Page 81 of The Twisted Mark
Besides, though I’d assumed Gabriel had had a hand in Bren being falsely charged with Niall’s murder, I’d worked on the principle that it was an opportunistic cover-up to hide dissent in the Thornber ranks or the like. If he could do something so cold and calculated in order to strike at Bren, what might he have planned for me?
I press the palms of my hands over my eyes and try to breathe deeply. This is properly psychotic stuff.
I ought to traverse out of there right now, but I’m too stunned to work the spell. And the curious, thoughtful, almost emotionless part of me that I’ve honed with years of legal training can’t help but want to know more.
“I glamoured Nikki to look like Brendan so she could wander around town giving witnesses something to see,” Gabriel adds, after my horrified silence drags on long enough that it’s clear I have no coherent reply to give.
“I got Leah to bring me Brendan’s gun, take him somewhere where he’d have no other alibi and weaken him with sex magic, then get him back home in time to be arrested. I stayed home and did the deed myself.”
I swallow hard. There’s a lot to unpick there, but one thing leaps out at me. “Body-switching is impossible…”
“Not for me. Everyone talks behind my back about all that demon blood I’m supposed to have. It’s always just intended as a veiled insult, but they never seem to wonder what rules it might allow me to break.”
“It’s true then, about your mother?”
He closes the gap between us. I keep my shields firmly up, but don’t try to run. His eyes are wide and he looks so utterly sad.
When he speaks, his voice is little more than a whisper. “She was half-demon, genetically. And an absolute angel, personality-wise. I loved my father in a way, but I watched him kill her with his attempts to constrain her magic. There were other factors at play, too, but if you want my classic two reasons, I wanted to stop Brendan, and I needed to avenge her.”
An irrational part of me wants to reach out and put my arms around him, drive away some of the hurt. Then I remember what he’s freely admitted he’s capable of—the point about his mother makes his actions marginally more explicable, but it hardly makes it okay—and I wrap my arms tightly round myself instead.
It’s a minute or two before I can speak. “Why the hell are you telling all this to the defence lawyer?”
“Good luck convincing the jury this was achieved through body-swapping.”
It’s a fair point. But surely there’s something I can do with this information? Assuming I’m willing to see Gabriel go down to save Bren. Which shouldn’t even be up for debate, especially after these new revelations, but my heart insists on making things difficult.
“You were so upset a few weeks ago, when you found out the truth about the Sadlers’ precious Dome,” he adds, running his hands through his hair like he’s struggling to find the right words. “Four sacrifices a year, even of willing victims, wasn’t a price you were willing to pay. But you’re still so blinkered by family loyalty that you never thought to ask the obvious question.”
I frown. “What’s the Dome got to do with anything?” I shouldn’t get drawn into discussion. Or if I must, I need to keep the conversation focused on Gabriel’s misdeeds.
“If it usually takes four deaths for basic maintenance, how many do you think it might take to expand the area of protection?”
I slump back against the rough trunk of the tree, as my mind throws up images of that night six years ago. Normally, my psyche focuses on the later bit, at Thornber Manor. But now all I can see is Gabriel pinning Bren to the ground and leaching away his magic.
In the aftermath of my first Ritual, I was able to understand Gabriel’s dislike of Bren’s attempts to enlarge the Dome rather more than I ever did at the time. But it still hadn’t crossed my mind that enlarging it might require deaths on a larger scale.
“Six years ago, Brendan attempted to extend the boundaries of the Dome by a mile,” Gabriel says, his arms crossed. “He needed to kill fifteen people. That time, I stopped him before he sacrificed more than five. Earlier this year, though, he tried again—and this time, he pulled it off.”
My body goes very still. What he’s saying sounds insane. And while my family might have come to think of the annual sacrifices as an acceptable tradition, surely Bren isn’t capable of killing fifteen people in cold blood?
He’s my brother. I’m not naïve enough to think he doesn’t have flaws, but he paints beautiful pictures. He babysits Chrissie’s little twins and fawns all over them. As a child, he’d entertain me for hours on end with fun little tricks—making my toy animals dance, that sort of thing.
I’d believed Bren capable of killing Niall Thornber, but even that turned out to be unfair on my part. He’s not a mass murderer. He just can’t be.
“Even if Icouldbelieve my brother were capable of that, what would he have to gain by extending the Dome by a mile?” My voice is trembling.
Gabriel steps even closer, his body touching mine, the edges of our auras mingling. “Do you really not know? Are you really that far outside your family’s confidence?”
I slam my palm into his chest, pushing him back. “Just tell me, Gabriel.”
“It was a trial run. Extending the Dome at all is hugely challenging. But once you’ve got the hang of enlarging it slightly, expanding itmassivelyis simply a case of scaling up the magic—and the sacrifices. He wants the Dome to cover all of the biggest cities in the North.”
I dig my nails into my palm and try to ignore my escalating heartrate. “Bren would never do something like that. Or if he did, the rest of the family would never condone it.”
I snap the words out without a moment’s hesitation, but as soon as I say them, I’m already wondering whether that’s true. My family love the Dome. They’re fiercely ambitious. And as the Ritual shows, they’re flexible when it comes to the sanctity of human life. But surely not something of this magnitude? I’m not clear on the precise numbers, but if it’s four deaths for maintenance and fifteen to move it by a mile, the sacrifice required for an expansion of the sort Gabriel is talking about would almost defy comprehension.
But then again, how many people in the cities surrounding Mannith died last year from homelessness, avoidable illnesses, poverty, stress, depression, and all the rest of it? Extending the Dome could save a lot more people than it killed. That wouldn’t make it anywhere near okay, but I can just about see how Bren might be able to convince himself he was attempting something heroic rather than evil.