Most of the room turned quiet. His older siblings looked at him, the triplets with wide smiles. Otto moved to scoop Casper up and hug him tightly. “Well done, ghost boy,” he murmured before blowing raspberries in his neck.
“That’s the right answer?” Tobi asked, her brows knit together.
“Yes,” Apricot confirmed, grinning at Casper.
Around them, their parents smiled proudly.
“Why are you always over there when you can be schooling us on answers, Cas?” Kellishon asked, ruffling the boy’s hair when Otto resumed his seat with their baby brother in his arms.
I knew I was seeing something that happened regularly. Casper was insanely smart, memorizing everything he read and always focusing on witchy things. But his confidence was lacking because he didn’t share their magic.
We’ve seen it often. Whenever we ask the Taikas to come over for anything concerning magic, this exact interaction takes place. But when we’re together and the older kids are home from school, they are a lot like I always was with my siblings. Close. Laughing. Wrestling.
Casper shrugged, his eyes still glassy as he blinked away his unshed tears.
“I’m going to get you to tutor us one day,” Apricot said, tapping Casper’s nose. “Midterms are coming up. You free for a few late-night study dates, Cas?”
Casper rolled his eyes and crossed his arms.
I tuned out their conversation as I scanned the room for Calix, our resident unicorn. While unicorns are a notorious dark and dangerous species, to our knowledge, they’re not hunted. As I looked at Calix, his eyes narrowed at the kids’ conversation.
Unicorn blood had a lot of unique and useful properties. But taking their blood without consent usually meant that those properties came back on the taker. That their blood was used on a Silence knife and worked in favor of the magic within suggested that a unicorn was cooperating with them.
I could just see Calix’s thoughts churning as he stared at nothing. Others in the room murmured as the kids carried on.
“What if they’re not working for them by choice, either?” I asked quietly. Several looked my way. “Anakin said that the aerial monsters appeared offline. Maybe Silence has somehow found a way to control people.”
The kids stopped talking as the room fell into a thoughtful silence.
“That’s a horrifying idea,” Miller said, a severe frown on his lips.
But Anakin was looking at me, his dark eyes narrowing. “You know, you might be onto something. Though I don’t think that’s the case with everyone that’s working with them, it makes a lot of sense, given what we saw with the monsters in the sky.”
“Vacant,” Idris said, his usual serene expression hardening to something irritated.
“I’d like to make a request,” I said. Eyes turned to me and waited. “I want us to make an effort to find who’s running Silence.”
“Why?” Saar asked.
I shrugged. No one was convinced that I didn’t have a reason, but everyone in this room knew that I couldn’t lie to save my life. It was best that I simply didn’t speak my motive out loud. I was sure others would be on board with my vindictive thoughts, but right now, we needed to find who was behind the trigger of the Division of Silence.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Iker said. “Finding out the origin might actually be insightful information.”
“Indeed,” Bastian said. “Identifying the source might give us some more cards.”
“While I feel this is more vengeance driven than anything, I don’t object,” Cobalt said. “However, if we’re going to focus on the ‘who’s’ of Silence, we need to dive deep and see who’s responsible for their torturous array of weapons.”
“That’s almost an easy ask,” Akello said. “All magic has a signature attached to it. While Plum, Torin, Seneca, Veri, and I can all produce the exact same spell, there will be… let’s call it genetic modifications in its code. Many combinations produce brown hair, even if the shade is slightly different. And like DNA, those codes can be traced back to their origin. The source of the code-writer.”
“So you’re saying that we can identify the witches involved with Silence,” Jennings said.
“Yes. We can,” Akello said, smiling wickedly. “Especially since we have the knives that hit both Tem and Koh in our possession.”
“This information cannot leave this room,” Calix said quietly. He looked at the kids for a minute before turning back to the rest of us. “Unicorn blood is unique among individuals. Using Kell’s genetic code metaphor—where DNA is a fuck tonalike between people and animals, with only an infinitesimal difference that separates one species to the next and less than that to determine families and so forth, unicorn bloodspecificallyis the opposite. All of our codes are unique to the individual, with only a few bases that are the same. And those basically dictate ‘you are a unicorn’ and nothing more.”
His words hung heavy on the air.
“How well can you read blood?” Akello asked.
