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Jade pulled her apron off and nodded to the other server, who gave her a salute that seemed to say she would take care of things. “By the time I got here everything was in place, but some of my friends came in a couple of years before me and they said it was very spare. Like the library was tight, you know. And there were conference rooms and stuff, but not a lot of fun. Which is weird because the primals aren’t what you would think. They like fun. The first time I went to a social hour I walked in and there was this tall bat dude playing foosball with a little troll, and the dwarves were betting on the outcome, and I felt like I was finally in a place I could breathe. Because it was weird but there was happiness here. I hadn’t seen happiness in a long time. You want me to talk about it, don’t you? Being held by Myrddin’s witches. I’m not sure I understand how it fits into Alvis’s murder.”
“It doesn’t.” She was a smart kid. “But I didn’t come here to solve a murder initially. I came here to investigate a prophecy, and it might have something to do with that.”
Jade settled in. “A prophecy? Like something the dark prophet said?”
“This particular prophecy comes from the outer planes.” I needed to treat Jade like the badass she was. She’d survived a lot, and she didn’t need hand holding, though if she did mine would be ready. I don’t think needing comfort is an admission of weakness. It’s strength. “It’s about defeating Myrddin.”
She straightened up, her gaze becoming serious. “What do you need to know?”
If she was acting, she was spectacular, but then she could have been trained. I didn’t like being so suspicious. Over the last couple of years, I’d grown to be less cynical. I wasn’t sure I could afford that now. Though I’d also learned to trust my instincts, and every one of them told me this girl was the real deal, that she was being genuine. “When you were in the…what did they call it?”
“An academy for young witches. That’s what they called it.” There wasn’t much emotion in her tone. I could understand that. It made me hate having to put her through this again. “It was truly a conversion camp.”
“Did he put all young witches in this camp?”
Her head shook. “There were several educational facilities. We all knew the academy I was assigned to was for what they called difficult ones. We were all either orphans or we’d done something our parents viewed as abnormal. That was only a few of us though. Most of us were older children of witches Myrddin had slaughtered. The younger ones were spelled to forget their moms and dads. It doesn’t work when you had too many memories. I was ten when he killed my mom. I spent five years there.”
“Was this place actually in the Council building…Coven House?”
“It was the Council building. I never would call it the Coven House, and no. The academy was in the country a few miles outside of a town called Rockwall. There was a place on a big lake that should have felt like a wide-open space, but somehow they made it small. The wards were there to keep us in and keep us quiet and docile.”
“How many girls were there?”
“At any given time probably twenty to thirty of us.”
“So you knew them all.”
Jade nodded. “Of course. When you’re in hell, you get to know your fellow prisoners. Of course sometimes they sent in people to spy on us, so you had to be careful. I had a friend who was almost out. She’d passed all the tests of loyalty and then she opened up to the wrong person and instead of graduation she faced the fire.”
A chill went up my spine. “They actually burn witches?”
“Oh, yes.” She sounded haunted now. “And they made us watch, made us listen as they pleaded for their lives as they promised to be good.”
“You know it was never about being good.”
“It was about being what they wanted us to be.”
“What Myrddin wanted you to be.”
Her head shook. “No, Kelsey. If there’s one thing I can teach you it’s that he isn’t alone in this. You want there to be one bad guy. You want to be able to kick his ass and be done with it. But that’s not what happened. He had witches who helped him, who killed vampires and weres and shifters and Fae on his command. They didn’t have to. They weren’t under his influence, or rather they allowed themselves to be. They chose this path when they could have fought. Like my mother fought. They chose to toss aside everything the goddess teaches us. We’re to do no harm. That is all they do. If you don’t think like them, they torture you until you do. Or at least you’ll never speak against them again. No one man can do that. It takes a small but powerful group to do the dirty work, and it takes an army of the apathetic to turn their eyes and allow it to happen.”
I reached out because her story was getting to me every bit as much as Casey’s had. I had come home to a generation of young people forever marked by trauma, by loss. The mother in me ached for what they’d gone through and was also so damn proud that they were still pushing, still fighting. “I’m going to do everything I can to make this plane safe for you again.”
“That’s what they said,” she replied quietly, but she didn’t pull her hand away. “I know that we have hope now. I do believe you, but you should understand somewhere in their fucked-up brains, they convinced themselves they were right, that anyone who didn’t believe the way they did was out to hurt the witches. A small group became convinced that they were oppressed and the only way to fix the situation was to oppress everyone else. They believe Myrddin can give them the plane, and once they kill or force the humans into bowing to them, they’ll be safe.”
He’d used their fears against them. “I assure you that’s not how it’s going to go. Once he opens that door, the demons will reign, and they will not care about what the witches want.”
She sniffled and tears gleamed in her eyes. “Why won’t the Heaven plane save us?”
I had asked that question a million times. “That’s not how it works. From what I can tell, Heaven is for later. It’s something we can’t understand in the form we’re in now. Or maybe it’s the bargain. Free will means responsibility. We have to fight, have to sacrifice, and we have to save ourselves. And we will, but I need help. I need to find Mia Day.”
Jade’s eyes widened and her mouth opened slightly, a sure sign of her surprise. She sat back. “Are you asking if I’ve seen her? If she was in the academy with me? No. I haven’t seen Mia since the morning of the attack. We were in classes together. Not at the school. She was a grade ahead of me at school, but we were in the same magical training classes. She hung out with the royals, but she was super nice to everyone. None of the royals were in this particular class. It was strictly witches. It was an earth magic class. We were sitting there and she was helping me with a spell to grow flowers and herbs when her dad ran in.”
This was what I needed. This was important. I had someone who had seen her on the day she disappeared. “Do you remember what he said?”
“Mr. Day talked to the teacher, and we all knew something was going wrong because she started to cry and then she told us we all had to go back to our homes. We had to find our parents, but mine was at work. So the teacher and Mr. Day moved us down to a more secure room. I remember how scared Mia was.”
They’d been protected little girls who hadn’t had to think about how scary the world could be, and then suddenly it was. “Did her father say anything about where they were going?”
