.”
But Max looked like he was at a crossroads, a deep frown etching his face as he considered how much to tell her. Trying to decide whether to be honest or to deflect. Finally, he sighed.
“Victoria, I must confess something to you.”
Apprehension wound down Vic’s spine. Max was the reason she was here, the reason she could stay.
He had been the first to welcome her inside, and he had treated Vic with more respect than anyone here.
She thought of the photograph—of Max sitting alongside her mother and Aren Mann—and Vic wasn’t sure she wanted to hear whatever Max thought he ought to confess.
“I had an ulterior motive in giving you the key to Meredith’s apartment,” he said, and Vic waited for the other shoe to drop.
“Your mother was a highly capable witch and a beloved friend of mine. But she was distrustful. She barred entrance to her apartment whenever she left the castle. When she died, whatever wards she had in place locked shut. No one had been inside that apartment in eight years.”
Max swallowed, and Vic had the sense he was nervous about how she would react. He didn’t want to tell her, but he plunged on.
“When you arrived at Avalon, I thought you might be able to bypass the protections. Spells react differently when they recognize their maker, and sometimes they recognize aspects of their maker that might be present in a close relation. Being made of Meredith’s own flesh and blood, you might have been able to get inside. So I gave you the key.”
“You didn’t give Henry a key.”
“I did not.”
“But I’m not—” Vic shook her head.
“Because I knew you could do it. And you did, didn’t you?” Max asked.
But she hadn’t, not on her own. It wasn’t her power that opened the door. She’d leaned on someone else, someone that would horrify Max. Vic should tell him—Max deserved to know that his theory was wrong. Vic bit her lip.
“I would never have sent you there if I thought it might put you in danger,” Max said, his eyes beseeching. “I even convinced myself that I did you a favor, that you would appreciate a glimpse into your mother’s life here.”
But Vic hadn’t gone to Meredith’s apartment because of Max. It wasn’t Max who’d pushed her to go. It wasn’t Max who’d planted the idea of pulling on the bind. All Max had done was give her the key.
“It seems I was foolish to think the wards were the only protection guarding Meredith’s sanctuary.”
“You’re suggesting the manananggal was there to deter intruders,” Vic said.
“The way I see it, there are two people who could have brought that Orcan into Meredith’s study,” Max said.
“Meredith, for one. I wouldn’t be surprised if she invoked something of that nature in the event that her privacy was invaded.
She had the talent to pull it off.” A ghost of a smile tinged Max’s face.
“And the requisite disregard for the rules.”
“And the second one?” Vic asked. The photograph sat against her hip like a shard of ice. Meredith, Max, Aren. Friends, now enemies. One dead, two left to continue fighting.
When Max replied, he spoke slowly. “We should discuss the circumstances of your mother’s death.”
Vic stopped breathing. Blood rushed in her ears. She had to know, though the idea sent a wave of panic through her mind. She had to know, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
“The official conclusion was that she died on a hunt. It’s what the reports say and what most people in this castle believe. It is not, however, the truth.”
“She was murdered,” Vic said. She’d known already, hadn’t she? She had to. She knew what Max was going to say next before he said it. She’d known the second she saw that photograph.
“Yes.”
“Henry doesn’t know.”
“Few do.”
“You know who did it.” Vic did, too, though the thought landed like a punch in the gut.
“Aren Mann.”
The man in the tower. The only one in the photograph not looking at the camera. The one who’d opened the door.
“Why?”
Knowing eyes locked on Vic’s. “Meredith’s role in the Order changed as she got older.
She didn’t want to hunt Orcans anymore. When the Brotherhood defected, and the tectonics of our world shifted, she began to focus on Mann.
She was concerned about his growing influence and power, and she foresaw where he would take his followers years before the bulk of the Order caught on.
In the period leading up to her death, Meredith infiltrated the organization with the aim of taking Mann down from the inside. ”
“You think he killed her because he found out she betrayed him?”
“The last thing I ever heard from Meredith was that she’d found something. I never knew what.”
Vic reached into her front pocket and pulled out the folded photograph. Her fingers, she noticed, were covered in blood. She handed it to Max.
When he pulled it open, his eyes widened.
Then, to Vic’s surprise, he smiled.
“She would have kept this, wouldn’t she?” Max said under his breath. “Sentimental Meredith.”
He tried to hand it back to Vic, but she shook her head. She didn’t want it anywhere near her. “What happened between the three of you?” Vic asked, her voice a whisper. Her head spun. Where was the doctor?
Max’s eyes were sad. “I could never predict Meredith,” he said.
“Aren Mann and I were at each other’s throats from the day we met, but Meredith kept us civil.
Even when things fell apart, she kept us connected.
She played both sides, made both of us think she understood us, made us believe we could come back together.
I never knew what she actually believed until she died for it. ”
A knock at the door interrupted Max.
“Come in,” he called, and the doors to the office swung inward to reveal a short, balding man carrying a leather bag. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Marcus. Victoria here has been injured.”
Marcus approached her with studied detachment while Max sank back and sifted through papers on his desk. The doctor plied Vic with questions about her medical history, her injuries, and she told him what she remembered.
“I don’t suppose you have some kind of magical remedy for any of these?” Vic asked, hoping that his bag contained something more potent than Western medicine. She remembered Xan stitching up the cuts on her elbow, thinking the doctor must be even better at it than Xan was.
“I’m afraid not. Medicine and magic rarely mingle.”
Vic frowned.
Max took a seat on the chair nearest Vic. His raven—which Vic had not noticed until that moment—flew to rest at his back.
“Innate healing ability is rare enough to be nearly mythical,” Max said. “Some powerful witches can heal wounds, but it’s incredibly draining. Most would prefer to suffer physical ailments than incur the cost of attempting to heal them.”
Vic stared as the doctor brandished a regular old stethoscope. That explained the circles under Xan’s eyes. Why had he done that?
“Although witches do tend to heal at a slightly faster rate than non-magic humans,” Max added, as though they were discussing the concept as a theoretical matter and not the injuries to Vic’s real-life, non-magical body.
“Made witches, no matter how dire the injuries that lead to their rebirths, almost always return fully or nearly fully healed. If you believe, as I do, that Made witches actually enter the Veil when they nearly pass, then it becomes more about a connection to the physical plane than about anything the body does.”
Vic sighed.
“I haven’t had the time to write this theory down or disseminate it, and it is a bit radical, but I suspect many in the Order would agree with my proposition over the more determinist points of view available.”
Max kept on like this while Marcus worked, which Vic found extremely annoying until she realized that being annoyed with Max kept her mind from the shining implements Marcus pulled from his bag.
When Marcus extracted a long silver syringe, Max opted to say the most distracting thing he could think of.
“Will you help me take down the Brotherhood?”
Vic’s head whipped toward him, and Marcus grabbed her arm to hold it still. Max leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
“I can’t do anything,” Vic said.
“You discount yourself. You can do many things.”
“Yeah, I know that. If you need your restaurant managed or your makeup done or your oil changed, I’m your girl.
But magic, Max? I opened a door this evening, and it took me two weeks.
” And she hadn’t even done it alone. In fact, she’d done it with the aid of the person Max wanted her to help him destroy.
“I told you I never understood your mother. Two decades into our friendship, Meredith remained a mystery to me. Being around her was exciting. She drove me wild a lot of the time. But Meredith was like a force of nature. She did and said exactly as she pleased, and no one ever knew what that was going to be until it was.”
As he spoke, sadness etched into the lines of his face. He looked his age, worn down by years of conflict and loss.
“That fire she had—it’s in you. Don’t argue with me. The mere fact that you could open that door means you’re more like her than you think.”
Vic was shaking her head. It was a nice thought, but Max was wrong. She couldn’t put her finger on why, exactly, she was nothing like her mother. It was deep under the surface. The sound of laughter in their apartment that Vic could never replicate.
“Meredith might be key to this whole thing. The Order, the Brotherhood, whatever comes next. You can help me unlock it.”
“She didn’t tell me shit about the Order,” Vic said, “let alone that she spent two decades in it. If this whole story boils down to my knowledge of my mother, then I’m afraid you’re screwed.”
Whatever the doctor had given Vic spread through her limbs like a pleasant fire.
“The Brotherhood is the reason your life has been so difficult,” Max said. “The reason you had to drop out of school, the reason your mom is gone, all of it.”
Vic let out a quiet, bitter laugh. “My life has always been hard. Long before Meredith disappeared for good, I picked up all the slack she dropped while fighting for the Order. She’d leave for days, weeks sometimes, and I carried everything she left behind.
Even when she was around, she missed so much she couldn’t remember the simple things, and all the responsibility for fixing it fell to me.
Now you tell me I need to pick up where she left off? Again?”
“Something is happening to you,” Max said. The doctor’s hands stilled where they were bandaging Vic’s calf. “You can feel the change, I know you can. Something inside of you is waking up.”
But Max was wrong. Nothing was happening to her. She hadn’t done any of it on her own.
“You were supposed to be powerful, you know?” Max said. “Meredith meant you to be the most powerful of all of us. She might have given up on that idea, but I never have.”
Vic rested her head against the couch. Everything hurt. All she wanted was to curl up somewhere warm and hope she didn’t remember any of this tomorrow.
“I think you’ll do it, you know,” Max said. “Meredith used to do the same thing. She would hem and haw and complain all day long, but she would wake up the next morning and do the hard thing that needed to be done.”
Her senses started to fade, like lights flickering out down a hallway.
“I’m not like her,” Vic said.
“You are just like her,” Max said.
“I think you’re full of shit.”
“I know.” And he sounded genuinely sorry.
Vic’s vision went last. Her head fell sideways on the sofa as she passed out.