Persie Merlin and the Witch Hunters - Bella Forrest Page 0,85

had no clue whatsoever.

Twenty-Four

Persie

Silence stretched between us while he tried to win me over with the full effect of his sad, bleeding-heart eyes. He reminded me of an Alsatian—cute to look at from afar, but ready to bite your hand off if you got too close. Honestly, I was mostly stalling for time as I attempted to form some kind of response to his cry for help.

Finally, I straightened my back and lifted my chin, the way my mom always did when faced with a hard decision. “I might’ve considered it at another time, but I’m not just going to forget about all the terrible things you’ve done. My friend survived, but you still killed her. And you’ve now kidnapped me twice. Don’t you think it’s a little too late for you to ask for my help?” He was doing exactly as I’d advised him in the fishery, to just ask, but I couldn’t get rid of the image of a deathly pale, motionless, fallen Genie. It didn’t matter that she’d been resurrected. She’d still died for long enough for me to feel the loss of her, and that trauma clung to me like a tangle of barbed wire, even without the kidnappings and his people’s hatred of mine to add the bitter cherry on top.

He emulated my stance, sitting up taller. “Then yer as heartless as I was told yer kind are. Ye only care about yer kind, and the rest of us who ain’t magic can go te hell.” His eyes narrowed, a stubborn pride hardening the lines of his sculpted face. “Ye say I should’ve asked outright, like it would’ve been so easy. Like ye wouldn’t have tried te mindwipe me if ye found out I knew about witchy folk. Ye seem te be forgettin’, I’ve seen people after they’ve had their memories scooped out, and it ain’t a pretty sight. It ain’t morally right, neither, but witches don’t care about that, do they? Ye don’t have any morals, unless it’s te do with yer own people. If I told ye that witches would get infected by this curse, I bet ye’d be jumpin’ out yer seat te help me. But I ain’t a liar, so I’m not about te make stuff up.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or punch him again. Did he really think he had the moral high ground, after what he’d done? And the irony was that he wasn’t even right. Yes, there were non-magicals who’d had their minds wiped in exceptional circumstances, but there were also non-magicals like my aunt who worked for the magical world as an educator and an envoy. Besides, mindwiping was generally only performed to avoid the wider non-magical world finding out about us and waging a fear-fueled war against us.

“I don’t know where you’re getting your intel, but you’ve clearly got the wrong idea about us.” I turned the frozen peas over on my knuckles to keep myself from punching him again. “We’ve helped countless non-magicals like you, and we’ve done it without mindwiping. Usually we just ask for voluntary silence, so non-magicals don’t get trigger-happy and try to wipe us off the face of the Earth.”

“Oh, ‘cause ye wouldn’t fry the lot of us first with them sparks ye shoot out your hands!” he shot back.

I clenched my jaw. “I don’t shoot sparks out of my hands. I don’t have any abilities at all, other than vomiting up monsters. I thought I was non-magical, too, until I turned eighteen. Someone put a curse on me that makes me vomit said monsters. So, don’t pretend you’ve got some monopoly on unwanted curses.”

He tilted his head, his eyes widening slightly. “Do these monsters ye throw up hurt people?”

“Occasionally, if I’m not fast enough to catch them,” I replied, thinking of my first Purge—the hydra that had almost bitten off Kes’s head. But that was a long time ago now, and my control had improved exponentially since then. “But I don’t hurt people. Not like you do.”

He growled in the back of his throat and I flinched, terrified he was going to turn again, but he didn’t. “That ain’t me. Aren’t ye listenin’ te a word I’m sayin’? Ye should understand better than anyone where I’m comin’ from. The Fear Dearg hurts people, not me. And don’t start harpin’ on about that car battery again. That were a terrible idea on my part, but I’d never have used it on ye. It were supposed to intimidate ye, and then