“No.” Ruth is earnest, on the verge of tears. “I didn’t need a reason to care about you, Veda. I just did.I do.You remind me of myself when I was younger. None of this changes anything.”
“It changeseverything,” Veda snaps. “She doesn’t deserve to be kept a secret.Everybodyshould know her name. And you’ve just been hiding her.Protecting her!”
“No! Wepunishedher. Ariadne was sentenced to a life of being Unseen and forced to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. She begged and pleaded with us, groveled and promised she wouldn’t meddle again, right up until Lucinda silenced her. Moab cut the fruit, and I forced her to bite down.”
Veda feels too heavy to keep standing, numbly rejoining Hiram on the couch. His hand returns to her knee.
“She broke out of prison and vanished a few months later. We found signs of her activities: She stole a substantial amount of money from me, put Scrambling Hexes on multiple books, and took copies of the Oracle Council’s personnel files. We looked for Ariadne foryears. Put alerts out to law enforcement, the government. Everyone pretended like it never happened, so we kept searching without them, determined to find her. We looked in every place we could think of until the trailran cold. Life went on ... until Oliver. He was the same Council member who had found her during the Great Vanishing.”
Veda puts her head in her hands. “Dr. Lawson ...”
“He died without knowing—”
Veda looks up sharply, scrubbing a hand over her face, but there’s no wiping away the memories. “Heknewwho killed him and why. I tried ...”
“I know.”
“What happened next?” Hiram asks.
“We kept begging the FCD to help us track her down, but they refused. Each victim was a Council member involved with capturing her after the Great Vanishing and carrying out her punishment. This is about revenge. It took four murders to attract a little media attention, enough to force them to put someone on the case. It went quiet after that, until Investigators Sallant and Padillo got involved.”
“You never helped them,” Hiram accuses. “You should have told them the truth.”
“Why would we?” Ruth replies coldly. “We couldn’t trust them to protect us then, and we can’t now.”
“And you all thought scattering was the best idea?”
“At the time, yes, but some of us banded together. There is safety in numbers, or so we believed after the next two were killed while in isolation. This is when we realized she was using the Registration to hunt us down. It tracks our every move. Even now, we are sitting ducks.”
Veda’s head pounds harder, but Hiram is relentless in his quest for knowledge. “And the spider lilies?”
“We found out about the spider lilies after Investigator Sallant started coming around, requesting meetings, telling us information. In January, spider lilies started appearing in the forest behind my house. Real ones. Not the ones she creates with Omnipotent magic.”
Like the flowers Veda saw in the forest.
“Now I know they were a warning.”
“What about Grace Fowler?” Hiram questions. “How is she involved in Ariadne’s case?”
“She wasn’t involved with Ariadne’s punishment, but a member of the Oracle Council in New York was friends with Grace, and said she had an Unseen friend she met while working at her outreach program maybe nine years ago. Never said her name, but their description matches Ariadne. That’s all I know.”
Hiram sits back. “This doesn’t make sense. Why kill Grace? Why plant real spider lilies? Why leave the spider lilies created by Omnipotent magic for Veda in the parking lot? Lucinda is murdered a few weeks later. Not long after, she attacks Moab, but he gets away. These gaps don’t make sense if she’s so methodical. How many original Council members are left?”
“Moab and I are the last.”
“And she’s after Veda,” Hiram remarks, looking at her. “She has to have the trickster pendant. Nine years ago is about when Grace lost hers. I bet she took it. Grace trusted everyone, to an extent. Using the pendant is likely why, to Moab, she looked like his daughter. Everett figured her—”
“He told me he Saw her true face, and she cursed him to go insane if he tried to tell the truth.” Veda’s emotions are still twisted, but she tells Ruth about Everett’s anagram, the attack, and what happened with her amulet. Ruth reaches to comfort her, but Veda avoids her touch. “You knew she was the one who cursed me this entire time.”
Silence is confirmation. “I would have died the moment I so much as gave you a clue. I’m so sorry. For everything.”
Veda understands so much was out of Ruth’s hands, but still can’t force down the bitter distrust and anger stuck in her throat.
“What aboutSight Unseen?” Hiram asks. “We know my uncle wanted to use it to steal Sight. Is that even possible?”
“It is. We suspect Ariadne has been using it on everyone she attacks, stealing their Sight as they die, and covering the remnants of the ritual with a wasting curse.” Ruth looks around urgently before leaning closer. “But there’s one thing no one seems to have figured out yet: She’s been doing it wrong.”
Twenty
