I took a step back, but the magic followed, sponging around my mind. I threw the last piece of the puzzle away before it formed.
He smiled and took a leisurely step around the table toward me, hand outstretched as my body arced backward. “Now you are perceiving the way of things.”
I gritted my teeth and backed up another step. He was like Raphael, who always said he wanted me to “learn” before he used me.
“No, not like my dear servant at all,” Stavros said. “I could have forced the knowledge within you from the start. I would simply do this.”
He twisted his hand. Knowledge appeared in front of me in a cloud of magic. And like a sign in English appearing in front of me, my brain automatically read what it saw. The cloud of magic changed from one block to another. Some of the outside information slipped by, but the bulk in the middle pulled together. That was how I was supposed to tie two ports together? I had thought—
And that was how rocks became rivers? That made sense.
My brain followed the path of the images and diagrams.
“Dear Sergei's mind was like yours. All Origin Mages think along similar deductive and inductive lines. It is their outside parameters—their emotions and experiences—that color their paths.” He tilted his head. “It's so hard to recreate the manipulations of Origin Mages. I've been quite starved since he managed to kill himself.”
Stavros needed my support. He needed me to give him the key to how my mind worked. Constantine had needed it to use my magic. He had pulled it from me with the leech, true, but I'd had to form it, and I'd only formed it out of curiosity. I could control my curiosity.
In this situation of life and death, literal life and death for billions of people, I could extinguish my curiosity.
“So, it's to be parasitical?” I asked, preparing myself. I'd known since I'd become a commodity, that this would be the end of the road if I was captured by the Department. “You worming in and taking control?”
“Crude tools. Who needs a leech?” he said, smiling that infuriatingly small smile. He lifted his hands and the entire atmosphere changed. Then he pulled.
I bowed forward, and my mouth opened, as if the emotions pulling out of me were corporeal.
“No, Miss Crown. I can simply remove the parts of you that possess moral quandaries. Or...unnatural ties.”
My connection threads started to dim. Horror overtook me, then that too started to dim.
He smiled. “I can remove the horror and fear. And the love. Remove all that is your natural empathy. I misunderstood the depth of Sergei's grief, then consumed him as he died. A mistake I didn’t fully realize until later. For I inherited part of his mind, but not the span to do the magic. I can visualize what I want, but I cannot make it happen.”
He swirled out a pattern and I could see the broken pieces immediately—all the areas that needed to be fixed for his plan to work. I said nothing, but he smiled anyway.
“I know you know how to fix it. And I won’t make that same mistake with you. I loathe the emotions that come with the connection he left behind. I have no desire to feel your teenage love, devotion, and angst. I need all that is you, but in pieces that can be manipulated around the whole. A jar here, a jar there. A conduit throughout. I simply have to remove the more useless parts of you that threaten the whole.”
“No.”
He smiled and sucked out my fury, directing it into a box inside his cloud. “Anger serves me as well as any other emotion. I care not which I take in what order.” He pulled with his hand and a large chunk of fear abruptly broke away from me—and along with it, some of my magic. The cocktail pulled forth and flew into the cloud, pulsing the entire mass and making the color darken.
He closed his eyes. “You are like five of the strongest of them.”
“Go to hell,” I said, holding on to what I had left—dulled emotions I wanted to keep, dirty feelings and all. The ones that made me me.
He circled his wrist and pulled again. I groaned, heaving forward onto my hands and knees on the floor, a cocktail of emotions pulled from me in one long wisp, dulling everything left behind.
“Everyone worries about Bridges,” he said. “Rightly so, of course, especially after Alexander Dare's little demonstration at Crelussa—and I will be utilizing such abilities when he comes to rescue you. Two bridges together, why the amplification will be amazing. But it was the reason I couldn’t afford to go after Itlantes like I wanted. Those initial terrified rumors about Bridges, why, I spread those myself.” He smiled.
“You're a Bridge,” I gasped before the last bit of fear was pulled from me.
His smile didn't change. “If you want to be pedantic, I'm a Bridge of a very specific type.” He directed the cloud to his chest and the magic absorbed inside him. He inhaled, flexing the magic outward in a bubbled, painted wave. “The more accurate description would be to call me a Hollow.”
I caught my breath enough to say, “What is a Hollow?” Not even my bracelet had information on them.
“Both Bridge and Empath.”
I stared at the painted floor swirling around me, then up at him. “I don’t believe you.”
He smiled. “Yes, I erased such information long ago, but who would believe it anyway? That’s the most interesting part of the ability. Cognitively, it doesn’t mean I have to care, I must understand. And I always understand.”
“So, what,” I said, rolling lethargically out of reach of his next pull while accessing passive information from my bracelet—the bracelet that held both the spirit of Christian and the enduring friendship of Will. I clasped the fleeting feeling, burying it deep. “You understand why people do what they do—you can even facilitate a response from them—”
“With precision.” He smiled.
“—but you don't have any of the side effects of caring?”
“It's called cognitive empathy. But without all the nasty affective part that causes great men to be average.”
He swirled through the paint and I groaned as another bit of love fled from me, causing another connection to dim.
“It makes me a decidedly excellent leader.”
“And yet, not necessarily a great human,” I spit. He took half that anger, too.
“In just a few minutes, I'll have enough of your emotion for you to willingly walk out of here and right into the lovely place I have set up for you.”
“Never.” I tried to hide the connections I had left, the strongest of them, covering them. Stavros simply lifted the feelings beneath, and one by one they started to die.
“Better to just let it happen, my dear. Easier. You won't care about your comrades soon anyway. Their love will seem like a burden to you.”
“I'll never leave them.”
He smiled. “Oh, you will.”
The connection to Neph went gray. Worse, I suddenly felt nothing as I looked at it. I knew that this wasn't right, but there was nothing to connect me to an emotion.
I looked at the threads to Olivia, which were struggling to hold.
“Did you do this to Helen Price too?”