Chapter XXXIV #2
The faces around Vic sobered at Max’s words.
He took one of Vic’s hands and held it. On the back of his, Vic saw something she hadn’t noticed before.
A tattoo of a raven inked into the smooth skin between Max’s knuckles and his wrist. As Vic watched, it twisted under his skin.
She supposed it had been there the whole time, and she had only now noticed it.
Magic, Vic thought, continued to confound her.
“What happens next is up to you, Victoria. If you want to stay, as a witch this time, you—”
“I want to stay,” Vic interrupted, her jaw set. Fury lined her veins, lacing her words. “I want to gut the bastard.”
Max smiled.
—
The eyes in the mirror were not her eyes.
Vic was filthy. Dried blood, mud, and soot streaked across her face. The snow caught in her curls had melted, and her hair hung limp around her ears.
But Vic paid little attention to any of that. She focused on her irises. Crimson, blood red, and gleaming. Right where a deep, dark brown had always sat.
Vic had seen many versions of the Lumen since her arrival at the Order’s safe house.
The Elder who had let her, Sarah, and May inside.
The Sentinel who came to call Sarah and May to a meeting.
The witch who led Vic to the small quarters she’d been assigned.
All of them had pleasant-enough eyes. Blues and greens and browns, subtle variations on the human iris.
Sarah’s eyes had a soft golden glow, while May’s were a stormy gray-brown.
Only Vic had eyes the color of violence.
She watched them in the mirror of her sleeping quarters.
The safe house, it turned out, was more of a bunker.
Concrete walls, deep underground. They’d driven in through a hole in the mountainside and taken an elevator to the base.
A honeycomb of tiny individual rooms connected a handful of operations bases impenetrable by weapons known to man or magic.
Vic hunched over the bathroom sink, her hands tight around the metal counter surrounding it. Everything in her quarters was metal—metal sink, metal shower, metal walls. Easy to clean; all you needed was a hose.
The room boasted a thin bed with a bare mattress and sheets carefully folded atop it.
Vic had been given standard-issue Sentinel garb upon her arrival and told that the Order would remain here while the castle was inaccessible.
They would return whenever the Sentinels cleared it, to whatever was left.
Vic had snuck out once already, which she found more difficult in the cramped hallways underground than in the oversize castle.
But she hadn’t gone far. Xan’s quarters, a few doors down from hers, had been left unlocked.
She crept inside while he showered and stole a dagger from the weapons belt he’d brought in with him.
Xan had hung it neatly on a hook by the door.
He was basically begging Vic to take it.
There must have been a weapons room here, but Vic lacked the energy to find it. Xan would notice the blade missing, and he’d yell at her tomorrow. But he probably would have yelled at her anyway. She might as well earn it.
Vic needed a shower. She needed to wash the muck of Orcan and blood and dirt from her skin. She needed to cleanse herself of this never-ending day. But there was one thing she needed to do first.
As if he heard the unspoken invitation in her thoughts, the voice in the back of her mind spoke up.
You did great today, Aren told her. I’m impressed.
Vic stared at the red eyes in the mirror as if they were his, as if she could tell him with a glare how sick of this she was. She didn’t want to talk to him. Didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of her curiosity or her condemnation or her fear. She just wanted him gone.
I was distracted during the ending. What did I miss?
“I’m done with you.”
Don’t say that. You and I have a long future ahead of us.
Vic picked up the dagger from its place on the counter. She weighed it in her hand, getting a feel for the balance of it in her left palm. She was far from ambidextrous, but she could make do with her nondominant hand.
What is that?
“You know what it is.” She turned the tap on, and cool water filled the bottom of the basin.
It won’t work.
“I don’t know that I believe you.”
Why do you want to get rid of me so badly?
“I don’t like you.”
That’s rude.
“You’ve killed people. Hundreds, thousands. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. You do it without remorse, and you’ll do it again.”
Doesn’t it bother you when people tell you how you feel?
“Are you going to lie to me and tell me you’re torn up about it? Will you cry fake tears at the loss of innocent life? All those murders that circumstances just forced you to commit?”
Would it be easier for you if I killed people because I like it, if I felt nothing for them? If I took a sick sense of pleasure from the act, would you have an easier time accepting who I am?
“You hurt people on purpose. Your reasoning is irrelevant.”
Na?veté does not suit you, Victoria.
“I’m not interested in your excuses.”
I do what I do because it is necessary. Because it must be done. There are elements at play here more important than the protection of a few innocents.
“That’s twisted.”
I haven’t hurt you.
Vic remembered the forest, that thing tearing into her, the knowledge that she had risen from the snow-covered ground as someone fundamentally altered. She looked at the eyes in the mirror and knew that he had hurt her worse than anyone else ever had.
I only ever wanted to show you how powerful you are.
Vic eyed the bind-mark on her wrist like a surgeon eyeing a tumor.
About the size of a nickel, but she didn’t know how deep the sigil extended into her skin.
It curled along the outer edge of her arm, over the bone.
Avoiding any major veins, that was good.
She angled the blade in her left hand until the tip came up against the thin skin.
You were supposed to be powerful, more powerful than your mother, more powerful than me or Max. You were supposed to be strong.
“I am strong.”
I can make you powerful.
“I’m good.”
And she dug the blade in.
Xan kept his knives sharp, she would give him that.
Vic barely felt the point break the skin.
But a piercing pain followed an instant later.
She turned the knife to the side and tugged until she tore a gash the length of the mark.
For a split second, the slash was bloodless, white, before crimson flowed from the cut like water breaking a dam.
You are just like your mother. Stubborn. Meredith convinced herself she understood the whole world, but all she saw of it was the inside of a gilded cage.
Blood wept streaks from Vic’s wrist, and she pulled her lip between her teeth. Tears fell from the corners of her eyes as she failed to shut out the pain.
Meredith thought that everything came down to a narrow conception of good and evil. She thought she could see everything through a lens she learned in Sunday school.
The skin all over Vic’s body felt light and prickly as the blood rushed from her extremities to the wound she sliced into her flesh. She’d cut an L shape; halfway done now.
You’ve repeated some of her mistake. It made her weak, made her miss things.
Vic sped her pace as the sink filled with blood. Bright and burning and the exact color of her eyes. It swirled around the drain.
Someone knocked on the door outside, and Vic ignored it.
You don’t have to follow her. She never meant to dig a grave deep enough for two.
Finally, Vic finished the square. Four cuts, each as deep as the muscle, connecting around the bind-mark.
Then again, perhaps we are all doomed to repeat the mistakes of our parents.
Gritting her teeth, Vic slid the flat side of the blade along one of the edges of the square and dug. As if to separate a line of fat from a steak, Vic teased the knife back and forth between her skin and her muscles. She bit back a scream at the pain, at the difficulty of carving her own flesh.
The knocking at the door grew louder, as someone started banging against the metal, rattling the door in its frame.
The sins of the mother are to be laid upon the children. The Bard knew it, I know it, you know it.
Back and forth, it took too long to tear the skin from her wrist. Until finally it was connected by only a thin piece of fascia. She eased the blade against it and pulled.
Perhaps it’s a fate none of us can truly—
And it was finished.
Vic threw the tainted piece of skin into the bloody basin and fell, sobbing, to the floor.
She curled into the small space under the sink, ignoring an unnatural pressure as her own wild magic spread throughout the room.
Magic sat heavy in the air around her, energy like a fist pushing her to the ground.
Dark strands of the stuff wove around Vic as she pulled her knees to her chest and pressed her left palm against the wound in her wrist, squeezing until she saw stars.
She held herself tight and waited for the pounding of her blood to recede.
It took her a moment to realize the pounding wasn’t only in her mind. And there was yelling, too.
There was someone at the door, she remembered. Someone had come for her. Her first thought was of Henry, whom she hadn’t seen since the day before. Her little brother, her closest friend, and someone she had no idea how to face right now.
“Vic!” someone shouted through the door, the voice angry and booming.
Xan.
When she could force her eyes to look she noticed feet in the gap under the door. Xan was standing in the hallway, waiting for her.
Vic was curled up on the floor, hiding from the world and falling apart, and he was waiting outside her door.
Pain and fear and cold, crippling exhaustion rumbled through her like an uneven breath, and Vic bit down a cry against the back of her hand.
She wanted Xan to come inside. She wanted him to knock the door down and rush in and hold her together while she broke into a million unrecognizable pieces.
She wanted him to run. To turn his back on her and leave this moment unwitnessed. To let her keep her weakness private like it always had been. The lights in the room went out—snuffed by magic Vic didn’t understand well enough to control.
“Vic!” he yelled. “Answer me, goddamn it. What are you doing in there?”
Vic’s old instinct won out.
“I’m fine,” Vic called, and her voice sounded cold and distant. She choked against a rising sob. Magic wound around her skin like a weight, suffocating her, pushing Vic further into herself, forcing her to stay still and small.
Xan made a sound of frustration. “You start training tomorrow,” he said. “Max’s orders.”
“Fine,” Vic said. She poured all her energy into sounding as normal as possible, though a pleading voice in the back of her mind begged Xan to hear the strain in her tone. Begged him to understand what she wasn’t saying, to come help her without her having to speak the request.
“Are you okay in there?” She heard him moving behind the door, heard his hand turn the handle like he was anxious to get inside. “I can feel magic—what are you doing?”
“I said I’m fine!” Vic snapped. “Leave me alone.”
He stilled.
“Get some sleep.”
Vic watched the twin shadows under the door disappear as he walked away from her.
Her head fell onto her knees, and she let shaking sobs overwhelm her.
It was pitch-black around her now. Not the pleasant darkness she’d come to associate with Xan, but something richer, darker, and meaner. Something that came from inside her, stamping out the light, and Vic couldn’t feel where her own body ended and the darkness began.
Training started tomorrow, he’d said. For real this time.
Vic smiled into the blackness at the realization. She belonged at Avalon Castle now—whoever she was.