“So what do you mean about Josephine, then?”

  “My father would always have found a way to get rid of her. She was too strong. Granted, she wasn’t as strong as me, but dear old dad doesn’t like risk that much.”

  “If he doesn’t like risk that much, then why am I still alive?”

  He stared at her evenly. “There you go – that’s the Felicity I’m used to. You’re thinking ahead.”

  She didn’t point out that he didn’t know her that well. She just waited.

  He yanked his father’s chair out with his foot and sat unceremoniously. He curled his thumbs back and forth, jerking his head this way and that as if he was pretending that he was in a council meeting. Then, suddenly, he looked up at her. “My father knows about you because he’s intimately connected to the school. He’s done more for its blood spell than any magical enforcement head who came before him.”

  She recoiled. “You’re talking about the blood spell that was up on the roof.”

  “Of course I’m talking about that blood spell. It’s at the heart of all of this. The blood spell keeps Broadstone ticking. It keeps the Magical Enforcement Unit on top. And it keeps this whole house of cards from falling over.” With that, Jake stood and unceremoniously kicked the chair over. It clattered onto the floor, but then corrected itself. With the faintest charge of magic, it pulled itself up and pushed itself back into the table.

  Jake stared at it steadily. It was clear he wanted to kick it down again, but it was also clear that he was smart enough not to bother.

  He turned to her sharply. He leaned against the table. “We want the same thing, Felicity. We always have. And it’s good that we want the same thing. Because unless someone takes on Broadstone and the larger magical community, things will get a whole lot worse.”

  She couldn’t help but frown at that promise. “What are you talking about?”

  “What do you think? Things are quickening at Broadstone. It’s not just the murders – it’s every aspect of the school. Every day, Broadstone spies on its students more and more. Every day, they take a few more droplets of blood – then a few more, then a few more.”

  She tried to control her reaction, but she visibly recoiled from what he was saying. Her cheeks were as pale as Bethany’s had been in the morgue.

  “I touched on this before, but maybe the best thing to do is actually show you what I’m talking about.” He strode over to the door. He shoved his hands back into his pockets. Perhaps he thought he looked casual and unaffected. But as she glanced down at the taut fabric of his pockets, she recognized that he was clenching his fingers into bloodless fists.

  She stared at them obviously until he reacted.

  He shrugged. “Do you expect me not to be angry? When there’s so damn much to be angry about?”

  She turned away sharply before she could reveal how much that statement affected her. Hadn’t she said the same to Jane?

  “You know, controlling someone’s anger is the worst thing you can possibly do. When they’re being oppressed, when they have to rise up, if you keep whispering at them that their anger is toxic, you keep them down. You might as well throw them into a river and tell them not to swim. Because it will drown them just as quickly. Now, come on.”

  She fell into step behind him. “Where are we going?”

  “To see a place that’s close to my heart.” He thumped his chest. “Literally,” he added darkly.

  Frowning, she followed him out of the door.

  He turned, made a complicated set of movements with his fingers again, and watched as the door closed. Then he gestured her onward with a quick shrug of his stiff shoulders.

  She fell into step behind him. He paused. He looked to his side. “You don’t have to follow me around like I am your leader, Felicity.”

  “And what would you prefer?”

  He stopped. “That you stand by my side.”

  Felicity didn’t trust him – she told herself that as, reluctantly, she stood beside him, nonetheless.

  “That’s better.” He shoved his hands back into his pockets.

  He kept walking through the halls. It didn’t take long until they came across a nondescript black door. The only reason she frowned at it was the fact that it didn’t seem to fit the corridor. The exact shade of the black paint was too dark, somehow. It was as if it had been programmed specifically to trap shadows.

  Jake noticed her frowning. “You always had a good eye. Trust it. Your intuition is telling you that something’s behind this door, ha? Well it’s right – and it’s something powerful.”

  He stopped in front of it. He pumped his hands into fists. Then he palmed his face and once more let his jagged nails scratch his pasty white skin. He didn’t seem to care. It looked as if he would happily scratch his own head off if he could just get rid of his tension. “Come on.” He made another complicated set of movements with his fingers, and the door unlocked.

  She jolted. She felt magic unfurl from around it. She couldn’t quite describe the way it slithered past along the corridor. It was like she’d been standing next to a snake all along only to realize what it had been when it disappeared.

  “If you don’t like the feeling of this door unlocking – you really won’t like what’s inside.”

  The door opened, and she followed him in. One by one, the embedded lights along the ceiling turned on. And one by one, in patches of five meters square, they illuminated the room.

  It was some kind of refrigeration complex. It looked like a morgue. But a massive one.

  There were long lines of refrigeration units. One was open. She couldn’t help but stare inside. There was a body.

  She jerked back and planted a hand against her mouth. She tried not to gag. “What…?”

  Jake just shrugged at the body. “I told you that this was a real nice place. I wasn’t lying.”

  “What the hell is this room?” she stammered.

  “This is where they do their experiments, Felicity,” he said matter-of-factly. He kept using that tone – the one that was no doubt calculated to make it seem that he was unaffected by all of this. But it kept fracturing just a little more every time he used it. It was as if it was a mask he kept feeling obliged to put on – but one that was starting to wear down with every use.

  He gripped his mouth again. This time he didn’t let go of his lips. They became white under the pressure. “Do you want to guess how many bodies are in here?”

  “No.” She secured a hand on her gut and doubled forward.

  “You know, I don’t know, either. It constantly grows. They get rid of them, but new ones come in.”

  “Where… where do these people come from?”

  He shrugged. “Not just this city. They’re from all around the country. If this many people regularly disappeared in Casa city, people would ask questions, right? At least we hope they would,” he said sarcastically.

  “Are these… people all magical?”

  “Yeah, technically. Some of them didn’t know that they were magical, though. Those are the best targets. My father has a whole unit that tracks them down.”

  “Why are people who don’t know they’re magical so valuable?”

  “That’s a strangely innocent question coming from you. Think about it. They don’t know what to expect. They don’t know who to trust, and they don’t know who’s gonna turn around, stab them in the back, and bleed them dry.”

  Felicity was done pressing her hand over her mouth. “How long has this been happening for?”

  Jake shrugged. “How long is a piece of string? As long as magic has had an organized community, aspects of that community have organized to find more power.”

  “I mean this.” She gestured to the morgue. “How long have people been dying like this?”

  “It only became a lot more organized when my father started controlling the Magical Enforcement Unit. What’s that been now? 20 years? Ha,” his voice was hollow, “feels like it’s been a lot longer than that.”

  “Why hasn’t—”

  He turned to her sharply. “I know what you want to say, but don’t bother saying it.”

  “What was I going to say?” Her voice was now just as hollow as his.

  “You were about to stupidly ask why no one has tried to stop this. That’s an assumption.”

  “So people have tried to do something?”

  “Of course they have. But they all go by the wayside. Because none of them have the power to go up against the Magical Enforcement Unit and the Council.” He looked at her. She was certain that if every single refrigerator in here opened and all of the corpses came to life, he still wouldn’t look away.

  She knew what he was thinking.

  “I’ve waited a long time for someone like you to come along.” He pressed a hand into his brow, walked away, leaned against one of the refrigeration units, and breathed hard. He looked back at her. Every time he did that, his gaze became sharper, the quality as piercing as a knife. It roved over her, looking for a way in. No, not a way in – the look didn’t want to kill her. It wanted a way out, and he intended to use her to find one. “The show is not over, by the way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He opened his arms wide. “It’s far from over yet.” he shrugged further down the line of refrigeration devices.

  She couldn’t describe what her stomach did. She was done listing just how sick this scene made her.

  With an expression she couldn’t place, Jake started to walk several meters ahead of her. His pace suggested that he wanted to get this done.

  Felicity wanted to get this over and done with, too, didn’t she? She needed to get out of here, figure out what she was going to do with Lucifer, and just do it. Because the longer she spent here….

  She didn’t want to feel sympathy for someone like Jake. He didn’t deserve it. And it was such a damn dangerous emotion to entertain. Sympathy would be the start of actually believing that his story and – critically, his actions – had credibility.

  It took a long time to walk through the refrigeration units. This room was massive. As she strode past each one, she felt sicker and steadily sicker. She was way done counting them. You know that famous saying from Stalin? One death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic? She’d never experienced that firsthand, but now she started to feel it. She could no longer differentiate every single crime. Instead, the oppressive weight of this reality just numbed her to the core.

  “Here we go,” Jake said as he reached the back of the room. There was a wall. It was solid, and to all but the strongest practitioner, it would appear that the room ended there. You would think that Felicity wouldn’t be able to discern much at the moment, considering her mind was broken with disgust and grief, but she still realized something was behind there.

  She took a shaking swallow. “What’s behind that?” She inclined her head to the wall.

  “Very few people would be able to discern that this is a fake wall. I’m not surprised that you’re one of them.” Leaning forward, he rapped his knuckles on it twice. There was very little auditory feedback. It was like he was knocking his knuckles on a vacuum. “Now you’ve got forbidden magic, Felicity, very little in this world will be able to hide from you.”

  “So what’s behind the wall?”

  “You will really want to hold your stomach for this next bit.” He thumbed his nose. He closed his eyes. He appeared to concentrate. She could feel magic picking up through him.

  “Here we go,” he said after a lengthy pause. He shoved his hands to the side. He made yet another complicated set of movements with his fingers. He stretched them out and in until the knuckles creaked. They looked like branches of a stunted tree that were trying to grow into the light.

  The door proceeded to peel back. That was no misnomer. It peeled as if it was just layers of skin. The sound was so spine-tingling, she knew she would never forget it.

  “What kind of spell is this?” she asked with a harsh tone.

  “A living defense enchantment.”

  “Living defense? I’ve never heard of something like that.”

  He let out another dry chuckle. Felicity swore that with every one he gave, his throat had to be constricting, because they sounded more and more strangled. It was as if someone was closing their fingers around his neck. She couldn’t see anyone, though, so perhaps he was doing it to himself. Maybe being here and seeing what his father had done in the name of the Kings was crushing Jake like half-melted ice underfoot.

  No, Felicity, be frigging careful. Don’t start feeling sympathy for him, she snapped at herself. She could repeat that all she wanted, but it wouldn’t change the fact that as she stared at his somber, conflicted expression, something was changing inside her.

  She’d been tortured by Broadstone. It had irrevocably changed her future. But she wasn’t the only person that had happened to. As… as hard as it was to admit, what about the elites? What about kids who’d been brought up under the oppressive weight of a crushing magical society that lived by the strong consuming the weak? They would never have had a chance. In many ways… Jesus, Felicity couldn’t believe she was thinking this, but in many ways, wasn’t her life better than his? At least she’d had the kind of background that had enabled her to see how wrong this world was.

  “You won’t like this next bit,” Jake repeated.

  She was done thinking that he was faking his emotions. No one could pretend to be just as disgusted as he was now. His cheeks had become a pasty white, and his hands shook as they clenched into loose fists.

  Felicity didn’t say a word. She watched.

  Once the living defense enchantment had pulled all the way back, and every layer of the wall had peeled off like sunburnt skin, Jake walked into a dark room. It took several seconds until the lights turned on.

  Reluctantly, Felicity followed behind him. As the lights flickered on and slowly chased back the darkness, she couldn’t move a muscle.

  “Oh my God.” Felicity couldn’t contain herself anymore. She dry-retched into her hand.

  “Yeah, oh my God,” Jake said in a dull tone. “Quite a sight, isn’t it? It’s what happens when your society becomes obsessed with magical blood on an industrial scale. I’ve got to hand it to my father,” again he shoved his hands into his pockets, but this time it was clear that he was only doing that to hide the fact he’d clenched his hands into bloodless fists, “nobody figured out that you could do this on such a large scale until he came along. Don’t get me wrong – the magical community has been attempting to mess with blood and forbidden magic in the hopes they can find more of your kind forever, but never on this scale.” Jake walked into the room with his arms held high.

  Felicity almost couldn’t follow him.

  She stood there, cold and on edge. The room was full of blood. It was circulating in the middle. It was the equivalent of some kind of centrifuge spell. Rather than what happens in a human lab, it wasn’t stuck in vials that were being spun around in some machine. It was circulating through the very air.

  Earlier, she’d brought up that coldhearted quote from Stalin – but now that went up in flames. Now, once more, she could see – and critically, feel – the totality of this barbarism.

  She continued to dry retch into her hand.

  Jake leaned over and patted her on the back briefly. “I’m not gonna tell you that I thought you’d be taking this better. Frankly, I would have been disappointed in you if you’d taken it any other way.”

  “How…?” She couldn’t spit out what she wanted to say.

  “How could this happen? How could people do this? On such a large-scale? You know the answer, Felicity. It’s been haunting you for the past three years, hasn’t it? They can do this on such a large-scale because that’s what the magical community has become. It’s now some kind of self-perpetuating virus. Right at its heart, is Broadstone.” His voice had been even. Now it was the equivalent of clenched, bloodless fists.

  “But Broadstone is just one school,” she found herself saying, even though she’d never thought she’d defend Broadstone in all her life.

  “Just one school?” He turned and looked at her pointedly. His eyes flashed with disappointment. “It’s one of the most important schools in the world. It’s also responsible for producing the new wave of magical decision-makers that led to this.” He gestured to the circulating blood. “Men like my father,” he added in a controlled tone that nevertheless gave her the opinion that with a single snapped second, it could shatter and take him with it.

  “Is this why you want to destroy the school?” Felicity muttered.

  He hadn’t been close to her before, but now he came right up beside her. He looked at her as if this was it, and he would never look away again. “Yes, Felicity,” his voice hit rock bottom, “this is why I want to destroy the school. And it’s why you’re gonna help me. Right?” The way he said right shook right through her. “This is why you’re gonna do everything – including using your forbidden magic – to stop this. You will use your skills – skills these bastards have been murdering people to get at for hundreds of damn years,” he swiped a hand toward the blood, “to ensure that it never, ever happens to anyone else again. Right?”

  She had to defend herself. At the very least, she had to look like she wasn’t a pushover. The last thing she could afford to do was stare into his eyes with fear in her own. She couldn’t let him know that she was now eating out of his hand.

  Yet she couldn’t look away.

  She just continued to stare at him as he turned, shoved his hands into his pockets, and looked right at her. “You will stop this, right, Felicity? You’re going to do something.” His voice bottomed out on the word do.

  She became distracted. As he spoke loudly, his breath eddied through the blood, changing the way it spun through the room. Shortly, however, it went back to normal.

  Felicity swallowed.

  “I know what you want. I know why you’re at Broadstone. I know you’re never gonna get another chance like this.” He shoved a hand out at her.

  She stared at it.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79