The Tragedy of Knowledge (17 page)

“Okay, so what?”

“Well, for starters …” He returned the Book of the Ancients to me, pointing to the last illustrated page. “If the ancients are leading us in the right direction, it looks as if you’re the firestarter this time.”

My eyes landed on the page. I stared hard at it, willing it to tell me otherwise.

No such luck.

Gavin and Josh appeared by my side, Gavin’s voice cooler than before, but still bitter. “What about the blood and the sacrifice?”

“You are the ones casting the spell. Only time will tell.”

“What the hell kind of vague answer is that? Gérard
planned
the original spell. He had designated players all lined up. Why aren’t the ancients giving us
those
answers?” Gavin smacked the page. “Why isn’t this thing lighting up to tell us who should do what?”

“What I mean is, you will have to choose who plays which role in the ritual. The book reveals truths as it’s destined to. That’s always how it’s worked. When the time comes, it will confirm whether you’re on the right path. In our day, it revealed wisdom for the witches: how to live, the meaning of life, those sorts of things. This prophecy we’re dealing with is new. We know as much about it as you do, if not less.”

“Yeah,” Dali chimed in. “We’ve been wolves for the last few decades, remember? We’re not exactly in the loop.”

Akim nodded, his eyebrows pulling together in thought. “And there’s still one other thing we need to figure out.”

Josh reached over and closed the Book of the Ancients, took it from my hand and placed it into my backpack. Words were still dead on my lips.

“Which is?” Gavin asked.

“Why Gérard hasn’t come for us yet. And why he let Camille come to us when he knows we hold the secret to his destruction—”

The wooden latch clicked on the windmill door and we all turned to face the intruder, Josh, Gavin, and I instantly drawing our knives when it creaked open.

“I think I can answer that for you,” Scarlet cooed, withdrawing a knife of her own from her inner thigh, just below the hem of her dress. She bared her fangs and shot forward, heading straight for Dali and Akim. Josh lurched behind me to whisk Dali and Akim out of the way, and before Gavin could, I collided with her. In a moment of supreme glory, our eyes met and I plunged my silver dagger straight into her heart.

10

SIREN

“Camille!” Gavin shouted from behind me. Scarlet looked down at the dagger and then back up at me, a euphoric smile spreading across her face. I glanced down at my fingers in shock. They were wrapped tightly around the dagger’s handle, the end of the blade shoved deep into her chest. Seeing no smoke radiate from her chest and hearing no burning flesh, I stumbled back, waiting for her to drop or cry out. Instead, she laughed and shoved me back farther, straight into Gavin’s arms, yanking the dagger from her heart with vigor. She’d found a way to enhance her protection spell—the one Vivienne helped us cast—the last time we were here, in Amaranth, managing to evade us after she destroyed our mission. Was the same spell protecting her now? How had she kept it intact since then?

My mind was spinning, but my reflexes swiftly caught up with my racing thoughts. I charged forward and slammed into her again, running her straight into the windmill’s brick wall. Gavin launched toward her next, coming at her from the side, but she thrust her hand into the air as I held her by the throat and swirled her wrist, just as Samira did, and Gavin flew back, landing in a stack of hay.

Tightening my grip on her throat, I bared my fangs and dug my fingers into her skin. She hissed and threw all of her force into one shove, pushing off the wall and tackling me onto the ground, landing astride me and pinning me by the throat. She peered down, a cougar ready to dig into her prey, and Gavin came at her again. She broke eye contact with me and glanced up at him as he soared through the air, zapping him clear across the space and this time, nailing him to the wall. I pressed my head back against the floor to watch him smack into the room’s brick interior.

“Ahhhhh!” he roared, realizing he couldn’t move his hands or feet. My eyes darted around the room, desperate to find Josh, Dali and Akim, but I couldn’t see them anywhere.

“I have a few tricks of my own now, Camille,” she said as she returned her triumphant smile to me, gazing down as if she held the power of a thousand suns beneath her grasp. “And I’m only going to get stronger.” The heady look frightened me, and I knew I had to think fast. My jaw clenched as I swiveled my hip to the side to twist and buck her off me, freeing up just enough room to bump her and cause her to lose her grasp of one of my wrists. I took full advantage, and delivered a punch across her face and then threw my forehead forward to punch her squarely in the nose. She fell back and I sprang to my feet, turning to find Gavin had slumped to the floor.

Scarlet stumbled as she stood, glaring at him as she directed her hand in the air to control him. His body raised slightly off the ground but then dropped, and the frustration was written over her face. She gave up as the power unraveled before her and weakened, letting her arm fall back to her side. Snatching her dagger instead, she lunged toward me again and spun me around, relying on her physical strength to position me into a headlock.

She held the knife to my throat as she backed up toward the windmill door, and Gavin inched forward, hands in the air. “What is it you want, Scarlet?” he asked.

“I already have what I want right here.”

“Let her go.”

“Ha.” Against my back, her body shook with laughter. “
Tu es très drôle.
Why don’t you run along and find your coward friends? So sorry things didn’t work out between us, but I suppose we had a good run while it lasted, right baby?”

I struggled against her grip, but the edge of her blade skimmed the skin of my throat and I shrieked in pain, the smoke drifting up and into my nostrils. Gavin started forward again, but Scarlet’s power, weak as it was now, slowed him. His steps were quicksand, each one a struggle.

“
Ah-ah-ah,
” she said, using her free hand to hold it vertical in front of me. It was shaking, as if it was warring with some unseen force, and I could feel her struggle to maintain the power she was using to control him. Pulling me tighter against her chest, she wrenched me to the left and turned us to the door to exit.

“Camille!” Gavin’s scream echoed from inside the windmill, but we were gone.

Scarlet loosened her grip on me just a hair, keeping her dagger tight and close to my collarbone, guiding me forward, down the hill and into the valley. My limbs wanted me to run, my mind urging me to fight back and break from her grip while I had a chance, knowing nothing good awaited me wherever she was planning to take me. With one glance at the shiny silver flashing near my neck and the images of what just went down in the windmill replaying in my mind, that desire was frozen in fear.

How had she acquired this kind of power? Had she known more about the witches’ magic all along, more than she originally let on? Or had she learned from Gérard himself all those years ago, and found a way to use it to her advantage now? I couldn’t wrap my brain around any of it. All I knew was I had to extract information from her, and that talking to her was likely my only chance of escape. Wherever Josh, Dali, and Akim were now, there was hope that Gavin would find them and that they’d come for me soon. If only he could move.

“Why won’t you just tell us what you want, Scarlet?” I asked. “Do you want Gavin? Well go ahead, I’m not standing in your way anymore. He and I are done.”

Scarlet slid me a side-glance, the corner of her lips giving away a hint of amusement. “You’re a terrible liar, Camille. But that’s okay. You’re also a masochistic fool, which makes you the perfect candidate for running around saving everyone else at the cost of your own suffering. You’re always more than willing to volunteer, aren’t you?” She jerked my head to the side, enjoying my murderous expression. “You are truly more naive than I gave you credit for. You really think Gavin is what I’m after? That my goal would be that shortsighted? Ha! Sure, I wanted him at first. The last time we were here I made that clear, but you didn’t comply, and I warned him you would pay. But that was only because I was hoping I could have them both in my new kingdom. Gérard is … well, he’s just delicious. But he’ll be gone often, doing God knows what, and I’ll need a king. Someone who can satisfy my whims. And Gavin
certainly
knows how to satisfy a woman.”

“What … what are you talking about?”

She ignored my question.

“Gavin chose to reject me. So be it. I’ll be perfectly content reigning on my own, and there will be plenty to keep me satisfied.”

She continued to guide me down into the valley toward the village, and I grew more frantic, desperate to see Dali, Akim, Josh or Gavin—anyone—before she dragged me somewhere out of sight and I lost any chance of being found. I said, “Where are you taking me?”

A dark laugh sounded from deep in her throat, and once again, she avoided my question. “All this time I thought Gavin found you appealing because he felt sorry for you, but it’s clearer now. You’re completely disposable. Pliable and convenient, just the way he likes it. He might have had fun with the chase, but that thrill will be gone soon, you’ll see. In the end, you’ll be nothing to him, and he’ll still be the same old Gavin I knew him to be: carnal, impulsive, and on to the next chase.”

My teeth began to grind as I worked to restrain my rage, aware my temper could take this situation from horribly bad to worse. The main village grew closer and closer as the steep decline of the windmill’s hill began to level out, and I couldn’t hold back. “I think you’re confusing me with someone,” I spat through gritted teeth.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah,
you
.”

Her eyes flashed liquid venom and she jerked us to a stop at the edge of the village’s main street. “What did you just say?”

“Gérard had fun with you, and then threw you out with the trash. Looks to me as if you’re the disposable one.”

Obviously, the wrong thing to say.

Her silver dagger collided with my torso, and as it sank into my flesh, I rejoiced in the fact that I’d hit my target, even if it meant paying for it. She watched me hit the ground with a thud and I writhed in agony at her feet, the smoke from the metal’s contact with my skin sizzling so loudly, I could barely make out her words as she hovered above me.

Seeming to sense this, she crouched down to speak close to my ear. “Apparently, not so disposable, because soon, Samira’s throne will be mine. You? You are
nothing
. Just a weak, pitiful excuse for a frozen soul. I should have ended you while I had the chance.”

Gasping, I curled into a fetal position and clutched the dagger’s handle, pulling it from my stomach and chucking it on the ground. “What’s … stopping you?”

She leaned in closer, her eyes dark coal, and picked up the dagger again, slicing it across my arm. “Because I need this,” she said, watching the blood drip down my arm and into the dirt. She kept one hand firmly on my throat while she dropped the dagger and pulled a clear vial, attached to a necklace, from her bra. She unscrewed the vial’s cap and tipped the tube to the stream of blood running down my arm, watching it fill. “Your sad, loyal blood. If I’m to reign as the new queen, Samira needs to be relieved of her duty first. The spell to break her power and transfer it to another requires the loyalist of blood to be taken and sacrificed in this realm. Gérard needed you here, alive—at least until the ritual is complete. Why else do you think he kept you around?”

She finished filling the vial and screwed the cap back on, holding it up to admire her work. “He knew your blood was the key, that you’d be the only one who’d sacrifice anything for your imbecile friends: You’d even save Samira! None of the others would do such a thing. He was going to bring you through the portal himself to perform the ritual, before those blasted witches got in his way. Isn’t it funny?” She smiled once more at the necklace, then slipped it over her head; the vial of blood dangled from her neck. “Loyalty being the price for betrayal?”

The piercing strain the dagger’s blade had left in the pit of my stomach began to spread, paralyzing my limbs and weighing me to the ground, my mobility lessening by the second.

This shouldn’t be happening, but it was.

All of it pointed to injustice, an abuse of power, an unnatural order of things. Good was supposed to triumph over evil, not the other way around. Destroying the enemy wasn’t supposed to be this hard. An army of good confronting the darkness should’ve caused its foundation to crumble by now, but instead, the light was being crushed beneath its feet.

As I lay there in the dirt, my consciousness fading while Scarlet rose to her feet above me, Joel’s words drifted through my mind:
Where is the victory without opposition?
I’d believed those words before, and I’d be damned if I was going to give up on them, even now.

I released one last battle cry, arching my back off the ground, allowing all my grief to pour from my lips. It bellowed from deep in my stomach and the depths of my soul, the wail piercing my ears as I willed my friends to hear me. Somewhere, they had to hear me. The village’s street was too quiet, everything deserted, the wind too still. Where did they go? Did they join the frontlines to retrieve help?