Page 109 of Blackwicket
“By making it more difficult for you to murder people, Fiona?”
“That’s enough. We’re all murderers in this room, for fucksake,” I said tersely to them both, stunning my sister. “You should have shown yourself, Fiona. We could have figured something out together.”
“Ellie, you were as trapped as I was the minute you stepped foot in Nightglass,” my sister replied. “I wanted to warn you at the morgue, and I tried to in the only way I could with Farvem standing outside the door.”
The Drudge that had attacked me at the funeral home. I hadn’t seen it as a message, but as a lingering symptom of my sister’s illness.
“How did you fool Mr. Farvem?” I asked. “He’s dealt with so many dead. How couldn’t he see you were alive?”
She pressed her lips together, knowing this revelation would wound me.
“It was his idea for me to fake my death in the first place.”
“Farvem’s?” I echoed, disbelieving.
“Before you arrived, I was staying in the morgue, out of sight. I didn’t know you were there until Horatio came barreling in, panicking, telling me you were demanding to see my body. I thought my warning in Devin for you to stay away would have been enough.”
“You didn’t think I would come after finding out you were dead?”
“You weren’t supposed to ever know, Ellie.”
“William made sure that I did,” I snapped. I was angry with myself for being gullible and so readily manipulated. Fiona was about to speak, and I didn’t want to risk hearing an apology I wasn’t ready for, so I intercepted. “What possessed you to make a deal with Farvem? The man was insane.”
She nodded, resigned to telling me even worse news, and I braced myself.
“I was working with the Veil from the moment the Authority procured Jack for Grigori. I couldn’t live with what we were doing anymore, and William was letting his father’s ideologies consume him. I was so deep in everything. Farvem offered protection for Thea and the boys if I’d help take care of the Brom.”
“But he hated Curse Eaters.”
“Because we’re unnatural, Eleanora,” Fiona said, holding my gaze. “We shouldn’t exist here. This isn’t our home. He knew that.”
“That’s not true,” I replied firmly.
“It is. Even mother knew it. That’s why she raised us the way she did.”
There was a bitterness in my sister I was learning to share. My mother had thought cloistering us from the world was safety, feeding us pretty lies about enchanted gardens that could take the burden from our shoulders, when it only held them in time, the same way I was holding the curses I’d collected in my wooden lock box. Then she’d offered Grigori as a single evil for us to focus on, so the overwhelming horde of factions who wanted to eat us alive wouldn’t worry us. “By the time he came to me, I was eager to believe Farvem’s lies, bought into building a world without curses, becoming normal. All we needed to do was eradicate the right people, and everyone would be safe. He was so sure. He seemed so good.”
Fiona pushed the hair from her face, eyes darting around the floor frantically as though she were tracking down the memory of what had driven her to trust the old man.
I wanted to ask about Roark, where he’d come from, where he’d gone, but it seemed a lot to request all at once.
“So you started feeding Brom to the Fiend?” I asked.
“I’d already been doing that,” she replied, unruffled by my knowing. “I was furious, lost, and the Drudge had already been forming for years.”
She touched her chest delicately, indicating the creature scratching at the walls of her fragile magic, and I finally understood her desperation.
I squeezed her hand to show her I was still there, that I wouldn’t abandon her even in the face of these admissions. I felt certain I understood, but she pulled away from me, ashamed.
“I started the work I did because I wanted to, the Drudgeneededme to.”
“Is that what drove you to attack Jack? The Drudge?”
I was freshly aware of the abomination lurking in my own magic, one that had dug far deeper than any I’d held before. A parasite, just out of reach.
“Of course not, I wasn’t trying to hurt him!” She was insistent. “I was in the tower and saw William getting out of the car. I panicked. I wanted to hide Jack in Dark Hall, keep him safe for a little longer. I knew the house wasn’t going to reject William. It was too weak by then. I’d been feeding off it for too long.”
This explained why the house had acted so strangely, why it had eventually grown silent. Fiona had been siphoning curses from it, consuming them for the power she needed when her magic was struggling to bounce back from its scourge. It likely required more and more to remain stable, like a drug. Victor’s pitiless comment made sense now. He’d come to that conclusionalready, knowing what it took to handle being inhabited by Drudge.
