“I will spare you the gruesome details,” she said, “because they are irrelevant. Suffice it to say my daughters died at the hands of witches. Witches who sold them out to the highest bidder, leaving me to linger, to try to make some semblance of a life when all I wanted to do was evaporate clean out of existence.”
I glanced at Emilio and shook my head. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her; I knew what it was to crawl through the endless hellfire of grief searching for a loved one who would never return, no matter what bargains you whispered into the darkest hours of the night. The pain in Norah’s voice rang true.
I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Could anyone really be so blind? So willfully ignorant?
“You’ve done the same thing, Norah,” I said. “Can’t you see that?”
Norah shook her head, willful till the end. “I know you think I’m a coward. I can see it in your eyes—all of you. Delilah, too. Even after she’d been under my enchantment, I’d still catch her looking at me that way. Judging. Pitying.” At this, her face twisted into a scowl, and she turned a fiery, wild gaze on me. “Butyou’rethe one who turned your back on who you really are, Gray. It was so easy for you, wasn’t it? Walking away. Pretending that the witch inside you—that sick, flawed part of you—had never even existed, when all along it was festering, rotting you from the inside—”
“Alright, we’re done here.” Emilio reached for my hand again and nodded toward the door, but I held firm. I appreciated the backup, but Iwasn’tdone here. Not by a long shot.
“What you call sick and flawed?” I leaned across the table, getting right in her face. “That hasnothingto do with witchcraft, Norah. It’s called being human, and it exists in all of us. Even you, and yes, even me.Especiallyme. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life—hell, I’m probably making a few right this minute. But I haveneversold out my own kind. Never turned a sister over to the hunters. Never bought into their bullshit about witches being evil and wrong. That’s on the witches who murdered your daughters. That’s onyou.”
But Norah only laughed, bitter and manic, the sound of it making my skin crawl. “Do you know what it’s like to hate yourself so completely, to look in the mirror every single day and force yourself to find another reason not to carve out your own eyes? Not to slice open your veins and spill your own blood down the drain?”
I exchanged another glance with Emilio, then shook my head, fighting off a shiver.
Even at my lowest points, even when I’d cocooned myself up in blame and guilt over the deaths of the people I loved and all the pain and suffering they’d endured, I still couldn’t imagine such self-loathing. Such emptiness. Such a desperate need for the final escape.
“You are blessed, then,” she said with a defeated sigh. “Truly blessed. Perhaps you should take that blessing, turn your back on all of this once again, and walk out that door. Because trust me, Gray. This is not a road you want to go down.”
I turned toward the glass and closed my eyes, trying to gather my thoughts.
All the time I’d been thinking about Norah, going over every detail of our conversation at her house the day she’d banned me from the coven, poring over Sophie’s book of shadows for more clues, looking for something that would tie her to Sophie’s death or to the disappearance and murder of the other witches… In all that time, it’d never once occurred to me that she might be suffering so deeply. That something—someone—had broken her, just like someone had broken Jonathan. Just like someone had tried to break me.
Again, I was reminded of this lesson, this simple truism that we as people—as witches, as supernaturals, as gods and goddesses, as cosmic forces and elemental energies and unfathomable beings as old as time—just couldn’t seem to grasp:
Hatred was made, not born.
And unless someone did something to stop the cycle, it continued. I could rally a hundred witches, a thousand, a million. Unite all the covens on the planet, kick that prophecy up into high gear, wipe out the hunters and dark fae, and establish a new world order where everyone wore yoga pants to work and spent our free time playing with puppies and having amazing sex and coloring mandalas in adult coloring books. But even with all of that, hatred would always be the biggest threat, the poison that could seep in undetected and rot us from the inside out.
If we didn’t find a way to end it, it would surely end us.
Thirty-Nine
GRAY
“You can still honor your daughters, Norah,” I said softly, compassion sneaking into my voice against my better judgment. I turned to face her once again. “It’s not too late.”
Another bitter laugh. “They’re dead. It doesn’t get any later than that.”
“So honor their memory and do the right thing here. Help us.” I leaned across the table again, close as I dared. The violet in her fake eyes was starting to fade, the natural slate gray peeking through underneath. “Who is Orendiel of Darkwinter working for?”
“I was not involved with the dark fae specifically,” she said, breaking our gaze. Her whole body had gone rigid with fear. “My arrangement was with the hunters.”
“Jonathan Reese?” I asked.
Norah shook her head. “Phillip Reese. Jonathan was just a pawn.”
“Our understanding,” Emilio broke in, “was that Phillip didn’t become involved until shortly before Jonathan’s disappearance.”
“Your understanding—or, rather, your lack thereof—is the reason this was able to escalate so quickly.”
“Explain,” he demanded. And this time, whether she truly was ready to cooperate, or just wanted to make us suffer at the telling, she obeyed.
“This has been an operation years in the making, detective. Phillip has never lost track of his son’s whereabouts, nor his aspirations. And while Jonathan has always been unstable, Phillip recognized the genius in many of his ideas, if not the execution.”
She went on to tell us that Phillip allowed Jonathan to develop his weapons and run his experiments under the misguided belief that he’d rid himself of his father’s influence. But Phillip had a hand in things all along, sending rogue supers to infiltrate Jonathan’s operations under guise of joining the cause, tracking Jonathan’s every move and discovery. He’d been aware of the experiments with vampire blood, of Fiona Brentwood’s involvement. Even the hunters in Raven’s Cape that we’d assumed were loyal to Jonathan had been moles planted by Phillip.
