Blood Marriage

Twenty: In Which Alice and Florian Plan

Alice spent most of the next day reading the journal. The ball was in less than twenty-four hours, and she was running out of time to garner useful information.

She managed to work her way through the rest of the writing, and she figured out a few things in the process. Unfortunately, Xavier never wrote anything about his plans for the upcoming ball. Instead, he detailed the rest of his time with Falina, as if he needed to remind himself that she existed.

But... it wasn't quite love, or at least it wasn't love as Alice understood it. This seemed more like an obsession, like someone he needed to have nearby because it kept him in check. She had turned into more of an object than a person over time, a treasure lost to time, someone Xavier desperately reached for through the ever-thickening fog of his memories.

Why, though? Why focus on her like that? He didn't seem to have any future plans involving her, and she was long dead.

If he was incapable of loving her... then what was the point of this obsession?

Then again, maybe that was all love could be to him in his current state: obsession.

By the time Falina passed away, she was no longer the mentor. She was absolutely, entirely obedient to Xavier, and she was just as power-hungry as he was. In the end, that search for power killed her in a magical experiment. Xavier did not record the details of that day, but he did say that her loss was devastating. He felt he'd lost the one person who truly knew him, who understood what he'd gone through.

He also said that the same experiment that failed for Falina, killing her, succeeded for him.

It turned him into a spirit in exchange for his soul, protected from psychopomps, able to move freely in incorporeal form, never aging or dying.

He was still left with a mortal mind, though, and that was why he needed his journal. He'd found a way to slowly keep his memories moving forward, but what was lost could not be restored through any means so far available to him.

However, if he had more power, he might have the means to restore his memory, to become a person truly at his prime once more.

Xavier wanted to live forever, yes, but... he wanted to control that forever. He wanted to oversee not only his future, but the lives of everyone around him. Xavier wanted to build a world for himself, and in essence, he wanted to become the new god of that world.

The idea of a human elevating themselves to the status of a god only made Alice more convinced of what she needed to do. Anyone with that level of hubris and greed, anyone with that lack of emotion and empathy, couldn't be trusted to fight for anyone except themselves.

He needed to be gone. Permanently. Trapped, caged, or dead— she cared less and less as time went on. Granted, Alice wasn't sure she had the stomach to kill someone. If anyone had earned it though, if anyone had plotted and planned and murdered their way to where they were, and if anyone planned to keep going, it was Xavier.

That didn't make her feel all that much better about her chosen solution to this situation, though.

She shoved her hand into her dress pocket, feeling for the now familiar, cool metal of the pocket watch. In her other pocket, she felt for the bottle of holy water— she didn't have a plan for it at the moment like she did for the watch, but it made her feel safer.

"Come on, Missy," she said firmly. "I've got a job for you."

"Reporting for duty," Missy said cheerfully, scrambling up from her position curled on the pillow.

"Let's go. Quick," Alice said, beckoning her forward.

She didn't know how much time they had before Xavier returned, but it probably wasn't much. Alice picked up Missy and practically sprinted down the hallway, tracing the now familiar paths down to the apothecary room.