But it was different now, wasn’t it?
And I didn’t know what to do with that.
“It’s . . . off script,” I finally said. “All of it.”
“What is?”
“This.” I gestured around at the pretty room. “The job. The kids. This place. I never had a home—”
“I understand—”
“No, you don’t!” I stopped, struggling to figure out how to say it so that he would understand. “You were there, at that school, as they called it. And it was terrible and lonely—Tami’s told me some things, how they practically brainwashed people to think that their abilities were bad, something to be repressed, to be ashamed of. How they made them feel that they were bad, without ever actually saying it, that they were dirty—”
A flash of remembered pain resculpted Augustine’s face, and his eyes went distant. For a second, I could almost see the boy he’d been, so shining with talent, with hope, with life. And then slowly changing, drawing inward, shutting down.
I’d never done that.
I hadn’t had any optimism to begin with.
“You didn’t start out believing it,” he told me. “You just . . . ended up that way. After a while, without hearing any other voices, their lies started to sound like the truth. Although there were always us defiant ones. We practiced our gifts in private, rebelling in the only way we knew how. It was shocking how much illegal magic went on behind the Circle’s perfect walls!”
He laughed suddenly, and then cocked his head, his eyes refocusing on me. “Was that you at this vampire’s court?”
“No.” I hugged my knees. “Tony wanted me to use my gift. It made him money. He would have liked me to have had more visions, not less. The Circle was trying to make you guys fit in to magical society, to force a square peg into a round hole, no matter how much they had to beat on it to make it go. Tony didn’t care if I fit in anywhere—and that was the problem! I never did! I couldn’t, even after I left him. I—”
I stopped, because I’d gone from halting and slow to a torrent of words and I didn’t know where they’d come from. I didn’t talk about this stuff. That had been one of the first lessons I’d learned. You never talked about anything but superficial stuff, because the deeper things . . .
Would
be used against you.
But those days were over, I told myself harshly. Augustine wasn’t going to use anything against me, and anyway, what I had to tell him couldn’t be turned into a weapon. And for some reason, I wanted to tell him. I wanted to tell somebody.
“I never had a home,” I repeated. “Even at Tami’s, among the other Misfits—that’s what we called ourselves, because none of us fit in. But we were . . .” I searched for the right words. “We were all different pegs, you know?”
“And none of the rest were vampire shaped,” he guessed.
Augustine could be pretty astute sometimes.
“No. Some had come out of pretty terrible places—worse than I had, at times. But they were different. They didn’t understand. We formed a group, learned to rely on each other, tried to make a family. But I couldn’t stay still. I couldn’t just let it be. I’d learned that Tony had ordered the hit on my parents, and I had to make him pay for that. I went back to him for three years, to try to set him up, and when I ran away again, I couldn’t find them. Tami and the rest had already moved on.”
And part of me had been relieved about that. Even as I searched everywhere for them, part of me had been relieved. I’d felt guilty about it at the time, even though I hadn’t really understood it because I’d cared about them. I’d told myself that it was because Tony was after me and I didn’t want to endanger them, which had been true. But there’d also been something else.
Something I was just beginning to see.
“And Tony was looking for you,” Augustine said, bringing me back to the point.
I nodded absently. “I’d run away from him twice at that point, made him look bad, made him look weak. He had to find me or maybe someone would start to believe he was weak, and that . . . doesn’t work too well in their society.”
“So you couldn’t stay in one place for too long.”
“I had to stay ahead of him, changing my looks, my name, my location, every little while. Because he’d find me otherwise. I became new people all the time, and every time I did, all the old stuff went away, and I started fresh. Every little while . . .”
“But that’s all behind you now, don’t you see?” Augustine took my hands. “Cassie, this isn’t going to fade away. This is permanent.”
Yeah, I thought. Permanent.
“I remember when I finally got out,” he told me, his eyes shining. “It felt like a whole new life—and it was! It was hard at first, with no support, no contacts. My parents had them, of course, but that didn’t matter. The fact that I’d been exonerated didn’t matter. But after a while, I realized that—”