Chapter Thirteen
From the timeline I'd been given, it was clear someone was killing every queen. The problem was that details were so scant. Always the same scenario arose; a secret lover, sneaking out, and sometimes the lover was killed too, sometimes not. It didn't take a detective to realize it was the same person.
But how could it be Alessandra? My wolves swore she was born just forty years before Sigrid's death but there was nothing on her birth or death in the book. She was just mentioned, but often as "Guardian." It seemed there had always been a guardian of my line, and large gaps between queens. One three thousand years earlier spawned the Council.
So in effect all I could surmise was someone had been killing queens, and that didn't even address the ones who never passed the tests and ascended. And so far only the Council had benefitted. How was I supposed to bring this up to my mentor, one of the three members of the damn thing?
Until I knew I could fully trust Val, I dared not let one word slip. There was no proof anyone wanted me dead, just a lot of paranoia. I no longer knew up from down, but I decided it was more important to learn to master my magic before I went off half-cocked. Once I mastered time-travel I could answer these questions myself. With that I pushed the dark thoughts aside and threw myself into the moment.
The second day of training had gone otherwise well. In the room reserved for transport I had brought us to Chicago along with a very startled Pierre, and Val was quite proud in his joy of my mastery. From Chicago I transported us to London to Val's home, and then back. While in London I conjured a piano and other large things to compliment the fine décor of his townhome. Once back on the island I let Pierre return with a kiss that had Valerius sighing impatiently over.
We dueled not to the death but so I could understand it, and after three tries I won. He produced the spell books of my line and I tried a few simple spells from them requiring ingredients to be summoned, and some that required the aid of another witch. Leafing through I saw things that terrified me, spells to reanimate the dead, raise dark armies, things that did not seem full of light. On the other side of the coin there were spells to bless a barren woman with child, or heal the tragically wounded. Magic was terrifyingly simple and complex all at once, and Valerius warned me never to attempt any of those spells until I had mastered all basic magic in, say, about a hundred years.
It was all exhausting, but Val smiled at me as we finished, almost paternal pride in his smile. I closed the books and he conjured towels for us to wipe our sweat off. At some signal a door opened and a wolf brought in a tray with bottled water, and she winked at me as she left.
Val watched her go with male appreciation, but I knew by then he was as faithful to his loves as any man could be. Sighing wistfully, he turned back and regarded me curiously. "Anna, may I ask what your life was like before Alessandra found you?"
I had been dreading this question from anyone, not proud of my origins, and it took me by surprise. "Um...it was not the life one would expect a queen to live, let's leave it at that." I stopped and watched him, trying to imagine him involved in a series of murders and cover-ups. Well, it was actually easy to imagine, but I thought the Roman wouldn't bother to hide his actions and pretend to be such a nice guy.
He stopped me as I turned to leave. "We have half an hour until your wolf comes. Anna, you must tell someone, there is a weight to you that you must let go."
I raised an eyebrow. "So another can take its place?"
His look was one of infinite patience which somehow made me feel more childish than a reproach would have. "So that you can rule from the light and never the shadow. I vow I will share it with none."
"How can I trust you?" Indeed, that was the question of the hour.
He held his palm up and looked every inch the imperial aristocrat he'd been in his human life, even in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. "I vow on the magic of my line I shall breathe not a single word of what is said here to another soul living or dead, for all of existence."
I felt the shimmer of magic and Diego, up until that moment sleeping in the corner, yipped as if signifying he had witnessed it. I didn't want to confess to anyone, but I knew someday soon I would want information from Val, and the best way to get was to give. Perhaps if we had a more intimate friendship I could find out just what the Council was hiding about the numerous unsolved murders of the Inrisdotti line.
"All right. I was sick as a child," I said as he conjured chairs for us in the little conference room we'd been using for practice. "I had epilepsy, do you know what that is?" He nodded.
"It's scary. I had grand mal seizures, not all that often, but every time there was great risk. Would I swallow my own tongue and choke to death, or would I hit my head and bleed to death if alone? It's not easy for any parent to deal with that in their child under the best of circumstances, but I didn't have the best.
"When my mother met my father it was a one night stand. He was a long haul trucker, away from home pretty often. We didn't have much money, he spent a lot on drugs and his wife spent as much on beer and wine. They didn't want kids, but when I was just two weeks old I was left on the doorstep with a letter.
"I don't know why they took me and didn't just foist me into the foster care system. But for some reason they did and decided to raise me believing my step-mother was my real mother. They weren't good people and they weren't real smart, and they had no patience. My dad knocked my mom around plenty and she hit him back. They both took it out on me.
"I was good in school, it was my only escape. When my dad was on a long haul it was okay, mom would just drink until she passed out and left me alone to read. We had a neighbor, real nice woman. If I felt a seizure coming on I'd go to her and she'd help me." I almost smiled at the memory. Funny that; no matter how dark the past was, it was the happy moments that touched you most. "But when dad was home...he was so angry, all the time. I got good at telling people my bruises came from my seizures and god damn them all, they bought it.
"Everything was fine until I turned sixteen. When I say fine...when you live in that situation the best thing you can do is survive, and to you it's fine. But then one day it fell apart. Pops owed some people money, he was into meth big-time. They came to collect but there was no money, nothing we had of value to give them except the truck which pops loved. So he sold me. Nice, pretty sixteen year old virgin and he sold me." I couldn't meet Val's eyes and made sure to study the beach scene out the window as I went on. "I lost it. Started screaming, kicking, punching...somehow I got away.
"I ran for miles in the snow, made it into Duluth. It was hard. Begging didn't bring much money, and I was so thin and drawn people thought I was younger and called child services on me multiple times. I took to stealing. It started by breaking into empty houses to sleep somewhere warm, stealing food from stores. I'm not proud of that. I got into fights, I did...things I won't ever talk about. I made enough a year later to get on a Greyhound, but only to the Twin Cities. I decided to go on the straight and narrow after one last lie, and with a fake ID I got work as a waitress. I got my GED, and went to community college. When I was almost twenty I transferred to the U of M, worked my way through school and graduate school. I moved to Chicago with my best friend and I have to admit, went a little nuts. That hole in my soul left from that life I thought I could fill with meaningless sex, but it didn't work. I got older, less happy, less sure of life, and then Alessandra came.
"That's it, the short version. Even with your assurances I'll say no more, go no further."
Val was quiet for a long moment and then strode over to the window and leaned on the ledge. Outside on the beach four witches and their wolf packs were playing a game of volleyball, happy in the moment and gorgeous.
"It might surprise you, but my origins were humble. See, it was my uncle Lucius who was supposed to inherit the magic, the one who took the test. My father was born the third son, but the second eldest to survive to adulthood. There was no money and we struggled. I was a stable boy for uncle Lucius. My mother had been one of his slaves, my father, a poor artist, sacrificed much to buy her. I was forever regarded as the son of a slave, a worthless bastard as my uncle didn't sell her to my father until I was two. I was born a peasant bastard. Life was...harsh. When my uncle died in battle it came as a true shock that his wife had borne him two sons and three daughters all fathered by another man. My father then became the heir to magic and for the first time, when I was a man of twenty-three with my own wife, the witch of our line came to us and explained magic. Two years later he died. My father failed the second test and had his memory wiped. I succeeded, obviously."
I wondered why he shared that, and then he turned back to face me.
