She wondered how many times Sylvia had had to pause to hide something before Katherine entered. She wondered how many secrets Sylvia had kept. Whether this was her first or just one of many.
Katherine had thought she was on the inside. She thought she knew everything—the dirty secret of Sylvia selling spells to ordinaries, her waning power, her deep insecurities about her place in the world. But those could’ve just been kernels—bits and pieces Sylvia fed her to keep her from figuring out the real truth.
Who knew how long Sylvia had been lying to her. How much.
She walked into the office. Sylvia had her hands crossed sedately on the desk, like this was any other meeting. Katherine wanted to slap her.Wanted to wrap her hands around her neck and demand to know what this relationship was really built on.
It certainly wasn’t a shared goal. It wasn’t respect. It wasn’t trust.
Sylvia smiled at her. “How can I help you?”
“Your magic.”
Sylvia raised an eyebrow, her facade staying perfectly intact. “What of it?”
“Quit the act, Sylvia.” Katherine barely recognized her own voice. She’d never spoken to Sylvia like this before. “I saw the spell you did with Silas. Your magic is unsettled. How?”
Sylvia leaned across the desk, her face the picture of calm tinged with mild confusion. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Please,” Katherine said, her voice breaking on the word in a way she fucking hated. She wanted to stick with fury, but she was also filled with a deep, deep sadness. Loss. “Please just tell me. Just give me some explanation that makes sense.”
Sylvia’s lips pursed. “The explanation is that you were mistaken.”
The evasion brought more of the rage back to the surface. “Okay. Then do magic now.”
Sylvia pushed out of her seat, walking around Katherine and pulling the door open. “I’m not entertaining this,” she snapped. “If you’re going to come in here and spout lies, I’m going to need to ask you to leave.”
Katherine walked up to Sylvia, forcing the other woman to look her in the eyes. “You were weak,” she said. “You were taking magic from ordinaries, but even that wasn’t enough, right?” She remembered what it had looked like when Silas first pulled up the wards—there were far more holes than there should have been, given how much Sylvia had been taking. On top of her own magic, that should have been more than enough to keep the majority of the wards up to par.
Unless things were worse than Sylvia had been letting on.
“You were tapped,” Katherine realized. “You had nothing left.”
“Stop,” Sylvia demanded. “You don’t want to go where this is going.”
But Katherine couldn’t stop now that the dominos were beginningto fall. “And then Silas showed up, and he was a threat. You needed him gone. And so you…”
Sylvia’s face was confirmation enough. Katherine didn’t know how she had missed all the signs—Sylvia’s insistence that she be the one to take Lily to Oak Grove. The way Sylvia’s ears had perked up when Lily said she didn’t want her magic anymore. The explanation for how Lily had wound up in Hollywood and Highland that always seemed so thin.
Her knees buckled.
Silas’ mother was screaming.
That was the first thing that came back to Silas as his vision cleared, as the clanging in his ears faded away. His body felt empty, and it was only then that he grasped how much heavier he’d been since he left Los Angeles. He hadn’t realized how much weight he’d been carrying.
Hadn’t realized how desperate that burden was to get out.
He felt like he was floating. Like he was no longer tethered to Earth.
Blood dripped down the bookshelf in front of him.
His mother was still screaming.
Silas looked down.
His father—his strong father, the man who never left the house in anything other than a perfectly crisp button-down, the man who woke up at five every morning to put in an hour on his rowing machine before work, the man who read the entireLord of the Ringsseries out loud to Silas before bed when he was ten—was slumped on the ground. His neck was tilted at a strange angle, and Silas wanted to say he’d get a crick if he kept that up, except he couldn’t make himself say anything, because if he opened his mouth, he’d scream too.
Dead. His father was dead.
