Persie Merlin and the Witch Hunters - Bella Forrest Page 0,126

more of a realist these days. I’m sure he doesn’t want to face what he could be.” Her eyes flickered over her phone screen. “Based on what we’ve seen, I think he’ll just double-down on trying to fight it. He let the witch hunters attack us, despite everything we did for him. I’ve got no choice but to see that as a broken truce. Next time we meet, if we meet, we might have a war on our hands. Veritas gave us a taste of what they can do tonight, and they mean business. Atlas spooked them, but who knows if that’ll be enough to keep them away?”

“Then we must be cautious,” I urged. “We should keep what we know between the three of us and observe Victoria whenever possible. I’d like to hope that, if she did this, she had a good reason. And if we no longer have the ability to ask Reid, then Victoria is the only one with answers. I’m becoming increasingly certain that she knows more about the witch hunters than she’s willing to divulge.”

Persie sighed. “I’ll send Reid a text, but I won’t hold my breath for a reply. In the meantime, I’ll try and pry some information out of Victoria during our private sessions.”

“Carefully!” I warned. Victoria could smell a rat a mile off, and she had a reputation to uphold. If she caught even the faintest whiff that someone knew she’d meddled with a non-magical, there would be definite trouble. “Speaking of which, we need to get back to the Institute and get Atlas safely in the Repository, before someone notices we’re missing.”

We set off via chalk-door to the Institute, and I thought about how it would have been a shame to climb straight out of a hellish frying pan only to topple into the fire of Victoria’s wrath. Especially now that I had an inkling of what she was truly capable of.

Thirty-Four

Persie

A few days passed without incident, and normality somehow resumed. Atlas found a new home in the glass enclosure that had been Gren’s—a bittersweet replacement for a monster I’d never forget. We’d covered his appearance by telling Victoria I’d had a huge Purge while I was visiting the Repository and he was the result, though I still needed to come up with a name for his shiny new species. We’d decided to keep my ability to Purge brand new beings between the three of us—me, Genie, and Nathan—so I really did need to label the species sharpish, so Nathan could create a backstory for their kind and stop any potential freak outs. As a placeholder, we were going with a ‘Colossus.’ And we’d covered Gren’s disappearance by saying he’d succumbed to a mystery illness. It wasn’t entirely untrue. He had died because of a bunch of people who weren’t unlike a deadly virus.

I visited Atlas and the pixies as often as I could, but the daily workload of classes and homework and personal study time took priority in my everyday life, made all the more difficult by the lingering effects of Purging such a powerful monster. Every so often, Genie would nudge me awake in the middle of a lecture or slip me one of her famed Atlantean energy brews to get me through the day. I knew the fatigue and the muscle aches would wear off soon; in the meantime, all I could do was endure.

The Institute’s normality might’ve resumed, but mine hadn’t. Being here, walking these familiar halls, pretending everything was peachy, just felt… wrong. I’d tried to be discreet during my private sessions with Victoria, hoping to surreptitiously crowbar some intel about the Anghenfil curse from her, but she was an expert in evasion and deflection. The not-knowing continued to weigh heavy on my mind, particularly because Reid hadn’t texted me back. Total radio silence.

What happened to clear-cut good and evil, huh? It was my biggest takeaway from everything I’d been through. Reid should’ve been the obvious villain, but he’d acted out of concern for his people and the wider world, and continued to suffer under a curse that had been forced on him. He’d taken that as his weight to bear, for the sake of everyone else. The antidote had gotten twisted in the same way the curse had, curing the side-effect of the contagion instead of Reid. I knew it was still working, too, because he hadn’t made contact to tell me otherwise and ask for a different antidote. Plus, I’d spoken with Leviathan, who’d