Page 73 of The Stone Curse
“No, you’re a child of the ancients,” Yarrow said.
Travani sucked in a sharp breath. “How…how can you know that?”
“You hide your mark well, but not well enough. Last summer when it was sweltering, a little of the makeup you use to mask it rubbed off.”
Markings? “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Travani said quickly before she turned her attention back to Yarrow. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and if you expect the word of a specter to hold up against mine when it comes to the council, then you’re delusional.”
I stepped forward. “Oh, we have no intention of getting the council involved. For all we know, they’re in on it. No. If you refuse to tell us the truth, then we’ll let Melanie have her way with you. She’s on the verge of going malevolent, and I’m sure you both know what a malevolent can do to a person, supernatural or human. So what do you say now?”
A little of Travani’s bravado slipped, but it was Carter who replied.
“I say it’s time we told the truth, Remi.”
Travani balked. “Regina, what are you?—”
“Enough!” Carter said. “I’ve had enough. What we did has been eating away at me for two decades, and I can’t…I won’t let it claim another minute of my life.” She pushed back her chair and stood. “Sit and I’ll tell you everything, and then you can judge us as you wish.”
“No,” Travani said. “I should do it. This is, after all, my fault.”
“Remi, no it?—”
“Hush, love.” Travani smiled softly at Carter, leaving us in no doubt as to the truth of their relationship. “Let me.”
Carter slipped back into her seat with a nod. “Okay.”
“There arerules for my kind. Many rules where I come from,” Travani said. “But the only one that matters in this case is the one that I broke. I fell in love with a human, and I shared my life force with her, rendering her as ageless as me without the need to consume blood.”
My gaze flew to Carter. “Wait…how is that possible?”
“My people have special…abilities. Ones that we are forbidden to exercise and yet…yet I did so.”
“To save my life,” Carter said.
“The reason doesn’t matter, not to the conclave. We were hunted,” Travani said. “Mercilessly for decades. For us, the graynites were a blessing. They allowed us to vanish, to become different people. They allowed us to find a home here at the academy. To be safe. Things were good—until they weren’t.”
“We received a letter,” Carter said. “Unmarked, unsigned. Inside was an address and instructions.” She rolled her lips into her mouth for a beat. “Instructions to kidnap and bring Melanie Thornton to the academy and hold her here until further instructions.”
“The person who sent the letter knew about us,” Travani said. “Who I was, what I’d done, and they threatened to reveal our location to the conclave if we didn’t comply.”
“We should have run,” Carter said. “Run that night.”
“And have them track us?” Travani shook her head. “No. There was nowhere to run. We had to preserve what we’d built here.”
“So you kidnapped Melanie?” Sharniza prompted.
“Yes. She let us into her home when we arrived. She knew us. We’d worked together. She even came back to the academy with us willingly. We told her there was a function to open a new wing and that it wouldn’t be the same without her.”
“She was our friend,” Carter said, biting back a sob.
Travani continued, her tone unwavering and without emotion. “Once we had her here, we gave her a room in the new dorm that was still under construction and locked her there. We kept her there for three months. I was forced to make her forget most of it to keep her calm. I may have…have broken her a little.”
“But the letters came, every week. Reminders,” Carter said. “Threats. To keep her there and wait for the baby to be born. And then…”
“Then to drop it off at a specific location,” Travani said. “We were told that once we left the baby at the church, we’d be free of our obligation. That all we had to do was administer a tincture to Melanie which would heal her body and wipe her memory of the last few months.”
“You’d already wiped her memory, though,” Curi said. “Over and over.”
