“Throughout history—even before people knew about real magick—the number one tactic they’ve used to isolate us is dehumanization. It happened during the Salem witch trials, and in Europe, and long before that, too. And the fastest way to dehumanize us is to make sure everyone fears us.”
“Exactly. So why not attack human-owned businesses and keep fanning those flames?”
“Because it’s way more effective this way. The message our enemies want to send is that magick is so powerful, so corruptible, that even witches and mages themselves can’t be trusted to control it. That we can just erupt at any time, causing chaos and death without warning. They want everyone to believe that we’re so unbalanced, we can just turn on our own kind in a heartbeat. Our own families.”
Kirin nods. “And if we can do this to our own kind, imagine what we might do to them.”
“Brilliant strategy, really.” I rub my thumb over the skin on my inside wrist, the slightly raised edges of the pentacle tattoo. “And they know exactly where to find us. How to target us.”
The registration is part of a national database. It’s supposed to be confidential, accessible only at the highest levels of law enforcement, but everyone knows how that goes.
“Something tells me it’s not just a bunch of human fanatics going after witches and mages, then,” Kirin says. “Working with a few crooked mages to stoke the flames. There are people working on this from the inside. Possibly at the highest levels of the magickal community.”
“You said you wanted to give me perspective?” I ask. “Consider it gotten.”
Shoving aside the folder, I grab one of Mom’s notebooks from the stack, opening it to a random page. Just like yesterday, new passages appear at my touch.
“It’s still happening,” I confirm. “Same as yesterday.”
“Yeah?” Kirin’s eyes light up behind his glasses.
I nod, reading the latest verse to appear.
Hexed and cursed, bruised and broken
What comes first, the dark words spoken
The veil is torn, the spells diminished
Mage firstborn, the final finish.
“Wow,” he says, his eyes filling with the same excitement I saw yesterday. He taps on the table, glancing around the lab. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. You transcribe the new phrases you’re seeing, and I’ll compare them with the original texts with all the Tarot card placements, see what kind of sense we can make of it.”
“Sounds good,” I say, and just like that, we snap into work mode, both of us diving headfirst into our respective duties.
It’s painstaking work. My mother’s passages don’t always appear clearly, and sometimes the words rearrange themselves, scrambling into nonsense before I can even finish transcribing them. I end up having to do a lot of re-work, and even after two hours, I only manage to transcribe a few pages.
Kirin’s got the original texts on a laptop, doing his best to match up my notes and make sense of it all, but I’m not sure he’s making much progress either.
“You holding up okay?” he asks when he catches me watching him.
I close Mom’s notebook and set down my pen. “I think I’ve hit my wall.”
“No problem. You did great, Stevie. I know it’s slow going, but we’ll get there. I know it.” He smiles that go-team smile again, and it makes my heart hurt.
We lock eyes, neither of us speaking for several long, uncomfortable seconds.
“Kirin,” I begin, finally breaking the silence, “what do you know about my mother? About her time at the Academy?”
Kirin removes his glasses and rubs his eyes, letting out a long, slow breath.
This time, when I feel the pulse of his energy, I know he’s going to tell me the truth.
“According to Headmistress Trello,” he says, “your parents were among the most powerful magickal students the Academy has ever seen. First as undergrads, and then as graduate students. Your father was studying potions—he was an earth-blessed. Your mother had three affinities—all but fire. Her gift, as you know, was for prophecy.
“But as the years went on, they became more and more isolated, your mother spending almost all of her time in the library, poring over old tomes, drawing cards, writing everything in these notebooks. I don’t know when things went bad, or how everything unraveled after that. All I know is that she and Anna had a major falling out that essentially divided the staff and graduate body into two camps—those that supported your parents and wanted to know more about the things your mother’s prophecies foretold, and those that… Well, to be blunt… Those that thought she’d gone mad.
“She was pregnant with you by that time, and your father finally convinced her to leave—that the stress of staying would do irreparable damage to herandto you.”
