From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 175
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
"What is it?" Millie asked.
"They're getting angry," Kat said, nodding at the knot of armed men across the street.
"Good," Niamh said.
Kat's blue eyes never wavered. "They tried to kill us."
"And they failed," Niamh replied.
Millie shot her a look. "Don't push her. She's been through this before."
Niamh looked over at Kat and her smile faded, thankfully keeping her tongue sealed firmly behind it.
The sound of a high male voice shrieking in German drew their attention forward again. Though Millie didn't doubt the translation she got, it still left her dumbfounded. Hitler spoke, if that was the word, with wild gesticulations and quite a bit of spittle that Millie could make out from across the square. He might have been used to not needing a megaphone, getting by with sheer manic intensity, but after following Helga, he probably should have bothered. It was just a blustering screed against foreigners and minorities, some pap about what it meant to be a true German that devolved into screeching about traitors and fifth columnists, and Millie stopped paying attention.
Helga's voice, even before her Manifest, was opera-trained to project to an audience of thousands, while Hitler simply sprayed it everywhere and hoped it would stick, by the sound of it.
Overall, Millie wasn't impressed.
With an overbaked rhetorical flourish, he finished his address to single-minded chanting of some kind by his followers, and jeers from Helga's side.
"Do those sound like answers to you?" Helga cried. "Is that going to help you feed your children? Is that a job offer?"
"No!" was the crowd's response.
"Are you going to let an Austrian lecture you on the dangers of foreigners?"
There was a wave of nervous titters, followed by a renewed surge of confidence and solidarity. "No!"
"Do you, the common people, fear hard work?"
"No!"
"Do you want things handed to you?"
"No!"
"Will you trust your children's future to men with guns who promise easy answers?"
"No!"
"Will you let slogans and violence sway you?"
"No!"
"Do you want a way out of our problems together?"
"Yes!"
"Will you help us find them?"
"Yes!"
"Do you stand with me?"
"Yes!"
"Then let us stand! Together!"
The crowd around Millie erupted as one, long-sought hope finally surging through them like a river returning to a parched desert in a glorious summer squall, washing over the built-up detritus and sending it tumbling out to sea. It was an energy unlike Millie had ever felt, and she couldn't help but get caught up in it. She wasn't even German, and she wanted to roll up her sleeves and get to work!
"We reject fanaticism! We reject fear! We reject you!"
With a stage-worthy flourish, Helga spun right around, turning her back on Hitler and his thugs without a second glance. The crowd took their cue and turned as well, so that all those brown shirts saw was nothing but the backs of the people they had come to intimidate.
EVE turned with them.
Even standing to the side as Millie and the others were, it was exhilarating. Such solidarity in the face of fear, the single-minded, emphatic rejection of everything EVE had been founded to oppose brought tears to her eyes and sent her heart soaring.
But Niamh had been wrong.
There was a third thing bullies responded to: being ignored.
A would-be demagogue screeched, and tiny men, unable or unwilling to think for themselves, did what they did best: obeyed.
The instant their guns came up, witchscale bloomed alongside the Sword of Stars, and Millie exploded forward.
Reports rang out, and she hurled herself over the crowd on tendrils of magic to pounce on Helga, shoving her to the ground and encasing them both in armour before they landed.
All around them, bodies fell, some to instant stillness and others into writhing agony. Blood burst across Millie's mask as a woman thudded to the concrete, the front of her neck blown open. The stampede was immediate, the crowd frantically seeking safety in every direction at once.
"I need you to stand up," Millie said into Helga's ear. "Right now. I'll protect you. Give them a target so more can get away. Trust me."
Helga nodded in a single jerk.
Amidst the chaos of blood and screaming, the most famous witch in Germany rose to her feet to stand in a hail of gunfire.
The demonic scream of ricochets rent the air as the bullets deflected off of witchscale, exploding through nearby brick. Glass shattered, the sharp thumps of lead punching straight through steel as every gun was trained on the woman who had dared stand up to them and say no.
She persisted.
"Cover your ears."
The moment Millie did, a sound unlike any other rent the atmosphere. It was the song of the Siren, the wail of a Banshee, the power of a diva and the righteous fury of a Manifested witch.
The rapid pops of the guns meant to end it were briefly rendered whimpers before the shockwave swallowed them completely. All who stood fell, blown backwards to tumble over their comrades, anyone with air in their lungs collapsed as the overpressure tore it from them in violent red mists.
Men's mouths fell open as if to scream, but there was no sound to be heard, as though the air itself refused to carry it. The blood-red banners were shredded, ripping away from splintering poles in clouds of iconographic viscera.
Himmler's eyeglasses exploded, blasting his eyes into mince. He clutched at his face as blood erupted beneath his hands, while the only others to move were the ones crawling away, spitting up blood while more ran freely from their ears.
What followed was deeper and thicker than silence, the air reverberating with the noiseless echo of what had just torn it apart. But as it faded, moans and cries filled the square, from the innocent as much as the guilty.
Helga began to sway on her feet, and Millie bolted up to catch her before she collapsed. Thankfully she only appeared overtired, with no signs of burst blood vessels or anything else that would indicate she'd pushed her brand-new Manifest too far.
"I've got you," Millie reassured her as she watched Adolf Hitler crawl away on hands and knees over his fallen followers whether they showed signs of life or not.
"Did it work? Hold me steady," Helga said as she turned slowly to take in those behind her.
There was blood everywhere, in pools and spatters, but all of it from gunshots. Millie counted eight dead, with at least nine more grievously wounded. Helga had managed to focus her Manifest entirely in one direction, where a field of felled bodies awaited harvest, most by an ambulance, some by the Reaper.
But Helga's attention was only for her people. "What have I done?"
"Exactly what you should have."
All around them, the streets of a peaceful resort town were carnage. Between the gunfire and Helga's Manifest, cars were overturned, telegraph wires snapped, windows shattered.
Off to one side, far from the human wreckage that Millie stood before, were two more prone bodies, one clad all in white.
But Millie's worst nightmare never had time to form, as the second swiftly took its place.
"Niamh!" Kat's voice was strained past its limits, and Millie barely spared Helga a glance before thundering away with every ounce of speed her legs could tear out of the ground. "Millie! Oh, God, someone please help!"
Witchscale thumped into the wall, taking all the impact of Millie coming to an instant halt beside Kat.
Draped over her was Niamh, her green coat slowly blackening with blood.
"She's alive," Kat said between shortened breaths, eyes wide in shock and terror. "I don't think I can move her."
"Are you all right?" Millie asked as she fell to her knees and sought her mentor's eyes.
"Y- yes…" Kat replied, dazed. "Millie, what's happened to her?"
In the centre of the spreading blood was a ragged hole, alternately oozing and bubbling with every one of Niamh's laboured breaths.
With shaking hands, Millie brushed the hair from Niamh's face to see her eyes open and staring, unmoving. "Niamh? Niamh can you hear me?"
A long, wet wheeze passed. "Aye… girlie… still here…"
"I'm going to move her." Millie let her witchscale distend and deform, working it between the two prone forms until she could take Niamh's weight with it. "I've got her."
As Kat worked her way out from under Niamh, it revealed her bright white coat and blouse were stained with blood, witchscale smearing it down her trousers. "Niamh, Niamh, oh God, I'm so sorry. Why? You didn't have to do that…" Thin, pale fingers sought Niamh's hand, trembling as they closed over it. "Someone get help!"
"You're… too important… Millie…?"
"Don't speak, just… goddammit, Niamh." Tears welled in Millie's eyes, swollen and painful, but she couldn't let them fall. Not yet. Running her fingers through Niamh's coal-black hair, everything that needed saying ran through Millie's mind, but now there was no time.
"Did…" Niamh's every breath came slower than the last. "Did I… make a difference?"
"More than any of us. Kat's unharmed. You…" Millie swallowed against the lump in her throat, "snatched life from death so many times… I don't suppose you can manage one more?" The first tear slid from Millie's cheek to spatter on the back of her mentor's hand.
"Not this time…"
Kat knelt down so Niamh could see her. "Niamh? Thank you. You saved my life… I can't…" Her features twisted in grief, red threads spidering from the ice-blue rings that had always borne so much with such grace. Now they were drowning in grief, and words failed the witch who always knew what to say. "Thank you."
"Did my job…"
The thing that had consumed Niamh for centuries. The only thing she knew, that she would let herself know. Her single-minded purpose since the moment she'd Manifested. But as her breaths began to weaken, her eyes started to lose focus, and Millie knew what needed to be said.
"And it's done now, you can rest."
Niamh's thumb weakly found Millie's finger.
"I love you."
"I love… you too…" The tension that Niamh had always held began to ebb, the mask she'd so long worn slipping away. "Get to see… my little girl…" Grey eyes widened, as if they'd finally found something they'd long been seeking.
"She's so beautiful…"
And then she was gone.
Victoria shot bolt upright directly into a sunbeam, her chest heaving. The reason why evaporated before she even got the curtains closed, however, leaving her to experience her headache in dimness and confusion.
Cursing herself, she slipped from bed and into the flat proper without bothering with her slippers or housecoat. Beelining straight for the bathroom, she downed two entire glasses of water before relieving herself of what felt like twice that amount.
As she washed her hands, the eyes looking back at her in the mirror were swollen, purpled as though she'd been in a fight. One she was now determined to win.
She thought back on the spotty, half-filled path that had gotten her here, and vowed to make it up to the ones who had carried her over the finish line. Her behaviour had been inexcusable, no matter how much a dream tried to reassure her to the opposite, but it felt like getting over the effects were going to require a minor miracle.
Something her Coven-mate specialised in.
"Good morning, Victoria." Elise stopped in the doorway, her smile half-formed. "Or perhaps not. What happened to you?"
"I did. I will explain later, but more important business must take priority. Do you have a moment?"
Elise glanced back into her flat at the clock. "If you do not mind watching me prepare for work."
"I will very likely be too lost in thought to notice. No offence."
"None taken. But you look awful, let me at least restore what I can first."
Nodding her eternally grateful consent, Victoria held out her wrist. The moment Elise's fingers touched it, Victoria's first hangover melted away in moments. She hoped it would be her last. "Thank you."
Elise hesitated. "It is my pleasure, but you did not sleep for days. I suspect the reason is what you wish to speak about?"
"Yes, my investigation. I am at an impasse, and in need of someone I can… trust." Victoria knew how explosive the word was in the context of EVE, but sometimes the only way to breach a significant blockage was with dynamite.
Elise held Victoria's gaze in the mirror a long moment, water dripping from her nose. "I see." She dried her face, then began taking a brush to her platinum tresses. "I will help how I can. What is the problem?"
With Victoria's mind restored, it took off without her, making up for the time she'd lost trying to pickle it with abandon. To be safe, and to burn off some of her energy, she threw up a silencing screen. "The most plausible theory I have right now is that Alex tried to poison herself, but I don't want to believe it. Nothing else of what I have gathered makes any sense, however. Every single lead I have followed winds up in a dead end. By itself, that is suspicious enough, but what sticks in my craw more than anything is the coincidental timing."
"Of?" Elise asked, her teeth bristling with bobby pins.
"Everything." Victoria's bare feet squeaked on the tile as they shifted with discomfort. "Zoya arrived hours after Katya and Millie left bearing a warning that Alex was potentially under threat. Alex then fell ill mere hours after that. The odds of both of those events happening independently in that span are incalculably small. I can accept one coincidence, not two."
Elise's hand stopped halfway to her head. "You suspect Zoya poisoned Alex?"
"I have no evidence of that, and I cannot come up with a motive that does not result in the attempt being 100 percent successful." Victoria brought a thumbnail to her teeth, only remembering too late that she'd already chewed it down to the quick. "She is involved. She must be."
"And what of Patrick?"
For all the magic flying around EVE, there was still little more effective than thinking aloud. "I am not convinced he actually exists."
In the sonic vacuum that followed such an assertion, there was the sound of several pins dropping. "What?"
From now on, proper rest was going to be canonised in the Conservatory's curriculum, and alcohol banished from Victoria's vocabulary. "It's too neat. Alex just happens to confess she has a mysterious beau we've never seen so much as a photograph of, retroactively I may add, days before she falls ill, and said beau just happens to be under the sway of Soviet intelligence? Willing or otherwise?"
"And Zoya is the one who told you to suspect him," Elise said.
"Precisely. As a Soviet agent, could he have initiated contact first? Yes, but where would she have met him? The only socialising Alex does, as verified by Pretoria, is at the Prop."
"Where only women are allowed."
"Correct."
"Alex said he works on the train, she could have met him there."
"In a career that would see him in constant motion, with irregular hours and make him extremely visible to the public? A contradiction."
Victoria watched Elise twist and bind her hair as she ruminated on this, muscle memory making quick work of something it would have taken Victoria ages to figure out.
"Millie told me that Alex came to her asking about her family. Her… old family. About her legacy. She has not spoken about them in years. She became Alex to separate from them. It seemed natural if she has a man. But if she does not, I too think the timing is strange."
Victoria took this in. "With me, she expressed only fear. Fear of getting caught, of what would happen to us if she did. Fears that had lain dormant until Zoya arrived."
Leaning against the tiles on the wall helped cool Victoria's overheating imagination. "So, I am left with one of two conclusions, neither pleasant: a suicide attempt or a botched assassination by someone we believe to be a friend. In either case, Zoya is at the centre."
"Perhaps," Elise said as she started in on her make-up. She never wore much on workdays, so it provided a reminder her time was running short. "But if it was the first, you do not suspect Ivy or Carice for giving Alex the Embrace? They know the true purpose of it. A gentle death at a time of one's own choosing is the only reason it exists. If she asked them for a way out…"
"Do you believe they would give it to her? Can you truly imagine for a second that anyone who knows Katya would allow her to come home to that?"
"The question would not be about Katya, Victoria. Did you think about how Millie and I would react the night you chose to end your life?"
Victoria physically recoiled from the mirror, unable to bear the sight of either person in it. "That is unfair."
"Yes. It is also true. Strike me down if it is not."
"I didn't ask for assistance to effect it. If I had, you would have rightfully said no. And helped me when you found out what I wanted. Ivy was horrified when she found out what I did."
The hair on Victoria's right side had come loose, hanging freely below her eye like the curved talon of a great raptor. When she went to brush it back in place, her fingers stopped on her temple. "My decision was selfish. Neither Ivy nor Carice would abet that for Alex. She is young and hale, not… ending."
Elise's eyes were soft as she held out a hand to bring Victoria back. "I am sorry to remind you. But you understand why I did?"
"So that I would interrogate my conclusions further. Double-check my reasoning. You know me too well," Victoria said.
"How could I not? You are the closest thing I have ever had to a true sister, beyond how witches use the word. Did it help more than it hurt?"
"I believe so."
"Good." Elise turned back to the mirror.
"So you agree with my conclusions regarding Zoya?"
With delicate strokes, Elise began applying her professional-use lipliner, only a shade darker than her natural colour. "Yes. I do not see another way."
"Excellent. In fact, I may have just thought of… Elise?"
Her face had gone completely slack and preternaturally still, showing no reaction to the lipliner streaking over her cheeks and across her nose.
"They're getting angry," Kat said, nodding at the knot of armed men across the street.
"Good," Niamh said.
Kat's blue eyes never wavered. "They tried to kill us."
"And they failed," Niamh replied.
Millie shot her a look. "Don't push her. She's been through this before."
Niamh looked over at Kat and her smile faded, thankfully keeping her tongue sealed firmly behind it.
The sound of a high male voice shrieking in German drew their attention forward again. Though Millie didn't doubt the translation she got, it still left her dumbfounded. Hitler spoke, if that was the word, with wild gesticulations and quite a bit of spittle that Millie could make out from across the square. He might have been used to not needing a megaphone, getting by with sheer manic intensity, but after following Helga, he probably should have bothered. It was just a blustering screed against foreigners and minorities, some pap about what it meant to be a true German that devolved into screeching about traitors and fifth columnists, and Millie stopped paying attention.
Helga's voice, even before her Manifest, was opera-trained to project to an audience of thousands, while Hitler simply sprayed it everywhere and hoped it would stick, by the sound of it.
Overall, Millie wasn't impressed.
With an overbaked rhetorical flourish, he finished his address to single-minded chanting of some kind by his followers, and jeers from Helga's side.
"Do those sound like answers to you?" Helga cried. "Is that going to help you feed your children? Is that a job offer?"
"No!" was the crowd's response.
"Are you going to let an Austrian lecture you on the dangers of foreigners?"
There was a wave of nervous titters, followed by a renewed surge of confidence and solidarity. "No!"
"Do you, the common people, fear hard work?"
"No!"
"Do you want things handed to you?"
"No!"
"Will you trust your children's future to men with guns who promise easy answers?"
"No!"
"Will you let slogans and violence sway you?"
"No!"
"Do you want a way out of our problems together?"
"Yes!"
"Will you help us find them?"
"Yes!"
"Do you stand with me?"
"Yes!"
"Then let us stand! Together!"
The crowd around Millie erupted as one, long-sought hope finally surging through them like a river returning to a parched desert in a glorious summer squall, washing over the built-up detritus and sending it tumbling out to sea. It was an energy unlike Millie had ever felt, and she couldn't help but get caught up in it. She wasn't even German, and she wanted to roll up her sleeves and get to work!
"We reject fanaticism! We reject fear! We reject you!"
With a stage-worthy flourish, Helga spun right around, turning her back on Hitler and his thugs without a second glance. The crowd took their cue and turned as well, so that all those brown shirts saw was nothing but the backs of the people they had come to intimidate.
EVE turned with them.
Even standing to the side as Millie and the others were, it was exhilarating. Such solidarity in the face of fear, the single-minded, emphatic rejection of everything EVE had been founded to oppose brought tears to her eyes and sent her heart soaring.
But Niamh had been wrong.
There was a third thing bullies responded to: being ignored.
A would-be demagogue screeched, and tiny men, unable or unwilling to think for themselves, did what they did best: obeyed.
The instant their guns came up, witchscale bloomed alongside the Sword of Stars, and Millie exploded forward.
Reports rang out, and she hurled herself over the crowd on tendrils of magic to pounce on Helga, shoving her to the ground and encasing them both in armour before they landed.
All around them, bodies fell, some to instant stillness and others into writhing agony. Blood burst across Millie's mask as a woman thudded to the concrete, the front of her neck blown open. The stampede was immediate, the crowd frantically seeking safety in every direction at once.
"I need you to stand up," Millie said into Helga's ear. "Right now. I'll protect you. Give them a target so more can get away. Trust me."
Helga nodded in a single jerk.
Amidst the chaos of blood and screaming, the most famous witch in Germany rose to her feet to stand in a hail of gunfire.
The demonic scream of ricochets rent the air as the bullets deflected off of witchscale, exploding through nearby brick. Glass shattered, the sharp thumps of lead punching straight through steel as every gun was trained on the woman who had dared stand up to them and say no.
She persisted.
"Cover your ears."
The moment Millie did, a sound unlike any other rent the atmosphere. It was the song of the Siren, the wail of a Banshee, the power of a diva and the righteous fury of a Manifested witch.
The rapid pops of the guns meant to end it were briefly rendered whimpers before the shockwave swallowed them completely. All who stood fell, blown backwards to tumble over their comrades, anyone with air in their lungs collapsed as the overpressure tore it from them in violent red mists.
Men's mouths fell open as if to scream, but there was no sound to be heard, as though the air itself refused to carry it. The blood-red banners were shredded, ripping away from splintering poles in clouds of iconographic viscera.
Himmler's eyeglasses exploded, blasting his eyes into mince. He clutched at his face as blood erupted beneath his hands, while the only others to move were the ones crawling away, spitting up blood while more ran freely from their ears.
What followed was deeper and thicker than silence, the air reverberating with the noiseless echo of what had just torn it apart. But as it faded, moans and cries filled the square, from the innocent as much as the guilty.
Helga began to sway on her feet, and Millie bolted up to catch her before she collapsed. Thankfully she only appeared overtired, with no signs of burst blood vessels or anything else that would indicate she'd pushed her brand-new Manifest too far.
"I've got you," Millie reassured her as she watched Adolf Hitler crawl away on hands and knees over his fallen followers whether they showed signs of life or not.
"Did it work? Hold me steady," Helga said as she turned slowly to take in those behind her.
There was blood everywhere, in pools and spatters, but all of it from gunshots. Millie counted eight dead, with at least nine more grievously wounded. Helga had managed to focus her Manifest entirely in one direction, where a field of felled bodies awaited harvest, most by an ambulance, some by the Reaper.
But Helga's attention was only for her people. "What have I done?"
"Exactly what you should have."
All around them, the streets of a peaceful resort town were carnage. Between the gunfire and Helga's Manifest, cars were overturned, telegraph wires snapped, windows shattered.
Off to one side, far from the human wreckage that Millie stood before, were two more prone bodies, one clad all in white.
But Millie's worst nightmare never had time to form, as the second swiftly took its place.
"Niamh!" Kat's voice was strained past its limits, and Millie barely spared Helga a glance before thundering away with every ounce of speed her legs could tear out of the ground. "Millie! Oh, God, someone please help!"
Witchscale thumped into the wall, taking all the impact of Millie coming to an instant halt beside Kat.
Draped over her was Niamh, her green coat slowly blackening with blood.
"She's alive," Kat said between shortened breaths, eyes wide in shock and terror. "I don't think I can move her."
"Are you all right?" Millie asked as she fell to her knees and sought her mentor's eyes.
"Y- yes…" Kat replied, dazed. "Millie, what's happened to her?"
In the centre of the spreading blood was a ragged hole, alternately oozing and bubbling with every one of Niamh's laboured breaths.
With shaking hands, Millie brushed the hair from Niamh's face to see her eyes open and staring, unmoving. "Niamh? Niamh can you hear me?"
A long, wet wheeze passed. "Aye… girlie… still here…"
"I'm going to move her." Millie let her witchscale distend and deform, working it between the two prone forms until she could take Niamh's weight with it. "I've got her."
As Kat worked her way out from under Niamh, it revealed her bright white coat and blouse were stained with blood, witchscale smearing it down her trousers. "Niamh, Niamh, oh God, I'm so sorry. Why? You didn't have to do that…" Thin, pale fingers sought Niamh's hand, trembling as they closed over it. "Someone get help!"
"You're… too important… Millie…?"
"Don't speak, just… goddammit, Niamh." Tears welled in Millie's eyes, swollen and painful, but she couldn't let them fall. Not yet. Running her fingers through Niamh's coal-black hair, everything that needed saying ran through Millie's mind, but now there was no time.
"Did…" Niamh's every breath came slower than the last. "Did I… make a difference?"
"More than any of us. Kat's unharmed. You…" Millie swallowed against the lump in her throat, "snatched life from death so many times… I don't suppose you can manage one more?" The first tear slid from Millie's cheek to spatter on the back of her mentor's hand.
"Not this time…"
Kat knelt down so Niamh could see her. "Niamh? Thank you. You saved my life… I can't…" Her features twisted in grief, red threads spidering from the ice-blue rings that had always borne so much with such grace. Now they were drowning in grief, and words failed the witch who always knew what to say. "Thank you."
"Did my job…"
The thing that had consumed Niamh for centuries. The only thing she knew, that she would let herself know. Her single-minded purpose since the moment she'd Manifested. But as her breaths began to weaken, her eyes started to lose focus, and Millie knew what needed to be said.
"And it's done now, you can rest."
Niamh's thumb weakly found Millie's finger.
"I love you."
"I love… you too…" The tension that Niamh had always held began to ebb, the mask she'd so long worn slipping away. "Get to see… my little girl…" Grey eyes widened, as if they'd finally found something they'd long been seeking.
"She's so beautiful…"
And then she was gone.
Victoria shot bolt upright directly into a sunbeam, her chest heaving. The reason why evaporated before she even got the curtains closed, however, leaving her to experience her headache in dimness and confusion.
Cursing herself, she slipped from bed and into the flat proper without bothering with her slippers or housecoat. Beelining straight for the bathroom, she downed two entire glasses of water before relieving herself of what felt like twice that amount.
As she washed her hands, the eyes looking back at her in the mirror were swollen, purpled as though she'd been in a fight. One she was now determined to win.
She thought back on the spotty, half-filled path that had gotten her here, and vowed to make it up to the ones who had carried her over the finish line. Her behaviour had been inexcusable, no matter how much a dream tried to reassure her to the opposite, but it felt like getting over the effects were going to require a minor miracle.
Something her Coven-mate specialised in.
"Good morning, Victoria." Elise stopped in the doorway, her smile half-formed. "Or perhaps not. What happened to you?"
"I did. I will explain later, but more important business must take priority. Do you have a moment?"
Elise glanced back into her flat at the clock. "If you do not mind watching me prepare for work."
"I will very likely be too lost in thought to notice. No offence."
"None taken. But you look awful, let me at least restore what I can first."
Nodding her eternally grateful consent, Victoria held out her wrist. The moment Elise's fingers touched it, Victoria's first hangover melted away in moments. She hoped it would be her last. "Thank you."
Elise hesitated. "It is my pleasure, but you did not sleep for days. I suspect the reason is what you wish to speak about?"
"Yes, my investigation. I am at an impasse, and in need of someone I can… trust." Victoria knew how explosive the word was in the context of EVE, but sometimes the only way to breach a significant blockage was with dynamite.
Elise held Victoria's gaze in the mirror a long moment, water dripping from her nose. "I see." She dried her face, then began taking a brush to her platinum tresses. "I will help how I can. What is the problem?"
With Victoria's mind restored, it took off without her, making up for the time she'd lost trying to pickle it with abandon. To be safe, and to burn off some of her energy, she threw up a silencing screen. "The most plausible theory I have right now is that Alex tried to poison herself, but I don't want to believe it. Nothing else of what I have gathered makes any sense, however. Every single lead I have followed winds up in a dead end. By itself, that is suspicious enough, but what sticks in my craw more than anything is the coincidental timing."
"Of?" Elise asked, her teeth bristling with bobby pins.
"Everything." Victoria's bare feet squeaked on the tile as they shifted with discomfort. "Zoya arrived hours after Katya and Millie left bearing a warning that Alex was potentially under threat. Alex then fell ill mere hours after that. The odds of both of those events happening independently in that span are incalculably small. I can accept one coincidence, not two."
Elise's hand stopped halfway to her head. "You suspect Zoya poisoned Alex?"
"I have no evidence of that, and I cannot come up with a motive that does not result in the attempt being 100 percent successful." Victoria brought a thumbnail to her teeth, only remembering too late that she'd already chewed it down to the quick. "She is involved. She must be."
"And what of Patrick?"
For all the magic flying around EVE, there was still little more effective than thinking aloud. "I am not convinced he actually exists."
In the sonic vacuum that followed such an assertion, there was the sound of several pins dropping. "What?"
From now on, proper rest was going to be canonised in the Conservatory's curriculum, and alcohol banished from Victoria's vocabulary. "It's too neat. Alex just happens to confess she has a mysterious beau we've never seen so much as a photograph of, retroactively I may add, days before she falls ill, and said beau just happens to be under the sway of Soviet intelligence? Willing or otherwise?"
"And Zoya is the one who told you to suspect him," Elise said.
"Precisely. As a Soviet agent, could he have initiated contact first? Yes, but where would she have met him? The only socialising Alex does, as verified by Pretoria, is at the Prop."
"Where only women are allowed."
"Correct."
"Alex said he works on the train, she could have met him there."
"In a career that would see him in constant motion, with irregular hours and make him extremely visible to the public? A contradiction."
Victoria watched Elise twist and bind her hair as she ruminated on this, muscle memory making quick work of something it would have taken Victoria ages to figure out.
"Millie told me that Alex came to her asking about her family. Her… old family. About her legacy. She has not spoken about them in years. She became Alex to separate from them. It seemed natural if she has a man. But if she does not, I too think the timing is strange."
Victoria took this in. "With me, she expressed only fear. Fear of getting caught, of what would happen to us if she did. Fears that had lain dormant until Zoya arrived."
Leaning against the tiles on the wall helped cool Victoria's overheating imagination. "So, I am left with one of two conclusions, neither pleasant: a suicide attempt or a botched assassination by someone we believe to be a friend. In either case, Zoya is at the centre."
"Perhaps," Elise said as she started in on her make-up. She never wore much on workdays, so it provided a reminder her time was running short. "But if it was the first, you do not suspect Ivy or Carice for giving Alex the Embrace? They know the true purpose of it. A gentle death at a time of one's own choosing is the only reason it exists. If she asked them for a way out…"
"Do you believe they would give it to her? Can you truly imagine for a second that anyone who knows Katya would allow her to come home to that?"
"The question would not be about Katya, Victoria. Did you think about how Millie and I would react the night you chose to end your life?"
Victoria physically recoiled from the mirror, unable to bear the sight of either person in it. "That is unfair."
"Yes. It is also true. Strike me down if it is not."
"I didn't ask for assistance to effect it. If I had, you would have rightfully said no. And helped me when you found out what I wanted. Ivy was horrified when she found out what I did."
The hair on Victoria's right side had come loose, hanging freely below her eye like the curved talon of a great raptor. When she went to brush it back in place, her fingers stopped on her temple. "My decision was selfish. Neither Ivy nor Carice would abet that for Alex. She is young and hale, not… ending."
Elise's eyes were soft as she held out a hand to bring Victoria back. "I am sorry to remind you. But you understand why I did?"
"So that I would interrogate my conclusions further. Double-check my reasoning. You know me too well," Victoria said.
"How could I not? You are the closest thing I have ever had to a true sister, beyond how witches use the word. Did it help more than it hurt?"
"I believe so."
"Good." Elise turned back to the mirror.
"So you agree with my conclusions regarding Zoya?"
With delicate strokes, Elise began applying her professional-use lipliner, only a shade darker than her natural colour. "Yes. I do not see another way."
"Excellent. In fact, I may have just thought of… Elise?"
Her face had gone completely slack and preternaturally still, showing no reaction to the lipliner streaking over her cheeks and across her nose.
