Tarot Academy 4 - Sarah Piper Page 0,102

that what you said about mental magicks?”

“Yes, and I stand by it. But Doc? This is the one time. The one time out of ten.” She grips me tighter, her eyes imploring. “I don’t know how much clearer I can be. The Dark Magician is stealing the souls of the executed witches and mages, turning their bodies into a soulless army with all of the power and none of the conscience. He’s doing the same thing to the Light Arcana—that’s his plan. That’s how he turns them dark. So unless you want to condemn Ani to that fate and lose him forever, we need to hack into his mind, scramble everything up, and break him out of Judgment’s hold.”

“If what you’re saying is true,” Kirin says, “we don’t even know if that’ll work. Ani’s soul—the very thing that makes him Ani—is gone. Even if we could break Judgment’s influence and turn Ani back to our side, what then?”

“That is tomorrow’s problem,” she says confidently. Then, turning back to me, “I know how you feel about this. What happened to Elizabeth—”

“My father,” I blurt out. “He was the dark mage who manipulated her. And he did it simply to prove that he was better than me. Better at mental magicks. Better at cruelty. Better at the sheer terror that would keep me beholden to him for my entire life, whether or not I ever set foot in his house again. But I had to, one more time.”

I pick up the bottle, giving it another gentle swirl. The black mist climbs up the inside, desperate to escape.

“One more time, to deliver my final message. My final proof that no, he wasn’t better at cruelty. Not by a long shot.”

She blinks up at me, thoughts flitting behind her eyes at a mile-a-minute. That’s only part of the story though, part of my long and complicated history with this particular potion, with this particular trick.

There’s no need to reveal the rest.

Why did you do it?

Sorry, I know. You’re always sorry…

“We can try to prove how much we love him,” I say, still trying to sway her onto some other path, anyone but this one. “But he—”

“We don’t need to manipulate him with love, Doc.” She moves her hand to my chest, her eyes hardening right along with her resolve. “We need to do it with fear. We need to make him believe in something so awe-inspiring, so terrifying, it overrides his circuits and gives him a complete reboot.”

I glance down at the bottle in my hand, the black smoke calling to some dark, secret part of my soul.

Shame burns a hot path across my chest.

“You want me to judge you for what you did to your father and Janelle,” she says, reading my energy, damn near reading my thoughts. “To punish you. For something that any one of us might have done in the same position.”

“Might have, might not have. But I did do it, Stevie. More than once.”

Kirin and Baz remain silent.

“We call ourselves Light Arcana,” she says. “And our enemies are the Dark. It’s an easy way to draw clear lines in the sand, right? But the truth is, there are more shades of gray between us than we can count, and most days, we’re all just fighting for what we believe, deep in our hearts, is right. For the people we love. For the people we most want to protect. So no, I won’t condemn you for this, Doc. Not for your father. Not for Janelle. And not, when the night is over, for Ani. Because he’s ours to love and protect.” She presses a hand to her heart, her voice breaking. “Ours. The family he chose. The family that chose him. The family that wants and loves him. The family that needs his light in our lives—not because of some stupid prophecy or magickal war, not because we share DNA, but simply because he belongs to us, now and always.”

Tears spill down her cheeks, but Stevie’s smiling, her love for Ani bolstering her, giving her hope.

I wish I could feel it too, but when I look down at Ani now, all I see is the Dark Sun, the mage who incinerated an entire town—his hometown—murdering thousands of innocent people.

Ani—our Ani, the one we chose, the one we love—he’ll never recover from that.

And the worst part is, I saw it coming. That night beneath the Towers of Breath and Blade, when he conjured the witchfire against Janelle and Casey, I knew