by Eva Chase
The spell tugged me toward the right one. I pushed the key in. It slid into place without any resistance, and the lock clicked over with the twist of my fingers.
A large envelope sat inside the box—nothing else. I grabbed it, shoved it into my purse, locked the box up again, and hurried out as quickly as I could without looking frantic.
I scanned the street again as I headed to my car. No one around me looked shady, but it wasn’t as if I knew for sure what to look for. All of my enemies had magic too.
I set my purse carefully onto the passenger seat and started the engine. I’d noted a good pull-off spot on my way here. About a half hour outside the city, there was a little diner that appeared to have been closed for years, given the amount of rust on the drooping sign. It wouldn’t look too strange for me to be parked in the lot out front, and the open fields all around gave me a good line of sight if anyone approached.
Despite those benefits, after I’d pulled into the parking lot, I also cast a few temporary wards on the ground around the car. Better safe than sorry, especially with the kind of enemies I was clearly up against.
My mouth went dry as I picked up the envelope. It was sealed, with a postage label and mark on the upper corner—Professor Banefield hadn’t just stashed it in the box but mailed it to himself. Just before he’d gotten sick the second time, from the date on the mark. He’d been preparing, knowing he probably wouldn’t be able to tell me anything useful directly because of the spell on him.
The seal tore easily at the tug of my thumb. I pulled out the sheaf of papers inside, many of them creased and different sizes. A hodgepodge of compiled records.
One of the first papers, lined and frayed at the top as if it’d been torn out of a notepad, held only a list of names, a couple of them crossed out, added to at various times based on the different shades of the ink.
Julian and Dahlia Nightwood
Edmund Killbrook
Marguerite and Quince Stormhurst
Wesley Cutbridge
Alice Villia
Roland Crowford
I paused over that one. Was that Professor Crowford? The professor who’d come up with our horrible summer project? I couldn’t remember if I’d ever caught his first name. I’d have to check the plaque on his office door when I got back to school.
There were several more names on the list. I didn’t recognize any of the others except Pierce Darksend, who might have been the junior Physicality professor based on his last name, and an Ilene Burnbuck, who might have been related to my Illusion professor. A few of the other last names sounded vaguely familiar, maybe from hearing the professors call on fellow students in class, but I couldn’t connect faces to them.
Who were all these people? The barons were obvious—were the rest of them the “reapers” Banefield had mentioned? I set the list aside and dug deeper into the collection of papers.
A lot of them were what looked like rough meeting minutes. Last names and hastily jotted point form remarks that referred to ideas I wasn’t familiar with: Faraday transaction and Ulverton switch and so on. The parts I did understand sounded like plans being made, resources shifted around. A few comments gave the impression of some sort of a bribe, promises made to ensure support.
Then there were articles, both newspaper clippings and printouts from online publications. Politicians announcing new undertakings or canceled projects, companies starting up ventures or adjusting old ones, things like that. Things maybe the people on that list had influenced?
At least some of the events must have been connected to those meetings, because I started seeing names I recognized. James Faraday, CEO of this communications conglomerate. Ulverton Pharmaceuticals. My body tensed as I flipped further.
If I’d had all the context, I suspected this collection of information would have pointed to fearmancers purposefully influencing various powerful Naries. I had no idea why, though. There wasn’t any clear pattern I could see to the news articles. And I wasn’t even sure using that kind of influence was against mage laws anyway.
A realization sank in slowly as I approached the bottom of the pile. There was something bigger than what I could find here that the barons and maybe some other people working alongside them wanted to accomplish. Something they couldn’t accomplish without my agreement, either given freely or forced. If this stuff was all that mattered of them, they wouldn’t be attacking me—or magicking the people around me into attempting assaults.
Professor Banefield must have been at these meetings. How else would he know so much about what they’d talked about and who’d been there? Had he agreed with what the barons were doing some of that time?
I flipped another page, and suddenly that question didn’t matter anymore. Because the next article had a large photograph of a man in a suit surrounded by onlookers—and on the fringes of that crowd stood the barons Nightwood and Stormhurst. Behind them, her head just partly visible beside Connar’s mother’s, was the unmistakeable profile of Lillian Ravenguard.
A cold shiver crawled up my back. I set the papers down and closed my eyes.
Maybe it was just a coincidence? She was a blacksuit—she might have been assigned as a sort of bodyguard in the crowd.
I held onto that hope for a few minutes longer, until I came to another set of meeting minutes. The fourth of those pages had some discussion about the blacksuits. Something about them coming on board and assisting with the transition. And the initials LR were marked down here and there all through that section.
I hadn’t trusted my mother’s best friend to begin with. I wasn’t even sure I could trust the person my mother had been. But Lillian had at least appeared to be kind to me. It would have been nice if she’d turned out to be an ally and not in cahoots with the people Banefield had desperately wanted to warn me about.
Maybe I didn’t know what to make of everything here, but one thing was clear—I couldn’t tell Lillian anything, couldn’t ask her anything that might reveal my intentions. She might have been my mother’s best friend, but she was no friend of mine.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Connar
The entire Stormhurst mansion was gloomy, but the hall outside my brother’s rooms held so many shadows I felt them pressing against my skin as I walked to his door.
I wasn’t supposed to be in this part of the house. Since the fight they’d provoked and his subsequent injuries, my parents had shut Holden away in a small section of the house with a few adjoining rooms. They’d hired a nurse to check on him and see to his needs. Now, they pretended he didn’t exist, and they expected me to follow suit.
To care about the loser in our battle was weakness. They didn’t want to see any weakness in their scion. But the truth was, it took far more strength for me to make this walk than it did to stay away and avoid the guilt.
I stopped outside the door and whispered to the air around it, tasting the spells cast there. My parents were talented mages, as all the barony families and their chosen spouses were, but I’d started to surpass them in a few areas. There was a ward meant to alert them if anyone other than the nurse crossed this threshold—I could shift it to one side so my coming and going wouldn’t affect it. Opening the physical lock was a piece of cake.
The hardest part, really, was opening that door and stepping through it.
“Holden?” I called cautiously as I entered.
Classical music carried faintly from one of the deeper rooms: strains of flute and piano. The room I’d come into was sparsely furnished with a desk by the broad window, an armchair in the corner, and a couple of bookshelves along the walls. Holden had loved to read his whole life, and he still did. The brain injury he’d taken made it difficult for him to express much, both verbally or in writing, but he could still take just about anything in, as far as I could tell.
A sweet smell drifted from a few springs of lily of the valley arranged in a vase on the desk. He must have managed to communicate to the nurse that he’d wanted her to bring some up f
rom the sparse garden on the west side of the house. They were just starting to droop.
“Holden?” I said again, and the music quieted. The whir of the electric wheelchair announced his approach before I could see my brother himself.
He cruised into the room and came to a stop a few feet inside with a tight smile. I couldn’t read much into that, since from what I’d seen it was the only kind of smile his face was capable of now. His head always listed slightly to one side. He’d once been as broad in frame and features as I was, but the lack of exercise had slimmed him, turning him into sharper angles. His hair, a darker shade of brown than mine, fell in waves to the tops of his ears.
“Con,” he said in acknowledgment. He hadn’t been able to manage my full name since the fight.
“I’m just home for the weekend,” I said, as if that mattered all that much to him. “I felt like it’d been too long since I came to see you. How are you doing?”
An awkward question, but I couldn’t not ask it. He gave his closest approximation to a shrug and said, “Ar—Th—Same.” Sometimes it took him a few tries before he hit on a word he could force all the way out.
“The nurse is keeping you well-stocked in new books?” I glanced toward the shelves.
“I,” he said, the smile tugging a little wider and even tighter, and gestured to the tablet he’d tucked beside his paralyzed legs.
“Oh, you’re lowering yourself to ebooks now, huh? I doubt you can get many fearmancer texts that way.”
He made a snorting sound, but the flicker of his eyes made me regret the attempt at teasing. A lot of the books on the shelves behind me were magical texts. He’d kept studying them even after he’d lost any real ability to cast. He didn’t need his limitations rubbed in, though, especially when I was the one who’d caused them.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just—” I made myself shut up for a moment. I never really knew what to say to him. Sometimes I was sure I was only making things worse. That feeling had lengthened the time between my secret visits more than once.
There was one thing I’d decided I had to say before I’d even come up here. I took a step toward him, my head bowing.
If I could talk to Rory about this—if I could beg her forgiveness for what I’d done to her—I should at least be able to say a few honest things to my own brother.
“I’m sorry for a lot more than that,” I said. “We never talk about it, so I don’t think I’ve ever really apologized. I never wanted to hurt you. I hate that I did. I—If I could give the barony to you and have you back the way you were, I’d do that in a heartbeat. You’d be better for it anyway. Our parents have messed up ideas about what makes a good leader. You were the one who was stronger. You resisted them longer—you had more self-control.”
I braced myself as I raised my eyes again, half expecting anger or disgust on his face. Instead, Holden only looked sad. “There—” he said, and grimaced at the strain of trying to squeeze the words in his head up his throat. “See— Can’t—”
With a frustrated sound, he directed the wheelchair past me to the bookshelves. He leaned forward to snatch up a volume he must have known well. After a few brisk flips of the pages, he held the novel out to me with his finger poised over one paragraph.
There was never any going back, not to the good or the bad. The best we could do was move forward carrying those lessons with us. It was hard to remember, but I returned to that thought whenever I drifted too far into regret.
A lump rose in my throat. “I know,” I said. “I know I can’t actually undo what happened. And I’m trying to do what’s right going forward. It’s still…” I trailed off, not knowing how to end that sentence.
Mom had brought in doctors to tackle Holden’s injuries, but she said they’d declared most of them too severe to heal even with magic. He was never going to walk again. He was never going to be able to speak or write properly. He would never cast more than a hiccup of magic here and there. And there wasn’t anything I could do to change that.
“When I’m baron, I’m kicking them out of the house,” I said with abrupt certainty. “I’ll put in an elevator and ramps and whatever the hell else so you can go wherever you want, when you want. They shouldn’t keep you shut away like this.”
He gave that sort of shrug again, as if to say he was used to it, which after nearly six years, I guessed he was. That only made the situation worse.
“I mean it,” I said, holding his gaze. “That’s a promise.” Even if it was one I wouldn’t be able to fulfill until years from now.
The highway-side restaurant a couple hours away from the university wasn’t much to look at. “Dive bar” would probably have been the appropriate term. But that might have been exactly why the four of us scions had come to appreciate it as a stop-off and meet-up spot on the way back to campus.
After the stresses of a visit home, with all the expectations and emphasis on appearances, where better to unwind than a place where nearly everything on the menu was deep-fried and the only kind of button-up shirts the other clientele wore were printed with plaid?
It was usually Malcolm or Declan who arranged those meet-ups, though. I couldn’t remember when Jude had ever reached out to me with a specific invitation. I hadn’t even realized he’d gone home this weekend too. But he’d texted me while I was saying my goodbyes to my parents, and while I wasn’t sure whether this was going to be a friendly conversation, I wasn’t going to snub him.
It was easy to tell he was already there when I arrived. His Mercedes was the fanciest car in the lot by several degrees. I parked beside it and headed inside.
A country rock song was twanging over the speakers, and the air had its familiar salt-and-grease flavor. Jude had staked out a booth near the back, his dark red hair catching my eye even with the yellow lighting dulling its vivid color. I walked over and slid onto the opposite bench.
“You made good time,” Jude said mildly, and beckoned for a waitress. He already had a drink in front of him, something dark poured over ice. Even when we’d been in our mid-teens, the waitstaff here hadn’t given our enchanted IDs more than a cursory glance. Another reason we liked this place.
“I’ll have the bacon burger with pepper fries,” Jude said, and tipped his head to me.
“A New Belgium if you still have it on tap, and the barbeque wings.” I’d been here often enough to skip a glance at the menu.
“I’ll get right on that,” the waitress said cheerfully, and sashayed away.
Jude tugged at the collar of his shirt as if he were too warm in it, even though the air conditioning blasting from the unit nearby was keeping the space pretty cool. He looked away from me for a moment, the corners of his mouth pulling down.
“Tough visit?” I ventured.
“Ah, I was prepared for that. It’s never fun.” He turned back to me with a wry smile. “As I’m sure yours wasn’t either.”
“Let’s not get into that.” The waitress plonked my beer on the table, and I took a large gulp. “Is there any specific reason you wanted us to grab lunch today?” The last time we’d talked one-on-one, he’d been telling me off.
“Can’t I just want to hang out with one of my good friends?” Jude said innocently, and shook his head at himself. “I figured if Malcolm of all people can own up to his assholery, I should be able to too. I’ve been rough on you this summer, mostly because of my issues rather than any real issue with you. So, I’m sorry about that.”
It took me a second to process what I was hearing. I’d have much sooner expected Jude to simply pretend any hostility had never happened than to apologize for it.
“It wasn’t a big deal,” I said by way of accepting the apology, and let a wry note creep into my voice. “I learned a long time ago not to get too offended by anything you say when you’re shooting your mouth off.”
Jude sputtered with mock-indignation, but his eyes glinted with amusement. “Look at Stormhurst giving the verbal smackdown. Not your usual style. I guess Rory was right
.”
At the mention of the girl who’d taken up so much space in my head and heart over the last few months, my mood turned more serious in an instant. “Right about what?”
“Oh, don’t worry. It was a compliment. She said the rest of us didn’t give you enough credit for being more than the brawn. I’m willing to concede that may be true.”
The thought of Rory speaking up for me that way sent a warm flush through my chest, only slightly moderated by Jude’s cheeky phrasing. “May be true?” I muttered.
He grinned at me. “I’m not finished collecting evidence yet. That is the other subject I wanted to talk about, though. Rory—and our common interest in her.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I hope you didn’t apologize for laying into me only to warn me off her all over again.”
He waved his hand dismissively. “No, no. Really the opposite. For reasons I’m sure no one would be able to fathom, she’s clearly fond of both of us. And she’s had a rather rough few months since she arrived at Blood U, I’m sure you can agree.”
“Yeah.” Not least because of our own initial treatment of her.
“So, I simply suggest that we should focus on making the coming months more enjoyable for her, however we can. And if that means both of us fawning over her, well… In this particular case, maybe more can still be merrier.”
I studied him. “Is this some weird way of giving me your blessing? Which I didn’t actually need in the first place, by the way.”
“Hey, you could give me the benefit of the doubt too,” he said. “I’m just saying… Let’s not fight about it. Let’s not interfere with whatever she ends up having going with the other. We each do what we can to show her a good time, and she’ll end up with double the good time. Maybe we can even make a joint effort of it now and then.” His grin came back. “With both of us on a date, I’m fairly certain she’d at least never be bored.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said, but as the idea sank in, my initial balking reaction faded. His main point was solid. Rory deserved better than having us squabble over her. And maybe… it would make her even happier to see we could not just tolerate each other’s presence in her life, but embrace the fact. I wasn’t sure what a “joint effort” would look like, but anything that’d make her happy, that’d offset the pressure she was under, I was all for.
