The shrouded figure turned up toward the camera for a second, revealing a face I didn’t want to see. Alton snapped his head back around and hurried up to the doors of the Bestiary, placing a small, silvery object on the ground. I gasped and almost dropped Smartie on my face, my clammy palms gripping the sides of the tablet. My heart rate spiked, my eyes widening in horror. No, no, no, no, no… This can’t be right.
My father whirled back around and hurried back the way he’d come. A few minutes later, a second figure strode up to the door and picked up the abandoned object. I knew it had to be the Shapeshifter spy, but they weren’t wearing a familiar guise—not John Smith, not Alton, not Preceptor Parks, but someone else entirely. Very cunning.
With no guards around to stop him, the Shapeshifter opened the door and skimmed the silvery object inside. The blast went off ten seconds later, the figure darting in through the fog that rolled out. He sprinted back out soon after, with Quetzi slung over his shoulder, the serpent’s tail dragging behind him. He was clearly struggling with the feathered serpent, the weight slowing him down, but Quetzi didn’t move or fight back, a shimmering golden rope wrapped around him. Running as fast as he could with the added weight, the spy disappeared out of the camera’s sight, no doubt using the nearby concealed stairwell to get down to the Crypt.
I realized I’d been holding my breath, and I let it all out in one shaky exhale. Alton had facilitated Quetzi’s release. He’d made it possible for John Smith to get in and get out, with Quetzi in his arms. Alton had, by proxy, caused the chaos in the Bestiary. And, presumably, he’d been the one to cover these tracks.
But why? Why would you do this?
I threw on clothes, grabbed Smartie off the desk, and sprinted toward my father’s office to confront him. Furious tears meandered down my cheeks, my broken heart too overwhelmed to stop them. None of this made any logical sense to me. Why would Alton have done all of that for the spy? A sickening feeling wrenched inside me. Please tell me you aren’t working for her.
I burst through the hefty doors of his office, to find him sitting behind his expansive desk. He looked up in alarm, shoving something into the top drawer before I could catch sight of it. A memory came pinging back into my mind—his suspicious behavior the last time I’d been in here, when he’d pushed documents and something shiny into his desk.
“Why did you do it?” I barked, my voice cracking with emotion.
He frowned. “Do what, Astrid?”
“Why did you do it? Why did you set things up so Quetzi could be stolen? Why are you working with Katherine? Tell me now!” My body shook violently, my heart racing so hard I thought I might suffer a cardiac arrest at any moment.
“This is preposterous. Astrid, you need to calm down. Who has been feeding you these lies?”
“You’re the only one who’s been feeding me lies, Father!” I snapped, breathless. “I saw you. I found a glitch in the camera footage, and I recovered the deleted files. It showed me the real footage. You left an object for the spy so he could get into the Bestiary and take Quetzi. All that mess, all those escaped beasts, it happened because of you. I want to know why, and now.” Anger spiked through my veins. “You blamed Garrett, when all this time you were the one doing the betraying. How could you?”
His face turned as white as a sheet. “You did what?”
“I found the original footage, Father. You can’t wipe anything permanently from the coven’s system—even you should know that. The doctoring was well done, I’ll grant you that, but I have a keener eye for detail than most. I saw you. I saw what you did.”
“Nonsense. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Are you really going to lie to my face?” I turned Smartie around and played the footage to him, his eyes getting wider and wider as the images danced across the screen, revealing the truth—the unmistakable facts, in vivid Technicolor.
He sank back down into his chair, holding his head in his hands. From the purple circles under his eyes, and the drawn, sunken look of his skin, it was clear he was still exhausted from his Necromancy and the Purge that had ended John Smith. Still, I could muster no shred of sympathy, not after what he’d done. He had brought all of this on himself.
“I’m sorry. I won’t lie to you again,” he whispered, tears brimming in his eyes. I’d never seen my father cry before, and the sight was deeply unsettling. Part of me wanted to hug him, while the other part wanted to smack him hard in the face. “I made a deal with Katherine—Quetzi, in exchange for the missing children. I didn’t find that medallion at Purgatory. The spy brought it to me, from her, though he was impersonating someone else at the time. I didn’t know who he really was, I swear. I didn’t know he was pretending to be Jacintha, and I definitely didn’t know what he’d done to her. If I had, I would never have gone ahead with it.”
He paused, taking a shallow breath, his face contorted in pain. “Katherine threatened to kill you and destroy your body before I’d get the chance to resurrect you. Out of devotion for the coven and the magical world, it wasn’t an easy choice to make—I thought about it for a while before I gave her anything, weighing up my options. I wondered if I would put the lives of others above yours... Katherine was so eager to get Quetzi, she even offered the San Diego kids, to ‘sweeten the deal,’ in her own words. I said yes, but not with an easy heart. I figured Quetzi would be powerful and smart enough to get away from whoever she sent here to collect him. It was a huge risk, I know, but… you’re my daughter, Astrid. I couldn’t let anything happen to you. I had to keep you safe.”
I stared at him, not knowing what to say. There were some reasons in there that I could understand, but my life wasn’t worth all of this mayhem. I wasn’t more important, just because I was his daughter. If Katherine fulfilled the ritual because of this, then what was the point? There wasn’t one. And what if Katherine had been bluffing? She wasn’t known for doing that, but what if she’d known she could bend Alton to her will by saying something like that?
“Katherine might succeed because of you,” I said coldly.
“You think I don’t know that? You don’t think I feel the weight of that?” His eyes burned with grief, his bottom lip trembling.
I frowned. “What if Quetzi hadn’t escaped?”
“I planned to help the serpent out, when the spy tried to take him during my monthly debrief. I had a fail-safe in place, but then you went looking for Quetzi, and now he’s gone. Katherine is out to get him now, and she won’t stop until she gets what she wants. Which is why I sent you all after Quetzi. I wanted you to find him before Katherine does.”
“Why did you even bring that evil man back to life?”
Alton sighed. “I wanted to know who he really was, and if Quetzi had told him anything prior to his death.”
Realization hit me like a stab in the chest. “Did you… kill John Smith? That story about you Purging and the beast killing him—was that true, or was that another lie?”
“That is how it happened. That wasn’t a lie. I’d intended to wipe his memory of me and hand him over to the Mage Council, but everything hit me at once. I was so tired and angry, and I Purged before I could get him to safety. The Purge beast did kill him, but that wasn’t my intention.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth, at least with that aspect of it,” he replied solemnly.
“Pretty handy, though, right? That took the spy out of the picture, in case he let anything slip.”
Alton’s eyes hardened. “Either way, I couldn’t have anyone finding out about what I’d done, not when I’d planned to make things right. But I did not mean for him to die like that. There’s been enough death in this coven.”
Everything they’d said during their exchange in the Escher Reading Room made sense now. Alton had told John Smith to be very careful how he answered, presumably warning him not to reveal his involvement. John Smith had replied by saying he knew how this worked, and that he wouldn’t say any
thing. It had been a silent agreement between the two of them, and we’d all been duped.
“Why did you try to set Garrett up, when it was you all along?” I hissed, tears falling.
“I didn’t know that it wasn’t Garrett. When I checked the footage myself, I saw that his body cam had been set on a loop. It made me suspect him even more, though I realize now that I was wrong. The spy must have hacked the system to make it look like Garrett was responsible, just as I’d done to cover the images of me in the hallway outside the Bestiary.”
“You can’t just be forgiven for this,” I murmured.
He nodded. “I know… but I beg of you, please don’t tell a soul about what you’ve seen. We have to find Quetzi before Katherine does, and you will need me for that. I can make this right, but I can’t do that if everyone finds out what I did. No one will trust me, no matter how good my intentions might have been.”
“You could have told me. I would have understood. I could have helped you.” My voice came out as little more than a squeak, my eyes blurry with weeping. Alton had always been loyal to the coven, almost to a fault. This betrayal did not compute with my brain—it was a crime against the very thing he adored, and surely would have ended up with him in Purgatory, or the coven prison at the very least. I couldn’t get the pieces to fit properly. It was as though I were still in my bed, half-waking from a terrible nightmare.
“You would have talked me out of it,” he replied bluntly. “I was terrified of losing you. I couldn’t let her do anything to you.”
“So, you’ve actually spoken with her?” I gaped at him. I’d presumed that all communications had been made via the spy, with Alton using the medallion solely as a means of locating the children.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“You’re making deals with the devil now?”
“You would never have seen it from any other perspective. I had to do this—she would have stopped at nothing to make me accept the deal!”
I shook my head. “Do you truly believe this deal will keep any of us safe from her? And what did it accomplish? She’s got to have an alternative in place—more kids to use. It was all too easy, Father—even you have to be able to see that. She wouldn’t just give them up unless she also had a fail-safe in mind.”
He sank deeper into his chair. “She does have more children. Louella told me about it. I’d already realized that when the security teams picked them up without so much as a fight, but Louella confirmed it. The report explained that there were more cages in that abandoned ferry port—empty ones.”
“I know that saving some of the kids is better than saving none, but my life isn’t worth all of this, not when she’ll come for me anyway, next time she needs you to do her bidding.”
“Your life is worth it, to me. I couldn’t take the chance. I couldn’t live in fear of wondering when she would come to take you away. You can’t understand that, I know you can’t, but my intentions were good. You’re my only child—I wasn’t about to let you die, when I could stop it from happening.” He looked up in desperation, his voice oddly boyish and vulnerable. “Besides, we still have time to fix this, if we find Quetzi. Although, in order to do that, I’m going to need your silence a while longer.”
“Fine.” I stalked out of the room, my head brimming with a thousand emotions, all in turmoil. I heard his chair scrape back as I exited, and the sound of footsteps hurrying behind me. I kept my gaze fixed on the end of the hallway, walking quickly.
He didn’t follow me, nor did he call out, but I could feel his eyes on my retreating back. I kept right on, wondering what on earth I was going to do now.
Twenty-Six
Astrid
“Are you busy?” I asked Garrett over the phone. I’d more or less stopped the endless tears from falling, angry and hot down my cheeks. My phone had been ringing ceaselessly, with Alton’s name flashing up. In the end, I’d forwarded all of his calls to voicemail, unable to bear the sound of him or even acknowledge him. I had yet to fully process everything, and until I’d done that, I didn’t trust myself to talk to him again.
“Not really. Why, what’s up?” Garrett said.
“Can we meet?” I asked.
He paused. “I guess so.”
“Dragon garden in ten?”
“Can we pick somewhere else?” His words wounded me a little. Why didn’t he want to meet me there, in the place we’d had our date? More to the point, why did he sound so standoffish? Things had been normal between us during the memorial service, and even before then, when he’d held me during Alton’s Necromancy. What had changed since then? I wasn’t sure, but there was a newfound strangeness to his tone that brought back memories of the other day, when he’d said that I was one to talk about secrets.
“Uh… the library?”
“Sure. I’ll see you there.” He hung up without saying goodbye. Ordinarily, I might have thought very little of his behavior, but I was already on the brink of losing my mind. I couldn’t add Garrett’s coldness to the list of things that were bothering me, not when I needed his comfort more than ever. Whatever it is, I can fix it when I see him.
Feeling somewhat better, I walked in the direction of the main library. I arrived long before he did, taking up a seat in one of the corner desks, close to the window. It was out of the way of the main space, sheltered from prying eyes. Although, there weren’t many other people around. After Jacintha’s memorial service, the coven had been more subdued, with most of its residents choosing to spend time away from its walls. Even the preceptors’ students had been given the week off, to cope with the loss, and they certainly weren’t using the free days to study.
Garrett appeared fifteen minutes late, waltzing in with a casual air. He wore dark jeans and a gray T-shirt, his short, dark hair freshly cut. His piercing blue eyes scoured the room for me. I raised my hand, waving him over. Not even then could he muster a smile for me, his brow furrowed as he crossed the gap between us and sat down with a thump.
“What’s up?” he asked brusquely. “Were none of your other buddies free?”
I stared at him, struggling to hide my sudden hurt. “I wanted to speak to you.”
“Oh, so now you trust me?”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “You basically accused me of being the traitor, because I wouldn’t do that stupid interview. Have I heard a single word of apology from you since the real one was found? No, I haven’t. What—did you think I’d just gloss over it and everything would be peachy?”
Tears brimmed in my eyes again. “I… I thought we were good?”
“Why, because I held you during all of that scary Necromancy crap?”
I nodded slowly.
“I held you because it was crazy cold. I haven’t stopped caring about you, Astrid, but you treated me like dirt. You can’t expect me to just get over that. You’re supposed to be the one person in this place who trusts me, but you just bought into the same old trash as the others.”
“No, I do trust you,” I insisted, my voice thick. It calmed me to know he still cared, but the rest worried me. Did this mean we weren’t good anymore? It certainly felt that way, much to my horror. I didn’t want to lose him.
“No, you didn’t. You looked into my eyes and asked me where I was, and when I didn’t give you the answer you wanted, you judged me, same as everyone else. I asked you to trust me, the way any couple should be able to, and you didn’t. You don’t, Astrid. You jumped on the Shapeshifters-are-bad bandwagon and you doubted me. I let you have your secrets and I don’t say a word, but you won’t let me have mine? Seems a little hypocritical, doesn’t it?”
“I know it wasn’t you!” I blurted out, warring with my fractious emotions.
“You do now, but only after the spy got caught.” He smiled sadly. “Did you look at the camera footage?”
My heart plummeted. I was a terrible liar at the best of times, with the exception of about who my father was. Somehow, I knew t
hat if I lied, he would see right through me.
“You don’t need to tell me,” he said. “I know you did, because you didn’t trust me. That’s who you are. You always need to get to the bottom of everything, and I admire you for that, but not when I’m the one in the line of fire. I wish I could say I hoped you wouldn’t, or that I knew you’d trust in me enough not to, but then you wouldn’t be you. As soon as I said it, I figured you’d check the footage.”
My cheeks were fiery hot. “I wanted to check you off the list, that’s all.”
“All you had to do was believe me,” he replied evenly. “But you couldn’t, could you? Alton put the seed of doubt in your head, and you had to know for yourself. My words didn’t matter. See, regardless of what you think, or feel, about me, you’ll always side with Alton and do as he tells you. He’s your dad—what else are you going to do?”
My eyes felt as though they were bulging out of my head. “What did you say?”
“I know, Astrid. I wasn’t going to say anything because, hey, families are hard enough as they are without other people getting involved. Plus, I thought I’d bide my time, see if you came clean about it on your own. But then you had the nerve to question my honesty, after the lies you’ve been telling everyone?”
I shook my head effusively. “How can you even know that?”
“See, even with this, he’s your first thought. You don’t care about my feelings, or how this might have affected me; you’re only bothered about your secret with dear old Dad.” He huffed out a breath. “I followed you, after he took you away from our date. I overheard your argument.”
Harley Merlin 4: Harley Merlin and the First Ritual Page 29
