I caught him at the airport, thanks to Liesel, who’d grudgingly said, “He is going to New York, obviously!” after watching me all but crawl out of the enclave and start lurching round the temple grounds looking for him. She did first try to talk me into having a lie-down and not worrying about him, but gave in after it didn’t work.
“You’re not going to New York!” I snarled at him, standing between him and the security line. “I’ll start yelling you’re a terrorist and get us taken up, I swear I will. She’s not getting her hands on you again! Are you out of your bloody mind?”
He didn’t shout back. He just went on standing there in the middle of the concourse, looking far better than he had a right to in the still-pristine white T-shirt and jeans we’d got him at the commune, his silver hair artistically floppy; opposite him I looked like a ragged urchin, my clothes filthy with sweat and dust, stained all over with faint red marks from the bricks, torn in a few places. I wasn’t getting him taken up; if I started howling, any policeman would look at the two of us, and I’d only get myself taken up instead, and be locked up somewhere for weeks until Liesel and Aadhya got me out somehow, assuming Liesel didn’t sabotage the process to keep me locked up for her opinion of my own good. People were already giving me sidelong looks.
But Orion was staring at me like I was a drink of water, so I drew a few deep breaths and forced myself calm. “Lake, I know she’s your mum, but she’s a maleficer,” I said, level and measured. “Whatever’s wrong, it’s her fault. She’s done it to you. And she won’t fix it for you, either.”
“She’s the only one who might be able to,” he said. “If anyone else could have—” He stopped, and I remembered Mum with her hands on his head, sorrowing, after everything she could do. I couldn’t set him right, she’d said. All she’d been able to do was give him hope. Enough hope that he’d taken himself back out of the despair he’d fallen into, let himself believe that he deserved to live after all, no matter what was wrong—wrong with him, the words I hadn’t said, but they were in him already.
“You don’t need fixing,” I said, and tried to mean it. “You’ve spent every minute of your life saving people.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve spent every minute of my life hunting mals. I wanted to—” He looked away, a shine of misery in his eyes. “I wanted to think I was saving people. I wanted to be a hero.”
“Oh, shut it, you absolute block, you are a hero!” I said savagely. “You did save people. You saved bloody all of us!”
“You did that,” he said.
“I’d’ve been eaten ten minutes in, along with everyone else in the hall, when the horde came back down!” I said. “I couldn’t have tried it, anyway. I couldn’t have done a thing if you hadn’t been there; we’d never even have fixed the machinery in the first place if you’d just faffed round and took out mals when you were bored.” I was grasping wildly round. “You cleared the whole Scholomance! You killed half the mals in the entire world—”
“I ate them!” he burst out.
I pulled up short. “What?”
“I ate them,” he said again, his voice raw-edged. “All those mals in the school. I didn’t kill them. I just—sucked them up. They tried to fight me, and it didn’t do any good.” He looked away, his face twisting with something horribly tense. “I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ve been doing all along. Not killing them.”
“I’ve seen you kill mals!” I said.
“I was doing it the hard way,” he said. “Maybe I needed to—to get through their skins, before, somehow. But I don’t have to anymore. I just have to get hold of them, and then—” He made a horrible gesture like someone slurping up noodles. “I can take everything.”
“What, like a maw-mouth?” I said, a howl of protest, and stopped, my whole stomach gone into free-fall.
“Yeah,” Orion said, smiling at me, an awful and utterly mirthless smile. “Just like that.”
I wanted to scream questions at him, but I couldn’t, not with that look on his face, gutted of hope. I’d have been pretending I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand, but I did, with horrible clarity: this was what Ophelia had done to him. The monster that couldn’t be killed, the monster that all the other monsters feared. The monster that extracted every last ounce of power from its victims. She’d found a way to put that horrible devouring power into a person—and then she’d taught the person to feed the malia he gathered back into her enclave—where it superficially became mana again, purified by the act of being freely given. Beautifully efficient.