by Violet Grace
‘No!’ yells Abby, seeing what’s coming and pulling her wand from her boot.
Jules is thrown off-balance, the magic in her knuckledusters sizzling and fading as she falls to the ground. Abby flares her wings and launches. But she doesn’t get far. Another pop. Another puff of smoke. She twists out of the way but is hit in the shoulder. She falls a short distance to the ground.
I rush to where Jules is lying, struggling and clawing at some sort of net. I drop to my knees to help her remove the net and realise what it is. The mesh must be coated in graphite, which neutralises the Art in all Fae – except me. Which is presumably why they haven’t bothered firing one in my direction.
I look over to Abby. She’s on her knees, freeing herself. She rips off the last of the netting and her wings flare, ready to take flight, but she’s too slow. One of the guards is upon her, lifting her up and tossing her like a ragdoll to where Jules and I are. She crumples to the ground with a cry of pain. I manage to free Jules, just in time to see all three of the Agency guys circling us.
‘A portal,’ Jules groans as she stands and prepares to take them on. ‘We need to get out of here.’
‘Graphite,’ Abby says. She turns to me.
I reach for the magic inside me but it’s still absent. I stand there on the dock, completely useless.
‘I … I can’t.’
Jules turns, her eyes widening in confusion, before taking on the guards with roundhouse kicks and close combat moves. The rumble of the motor is getting louder.
‘You can’t what?’ yells Abby, who’s on her feet now and scrambling around in the pockets of her bodysuit.
‘I can’t access the Art.’
‘Hell of a time to get stage fright, Queeny,’ yells Abby.
‘I can’t do magic anymore! I can’t transfer.’
Abby gawks at me as she pulls something from her pocket, pops it in her mouth and starts chewing furiously.
‘The Agency,’ I say. ‘Their weapon killed the Art in me. At least I think it was the Agency. It could have been … it doesn’t matter. We just need to get away,’ I yell. ‘Come on, let’s fly.’
Abby shakes her head in disgust. ‘What about Jules?’
I didn’t think about that. Jules would have to trans to unicorn, or use magic to conjure wings. But the graphite would be affecting her capacity to channel the Art too.
One of the guards smashes his fist into Jules’s jaw with a sickening crunch. He wraps her in a bear hug. She swivels around and, planting her feet on the ground, throws herself – and him – backwards into the wall of the boatshed. The guard swears and releases Jules, who pivots and uses the weight of her knuckledusters to give him an uppercut.
The third guard comes towards me. He grabs my arm, his huge hand locking me in a vice-like grip. I pump my wings, getting upward thrust, but he drags me back down towards him. I give my wings one more pump. Jules strikes him from behind and his eyes roll back in his head, his grip loosens and he’s falling. I land with a thud, just in time to see Jules karate-chopping his neck and sweeping his legs from under him. He collapses to the ground, unconscious.
Then everything happens at once. The source of the motor sound comes into view: a speedboat idling up towards the dock with three more thugs in black cammo gear – and Agent Eight standing over a prisoner with his hands bound. Massimo. His face is bloodied and his striped shirt is torn.
One of the guards is holding the radio wave weapon, and it’s trained on me. I feel like I’m going to pass out from my fear of it.
I launch across the deck as a pulse of sound energy is released from the weapon. Crashing onto the rough wooden planks, I scrape the side of my face but narrowly avoid the blast. Abby, who was standing behind me, isn’t so lucky. She’s thrown backwards from the force of it, stumbling to the ground.
A moment later she jumps back up, unharmed. She smiles back at the agents and continues to chew what looks like a mouth full of bubblegum. ‘Is that toy the best you’ve got?’
Of course she’s unaffected. She doesn’t have chromium in her body.
In a split second, the guard adjusts his aim to where I’m still sprawled on the ground. I’m on my feet, about to launch upwards once again when another pulse from the weapon is released.
In my peripheral vision, I see Jules running towards me. She leaps, shielding me from the blast, taking a direct hit.
Jules thuds to the ground. I wait for her to spring back up the way Abby did, but she doesn’t. She lies on the ground, hunched over, writhing, her teeth gritted in pain. She looks just how I felt when I was hit by the weapon at the villa.
Something is wrong. Very wrong.
Abby runs to Jules but a guard intercepts her, wrapping his arms around her body.
My mind is racing. The other guard grabs me from behind, catching me by surprise. His knee slams into my back and he twists my arms behind me.
But I can’t tear my eyes from Jules. Why has she been affected like I was?
Dots, waiting to be joined …
There is only one explanation.
Jules has chromium in her blood.
Jules is part human.
‘Get them,’ Agent Eight orders.
The guards from the boat join the others on the dock. Two of them shadow me; the other goes to Jules, who is still lying on the ground.
It all falls into place. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to see what has been right in front of me. The flashes of morality that I’ve seen in Jules. Her empathy and concern for others. In spite of her stubborn insistence that Fae are amoral, Jules’s humanity was on display all this time.
This realisation unleashes a torrent of new realisations that rob me of breath. I look at Agent Eight stepping up onto the dock. And then back to Jules. And back to Agent Eight.
The cheekbones.
The way their noses turn up at the ends.
The shape and colour of their eyes.
The way they hold themselves.
I do a quick calculation. The timeline works.
Jules is the half-blood girl a couple of years older than me that Agent Eight created as part of an Agency plot to create a moral fairy. Agent Eight is Jules’s mother.
The Agency files said that they ‘discarded’ her because she was scaevus. I assumed that meant that they’d killed her, but that could also mean dumped in an orphanage. That girl I read about has been by my side all this time and I never knew.
And then I join the final, awful dot: Damius is her father.
That also makes her a Raven.
We’re cousins.
‘Do something!’ yells Abby.
I watch in horror as the thugs in black reach down and pull Jules up. She fights back as best she can. Her leg shoots out, knocking one off balance, but he recovers. Another wrestles Jules’s arms behind her, clicking restraints onto her wrists. Graphite, I’ll bet, because for some reason graphite smothers Jules’s Art just like ordinary Fae. A third guard takes a clear shot at her. His fist slams into the side of her face and her blood splatters onto the dock.
Jules tumbles back onto the ground as another guard readies to kick her in the stomach.
‘Wait!’ I shout, thinking fast. I turn to Agent Eight. ‘You would hurt your own flesh and blood?’
Agent Eight’s face flickers. The Agency goons continue to restrain us, but at least they’ve stopped hurting Jules, who looks barely conscious.
‘She’s your daughter,’ I say. ‘The one you and Damius abandoned.’
The colour drains from Agent Eight’s face and I know that it’s clicking into place. Jules is her failed experiment: like me, a half-human, half-Fae created to unlock the Luck of Edenhall. But Queen Signe decreed that only a moral fairy could unlock the Art in the Chalice so when they realised Jules was a unicorn, not a fairy, they discarded her. Agent Eight locks her eyes back onto mine, unwilling – or unable – to so much as look at Jules.
‘No,’ Agent Eight says flatly, resolved. ‘Enough with the Fae m
ind games. Round them up.’
‘Look at her,’ I insist. ‘What does it matter? You’ve got us. Look into her eyes and you’ll see.’
She shakes her head, but she can’t help looking over to where Jules lies. And I watch the facade of the ruthless agent suddenly falling away, revealing a mother reliving a lifetime of heartbreak.
Abby’s eyes are wide as they bounce between Agent Eight and Jules.
‘She died,’ I hear Agent Eight whisper, as much to herself as to me. ‘They told me she died. He told me she died.’
‘He lied,’ I say. ‘Now call off your dogs.’
Agent Eight’s pain transforms to rage.
‘No. You’re the one who’s lying,’ she screeches. ‘Round them up!’
At that moment Abby turns her head and breathes directly into the face of the guard restraining her. I smell the sweet aroma of floral spice as he drops to one knee. He slumps down, face-planting on the ground.
Abby runs over to the guards towering over Jules. Leaning into them, she breathes her toxin into their faces, as if she’s blowing out a candle. Overcome, they crumple to their knees and slump over.
I use the distraction and deal with my guard the old-fashioned human way: a quick knee to the groin.
Abby comes over and blows in his face for good measure as Agent Eight rushes back to the boat, which is now empty. Massimo must have escaped into the canal. But Agent Eight stumbles and crashes onto the dock, just in time for Abby to breathe her off to sleep too.
Jules is barely conscious when I reach her. She’s covered in blood, scrunched up in the fetal position, and shivering from hypothermia, the after-effects of the weapon.
‘Abby,’ Jules mumbles.
‘We need your warming elixir,’ I call over to Abby.
Abby pulls a vial from her pocket. ‘Fortunately I have so little faith in you, I came prepared.’
She pours the potion into Jules’s mouth. Jules coughs and splutters as she sits upright, leaning into Abby’s arms.
Jules looks up at me, her eyes brimming. ‘I told you I did not want to know,’ she whispers.
Her eyes, weak and soft, knock the air from my lungs. With those few desperate words to Agent Eight, I have changed Jules’s life. And not in a good way.
I open by mouth to defend myself but I’ve got nothing. I can’t defend the indefensible. Jules can never unknow what I just revealed.
‘My father …’ Jules says. ‘Damius?’
‘Yes.’ The word feels like a razor blade on my tongue.
Jules gasps and gurgles like she’s choking. Abby bangs her on the back. Jules curls up into a ball, rocking and crying.
A hollow emptiness overtakes me. The night air feels like ice. The andrenaline pumping through my veins makes me feel ill. What have I done? It was unnerving to see Jules fall to pieces on the roof of the V&A after she revealed herself as scaevus. But that was different. She was still herself. She remained strong and duty bound to a fault. But right now, as I look at her trembling on the dock, I see a broken girl.
I want to do something to fix this. Jules found the right words to help me deal with the brutal reality of my father. I want to offer her the same comfort. But all I manage to come up with is, ‘Jules, please … I —’
‘Shut it, Chess,’ Abby says. ‘Haven’t you done enough damage?’
I know she’s not just talking about Jules. Her words cut so deep I feel like I could bleed out. Jules and Tom, the only real friends I’ve ever had, who have literally risked their lives for mine, are devastated. Because of me. And Gladys. She cared for me too.
‘Secrets never help —’ I start again, before Abby cuts me off.
‘No, they never do, do they? Like your little secret about the Art?’ Abby snaps. ‘You didn’t think to tell anybody that we couldn’t count on you if things went bad?’
Jules holds out her hands and looks at her knuckledusters, cold and lifeless around her fingers.
‘Have I just lost it too?’
‘It will come back,’ I say, hoping to heaven and hell I’m right.
‘How can we trust anything you say?’ Abby sneers.
‘They fired those radio waves at me for hours, and I was hit at very close range. You were only hit for a few seconds. Or maybe it wasn’t even the radio waves. The Luminaress said the problem with my Art might have been caused by the mermaids.’
‘Oh, so you did tell someone, then?’ Abby hisses. ‘You just didn’t think to tell the one person protecting you!’
‘No, no, I didn’t tell Madeline. She guessed. Or she might have. I don’t know.’
Abby wraps Jules up in her arms, stroking her hair, angling their bodies away from me. There is something in the way Abby looks at Jules that tugs at my heart. It’s the exact same way Tom used to look at me.
Darkness swallows me up as I look at them together, a unit. Black clouds move in, weighing down on my head and shoulders. My body feels like lead but I’m overcome with that familiar desire to flee.
Abby gets to her feet, cradling Jules in her arms with a strength that surprises me. She shifts her stance, adjusting to accommodate Jules’s weight. Her wings unfurl from her back, and she launches into the sky, carrying Jules.
‘What about me?’ I call out, panic rising. ‘I can’t transfer.’
But neither Abby nor Jules look back.
I’m stranded in the human realm with nowhere to go.
Even if I could find a way to transfer back to the Grigio castle in Iridesca, would I even want to? A week ago I’d never heard of Victor Grigio or the Scroll of Sirena, and now my whole life seems to revolve around both. I’ve learned truths about my dad that, just like Jules, I would have preferred not to know. And I’ve betrayed Jules so badly that she may never forgive me. I need to get away from this place, from the mermaids, from the Agency weapon, from everything.
I should never have left Windsor. It is far from perfect there, but at least it’s not Serenissima. And my mum is there. Just thinking about her makes me realise how much I want to see her. Maybe she’ll be able to speak to me again, give me more information about what she needs me to do. But even if she can’t, just seeing her will be something, more than I have now.
I feel a wisp of wind on my neck, then hear a voice. It’s ancient and wise, and at first I think it’s Gladys.
But it’s someone else, someone familiar.
‘Problems can’t be outrun, girl, they can only be solved.’
Not all of them, I think.
‘You are better than this,’ says the voice on the wind. ‘Start acting like it, girl.’
The air crackles behind me like the beginning of an electrical storm. I twirl around to see a fairy gliding through a portal.
The Luminaress stands in front of me, her silver gown wafting gently in the light sea breeze.
Part of me is filled with relief at seeing a familiar face. Another part of me is furious.
‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘When you have lived as many years as I have, girl, you intuit these things.’ She scans the dock, her face scrunching in disapproval at the unconscious guards lying on the ground. She crinkles her nose. ‘There is graphite here. Come quickly before it smothers my portal,’ she says, motioning for me to follow her.
I hesitate.
‘If only you would trust me, child,’ she says, her voice softening, ‘it would save so much trouble.’
I stare at the shimmering dust surrounding the portal as I weigh my options. She’s right – I can’t just run. There are still answers to find in Serenissima. I need to keep looking for them and I can’t do it all on my own. Besides, I’ve lost my power, and I’m unlikely to get it back in Volgaris.
The sun peeks above the horizon as I follow the Luminaress through the portal and find myself on the terrace of the Grigio castle. The blush of a new day casts a rosy hue on her face. She reminds me so much of Gladys, with her silver hair pulled back in a bun and eyes so piercing they make me flinch. I wond
er if that’s why I took an instant dislike to her when we met in Windsor. Was it my guilty conscience resisting the opening of old wounds? Maybe on some level I just couldn’t deal with anyone trying to replace Gladys.
‘Tell me what you feel,’ she says, lowering herself into a cast-iron chair.
‘Confused, mostly.’
‘Confused?’ she asks, ‘About what?’
I bite my lip. How much do I tell her about what I’ve learned from the mermaids? I don’t really know her. But then, she is a source of wisdom so she might know something of the secrets of the mermaids.
I walk over to a plant box filled with some sort of citrus tree I’ve never seen before. Snapping off a twig, I use it to draw the image from the merglass – concentric circles with dome shapes in the centre.
‘Do you know what this means?’
The Luminaress goes as still as stone. ‘Where have you seen that glyph?’
‘First tell me what it means.’
‘I cannot.’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘I thought you told me to trust you. This isn’t a good start.’
‘I cannot tell you because I do not know. All I know is where this glyph originated. It comes from an ancient text called the Veritas. The book of truth. But it has been lost for centuries.’
Veritas. I’ve heard that word before. I trawl through my mind. Prince Salvatore mentioned it at the welcome banquet. He said there’s a page from the original in the Grigio museum. Victor offered to take me there.
I think about the glyph, supposedly carved from the sea, coming to life to show a symbol from a book of wisdom that is said to contain every secret worth knowing. Surely the location of the scroll would fit into that category.
I need to see the page from the Veritas in Victor’s museum. Now.
I leave the Luminaress looking bewildered on the terrace as, without an explanation or even a goodbye, I sprint up the external stairs to Victor’s apartment. It doesn’t occur to me how early it is until a stern-looking guard tries to block my entrance.
I’m gasping from the exertion and the adrenaline rush as I puff, ‘Tell him it’s me, Queen Francesca.’
