And then, when it felt like her fist was going to fly out, and connect with his face, Catherine stopped, and took a mental step back. Her thoughts were fuzzy, but cogent. It never occurred to her that David didn't feel the same way as his parents about her being cut out of his life.
She had just been so hurt, so utterly humiliated, when her best friend of ten years no longer had anything to say to her. Of course she had assumed that the silence had been voluntary, the decision mutual. Was David trying to tell her now that he had been coerced.
Her eyes were sharp when she looked at him. “I was fifteen. No fifteen-year-old deserves that.”
“No.” David studied the table. “They don't. I'm sorry.”
She breathed out slowly, and some of the anger left along with the carbon dioxide. “Yeah, well, I'm sorry, too.” The words rolled out of her mouth like heavy rocks. They made her mouth hurt. They made her head hurt. “Here's my cell.”
She rattled off the numbers quickly, without checking to see if he'd gotten them.
All she wanted to do was escape this laboratory, which had suddenly become too small.
But she couldn't resist adding, superciliously, “I don't think you want my house number.”
His complexion went ashen at the prospect. “No, probably not.”
Catherine slung her messenger bag over her shoulder. “I have to get home. Are we done here?”
David looked down at his phone. Back at her. “Don't you want mine?”
“No.”
He didn't flinch like she'd wanted him to. His eyes seemed to be trying to nudge their way into her soul. “Did you ever…you know?”
Catherine's eyes flicked to Chase and Karen. Neither of them were paying any attention but that could change if David didn't keep his mouth shut. She shot the aforementioned a poisonous look that conveyed how much she resented enduring the misery inflicted upon her by his family for the last three years and said, “No. I haven't.”
“Oh,” said David.
She searched the room for something to glare at and received a look as searing as a gas flame.
“Karen is looking at you,” said Mr. Obvious.
Catherine tore her eyes away from the witch. “I don't think she likes me very much.”
“I don't think she likes anyone very much.”
“Yeah, well. She's a bitch,” Catherine said. Conveniently overlooking the fact that there were many who would say the same thing about her.
“I don't know why she chose to go to Barton Academy when she could have gone to one of those special schools.” He encapsulated his words in quotes with his fingers, just in case she didn't get it, and she had to make an actual effort not to roll her eyes.
Witches usually attended exclusive private academies that taught them to refine their powers. They could dedicate their entire lives toward the mastery of all four elements, though few succeeded. The thought made her remember the male witch, the Triad who had hunted her down like a deer in the woods.
“Maybe she likes it here,” Catherine said flatly.
“I doubt that's the reason.”
“Whatever. That's her business. I don't care.”
“You should,” said David. “She has friends in high places and her parents are on the Council.”
Something thrummed inside her chest. Connections to the Council.
“If you're trying to scare me, it won't work,” she said, tossing her head. “You're on the verge of breaking the Third Rule, by the way. Don't discuss Otherworldly affairs within the hearing distance of humans.”
“All the same. Don't get on her radar screen. The Council doesn't take rule-breaking lightly.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“It's not advice, it's a warning.” He lowered his voice. “They hate our kind more than ever now. A minority group of shape-shifters is threatening to come out. To expose themselves to humans and reveal our world because they're sick of hiding in the shadows like prey. The witch king is actively discriminating against those who get arrested and why, using his son like a bounty hunter. There's even rumors that they plan to overturn our truce and ally themselves with the vampires instead. I'm serious, Catherine. Don't give them a reason to go after you.”
Maybe she already had.
“I don't need your concern. I can take care of myself.”
Predator purred her approval. Prey whispered, Can you? Can you?
She grabbed her pencils from the desk and shoved them deep into the pockets of her book-bag. It bothered her that she didn't know.
“See you.”
“See you,” David echoed glumly.
Catherine could feel Karen's eyes burning into her back as she left.
Chapter Six
“Honey, is that you?” Mrs. Pierce called out, as the door swung shut behind Catherine.
“No, Mom,” she said. “It's an astral projection of myself one week from now.”
Mrs. Pierce sighed. “You know I don't like it when you use sarcasm with me, Catherine.”
Catherine kicked off her shoes in the hall. She knew her mother didn't like that, either, but after her unpleasant encounter with David she was feeling rebellious.
“Why aren't you at the college? I thought you had a class right now.”
“I had to cancel class because Lucas had a dental appointment.” Her mother appeared in the front hall. Her sharp, golden eyes went immediately to Catherine's shoes but she didn't rise to the bait. “We're not talking about me. We're talking about you. You, and your attitude problem.”
“What happened? Did one of my instructors call to complain about me?”
“I really wish you wouldn't be so flippant about this. You come home late. Get into fights at school. Argue with your teachers. And when I bring it up, you have to ask me if someone called to complain about you?”
“Well?” Catherine prompted. “Did they?”
Mrs. Pierce threw her hands up into the air. “I don't know what I'm going to do with you!”
That makes two of us.
Catherine started up the stairs in her socks.
I don't know what to do with myself most of the time.
“Catherine!” Don't walk away from me. Talk to me.”
She turned slowly around. “Okay. Let's talk. Do you remember the Trans?”
Her mother paused, clearly surprised. She recovered quickly, but there was a wariness in her eyes. “Yes. You played over at David's when you were just children. Of course I remember.” Her tone was guarded; she spoke with more care than usual. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason.” That strained, horrible smile was still on her face, she knew. “Just idle chit-chat.”
“Catherine—”
This time, Catherine didn't stop. She kept turning and walked away. And the moment she was in her room, the floodgates opened and guilt and fear and anguish surged through her, threatening to wash everything that was Catherine away. She tried to bail it out with the Pail of Spite, but it was a very small pail. Guilt quickly capsized the sinking ship that was her composure.
She flopped on her bed. Her mother and brother kept trying to nose into her business, and the only way to keep them out was to push them away. David made it sound like their world was about to end, and, in the process, exposed all the personal inadequacies that she had kept locked away these past three years. Oh, and she had a psychotic witch hunting her, a witch who couldn't decide whether he wanted his shape-shifter served charbroiled or freeze-dried.
Life fucking sucked.
She unzipped her bag, dumping its contents out on her bed. The black aura of the Grimoire seemed to have become more tangible in the last few hours. Where the black particles clung to her skin, she felt a strange, bitter cold that burned.
She shuddered and pulled away, setting the book down on her pillow instead of her lap, and began to turn through the pages. The chapters weren't in any particular order and there was no index. The book opened with a brief history of the four classical elements, plus de
tails on the more specialized forms of magic possessed by various Others. It was almost, she thought, like a medieval bestiary. There were drawings, but they were so skewed as to be almost useless.
The text itself was very dry. Was this a spell book or a textbook? She let the pages fall open naturally to where someone had inserted a heavy leather marker that looked even older than the tome. Finally, spells. But strange ones. Witches guarded their magic jealously; they even had their own language, an ancient one inscribed in runes, and not phonetic. These spells were written out in English with a series of steps and ingredients. And nearly every spell called for an ingredient called ichor.
Frowning, Catherine turned back a couple pages, wondering if there was a “key terms” page she had missed. What the hell was ichor? She opened her laptop and typed it in. The first result took her to some educational site. Mythology, it looked like. Which puzzled her until she realized that ichor was the name for the fluid than ran through the veins of the Greek gods.
Her eyes snagged on the phrases “poisonous to humans” and “used in ambrosia.”
Poisonous to humans. That sounded an awful lot like—her heart skipped a beat—witch blood.
Witch blood was fatally poisonous—not just to humans, but to Others, too. Drinking the right amount wouldn't kill you, though. At least, not all the way. It would only leave you half-dead. The magic ate up all the blood in your body, forcing the drinker to feed off the blood of mortals to keep themselves replenished and alive.
Ambrosia, on the other hand, was the food of the gods. Eating it was supposed to make a human immortal. Just like what happened when one drank the blood of a witch. And both had catastrophic effects. The vampires were a scourge on those of the Otherworld. They were murderers who had scorned the First Rule, in their quest for wealth, immortality, and untold power.
Catherine ran her fingers over the page. The words were pressed deeply into the paper.
Converting the ichor reverses the properties of the Particles so that they are attracted to magic in the same way that the north and south poles of a magnet are attracted to each other. This is done by running the ichor through an iron centrifuge.
This was boring and completely stupid. Catherine felt like she was reading a chemistry textbook.
“Catherine?” Her mother was in the hall, approaching her bedroom door.
She stuffed the book underneath her pillow. Its aura had begun to throb in a way she found distinctly sinister. “What?”
Her bedroom door opened. Her mother stood there, framed in the doorway. She blinked, looking surprised to see her daughter surrounded by a circle of open books. “What are you doing?”
“Studying.” Catherine tugged at the spine of the nearest notebook, pulling it closer. “Biology.”
“Is that the class you got the D in?”
“It's a C now, Mom.” Hopefully.
“Good. See if you can get it up to a B.”
Catherine nodded. That way she could always say that she had never specifically promised to raise her grade.
“Catherine,” she said again, “Earlier—why did you ask me about David?”
Shit. “He's my lab partner in biology. I just wondered if you remembered him.”
“Is he bullying you? Did he say anything to you?”
From the look on her mother's face, Catherine knew she only had to say a single word and her mother would swoop down on the Tran family with the full force of her wrath. It was tempting.
“No, nothing like that.”
“Are you sure?”
Catherine pressed her lips together and said nothing.
“Honey, I know what they did to you hurts—and trust me, I hate them for that as much as you do—but there's absolutely nothing wrong with you. If you're a little slow to develop…so what? That just means you have more time to enjoy your freedom. If the Trans don't grasp that, it's their problem. Not yours. Never yours.”
“I get it.” Her mother's love was stifling; Catherine felt as if she were being poisoned.
“All right. Wash up, then. I can smell the dirt on you. But we're going to continue this conversation later.”
“I can't wait.”
Her mother turned to leave, but then paused. “Oh, and Catherine?”
“What, Mom?”
“Have you been leaving your window open at night?”
Wordlessly, Catherine shook her head.
Mrs. Pierce looked around, frowning as she rubbed her arms through the sleeves of the house dress. “It feels like there's a draft in here. Maybe I should have your father come in and check your window,” she muttered as she left, swatting at what she thought was a fly.
It wasn't. It was a stray particle of black magic.
The book's aura quieted to a steady pulse.
•◌•◌•◌•◌•
If the shifters were in the process of negotiating a contract with the Slayers that would be grave news. All witches loathed—and, though they would never admit it, feared—the Slayers, but Finn had more reason to hate them than most. He'd been captured and tortured by them eleven years ago, when he was still more boy than man. He still bore the scars around his wrists.
They had been etched with an iron blade, and had never fully healed.
Witch blood was used by Slayers for practicing black magic. Magic particles flowed freely through witch blood, which made it a highly desirable source. The more powerful the witch, the higher the concentration of free-roaming magic particles, with Quads being the most sought-after.
Slayers used iron blades, with black handles, called athamés. Perversions of the Wiccan blades of the same name. Iron could not be spelled or enchanted—witches had no natural defenses against that dark metal—so they were the tool of choice for many when dealing with his kind. It was also ideal for collecting witch blood, since it did not absorb the magic the way other elements did. Magic was precious, and Slayers did not want an ounce of it to go to waste.
Finn was well familiar with the alchemical processes that went into transforming magic into black magic. The Slayers spun the blood through an iron centrifuge. The high speeds, combined with the reactions of the magic to the iron container, caused the magic particles to implode, and when their energy extended outwards, it reacted to the iron, again and again—until it changed.
Into black magic.
Black magic sought out its opposite like the two poles of a magnet. And once they collided, the effect was always catastrophic. Knowing this, the Slayers would spell bullets and arrows with black magic. When fired at an Other, they went straight for the heart—and they never missed. When they caught Finn, and drained him, he was given a demonstration. One he never forgot.
His scars burned, the way they always did in times of stress. He slammed the door to his hotel room behind him and leaned back against it. The gnarled pink lines of upraised flesh intersected perpendicular to his veins. The Bracelets of Misfortune, they were called. Slayers commonly cut there; it was the best way to drain as much blood as possible without killing the intended.
At least, not right away.
They would have killed him, eventually. He was too powerful, and the Slayers shook in their boots at the thought of the Others. It was why they hunted them down so ruthlessly. Fear could drive one to violence as quickly as anger could. If they had known who he really was, they probably would have slashed his throat over a basin rather than risk keeping him around.
Slayers also performed various experiments on witches. Like killing their familiars, to see what happened. Graymalkin butted her head against his shin. He scooped her up under one arm as he walked to the bed. When he lay down, she wriggled free from the crook of his arm and climbed up on his chest. Since familiars were a magical extension of the self, it was like having an entire portion of one's brain obliterated, all at once. Madness was the usual result. Or death.
Graymalkin shuddered, and the gold half moons of her eyes disappeared. He ran his fingers through her bluish-gray fur, until she s
topped shivering and her beating heart began to calm. Every one of her thoughts flowed into his head, as his did hers. It was a two-way connection, like the ebb and flow of the tide. Cyclical. Perfect. He wasn't sure what he would do if anything ever happened to her. Only that he would do everything in his power to keep from finding out.
•◌•◌•◌•◌•
Lucas was already at the kitchen table by the time Catherine made it downstairs.
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