Chapter 53: Bloodline Interrogation
The text from Marjorie hung in Angel’s mind like a toxic cloud for weeks. Their usual sessions continued, but the warmth had evaporated. The older woman’s smile was a little too sharp, her compliments layered with a clinical assessment. She’d ask oblique questions about Crow, about Angel’s sleep, about the “quality” of her soul’s resonance. Angel gave vague answers, a low-grade dread simmering in her gut. She’d catch Marjorie watching her with an unreadable expression, as if she were a specimen under glass. The summons to the Headmaster’s Throne Room felt inevitable, a guillotine blade finally dropping.
Marble floors stretched into a distant gloom, swallowing the sound of her hesitant footsteps. The air wasn’t cold, but sterile, carrying the acidic scent of polished stone and ozone. Flickering light from massive, crystal chandeliers danced over the gold-framed portraits of severe-looking men and women lining the walls, their hollow eyes seeming to track her progress towards the dais at the room’s far end.
Headmaster Death sat in a high-backed obsidian chair that wasn’t quite a throne. He spun a thin, candy-cane striped scepter absently between his fingers. Marjorie stood to his right, her posture impeccable, her expression one of gentle concern that didn’t reach her cold, red-rimmed eyes. To his left was a tall, suited man Angel had never seen. His face was all severe planes, his dark hair slicked back, and his presence seemed to leach the warmth from the very light around him.
“Angelina,” Headmaster Death said, his voice a resonant hum that vibrated in her molars. “Thank you for coming.”
As if she’d had a choice.
“Headmaster,” she managed, her voice small in the vast space. Her gaze flicked to Marjorie, who offered a tiny, pitying shake of her head.
The suited man stepped forward with a predator’s fluid grace, his smile revealing perfect, faintly sharpened teeth. “We have reason to believe,” he began, his voice a low, smooth baritone, “that you and Professor Kaelen Drusus are engaged in an inappropriate relationship. One that is interfering with your resonance and your duties at this academy.”
Headmaster Death stopped twirling his scepter. The tiny click of it against his ring was deafening.
Angel’s heart hammered against her ribs. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Marjorie sighed, a sound of profound disappointment. “Child, the evidence is in the air. Your soul wavelength carries his signature, a deep contamination. And his… his degradation has slowed. Curious, isn’t it?” She produced a small, obsidian vial from the folds of her sleeve. Inside, a substance the color of ink and void swirled with a life of its own. “Shall we test your purity, granddaughter? My truth serum works beautifully on liars.”
The strange man took the vial from her with a gloved hand. He produced a syringe from his jacket, deftly drawing the black liquid into it. It seemed to absorb the light around it.
“This is unnecessary,” Angel stammered, taking a step back.
The man was on her in two strides. His grip on her bicep was like iron. “It is very necessary,” he murmured. Before she could wrench away, he jabbed the needle into the soft skin of her inner arm.
The injection was a jolt of ice and fire, a venomous cold that spread up her vein followed by a wave of scorching heat. The room swayed. The edges of her vision swam with dark, oily motes. A metallic taste flooded her mouth.
The man leaned close, his breath smelling of mint and something chemical. His voice was a deep, intense rumble that vibrated in her skull. “What is the nature of your relationship with Professor Kaelen Drusus?”
The truth surged up her throat, a scalding, desperate confession ready to spill out: He loves me. I love him. He’s my anchor. I’m his. She clenched her jaw shut, trapping the words. A searing pain erupted behind her sternum, as if a hook were lodged there and someone was pulling. Her muscles locked. A violent shudder racked her frame, her spine arching against her will.
Marjorie glided over, kneeling beside the chair the man now forced her into. She placed a cool hand on Angel’s sweating forehead. “It will only hurt the more you resist, little one,” she whispered, her voice a parody of grandmotherly tenderness. “And lying… lying will burn.”
“Answer the question,” the suited man intoned.
Angel shook her head, a tiny, fierce movement. The pain intensified, twisting her insides. She felt her stomach heave. Tears welled in her eyes from the sheer, overwhelming agony.
He watched her for a moment, then shifted tack. “What do you know about the madness strain infecting the shadow realm?”
The question threw her. The pressure to speak lessened slightly, redirected. She focused on the truth she knew. “Nothing,” she gasped. “I just… I see it in Crow. I feel it when we resonate.”
“And how do you ‘feel’ it?” Marjorie pressed, her hand still on Angel’s brow.
“Like… static.
“Like… static,” she forced out, the words gritty. “A grinding noise in his soul. I smooth it.”
Headmaster Death leaned forward, his scepter going still. “And the source of this static within our walls? You’ve been here for weeks. You resonate with everything, you sense everything. Yet you bring me nothing.”
His tone wasn’t questioning. It was a flat statement of failure. Angel’s eyes darted from his impassive face to Marjorie’s feigned concern, then to the cold, expectant eyes of the suited man. The realization was a slow, cold drip down her spine. This wasn’t an interrogation to discover the relationship. This was a performance to make her confess it, to use it as leverage.
The suited man placed his hands on either side of her head. His palms were clammy through his gloves. A fresh, sharper shock, not from the serum but from him, jagged through her temples.
Her eyes studied the room through the pain: the too-perfect portraits, the predatory tilt of the stranger’s head, the practiced worry in Marjorie’s gaze. She saw right through it. A deep, acidic disdain rose in her throat, mixing with the coppery taste of blood. She scolded herself for ever believing this woman’s caring act.
Warmth trickled from her nostril. She felt the blood slide down the back of her throat, thick and salty. She leaned forward and spat a glob of crimson onto the polished marble at the man’s feet.
“What the fuck is it with this shadow realm,” she slurred, her voice raw, “that is so against love?”
Marjorie moved faster than sight. The crack of her palm against Angel’s cheek echoed in the cavernous room. Angel’s head snapped to the side, white light exploding behind her eyes. She knew a bruise was already forming, a blossom of shame and fury.
“Angelina!” Marjorie’s voice was a whip. “A great meister of your blood does not need such frivolous distractions!”
The pain was a catalyst. It burned through the serum’s fog, through the fear, leaving behind a clear, cold, and utterly mad clarity. Angel gritted her teeth. She arched her back against the chair, a tension so profound the wood groaned.
Then she started laughing.
It began as a wet, choked sound and spiraled into wild, uncontrollable peals. She laughed at the absurdity of the gold-trimmed portraits, at the suited man’s startled blink, at the faint tremor she now saw in Marjorie’s poised hand. She laughed until her ribs ached, until the sound filled the room, making everyone shift uneasily.
The ornate metal restraints on the chair’s arms, designed to contain the strongest weapon-student, gave a sharp ping. Then another. They snapped open, not from a spell or a key, but from the sheer, radiant pressure expanding from Angel’s body.
The laughter died, leaving a ringing silence.
“I know where this fucking madness strain is coming from,” Angel said, her voice now terrifyingly calm.
She glared at Headmaster Death, who had not moved but was watching her with intense, reassessing eyes.
Marjorie composed herself, brushing a strand of flawless red hair from her cheek. “This changes nothing. Professor Drusus will be transferred to the Siberian district by morning. We’ll find a suitable meister there to marry him off to, keep him quiet and useful.” Her eyes flicked to Angel with clinical calculation. “And you, my dear, will be wed to young Jack Death. Your lineages combined could produce heirs of unparalleled potential.”
She tapped a sharp nail against her chin, a ghastly, thoughtful look on her face. “Or, if that proves troublesome… perhaps I should be the one to breed with Kaelen. Oh, the potential in that union…”
An emotion detonated in Angel’s chest. It was not rage. It was something purer, more final: a total, annihilating no. It possessed her, body and soul.
The next thing she knew, she was standing. The space between her and Marjorie had simply ceased to exist. Her right hand was buried to the wrist in her grandmother’s chest. The sensation was not of pushing through flesh and bone, but through cracking porcelain and wet, rotten silk.
Marjorie’s face held only shock. Her perfect red lips formed a small ‘o’.
Angel closed her fist. She felt the pulsating, diseased thing within. With a wrench that took all her strength, she pulled her hand free.
Her clenched fist held a still-beating heart, blackened at the edges, veined with pulsing crimson light. Marjorie’s body didn’t bleed. It shimmered, then dissolved into a cloud of swirling, shrieking souls—hundreds of them, maybe thousands, trapped and glittering like malignant stars.
A hunger Angel had never known roared to life within her. She opened her mouth and inhaled.
The souls streamed into her, a vortex of power and stolen lifetimes. They filled her, burned her, rewrote her. Light erupted from her skin—not the gentle gold of her resonance, but a blinding, metallic silver. It wrapped around her, solidifying, shaping itself.
When the light faded, Angel was no longer just Angel. She stood taller. In her soul gleamed a weapon of impossible craftsmanship: a double-bladed scythe with a haft of black bone and blades of solidified soul-light. The air around her hummed with a deadly, complete frequency.
She had consumed a witch. She had consumed a thousand souls. The requirements were met.
She was now a Death Scythe.
The chamber was silent but for the dying echo of the souls. The suited man had taken a step back, his predatory smile replaced by something like clinical interest. Headmaster Death had not moved from his obsidian chair, but his candy-cane scepter was utterly still in his grasp.
Angel lowered her silver-shining hand. The phantom weight of the scythe’s haft lingered in her palm. She felt each of the thousand souls orbiting her own, a cold, humming constellation of stolen power. She also felt the slick, warm wetness of the blood coating her arm, her front, soaking into her white blouse. The metallic scent filled her nostrils, choking and rich.
She turned to face Headmaster Death, blood still covering her clothes. Her voice was flat, devoid of tremor, carved from the same cold stuff as her new weapon-blood.
“Your madness problem is resolved,” she stated. “The witch is dead.”
With that, Angel turned on her heel. The new, built power of her weapon-blood pulsed through her veins, a foreign, thrilling rhythm underscored by a deep, sickening ache. Her muscles trembled with adrenaline’s ebb and the aftermath of the truth serum’s torture. She kept her spine straight, her chin level, as she walked across the vast marble floor.
The great doors swung open for her without a touch. She passed beneath the many Tori gates lining the approach, their solemn red lintels seeming to bow under the weight of what she now carried. The halls were emptier than usual, the shadows longer.
She passed her father, Kilson, in a wide, tapestry-lined hallway. He was frozen mid-stride, a stack of student files in his arms. His eyes, so like her own, scanned the blood smeared across her face and school uniform, the silver sheen still clinging to her skin like frost. His face was that of pure, unvarnished horror.
She brushed past him without a word. The swing-door of the student female bathroom sighed shut behind her. Only then, in the sterile, lemon-scented quiet, did her brave face crack. She stumbled into the nearest stall, fell to her knees, and vomited into the toilet. It was a violent, empty heaving that brought up nothing but bile and the taste of ozone and regret.
After long minutes, she pushed herself up. She went to the sink, ran the cold water, and began washing the blood from her hands and arms. The red swirled down the drain in pale, pinkish tendrils. She cupped water in her hands and splashed her face. The cold stung. She caught her reflection in the mirror.
Her face was starting to bruise where Marjorie had struck her, a dark, blossoming purple across her cheekbone. She realized, with a detached part of her mind, that she could just heal it. The power thrumming inside her could easily knit the capillaries, erase the mark. But she wanted to wear it for a while.
The blood stained her white blouse in a wide, rust-brown Rorschach blot. It had speckled her red plaid skirt, darker spots on a dark field. She didn’t try to scrub it. She just patted her face dry with a rough paper towel, the simple texture a grounding point.
She left the bathroom. Kilson was still there, rooted to the same spot, the files now clutched to his chest like a shield. His horror had softened into a profound, weary grief. He looked older.
Angel stopped before him. The hallway was empty. The only sound was the distant hum of the academy’s soul-lights. She met his eyes, and hers were dry.
“I did something unforgivable,” she said, her voice a husk of its former calm.
Then her strength left her. The bravado, the power, the cold resolve—it all crumbled. Her knees buckled. She fell forward into his arms. He caught her, the files spilling to the floor with a soft shuffle of paper. He held her tightly as her body shook with a silence more terrible than any sob.