Anomaly (Causal Enchantment #4)(44)
Evangeline spotted it at the same time. “No!” I yelled as her fingers closed over it.
And yanked it off.
My mouth dropped open. Did she actually just touch the merth and not collapse?
The werebeast was on his feet in a flash, releasing a baleful howl before nosing his brothers in vain, trying to get them up. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been bound by merth and would not be getting up again.
“Sofie!” Lilly hollered, toeing a white-haired body lying between Cecile and Brian.
“Is that … Jonah?”
“Who cares who that is!” Mortimer boomed. “Who cares about any of them! Let’s focus on who’s not here!”
Veronique was missing.
“Did you know he’s been tailing us the entire time?” Mortimer spat, holding up a tablet with a frozen image on it, the cold cobalt eyes staring out at me.
I knew I couldn’t lie. Not with what may be on that video. “I suspected.”
“You suspected …” The even measure of Mortimer’s voice was the calm before a violent storm. “And yet you never felt the need to warn us!” His body shook, lips white with pressure, as if struggling to keep the words in. He held the tablet against his chest, the screen facing out, and hit “play.” The hairs on my neck stood on end as the haulage tunnel filled with his revolting voice.“ There’s a benefit to knowing Sofie for over a century,” Viggo began. The wicked smile never came close to touching his cold irises. Seated on a bench, he threw an arm over its back, as if getting comfortable in a friend’s living room. Nothing in the screen gave his location away, but by the occasional horns and distant sirens, he was obviously filming on a street. “Get screwed over by her enough, you begin to anticipate her next move. Her next two moves.” His eyebrows waggled. “Her next ten moves.” He whistled as his eyes trailed an unsuspecting passerby beyond the scope of the tablet’s camera. “And when you can anticipate her next ten moves, it becomes easy to get what you want. I tried to warn her, in all fairness. The pendant tied to the knapsack? Oh, come, Sofie, what did you think that was? A peace offering?” Every gaze in the room shifted to me.
“And I’m sure you never told anyone about that, did you, my dear Sofie? You would have lost their attention. It would distract them from your big plan to save the world. But perhaps, if you had told them, then it would have been harder for me to do this—” The screen suddenly switched to a new scene—a window overlooking the city skyline. The angle rotated, taking in desks, lamps, and filing cabinets.
Until it settled on a female with blond ringlets, hunched over in a chair.
“Amelie!” Julian cried out. The camera zoomed in on her limp body, her limbs coiled in a strand of merth, tied upright to the chair by regular rope.
Sounds of despair filled my ears, my suspicions proven true. Viggo had killed Galen. Viggo had captured Amelie. And Jonah must have been helping him because there was no other way he’d manage with that silver cord.
I guess Jonah had since worn out his use.
The camera angle moved back to Viggo. “To be fair, I was trying to get my hands on her brother. You know, because I figured that would hurt the treacherous little Evie the most.”
Oh no …
“I don’t know how you managed to revive her, my dearest Sofie. After all, I felt her little bones snap like twigs. But you obviously must have. I figured that out quickly. There’s no way you would care about fledglings if your little obsession had died like she should have.”
Viggo’s shoes scuffed along the floor as he paced, the camera still on him. “I almost had him in the blood cellar. Unfortunately, I missed my opportunity by mere seconds.”
Unease roiled inside me. I knew it! I had felt his presence. Why had I dismissed my senses so quickly? I should’ve burned the rest of the building down. Burned him on the spot.
“I have to thank Mage for giving me the foresight to your plan, actually,” he said, the twinkle in his eye enough to make me want to destroy the screen with a bolt of fire. “I remembered her telling me once that had she been able to do it over again, she would’ve dropped a bomb on the city that bred the beginnings of the demise. So, it was only common sense that she would counsel you, Sofie, on that strategy. And of course you would listen because you are a weak, uncreative leader who cannot make her own choices.”
Shifting the camera again, Viggo leaned over Amelie’s shoulder, both of their faces in the screen, as if about to take a close-up. Amelie’s emerald eyes stared back at us, filled with terror.
My stomach clenched.
“Would you go through with it, if the beloved Amelie’s life was at stake? For sure you suspected me all along, Sofie.” Again, the eyes around me weighed upon my conscience. Viggo turned to Amelie. “Don’t you wonder? Should we find out?” He paused, as if waiting for an answer. “Yes, let’s find out, shall we? We’ll leave you here, in this Manhattan office building.”
Another gasp sounded, this one Julian’s.
Viggo planted an amiable kiss on her cheek and then stood, patting her shoulder. “If Sofie doesn’t go through with it, then here’s the address. You can come get her.” He captured a plaque on the wall with the broker firm’s address on it. “And if that vixen Mage manages to whisper sweet nothings of destruction in Sofie’s ear and she goes through with it, then, well …” The camera took one last shot of Amelie. “Say goodbye to this beautiful little face, folks. I figure the nuke will be coming from the Atlantic. Maybe Amelie will get to see its approach.”