“Maybe.”
“Pass.”
Victor used to live in a very nice home beneath the Japanese Gardens. A home that was built back in the early nineteen hundreds to guard the Faith well beneath it.
We’d pretty much demolished the place trying to survive the apocalypse, and while I’d been told it had been repaired and rebuilt, Victor had moved into a modest one-level home with a couple of acres and a small creek behind it.
He said it was easier on him because of his bad eyesight. I think he just hadn’t ever gotten over his house being blown to bits by magic.
In some ways, he hadn’t gotten over how much the world had changed now that magic was healed and reduced to a fraction of its strength.
Well, unless you were a Breaker.
Terric pulled up into the drive. We both got out.
“Want the statue?” I asked Eleanor.
“What?” Terric said as he walked to the front door.
“Nothing.”
He shot a look back at me, then kept walking.
I nodded toward the car. Eleanor shook her head.
So we strolled up the path. Terric was already walking inside the house and I slipped in after him.
“Thank you both for coming.” Victor wore a sweater with a shirt collar beneath it, and jeans, and of course, his heavy glasses. He shut the door behind us and turned the lock. “Let’s sit in the living room.”
I chose an overstuffed chair, sat there feeling a little bit like the pupil I once was, and tried to keep my hands and hungers to myself. Terric settled on the couch near me, which both helped and, for some reason, annoyed me.
Victor walked with that slow, old man pace he’d settled into since he’d lost almost all of his sight.
“To begin with,” he said, “I didn’t know Eli Collins was involved until yesterday when Joshua’s body was found. I want you both to know that.”
“Victor,” I said. “A confession? My, how the tables have turned.”
“It is not a confession. I am simply clarifying why I haven’t told you this before,” he said. “We know who Eli’s Soul Complement is.”
He stopped at a rolltop desk in the corner and retrieved a file folder. That, he handed to Terric.
“Who?” I asked.
Terric scanned the file, then looked up. “Brandy Scott.” He tipped the file so I could see the picture clipped there. Short dark hair, almond eyes, shy smile with a dimple. She didn’t look old enough to drive.
“How old is she?” I asked.
“That picture is from a while ago,” Victor said. “She’s fifteen in it. She’s thirty-five now.”
“Mental institution?” Terric said.
“That,” Victor said, “is what I needed to tell you. We’ve known Eli had a Soul Complement. Have known it for many years. They were even tested. But Brandy wasn’t stable. We did everything we could, medicine, magic, counseling. But she never recovered from the test to see if she and Eli were a match. Over the years her condition has grown worse. The last report we have from her doctors is that she has grown less and less responsive.”
“You took her from him, didn’t you?” I said, putting it all together. “When you Closed Eli’s memories away, you made him forget her.”
Terric glanced up at Victor over the file. Waiting.
It was, if you thought about it too long, a horrifying thing to do. Like cutting a person in half straight down the middle.
Victor had been standing behind the chair that matched mine. His fingers squeezed the top of the upholstery; then he let go and walked around, sat and exhaled tiredly.
“Mr. Collins . . . Eli is brilliant.” He nodded. “We have the tests that prove it. But he is also unstable and dangerous.”
“A sociopath,” Terric said.
“Yes,” Victor said. “Soul Complements can make magic break its own rules. We’ve always known that. Even when magic was strong, Brandy and Eli were a danger then. To themselves. To the Authority. To mankind.”
“So you kept them apart?” I didn’t know why it was bothering me so much. I mean yeah, I had stayed as far away from Terric as I could these last few years. And a few years before that. But that was my choice. No one had made me forget him. No one had forbade me to be with him.
It was my choice.
Eli and Brandy hadn’t had a choice.
“It was decided, by more people than just me, that it would be best for them to never know about each other,” Victor said.
“So you Closed Eli,” Terric said, “took the memories of Brandy away from him. And then you took the memory of how to use magic away from him too?”
“Yes.” He was quiet a moment, maybe thinking over those times, those decisions.
I’d always wondered if Victor followed rules, or made rules to follow. Too many times in the past he’d leaned a decision one way or another to make sure things in the Authority turned out the way he approved of. The way he thought was right, despite what the Authority stood for.
“Yes,” he said, “I did. I made him forget Brandy. I took away his ability to use magic.”
“Not that he didn’t relearn it,” Terric said.
“And when Eli demanded you Unclose him back when Davy Silvers’s life hung in the balance,” I said, “you didn’t give him the memories of Brandy back, did you?”
“No.”
A pause while I, at least, swallowed the fact that my teacher, my friend Victor, had been playing God with someone’s life. With their soul.
“It was my decision not to let him know about her. I still believe it was the correct thing to do. She is broken. There is no future for them together.”
“I had no idea you have a crystal ball,” I said. “How very convenient you know what they can and can’t be.”
The rings snapped with tiny sparks of red.
Yes, I was angry. Even though I hated Eli, I hated even more that Victor had made decisions that only Eli and Brandy should have made.
“Would you rather I have let two very unstable people have full access to a magic more powerful than ninety-nine percent of magic users in the world could access? It is not unthinkable that they could have destroyed the world.”
I knew he wasn’t being overly dramatic. Soul Complements could be walking time bombs. Soul Complements, in fact, had almost ended the world just three years ago.
“But to just cut them off from each other? There had to have been other options.”
“There were not.”
“Have you considered that by not having Brandy it drove Eli to extremes? That all this—all the crap he’s doing—is because of what you did to him? Joshua might still be—”
“Shame,” Terric said gently. “Don’t.”
I just glared at Victor.
He nodded. “Yes,” he whispered. “I have thought of it many times. Especially over the last three years.”
I’m sure he had. One of the side effects of surviving the apocalypse was that Cody Miller had healed magic with the intension of making everything better. That healing had made magic soft, and it had given memories back to everyone in the world who had had their memories taken away by Closers.
Closers like Victor.
So Eli had remembered Brandy and the part Victor and the Authority had played in keeping her separate from him.
“Damn,” Terric said softly. “He’s known for three years that she’s his match? And that she was locked away?”
Victor nodded.
“When did he find her?” I asked.
“Our sources say it was two years ago. She doesn’t have family, was a ward of the state. They were trying a new medication. It seemed to be helping. She was more responsive. Aware.”
“Then?” Terric asked.
“Then the war.” Victor spread his hands. “The end of magic being separated into dark and light. The end of our power. And the beginning of the new world where the Authority is no longer secret, where memories are no longer hidden, where those of us who fought to keep the world, and all its people safe, are ignored. Unwelcome. Silenced.”