I got away easy this time, but what about the next? I could never forgive myself if something happened to Dylan. He’d come quite late into the magical world. I didn’t want to ruin the experience for him, or worse, kill him. I just… I couldn’t.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Astrid said as she came in, accompanied by Harley, Wade, Santana, and Raffe. They were all pretty roughed up, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with some ice or concealer. Again, guilt gnawed at my stomach. “Oberon played you like a fiddle, but I figured out why and what happened to him,” she added, taking out her Smartie tablet as she came around to my right side of the bed.
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused. “I heard him talking about Katherine Shipton, but I don’t know anything about that. He locked me out completely when he took over. I couldn’t even sense his intentions anymore.”
“I’ve done some research. Put two and two together. Plus, the ‘homework’ that Harley gave me the other day came in super handy,” she replied.
“Wait,” I said, frowning. “How long have I been out?”
“Oh, about ten hours,” Harley answered, grinning. “They’re serving breakfast downstairs. How are you feeling?”
“Like crap,” I breathed.
She chuckled. “Figures. You’ll be okay, though. Krieger checked your vitals and everything. Your body is fine. I guess it’s just your ego that’s bruised.”
“And my ribs,” Santana muttered.
“I’m so sorry—”
“Chica, enough! Don’t worry about it!” Santana stopped me, then nodded at Astrid. “Go on, genius. Tell her what you found out!”
Astrid smirked and handed me the tablet so I could see the files she’d pulled up. A mixture of documents and images were scattered across the screen—crime scene photos, autopsy snapshots, and investigative reports. I recognized Oberon in some of the images. Specifically, his dead body.
“So, here’s what I got so far, and I didn’t realize I had it until I read Oberon Marx’s autopsy report,” Astrid said. “The Icelandic spell that Harley wanted me to research, Sál Vinna… it’s very old, extremely dark and evil. Obviously forbidden. We don’t even have any references about it in the coven. I had to go into the nationwide database and dig really, really deep. It’s a powerful, perverted mental control spell. It feels so natural, but so strong that the victim won’t know he’s under it until it’s too late, and he’s lost control.”
“Is that what happened to Oberon?” I asked, trying to make a connection.
“Sál Vinna implants the thought of someone so deep in your mind that it feels like you’ve always thought about that person,” Astrid replied. “It is stronger than any form of hypnosis or mind control, and it’s very dangerous because it’s known to be unbreakable and incurable. Once you get it, that’s it. You’re done. So, that’s the curse. Now, as you can see, I pulled up everything we had on Oberon. He died here in the coven. Fatal head trauma, but the circumstances of his death weren’t clear. I only know that it was ruled an accident. He bled out.”
“He said that his love for Katherine Shipton killed him,” I said, even as I remembered his bloody shirt.
Astrid nodded, before pointing at another file on the tablet, complete with grainy footage of a woman with red hair. Harley crossed her arms, visibly angered and concerned.
“I gave Smartie all of Katherine Shipton’s details, including a last official photo of her. I had the system search through the CCTV archives and pulled this little gem up,” Astrid continued. “She wasn’t affiliated with the coven or registered here, but she matches Katherine Shipton’s facial features—otherwise Smartie wouldn’t have pointed her out. Thing is, this footage is from a period of three months preceding Oberon’s death. So, naturally I figured that, based on what Oberon told us, Katherine Shipton was definitely here at some point, and had something to do with his death. It seemed pretty obvious.”
She tapped on the tablet screen again and zoomed in on an autopsy photo of Oberon Marx. I was looking at a blackish purple puncture wound behind his ear, surrounded by a small rune symbol of Celtic origin, burned into his skin.
“Then this came up and I had a connect-the-dots moment!” Astrid went on. “The Sál Vinna works as a liquid spell. A mixture is concocted, then injected into the victim—hypodermic needles are the bomb. But it needs to be sealed into the victim’s body, so the rune is added to keep it tight and evil. From there on, it’s good riddance for the poor fella. And this is proof that Oberon Marx was under the Sál Vinna. The mortician at the time didn’t spot it because he already had cause of death. His skull had been crushed on the other side. Whether Oberon fell or Katherine bashed his head in, though, we don’t know. Results were inconclusive.”
I held my breath for a moment, following Astrid’s line of reasoning, then looked up at Harley. “Why did you want Astrid to look into Sál Vinna?” I asked her.
“Isadora told me about it. She said not to believe everything I read about my dad, and to look into that spell,” she replied, her voice uneven.
We were both thinking the same thing at that point. I could see it on her face. “You think your father was under the influence of Sál Vinna when he… did what he did?”
“We’re considering the possibility, yes,” Wade said.
“We definitely think that Oberon was cursed with Sál Vinna by Katherine and got himself killed with it. He couldn’t move on as a spirit, and he took the curse with him,” Astrid continued. “From the moment you let him in, he had a plan to get back to Katherine. His spirit is still obsessed with her.”
“The point is,” Dylan said, “this wasn’t your fault, Tatyana. Oberon knew exactly what he was doing. He wasn’t going to leave your body even if you told him no. He was going to fight you for it. Nothing was going to stand between him and Katherine.”
“Though, he probably had no idea where to even begin looking for her,” Santana said.
“And even if he were to find her, chances are that Katherine would’ve chopped his head off. Well, your head. Sorry,” Harley replied. “You dodged a bullet with that guy.”
“We do appreciate the fact that you saw this as an opportunity to help our team,” Wade said to me, then squeezed my shoulder. “You had good intentions.”
“Shoddy execution.” I scoffed.
“All Oberon’s fault.” Harley sighed. She looked at Wade. “If my father was under Sál Vinna, too, that might explain a few things, including Finch’s account of my father getting back together with Katherine, then killing my mom and the other magicals.”
“There should be mortuary records available,” Astrid said. “Photos, for sure. They wouldn’t have had to do an autopsy on Hiram Merlin, since they knew exactly what killed him—they did.”
“Would they be in the New York Coven?” Harley asked.
Wade nodded. “Probably. But not available to the magical public.”
“Let me check,” Astrid said. She took the tablet back and did her magic through the inter-coven electronic database. She pouted as the results came back. “There are no electronic copies. Which is kind of weird.”
“How’d you get access?” Wade asked, clearly surprised.
Astrid gave him a playful smirk. “I’ve got higher clearance than you, it seems,” she replied, chuckling.
“So, what, there are only hard copies?” Harley cut back in.
Astrid nodded. “The covens were supposed to have digitized everything over the past ten years,” she said. “Including all the data they had from judgments, executions, investigations, autopsies, and so on. This is a bit odd, if you ask me.”
“I may have to make my way up to New York to check the archives myself,” Harley concluded. “I’m sure Alton will sign off on that. I have to find out whether my father was under Sál Vinna. If he was, then he was definitely innocent. Like he said…”
Santana cried out in pain, dropping to her knees. Bright blue-and-green Orishas shot out from inside her, chaotically darting through the infirmary.
“What the… What’s happening?” Harley gasped.
Raffe helped Santana up. She was trembling from head to toe. I froze. I knew exactly what all this meant.
“The charms,” Santana panted. “They all went off at the same time. Every single one I put in. Something happened to the kids… the families… something bad.”
Harley turned white as a sheet of paper. “The Ryder twins made their move.”
Thirty-Three
Harley
Nothing could keep Tatyana in bed at that point. We all rushed into Astrid’s computer room, a place I rarely visited but always found myself in awe of. An entire wall was covered by giant screens, connected to the central AI node, which, in turn, was powered by a dozen processing units.
Astrid connected her tablet to the node directly through a slim cable and proceeded to pull up the information she’d gathered so far, as well as live CCTV footage from different parts of the city. Wade got on the phone with the magical security command center and had them dispatch more people to each of the houses we’d been to.
Santana was breathing heavily and sweating, her Orishas nervously buzzing around the room, while Dylan held Tatyana close, with one arm snaked around her waist.
“They’re sending people to each magical location,” Wade said, once he got off the phone. “I told them to expect the worst.”
“We can’t cover them all ourselves,” Santana replied. “We can’t do anything there, now. We need to find the Ryders. If the kids are gone, we know they’ll be with them.”
“The Ryders wouldn’t be able to pull off a mass kidnapping by themselves, though. They must have some help,” Raffe said, frowning.