Page 54 of Unbroken
Victoria had brought him here—he remembered that much. There had been a coach accident, the Chancellor…
Bonnie, Clara, and Ves were in danger.
He yanked at his bindings, but the ropes were tied too well. He had to get out of here, had to?—
Victoria stepped through the gap in what must be the hedge maze Mrs. Rice had told them about.
She’d thrown aside her cloak, and the lantern light revealed her in full. The single, horn-like branch curved toward the sky, and her green eye glowed with a firefly’s radiance. What little clothing she retained was tattered and torn, stabbed through with small branches on her inhuman side. What looked like roots crawled over her skin, both bark and human, and both legs ended in goatish hooves instead of feet. Vines sprouted from the wooden side of her back, lashing the air like tentacles.
In her hands, she held a heavy tome bound in leather the precise shade of dried blood. Veins bulged from its cover, seeming to pulse as if it were in some way alive.
His scars sang with its nearness and hers, and he could tell from her expression she felt the same pull. “Victoria,” he said, tugging ineffectually at his bonds. “Mrs. Rice told us what happened—I’m not your enemy!”
“I don’t consider you one.” She drew closer, then reached out and gently brushed a lock of hair from his face. “You’re my salvation.”
His heart drummed in his chest. “I don’t know what the Book of Blood has told you, or shown you, however it communicates, but it’s lying. It doesn’t have your best interests at heart, I promise.”
She snatched her hand back as if burned. “Yet you’re using the other Books. I can feel them on you! You just want to keep the power for yourself.”
“That’s not true. It—it’s complicated!” He struggled, just as uselessly as before. “Let me go—my sister, my baby niece, they’re in danger now that you’ve killed the Chancellor.”
“Of the university?”
“No—a cult—it doesn’t matter.” Victoria was immune to his powers; he had to get her to listen to him. “We’ll help you, my friends and I. We know sorcerers who can undo this, if you want. Or not, if you don’t!”
“How could I possibly want this?” she snarled, leaning in so he could get a close look at her face, at smooth human skin meeting a seam of bark. “Save your lies. With the help of your blood and the Book, I’m going to cleanse this taint from my flesh and end this living nightmare.”
“My…blood?” He swallowed heavily. This wasn’t good, not good at all.
She smiled, her mouth stretching wider and wider, opening into a terrible gape. From under her tongue extended a long proboscis, far more delicate than those of the leeches but just as deadly.
Then she bent her head, and with a sting like a sliver of ice, pierced his skin.
CHAPTER 25
Ves stared at the wreckage of the coach in despair.
They’d hurried along the most direct route to the museum, only to find the body of the footman lying to one side of the road. Like Fuller, he’d clearly died of some terrible poison, his skin blistered and swollen, foam on his lips. The driver was a few hundred feet farther along, followed by the Chancellor. For all her magic, all her scheming, in the end she’d been as vulnerable as any other human to Victoria’s toxic touch.
Then the wrecked coach, the horses long gone. A splotch of blood marked the interior, but there was no sign of Sebastian.
“Why?” he asked, not expecting any answers. “Why did Victoria attack the coach? Did she know the Chancellor was after the Books, including hers? Why did she take Sebastian? Where did she take him?”
“Victoria?” Mother asked. “Is that the creature’s name?”
Of course she knew. Damn her and Grandfather both. “Then you’ve seen her.”
“Only from a distance. As I said, I know more about what happens in this town than most.” She surveyed the wreckage of the coach with a clinical dispassion. “For instance, I know there’s another Dark Young, nestled within the heart of a poison maze.”
“And you didn’t think to say anything about it,” he said bitterly.
Thunder growled off in the distance, warning of an approaching storm. “I spent many a year locating a wood where your progenitor walked. I doubt any other living human is as finely attuned to traces of the All-Mother, the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, including the passage of said Young. Your presence is whispered in the very wind, the song of birds, the pattern of ivy growing on a wall. Perhaps I should have instructed you in the art, but it didn’t seem useful at the time.”
Because the world was supposed to have ended. But that was old news, over and done with. “Do you know where Victoria is, then?”
“Possibly.” Mother met his gaze, her dark eyes calculating. “But I will want something in exchange.”
His body felt strangely distant, as though this was all some terrible dream. Just like when Grandfather spoke to him with such hurt, as though nothing bad had ever happened in their household, as if his childhood had held no horrors. He was frozen, unable to escape, able only to endure.
