Feeling rose in me, something like validation, even triumph.
So, not everyone thought Arcturus and I should be forced to live with our horrible aunt. Looking at the old mage, I felt an irrational wave of gratitude and affection for the theurgy professor. Someone had actually cared. Someone had seen Ankha for what she was, and cared enough about two half-blood kids to try and stand in her way.
Ankha also stared at Forsooth, but all I felt from her was blind rage.
She despised Forsooth, loathed his very existence. She despised everything he stood for, everything he cared about, his fame, his reputation, everything he’d accomplished. Theintensity of feeling there made me feel a new, much rawer emotion.
Hatred.
Maybe for the first time in my life, I admitted to myself that I hated my aunt as intensely as she hated me.
“My sister’s choices, as you put it, Professor Forsooth, were highly illegal,”Ankha spat.“If you expected me to approve of what she did?”
“Are you a member of the organization known as Dark Cathedral?”Forsooth cut in. The distrust and revulsion in his voice were as obvious as hers.“And before you answer that question Ms. La Fey, a reminder. You are currently under oath by the Council of Ancients of the United Kingdom. The punishment for presenting false witness while under a magical oath issued by the Council of Britain remains a lifetime sentence in the Pyramid.”
“No,”she said coldly.
Forsooth didn’t blink.
“You deny the testimony of Fitzsimmons that you have long been a member of good standing? That you swore loyalty to them years ago, and answer only to their leader?”
“I deny it.”
“You deny your hostility towards the ideology of peaceful coexistence?”
“I deny it.”
Forsooth stared at Ankha, his eyes unmoving.
I could see plainly that he didn’t believe her.
The image in front of me was breaking up, just like all the others, when…
…something touched me that sent a violent shiver down my spine.
The presence made me sick, even as it infuriated me.
No.
I shoved back, hard. The gold-white sun flared brighter than it had since I’d fallen out of the back of that taxi cab. Fueled by my fury, my disgust of my aunt and everything she’d done, the hatred I’d always suppressed, those flames smashed outward, forming a ring of white-gold light that violently shoved the presence away from any part of me.
The courtroom vanished entirely.
My eyes snapped open.
I was lying onto the wooden floor of the Victorian house, panting, only a few inches from the fireplace hearth. My head hurt, badly enough that I suspected I’d hit my head on the stone. I fought to breathe, to suck air into my lungs, shocked by my sudden return to the smoke and sulfur-smelling room.
After being in my aunt’s mind, or maybe after that flash of light and fire from my primal, my own mind cleared entirely. That clarity allowed me to think logically for the first time since I’d gone out on that balcony at Malcroix Mansion.
I could feel my aunt’s magic had left mine.
I could also feel something else, something a lot more important.
I was still me.
Whatever happened with my aunt’s spell, Morticia La Fey wasn’t inside my body, at least not yet. I felt no trace of that dark, sickening presence in me anywhere.
I was still a few feet from the mirror. I stared at it as I turned over and started to drag myself to my feet. I felt eyes on me then, and my gaze flickered to the other side of the hearth.
