When everything is over, she has just enough energy to drive home. (And when did a small apartment in Palm Springs become home, anyway, and not the house of her family?) She rolls the windows down, letting wind and rain whip her fevered forehead, but it doesn't make what she learned any easier to digest.
Magic isn't of the human domain. Just as she was beginning to wonder about the truth of it, whether magic really was wrong and unnatural, it was proven correct, if an understatement to the hidden horrific truth, and she has to tell her superiors straight away.
"The first Strigoi," she mutters disbelievingly, and shakes her head, but her fingers tremble against the steering wheel. The oldest of the Moroi killers, and it had wanted to tell her its story. The only difference between her, and the thousands of victims who died after listening to the tale, is that she had a friend who tried to help her survive, and succeeded.
Sydney looks into the rearview mirror, but Adrian is still unconscious on the back seat. She steps on the gas. He needs help, and not Spirit healing either.
It's going to be hard for him too, when Adrian defines himself so closely with his powers, whether it's rebelling against them with drinking binges or walking through dreams when his apathy has been replaced by curiosity. She represses a shudder at the memory. But he was there. He heard every word, even if Adrian does not have her historical learning to sense just how well the Strigoi's story slots into the facts.
They're almost back at the apartment they've recently started to share, when Adrian finally opens his eyes. He catches her eye in the glass.
"That must have been some party."
Same old Adrian. "You're not hung over."
He narrows his eyes at her. Sydney was expecting it, so catches the flinch the moment Adrian's memories rush back. She's not surprised either that he flops back down.
"Sage," he says, "you know bad guys love to lie, right?"
She had anticipated this route. "Why would he? I was about to die. And do you think it's coincidence that the Strigoi began to appear when Moroi finally started using their powers?"
"The first documented case of Strigoi," he points out. "There could have been many more before him, even if he is who he says he is. Just like I highly doubt the lauded St. Vladmir was the first Spirit-user."
"Did his aura say that he was lying?" she asks.
"He had to have been."
"But did it?" she presses flatly. "My charms said he was telling the truth."
There is a brief pause. Adrian's voice is muffled, laced with a strange edge to it. "Maybe he just thought it was the truth."
She decides to ignore the hidden meaning there, the lies he was caught in when he tried to hide what he thought she'd done from the Alchemists. No part of that thought makes any sense, really, and she's still not sure whether to be offended he believed her capable of cold-blooded murder, or shocked he tried to cover it up anyway.
"But with everything else Dimitri and Sonya came up with? That's the only explanation that makes any sense. And we, both of us, are going to have to tell the Moroi world that the magic they use so freely is responsible for the void between life and death that let Strigoi exist." And Sydney has to tell the witches, too. She tries another way to convince him. "Magic wants in to anything it can enter."
Adrian makes a reluctant sound of assent. "That it does."
"And you saw the records yourself: in the old country, when magic itself was taboo, draining someone to death didn't turn you into a Strigoi at all."
"I have the eye strain and head ache to prove it." Even now, deadly serious and unhappy about the conversation's direction, he apparently cannot resist.
"You wouldn't have believed me if you didn't translate it yourself."
There's a pause. "And that's why you need to convince me, isn't it? Without me there's no way you'll convince Lissa, and without her, no one will be on your side."
Sydney is quiet.
"You could have just asked, you know," he says quietly.
"Then consider this me asking you," Sydney says. He doesn't argue any further, which Sydney takes as assent. They are quiet when she pulls up to the brick building of the apartment, and she hesitates before adding, "For what it's worth, I'm sorry use of magic will be banned." It has to be, or they'll never be rid of Strigoi.
He sits back up, and there is sorrow on his face. But for her as much as for himself, because it's worse when he looks at her through the rearview mirror. When he looks at her like that, she wonders if it's such a great idea to share an apartment with him, while still trying to keep the proper distance between them.
He clasps her charm in his hand for a moment. "Not as much as I am."