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With a quickly hashed-out plan at the ready, I hurried through the corridors toward Victoria’s office. Ordinarily, I preferred to have things organized down to the letter, with little room for error, but Genie’s love of all things spontaneous appeared to have rubbed off on me. Besides, it wasn’t as if we had much time to waste, not if this monster curse was spreading as swiftly and dangerously as Reid had implied. Did I believe a word that came out of that wastrel’s mouth? Not exactly. But I did trust Persie and Genie’s judgment. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been doing this on their behalf.

Coming to a halt outside Victoria’s office, I knocked politely. As I waited, I took a steadying breath and straightened the lapels of my tweed jacket, going through the questions I wanted to ask and the fabricated backstory as to why I wanted answers to them. I wasn’t much of a warrior or an antagonist, but I did have one card up my sleeve—I was a very gifted liar. While that wasn’t necessarily something to be proud of, I knew it would give me the advantage of not looking as though I had “guilty” branded across my forehead.

A moment later, Victoria replied. “Come in.”

I did so, finding her at her desk, browsing through a pile of folders that put my own stack of research to shame. She looked at me over the rims of an elegant, expensive-looking pair of cat-eye glasses that I rarely saw her wear. No doubt implementing the prison mentality that any visible sign of weakness made you look… well, weak. Personally, I liked to think a smart pair of specs made you look formidable, at least in terms of intellect.

She removed the glasses and folded them back into their case, which she laid next to her phone. I’d texted her a bit ago, asking if I might have a private meeting with her, with regards to “evidence” I’d found in my books about what had occurred in the fishery. Now that the three of us—Genie, Persie, and I—had made a decision to keep the larger truth from Institute hands, lest it cause another and far nastier code red, I knew I had to be craftier than I’d ever been before. I didn’t like telling untruths, or even half-truths, but I had to hope I was doing it for the right reasons. I did not want blood on my hands, not when I would likely spend a lifetime trying to scrub away the blood of my father’s legacy. This was a small way of showing that I was not like him. He would certainly have told the authorities, vouched for these infected individuals being more monster than human, and watched mayhem ensue, bathing in the havoc and devastation that he’d caused.

“What did you want to discuss?” Victoria prompted.

Here goes nothing… I was about to relay the info dump of my life, in the hopes of eking intel out of Victoria. My forte, in some ways, but it did not usually come with such high stakes. If I failed in my endeavor, we would have nothing. Still, I felt somewhat comforted by the knowledge that I had Genie standing by to provide a diversion if this didn’t go to plan. I had asked her to give me twenty minutes. If I didn’t text her within that time to say that it had been a success, then she would take up the reins and give me a window to put my back-up plan into play.

I shook myself out of my reverie and said, “I came across some passages in the journal of Ronan Lomax from 1972. In it, he spoke about being in Merrion Square in Dublin on the day that crowds burned down the British Embassy after Bloody Sunday—you know, during The Troubles.” I knew Victoria, being of Irish heritage herself, would be no stranger to this dark part of our history. “He mentions seeing a group of men acting very strangely on the sidelines of the incident—and they must have been acting very strangely to be noticeable at such a time of heightened anger. He goes on to say that, shortly after, he saw these same men snatch a young woman from the crowd. He gave chase, only for them to use a device of some kind which vanished the entire group into thin air. The woman turned up three weeks later on Grafton Street, beaten and bloody, with no memory of who she was or where she’d been. Ronan reported that the Dublin Coven recognized her as a magical and took her to their Infirmary where she died, a few days later, from her injuries.”

Victoria leaned back in her chair. “That was almost seventy years ago, Nathan.”

“I know, but hear me out.” I sat in the chair opposite, pulling out the journal in question and turning to the yellowed page. The idea had come to me while I’d been talking with Genie and Persie. It was a journal I knew inside and out, and these events really had occurred. Sometimes, to tell a convincing lie, you had to bury it in truth. “The Dublin Coven had investigators working for months on the case, but they could never find out who did it, and the non-magicals presumed she was just an unfortunate victim who’d dropped off the radar after the coven took her in. Eventually, that’s what the Dublin Coven declared it as—the tragic death of someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But what if they were missing an important factor? What if the people who snatched this woman were an earlier version of these witch hunters, and their organization has steadily been growing ever since… or even long before then? Think about it—the more slip-ups the magical world has made, with non-magicals seeing things they shouldn’t and evading our track-and-trace methods, the more weight would be given to these conspiracy groups who think they know something like us exists in the world.”

Victoria pursed her lips, a subtle response that sent a dagger of ice through my heart, because I knew it meant she wanted to throw something or bang her fists on the desk. “We don’t even know that we are dealing with witch hunters, Nathan. You, of all people, should know that it is unwise to jump to conclusions.” Her tone remained eerily calm. “I am not doubting that the people in that journal may have been witch hunters, but they could just as easily have been magicals who got lucky in avoiding capture for that poor woman’s death.”

“True, but there’s more.” This was where the lie came in. Well, it was more of an embellishment. “Ronan makes a note of seeing one of the men’s forearms. The man had a tattoo of a Celtic cross with the words ‘Veritas Aequitas’ written around it.” The truth was that Ronan had seen a tattoo with a Celtic cross, but in the journal he had only specified seeing the “Aequitas” part.

Her eyebrow rose a quarter inch. “Truth and justice,” she translated.

I nodded. The two words were often seen together in Latin; I’d only taken a few liberties to pull a few puzzle pieces together. “Exactly,” I said. “But what if they dropped the Aequitas part somewhere along the way? What if the Veritas and the witch hunters are the same thing, with a long history of capturing magicals to… I don’t know, wheedle information and magical devices out of them. Know-your-enemy kinds of endeavors, or to deliver warnings to magicals who had come too close to non-magical families. One nasty divorce between a magical and a non-magical, or a falling out between mixed friends, and all those secrets would come tumbling out. Maybe these are the results of non-magicals who’d been forewarned about mindwiping by magicals in their lives, before those relationships—whatever they might have been—deteriorated?” I theorized. The more I talked it through, the less it sounded outlandish or falsified at all. Maybe “Veritas Aequitas” was precisely what Ronan would have seen, had he been able to see the entire tattoo. However, my plan of action was far simpler than finding confirmation of my theory. I hoped that, by simply speaking at a mile a minute, I would be able to bamboozle her into giving up some truths of her own about these Veritas witch hunters.

“What is it you are actually asking, Nathan? Or have you come here just to offer theories to aid the investigation?”

Two masters of craftiness meet… who will win? I hadn’t forgotten just how clever she could be, but I was certainly being given some kind of lesson. It appeared she could see right through my intent, which meant I needed to crank up the heat.

“My point is—Ronan transferred to the Institute when it was first built, to take on the role of living encyclopedia for all things monster, where he remained until his death. That’s how I came to find his journal in the library,” I explained, thinking fast. “There are references to witch hunters in his later notes. Two events in particular: a magical’s disappearance in Galway and another from Cork. Both had the same methodology as the one in 1972, which is likely why he made note of them. The magicals were taken unawares, then returned some three weeks later in a state of physical harm and amnesia. And one of the returnees kept screaming every time he saw a Celtic cross.” Again, these weren’t lies. I had notes on the two disappearances, but both instances had been declared the actions of a rogue magical called Erin O’Dowd, who was now serving a life-term in Purgatory. She certainly wasn’t an innocent wallflower who had been wrongly sentenced; she had been a serial killer around the same time, but she’d only targeted non-magicals up to then. And she’d been into more creative torture spells as her MO—hexes that burnt people up from the inside out or turned their lungs into metal while she watched them suffocate. It didn’t fit with what had been done to the missing magicals, nor did the part where they’d been left alive. She’d confessed to killing those non-magicals when the Irish security magicals had caught up to her and she’d gone to trial, but she had always maintained that she had nothing to do with the tortured magicals.

“Again, you leave me at a loss as to your intent, Nathan.” Victoria drummed her fingertips on the desk, her patience apparently wearing thin.

I swung in with the heavy blow I’d been waiting to use. “I find it hard to believe that you’d be unaware of these events, or the existence of potential witch hunters in Ireland, when you are always on top of possible security breaches and dangers to the Institute.” I paused for breath. “And I would rather you keep me informed of what you know regarding witch hunters and these Veritas individuals so that I don’t have to waste time sifting through endless research. I’m not a trainee, Ms. Jules. I am a scholar’s assistant, and I want to use my talents to help you. I can’t do that if I’m not up to speed.”

Victoria sighed as if she wanted to hoof me out of her office. “Were you a scholar with the right clearance, I would have no qualms about informing you of the Institute’s wider knowledge. Unfortunately, you are not.” She offered me a tight smile. “I have great faith in you, Nathan, but there is also the matter of your emotions being somewhat compromised. That is not an insult, nor do I frown upon one’s personal affections. You and Genie Vertis are of similar age, and you are not a scholar so there is no issue with fraternization, but I could not risk top-level information accidentally finding its way to students, no matter how powerful they might be.” She gave me a knowing look. “In that sense, I have no choice but to put you in the same bracket of clearance as the trainees.”

Damn. I stared in disbelief, my mask of confidence slipping slightly. How could she have known about Genie and me when I hardly knew what was going on, myself? There were no cameras in the Repository due to certain monsters—AKA, the pixies—using high-pitched soundwaves to mess with the feeds, so she couldn’t have seen us in there. Not that there was anything to see.

She laughed softly. “I confess, I may be wrong in this matter. However, it is not normal procedure for someone like yourself to spend hours at the bedside of an unwell student unless there is a deeper connection. If there is, I wish you well—Genie Vertis is a delight and a rare asset to the Institute.” Her expression hardened abruptly, throwing me for a loop. “But the point stands. I cannot tell you what you want to know, in case I am correct about a blossoming romance.”

“You aren’t,” I said, a beat too quickly. “Even if you were, you should know me better than that. I would never cross those lines. I only want to do what I can to help. If the Institute is in imminent danger, then I want to be there on the front line, protecting it.”

She nodded, but I knew she didn’t believe me. “I know you mean well, Nathan, but this is a matter for the Institute’s executive branch to handle, not you. If it were a monster-based matter, then I would, of course, involve you. As it is not, there are people who are better equipped for this task, and I must put my trust in them to find the answers.”

Then it’s lucky for me that I don’t give up so easily. I held my tongue and tried to look just morose enough to fool her. The mile-a-minute rambling had been my first line of attack. The archers in this battle, if you will. Genie and Persie were, at this very moment, gearing up to act as the cavalry, while I snuck in with the proverbial infantry. I might not have been much of a physical fighter, but there was little I did not know about military tactics from the mountain of period warfare novels I’d read.

“I am sorry,” Victoria reiterated.

I slumped a bit, to emphasize my supposed defeat. “As am I.”

You’ve underestimated me, Victoria. I had heard things during my years here—some accidentally, through the likes of Ronan Lomax’s extensive journals, and some on purpose, such as when Ingram was down at the pub on Friday evenings, deep in a bottle. Tidbits of Victoria’s famed power, and the mischief she’d gotten up to before she became a revered head huntswoman. She’d been quite the spellcaster back in her wilder youth, and I had come to pity any man who crossed her. Her former excellence as a caster of curses was the target of my secret agenda. If I could find one in her Grimoire that had a similar influence and magical heft to the one plaguing Reid, then perhaps I’d be able to modify an anti-curse from it. Of course, a monster curse that afflicted magicals or non-magicals was more or less unheard of, but I hoped she might have something in the same vein that we could work from.

I had kept those tidbits to myself because I wanted to be decent and honorable. But now it was time for me to start digging deeper. I had given Victoria the chance to tell me more, and she’d refused. So, now, I had to chase the truth. Ironic, considering I’d spent my whole life running from a different truth… or perhaps it was fitting?

Like clockwork, Victoria’s assistant, Taryn, burst into the room, sweating profusely. I hadn’t wanted it to fall to Genie to take the heat off me, but my talking time was up. “Ms. Jules! There’s been an incident near your personal quarters, and it requires your immediate attention!”

Victoria rose from her chair, running a hand through her blonde hair. “What sort of incident?”

“It’s… uh… best that you see for yourself.” Taryn reddened, looking as though she wanted the ground to swallow her up. “I can’t even begin to describe it. It’s… a whole mess, and… it has a few people panicking. You’ll understand when you see it. I think it might be a, uh, warning.”

I hid a smirk, silently praising Genie for how quickly she had moved the metaphorical horses into place. The plan had been to vandalize Victoria’s bedroom door with a nondescript threat from the Veritas—something that would be sure to rattle her. Genie would use her infallible Invisibility spell to get the job done so no one could trace it back to her. It appeared my Atlantean wonder had come through, with bells on.

Victoria drew in a hissing breath of vexation. “If you would excuse me, Nathan. I will return as soon as I can so we can finish this conversation properly. Unless you would prefer to come back later?”

“I’ll wait. I’ve got nothing better to do,” I replied sullenly, showing no anticipation or excitement on my face whatsoever. Her mind already elsewhere, Victoria bought my act and hurriedly exited.

I stayed put for a few minutes longer, in case she came back for something. Satisfied that she was truly gone and would be distracted for a decent while, I jumped up and set to sleuthing. I’d heard in one of Ingram’s inebriated confessions that Victoria kept her Grimoire in this very office—but finding it wouldn’t be easy. Grimoires were as precious as diaries, and hardly anyone just left them out for the world to see. Even if I managed to find it, I doubted she would have left her secrets un-hexed. Fortunately for me, I had a somewhat rare ability in my Chaos arsenal—I could read any Grimoire. Hexed, unfinished, magically erased… you name it, I could read it. I’d discovered this particular skill when I’d found my father’s Grimoire, after my mum had told me there was nothing in it aside from squiggles and blotches. But when I’d opened it, those seemingly random marks had changed before my very eyes into perfectly readable script. I could hear Grimoires, too, presumably as part and parcel of the overall talent, whispering to me regardless of where they were hidden. The tricky part was getting attuned to their unique voices, especially with my heart pounding loudly in my ears.

I darted behind Victoria’s desk and closed my eyes, drowning out every other sound. This wasn’t a skill I used frequently—it was tantamount to stealing private information, and I wasn’t an advocate of that—and getting back into the feel of it took some time. Focusing on my breathing, the steady inhale and exhale, I felt the world around me slow and fade, leaving the still silence of my emptied mind.

Where are you? My thoughts reached out for those telltale whispers, coaxing them out of their hideaway. Much like riding a bike, the physical recollection of how to do this came back swiftly. However, after a few minutes went by and the whispers still hadn’t come, I knew I was dealing with a Grimoire of epic proportions. The more powerful the Grimoire, the quieter their siren call. And this one was proving to be near silent.

To break the heart of a betrayer… Finally, a soft hiss pierced the quiet in my skull. The voice rattled with bitter, cruel energy, giving me an idea of the state of the creator when it had been written. Victoria must have hated someone a great deal to put so much venom into a spell. To make him forget he ever knew you… A second hiss pinballed between my temples, though these words were much softer. Sadder. Victoria must have been suffering a great deal when she wrote this one. How to speak to those who have passed through the veil… A third hiss, even sadder than the last, so much that tears welled unexpectedly in my eyes. But it brimmed with power, intense enough that I had to gasp for breath. It made me wonder how much pain Victoria hid behind that impeccable mask of unflappable serenity.

How to extract abilities… How to meld two monsters… A sharp pain jabbed at my skull as the enormous energy of those two spells careened into me, leaving me momentarily breathless. The nature of these spells was borderline forbidden, which was likely why she’d kept them secret in her Grimoire. Perhaps they’d been a bygone experiment from her younger days, when rules were made to be broken instead of enforced. I knew of many magicals who had crafted spells and curses in their Grimoires that they later came to regret and had buried deep in the pages. That was usually where the magical erasure came into play. If Victoria had any of those in her Grimoire, I’d still be able to read them. Like a back-up recovery file, I could still tap into the obliterated words.

Sensing the epicenter of that pulse of power, I turned around and faced the vacant windowsill. There didn’t seem to be anything there at all, aside from a few candles and a framed picture of Victoria on the day she had been inducted into the Institute. But the energy was definitely coming from there. Puzzled, I traced my hands across the sill, feeling for where the energy was at its strongest.

There! A potent shock, like sticking my fingers into a plug socket, jolted up my fingertips from a wooden square of paneling, the kind usually used to conceal a radiator. Feeling around the edges of the panel, I gave it a firm push, and the panel swung loose on hidden hinges with a faint click. Beneath lay a recess of sorts with a solitary item inside, wrapped in a large pouch of dark green velvet. I could barely catch a breath as I reached in and took the package out, the power overwhelming my senses as jumbled whispers bombarded my brain.

Hastily, I unwrapped the article and looked down upon the white leather binding. Elegant golden fleur-de-lis adorned the front, with the letters “VJ” glinting at the center, encompassed by a raised circle of mother-of-pearl. It was one of the most beautiful Grimoires I had ever seen, and my fingertips itched to turn the pages and see what was inside. I knew it was wrong on many levels, but impulse took over. Before I knew what I was doing, I had turned to the index. As I’d suspected, the interior was a mass of sigils and markings that made very little sense… but they would soon.

No sooner had I thought it than the seemingly nonsensical symbols merged together in a collision of mesmerizing, dark golden ink that spread out onto the page, unfurling into words that my prying eyes could read.

An index appeared, listing spell after spell. The ones I had heard in the Grimoire’s whispers, and so much more: Ut Loquuntur Verum, which translated to “speak the truth”; The Dragon’s Kiss, which I’d seen variations of in other Grimoires—a nasty spell that created a black flame which burned more powerfully than any ordinary fire; Memoria Aeterna, meaning “Eternal Memory”; and one simply named Euphoria, which either related to a spell for happiness or a sort of conduit spell to make reaching a state of Euphoria much easier.

Halfway down the index list, a title jumped out at me: In Essentia Transformatio,“The Essence of Transformation.”I didn’t know if it was exactly what I was looking for, but it piqued my interest with its forthright confidence. Perhaps, if Victoria had written of ways to transform things, I could use that to create an antidote that would de-transform Reid.

I flipped to the corresponding page only to find it blank. The stinging scent of modified quicksilver singed my nostrils, letting me know that this page had been magically erased. An error from Victoria’s past that she didn’t want immortalized forever in her Grimoire, or something too powerful to remain on paper. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hide her mistake from me. Carefully, I pressed my palms to the blank page and fed my reading ability down my arms and into my fingertips, pinkish tendrils of Chaos slithering across the thick vellum to urge the erased letters back into being. This would only be temporary, the letters disappearing again as soon as I was done reading. Victoria would never be the wiser to what I’d done.

I smiled as the words appeared, but the smile rapidly faded as I read the spell she had tried to forget. It was a curse that blended the essence of one being into another, inflicting the effects by way of an extraction of the essence from whichever being you chose to use—monster, magical, spirit, etc. In the margins, I noticed small scribbles, like afterthoughts: only works on humans. Effects on magicals unpredictable. At present, side effects unknown. Needs further observation. My stomach tightened with fear, my mind unable to believe that Victoria Jules, whom I admired and respected, had ever written such a curse. This kind of magic wasn’t strictly forbidden, as people tended not to mess with the natural order to this extent, and there were very few magicals with the sort of power to pull this off, anyway, but it should have been completely prohibited. It sickened me to see it, and to view her notations, which suggested that she had actually attempted to experiment with this curse at some point in her life. I mean, we all had things in our past that we would rather forget, but this… I couldn’t fathom it.

Trying to gather my thoughts, I focused on how this might relate to the Fear Dearg issue. It wasn’t explicitly the same, and I couldn’t see any mention of it having a contagious element, but it certainly rang a few bells. And it could certainly be used to work on an anti-curse for Reid’s problem, given the similar nature of the spell.

What did she hope to achieve with this? Curiosity got the better of me, urging me to flip through the pages before and after this particular aberration. Most of the spells surrounding it were to do with payback or punishment of some kind, and I could feel the anger and bitterness that the curses had been written with. And, while the anger was fairly potent in the erased transformation curse, it was no more potent than any of the others—in fact, the level of resentment that powered through to me was slightly less than on the curse intended to break a betrayer’s heart, for example. Still, when Victoria had written it, she had clearly intended to use it as a form of punishment against someone who had hurt her very much. But who? And what state was that poor soul in now? I dreaded to think.

Unless… I’d encountered that poor soul, and his name was Reid Darcy. The notion lodged in my mind, chilling me further. But it didn’t make sense. Why would she have done something like this to Reid? I forced the thought to the back of my head, making a note to get to the bottom of it later. After all, asking her outright would be extremely unhelpful, and more likely to put a blockade on our plan. No, I would do my digging after Reid had been aided, for the sake of those who stood to get infected if I did not.

At least this is proof that such a spell exists, I thought, trying to calm my whirring suspicions. Maybe someone else read it, which is why she erased it—so no one would be able to get their hands on it again. Maybe it’s not her. Until that moment, I’d only seen a curse like this in action during Reid’s turns, but I hadn’t known how the magic had been done, so to speak. Now, I had a much better idea. Taking a picture of the revealed pages before folding the Grimoire back into its velvet pouch, I stuffed it back into the secret recess and locked the panel back into place. With the spell safely stowed inside my phone’s memory, I legged it out of there.

Victoria would be too rattled by the vandalism to continue her conversation with me, anyway. And I was too rattled by what I’d found to face her.