Distorted Affliction

Chapter Thirty Eight

There was so much relief the moment my eyes opened to the sight of both my Mouri standing before me, concern plastered across their perfect features. We had made it out alive, though the deep sadness still lived inside of me that Vanessa hadn't. They had taken me to my mother's nursery in Irvington after I had collapsed, hoping to put distance between us and Rob's trailer. I had no real concept of how long I had been in the Realm of Rowan Tree before my soul had returned, but I was anxious to share the details with them. The men had, in fact, noticed the absence of my essence from my body, but that had only been a small setback in comparison to the other details they had gathered.

My mother, unaccompanied by Ophelia, had arrived before I woke, and held a grim face when she brought me water, though she didn't speak. Glancing around, my mind feeling sluggish, I realized that Ophelia wasn't the only individual missing.

"Where is Lazarus?" I asked, my eyes searching Sin's for an answer. "You didn't kill him, did you?" 

His initial response was a grim face, and I felt myself frown at the thought that he had finished him off after his transformation. It didn't seem beyond him to have killed him for the things that he had done to our family, and I had acknowledged on several occasions that it was a likely scenario. Still, it made me feel slightly irritated because I had hoped to earn the Council's respect by bringing him back to have a proper punishment.

"August, we should talk about what happened." It was Demidicus who had spoken up, though his voice seemed to hold an odd tone that left a seed of worry inside of my mind.

"What?" I asked, glancing between the faces before me, their eyes all different shades of concern. "It worked right? I mean, Lazarus is human again, isn't he? I felt the magic..." My voice trailed off as the memories from the previous night's battle replayed, the way Vanessa's eyes held mine as Kettelie slit her throat, the satisfaction I felt in watching Seline struggle against the darkness that I had summoned. Was that what they wanted to talk about?

"Something happened," Sin spoke, his eyes shifting away from me to Demidicus as if he were struggling to find the words. This was a first for him, as it always seemed he knew exactly what to say when I needed him to.

"Just tell me," I said, my voice holding an unsure note to it that I was certain everyone in the room heard. "Did I do something?" Sure, I recalled the majority of the night in almost perfect clarity, but in the end, I had certainly been under the influence of something much stronger, something I couldn't quite pinpoint. I hadn't exactly been myself.

"Lazarus isn't human," Demidicus started, but before I could interrupt, he continued. "I mean, I'm certain at some point he reached that stage, but when you siphoned the magic from him, that wasn't the only thing you took. Lazarus isn't human because he's dead, and we're pretty certain you...well, I'm not sure how to explain this right, but we think you absorbed his entire soul when you drained him of magic."

My only response was a quick blink and a blank stare. I wasn't sure if my brain was still having a hard time processing things, or if this was just information that was hard to swallow. Either way, I wasn't capable of speaking just then, and I was grateful no one seemed to expect me to. Instead, my mother spoke up.

"I'm not sure what took place out there," Kallisto began slowly, her deep blue eyes thoughtful yet piercing as she looked at me. "But I'm certain it has something to do with your blood, what you are. Your coven never had the ability to touch the kind of magic that came through you, you just...retained it, like it's stored in your own personal stockpile of magic separate from the spirits. Do you have any understanding of what that means?"

I shook my head, feeling like a child whose mother was explaining why she was getting divorced. I supposed that was a rather inappropriate analogy, considering I would have had an easier time understanding parental separation over the dynamics of magic siphoning from Mouri by the anomaly created out of a love affair between the oldest living dead creature and the oldest witch bloodline.