Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) (22 page)

When they finished Gordon said, “You mean to tell me the superhex was in the building?”

“Of course it wasn’t,” Graves snapped. “She obviously had it with her and used it to create a distraction and try to get away.”

“We were with her when it went off,” said Jacob. “She didn’t have anything. In fact, she was trying to help Elon and Cassius, who are both in Wellness right now in really bad shape.”

“Thanks to the fire she started,” Graves added.

Jacob squared his shoulders and looked Graves in the eye. “Thanks to the fact that you were still developing the superhex in that lab. And lied to everybody about it.” He looked back over the board. “Thea didn’t release that hex, and neither did Nero. I’ll swear to it. It had to be in the house, and the fire set it off somehow.”

Graves narrowed his eyes. “How much has she paid you to help her? I hear she’s quite wealthy.”

Alecto, who hadn’t said a word since Thea came in, stood. “Surely the board will strongly consider the testimony of these guards. And we have other evidence against Graves. Cora and Nero both have emails they’ve received or, in Cora’s case, dug up through the network.”

“That’s not all.” Thea didn’t meet Alecto’s eyes as she told them about the email she’d found from Megaira.

“But nobody else saw this email, and the fire has no doubt destroyed that computer,” Stefan said. “How convenient.” He looked around at the board. “This is a waste of our time, and it’s late. Obviously Alecto and Thea—”

“It’s not obvious!” Iren’s voice was uncharacteristically loud, and her eyes hard as she looked at Graves. “If you have tampered with the account logs and led me into false testimony—”

“You’re being silly,” Graves interrupted.

“She’s not.” Langdon stood beside his wife. “There’s clearly at least enough evidence here for us to investigate the matter. Gordon?”

“I agree. Put Graves under guard until we get this straightened out.”

Hexing House was recovering.

The poor burned guard, Cassius, was recovering slowly but steadily. Thea’s arm was recovering in its cast. Elon was recovering from his gunshot wound, and seemed to think walking with a cane gave him flair. Everyone was recovering from their burns. Their voices had already recovered from the smoke.

The neighborhood where the lab had been was also recovering, with the help of some well-placed bribes to help smooth things over and provide satisfactory official explanations. Rumor had it that the owners had been cooking up some new kind of street drug, and the explosion and subsequent fire were related to that. If some toxic fumes had gotten loose and caused a few ill effects, well, that wasn’t surprising for a drug, was it?

In the two weeks since the fire, Alecto had been reinstated. She was cleared of all suspicion, largely due to emails Cora had recovered—including the one from Megaira to Lucien—by hacking into the network of the local cable company that provided the lab’s internet service. It seemed the lab employees, many of whom were human and had no grasp of Hexing House politics, were less careful about putting things in writing than their employers were. Graves and Megaira were both implicated several times over.

With Megaira gone, Nero was promoted to head of RDM. Cora was being showered with bonuses for her work in Tech. And Thea had finished her exploratory meetings, with an eye toward working for HRI as an Investigator. She liked the idea of making sure no human was hexed unfairly.

The only people who hadn’t resumed business as usual were Graves and his cohorts. Stefan and Philip had already been put to trial and found guilty. Like several others who were involved one way or another in the superhex scandal, they claimed limited knowledge of what Graves had really been doing. Unlike some of those others, the board didn’t believe them. While neither would lose their wings, both would be demoted to menial work for the rest of their lives.

Thea hadn’t attended either of their trials, having been busy with her meetings. But she went to Graves’s.

Despite what was now a mountain of evidence against him, Graves continued to insist that it was Alecto who’d orchestrated the superhex research, and that she was desperately trying to frame him. He accused Cora of manufacturing the emails, and the rest of them—including the guards who’d been there the night of the fire—of lying, probably because they’d been bribed with Thea’s ill-gotten money.

Those were his exact words,
ill-gotten money
. Thea supposed it was possible he had a touch of his mother’s visionary powers, and knew that for a fact. Or that he’d had her investigated and they’d somehow found out. But she thought it more likely he was taking a shot in the dark in his attempt to cast as much of a shadow over all of them as he could. Any money earned in Hollywood was an easy target. She refused to worry about it, or wonder whether people were shifting in their seats to stare at her.

His defense almost certainly wouldn’t have worked in any case. While he still had friends on the board and throughout the colony, there were just as many who were outraged at being lied to and made fools of. With Langdon and Iren leading the charge, a conviction was probably inevitable.

But probability became certainty when Nana pounded the final nail into her son’s coffin.

The packed auditorium quieted except for a few whispers as Nana came down the aisle. Thea caught enough of these to gather that Nana was universally revered, and that her visiting the campus had become unheard of.

“My husband was the head of this colony for forty years,” she said when she finally, with the assistance of Alecto, made it up onto the stage. “I probably would have gotten the job myself, mind, but back then even fury women didn’t get to be
openly
in charge.”

Nana waited until the chuckles passed, then her face hardened.

“My son took over for my husband, and his daughter for him. So I’ve been pretty closely involved in the running of this place for almost seventy of my ninety-six years. And in all that time, I have never seen anything so disgraceful.”

“Mother—” Graves began, but Nana silenced him with a look.

“You will keep your place,” she said.

“Yes ma’am,” Graves muttered.

Thea hid a laugh behind her hand. Others were less polite, and snickered openly at Graves.

“The honorable thing,” Nana went on, her eyes still on Graves, “would be to end this now by taking responsibility. But honor was never your strongest virtue. Nor honesty.”

“Mother!”

“Hush!”

Thea didn’t bother hiding her laugh this time. The whole audience was roaring at the elegant, prideful Graves being publicly dressed down by his mama.

“But since my son can’t seem to do his duty, I’ve come all the way out here today to do mine. He wouldn’t come to visit me, you know. Not for months.”

Graves scowled, but didn’t bother saying anything.

“So I’ve had to come to see him,” Nana went on. She flew lightly over to where Graves sat and, before he could react, put a hand on his shoulder and closed her eyes.

Of course she hummed. She seemed to be quite enjoying her performance. Thea supposed this was where Graves had gotten his own talent for grandstanding.

Nana stayed that way for what Thea guessed to be about two or three minutes while everyone, Graves included, kept quiet and waited.

When she opened her eyes, she cuffed Graves in the back of the head. “You were already talking to potential buyers? Bad enough you were developing this illegal product in the first place, without you compounding it by selling it before it’s ready and promising things you can’t deliver. There is no excuse for that kind of customer service.”

She turned to the table where the board sat. “As I expected, I saw him in meetings. I saw him at the lab. I saw enough to know he’s responsible for this, at least partly.”

“Surely we have not reached the point where we’re accepting the imagination of an old woman—” Graves began.

The whole auditorium exploded with outrage. It seemed you didn’t mess with Nana. Thea couldn’t say she was surprised.

“Nana has used her visions to help us through crisis after crisis, as you well know,” Langdon said when calm was finally restored. “I imagine I speak for most of us when I say I trust her testimony more than any of the hard evidence presented here.”

Thea could see the exact moment when Graves accepted that he had lost. He didn’t slouch or hang his head or look guilty. If anything, he looked more proud than ever. For a brief flash, his eyes glowed violet, as if he was hexing somebody. His expression was cold and hard.

“What about Megaira?” Alecto asked. “What did you do to her?” She continued to hold out hope that her sister had been coerced into cooperating, but had balked when Alecto was framed. Apparently thinking Graves had silenced Megaira, that she was hurt somewhere or even dead, was preferable to thinking she was a traitor.

But Nana shook her head sadly. At the same time, Graves laughed.

“I’m sure Mother saw Maggie at some of those same meetings.” Graves stood and put his hands in the pockets of his very expensive pants. He still didn’t look defeated. Now that the game was up, he looked glad to be taking some credit at last. “I was the voice of the operation. I excel at client-facing work. But she was the brains. This was her baby.”  He gave Alecto a cold smile. “And she has a backup of the data. You won’t find her, and you won’t be able to stop her.”

Now that he had the floor, he took full advantage of the moment. He turned to the audience.

“What I am being accused of, what it seems they will try to punish me for, is progress. Innovation. It’s refusing to stand still and keep doing what we’ve always done in the same way we’ve always done it. All we were doing in that lab was experimenting. Researching.
Learning
. And we’re calling that a crime? Has our colony become so stagnant, so complacent in what we do, that we fear
knowledge
now?” He glowered for a second or two, then bellowed, “WHERE IS YOUR COURAGE?”

A few people started. Others hurled insults at him.

But to Thea’s horror, a few were nodding.

“Enough!” Alecto stood up. “You weren’t pursuing knowledge, you were pursuing mass destruction.”

“And you’re so involved in human politics now that you care who goes to war, and who is left standing?” Graves asked. “Perhaps you’ve been working too closely with them. Taken a bribe or two?”

It was ridiculous, as most of the things that came out of Graves’s mouth seemed to be. But he had too much charisma. He was too good at planting doubt. Thea willed Alecto to stop engaging him.

Alecto seemed to reach the same conclusion. “I’m not going to argue with you. The board will decide your fate.”

She turned away from Graves and stepped forward to look out over the audience, a compelling figure in her own right. When all eyes were on her she said, “We are creatures of vengeance. It does not suit us to be soft or hesitant. But even above that, we are creatures of justice. Everything we do, we must do with that in mind. I’m sure I need not clarify that selling a hex that could result in thousands of deaths—or more—to the highest bidder is not just.”

Most of them were nodding at Alecto now, but Thea heard somebody behind her mutter, “Just because it’s wrong to
sell
it, doesn’t mean it’s wrong to
research
it.”

Someone a few rows back said, more loudly, “Why should we be afraid to develop a weapon? We don’t have to use it, but having it makes us stronger. What if the humans turn on us one day?”

Thea glanced at Graves and saw a little smile on his face that she wanted to claw off. What was Alecto thinking? Why would she even open this conversation? She was playing right into his hands.

Thea stood up and turned to face the audience herself. “I think Cassius could tell you why it’s a bad idea. I saw the superhex in action. I know what it can do. It doesn’t make us stronger and it definitely doesn’t make us safer. It’s not something we want in our home. Some of you are parents. You want your kids living with a hex that nobody can resist and nobody can control?”

Most of the eyes she met were approving. Thea thought the dissenters were few. But she also didn’t think they were convinced.

“I’m not a tyrant,” Alecto said in a voice hard enough to belie the claim. “Nobody on this board is. If somebody wants to make a case that this is a moral, ethical, or in any way appropriate avenue of research, put a proposal on my desk and we’ll consider it.” She turned back to Graves. “In the meanwhile, what you did was illegal. Resources, including some valuable enchanted items, were misappropriated and destroyed. Furies were hurt. Hester is
dead
. You’ll have to answer for all of that.”

In the end, he only had to answer for most of it. The prevailing theory was that Hester had been unhinged by what she was doing, until she either became a liability or actually threatened to expose the whole scandal, and had to be dealt with. But there was no proof that Graves or anybody working for him had killed her. Officially, her murder remained unsolved.

Graves was found guilty of all the other crimes laid at his feet. The sentence was inevitable. Possibly thinking it made the board look more impartial, it was Langdon rather than Alecto who stood up the next morning and announced that Graves would have his wings removed at dawn the next day.

Graves sat upright in his chair, impeccably dressed as always, and showed no reaction at all. In the audience, a few people clapped. Most were silent. Even the people who’d been murmuring about the benefits of researching the superhex the day before didn’t speak up on Graves’s behalf.

But one person did. To Thea’s great surprise, Nana came forward.

“He’s been convicted in part because of me, and I can’t regret it,” she said. “There are consequences when a person does wrong, and it is our duty if it’s anybody’s to insist that justice be done.”

“But?” Alecto asked.

“But he’s still my boy,” Nana said with a shrug. “And I don’t want to see him hurt like that.”

“Nana, that’s not—”

“So I’d like you to consider,” Nana interrupted, “what he’s done for this colony. His many years of service. The great strides made in RDM when he was head of that department. A person could argue that his contributions have been just as great as his sins.”