I thought that coming to the Vault was going to be an exercise in awe, of witnessing the literal foundation of the Brandt family’s power. I did not expect to go from bewildered wonder to abject horror in the span of so many seconds.
The woman on the plinth was alive, very much so, but she might have been better off dead. Her bulbous gray eyes rolled about in sheer terror, searching far beyond the room for something only she could see.
Imagine, for a moment, a woman made out of wax, or a candle in the shape of a human being. Now leave that figure out in the sun. Set it on a warm pavement.
Set fire to its hair.
“This is Agatha Black,” Luella said. “Perhaps one of the most powerful witches to ever walk this earth. She was my mother, and grandmother to Sebastion. A strong woman, brimming with destructive force, a sorceress with a brilliant mind.” Luella’s breath caught in her throat. “But even the best among us make mistakes.”
This had to have been one hell of a mistake. What could cause someone to be warped as grotesquely as Agatha was? This was a husk of a person, no longer human. The thing on the plinth lurched and jerked, twitching away from threats we couldn’t perceive.
Bastion made sure to catch my eye, his arms folded across his chest. For once he didn’t seem like the impetuous, arrogant boy I’d always made him out to be. For once he looked like a man, albeit one tarnished by his past and his loss.
“I told you, once, that this is what happens to those who draw the attention of the Eldest. Grandmother was at the peak of her power, one of the strongest the Lorica had ever recorded. But she wanted more, much more than the entities could give her. Gods, demons, creatures of myth, none of them could have done something this cruel.” Bastion shook his head, watching his grandmother with something that looked like anger, then something that looked like pity. “Only the Eldest.”
I remember that night. It was just before we first contacted Hecate, in a dark alley, when we were waiting for Prudence to show up with the reagents we needed for the communion. This was what Bastion meant. Anyone who toyed with the Eldest didn’t truly know what was coming to them. This was the consequence of attracting their sightless, uncaring eyes: cursed to live endlessly, blind yet all-seeing, screaming with a mouth that has no voice, in agony, undying.
“It would be more merciful to kill her,” Sterling muttered. I went still as a rock. The silence was tense, and brutal, until Luella spoke again.
“You say that as if we haven’t tried.”
“It’s the nature of the Eldest,” Bastion said, his voice dropping in volume each time he uttered their name. “This was her curse, to be twisted into this form forever. And we know that she’s screaming. You can’t hear her, but all the time, she’s screaming.”
I couldn’t bear to look, to see that he was telling the truth, to see the way her lips wavered and stretched taut as her mouth issued its voiceless scream. Gods knew how long she’d been screaming.
“We tried the Null Dagger,” Luella said, watching her mother with pity. “That was why Sebastion liked to practice with his knife. Theoretically, we thought that damping the magic surrounding her curse would create an opening long enough for the knife to pierce both the enchantment and her heart.” She shook her head. “But it didn’t work. Worthless.”
So that’s what the pocketknife was for. I avoided Bastion’s eyes carefully, and with nowhere else to look – not Agatha’s suffering, nor Luella’s mourning – I turned my eyes to the ground.
“Mother,” Bastion said. “We should go. It isn’t good for you to stay too long. You know how you get.”
“It’s all right, Sebastion.” Her voice was hoarser. “I’ll be quite all right. You go on ahead. I’ll stay. Just a bit longer.”
I snuck a glimpse of Luella’s face then, catching the reddening around the rim of her eyes. She smiled at me tightly, then turned to Bastion again.
“I’ll only be a few minutes. Make sure Silas has a fresh drink waiting for me when I come upstairs.” She gazed at Agatha, then sniffled quietly. “Come to think of it, tell him to leave the bottle.”
Bastion led us wordlessly out of Agatha’s chamber, then in silence through the tunnel heading back into the manor. When we finally emerged in the house’s foyer, he cleared his throat, then addressed me in an oddly formal way.
“So now you’ve been to the vault, and you’ve met grandmother. This has to be proof to you that I was wrong about the break-in. You have my help if you need it to stop whatever the hell is plaguing Valero. But as for Agatha? I’d rather no one else find out.”
He angled his head at Sterling, waiting for a response.
“I mean this in the kindest way I can,” Sterling said. “I could care less. No one will ever know.”
Bastion looked at me next, his eyes as imploring as I’d ever seen them.
“Your secret’s safe with me.”
And that’s why I felt like human garbage when, the next morning, we found ourselves back at the Boneyard, Sterling still in his bedroom avoiding the sun, and me swelling with guilt as I recounted the evening to Carver.
I don’t know. I had to tell someone. He needed to know what we were up against, about both the doppelgangers that had popped up like poisonous mushrooms throughout the city, and about the thing that used to be Agatha Black.
“It feels,” Carver said, “as if we draw closer and closer to the Eldest with every passing day. I won’t pretend and say that things will get better or easier, Dustin. The Eldest have slept for a very, very long time, but considering recent events – and considering Thea’s actions – I fear that they’ve set their sights on the earth once more.”
We were at his desk, the one that sat in the middle of a vast, empty room within the even vaster emptiness of the Boneyard. The darkness around us, the thin space, all of it only pressed me into something smaller, less significant. A speck of dirt in the cosmos.
“If they do finally decide to step into our plane, could we even hope to fight them?” I pushed the fist of one hand into my palm, twisting it there, uncertain, and maybe slightly afraid. “Could we hope to stop them?”