Stuart looked away, lips tight. “You think people haven’t had concerns about him? Even without the damning evidence around us right now to prove it? You think I didn't know what he really was under that gentlemanly demeanor? Even with his mind locked far away where I can't reach it, I've always known. Everyone who encounters him for more than a minute, knows, somewhere deep inside. Even without our powers.”
“The old Stuart got rid of those who opposed him. He was good at it. Like the reels show so well. No one stayed in business when you wished it otherwise. Entire operations went up in smoke the next day.”
“Yes, I was once exactly like him, but for the scale and human horror,” Stuart said, looking around the space. “But you know it isn't that simple. The more important question is how has he stayed in power? How did I? Why does the public turn a blind eye?”
Constantine grit his teeth. “By giving them what they want, so they conveniently ignore anything else.”
“By being useful. By giving so much on one hand that people ignore what he is taking in the other. By keeping the monsters from fully breaching the gate—monsters who are always at the gate. So close to the gate, that they don't care that the occasional villager disappears. It usually isn’t a villager anyone knows. Ferals are blips in a sea of comfortable ignorance. He doesn't take the known ones though, such as you and Alexander. He would have taken you both long ago, if he could have.”
“I'm surprised he didn't.”
“All of those parties and social events that Maximillian, Sera, your mother, and I sent you to so early, some far too decadent for ones so young, but they got you both noticed. You can never be anonymous. Society's heirs all know each other by sight and magic. You can't go missing, if you are known. Disappearance costs the government far more.”
“Society is a game. I never noticed.”
“Don't be boring, Constantine,” Stuart said, more harshly than I'd ever heard him. He was usually very conciliatory to his estranged son. “You know exactly why I did it. And you know why Stavros is in power.”
“He protects our interests. And as long as little Apollo is fine, and everyone's companies are faring well, everyone is free to turn a blind eye. No one cares about feral mages who aren’t even of this layer.”
“No matter what kind of dirt you get on Stavros—pinning this horrible place to him—the only way his supporters will care is if he is seen killing an untouchable person in their eyes. And he's too careful for that. People are willing to let a lot of people they don't know die. Numbers on a spreadsheet. However,”—he straightened his fashionable coat—“you save a place like Crelussa Sanitarium and thousands of magicist children with ties that Stavros could never count on defeating... You find plans for his destruction of Tus Onus... Or Gliar Peit. Or whatever culling he’s going to do with all the Awakening magic and a Bridge and Origin Mage at his disposal, and, well, now we have some ink.”
I felt Constantine's echoing shock to mine.
Stuart's mouth firmed grimly. “Selen Vanator was a very close friend before I met your mother. But while I can nail the Department with Crelussa, Stavros will blame it on Helen Price. It will take more to ruin the Prestige.”
“We find this evidence, and you will what?”
“I will make them see.”
Constantine looked at him for a long moment. “Very well.”
Over the comms, Olivia was trying to corral the others into moving into Phase 2, while Patrick was advocating for a little “celebratory time.”
“Stavros's culling isn't going to wait for our celebrations, Patrick,” she said firmly.
“Just one small—”
“What do you make of this, sir?” a tech asked Marsgrove, frowning at the console. “There's powerful magic here, almost like another lab space. But where?”
Axer stepped closer to them, Guard Rock traveling with him.
Another tech was flipping shelves, cataloging the contents of the Basement, and a third was flipping the rows of occupied cells. It was between one of those flips and the next that the Kinsky appeared.
“Con, Axer.” I inhaled sharply.
I could hear swearing, but I couldn't look away, couldn't move.
A Kinsky, previously hidden by rows of shelves, was in full view. A small symbol rippled in the lower corner of the portrait and a heavy beat drummed in its paint, vibrating its frame.
Between one breath and the next, I was suddenly in front of it—like I had been moved by a godly hand from one spot to another.
Priyasha waved me back with panicked motions, pointing frantically at my cloak with one hand while the other pressed against her painted veil. The symbol rippled in the lower corner of her canvas.
“Do you have something else for me?” I asked, already knowing that wasn't the right question.
She motioned again, aggravated strokes of paint even more frantic, her head tilting behind her as she grew increasingly panicked. I started to back away, feet moving nightmare-slow.
I saw Kaine slither behind her a split second before I was lifted from my feet and pulled into the painting. The room turned, flipping in on itself like a moving tessellation—separating me in a clean slide from those running toward me, like I was on a turning face of a Rubik's cube.
I could no longer hear the others. Not the boys, not the Bandits or Olivia. Not Neph.
And I couldn't feel my magic anymore.
Chapter Twenty-two: Empathy of the Lost/Hollow
Pressure pushed down on me and my cuff disintegrated as soon as the paint touched it. The paint was seemingly attached to me everywhere—like an animal stuck in a tar pit—leeching my magic so I couldn't use it.
“Struggling will just pull the magic from you faster. A small gift from one Origin Mage to another, though your predecessor had no idea the Pull would be used for this.”
I could barely feel my friends, and I could hear none of their words. The connections were still there, but growing hazier, and I grasped onto them as the pull grew stronger.
Kaine smiled and his shadows lashed through the air, searching for weaknesses in my cloak and shields, and tearing apart both.
“I will kill Verisetti for the time I spent as his prisoner,” Kaine said pleasantly as he worked. “But do you know the unintended consequence of combining with him for those months?” Kaine smiled. “Your shield set. The keys to all that he has created are now mine.”
And through the pull, I felt my shields stripped from me, taking with them all the protections that I had relied upon forever. All except for the last shield—the last one he flipped into an amplifier. An amplifier and detonator.
“Verisetti embedded them in your very marrow. They will regrow, but how long will it take? One day, two? Far too long, I think, for you. You can't even control yourself with them.”
He let me go, as abruptly as he had caught me, and my magic, raw and scraped and empty, started to slowly fill, but it was pulling the magic around me inside instead of regenerating my own. Kaine's gaze was taunting, daring me to use it.