“I had something else I wanted to ask you—” she started, but then she was cut off by the shrill sound of Sylvia’s phone ringing.
“I have to take this.” Sylvia sighed. “Henry’s been on the verge of a conniption all morning.”
Sylvia answered the phone and stood, pacing as she snapped at Henry about readying the coven’s financial records for Noctis’ perusal. Katherine could feel Sylvia’s anger building, the mood in the room turning so sour it almost felt hot. Katherine would be better off waiting to ask until another day, but she couldn’t wait.
She could just do it without asking.
She shifted in her seat. She had permission to take any spell she wanted from the spell library, but she’d never used it to go behind Sylvia’s back before. Sylvia had told her not to look into Byron, and doing this spell definitely went against that.
But Katherine needed to know if he was involved, and the altum tracking spell was her best bet. It was the same spell she’d used to track the drug’s residue to Joe, except then she’d had Sylvia’s full support. All she’d had to do was have Fiona flirt with him for approximately thirty seconds at a coven meeting while Katherine “accidentally” bumped into him and did the spell. (Fiona had said she’d felt like she needed to take a dozen showers afterward.) Somehow, she didn’t think she’d get away with something that obvious with Byron.
Maybe if she were better at the intricate spells. As Sylvia clearly knew, Katherine’s magic was too big, too bold—her runes always litup like fireworks, easy to spot for anyone looking. If she did this spell around Byron, there was no chance he wouldn’t see it.
But if he was guilty—and she was sure he was—it wouldn’t matter. She just had to get Sylvia on board with her suspicions. She had to tell her that she and Silas had broken into police Evidence. That she’d found altum there, and that it may have played a role in Lily’s death. With the stakes that high, Sylvia couldn’t say no.
“Just—please,” she heard Sylvia say into the phone. “You’re a big boy. You can figure this out. I promise.”
Sylvia hung up, then slumped back in her chair, resting her head in her hands and rubbing her fingers on her temples. She looked… fragile. Like one strong breath would blow her over. Katherine had never seen her so close to the edge, and the possibility of this woman falling apart—this pillar, who had always seemed so solid—was unthinkable.
And Sylvia would never admit that, not even to Katherine. They’d both had to learn early in life that weakness was unacceptable. That weakness was shame. That weakness was death. And so Sylvia would force hers down, and Katherine would too, and they would both go on until their grief was buried so deep that it became a part of the foundation of who they were.
She couldn’t push Sylvia further toward her breaking point.
And so she stood, and said her goodbyes, and headed toward the door. When she’d named Katherine Executrix, Sylvia had placed trust in her that she would only do what needed to be done.
Byron needed to be caught. Katherine could fill Sylvia in on what she’d done to accomplish that after the fact.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Silas tried to ignore the weight of Sylvia’s caster in his pocket and focus on the papers in front of him.
It didn’t help that this collection of paperwork was, perhaps, the most boring collection of paperwork to ever exist. Silas had flipped through this exact same stack of forms at every coven he’d visited over the past few months, and it never changed. Surprise, surprise, witches needed spells to keep their car tires full and their coffee hot (or cold, or oat milk–ed, or whatever it was that people who drank the infernal stuff instead of just having an energy drink like a normal person preferred). He didn’t know why he had to examine page after page of Excel spreadsheets documenting that fact.
But it was part of the job, and at least Fiona was the most fun Recorder he’d gone through the process with. When he arrived, he noticed her fiddling with bags of saltpeter for a cleansing spell she was working on, which had led to a wonderful discussion about the intricacies of old magic and the cultural loss that had come with the shift to runes. He’d considered asking her to elaborate in a column for the Noctis newsletter, but he knew his parents would never publish it. Runes kept people safe, and they wouldn’t want to put out anything that could encourage witches to take unnecessary risks.
Instead they’d gotten to the business at hand. They were perched at the bar in Sunspot’s dining room, Silas enjoying another glass of thesuperb Cranberry Red Bull re-creation while Fiona sipped on a nonalcoholic daiquiri that had been passed to her by the chef with a wink.
“And on here, we have, you guessed it, more requests for vacuuming spells,” Fiona said. “Are you not entertained?”
Silas chuckled, running his pen down the lines of the printed-out spreadsheet in front of him. Just like the dozens of pages that had come before, it was all perfectly normal. Part of the job of the yearly check-ins was to go through the records of every spell that had been lent out of the coven’s library in the last year, to make sure that they were all up to code and to confirm that they were being used at the expected rates. Any discrepancies had to be reported back to Noctis using another exceptionally long and boring stack of paperwork, which would then be investigated and answered with, you guessed it, even more paperwork.
“Thank you,” Silas said, taking a much-needed break from the lines of the spreadsheet to look at Fiona. “For walking me through this. I’m sure this isn’t how you wanted to spend your Sunday.”
“Are you suggesting this is anything other than my very definition of fun, Silas Khatri? I’m insulted.”
“She was talking about how excited she was for it all night,” the chef—Tess, if he remembered correctly—chimed in from behind the bar. “Couldn’t get her to shut up about it.”
“I think you thought of a few ways to shut me up.” Fiona grinned as she leaned over and kissed Tess. Silas’ heart crunched. Thirty years into his life and his longest relationship was a six-week stint with a girl in college—and it only lasted that long because she was too busy with the spring musical to find the time to dump him. He’d known from the beginning every relationship he had was going nowhere. He’d never had the easy affection these two had, the potential to grow into something more. He repeated the familiar narrative that he didn’t want to be tied down anyway, but it was hard to hear it over the roaring scream that he wasn’t good enough.
At least his parents had stopped pressuring him about it. The only thing they wanted more than seeing him happily married and pumping out babies to continue the Khatri line was seeing him in charge ofAestas. He bristled with the weight of their expectations, which had been slammed down on him again and again the night before as he’d projected to their office in New York, telling them that he’d found nothing magical about the Hollywood and Highland attack. Just a coincidence. Aestas mourned for their city, but that was all.
They had not liked that answer. They had treated the deaths of a couple dozen people as an opportunity.
Silas had always noticed the sharp edges to his parents, but lately, those edges had cut. He’d been born to kings, but over his lifetime, those kings had fought and clawed their way into an empire. Vikrant and Nina had taken the Khatri name to another level, relentlessly expanding their influence in both the magical and ordinary world, always moving the goalposts of how strong was strong enough. And at some point along their unrelenting climb, Silas fell behind, and they didn’t think to turn around and look for him.
He had good memories with his parents. Sitting on his father’s shoulders at six years old so he could get a better view of the Diwali fireworks. Holding his mother’s hand at twelve years old as they explored the High Line. Both of their arms around him at twenty-two years old, posing for a photo at his college graduation. He loved them, truly and deeply, but he couldn’t say that he liked them anymore.
The conversation about the attack had left him with an upset stomach all night. His mother had looked almost happy when they got on the call. Nina’s edges were more jagged than Vikrant’s, chipped again and again by the small violences the world visited upon powerful women. Silas knew this, loved her in spite of and because of it, but he had seen for himself the bloody aftermath of the attack. He couldn’t handle the knowledge that, to her, the opportunity to nail Sylvia to the wall was worth any price.
