Chapter Twenty-Five
Silas sat across from Sylvia and tried to figure out how to accuse her of a crime.
He’d left his dinner with Katherine feeling certain.
Certain that Sylvia, no matter her faults, was a good person.
A person who had taken care of Katherine, and who’d had to make tough decisions to take care of other kids like her, all at great personal risk.
At the risk of being ostracized and targeted by people like his parents. People like him.
He wanted to be better than that. He wanted to be fair. So he was going to give Sylvia a chance to make it right.
He just had to make sure she believed that was actually what he was doing, that this wasn’t a betrayal. The fact that her hands were fisted tight on the desk suggested that was not going to be an easy task.
He pulled Sylvia’s caster out of his pocket and rested it on the surface in front of him. Her eyes went wide.
“I thought you might want this back,” he said.
She tried to cover, but there was a flash of something almost like sadness in her eyes as she reached for the knife and took it in her hand.
Silas knew the last few days must have been incredibly stressful for her.
Witches could do magic with anything that could cut into their skin, but to do it without your caster felt inherently wrong.
To know that it was missing, that someone could find it—that he could find it—must have left her reeling.
“Thank you.” Her voice gave nothing away.
“I found it in the police evidence from the Hollywood and Highland attack.”
Sylvia’s lips pursed. “How strange.”
“I know that you were there that night,” Silas said, keeping his face blank. “And I know why.”
At that, Sylvia’s body went rigid, her eyes narrowing to slits. The air heated with anger, and Silas instinctively started to reach for his caster. He made himself stop, putting his hands on the desk, showing Sylvia that he had no plans to hurt her.
“I’m not going to tell my parents about it,” he said. “I just need you to stop.”
Sylvia’s head cocked to the side, but her body didn’t relax.
“Selling altum is a serious offense, Sylvia. I can guess where it started. Running a coven is incredibly taxing on anyone’s magic, and for you to have been running a coven as large as Aestas for this long must have been difficult.
Not to mention everything extra that you’re doing to help unsettled witches and how much power that must have taken.
I know the high from the altum must have helped a lot with the exhaustion. ”
She didn’t say anything, keeping her expression neutral as she listened to him.
“But selling it to other people is dangerous,” he continued. “You of all people should appreciate the havoc that altum can wreak if it gets in the hands of someone who unknowingly has unsettled magic in their blood. What happened on Halloween … that can’t happen again.”
Silas waited for Sylvia to respond, his gaze holding steady with hers. She stayed silent for a moment, and then her face just … crumpled.
She buried her head in her palms as she let out a small sob—an admission, he thought, that she had been at Hollywood and Highland selling drugs that night. That it was because of her that the altum had landed with whatever poor, ignorant soul had wrought that destruction.
“God, I didn’t mean for that to happen,” Sylvia said, lifting her gaze and shaking her head, dispelling the single tear in her eye before it fell. “Life just spirals out of your control sometimes. You get on a path and before you know it, you’re stuck and you don’t know how to get off.”
Silas blinked, unsure how Sylvia had managed to so succinctly sum up the problem that haunted him every day. He wanted to take a road different than the one that had been set out for him. Wanted it so badly it might tear him apart.
Maybe he could redirect them both.
“I know you didn’t. It was a mistake. An awful mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.”
Sylvia nodded. “I needed this. I needed someone to tell me to stop. Someone to snap me out of it, to make me get my priorities in order.”
Didn’t they all. His own priorities were fucked, his parents’ wants and needs coming before his own, day in and day out. Was that any way to live?
He wouldn’t delude himself into thinking he could find a permanent way off the relentless climb of Khatri upward mobility.
But he could push the minor rebellion that had grown from a seed to a tree since his arrival in LA even further.
Find a way to delay this for a year or two so he could go back to his students in New York.
Revise the curriculum, do the research to make sure what they were learning was actually true, not the biased history he’d been fed.
He could steal just a little more time living the life he wanted to live. A few more months of happy memories that he could cling to as the weight of his responsibilities slowly crushed him to dust.
The thought of leaving LA twinged, a brief ping through his head about missing Katherine and her wry wit, but he pushed it aside. Katherine, he knew, would not miss him one bit. He should ensure that he felt the same.
“We both want the same thing here, Sylvia,” he said. “We want you to keep your job.”
“Yes.” She fixed her eye makeup with a manicured nail. “I want that very much. I promise I’ll stop.”
He wanted to believe her, but he also needed to be sure.
Altum was an addictive high, and Sylvia’s problems with managing her power and keeping a hold on the coven would only get worse.
He couldn’t be called back here a week or a month from now because she had been caught.
And he couldn’t handle the guilt of leaving the drugs on the street and then hearing that another disaster had happened.
“I need you to bring me your cauldron,” he said. “As proof that you’ll stop.”
Sylvia nodded. “Of course. I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.”
Silas breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you, Sylvia. Truly. I am so happy we’re able to work together to find a solution on this.”
“Me too.”
Silas gave her one last tentative smile, then left.
God, he was a dick.
Sylvia waited until her office door had swung shut behind Silas, then slammed her fists on the desk in frustration.
Like just about everything she did nowadays, it had an unintended consequence: The papers that littered the surface went up in flames.
She cursed as she grabbed them, throwing them in the trash can and then stomping on them with her booted foot.
She wasn’t any closer to controlling her power, and it was driving her up the wall. She couldn’t clear her head. It felt like her skull was filled with gnats, the buzzing drowning out all of her thoughts—except that ever-present anxiety, which whispered constant threats in her ear.
And now the threat’s cologne was lingering in her office.
He was easy, at least. Transparent as a piece of Saran Wrap, and just as simple to tear apart. So desperate not to get blood on his hands that he was willing to see good intentions around every corner.
“You get on a path and before you know it, you’re stuck and you don’t know how to get off.”
What absolute bullshit. You set your own damn path, and if you didn’t like it, you forged a new one. No matter what it took.
Sylvia stared down at the caster that rested on her desk. Careless, for her to have dropped it. Sloppy, for her not to have noticed it was gone. Strange, that the thing that had been glued to her hip for the last thirty years had been missing for days and she hadn’t cared.
There had been a time when she wouldn’t have let that caster out of her sight. When the sense of the woman she was had been so tied to the woman who had given it to her that she couldn’t imagine parting with it.
She picked it up, turning the knife over in her hands. Staring at the gold inlay on the handle—a butterfly. At the time, she’d thought it was sweet.
She opened her desk drawer and shoved the knife all the way in the back, burying it under old receipts and empty wrappers.
Fuck Nina Khatri.
1997
Sylvia was twenty-two, and she was settled.
She’d had a good run, keeping her unsettled magic until only a few months earlier—far longer than most. For six years, she’d been the most powerful witch in the most powerful coven in the country.
And she’d never been able to do a goddamn thing with it.
Strength, it turned out, didn’t mean power. She could run magical circles around everyone in Noctis, but she couldn’t make them listen to a word she said. She wasn’t just other—her unsettled magic and her lack of pedigree made her less than.
And then she settled.
It was like a switch flipped in her body.
She went to bed limitless, and she woke up limited.
The loss was indescribable. That itch, the burn that had been a constant for so many years, was gone.
Her skin was just skin, nothing roiling underneath.
The same people who had sneered at her unsettled magic now sneered at its lack, telling her in hoity-toity terms how much of a relief it must be and at the same time looking down their noses at her because they knew she was now stuck with the same awful restrictions as them.
Her unsettled magic had been a key part of her, and now it was missing. She’d lost a friend.
Her magic wasn’t the only friend that she was losing.
Since she’d followed Vikrant into that office building, every member of Noctis had avoided her, save one.
One bright-eyed woman who wore butterflies over her heart.
Nina had never sidestepped to put extra distance between herself and Sylvia in a hallway.
Nina had never lowered her voice when she saw Sylvia coming, scared of that unstable girl overhearing her conversation.
Nina had never seen Sylvia as anything other than an equal.