Page 40 of Warlocks Don't Win
“And you’re supposed to be bright. What I don’t understand is why you tattooed a sage over your heart. It wasn’t about me.”
His mouth tightened before he gave me a slight smile. “Of course it was. I needed a reason to unite witches for their protection while I uncovered the dark covens. My heartbreak about your imprisonment was the obvious driving force that covered up my deeper motives.”
“How is that about me? It was your lie about me. Those don’t count.” It didn’t hurt to hear him admit he’d even used my jail time. I was too numb for anything to hurt me. Good. Hopefully it lasted until I got out of this awful hole and left Winston behind. Permanently. It did feed the slowly growing anger, though.
“It was always about you.”
I glowered at him. “Excuse me?”
His eyes grew dark and smoky as he pulled over on the side of the road in front of a field with a fast food place a few car lengths away. Traffic wasn’t busy this time of night, but we weren’t isolated on the middle of a desolate highway, where he could strangle me. Let’s be real. I was more likely to strangle him.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
“I fell in love with you.”
My stupid heart had the nerve to have nerves, like it hadn’t been stupid enough for one lifetime. “It’s the stripes,” I drawled. “It seems tasteless, but it’s secretly the key to unlocking true love. Why would you say something that stupid?”
He turned to look at me, eyes flickering with the purple lightning. “The letters. Do you remember?”
My whole body became encased in ice and then exploded into shards of agony. “You wrote them?” He’d say no. He just found them in his grandmother’s dresser and reading my words had wracked his soul with the endless torment of undying love.
“I wrote them,” he said after a long pause.
I looked out my window at the stray dog dragging something iffy across the field. I’d never had an ally. No one had remembered me while I was in jail. Jessica was saving her own skin, the rest of my coven was vying for position, and my other friends and peers didn’t want anything to connect them to the convicted murderer. “You wrote to see if I’d become part of this dark coven, if I’d killed my mother for them? You’re tenacious, Igive you that. Stupid, but most tenacity is. You must have liked your parents to work so hard to find their killer.”
“I was five when they died. I shouldn’t remember them, but I do. I remember every moment from my mother teaching me to sound out my letters to my father explaining neutral magic while playing catch. It was the same when I was with you. I remember every second from the moment I saw you in the Florshay’s ballroom, too good to be true, to the moment I walked into that parlor and saw you covered in your mother’s blood with your glowing green eyes, and the green and silver smoke as you siphoned her magic. Too evil to be true. I was looking for evil, and I found it, but it was a distraction.” His voice was rough at the end, a hint of anger in those words that was doubtless part of his immaculate acting.
“So I’m the red herring? Good to know.” It was infuriating. Anger wasn’t a good look for me, not when it involved using my mother’s magic and melting down cities. But what else was I supposed to feel when some group or person had used me to hide their own nefarious purposes? I’d murdered my mother, sure, but I hadn’t wanted to. It felt like a set up. And Winston wrote the letters. Those precious words that had felt like connection to someone else, something good, in an impossibly cold and cruel world was just another lie. I was going to be sick, or I was going to kill him.
I threw open the door and started walking. Those bushes on the edge of the field would lead the woods. I needed to not start murdering people, particularly movie stars. I had my own life, and I’d die before I threw it away.
“You’re right to be angry,” he said, walking beside me, like he had no sense of self-preservation.
I stopped walking and turned to face him, staring at those handsome lines and planes. “No. Anger doesn’t get to be right, it only gets to be angry. You’re messing with my life like youdon’t respect my ability to tear you apart. Don’t forget that I did murder my mother, someone likely more difficult to kill than you are. I was taught to kill as much as I was bred for it. I lack the disposition, not the skillset. You’re trying to set me off. Stop it. If I killed you, what would that prove?”
“I’m not trying to get you to kill me. I’m trying to be honest. It’s not easy for me, particularly when…” He frowned at his hands. “I started out lying to you, manipulating you, but at some point, I fell for my own lies, my own manipulation. It started out a game, but ended up the biggest mistake I’d ever made. I tattooed a sage on my heart so I would remember my greatest mistake, and hopefully not make it again.”
“I was your biggest mistake? Mutual, I’m sure,” I spat while my hands curled into fists, nails digging into my palms while my heart beat out its warning, a thrum of death drums louder and louder.
“Trusting the gossip about you instead of using my own experiences with you. Letting society’s judgments condemn you instead of your own actions. You were a flower blooming in a poisonous garden. None of that corrupted you, but all I could see were your connections to the darkness, instead of you.”
I snickered. “Sure. Because if someone isn’t evil, they’re definitely a pure bloom in a poisonous garden. I’m not good or evil. I’m mostly self-serving, but I have generous impulses from time to time. That makes me normal. You’re so fixated on absolutes, you’re going to miss the obvious. These dark members of society that you’re hunting have respectable sides. That’s why you can’t find them, because you’re looking for pure evil. Trust me. No one’s pure evil, not unless they’re disciplined and well-trained enough to weed out any other instincts. There are very few of those. Look, here’s the boundary to Sage House’s woods. Go back to your car before someone takes it for a joyride.Then again, there should be more joy in the world. I’m not inviting you in.”
His smile was slight. “You don’t have to invite me. You bound me to your soul. Sage House is part of me as much as you. But if you don’t want me to come with you, you should be safe enough here without me.”
I smiled back at him, trying to get the exact same vibe as his. “You’re the only one who ever really hurt me. Do you want to know why I killed her? Because she was going to drain you of your life and magic. Said that you were setting me up to destroy me. So I killed her to save you. I loved my mother. She kept all her kindness and affection for me. And I killed her to save the lying, traitorous, two-faced warlock standing here, telling me that I’ll be safe without him. You’re right. I’ll always be safer without you. Also, you need to watch your wonderful coalition of honorable, because odds are that as it grows in power, it’ll become more corrupt than that dark society you’re failing to find.”
I turned and slipped through the shrubs, heart beating too fast, the absolutely crushed look on his face a perfect expression for how I’d felt when he’d testified against me. Somehow, I didn’t think he was acting. And hurting him made me feel almost as bad as he did. I really did have the worst disposition.
Chapter
Fourteen
Iwent directly to the large family mausoleum where my father’s bones were kept. Everything should be there for reanimating him, and I needed a perspective that wasn’t skewed by human emotions. If anyone knew about dark societies that spread like a canker across the land, it would be him. Also, if anyone were pure evil, it would be him.
Tolly found me on my trek through the woods and fell in beside me, her company much easier to handle than Winston’s. My husband. Maybe Rasputin would have some good advice on how to break those bindings along with Dame Winston’s curse.
To enter the mausoleum I had to first clear off fifteen years of vines. I forgot which side the entrance was on, so I spent an hour hacking at it in the growing dark, getting my hands all sticky with angry vines. Probably poisonous. Winston wasn’t wrong about my growing up in a poisonous garden.
