Who is Magpie?
Chapter 32- More questions than answers

Everything happened as she said, she drank the tea quickly, staring at Bronx in a way that made Ezekiel uncomfortable. He didn’t see her blink as Bronx said the words she had told him to repeat, and when she was done she placed the cup shakily on the table. She was sure everyone could hear her heart racing and the anxious feeling invading her sense told her she had made a terrible mistake.

She continued to sit on the desk because it put her at a comfortable height to look at Bronx. While she sat, Ezekiel continued his meeting explaining how her behaviour had changed from the morning of her attack to the afternoon when his father arrived. Bronx had added an anecdote about everything they had found in her bag, after searching, and how she had reacted to the tea versus how he had felt about how it could have been used. Ezekiel fought the urge to shoot him at adding that, knowing it would all come out one way or another.

“Excuse me, I mean no disrespect Alpha, but why send someone who, at the time, was of human skill with a couple of knives and a stick to kill you? If she had gotten that close with anything else you’d be dead.” Raymond asked, disbelief coating every word.

“I had asked her the same thing.” Bronx said before Ezekiel could. “They have never provided her with her own weapons beyond these, and she is made to pay a consequence in order to borrow other equipment. We believe they intended for her to be caught and killed. Her actually killing Ezekiel would have been a bonus.”

Bronx was not impervious to the look Ezekiel gave as he leant against the table and listened to his Beta’s words. Without the counsel to see, the look told Bronx that he would have his own consequences for not sharing such details from their private meeting.

Magpie began to sway, her anxiety climbing and her mind overworked. “Magpie?” Bronx asked as she reached over, without clanking her chains, and grabbed his shirt.

She looked slowly toward him, the tea taking over her personality again as their eyes met. “Yes?”

“Are you ready?” He asked instead.

“What do you need?” Her face was bland like it had been before, and even as Ezekiel moved into her view, her eyes didn’t moved away from Bronx.

“I need you to be honest in the answers you give me, and to the questions asked.”

She nodded, and looked at him patiently. “What is your name?”

“They call me Magpie.” She returned.

“What is your real name?” Bronx asked again, looking at her firmly.

“I’ve only ever seriously been called Magpie. Anything else was made up on the spot because we were out in public.”

Bronx was sorry he asked again, but was hoping she would give a different answer under the tea’s influence. “Where were you born?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who are your parents?”

“I don’t remember them.

“How did you come to be with the Fae?”

She sighed this time like this answer would require more air. “They said I came to them, begged for their help and salvation, which they so kindly provided in exchange for my undying devotion to them.”

“That’s it? What about a location, a time even? A reason you went to them?” Bronx encouraged, secretly wondering if she had been a kidnapped wolven from before the Ashford family had taken over this region.

She shook her head. “Did you ever ask?” Corleone asked from across the room, looking away impishly as attention shifted to her.

“Answer her, did you ever ask?” Bronx encouraged.

Magpie’s eyes narrowed, looking to the backs of her hands where light scars could barely be seen in the light. “Questions were not… /encouraged/. I didn’t even know how long I had been there until recently. You lose track of time without a calendar, but I think that was part of the point.”

“When is your birthday?” Ezekiel asked, and Magpie didn’t need to be encouraged to answer his question.

“To celebrate a birthday you must first have people around who are glad you are born. You don’t celebrate the day you acquired a tool, nor do you the day it was created.” Her focus didn’t break away from his as she continued. “No matter how well I did or performed or trained, I would always be the human. Called when needed and returned to the attic when not.”

Ezekiel was ready to make heads roll. Holding his hands together did little to stop his trembling as his wolf begged to be let out. His thoughts rolled through how the scars on her back had occurred and that only made it worse.

“While this is, quite moving, what does this line of questioning hope to accomplish?” Wallace grumbled.

Eugene Anson, who had been fairly quiet this far, rolled his eyes so loudly that Magpie, who wasn’t looking at him, could tell from what he said next. “She’s on trial for breaking and entering, and trying to kill an Alpha. The defence is that she had no choice because she was forced to under drug control, and what kind of people drug someone everyday, under their care, and tell them it’s their idea? People who also say shit like that to a 20-something year old on her birthday.”

A feverish knock came at the door, and Bronx walked down to open it, Ezekiel moving into his place beside Magpie in the meantime. The door swung open to reveal a very excited Doctor Pon. He walked in and closed the doors before anyone even asked.

“Wolves bane.” He declared happily. “When creating her withdrawal plan we had to use a new tea bag because the old one was created with wolves bane!” He began to gesture at her. “That’s why she’s never shifted, they’ve been dosing her with high amounts of it everyday for years. They must have added all of those other ingredients for weakness and impaired healing to hide the other traits.”

“Well that’s fucking rude.” Magpie muttered, causing everyone to turn and look at her now. “What, it is! Do you know how long I trained because I wasn’t strong enough, or how often they beat me until I passed out because I wasn’t good enough, and then I spent days healing miserably until they chose to treat to my wounds.” Magpie was quietly fuming while the Doctor walked the room.

He passed out papers to the counsel members. “When I heard my patient was having her trial today I rushed to make these copies. These are just the herbs I could identify, see the picture there, we had to use them to make more tea when her body started crashing but that’s them as spread out as I could get it. Those are their known side effects, there, and I’ve added a couple there in red once we found out she’s wolven.” He held a copy of the page he passed out up and gesture to the different sections.

Ezekiel scooped up a copy of the paper, examining the things added in red. “Doctor Pon, under normal circumstances how long would it have taken for the wolves bane to leave her system enough that we’d notice?”

Doctor Pon looked curiously at Ezekiel, then to Magpie, and back. “Normal circumstances like not adding the other ingredients, or normal as in not replaceing you?”

He nodded considerately. “The latter.”

Doctor Pon thought quietly for a few minutes. “I believe the fevers and chills were a direct result of her wolf trying to reach out to you, and without that her body would have slowly started to break down from the sudden withdrawal. It’s hard to say if the wolves bane would have withdrawn enough for her to fully shift before death, but her body would have tried…. It would have been ridiculously painful.”

“Pain in my ass until the end, at least they’re consistent.” Magpie cursed, unintentionally gathering everyone’s glances again. “Right, sorry, convict and all.” She clattered her chains noisily at them. “I’ll just be over here shutting the fuck up.”

“She’s very lippy for being ‘drugged’.” Wallace muttered angrily, like her just being there would have offended him.

“What was her order?” The doctor asked thoughtfully.

Bronx chuckled loudly. “For her to be honest.”

The doctor made a motion towards Wallace as if to say, ‘well there you go’.

“There was no way she would have gotten in, and out.” Ezekiel said slowly. “We would have arrested her and put her in the prison… where we would have watched her slowly dying if it weren’t for her doctors last efforts to help her and her wolves determination…..” He looked over at Bronx who was returning to his place at the front. “She was the message. They sent her to show us that we’re not safe from our own, being an alpha means nothing because they can take our wolf and use us like puppets.”

Magpie bit on the inside of her cheek to keep herself from being too honest out of turn again but she was caught.

Hariette Grigg caught her eyes and asked, “why did you think you had been sent?”

She looked to Bronx who told her to answer the question. “I was forbidden from going into the garden, and snuck out to see the night blooming roses.”

“But their garden is covered in shit that’s toxic to wolven.” Ezekiel added, eyeing those around him that met his gaze.

She nodded. “I was told it would kill anyone but the Fae, but I thought I would be okay for a short time. I was found out, and when I woke up I was told to pack my bag and go kill the wolven’s alpha. I figured it was my punishment.”

“And you went along with it?” Corleone asked, seemingly torn between thinking she was a sad story and a stupid one.

Magpie rolled her eyes. “Even if I had a choice, I didn’t. All I know is the Garden, they told me my life was theirs and I owe them everything for them taking me in, that they were the life that sustained me and if I didn’t return I would die.”

“Do you still feel indebted to them?” Bronx asked, eyeing her thoughtfully as she spoke.

She looked him dead in the eye as she uttered, “after everything they forced me to do, they sent me here to die, I’d say that about settles my supposed ‘life debt’, wouldn’t you?”

She lowered her legs off the desk and crossed them thigh over thigh since she couldn’t cross her arms. “Besides, I never felt like I owed them anything, but they told me I owed them everything.”