The Council investigator looked back down at her notebook. “Because you deliberately made everyone hate you.”
Priscilla nodded.
“So, the second to last time you went to visit your mom, you knew something wasn’t right,” The Council investigator stated.
Priscilla nodded. “My mom had moved into a new house that came with a hob. She told me the previous witch had abandoned the house, and she’d had to compel the hob just to make it stay. She treated the hob like a personal slave, and I couldn’t leave it under her compulsion.” Priscilla’s mask of disinterest had slipped, her voice now laced with genuine empathy.
“Uh-huh. So, at this point,” the Council investigator continued, “you’re still unaware that your mother had actuallymurderedthe witch to take her house.” Priscilla nodded. “And you decided to free the hob from her compulsion using a—” She glanced down at her notes. “—magic shell.”
Priscilla’s eye twitched. “I’m only a quarter siren, but I learned how to imbue shells without my mother knowing. I would sing to it every night, concentrating my song into it—”
“Your song being one meant tounravela compulsion.”
Priscilla gritted her teeth at the interruption but continued. “Yes. Mother wasn’t the brightest person. If she was, she’d have realized that our siren lineage wasn’t from a branch whose strength lay in compulsion. Our lineage was quite the opposite. We were most famed for creating siren shells thatdispelledcompulsion, trading them with supernaturals crossing the Atlantic for hundreds of years. I stole a shell that belonged to my grandmother and made it into a siren shell when I was a child. I would use it to break whatever compulsion my mother had put on me that day. I gave it to the hob to break her compulsion, as well as one of my mother’s sweaters, then compelled my mother to think it had simply freed itself.”
“Which brings us to the next part,” the investigator said. “The hob, understandably unhappy about being compelled, began attacking the house and your mother, forcing her to call inShadowbound Security.” She glanced between Blaise and me. “Which is how you, Ambrose, ended up under her compulsion.”
Blaise’s shadows coiled around me as a crackle of Caitlyn’s magic skittered up her arms in anger.
“In the meantime,” the investigator continued, “you, Blaise, took a job with Caitlyn”—she pointed her pencil between the two of them—“who had hired you to keepyou”—she pointed at Priscilla—“from stealing her recipes—”
“I never actually wanted the recipes,” Priscilla cut in.
The investigator flicked through her notebook and said, “You only let Caitlyn think that, but in reality you were sneaking around her house because it was where you used to go as a child to escape your abusive mother. You also left your doll, Purdy, here—which the sentient house then magicked to life as a companion for you.”
The investigator glanced up from her notes and pointed toward Creep, who was keeping silent vigil beside the carnivorous plant.
At the mention of her name, Creep slowly rotated her head a full one-eighty.
The investigator visibly shuddered. “Creepy doll,” she muttered under her breath. “And when you arrived here, you realized thatshewas your mate.” The pencil moved between Caitlyn and Blaise, who both nodded. “Meanwhile, you, Priscilla, were on your way back to your mother’s, where you foundhim”—the pencil shifted to me—“under her compulsion.”
She glanced back down at her notes. “So you lured him out to the woods where the hob now lived, forced him to wear this magical seashell thingy to break the compulsion, and then sent him all the way here to warn his colleague that your mother had discovered the sentient house and was on her way to try to enthrall it too—once she finished makinghermagic seashell.”
Priscilla rolled her eyes at the complex, sacred magic of imbued siren shells being reduced tomagic seashellbut nodded nonetheless.
“But when you”—she pointed at me—“arrived here, half starved, and realized that not only was the witch your colleague-slash-roommate-slash-lover-slash-best friend was working for actuallyyourmate”—she waved the pencil between Caitlyn and Blaise and me—“but that he was also mated to her too. And those feelings you’d been denying for years toward your colleague-slash-roommate-slash-lover-slash-best friend also turned out to be a mating bond between the pair of you, but you just never realized.”
All three of us nodded.
“Which is presumably what distracted you from the warning Priscilla gave you to get everyone back to the coven.”
All three of us looked sheepishly at Priscilla.
“We thought we had at least a week,” I admitted.
“In the meantime,” she continued, pointing at Priscilla, “you came up with the grand plan to compel your mother into believing a week had already passed, meaning the magic seashell didn’t actually have much magic in it at all.”
Priscilla nodded.
“And so you both show up here with nothing more than a regular seashell,” she went on, “which means your mother couldn’t have compelled the house anyway.”
She flicked the pencil toward Blaise and me. “And she couldn’t compel either of you because you’d decided to wear magic earbuds bought becauseshe”—she pointed at Caitlyn—“snores.”
Both Blaise and I nodded.
“And then the sentient house magicked itself on top of Ms. Raisin, conveniently placing her in the greenhouse with your person-eating pet plant.” She glanced toward Mordi, whichobligingly allowed one of Isadora’s feet to slip free between its petals, which gave an almighty jerk before being swallowed again.
Beneath it, Creep clapped her porcelain hands together enthusiastically in anAgain! Again!gesture.
