Persie Merlin and the Witch Hunters - Bella Forrest Page 0,94
was a journal I knew inside and out, and these events really had occurred. Sometimes, to tell a convincing lie, you had to bury it in truth. “The Dublin Coven had investigators working for months on the case, but they could never find out who did it, and the non-magicals presumed she was just an unfortunate victim who’d dropped off the radar after the coven took her in. Eventually, that’s what the Dublin Coven declared it as—the tragic death of someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But what if they were missing an important factor? What if the people who snatched this woman were an earlier version of these witch hunters, and their organization has steadily been growing ever since… or even long before then? Think about it—the more slip-ups the magical world has made, with non-magicals seeing things they shouldn’t and evading our track-and-trace methods, the more weight would be given to these conspiracy groups who think they know something like us exists in the world.”
Victoria pursed her lips, a subtle response that sent a dagger of ice through my heart, because I knew it meant she wanted to throw something or bang her fists on the desk. “We don’t even know that we are dealing with witch hunters, Nathan. You, of all people, should know that it is unwise to jump to conclusions.” Her tone remained eerily calm. “I am not doubting that the people in that journal may have been witch hunters, but they could just as easily have been magicals who got lucky in avoiding capture for that poor woman’s death.”
“True, but there’s more.” This was where the lie came in. Well, it was more of an embellishment. “Ronan makes a note of seeing one of the men’s forearms. The man had a tattoo of a Celtic cross with the words ‘Veritas Aequitas’ written around it.” The truth was that Ronan had seen a tattoo with a Celtic cross, but in the journal he had only specified seeing the “Aequitas” part.
Her eyebrow rose a quarter inch. “Truth and justice,” she translated.
I nodded. The two words were often seen together in Latin; I’d only taken a few liberties to pull a few puzzle pieces together. “Exactly,” I said. “But what if they dropped the Aequitas part somewhere along the way? What if the Veritas and the witch hunters are the same thing, with a long history of capturing magicals to… I don’t know, wheedle information and magical devices out of them. Know-your-enemy kinds of endeavors, or to deliver warnings to magicals who had come too close to non-magical families. One nasty divorce between a magical and a non-magical, or a falling out between mixed friends, and all those secrets would come tumbling out. Maybe these are the results of non-magicals who’d been forewarned about mindwiping by magicals in their lives, before those relationships—whatever they might have been—deteriorated?” I theorized. The more I talked it through, the less it sounded outlandish or falsified at all. Maybe “Veritas Aequitas” was precisely what Ronan would have seen, had he been able to see the entire tattoo. However, my plan of action was far simpler than finding confirmation of my theory. I hoped that, by simply speaking at a mile a minute, I would be able to bamboozle her into giving up some truths of her own about these Veritas witch hunters.
“What is it you are actually asking, Nathan? Or have you come here just to offer theories to aid the investigation?”
Two masters of craftiness meet… who will win? I hadn’t forgotten just how clever she could be, but I was certainly being given some kind of lesson. It appeared she could see right through my intent, which meant I needed to crank up the heat.
“My point is—Ronan transferred to the Institute when it was first built, to take on the role of living encyclopedia for all things monster, where he remained until his death. That’s how I came to find his journal in the library,” I explained, thinking fast. “There are references to witch hunters in his later notes. Two events in particular: a magical’s disappearance in Galway and another from Cork. Both had the same methodology as the one in 1972, which is likely why he made note of them. The magicals were taken unawares, then returned some three weeks later in a state of physical harm and amnesia. And one of the returnees kept screaming every time he saw a Celtic cross.” Again,