Guardian Academy 2: Prisoner Of Magic (The Mystery Of The Four Corners)

by Maria Amor

  “I think so,” she said. “Of course, if it were just him, I’d have my other friends to help me track him down.”

  “Yeah, that does make it harder, not knowing who you can trust, who can really help you,” Blake agreed.

  “Our driver should be here any minute,” Julia told him, eager to change the subject. “Hopefully we’ll have time for both the candy shop and Teavana. Maybe even the book store?”

  “The mall still has a book store? Holy crap,” Blake said. He shook his head in disbelief. “I thought those were all extinct.”

  “It’s run by one of us,” Julia told him. “Earth-aligned Guardian, a weird aberration in a family of air-aligned Guardians. He’s a nice guy.” Maybe he knows something—or knows something about something, Julia thought. If nothing else, at least she would be away from campus for a few hours, and not stuck sitting around thinking about how helpless she was. That had to improve matters, didn’t it? Their driver approached, and Julia resolutely decided to keep her mind on relaxing. Blake had been right, she needed a change of scenery.

  *

  It was one of the rare moments when their captors allowed more than three of them outside of their cells at once. Dylan looked around at Tal, Azhar, and Suzanna, seated around the room, all three of them ostensibly occupied with amusing themselves.

  Dylan pretended to write another line in his journal and thought about what little he’d been able to glean so far. All six of them were being held—for an indefinite period of time—and would be released at some point, though no one knew when.

  Odan had told him what little he knew from the people in charge of the plot: that the goal wasn’t to kill any of them, that the elves involved in the security of the prison they were held in had decided amongst themselves not to follow any orders to harm Dylan or the others.

  “When do you think they’ll let us out, Suzanna?” Dylan had made a point of doing what he could to bait their captors whenever he had the opportunity, feeding them false cues, trying to get answers. Bernadette had remained as tight lipped as ever the few times Dylan had seen her since she’d introduced herself.

  The people holding them captive seemed to want to keep them at least a little bit occupied, keep them separated, enough to prevent an escape attempt. Dylan hadn’t been able to even come up with the beginnings of a plan to escape, even if he knew there was no way the prison-building they were in was perfectly guarded, or perfectly warded. There had to be a way, but since he didn’t know where they were, or who they were being held by, the point was moot—at least for the time being.

  “As soon as they’ve accomplished whatever they’re trying with Julia,” Tal said.

  “What do you think they have in mind?” Suzanna stretched, and Dylan caught a glimpse of skin along her abdomen as her tee shirt rode up along her ribs. “I mean—obviously, they’re not going to tell us anything about it, but what do you guys even think they’re trying to do?”

  “Obviously, they want her on her own—aside from maybe her parents and grandmother,” Dylan said.

  “Yeah, if they abducted her they’d be in a lot more trouble,” Azhar agreed. “The council is interested in her, they want to keep her safe.”

  “But to pull something like this off, they’d need people on the council to cover for them,” Dylan pointed out.

  “If we could just find out what they want from her, we could figure out what to do about it,” Suzanna said.

  “They’re never going to tell us,” Dylan said. “Even if they succeeded, they wouldn’t tell us that. I’m not convinced that they still plan on keeping us intact—especially if they don’t succeed.”

  They’d been baiting their captors for weeks, trying to goad someone into giving them information, and Dylan was almost ready to change tactics; Odan didn’t know much at all about what his masters were doing, and Bernadette never seemed to rise to the bait.

  He hadn’t met anyone other than her and the various servants; all of the guard-servants taking care of the captives seemed to be earth-aligned creatures, but Bernadette was clearly fire-aligned. Did the situation have anything to do with Dimitrios and his patronage on the council? Dylan hadn’t seen any conclusive proof—but he couldn’t deny the coincidence.

  “You think they’re going to kill us?” Azhar’s almond-shaped eyes widened slightly.

  “I think there’s a good chance it will come up,” Dylan said. “Especially if they’re not successful soon enough—or if someone figures out where we are and tries to attempt a rescue.”

  “It’s been months,” Tal pointed out. “Obviously, they’ve got enough of a lockdown on things to keep people from actually looking for us.”

  “Not Julia,” Suzanna said. “She’s looking for us.”

  “But she doesn’t have any support,” Azhar countered, saving Dylan the trouble. “She doesn’t have any of us, and she’s probably being restricted even more with no one to trust around her at the school.”

  “We need to think of what they could want with her,” Dylan said. “Why do they want her isolated?”

  “Either they want her vulnerable to harm her, or to make her open to some kind of alliance,” Suzanna said. “They want her to have no allies, no one who can interfere with whatever they’re trying to do.”

  “If they wanted to harm her, wouldn’t it have been done by now?” Azhar raised an eyebrow.

  “I guess,” Dylan conceded. “It doesn’t take months to harm someone.”

  “So that implies that they want something more long-term from her,” Tal said.

  “But what?” That was the big question, the one none of them ever seemed to be able to get an answer to.

  Their conversation stopped when Bernadette came into the room. Dylan looked at the older, fire-aligned woman with more than a little resentment. “I understand that you all have a lot of questions,” Bernadette said. “Now that our plans seem to be progressing on an even keel, I might be able to tell you something about it.”

  “Oh, good,” Suzanna said. “Does that mean you’re going to let us out sometime soon?” There was a hint of sarcasm in her voice, and Dylan resisted the urge to smile.

  “No,” Bernadette replied. “You’re going to be with us for a good bit of time to come.”

  “You obviously wanted Julia to be isolated,” Dylan said. “You wanted me away from her, and you wanted her air-aligned allies away from her. Does this have something to do with her busting Dimitrios and the people on the council who funded his thefts last year?” Bernadette shook her head.

  “We have nothing to do with that,” Bernadette replied. “Allow me to introduce one of the others involved in this plan.” Dylan sat up, wanting to look as alert as possible; this was an interesting development. Why would they just tell us directly? Even if their plan is going well, why not keep us in the dark until they know they’ve succeeded? It didn’t add up, and Dylan suspected that they were going to be lied to—just to keep them from questioning more effectively.

  A man stepped into the room, and Dylan disliked him instantly. Like Bernadette, he was fire-aligned, and Dylan began to think that the whole operation was being masterminded by fire-aligned Guardians. That explains one aspect of things, at least. The man who came into the room was medium height, with blond hair and gold-toned eyes that made him look strange.

  He was dressed in jeans and a dress shirt, but Dylan was fairly certain both were high-end shop products. There was something that struck him—something in the way the man carried himself, of some aura—as almost cruel, overly ambitious. Fire-aligned people in charge of this. So what do they want with Julia?

  “Good afternoon,” the man said. “I’m Alistair Phoenix.” Dylan held onto the man’s gaze and tried to use the limited water-aligned energy available to him in the warded room to try and get some kind of “read” on his emotional state, on his core personality.

  For a fire-aligned Guardian, there was something so cold about Alistair; and Dylan felt—for a moment—that they’d misjudg
ed, that the goal of the people who had captured them was not just to make Julia vulnerable, but to take her out entirely—and that they were waiting for a good opportunity to do it. And then once they have her taken out, they can get rid of us. Quietly.

  It would be much more of an uproar for a promising, powerful air-aligned Guardian to disappear than it would be for a group of changelings, fae, and one fairly mediocre water-aligned Guardian to finally be found dead. Ruth would destroy them all, if she caught them, if they harmed Julia; but they had to make her vulnerable first.

  “Explain to us what the goal is in all this,” Tal said, flashing straight, sharp teeth at the man, and Dylan envied the other boy’s confidence.

  “You’re all correct in that our goal was to isolate Julia Beval,” Phoenix said. “I can’t deny that it is a bit on the unethical side, but far from the worst things our supernatural community has done in its history.” Dylan rolled his eyes; there were moral and ethical standards, but of course there were plenty of people of all alignments who didn’t want to play by the rules. Some more aggressively than others.

  “We had noticed that Julia tended to spend most of her time with Dylan, or with air-aligned creatures,” Bernadette said. “We thought that it was unfair to the earth-aligned and fire-aligned people seeking her favor, her interest, for her to be so exclusionary.” Dylan snorted in disbelief at that sensible-sounding explanation. There had to be more to it than that; Julia had spent most of the summer before her birthday meeting with Guardians and creatures of different alignments.

  “So, you’re just holding us hostage so that Julia will make some more diverse friends?” Clearly, Azhar didn’t believe it any more than Dylan did. Dylan didn’t bother to smother a chuckle.

  “She is reaching an age where she can begin looking for someone to bond with, someone to take as a mate,” Bernadette said.

  “We wanted to make sure that distractions—people who might cloud her judgment—were sequestered,” Alistair Phoenix added. Dylan knew he wasn’t imagining it: the man was looking directly at him.

  “You wanted her to choose a fire-aligned mate, even though she won’t be legally allowed to seriously consider anyone for a year,” Dylan surmised. “By that I’m assuming that you’re going to keep us here until she’s 18? She could change her mind at any time.” Intent’s not as bad as the action...take a breath to distort the fear in your eyes. He pushed his shoulders back and met the older Guardian’s gaze as levelly as possible.

  “We wanted her to have an open mind,” Bernadette said. “And keeping you here during the rest of the school year should help accomplish that. Julia will be freer to explore her options without well-meaning friends interfering.”

  Dylan glanced at the other people in the room. There were two of the air-aligned students missing from the group assembled in the sitting area, but Dylan was sure that the two fire-aligned Guardians were assuming that he or the other three would inform the remaining captives about the situation. There was still something about the whole scheme that struck Dylan as being off, in a way he couldn’t define.

  Obviously, what their excuse was didn’t hold much water even on its own; but the fact that they were telling their captives anything—even if it was only close to what the real plan was—alarmed him. He wanted to believe that it was just a matter of suppressing any rebellious ideas they might have, or any escape attempts, but that didn’t seem to add up, either. Why are they telling us this? What role does this play in their plan?

  Suzanna had apparently leaped ahead of him in thinking about their captors’ plans. “ I’m assuming that part of the deal of releasing us would be that we don’t interfere with your goal of getting Julia to make friends with more fire-aligned Guardians,” Suzanna said.

  “You would be correct in that,” Alistair said. “We would hope that since we haven’t harmed you, and have tried to be as accommodating as possible—within the limits of making sure you can’t leave—you’d be willing to let things progress the way we’ve set up.”

  “But as soon as we told Julia who it was who held us, she would make up her own mind,” Tal pointed out.

  “The mere fact that you held us against our will, and tried to manipulate her, would make her less than willing to have anything to do with anyone you wanted her to become friends with,” Azhar added.

  “We were depending on the six of you to paint a rosier picture of the situation,” Bernadette said. “To point out that you weren’t mistreated.”

  “Even still, though,” Dylan said. “The fact that you abducted us at all would be a major turnoff for her.”

  “We’re hopeful that she’ll respect her new friends enough to see past that,” Alistair said. “Of course, if you’re arguing that we would be better served to eliminate the six of you entirely, there are people involved in this operation who would agree with you.”

  “If you killed us, Julia would come after you with a vengeance,” Dylan said. “It wouldn’t just be a matter of distrusting everyone associated with you; she would find a way to ruin all of your lives.” It sounded haughty—it sounded especially improbable, Dylan knew, considering that Julia was only seventeen. But he also knew that the elves wanted to preserve Julia’s good opinion; at least, if the servants were to be believed. Julia was—whether or not she wanted it—a force in Guardian politics, not the least of which was because everyone assumed that she would one day rule the element of air altogether. Now that she was fully endowed with her abilities, the council would take her input much more seriously.

  “That’s why we haven’t moved to kill you yet,” Bernadette said, matter-of-factly. “It’s important to us that Julia makes strategic alliances that benefit our own people. And we don’t want to do anything to jeopardize that. But if it becomes clear that the six of you aren’t willing to play along…” she looked at each of the four who were in the sitting room.

  “You all become much more expendable,” Alistair finished for her. Dylan felt a chill go down his spine.

  “I think it’s time the four of you returned to your rooms for a while,” Bernadette said. The servants came into the room behind them, and Dylan knew that there was no point—then, anyway—to trying to break free, trying to contest the two older Guardians.

  Odan took him by the arm and gently led him towards his room; Dylan had noticed that his cell was more isolated even than any of the other air-aligned students’, on the far end of the hall, all by itself. “They aren’t telling you the full truth,” Odan murmured.

  “You know something?” Dylan tried to keep his voice too low for the two older Guardians to be able to hear; fire-aligned guardians had sharp eyesight, but usually not the kind of sharp hearing that air-aligned Guardians did.

  “They intend to get Julia to choose a particular fire-aligned boy as a mate,” Odan murmured. He unlocked the door to Dylan’s cell and gestured for Dylan to enter. “They have made some progress—I heard them talking about it before they came in. That’s why they gave you information. To keep you quiet, to give you a warning. They want Julia to start a romance with this other boy, without anyone interfering.”

  Dylan nodded; that made more sense than just wanting her to make more fire-aligned friends, though he thought privately that if she had a fire-aligned boyfriend, it would mean that she would probably travel more in those circles, avoiding the water-aligned students he had connected her with, and the air-aligned students that she naturally gravitated to. She was already friends with Magda, but Keegan and she had fallen out. “I think they intend to use her as a puppet, since she’s so popular,” Odan finished.

  “Thank you,” Dylan told the elf, stepping into his room and letting the man lock the door behind him. He had a lot to think about. If people were trying to arrange a match by force, then Julia was still in danger; for what would happen to her—and her friends—if she decided she didn’t want the boy? We need to find out where we are and how to get out, Dylan thought. Those, however, would be harder to get an answer to than wh
y they were there.

  CHAPTER 14

  Julia glanced at Blake from the corner of her eye as they made their way along Canal Street, with no particular goal in mind. Blake had shown up at her parents’ apartment on the first day of spring break, wearing jeans and a John Lennon tee shirt and a light hoodie, and asked if she was hungry.

  At first, Julia had been suspicious; Blake’s story of his parents being in the city for the week, and being bored to death of sitting around in the apartment they’d borrowed for the break, didn’t really seem to add up to her, but she had to admit that she was intrigued at the possibility of spending a day with him.

  Don’t get comfy with him just because he’s cute, Julia reminded herself. She had managed to get some good information from Blake, and he’d been helpful—and he’d managed to somehow win some of her trust to get her to confide in him—but Julia felt as if there was some instinct in her, something telling her not to give Blake her complete trust. There was something too convenient about the way he always seemed to be exactly what she needed him to be in the moment—and the fact that she never seemed to have arguments with him the way that she had with Dylan.

  “Are you planning on actually buying anything, or just trying to walk my feet off?” Julia grinned at Blake’s half-serious complaint, shrugging. It was a beautiful day. Julia had taken the time to change into a soft, comfortable dress and a pair of sturdy, well-worn boots before she left the apartment with Blake, deciding to head to the part of town she liked the most for lunch and for some shopping. They’d wandered ever since, getting off the subway at Varick, and they were nearly at Broadway.

  “It’s honestly just good to be out of the apartment,” Julia told him. Her parents didn’t want her wandering the city alone when there were obviously people after her; when she’d called them to tell them that Blake had invited her to spend the day out in the city, they’d almost sounded relieved.

  They didn’t know Blake very well—or even his parents—but they knew that she’d made friends with him at Sandrine, and that he’d been invited to her birthday party, his family known to Ruth. He came from a good family, he was a fairly strong Guardian, and seemed to get along well with Julia.