“That might be true enough,” he said, his expression losing some of its anger. “But surely after five other deaths, they would have at least been willing to entertain your information.”
“Except the information didn’t come via magic. It came to me as a prophetic dream.” One that had taken me entirely too long to understand. By the time that I had, it had been too late to save Cat.
“Ah.”
“Yeah,” Belle said. “We all know just how highly bluebloods value psi powers.”
“That’s because most of them are of little true use.” He paused. “Which I guess is your point.”
“Yes.” I took a drink, but the fiery liquid did little to check the rush of images that pressed at my mind—the grimy abandoned warehouse where Cat had met her doom, the bloody parts of her body within the black pentagram, the sorcerer’s face smeared with her blood. The force of his energy hurtling me backward and then smashing me into one wall after another, until my body was almost as broken and bloody as Cat’s. The desperate, last-minute spell I’d cast that had set him alight and broken bones even as Belle raised the spirit world and sent them riding to my rescue.
I probably should have died that day, right alongside my sister. It was only thanks to Belle that I hadn’t. To this day, I had no idea what had happened to the sorcerer who’d killed Cat and the other witches. His body had never been found; the general consensus in Canberra was that the dark spirits he’d dealt with had claimed both his flesh and his soul on death.
My prophetic dreams believed otherwise.
I gulped down the rest of my drink. “My parents held me accountable for her death. It didn't matter that they wouldn’t have believed me, didn’t matter that she was already dead by the time I got there. Their golden child was gone, and they had to blame someone. I was the easiest target.”
He was silent for a moment, his gaze on my face. It was something I felt rather than saw, simply because I didn’t dare look at him. It might have all happened just over twelve years ago now, but the pain and the deep sense of betrayal still hurt as fiercely now as it had back then.
“Why did you run?” he asked eventually.
I grimaced. “Because my father decided the best way to deal with a problem was to get rid of it.”
He blinked. “You’re not saying he tried to kill you—”
“No. But sometimes there are worse things than death.”
And Clayton had certainly been one of those things.
A shudder ran through me. Belle silently filled my glass again and I hastily gulped it down. At this rate, I’d be drunk before dinner was even served.
“So what has any of this got to do with you shutting down my ability to say your names?”
“You can say our real surnames,” Belle said. “Just not when you’re in the company of anyone else but us.”
He didn’t look relieved by this statement. “Why the restriction?”
“Because we legally changed our surnames to Grace and Kent to ensure my parents could never track either of us down.”
“If they’d wanted to find you, they would have by now.” His voice was dry. “Tracing spells are very proficient at such things.”
“Yes, but there are also spells to counter them.”
“Which you don’t have the magical strength to perform.” He studied the two of us for a second. “Or, at least, you didn’t back then.”
“But I did have a large inheritance from my grandfather. It’s amazing what money can buy if you apply it in the right areas.”
“Which you—as a sixteen-year-old—should not have known.”
“The three low witch houses are not as finicky in their friends as the three blueblood,” Belle murmured. “And sometimes that very much plays to their advantage.”
“Is that why your mother was taken into custody and questioned?” Monty asked.
Belle leaned forward at that, her expression alarmed. “Did they harm her?”
“Not as far as I heard—and I heard quite a lot given I was still my father’s shining light at that stage.” He hesitated. “They would have spelled her to speak what she knew, though.”
“Which wouldn’t have revealed anything,” I said. “She might have been the one who advised us to run, but we never told her our plans or what we intended.”