Chapter 165: The Wraith 1
SÉVERINE
His blue eyes stayed on mine for a moment like he was trying to remember but certainly, when he could not remember a thing, given that he was not even allowed to question his memories or what exactly happened, he believed me and stood up.
I looked around and soon found my phone which must have slipped from my hand when he teleported us out of Valcourt.
I walked toward it.
The phone screen fractured into three sharp scars, but when I pressed the button, it flickered awake and could still be used. I chose to believe this was the universe offering me one delicate mercy after everything it had taken.
My familiar reappeared beside me on the rough ground. When I stated at him, it still looked like his form was thrown together in a rush, the edges smudged like he had been ripped apart and sewn up again in frantic haste.
That creature had power. What exactly was it? A demon? It couldn’t. The way my familiar had reacted was insane so that couldn’t be a demon. It had to be something more.
Still, it was none of my business. Best not get involved in that. There were other pressing matters.
"My grandfather," I said. "I need you to take me there."
"Séverine—" he tried to argue but I was so over it.
"Now."
He took me.
Teleportation hurled us into my grandfather’s bedroom. The bed sat perfectly made, and the curtains flung open. The room thrummed with the hush that lingered when someone has only just departed, their presence still clinging to the air.
"He is somewhere in the house," I said. "Go get him. Bring him here directly. Do not let anyone see you."
My familiar flashed me a look crowded with a dozen silent anxieties in a heartbeat, then vanished.
I stood alone in my grandfather’s room, the phone digging into my palm, and waited.
He arrived in pieces, teleportation knitting him together at my familiar’s side. When he saw me, with blood crusted on my temple and my clothes warped by the chaos of the last hours, his face showed no confusion, only the grim recognition of someone who already knew the shape of disaster and of course how well I wore it.
"What the hell are you doing here?" His voice was low and controlled, the kind of control that only came from someone struggling to keep a long-simmering anger in check.
"If you are looking at me like that," I said, "you must already know."
"Of course I know." He moved to the window and checked the grounds below before turning back. "It is only a matter of time before Valcourt’s sentinels come here. They will want me for aiding and abetting, and they will not be wrong." His jaw tightened. "I told you to stop. I told you specifically, more than once, with as much clarity as I was capable of, and you did not stop."
"I came to warn you," I said. "To get you out before—"
"I have begged you." The words came out stripped of the control he had been maintaining. "Many times, I have been forced to sit across from you, and I begged you to let this go. To let that man go, to leave that estate and rebuild something somewhere that was not constructed on your fucking obsession." He looked at me with an expression I recognized because I had seen it before, in smaller versions, in moments when I had gone too far, and he had struggled to find the language for how tired it made him. "Do you know... This is probably why your parents could not stay?"
The room went quiet.
"Do not," I said.
"Your mother was a witch. You know that. You have always known that." He moved away from the window, crossing toward his chair but not sitting down. "Just like her mother. My wife. And she loved your father. I believe that was real. But the darkness that covered her eventually covered everything around her, and your father could not breathe inside it anymore. And she, for whatever reason, when she left, made sure to leave you with him rather than take you with her."
"Stop."
"And then your father could not manage it either. He could not manage you. So when your insanity started to show, he brought you to me because he believed I would understand, because I had loved your grandmother through the same thing and had chosen to stay despite it, and he thought that meant I knew how." He looked at me directly. "I have asked myself every day since whether I made the right choice in taking you in."
The magic began before I told it to.
I felt it coursing through me like water seeping through the first crack in a dam, not a flood yet but the mounting pressure of one. Objects on the nearest shelf shivered. The lamp on the bedside table quivered.
"Séverine." My familiar’s voice came through the brink that my mind was as a warning.
My grandfather was not looking at the floating objects. He was looking at me.
"And there it is," he said. "Right on schedule."
"I am not going to hurt you. It just happens."
"You might not mean to," he said. "But you do not always have control of what you mean to do, and we have both had to live with that reality for years." He took a step backward, measured and deliberate. "What happens next? You lose control, and then something breaks, and then you come back to yourself and find me bleeding somewhere, hoping my healing factor or your magic is fast enough to catch up to whatever you have done."
Everything floating dropped at once. It was like that was all I needed to hear for common sense to break through.
"I would never," I said.
"You would," he said. It was not an accusation. It was tired certainty, the kind that came from the same evidence being presented too many times for one to even fathom a different conclusion.
I stood there and let the words hit with the unique devastation of truths you could not refute, the inability to argue becoming its own wound, separate from the pain of the truth itself.
"I came here to save you," I said. My voice came out smaller than I intended. "You were the one person who stayed. I came because I could not leave without making sure you were safe first."
"You are in this situation because of choices you made," he said. "And I am in this situation because of choices I made in choosing to stand beside you through them." He moved to the door and rested his hand on the frame. "But no more. I am not going to run, Séverine. I will not leave everything I spent my life building and start again somewhere else, and then the next time, and the next, always moving, always burning what came before. I would rather face the consequences here."
"You are abandoning me," I said.
"Perhaps," he said, "there is a reason that a witch cannot simply live among the rest of us. My wife, your grandmother, left with your mother once what they carried could no longer be hidden from view. She probably left you here because unlike her, you are a hybrid, and she believed that meant you had a chance at something different." He looked at me steadily. "But you have never shifted. You have no wolf in your head and soul that I have ever been able to see. You are exactly what they were." A pause. "You should find the witch mountain. It is where they go, the ones like you. Your mother is there. Your grandmother too. Those are the people who abandoned you when they should have been there for you. That is my final gift to you Sevy. It is the only place I know of where what you are might be understood rather than feared."
The lights started to stutter and flicker.
"This is childish." He said.
I sensed it before I saw it, the air in the room turning cold in a way that had nothing to do with me.
"I am not doing that," I said.
My grandfather looked at the lights.
"Then what is that?"
The door did not open. What came through it did not need doors.
It slipped through the wall, pure white, electric and wrong in every proportion, moving so fast there was no time to prepare.
But the hostility that followed with it was something that I did not miss.
I hurled the shield up instantly, pouring everything I had into it, my hands already raised.
But I was too slow.
The creature’s claws went through my grandfather’s chest before the shield ever reached him.
I felt the impact through my own magic as a sharp, sickening wrongness, and then the claws withdrew, holding something that should never have been taken from a living body.
The shield closed around him half a second too late.
He collapsed against it, the barrier holding him upright when his legs could not, and the blood poured quickly.
The creature turned to face me.
I knew the face.
I knew it from a gentle woman who had brought tea without being asked and had never once given me a reason to see her as a threat.
The same woman I had used as a pawn in my little games.
"How does it feel," Prim’s voice said, distorted and layered with something that lived underneath it, "to be the reason your loved ones die?"
I could not make a sound.
Her face changed.
The gentleness vanished, replaced by something that refused to be recognized as anything once human, and she lunged at me.