2 Witch and Famous (17 page)

I ignored that. There was one thing I couldn’t ignore, though. “Are you telling me that Niall knew all about this? All about you?”

She laughed that attractive, bell-like laughter again, but didn’t answer my question. “You’re still so young. You think that all this is wrong. You’ll learn to become an opportunist.”

I shook my head. I would never turn into that. “Jessica’s life meant so little to you? You just killed her, because it was convenient? Her love meant nothing to you?”

 “Why shouldn’t we do what we please? Jessica was lovely, but she was human. In a few short decades, she would have been dead anyway. At least this way, she had a chance to serve a useful purpose for something bigger than her human life. I took her at the peak of what she was, like the sweetest peach on the tree. She always told me that she wished things could stay like they were when she was on stage. Now people won’t have a chance to remember her any other way.”

I wanted to hit Victoria then. “You used her up, and then you made her put a noose around her own neck.”

“It was necessary.” Victoria said it so evenly. If there was regret there, it was no more than that of a chess player sacrificing a pawn. “She understood that at the end, I made sure that she understood, and her precious sister is well taken care of. How else was I to get you to this point?”

“You could have simply introduced yourself,” I suggested. “You know, the way any normal person would have.”

Victoria shook her head. “Dear Niall would have warned you away from me. He
tried
to warn me off when he heard I was here, you know. He’s been trying to keep the two of us apart. He doesn’t think I’ll be a good influence.”

“Like you were for him?” I asked. “I know all about the handfasting and how he fled you when the year was up. Clumsy, Victoria. He only needed a pair of scissors and a broken heart to free himself from you.”

“He still came running when he heard I was here.”

Now it was all beginning to make sense. Those secret meetings and Niall’s sudden absences. I didn’t doubt that on some of them, Niall had been hunting, but how many had been about looking for Victoria? How many had been him trying to warn her against going near me?

“You manipulated all of this,” I said.

Victoria’s smile was back. She obviously thought it was a compliment.

“You set me a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. You gave me the sensation of an enchantress being there. You led me to the clubs.” I thought about Niall pulling me out of the second club I had visited. “You wanted me to lose control.”

 “I wanted you to see that there is nothing wrong with being what you are.” Victoria drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. “Clearly, Niall has failed to teach you that. The way you feed on people is so delicate, like a bee gathering pollen from a flower. I wanted to see you become who you really were.”

I took a guess at the next part. “You had me shot at.”

“A little conflict with the coven seemed far more natural than the cozy arrangement you have going at the moment. They are our enemies, Elle.”

“Which is why you’ve taken all these.” I nodded at the men and women kneeling around her throne. The coven’s missing people, I was sure of it. “You
want
conflict with the coven?”

Victoria stretched languidly. “I want a lot of things, Elle.”

I swallowed back some of what I might have said then. “You turned me against Niall. You tried to make me kill him. You framed him for Jessica Hammersmith’s murder.”

Victoria spread her hands. “Actually, I was fairly confident that you would not kill him. However, I needed him to see that this dream of a life out there with you couldn’t work. Not yet.”

“Not yet?” I echoed. “Where is Niall?”

“He’s safe.” Victoria gestured to the goblins around us. “What do you see when you look around this room?”

I looked. I didn’t have a good answer. “Goblins?”

“Goblins,” Victoria agreed. “A term coined by the coven centuries back to cover all those fey who don’t suit their ends. Who don’t fit their precious Tolerance Directive. A hundred different varieties of supernatural being, shoved underground and kept here against their will, while humans…weak, foolish humans, get to walk around on the surface as they wish. Free.”

“That’s what this is about?” I asked. “You…you’re talking about coming back to the surface?”

“I’m talking about people being free. About giving the goblins back their place in the world. About taking back what the coven took from us.”

“You’re mad.”

Victoria stared at me levelly. “Is it mad to want to simply be what you are? The coven forced me down here with their hunters. It was either banishment or execution, simply because I was true to my nature.”

“Meaning that you killed people,” I guessed.

Victoria shrugged. “Yes, and for that they forced me to hide here. Is it mad that I should want that to stop, or are they the mad ones? I’ve seen you, Elle. I’ve watched you. You just want to live your life. You want to be free. But to do that, you’re putting aside what you are. I can feel the hunger in you that you insist on denying. All because the coven taught you it was wrong. That can never be right. Not for you. Not for any of those here.”

“So, you’re planning what?” I demanded. “Some kind of mass exodus to the surface? A revolution with goblins as your cannon fodder?”

Victoria smiled. I had struck a nerve.

“That doesn’t matter for now,” she said. “What matters is that we build our strength. I need you to join us. I went to a lot of trouble to get you to see things as they were. I need to know that you’ve learned those lessons. I know you have no love for the coven. So, what is that old saying? ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend?’”

“You wish,” I replied. I got it then. All of this, Jessica’s death, the faked attacks from the coven, everything, had been about recruiting me. She’d separated me from Niall. She’d set me against the coven by making it look like they were attacking me. She’d lured me here.

Oh, she wanted Niall, too. Victoria wanted
both
of us on her side if she could manage it, if not under her thumb. Yet I sensed that in a lot of ways, I mattered more to Victoria. Otherwise, she would have taken Niall a long time ago.

“No, Victoria,” I said. “I came here to get Niall and Siobhan’s boyfriend, Dougie. That’s it. You blew any chance of getting me to help you when you started killing people to get my attention.”

“You still don’t truly understand what you are, do you?” Victoria asked, standing.

“Niall and Dougie.” I looked her in the eye. “Give them back, or the coven gets to hear all about this. They will not take kindly to you using the goblins as some kind of private army. You want to stir up conflict with them? That’s one thing, but I don’t think you want them hunting you down personally. Hand over Niall and Dougie and let us walk out of here, or you’ll have every hunter they can muster coming down here.”

“Niall is…indisposed right now, and the goblin boy?” Victoria nodded to someone back in the crowd of goblins. A couple of goblins dragged something forward, depositing it at the foot of the dais. I had never liked Dougie, but even so, seeing his dead eyes staring up was hard. Seeing how it hurt and shocked Siobhan was harder.

“But you promised!” Siobhan yelled, starting forward. “You promised you wouldn’t! Dougie!” she cried out in anger and pain.

Victoria caught her, pulling the goblin girl to her in a cruel parody of true comfort. “It’s all right, Siobhan. It’s all right.”

“Let her go!” I demanded, to no avail.

I could feel the waves of emotion Victoria poured into her, pushing the now-unresisting goblin down to her knees beside the throne-like chair, down with all the witches and warlocks.

I reached out with power, trying to help her. I knew I had more potential for power than Niall, so why wouldn’t I also be able to eclipse Victoria’s strength? I decided to give it a try.

I found out the answer to that almost as soon as I touched the weavings of emotion running through Siobhan, weavings that took her grief and tied her up in it as securely as chains might have.

Victoria was old. Old, and powerful, and well fed. Whereas, I was young, and even if Niall had thought I had the potential for power, I was on the verge of starvation, magically speaking. Every strand of power Victoria had put into Siobhan seemed cable thick and impossible to break. Worse, they seemed almost sticky, catching my attention, dragging my mind down to tangle in them, too. I barely felt the moment when Victoria’s henchmen goblins grabbed me, only looking up when Victoria cupped my jaw gently, forcing me to meet her eyes.

“Teaching is always so hard,” she said softly. “Niall ran from me all those years ago, and more recently…well, even with you thinking he was a murderer, he seemed to think it would be betraying you to help me. In fact, he
refused
to help me. His old mentor, his former lover, his wife, can you imagine? So, I’ve given him some time to think. In time, I’m sure he’ll see things my way.”

“You—”

Victoria put a finger to my lips and wherever she touched me, it burned—I tried, but could not pull away. “I’m going to give you the same opportunity that I have given Niall. Not because I hate you. Not to punish you. Please don’t think that you have made me angry, Elle. I do this only because I have a duty as your new teacher. I want you to learn exactly what you are. Once you understand, I’m sure we’ll be friends.” Her lips brushed my forehead. “And so much more than that.”

I tried to protest but Victoria was so strong that I was unable to even shake my head in that moment. Even though she wasn’t even touching me I couldn’t say anything. I was too deep in the tangles she had left on Siobhan. In reaching out, I had let her in. I even had trouble drawing a full breath. She was crushing me with her power. Simply crushing me. I fought against her in my mind, to no avail. I was paralyzed.

She looked at the goblins around me with dark intent in her eyes. “Take her to the oubliette. Once she’s nice and starving, throw in a human.”

Oubliette.
A little place of forgetting. A place to forget about prisoners. The pretty word made a hole in the ground with no way out sound so much nicer than it was. I could have hurt the goblins who held me. I could have killed them, but for Victoria’s power at holding me back from struggling as I stood there in the throne room.

“How old are you?” I managed to ask. Even that took too much of an effort. It wasn’t that Victoria was controlling me. I was simply crushed by the weight of her power.

She laughed, and as if to prove that the world wasn’t fair, it wasn’t the laugh of some movie villain. It wasn’t equal parts madness and evil. It sounded, if anything, like the laugh of a slightly racy aunt. The one your parents didn’t want you ending up like, but probably slightly envied for her freedom to do as she pleased.