Chapter Fifteen

Two o'clock in the morning is not my favorite time to be awake. Unfortunately, it is the best time for sneaking. I crept out of my room and down to Violet's cell, making as little noise as humanly possible. No way was I going to rouse the grumps if I could help it.

Luckily, I was pretty much sober again and had regained full control of my limbs. It hadn't taken long at all after Jared's departure for my body to remind itself that, in spite of some truly spectacular kissing, I was still intoxicated, which was actually rather pleasant as it allowed me a sufficient lack of concentration that prevented me from dwelling on the Grouchy Duo and what the hell kinda stick was stuck up Danny boy's ass.

When Jared had asked me to promise not to help Violet, I had readily agreed, more because it would have seemed highly suspicious if I hadn't than out of any real sense of morality or duty. I know if it came right down to it, had Violet asked me to help her escape, I would have handed her the keys to her freedom with nary a pause.

'Course, I would have been beheaded later, but that's besides the point.

The point, was that I'd actually had every intention of aiding Violet in her escape as much as humanly possible. And now I couldn't. At least, not directly. And as you may or may not have noticed, I'm not so hot at the indirect stuff.

Violet was awake, though I'm not entirely sure she was conscious. She stared at the wall opposite her bed with intensity unwarranted by the bland concrete.

"Violet?" I called gently. She returned to herself with a jolt.

"Oh! Phoenix, it's you. Well, of course it's you, who else would it be, hah. I was just…well, I was…thinking."

"Feel like sharing?" I asked, pulling up a wooden stool from the corner of my lab.

"I was just thinking about the trial…"

"Ah."

"Yes…I'm an…Old Soul, aren't I?"

"Yeah, basically just a fancy term for someone who gets reincarnated."

"So, if I were to die, I would just come back?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"And the Merlin's Council is still going to execute me?"

Oh. I saw what she was getting at now.

"Ah, not entirely. You see, the Merlin's Council Executioner uses this sword…uhm, well, he uses Excalibur."

Her eyes widened. "Like from the King Arthur tales?"

"Well, yeah, 'cept they aren't tales, they're true. Mostly. But the Blade of Righteousness is imbued with magic, and when it kills something, it kills something. For someone or something killed by Excalibur, there is no heaven, there is no hell, there is no limbo or reincarnation. The soul, if it was there to begin with, simply ceases to exist."

Violet looked slightly less than reassured. "Oh." She forced a small smile. "I didn't really expect there to be such a large loophole, really, I just hoped…"

My heart stabbed itself several thousand times as I watched Violet come to terms with the fact that in all likelihood she only had several days to live and they would be spent in a cell where she had plenty of time to contemplate her sins. I really have to learn to start reviewing what I say before I open my yap.

We sat there in mutual awkward silence for a few moments, me feeling like a complete and utter tool.

After a minute, violet looked up as me and smiled that sad, knowing smile she was getting so good at.

"It's alright, Phoenix. I asked. Don't feel guilty for being honest." She said. It didn't make me feel any better.

I looked down and shoved my hand in my pocket, retrieving the vial of ick that Jared had given me.

"Here, it's the potion I promised." I said, tossing it to her through the barrier of my Inverted Circle. The sole redeeming feature of the otherwise annoying inverted circle is that anything can enter them; it's the exiting that's a problem. She caught it and held it in her open palm for a moment, regarding it with the delicacy of a rare and potent poison. The liquid sloshed thickly and clung to the slides of the glass, looking as thoroughly malevolent as a liquid possibly can.

"So I drink this, and it will strip away my blackened powers?" she asked. She was stalling.

"Yes."

"And it won't harm me?"

"No." We'd been over this. I understood it was hard, but she had to take it on her own. If she didn't want to do it, I wasn't going to make her; the whole point of the potion was voluntarily giving up the evil in you. She looked at me to ask another question, then stopped. She knew she was stalling as well as I did, and she knew it was pointless. It wasn't going to be any easier in ten minutes.

She sighed and uncorked the bottle. "Thank you, Phoenix. For everything."

I smiled. "Don't thank me 'til you've seen the bill."

She smiled back and put the vial to her lips, tilting her head back and downing the potion in one gulp. I quickly cast a muffling spell over the basement. This was going to hurt, and she was going to scream.

I didn't place myself outside the barrier. It felt wrong, inhumane, to stick her alone in her own little soundproof bubble while she suffered, me standing peacefully and unaffected on the sidelines.

Maybe that was exaggerating a little, but I still would have felt like a heartless bitch.

Violet's eyes bulged and she sucked in a sharp breath, and I closed my eyes as she screamed. I knew what it would look like. If I looked at her with my magical sight, my third eye if you will, I would see her being torn in half from the inside out, surrounded in gritty black dust, which would slowly disappear as her psyche bled out the evil in her.

I didn't look.

Violet lay on her bed, panting and convulsing, but no longer screaming. She'd known it was going to hurt, but not that much. No one can know how much it's going to hurt until they've experienced it, and even then memory doesn't serve it justice. Just one of those horrible things in life that you never want to have to go through.

As I have previously mentioned, magic is in everything. Every single being on the planet has magic in them simply because they are alive, and this holds true for Practitioners. They channel the magic, but when it passes through them, it takes on a bit of their personality, and some of it is left behind after a spell. So if you use black magic, a part of that spell will be left behind, tainting your magic and your soul, and logically, the more you use, the worse it will become. That magic is a part of you, and if it is taken away, to a Practitioner, it is equivalent to taking away a limb. By ripping it off. Sans anesthetics.

Violet had a pretty big chunk of black magic.

I'd taken the potion once. When I was tried for witchcraft at eleven, one of the conditions on my life was that I take the potion.

It sucked.

I honestly thought I was dying. I thought they'd lied to me and had decided to kill me, despite their promises to let me live, in the most painful way they knew how. Not a pleasant experience for an eleven year old kid, now matter how spunky they are.

And thus was born the seeds of dislike for the Council. That and the fact that most of them are self-righteous pompous snobby idgits, but mostly it was the potion.

Eventually Violet recovered enough to sit up, though she was still ashen and shaking.

"That." she paused, swallowing, "was not a pleasant experience." She said.

"Tell me about it."

"Did you ever do that?"

I nodded. "I had to when I was on trial. I was eleven."

She winced. "That young?"

"Yeah. I tend to start bad habits early, give them a sporting chance to sink in."

She lay back down for a moment, breathing deeply. "That really hurt."

I smiled but didn't say anything. I remembered feeling just as she did now. She'd keep talking when she was confident she wouldn't throw up. She sat up again and looked at me intensely.

"I'm free." She said.

"Actually, darling, you're still in a cell."

"No, no, I mean I'm free." She looked around, standing up and twirling a little. "I'm clean. How could I have lived like that before? I was so tainted. The magic was so..." her voice faded off, her face clouding over. "My magic. It's gone. I can't feel it anymore."

"No, it's still there, but it's a fraction of what it used to be. You have to understand that you aren't powerful anymore. There was a lot of tainted magic in you."

"But it is still there?" she said hopefully.

"Yes." I agreed reluctantly. She seemed just as concerned with her magical power as she had before. Had it been a waste? "But the most you could probably do right now is light a candle."

She sat back down on her bed, looking at her hands. "I see."

I waited tensely, unsure if the potion had done any good. What if Jared had been right, and she was unredeemable? What if the temptation for power was too strong? Finally she looked up at me, and there were tears in her knowing grey eyes.

"Thank you, Phoenix. Thank you so much." She whispered. I released the breath I hadn't realized I was holding in a rush, tears nearly springing to my eyes as well. Thank God, it worked.

For what was probably the first time since I'd known him, I was happy Jared was wrong.

A/N: heeeey, guys...ha-hah.

okay, please don't kill me. i know it's short, but hey! better than nothing, right? i know it's kinda old stuff mixed with new to all you who read the crap chaps i posted earlier, but i promise, when i post the rest of 15, it will be entirely new stuff. mainly cuz i lost just about everything when my computer died. blasted box of doom.

as per usual, dunno when i'll be posting again, but i'll try to make it soon! reviews are super coool and mucho appreciated-o! (yaaay spanglish!)