LAMIAE

CHAPTER THIRTY: INQUIRY

"Why did they kill her?" she asked after a long silence. She deliberately used the plural form, because it was also mentioned in the diary. There was no one perpetrator, despite what she had been told before.

"Did you see more than one note?" asked her grandmother, and the girl nodded slightly.

Genevieve looked as if any moment something was going to explode inside her because she knew she would have to reveal something.

"There is a Council," she muttered, after a silent battle with herself. "Casper belonged to them, but he didn't like the ideology that the members followed, so he abandoned them and left. Victoria's death was a sort of lesson for daring to do it."

"Is the Council like a cult?" she wondered aloud. "Or rather an American fraternity?"

Her grandmother's lips twisted into a strange grimace.

"Neither of them fits the Council. But if you must know what it is, imagine combining both terms."

The girl shuddered. She would never want to be part of such a group.

"So Victoria knew she was going to die and did nothing? All of you did nothing?" she couldn't believe that everyone knew the date of her death and didn't try to protect her from it.

"I wasn't with her then, everything didn't go as it should," Genevieve stared at the wall. It was obvious that Victoria's death was something her grandmother still didn't accept, something that still caused her pain. "She was a very smart girl, but at that time there was a lack of knowledge, people and seconds. If it weren't for those seconds, they would have left them alone, they definitely wanted to do it on her birthday."

Dagmara recalled how Casper said one day: " Some people say they hate Mondays. I hate Wednesdays, it was so close to midnight, until another year... And she didn't make it. I think I've even heard the countdown on the streets."

"Casper blames Alan for it," she added casually, but her grandmother said:

"He wouldn't do anything, he was too young to do anything, Casper was a fool to think that two fifteen-year-olds would help him. Alan and Nikolai are only now understanding what Casper has gone through. Unfortunately, they needed two years for this."

Genevieve mumbled something to herself and then turned her back to her granddaughter.

"That's all? I would like to finish making the decoction."

Dagmara nodded and even though her grandmother had her back turned, she was somehow sure that she understood.

Right after she left the kitchen, she decided to go to Casper's room to talk to him before he took her to school. It was Friday and she only had four classes (including PE) so she could skip them, but she would probably have to explain it to her grandmother, and she didn't want to do that today. The second thing was that she wouldn't be able to see Arleta, and she really wanted to talk to the girl.

She knocked politely on the door - Casper was inside, because he immediately opened it in his pajamas.

"Oh my, why did the lady's noble legs bring her here?" he asked courteously, and only then did she realize that she had not officially visited Casper yet.

" After all, one day they have to come here," she said calmly, then smiled like the embodiment of innocence.

"Do you want to remind me that we're about to go to school?" the boy winked at her. At the beginning of September, it was not easy to reach an agreement on the issue of rides, but Casper finally had his way and Dagmara was banned, approved by her grandmother, from riding buses herself. "I remember that, with me as your chauffeur you won't miss a single class."

"Great," she was pleased, but if Casper had been more observant, he would definitely have heard a note of anxiety creeping into her voice.

She looked around, pretending to look at the room. This gave her some time to organize her thoughts and questions and gave Casper time to search the closet.

"I was just talking to grandma," she started, but her words had no effect on him at all - he continued rummaging through his clothes, choosing an outfit for today. If someone were to ask her about an assignment, she felt he wasn't even listening to her. "I asked her about the similarity between the deaths of Victoria and Sandra's boyfriend," in fact, she was bluffing. Her grandmother only made a slight mention of it, but the effect of what she said was appropriate. Casper looked back at her, frowning.

"Yes? And...?" he asked, obviously waiting for an explanation.

"You know..." she muttered, shrugging. "They're a bit close, even she had to admit that."

"I don't see anything like that there," he said indignantly.

He took his pants and shirt and sat on the bed, not saying anything for a moment. He resembled someone extremely defenseless, as if even one bad word could pierce him to the core, so she began to draw her words carefully:

"Victoria died, Sandra's boyfriend too."

"Victoria wouldn't have died if Alan and Niko..." he started, but she interrupted him in the middle of the sentence.

"Grandma thinks they wouldn't have done anything," she wasn't sure why she felt obligated to defend the boys, but she thought exactly the same as her grandma - two fifteen-year-olds couldn't help much.

"I know better," he said, and when he started unbuttoning his pajama top without her response, she thought it was time to leave the room. She was not fully satisfied with this conversation, but she didn't want to delve into the topic, which was like a taboo for Casper. She dressed warmly in a coat, gloves and a hat, said goodbye to her grandmother and left the house as quickly as possible, hurrying to the car.

The snow crunched under her feet with each step. he wondered how it was possible for so many snowflakes to tear through the dewy trees and their branches, but when she couldn't find a sensible argument, she abandoned these thoughts. The mansion looked beautiful in winter, if she had to choose, she probably liked it even more now than in the fall. Roofs sprinkled with slight frost and trees that had long lost their leaves looked like something out of a fairy tale. From time to time she heard a rustle so typical of the forest, but as if it was a bit dormant, as if the entire forest and its animals had fallen into a long-awaited nap.

She had to wait another fifteen minutes for Casper to show up. As she expected, he was accompanied by a cat, wagging its tail proudly. Tie had no sweater on it, but he didn't look like he was cold.

It's strange that they never pet him, she thought involuntarily, because whenever she remembered the animals of her friends or family from Warsaw, the pets were often transferred from one hand to another. The only sign of affection that Tie showed was when he sometimes sat on someone's lap, and he no longer showed any desire to be stroked. She had the impression that if he ever purred or clawed at her hand, it was more out of obligation than pleasure, as if he was doing what was considered a cat's code to stay within the norm.