34
Silver
“I’m sorry, you didwhat?” I demand.
These idiots turn up, stinking of smoke and expect a blurted explanation and a couple of doe-eyed stares to be enough to appease us? Hell no.
Rook hasn’t got the look of innocence down at all. Instead, he scowls around the room, not quite meeting my eye. I can’t tell if he’s pissed at me or at the others, or the situation as a whole.
My orgasmic buzz hasn’t quite faded, but it’s now a pleasant hum in the background. And, right now, it’s probably the only thing that’s stopping me from biting their heads off.
“Explain to me exactly what happened after you got away from Simpson and the angry mob.”
“Nice job with that, by the way,” Seb says with a grin. “Ro explained how you single-handedly saved the city from evil.”
“Not quite,” I reply drily. If he thinks that he’s going to get away without explaining himself with a few compliments, he doesn’t know me at all.
“Fabian has people cleaning up the scene at the minute. And don’t think you’re doing a good job of distracting me. You’re not. Tell me what happened.”
“We figured we’d go the long way around, just in case there was anyone following us. Smart, right? But it meant we wound up going by Arcanum Heights,” Seb explains.
“When we saw the mansion Simpson had taken over, it made me super pissed,” Hanna says. “I was only going to set fire to some of the stupid hedges in the area. You know the ones that they have that look like witches riding into battle on a horse or whatever. Pretentious as hell. I figured that since a bunch of Nexus has been burning on and off for ages now, they’d probably just blame it on angry deviants, or whatever.” She gives an exaggerated shudder. “But then I had this weird surge of power and the flames wound up being way bigger than I expected. Anyway, they lit up like a tinderbox and the houses in that area must not be fire retardant, so the mansion was set on fire too. Then I figured we didn’t want it to look too targeted, so I kinda wound up setting other places on fire too.”
“It was so cool,” Seb says with a huge grin. He’s practically bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement.
I shoot a look at Fabian who has his arms folded and is giving off stern dad vibes which has Seb’s buzz cooling until he starts to look sheepishly at the floor.
“Was there anyone inside the houses? Did you check they were empty before you set them all on fire?” I ask, aghast. If I expected Hanna to take tips from anyone, it wasn’t going to be the idiots who have been setting Nexus on fire.
“Yeah, Ichecked, Silver. It’s not like I want to burn people alive, or whatever. Since it’s the middle of the day, there was no one around. There are just gonna be some people who come home to all their stuff as ashes. Might teach a few of them humility, you never know.”
“And anyone we did see on our way in or out, I wiped their memories so they won’t know it was us,” Seb says.
“Which gave us another idea,” Hanna continues.
I have a sinking feeling in my gut. This can’t get worse, can it?
“And that was what?” Fabian asks, stepping closer to my side until I can feel the heat of his body against mine. He links our fingers together so we can stand together as two disappointed pseudo-parents.
“We all had this crazy amount of power flooding through us and I wanted to see if I could do a memory wipe for people I wasn’t standing with,” Seb says. “You know how I normally have to see and maybe touch the person? Yeah, well, it turns out today I didn’t need any of that.”
My throat’s gone dry as I fight the urge to rub away the crease at my brow. “Whose memories did you wipe, Seb?”
“The Archarcans. Wiped every one of their memories of every one of us.” He beams at us, clearly proud of what he’s achieved.
I mean... it’s pretty astonishing, really.
“All of them?” That must be hundreds of people. Hundreds of powerful witches and mages.
Including my mother.
“Every single one.” He puffs his chest out. “It was weirdly easy. Most of them didn’t really know who any of us were, anyway. But I figured if we just wiped out all the memories of the people that might cause us problems, then we’re all free.”
He nods at me and at Fabian.
“That’s a shit ton of power,” I murmur. I guess it was the same power that came courtesy of the ghosts—the power which allowed me to control an angry mob and for Fabian to take down Simpson.
