Chapter Thirty-One
Katherine opened the door of Sunspot to laughter.
It was a strange thing to hear, on a day filled with dread.
Byron had wasted no time filing his official complaint, and Katherine had been woken up by a terse text from Sylvia at five thirty in the morning, demanding that she be at Sunspot in three hours.
She’d had to roll out of Silas’ warm embrace to run to the bathroom and throw up.
She had barely been able to face him when he woke up, unable to look at him past the shame of knowing what she’d done.
As soon as the door slammed shut behind him, she’d found Cheez-It and passed the time until her meeting crying into his fur.
She stepped inside to find Tess behind the bar while Fiona sat across from her, futzing with an array of candles and potion ingredients.
The restaurant was open, a few witches she recognized gathered at tables, plates of food in front of them.
Katherine knew the scent of the room was probably heavenly, but she couldn’t smell a thing, her nostrils too clogged from a morning of tears.
“Oh, perfect,” Tess said as Katherine approached. “Settle a debate for us—is this candle purple or pink?”
Fiona turned to Katherine, holding up the aforementioned candle. “It’s pink. Beautiful, Barbie pink.”
“It’s magenta, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘purplish red.’”
“Magic doesn’t care about Wikipedia. It cares that I feel bad vibes in your new apartment—which is what you get for moving to a ‘luxury’ building, no apartment complex needs its own photography studio—and that I would like to create a spell to cleanse the dark spirits and make it a den of love and happiness. ”
“And if you try to use a purple candle instead of a pink one, you’re going to make it the den of a finance bro.”
“I love when you say annoying nerdy shit.”
Fiona and Tess leaned toward each other, kissing over the old magic detritus. Katherine’s heart pulled in her chest.
They sat silently, and Katherine realized they were waiting for her to answer. She opened her mouth, but she couldn’t make the words come out.
“This is why we shouldn’t have accosted her before coffee,” Fiona said.
Katherine grunted, thankful for the save but needing this interaction to be over. She mumbled something incoherent and hustled toward the door. She heard Fiona calling after her as she walked, but she didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop, as she marched toward her grim future.
She sucked in a breath as she arrived at Sylvia’s office, stuffing her hands in her pockets in an attempt to hide her still-raw knuckles. It was pointless—Sylvia knew exactly what she’d done, and soon all of Aestas would too.
She walked inside. Took her usual seat across from Sylvia.
Registered, briefly, that Sylvia looked different—she’d forgone her usual red lip, and was wearing a simple long-sleeved top, instead of one of her expensive cardigans.
Her hair was in a ponytail, something Katherine had never seen.
That, Katherine chided herself, was how stressed she had made the one person who had given her everything.
“You know why you’re here,” Sylvia said.
Katherine nodded.
“This could be very, very bad for us, Katherine.”
Her words were grim, but Katherine’s mind snagged on just one of them—us. Us. Us.
Did that mean …
“But I think I might have a way out of it.”
Katherine’s heart kicked into high gear.
Her job was to enforce consequences, and she’d always taken it seriously, holding the law—or at least, the laws based on common human decency, like not beating someone to a pulp—above all else.
She had been prepared to accept what was coming to her, but presented with an out, it was impossible not to want to run toward it at top speed.
The urge to immediately accept Sylvia’s help was so strong it almost choked her.
It would be so easy to fall into that old habit, to let Sylvia fix everything, just like she always did.
But there was one thing she needed answered first. One doubt that had ping-ponged across her mind all morning, a simple question whose answer could change everything.
“Did you set fire to the InterContinental Hotel?”
Sylvia sat back, her eyes flicking to her hands, and Katherine knew what the answer would be before she said it. Still, Sylvia waited, as if she was struggling to get out the word. Finally: “Yes.”
Katherine swallowed around the growing lump in her throat.
“Silas was asking questions,” Sylvia continued. “And he found my caster in the evidence from Hollywood and Highland. He thought I was the one who sold the altum and caused the explosion, and he was threatening to use that to get me kicked out of Aestas.”
Katherine bit her lip, her mind contrasting Sylvia’s words with Silas’ from the night before. She couldn’t picture him threatening Sylvia like that. “But he said—” she started, but Sylvia cut her off with a glare.
“He lied, Katherine. That’s what his family does. They lie, and they cheat, and they steal—whatever they need to do to hold on to their power.”
Even though Katherine didn’t think that was true of Silas, Sylvia was right about Vikrant and Nina.
Noctis was all about taking and maintaining power, no matter what the cost. They meted out spellbooks and runes and basked in the glory of that at every turn, but they kept the most powerful spells secret instead of sharing them with the wider witching community.
They hoarded enough resources to provide their son with a pocket spellbook.
They forced unsettled witches out of their homes, made them fend for themselves, then ostracized them when they tried to rejoin society.
And despite all of that, Sylvia had managed to make a safe haven for so many who had been rejected by their system. And now they were trying to take that away.
How had Katherine let herself forget that?
“I got everyone else out first,” Sylvia said.
“I warded the place so they’d all feel dread and leave.
I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. I’ve been tearing my hair out about how the whole building burned down.
The fire was supposed to just target his room, but you know how unreliable old magic can be. ”
Katherine nodded, her head swimming. She shuddered as she was assaulted with memories of smoke pouring under the door, the room getting hotter and hotter. The rough walls of the building cutting into her hands as she prayed to everyone who would listen that her spell wouldn’t fail.
“I was there,” Katherine admitted.
Sylvia reeled back at that, her face going slack. “Why?”
Katherine scrambled to come up with a lie, her instincts still telling her to cover up what had happened with Silas—but there was no point. “I wanted Silas’ help coming up with a spell to track Byron. He was evading everything I tried. I was desperate.”
“Desperate enough to go to your enemy, but not desperate enough to tell me what you were doing.”
The betrayal was clear in Sylvia’s voice, written into every line of her tense body. Katherine shifted in her seat, guilt pummeling her. Both she and Sylvia had kept secrets from each other. Both of them had made mistakes and hurt people who didn’t deserve it.
They were supposed to be in this together. In everything together. Yet another thing Katherine had forgotten.
“I’m sorry,” Katherine said. “You’re right. I should have come to you. I made a mistake, and I’m willing to accept the consequences.”
Sylvia leaned back, surveying Katherine with cold eyes. Seeing that expression on her face was a stab in the gut.
“You’ve made a lot of mistakes, Katherine.
” Sylvia raised her hand, counting off on her fingers as she listed: “Letting Silas find my caster instead of you. Going to him for help with Byron when I explicitly told you to hold off. Taking matters with Byron into your own hands, creating a massive problem for me at a time when I already have so many others to deal with.”
“And”—Sylvia’s last finger went up—“failing to protect Lily from herself.”
Katherine’s breath hitched.
“You were supposed to take care of her,” Sylvia continued. Nausea curled in Katherine’s stomach. “You of all people should have known the risks she faced.”
“I—”
Sylvia waved off Katherine’s interruption, continuing on. “What’s done is done. Right now, I just need to know you’re focused. I need to know that you’re not going to get distracted. That you’re willing to do whatever you have to do to get out of this hole you dug. Can I count on you to do that?”
Katherine ran her hands through her hair, raking her nails along her scalp, letting the sting ground her.
Sylvia had never spoken to her like this before, but Katherine had never fucked up this badly before.
She and Sylvia were a team, and Katherine wasn’t supposed to go behind her back. Wasn’t supposed to lie to her.
Sylvia wasn’t supposed to lie to Katherine either. She wasn’t supposed to set fires, try to kill people, skirt the rules this blatantly.
But Katherine could understand why. Silas’ family’s name.
His mother’s eyes. Their attitudes, their words, their power, once again taking over Sylvia’s life.
Katherine had spent enough time burying the trauma from her own past to understand how one wrong move could give it the power to suck you down again.
Katherine had fucked up beyond measure, and Sylvia was offering her a lifeline that she wasn’t sure she deserved. She had to take it. She had to do whatever she could to find a way to make this right.
She had let herself get thrown off course—by her unwillingness to accept the truth of Lily’s death; by her need for vengeance; by her attraction to Silas. But she didn’t have room for distraction. Silas was a direct threat to her home, to her family.
She needed to fight. For Sylvia. For Aestas.
For herself.
Silas felt like shit.
His jaw pounded from Niles’ punch, his body from climbing down the building, his head from the depression that had set in as soon as he’d walked out Katherine’s door.
His phone had died as soon as he’d called the ride to Katherine’s, and when he’d stopped at CVS for an external charger and plugged it in, he had a litany of texts from his parents demanding he come home immediately, then more telling him to call them immediately, then even more telling him to answer their fucking messages immediately or he was being written out of the will. He’d ignored all of them.
There were no missed calls from Katherine.
Not that he expected there to be—she’d made it very clear how she felt about him, and he didn’t begrudge her an ounce of that hate.
She had every reason to spit on his purported “struggles.” Every reason to see him as spoiled, rich, naive.
Every reason to dismiss him as nothing more than a good time.
She was too good for him.
The fact that he was dawdling here proved that.
He forced one foot in front of the other, propelling himself closer to the scene of his crime.
He didn’t even get to the door before a set of hands grabbed him and pushed his back against the brick wall.
“What did I say?” Niles snarled in his face.
“I wanted to apologize again.”
Niles huffed a laugh as he let go, pushing Silas away with a hard shove. “Gee, thanks. That fixes everything.”
Silas stuffed his hands into his pockets, his fingers attacking each other, picking at the skin around his nails—a bad habit that he’d broken when he was a teenager, after years of his parents snapping at him that it was unprofessional and unseemly.
He could picture the look that would cross his mother’s face if she saw the red strip of raw skin Silas was creating on his thumb.
But he still couldn’t bring himself to stop.
“I really am sorry. I—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Niles interrupted.
“I don’t care if you regret it. I don’t care if you’re sorry, or if you realized that everything your precious parents told you is absolute bullshit.
I am not just a stop along your rich-boy journey.
I am a person, and I have people who rely on me.
People who relied on that spellbook. And now they don’t have it anymore, so they’re either going to have to do magic the dangerous way or not at all.
And if someone gets hurt … that’s on you. ”
Niles’ chest heaved. Silas ripped another bit of skin off his thumb as he searched his brain for something to say, but all he could think of were those same damn two words, the ones that didn’t mean a thing. But he said them again anyway, because he had to: “I’m sorry.”
Niles took a moment. Looked him over. Saw all of the wretchedness inside of him.
“You are,” Niles said, a statement of fact. “But it doesn’t make a difference.”
He walked off, back into the headquarters of a coven Silas had destroyed.
One more rip of skin off his thumb, and then Silas reached into the inside pocket of his jacket.
Took out the small spellbook that rested there and held it in his hands.
It was so light, for something worth so much.
So small, for something that could change so many lives.
He bent down and slipped it under the door of El Sereno Coffee. It hardly weighed anything, but he felt infinitely lighter without it. He stood for a moment, letting the warm breeze in the air rush over him, and then he walked away.