“I signed in all the right places, didn’t I?”
“Did you see how much the house sold for?”
“Are you going to keep asking me pointless questions or are you going to tell me why you called?” he asked crossly.
“It sold for a million dollars.”
Random stopped pacing. It was a nice house. It was a nice property. It was not worth a million dollars. Wonderful. “Daniel,” he said patiently, “this is a scam.” He wasn’t sure how, but this was what he got for not reading the paperwork for the first time in his life. “Why didn’t you mention this before you sent me the paperwork?”
He went to the hotel room’s small desk, opened his laptop and turned it on. Now he had to fix this when all he wanted to do was be miserable.
“Because I knew you wouldn’t sign it.” Daniel was quiet for a moment, then, “She said the price tag was to get your attention.”
Random’s heart stopped. “She?”
“The buyer. It’s all on the up-and-up, I can promise you that. And, well, frankly, I couldn’t turn down a commission on that amount of money. She asked me to pass a message on to you.”
Random’s hand shook as he found the email with the scanned copies of the mortgage documents and opened the file. He knew what he’d find but it still punched him in the gut to see her name written there. Valkyrie Evelyn Winters.
“What was the message?” he asked hoarsely.
“This is a direct quote, mind you. It’s not me saying it.”
“Just spit it out.”
Daniel cleared his throat. “’I loved it the moment I saw it. I should have stopped you. I’m an idiot. Please come home and yell at me.’”
“Thank you, Daniel.” Random hung up and dropped his phone onto the desk. He almost picked it back up, unblocked her number and called her. But no. He wasn’t going to go through this on a phone call.
He wasn’t sure he was going to go through this at all.
23
Valkyrie’s eyes were dry and grainy, her back hurt from hunching over a computer, and if she never read another legal document, physical or virtual, ever again it would be too soon. Elijah had hidden his tracks well where his activities as Danvers were concerned, and in the last two weeks she’d barely even managed to tie New Beginnings, the adoption agency used to place Lacey and Taylor with the Anders, back to him.
“I don’t know how you stand it in here.” Jace stood in the doorway, his lips pressed into a hard line as he took in their father’s old office.
“Necessity.” Valkyrie stood, stretched, and what seemed like the entirety of her back popped in relief. At first, coming here had been necessity—the need to access Elijah’s files, to try and find any remaining individuals he might have hurt. Lucille’s oracular premonitions had stopped with Elijah’s death—her grandfather, Charles, said it wasn’t unusual for a young Oracle to need a focus for the things they saw, and Lucille’s had apparently been Elijah himself—so finding any remaining victims of Elijah’s experiments fell squarely on Valkyrie’s shoulders.
Given that Elijah had a track record of dumping his experiments in the care of associates and not checking in on them for years, Valkyrie had no doubt there were people who still needed to be found and liberated. She intended to do both. She also had an absurdly large fortune to split among them.
Reparations had to be made, and they ought to be made with Elijah’s money. She didn’t feel guilty about the funds she’d used to buy Random’s house, or the small sum she’d kept to keep her afloat until she figured out what to do with her life—she was a victim of Elijah’s handiwork too. She deserved reparations the same as everyone else.
The only thing she wasn’t sure what to do with was the estate. She’d put off any decision on it thus far because she didn’t want to risk letting go of anything that might finally give her the full scope of Elijah’s operation. Didn’t want to risk anyone’s life just because she didn’t like being in this house.
So she’d come back to it—to this office, where so many terrible things had happened to her—day after day and tried find an answer. It shouldn’t have been so hard. She’d lived here the entirety of her life. But something about Elijah’s death had finally allowed fear and memory to swamp her as they hadn’t when she’d known he was still alive.
The first time she’d come back she’d stood here, shaking so badly she’d bitten clean through her lip, repeating the same thing over and over again in her head.
Dead. He’s dead. You killed him and he’s never coming back. He won’t hurt you or Jace or Random or anyone ever again.
Eventually, she’d accepted that. But while Elijah might be gone, his ghost wasn’t.
On the bad days, she wasn’t sure he would ever leave her entirely, wasn’t sure his voice would ever stop whispering in the back of her mind, telling her that she was weak, that she wasn’t good enough, that she was nothing.
In her heart, she had believed it. Random hadn’t. For that alone, she owed him a debt she could never repay. Because he’d given her the strength to see it too—that she was worth something. That she deserved to be happy.
So she planned to be. Maybe she couldn’t be as happy as she wanted, if Random never came back, but she could be happy. She could be—was—free. And she would never take it for granted.
She wanted to ask Jace if he’d heard from Random, but stopped herself before she did. If Random was talking to Jace again, it was none of her business. She wouldn’t make it awkward for her brother by constantly reminding him she was in love with his best friend and she desperately wanted to hear anything about him.
She told herself it was fine. That Random was fine. That it was fine if he never wanted to see her again. She’d hurt him, and he didn’t owe her his forgiveness. He didn’t owe her a second chance.
“Did you need something or did you just stop in to see if I was alive?” The words came out more sharply than she’d intended, and she cursed herself for snapping at Jace when she was angry about things that weren’t his fault.
Jace gave her an odd look. “I came by to get you. Big day and all?”
Big day? What could he—oh. She dug for her phone, saw the date, and wondered how the hell three weeks had passed since she’d bought Random’s house.
“Well, then,” she said with forced brightness. “Ready to go destroy an adnexus?”
Her brother’s face paled. “No.”
She rolled her eyes and shoved him out the door. “Siren will be fine. How many contingency scenarios did you run the math behind?”
“All of them.” His voice was deadly serious. “I ran all of them. Five times.”
His home office was probably knee-deep in papers covered in tidy rows of numbers from him running and re-running math that would make her head spin.
“And in how many of them did Siren die?”
“None, once I added in anchors from all the Aspect branches.”
“See? She’ll be fine.”
Jace did not look convinced.
24
The Warded Room of Council headquarters currently contained more people than Valkyrie had ever seen in it at one time. Every single branch of Aspect was represented, and gathering those people alone had caused a one week delay in this gathering, since many of the Aspecters had had to be summoned from out of state. They’d had no shortage of volunteers, as it seemed everyone wanted to be part of making history.
The adnexus rested on a pedestal in the center of the room, tucked away inside the black box Random had made for it. Her chest twinged—he should be here, should at least be here to see this, if nothing else. For one crazy moment she thought she felt him, felt the soft brush of his Aspect, but then it was gone. A brutally thorough sweep of the room proved he wasn’t here. She just missed him so her brain was conjuring the memory of him.
“If everyone could take their places, please.” Siren stood in the center of the room, a foot from the adnexus, Ella Tremayne equidistant from her on the other side.
At Siren’s direction the mass of people in the room shifted, each moving to a different node on the complex pattern drawn on the floor.
It had taken Siren and Jace the better part of two days to draw it and, truthfully, Valkyrie still didn’t understand what the hell it was. Between Siren talking animatedly about the adnexus as if the structure it formed between the councilors was a living organism in and of itself, and Jace descending into explanations of theory so dense Valkyrie couldn’t have pierced them with a longsword, she didn’t really understand how they were going to break the adnexus without killing the entire former Council.
After poking at the adnexus for days, Siren had said that blood magic was so powerful because it contained within it all Aspects, no matter the affinity of the person who’d given their blood to the working. As she explained it, though genetics played a large part in determining what affinity a person wielded, each person had the potential to bear any branch of Aspect, and that potential was carried in the blood.
“I think that’s why Random can do pretty much anything,” Siren had confided to her, “I think he’s so mercurial, so into everything, that he couldn’t choose an affinity. Or, rather, he chose all of them. Sort of like how some people have secondary affinities, except he has all the affinities.
“But he couldn’t have Life or Death because to have either of those requires absolute dedication, absolute resolve. It’s why so few people are born to either of them—there isn’t much wiggle room.”
That potential in blood magic was why Jace had determined they needed a representative from each branch of Aspect present at the time of the adnexus’ destruction, one at each node on the pattern that Siren claimed was a visual representation of how she saw the ties the adnexus formed between the councilors when she looked at it with her magic.
With the exception of Aunt Ella, whom Siren apparently needed close, the former councilors were all positioned at the corners of the room, outside of the pattern itself. According to Siren and Jace, blood magic exacted its vengeance for a broken work by exploiting all those affinity possibilities a person didn’t actually possess. In essence, it struck back against a person with every branch of Aspect they couldn’t defend against. So, in theory, with Aspecters of all the affinities gathered in the pattern, the rebound of the adnexus’ breaking would first filter through the nodes, the person at each node handling the branch of the rebound that correlated to their Aspect. By the time the backlash hit the councilors, what was left would be too weak to actually kill them.
Aunt Ella and Siren took the greatest risks. Aunt Ella, as the only living person with Death Aspect, had to be inside the pattern, at a node, for the plan to work. But as she was tied to the adnexus, she wouldn’t receive the buffering benefits of the pattern.
Valkyrie had tersely pointed this out since, if Random ever did come home, she didn’t want to try and explain to him how she’d let his aunt die while he was gone. Ella had simply given her a dragon’s smile and said, “I’ve cheated death before, dear.”
It was the “dear” that had floored her. That was what Ella called Siren and Random and Jace, what she called people she...accepted. Why the hell would Ella call her that when Valkyrie was the reason Random was gone and probably never coming back?
In the center of the room, Siren opened the box. The silk-oil call of the adnexus radiated out but it was muted, jumbled, as if it had never before seen so many Aspects, so many people, at once and it didn’t know what to do. Who to entice first.
Siren never gave it the chance to make a decision. Her Aspect streaked forward, precise as a scalpel, and neatly severed the ties that bound the former councilors to the centuries-old blood magic that had kept them in power.
The adnexus wailed, a howling shriek that split the air and tore through the room like a windstorm. The retributive power that lashed out, streaking for the four corners of the room, halted as it hit the bounds of the small circle where Siren and Ella stood on the first two nodes.
Trapped, the sundered power turned its fury on the only two available targets...and crashed against the combined might of Siren’s and Ella’s Aspects like storm-tossed waves breaking against seaside cliffs. The thread of power that was Ella’s own broken tie to the adnexus hammered against the woman. The Queen of Death smiled.
Siren’s Aspect wound around Ella and vice versa, Life Aspect buffering the rebound of the broken tie, Death Aspect tempering the fury leveled at Siren for being the one who had done the breaking. As the rebound broke around them, the pattern on the floor dragged at it, pulling power past Siren and Ella, filtering it out to the other nodes, and the Aspecters waiting at them.
Valkyrie stood in the ring closest to Siren and Ella, as Battle was one of the primary branches of Aspect affinity. But it wasn’t the assault of power against her shield that made her blink, made her heart stutter, made her world stop.
It was Random, suddenly in that same secondary ring, directly across from her on the other side of the circle, standing on a node that hadn’t been there before. As if he’d decided he was needed, so here he was, and the pattern had simply shifted to accommodate him.
She should have known he’d be here, known he wouldn’t leave Ella’s and Siren’s survival to chance. And Jace—Jace must have known he’d come. Because Jace wouldn’t have left it to chance, either, and for every branch of Aspect to be represented, they would have to have Random.
Because Random could do things that didn’t have a known branch of Aspect affinity—things like teleport—which indicated the potential affinity of Aspect extended to things that Aspect Society, for all its centuries of study, couldn’t even guess at. But Random could be all of those possibilities, all of those unknowns. And because he needed to be them right now, he would.
Holding her shield against the onslaught of the adnexus’ power until it spent the potential for Battle and moved around her, deeper into the pattern, was nothing next to looking across the ten feet that separated her from Random and feeling as if it might as well have been an ocean for the distance that radiated off him.
He looked good. He’d regained most of the weight he’d lost when he’d hastily regenerated his Aspect to come to her aid. His hair had grown out, long enough to fall across his forehead now, and the itch in her fingers to brush it back, to run her fingers through it, was painful.
She barely noticed when the power of the adnexus ran its course, lessening with each ring of the pattern, each node, until only a shadow was left to reach the former councilors in the four corners of the room. She didn’t join in the triumphant cheers and frenzy of hugging and back-slapping that occurred with the destruction of Aspect Society’s dirty little secret.
The entirety of her world had narrowed down to one point, one person, who finally lifted his gaze to hers. Random’s eyes weren’t quiet or triumphant. They were a chaotic jumble of want and hurt and confusion, and every instinct in her screamed at her to fix it.
She stepped toward him. He stepped back in tandem, as if an invisible rod stretched between them, forcing them to remain this precise distance apart.
“Random?” she asked tentatively, feeling like he was a wild animal, a mythical unicorn that would spook at the wrong tone, the wrong look.
He wavered, as if he might step toward her. Then he caught himself and shook his head. “I need some time.” He turned and walked away, through the throng of celebrating Aspecters and out of the room. Out of her life. Again.
Then Siren was at her side, wrapping her in a hug. “He’ll come back.”
“Yeah.” But she wasn’t sure she believed it. Because she’d seen the devastation in his eyes and he hadn’t looked like a man who was coming home. Ever.
“He will,” Siren insisted. “He loves you too much to stay away.”
But the depth of that love was precisely why Valkyrie was certain he was never coming back. Because if he’d cared about her less, what she’d done to him would have hurt less.
“In the meantime,” Siren continue
d, releasing Valkyrie from the hug, “I’ve been thinking.”
Valkyrie groaned. “It’s never good when you think.”
“Hey, I’m brilliant. Jace says so.”
“Jace is biased.”
“Whatever. So I’ve been thinking. You need a job.”
“Not this again.” So far, Siren had come up with a number of entirely unsuitable possible careers for Valkyrie’s future.
“Since you’re apparently incapable of doing anything non-battle-y, I think you should just keep doing what you’re doing, but official and everything.”
Valkyrie tried and failed to make sense of that. “Huh?”
“I want to hire you to find all the people like us, like the girls you found with the Anders. The people Elijah hurt. You’re already looking for them, so you might as well do it in an official capacity and get paid for it.”
“I—”
“And before you say no, I’ll remind you that I’m obnoxiously persistent. I’ll wear you down eventually. Besides, you will need backup for this. It’s too much for one person and, as acting head of Aspect Society, I have the resources to hire you and a team.
“Besides which, it will be good for people to see you for a change. To see that you aren’t what Elijah made you out to be. Do something good and let everyone see it.”
“No one is going to want to work with me.”
“Oh, please,” a new voice said, “you aren’t as scary as all that.” Meredith walked up and slung an arm around Valkyrie’s shoulders.
“Oh, look,” Siren said innocently, “your new partner is here.”
“You got roped into this mess?” Valkyrie asked.
“Turns out you’re not the only one Siren thinks would benefit from ‘gainful employment’.” Meredith snorted. “Whatever the fuck that means. I also made the mistake of explaining to Jace that I was Tracking an oracular hunch when I found Lacey and Taylor, and I exploded the geek side of his brain.”
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