Her words fell on me like stones. “You told me that she had attempted to communicate with you at Hecate. Is this true?”
I could feel every eye in the room on me, even Archer’s. “Yes.”
Mrs. Casnoff leaned forward. “And has she done the same here at Thorne?”
My fingers were icy as I curled them in my lap, but I didn’t say anything. Still, Mrs. Casnoff nodded as if I had. “There’s never been a case of a ghost communicating with a Prodigium, much less following one across the Atlantic Ocean. Elodie should be haunting Hecate. Instead, she’s haunting you.” She shook her head slightly, like she couldn’t believe it. “It’s possible that it’s an aftereffect of her sharing magic with you as she was dying, but again, there is no precedent for anything like it. When we take that into account with both the powers you’ve already displayed, and your heritage, I’m afraid it leaves us with no choice.”
My mind felt like an oversaturated sponge. There was just too much information to even begin to make sense of it all. I had somehow bound Elodie to me, and despite all the work I’d done this summer to not be scary-powerful, that’s exactly what the Council was saying I was. And what did she mean, “heritage”?
Mrs. Casnoff dropped her gaze, and Lara once again scrawled something across her parchment, then spoke. “It is our ruling that you be subjected to the Removal.”
As one, the Council murmured something, a word or phrase in a language that wasn’t remotely familiar. Whatever it was, there was power in it, so much that my hair blew back off my shoulders while I sat dumbly, glued to my seat. Archer’s hand landed on mine, warm and heavy, and I was reminded of the first time we’d ever touched, the night of the assembly at Hecate. From the back of the room, I heard Dad say something, his voice sharp as a blade. As stupid as it sounds, I wanted to laugh. Looks like I was finally going to get what I’d come here for after all.
Dad was beside me now, his fingers clamped on one of my shoulders. “Sophie was at Graymalkin with Archer on my orders,” he said, and I immediately grabbed his hand.
“Dad, no!”
But he didn’t even glance at me. He kept his gaze locked on Mrs. Casnoff. “I suspected you were the one who had raised Daisy and Nick, and I sent Sophie and Archer to investigate. If anyone should go through the Removal, it should be me.” He nodded at Lara. “Being head of the Council has always been your chief desire. I cede it to you freely.” He said the same phrase they’d used when handing down mine and Archer’s sentences, and once again, a pulse of power went through the room.
This time, the surge felt stronger, and as I watched, the candles in the room guttered, nearly blowing out. Lara took a deep breath and rolled her shoulders, like something heavy had landed on them. Dad seemed to deflate a little as he said, “Just let Sophie go back to her mother unharmed.”
“Oh, James,” Lara said, almost sadly. “Your sacrifice is noble, if pointless and predictable.”
Kristopher, Roderick, and Elizabeth were staring at Dad with the same look, a strange combination of pity and disdain. The dread that had been swirling around in me for over a month suddenly came crashing down, strong and heavy, stealing my breath. This was it. The thing I’d felt coming was finally here.
“You’ve been such a disappointment to us.” Lara’s gaze flicked to me. “Both of you.”
The whole room was silent, but Lara didn’t need any encouragement to continue. This was clearly the moment she’d been waiting for. “When my father and Virginia Thorne transformed Alice, they thought they’d created the perfect weapon—a being containing more power than dreamed of, yet completely under their control. Instead, they ended up with a mad, hysterical girl who had to be put down like a dog. Of course, Father still had such high hopes for Lucy, but she refused to work for the Council. So the Council simply waited until you were old enough, James, and then disposed of your parents.”
It took me a second to realize what she was saying. Alexei Casnoff had been Alice’s maker, so he’d had control over the whole bloodline. He’d made Lucy kill her husband. My grandfather. And then he’d had her killed, too. I was surprised I could hear anything over the sudden rushing of blood in my ears, but Lara was still talking.
“Father saw the value in using demons in our war against The Eye. Sadly, your grandmother and your mother proved…incapable of being used as weapons. Father had higher hopes for you.”
I didn’t think it was possible for Dad to look any paler, but as what Lara was saying sunk in, his skin went papery white. Rage and horror coursed through me, and I waited for my magic to surge up, too. But while my powers were swirling in my blood, it was like they were locked in a glass box. I could feel them, but I couldn’t access them. “Don’t bother,” Roderick said to me. “As soon as you were sentenced to the Removal, your powers were locked away from you. Your father’s, too, once he’d spoken the spell of binding. Very useful piece of magic. Otherwise, a witch or warlock could attempt to fight their way out of the Removal.”
Next to me, Archer sat up straighter, and I saw tiny blue sparks on his fingertips. I caught his eyes and shook my head. Archer was an amazing fighter, but he wasn’t the strongest warlock. If he tried something now, he’d just end up as another stain on the wooden floor.
Lara was still looking at Dad. “However, my father was a smart man. He kept the ritual used to raise Alice just in case you did not prove yourself to be what we needed. Sadly, you have not. Nor has you daughter. But we have others.”
Dad gave a humorless laugh. “Nick and Daisy? They’re too feral to be of any use to anyone.”
“No,” Mrs. Casnoff said, speaking for the first time since I’d been sentenced. “Nick and Daisy are simply the ones you know about.” If it hadn’t been Mrs. Casnoff, I would have said her eyes seemed pleading. “You were never going to move aggressively enough against our enemies, James. I know you have personal reasons for that, but we simply couldn’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable any longer.”
“This is madness,” Dad said, his voice trembling. “You have given The Eye and the Brannicks, the whole damn lot of them, more reason than ever to exterminate our kind.”
“They have infiltrated our kind, James,” Lara said, pursing her lips. “We need every weapon at our disposal.”
She was wrong. I could feel it in my bones, but I didn’t know if that was the psychic thing or just common sense. Raising demons would be seen as an act of war. There was no doubt in my mind of that. Despair crashed over me as I thought about all the evil this one family had done. Alexei Casnoff had destroyed Alice, Lucy, my grandfather…and now his daughters wanted me and Dad out of the way, too. The whole thing was so insane, I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
But that decision was made for me when Lara nodded toward the back of the room and two of the vampire guards, maybe the same I’d seen last night, stepped out of the shadows and grabbed Dad.
“No!” I shouted, but the guards were already dragging him to the door.
“I’ll be fine,” Dad said, holding my gaze. His voice didn’t shake, but I saw fear in his eyes.
I stared at him, my panicked mind trying to come up with something, anything, to say to him. After all, this could be the last time I saw him. But my brain was full of too much terror, and all I could say was, “Dad.”
And then he was gone, the slamming of the door echoing in the dark chamber.