Chapter 32: Bloody Betrayal

Silvana thrust the door to her house open and tossed her keys on the counter.

In minutes, she threw together a spell like the one she had cast to find Bruce, except the glowing parchment in the middle of the burning purple flames on the kitchen floor showed nothing when she searched for Solaris. She tried again and again, plucking plants from her garden to be used in the spell, and despite all her efforts, each magical map she conjured showed no sign of her father.

She rubbed both her hands to her head, knowing that with her location spell in particular, if there was no blue dot, no area highlighted on the map, it meant the person trying to be found was dead.

Silvana dropped to her knees and the purple flames of her spell died out. She was so incredibly tired, and whatever energy she hadn’t expelled by freaking out on Kurt and Bruce she had depleted with her last-ditch efforts to find her father. She tried to tell herself that everything would be okay, and that Bruce was on her side, but her headache returned, and she collapsed on the kitchen tiles.

Her phone buzzed as Bruce tried to call her, but she was too deep in sleep to hear it.

And as Bruce continued to investigate the bloody scene where he had found Solaris’s ring and finger, Kurt was approached outside his house by a quick little coyote with a single eye.

“Leon,” Kurt whispered, keeping his voice down just in case Bruce was somehow in the area. Kurt’s plan was coming together, and he didn’t want to risk any possible problems.

Not while he was so close to victory.

Leon’s burnt-orange fur was stained crimson, and his black snout was still wet with blood. He panted like a puppy searching for approval in front of Kurt, and Kurt rubbed the back of Leon’s ears, careful to not get any of the blood on his fingers or nails.

Nothing could be traced back to him.

“Looks like you got the job done,” Kurt said, grinning.

Leon bobbed his head and rapped his paws on the ground excitedly. He ran a few circles in the dirt and Kurt started to walk with him, leading Leon deeper into the forest near Bruce’s house.

Kurt shook his head and rubbed a finger to the corner of his lip.

“You know, Leon,” he said. “Things are going wonderfully right now.”

The sound of thunder struck above them both.

The two looked up and saw an array of thick, ashy clouds filling the sky. Crimson lightning hatched through the cracks of the clouds, then spat down into the forests and upon the city in larger bursts than it ever had before.

Kurt smiled so hard his face started to hurt.

“This is incredible, Leon,” he said.

Leon stood on his hind legs and yipped at the air.

And in the middle of Leon’s celebration, Kurt snatched him by the neck and held a knife to his throat.

“What’s so amazing,” Kurt whispered gleefully while Leon kicked and struggled, “Is how you completely served your part.”

Lightning and thunder erupted overhead, smashing down trees in the forest glades.

Leon whimpered and tried to transform back to human so he might have a better chance at escaping Kurt’s clutches, but Kurt held Leon so tight he couldn’t breathe, let alone focus on turning into a human.

Kurt told him, “I mean, to a tee, you did absolutely everything I said, and completely trusted me.”

Leon yapped and yipped his jaw towards Kurt’s arm, trying to bite his way free. Kurt punctured his throat with the knife, and Leon lost any fight he had.

Kurt took the knife and drove it into Leon’s neck a dozen times, pushing Leon’s face into the grime of the cold dirt. Kurt stabbed with such precision that he got no blood on his body, though even someone as tactful as Kurt was unable to prevent coating his hands in the blood trickling down the knife’s blade and handle.

“That’s the thing,” Kurt said to a twitching Leon. Kurt laughed as more lightning crackled in the sky and shot to the city. In the distance, he could hear screams, and the very thought of him being responsible for the terror of others delighted him.

“You served your part, and now there’s nothing left to do with you,” Kurt said, holding Leon’s head to the dirt, and looking into the coyote’s single eye.

Leon bled rapidly from his neck, and he whimpered helplessly, staring with his one good eye at the man he had admired and fought tirelessly to help at every obstacle. Leon considered how amazing of a charlatan he was with all the people he had convinced to his side while working with Kurt, and a part of Leon had to respect the fact that Kurt had served as the better snake-oil salesman.

The other part of Leon, however, didn’t want to die, and wanted only to escape and live a sequestered life away from the werewolves and witches and vampires, and away from the excruciating pain in his body and the bloodloss.

Of course, none of this was possible.

“What I saw in you, Leon,” Kurt said, digging his fingers into the fur on Leon’s head, “was a man who was ready to serve somebody to the dying end. I saw a man so lost in his own uselessness he would have done anything to feel a part of something.”

Kurt yanked Leon’s head so he had to look up at the incredible display of lightning in the sky.

“You see that?” Kurt asked, sounding absolutely manic and pointing his bloody knife upwards. “You were a part of something great, my friend. Something that will change this world.”

The ground beneath them shook with sprees of lightning nearby.

“Together, you and I have made a difference.”

Though he was bleeding profusely and woozy, Leon smirked.

“But, my dear friend,” Kurt said. “Your purpose is fulfilled, and therefore you don’t have any other use.”

Leon’s smirk flipped to the grimace of realizing and accepting this was his final seconds. Kurt hacked the knife across Leon’s throat, and Leon was dead almost instantly.

And the sound of the bombastic devastation caused by the crimson lightning and its thunder was what woke Silvana. Night had fallen, her phone had died, and she was alone in her home, cold and in the dark.

She turned the lights on, rubbed at her head, and looked out the window to see the surges of crimson lightning.

“Oh my god,” she whispered to herself. “How can I possibly stop this?”

She ran upstairs to her room and flipped through the pages of her father’s journal. If he had calmed a Spirit Storm of such magnitude before, maybe he had taken note of the trick so he could do it again.

Thunder sounded like a bomb above her head, and the entire house shook.

She searched through the journal, trying to make sense of the random symbols and sigils her father had written down.

And then, she started to see a pattern.

As she flipped through pages, dogearing and bookmarking the things that stood out to her, she noticed what Solaris had been trying to say.

He had left her a message.

The house rattled and Silvana heard glass from the kitchen shake from the cabinets and shatter onto the floor.

Still, her eyes traced the words and symbols on the page.

Silvana’s mouth dropped, and she inhaled sharply.

All her father’s secrets were revealed in the journal.