131
MADDY
Ascream burst from my throat and died in an instant when Nico, Sinthy, and the young man from the forest appeared before us. He looked almost as terrified as I felt. There was a faintpopas they flashed into existence in front of my eyes. Everyone else seemed equally surprised. I’d assumed it would be at least another hour before they returned—if they returned at all.
The young man, Maxwell, slowly lowered himself to his knees. He had a wretched look of sadness on his face. Sinthy stood over him and waved her hands across his hands. I blinked in surprise as I watched her. Out of thin air, a coil of smoke manifested, curling and spinning before descending down to Maxwell’s hands. The smoke encircled his wrists, and then a flash of light made me wince and look away. When I glanced back, the circles of smoke had turned into thick and heavy bracelets. They had the shine and color of gold, and polished silver twisted together.
“What are those for?” I asked.
Sinthy pushed her hair back out of her face. “They’ll prevent him from using any of his stolen magic. It works as a block. Hewon’t be able to get them off.” She looked at Maxwell with a sideways glance. “I’ll be surprised if he even tries.”
Maxwell held his manacled hands up to Sinthy pleadingly. “I never wanted this damned magic. Can’t you take it? Rip it out of me. All I ever wanted was to keep my siblings safe. It was all to get them away from my mother. I went along with her experiments, hoping I could steal them away and hide all of us where she could never get to us. Please,” he begged. “Please get it out of me. Take it.”
Sinthy’s face softened, and she knelt down close to him. “Maxwell, I can’t take it from you.”
The look on his face was one of complete despair. He let his hands flop to his thighs. “Why? I want you to. Take all of it.” His voice was so full of weary sadness, I felt a twinge of empathy for him.
Sinthy put a hand on his knee. “The ones who did this to you must have never explained how magic works. Natural or stolen, magic is a life force. Your ancestry is a magical bloodline. That’s the only way you’d be compatible enough to harness magic, to begin with. It’s inside you now, bound to your very soul. There is no removing it. Without magic, you’ll die.”
I didn’t think it was possible, but after hearing that, Maxwell’s face looked even more miserable. I looked across the room at Nico and Donatello. They were as mesmerized by the discussion taking place as I was. The fact that all this had been going on for years, that her own son was suffering so terribly, made me loathe Viola even more. She was a goddamned monster. All she did was rail on and on about how shifters were disgusting abominations that shouldn’t exist… Well, the woman needed to take a look in the fucking mirror. Maybe she was projecting her own black soul onto shifters.
Maxwell paled as he drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, hugging himself. Sinthy let out a sigh andstood, joining me by the door. She wrapped her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder. I put my arms around her shoulders, again feeling like I was a surrogate mother to her. It had to be hard for her, knowing that the man sitting on the floor had her own birth mother’s magic coursing through his body. She couldn’t even be angry at him for it since it had been forced on him without his consent or desire.
As he sat there, clutching his legs, his gaze darted around the room, bouncing from Nico and Donatello to Abi and Diego, then over to Luis and Felipe. So many people, and all of them, complicit in his kidnapping. He had to be assuming the worst. What else could he think after the life he’d lived? Had anyone ever cared for him? Probably his siblings, perhaps his father before he died.
“We aren’t going to hurt you,” I said.
Maxwell turned his head toward me, his eyes fixed on mine. I gently pulled away from Sinthy and stepped closer to the man. Hewasa man. Though I knew he was twenty-one, he had the qualities of a child who’d been abused and made to think he was worthless his entire life. Of all the travesties Viola had perpetrated, what she had inflicted on this young man might be the most depraved. He looked at me like a scared puppy waiting to be kicked.
“I promise, no one will hurt you here. You’re here because we need some leverage over your mother. We need to show her that she isn’t the only one who can go to extremes. We’re trying to get her to end this—all of it.”
Maxwell looked at me like I’d just told him two and two made five. He chuckled humorlessly and shook his head. “She’ll never quit. Never. You don’t know her as I do. If it meant she could get you or the vial, she’d skin me alive and make a coat out of my hide. She’d even laugh while she did it.” He shook his head again. “No. You won’t stop her. If anything, taking me will onlypiss her off more, and she was really pissed, to begin with. She hates you and despises you. Viola is used to getting what she wants at the snap of a finger. The fact that you guys have drawn this out for a year has her frothing at the mouth. She’s doing anything and everything. She’s burned bridges left and right.”
Nico stepped forward. “Can you tell us why you didn’t tell your mother about the tracker Sinthy placed on you?”
Maxwell’s eyes darted to Nico, and he swallowed hard. “I guess… I hoped you guys would use it to find her. To… end this mess. I never thought you’d kidnap me. I’m worthless. I don’t matter. You’d have been better off leaving me for dead.”
“You aren’t worthless,” I said soothingly.
My heart shattered. This young man had been so broken and twisted by Viola that he truly didn’t think he was worth a damn. She’d made him believe he was nothing but a tool. A reviled and disgusting tool, no less. He was stronger than I was. If Viola had been my mother, I’d have killed myself long ago.
Maxwell ignored my words; he was still looking at Nico imploringly. “What about my siblings? They aren’t Viola’s children. They were born to my dad’s second wife. She has no attachment to them. She’ll hurt them. She might think I planned this with you all and kill them for retribution.”
“Where are they, Maxwell?” I asked. “If you know where they’re being held, we can try to get them out. You saw what Sinthy is capable of.”
He looked at me, and before he even spoke, a cold, heavy lump formed in my stomach. Tears shone in his eyes as he shook his head. “I don’t know. She’s never told me.”
“Damn it,” Nico hissed. “That bitch might actually do it. We’ve got to hope she doesn’t hurt them until she can prove Maxwell did or didn’t have something to do with us taking him.”
“What do we do with our young friend for now?” Donatello asked.
Nico’s eyes darted up and locked on mine. He was thinking the same thing I was. We didn’t want to imprison him, but what other choice did we have?
“Sinthy?” I asked. “There’s not, like, a reverse tracker on him, is there? Viola didn’t manage to do to him what you did?”
She shook her head. “No, I already checked him. He’s clean. She won’t find us through him.”
I looked at Donatello. “I think we should put him in one of your free rooms. House arrest, you know? At least for now, just for a little while,” I added, turning back to Maxwell.
