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“The day the power went out.” My mouth formed the words before my brain fully registered the moment. The siren had that effect on me. I didn’t much like it, but I wasn’t going to fight it. This was too important.
“He was punching the wall,” I went on. “He was screaming. Panicking, I thought. But it wasn’t right, something wasn’t right. He just kept punching and punching and punching, even when Toland brought light downstairs.”
“Devra—her feelings?”
“Open,” the old empath said, her voice creaky. “Nothing blocked.”
“Good. Piper, take us through every step from the time you decided to follow Owen to the time you came back upstairs.”
I did, telling them every detail from the way things smelled to the way his footsteps sounded, all the way down the stairs.
“Then I went around the corner, and I couldn’t see him. I was angry that he disappeared. Then he hit me over the head.”
“What happened next?”
“I woke up—”
“No,” Cassandra sang. “Before you woke up. What happened?”
I frowned. I truly wanted nothing more in the world than to please her and give her everything she wanted—that was the siren song’s magic—but the unrealistic demand forced me to surface slightly from the depths of my hypnotic state.
“How would I know? I wasn’t awake.”
“But your ears heard,” she whispered. “What did they hear?”
Her song intensified once more, pushing me under. And she was right. Even in my unconscious state, some part of my mind had picked up little things.
Noises.
Sensations.
I could feel the jostle of moving, living stone under my rib cage. I could hear a sound like boulders grinding together. I knew it was Owen’s voice, but I couldn’t make out the words.
“His feet are heavy,” I said, speaking slowly. “They echo off the walls. His voice—his voice is—I can’t hear what he’s saying. It’s just noise.”
“Focus,” Cassandra instructed.
“She’s getting frustrated,” Devra interjected. “She won’t be able to remember if she’s frustrated.”
“Relax. Breathe, Piper, and relax.” Cassandra’s voice was like the softest rain and the gentlest sun, the coolest lemonade and the warmest brandy. I let her take me under, back to the memory. I felt entirely calm, but it wasn’t any more clear the second time.
“It’s just dark.” I shook my head. Or at least, I thought I did, but it was hard to tell if my body actually moved. “His voice is just a grumble. I can’t hear what he’s saying. It’s gibberish.”
“Move on,” Toland said. “We can come back to this later.”
“What happened next?”
I told her everything. Every little detail. How when I woke up, he’d been going off on a tangent about how girls like me were stupid for falling for jocks and bad boys, how I should have accepted his offer to help feed my succubus powers, and if I had he would have taken me with him when he got what was coming to him. How Gavriel had promised him that demon chicks were different, but I clearly wasn’t.
“He was sympathetic to Gavriel when he was still human?” Toland’s voice resonated with shock.
“That’s what it sounded like. He wanted power. Gavriel gave it to him.”
“What was his mission?”
The question whirled through my brain, slipping through memories, trying to attach to something.
“To screw you over,” I said helplessly. “Screw the school over. Give Gavriel an edge.”
