Chapter Thirty-Two
Katherine watched Silas’ face as the cauldron clattered on Sylvia’s desk.
He’d arrived quickly when Sylvia called him for the meeting—quickly enough that Katherine hadn’t had time to emotionally prepare to see him again. Just hours ago, she’d woken up with her hair fanning out across his chest, his arm thrown around her in a protective bubble.
Now, he sat across from her in Sylvia’s office, the warm safety he’d emanated the night before tucked away under layers of starched shirt and suit jacket.
His eyes held a question that Katherine knew there could only be one answer to: Yes, this did mean that she wanted him out of her city. Out of her life.
He tore his gaze from hers, then turned back to Sylvia.
“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate you bringing this to me.”
“Of course,” Sylvia replied graciously. “I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to atone for a mistake I deeply regret.”
Regrets were something Katherine was intimately familiar with.
She and Sylvia had spent the day making a deal with the devil.
They’d met with Byron in the same living room he and Katherine had destroyed the day before, standing stiffly across from him as he leaned back on his bloodstained couch.
He didn’t wear bruises well. Katherine had felt a brief wave of satisfaction seeing his handsome face slightly less so.
She had done that, searching for payback for a crime Byron hadn’t committed.
That took some of the joy out of it.
So did the deal they’d made.
Full immunity, permission to sell his drugs without consequence for the rest of Sylvia and Katherine’s time leading the coven, so long as he kept it quiet enough not to alert Noctis to his doings.
All for the low, low price of dropping his complaint against Katherine and giving them the cauldron so that Sylvia could complete her side of the deal with Silas and get him off their back.
Sylvia had tried to comfort Katherine, telling her that Byron wouldn’t be able to make altum without it, but Katherine knew he’d get another.
It’d take weeks, maybe months, to track down the old magic artifact, but with Byron’s resources, he’d find a way.
And then he’d be pumping danger back onto the streets and Katherine wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
Someone would get hurt from this, and that blood would be on Katherine’s hands. The weight of it was an anvil on her chest.
Silas’ eyes flicked to her again, and she pointedly looked away.
He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. “I’ll dispose of this. I promise you, no word will get back to Noctis.”
“Wonderful,” Sylvia said. “We appreciate that.” She reached into her pocket, pulling out her caster and laying it on the desk. “You’ll find that the wards are fixed as well.”
“Oh,” Silas said, his voice unsteady. “That’s wonderful.”
“Shall we check?” Sylvia asked.
Silas nodded and pulled out his caster. He and Sylvia slashed into their palms at the same time, then clasped hands over the desk, a drop of blood falling and hitting the cauldron below.
The air turned bitter as their magics combined, the room getting strangely warm.
After a moment, the rune on Silas’ palm lit up, and then the map of Sunspot exploded into the air, now glittering with bright, solid gold.
Katherine didn’t need to twiddle her thumbs as she waited for Silas to investigate this time around—it was clear that the wards were stronger than they’d ever been.
How the hell had Sylvia managed that?
Katherine stared at the map, at the glimmering magic that made it, at the power that flowed between Sylvia and Silas, and suddenly, it was obvious.
Katherine had been watching Sylvia do spells for years. Almost obsessively, staring at the grace and strength of her magic and dreaming of a world where her own jagged edges were that smooth. She knew Sylvia’s magic better than she knew her own.
And this was not Sylvia’s magic.
Silas stared at the map in front of him, pinching and prodding and pulling different areas up with the hand that wasn’t grasped in Sylvia’s, trying to find something wrong. Trying to find something that wasn’t shining perfection, some tiny hole that would give him a reason to …
To what? To stay?
He’d never really wanted this. He was here out of duty to his parents, something he felt increasingly like a fraud pursuing. He’d decided to try to find a way out, and here it was, bright gold in his grip. He should be ecstatic.
So why wasn’t he?
He knew why. Why wouldn’t even look at him, her hazel eyes pointedly glued to the ground. She might as well have slapped him across the face, or written in massive block letters across her forehead: I am not interested in you. You were a mistake.
I don’t respect you. I never could.
Stay out of my coven’s business. Out of my business.
“Does it look all right?”
That last phrase was said out loud, by Sylvia, and Silas coughed, wiping a bead of sweat off his brow. The heat must be getting to him—he was dizzy, he realized, his body swaying as his brain tried to chisel its way out of his skull.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you for handling that.”
“Great.”
Sylvia pulled her hand back, and Silas nearly fell over as the dizziness tripled. He swallowed vomit as he found a death grip on the desk, barely keeping himself upright.
No one moved to help him. Katherine stared right past him, her mind elsewhere. Already done with him.
Finally, the dizziness eased, and Silas stood.
He took the gauze Sylvia proffered and pressed it to his bleeding palm.
She didn’t say anything else, but her meaning was clear—the wards were fixed.
The cauldron was in his possession. She wouldn’t sell altum anymore, and no one would be in danger.
And per their deal, that meant that he could leave now.
“You get to go home.” His head shot up at Katherine’s voice. He couldn’t read her face, her eyes shuttered back to the complete, crushing emptiness they’d held when she’d first looked at him. “Aren’t you happy?”
Wasn’t he happy.
He pictured all of the things he missed about New York—the warmth of walking over a subway grate in the freezing cold; the hole-in-the-wall restaurants he and Anika spent weekends seeking out; the soft purr of the tortie cat at the bodega by his apartment.
He’d be back early enough in the semester that he could take over his class again.
His head should be spinning with lesson plans and project ideas, but instead, he was stuck on everything else that would come with his return.
The crushing expectations of his family. The stifling weight of pretending to be someone he wasn’t. The constant feeling that he wasn’t, and would never be, good enough.
He’d be back here. He knew his parents wouldn’t let Aestas go.
It’d be next year, or the year after that, or the one after that, but eventually, they’d nail Sylvia with something strong enough to get her out.
Any delay in her dismissal would be taken out on her with a more outsized punishment—and the burden would fall on Silas to deliver it.
And when it was all done, he’d be stuck in Los Angeles, with the woman he was desperate to impress hating his guts.
Silas nodded, because he didn’t trust himself to speak.
Katherine kept staring at him with that cold expression. “Have a safe flight.”
He nodded again, and then he walked out.