“Right,” Eli said, nodding. “We have flashes of intuitions, but not visions.”
“But isn’t Nina special?” Rachel asked.
Eli looked at Rachel, his eyebrows raising. “You’re right, I suppose she could have some emerging powers the rest of us haven’t. But it wouldn’t make sense for that to appear until after she’s bonded with the Greater Horde. I think it may have been some other power, mixed with the pressure and anxiety she’s been feeling. Power does strange things to us when we’re still coming into it.”
Pryce was smiling his slow, lazy smile. “Unless,” he said softly.
Nina was gazing at him. Unless what?
But, as she remembered their brief conversation in the hotel, she thought she might know what he meant.
Movement caught the corner of her eye. Nina turned her head, feeling dizzy, and saw a man wearing a deep purple sweater lined with gold thread and tight black pants climbing the stairs that led to her apartment. The others followed her gaze, and panic was mounting inside her again until Eli halted it with a single sentence.
“He’s wearing Council Guard clothes! He’s here!” Eli started to open his door, but as he did, Nina’s sense of foreboding came back. She watched the man pause at the door, then start to fiddle with the knob.
“Wait!” She knew that figure...
They all turned to look at her as her eyes narrowed. “That’s Anders Weber. He’s in my Ceremony Prep class.” Why is he pretending to be part of the High Horde?
For some reason, Eli sighed in relief and laughed. “Nina, this is great news.”
“How is it great news that notorious horndog Anders is impersonating a Council Guard?”
Eli turned around in his seat. “I’ve seen that man, too. He’s not impersonating—he attained his Guard status about two years ago, and I happen to know he reports directly to Eka for assignments. Which means that Eka placed him here to keep an eye on you, knowing that you’d be important to us. Anders knows the lay of the land, so he’s the best guard to send. Plus he’s probably already been doing security checks. The Council has been looking after you, after all.”
Pryce looked at him like he’d grown another head. “Really? Because she almost got shot yesterday.”
Eli’s cheeks colored. “Well, you saved her from that, didn’t you? No harm done.”
Pryce started to respond, but Nina shushed them. Anders had just gone in.
Rachel heaved an exasperated sigh. “Nina, why can’t we get out and go up? I don’t like the thought of creepy Anders in there alone, Council Guard or not.”
Nina shook her head. “No.” Fifteen seconds had passed, and she was still feeling as nervous as she had before. “Wait.”
Eli smiled. “All right. Though I’m sure—”
His words were cut off by an ear-splitting explosion. The car was filled with screams, and Nina watched a bright white flame swallow the top right side of the building, reaching up into the sky momentarily before settling back down to eat at the walls and ceiling. It continued to burn white, pale as bone, and seemed to be contained to her apartment only, though it wasn’t shrinking or slowing down.
That’s not normal fire.
“What is it?” Rachel whispered.
“Fairy bomb,” Pryce said, his voice hollow with shock. “A bomb containing magical fire that stays within a set boundary as it burns. Someone must have laid a trap before we got here.”
Eli started the car and reversed out of the lot without looking, sending the passengers crashing into each other as he righted the car and went speeding down the road, burning rubber as he moved forward. Nina was still trying to process what had just happened, and she saw Eli was having trouble, too.
“Holy shit,” he was saying under his breath. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit…”
Pryce looked at Eli in concern. “You gonna be okay to drive? Want me to take over?”
Eli just shook his head and squeezed the wheel more tightly. His knuckles were white. Nina felt a surge of sympathy for him—clearly he’d known Anders more than she had, and his death was going to grate on him more harshly.
Pryce turned around and looked at Rachel and Nina. “Well, I guess you can’t go home yet.” He looked at Eli again, eyeing him warily. “How long do you think it’s going to take before the Council finds out one of its guards was just murdered?”
“Not long,” Eli said haltingly. “Guards are easily trackable because of their communication stones.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror and met Nina’s; his gaze was heavy with anguish. “They have little rose quartz chunks that lie in the Council’s chambers, and they flash when there’s a problem. Eka or Lylah or Osrik will be able to find them through the bond and see that…” He inhaled sharply. “See what happened.”
Nina still couldn’t believe Anders had been a plant. Were there others? It made sense that there was more than one, if she was really important enough to be watched; obviously, though, they’d been instructed not to reveal themselves, and maybe not to even befriend her. Is that why Anders was so repulsive? To throw me off the scent?
She thought of Joey and how intense he’d been the day before her reading. Was Joey a plant, too?
Rachel took her hand and squeezed it. “Nina, are you okay?”
Nina looked at her sister dazedly. “I don’t know.” I got someone killed, she said to herself. That was a real vision. I could have stopped Anders, but instead I watched and said nothing. A man who was sent to protect me is dead, because I couldn’t work out what the fuck was happening with my own powers.
The men in the front seat must have felt the miserable energy she was struggling to contain. Pryce turned and looked at her, green eyes filled with compassion.
“Nina, this isn’t your fault.”
It wasn’t his sentence that calmed her; it was the fact that he’d called her by her first name for the first time since they’d met. She felt the hysteria that had been mounting start to recede, leaving a much more manageable wave of fear and indecision.
“What do we do?” she asked, feeling helpless. “Where can we go?”
“The Council was supposed to protect us,” Eli said. “I can’t believe this. Will they send another guard? Will they investigate now?”
“Why don’t you ask them?” Pryce said, his voice more gentle than it had ever been. “Like you said, they’re bound to know what happened already. Give them a call, explain, and see what they say.” His tone was like that of a teacher talking a child through a complicated math problem.
Nina knew Eli was shaken because instead of being upset that he was being addressed like a third grader, he nodded rapidly and smiled. “Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll pull over right now and call them.”
The car swerved to the shoulder violently and skidded to a halt. Rachel shot a worried look at Nina, but Nina just shrugged. She’d known Eli only a little longer than her sister had, so there was no way of knowing if the Reader was going to be okay. Pryce seemed to be far more composed, and that made her wonder how many chaotic situations he’d been in. It made her a little uneasy—he was unbonded, but still powerful enough to hide his energy from Eli. He was mysterious, but obviously interested in her. He also seemed to be a dangerous man who knew more about her past and power than she did. All of these things scared her, but the fact that she still wanted to get to know him better scared her more. He didn’t make her feel safe in the way Eli had, but Nina wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing.
Eli had used his phone to call the Council and was waiting on hold for Eka. He chattered excitedly for a moment, then abruptly stopped speaking after a few sentences. Nina saw his eyes in the rearview mirror; they were glowing vibrantly as he spoke to Eka, but the glow started to fade as the older dragon spoke.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I understand.”
Rachel smiled at Nina hopefully, and Nina couldn’t return it. Her sister couldn’t read dragon energy, and she didn’t see the way Eli’s face had changed during the
conversation. Nina was unsurprised when Eli hung up and reported back to them.
“They know about the explosion,” he said dully. “Anders was supposed to wait outside, they said. They’re sending someone to investigate, and Lylah is putting Joseph, the local horde leader, on alert. But they can’t send more guards. They’re stretched too thin, because the stone’s started to darken more quickly than they anticipated.”
Nina felt like she’d been stabbed in the heart. “Does that mean they’ll need me sooner?”
“Maybe,” Eli said as he put the car back on the road. “But, Nina—you just proved to us that you have some clairvoyance. That means you’re more powerful than we thought, and it ups your chances of retaining your powers.”
Pryce looked at him skeptically. “Doesn’t it also mean that the Council was wrong about new powers not emerging until after bonding?”
“No,” Eli said stubbornly. “Well, maybe. Nina may be a special case.”
“I may not stay alive long enough to do it,” Nina interjected. “It may not even matter.”
Pryce turned around in his seat. “Nina, I think you need to know something. I was going to wait until you’d ask more about what brought me here, since I saw that you were so bent on taking that offer, but this might be a better time to bring it up.”
Nina sat up straight and leaned forward, intrigued. “What is it? Is it about my parents?”
“Yes,” Pryce said. “About them and the Outcasts.”
Rachel was leaning forward, too.
“Many of the Outcasts weren’t told everything about the prophecy, for security reasons. Almost none of us got to hear your mom’s full prophecy, because the reading machines we built went berserk trying to read your mom’s blood. She brought a vial of your blood just after you were born, and she and Jasper tried the same thing with our platforms. They only heard the whole thing once, and then only told a few people. It took me years to piece together all that I have, and by the time I gathered all the information, no one wanted to be as proactive as they were in the past. People kept dying in the pursuit of more pieces of the puzzle.”
Rachel looked impressed and a little confused. “But you wanted to keep looking?”
Pryce smiled. “Not out of some sense of nobility—purely selfish reasons. I didn’t want dragonkind to die out. I wasn’t going to let some sick fucker destroy a family so they could usher us into apocalypse. The last piece of the prophecy I was able to uncover was regarding something called The Heart.”
Nina locked gazes with Pryce. She is the head and the heart, the prophecy said. “I’ve heard that term before.”
“In the watered down prophecy,” Pryce said, nodding. “But in the original, it’s phrased a little differently, and it stated that you had a heart—a heart of a jewel, to be exact. I consulted some of our stone technicians to see if they could help me out, and they told me it probably meant a large piece cut from the center of a powerful stone. It took me a solid year to find out that they were talking about the Rose Quartz.”
Nina remembered the photo the Council Guard had showed her; she recalled thinking that the enormous hole in the Rose Quartz made it look like a ring. “What does the missing chunk have to do with this?”
Eli inhaled sharply and nearly swerved into the next lane. “Without its heart, the jewel isn’t able to cleanse itself. I remember my mother teaching me about stone maintenance, telling me that stones that were damaged in their centers were harder to maintain than any others. It’s something to do with concentration of power.”
Nina’s heart started to beat more quickly as it ran ahead of Eli’s explanation, trying to reach the right conclusion. “That’s why the quartz is failing. Its heart is missing.” She frowned. “Doesn’t the Council already know that?”
“Probably,” Pryce allowed. “But they obviously don’t know where it is, or they’d be using your power to make the stone whole instead of trying to get you to cleanse it.”
“So I’m supposed to get the heart of the Rose Quartz,” Nina said slowly. “And reunite it with its body.” She shook her head. “I don’t have it, though. Did the original prophecy say where it was supposed to be?”
Pryce’s expression turned pained. “I don’t have that information,” he admitted. “I only have parts of the prophecy, since I wasn’t allowed to hear it, and almost all of the people who did hear it are dead now, while the others are even deeper underground than I am. The last thing I did before I came to you was put in a request to our chief archivist—the person who obtains copies of all of the prophecies the Council keeps. I thought he must have the original, too, but he didn’t have it.”
“Shit,” Nina said. “Who else might have it?”
Eli spoke up then. “As far as I know, the only people who would have the original are people who have electronic records of the prophecies, since it’s impossible to scrub those from the database completely, but their systems are guarded by magic as well as technology.”
“Who do we know who has access?” Rachel asked.
Nina knew who.
Joey.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Are you sure you can’t tell us what’s going on?”
Nina squirmed under her adoptive parent’s gazes. Nat had her hands on her hips, and Desmond was crossing his arms and peering at her with his one good eye.
“No, Mom,” she mumbled. “I promised Eli. You know how dragons are.”
“Rachel said this is dangerous,” Nat pressed. Her fire engine red hair was much shorter than Rachel’s, cut in an asymmetrical bob that favored her oval shaped face. “You know you can always come to us for help, or even to talk.”
“Or even to ask a favor,” Desmond said in his gravelly voice. “No questions asked.”
Nina laughed. “You guys, it’s not like I have a body to bury or anything. I just want to use the space under the center for a while.”
“With two strange men you just met,” Desmond added. “You can’t even tell us what that’s about?”
“I can tell you they’re dragons,” Nina said. “But that’s it. I’m sorry, but it’s dragon business.”
She felt a stab of regret; confiding in them might not help them figure out where the Rose Quartz Heart was, but it would lighten the crushing burden she felt. For a second, she wondered if her parents had told them about the prophecy; a moment later, she realized they couldn’t have, because Nat and Desmond would have told her by now. But they looked so concerned that she was having trouble convincing herself. She was on the verge of blurting out the truth to her mom’s worried face when Desmond finally heaved a sigh and nodded.
“Okay. You can use the space. Just be careful and let us know the moment things get to be too much.” Desmond squeezed her shoulder. “We love you, Neenee. We’d do anything for you. Remember that.”
The guilt swelled inside her until she felt like she was choking on it.
A few minutes later, she led Eli and Pryce down the set of cobblestone steps and into the cavernous space below. The steps opened out to a huge space lined with glittering black walls, bisected by heavy white curtains suspended by magic at odd intervals.
“The walls are enchanted hematite,” Nina said, gesturing to the onyx colored stones lining the room. “It protects our energies, meaning no one can track us here, even if you’re bonded. To the left is a bathroom, and to the right is a kitchen. Those spaces over there—” Nina pointed ahead of her to where several curtains sliced the space into four near rooms, “—are bedrooms. Already furnished. The big space is obviously meant to be a living area, but the couches can be moved easily to make a gathering space, too.”
Rachel was sitting on one of the couches, smiling beatifically at the looks of surprise on the dragon’s faces. “Beautiful, huh? These vaulted ceilings make this place look like a church.”
Eli moved to the nearest curtain. “Are these magical?”
“Yes,” Rachel said, rising and walking over to her sister. “Can’t see through them, can
’t move them without magic.”
“Soundproof?” Pryce asked curiously.
Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Uh, yeah. They’re magic, so…”
Pryce shot a wry look at Nina. She blushed, and he smiled that maddeningly slow smile, this time letting her see the wealth of heat behind it. “Good.”
Eli looked at Nina, expression unreadable. She gave him a defiant look and turned away. So now I can’t flirt in front of him?
She tried not to think about how much she really wanted to test out those beds with Pryce.
“So, what’s the game plan?” Eli said loudly. “Nina, you said you had ideas.”
Nina ignored Rachel’s confused look and waited for everyone to walk back to her. “I think we should start with Joey. It may be enough to just ask him if he can show me my prophecy.”
“Didn’t you say he might be a plant?” Rachel asked anxiously.
“It’s unlikely,” Eli said. “Plants aren’t usually from the High Horde, and Joey’s a horde leader. It’s much more likely to be someone in the ceremony class, or someone she hasn’t met yet.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time you were wrong, though,” Pryce said lightly.
Eli frowned, but didn’t say anything.
Nina looked between the two of them nervously. “We’ll be careful, but I think we should have a backup. That’s where Rachel comes in. As a witch, she’s better with tactical magic. I can try to brute force a security system, but she can actually fool it or disarm it.”
Eli looked impressed. “Is that true?”
Rachel laughed. “You don’t know much about witches, do you?”
“Okay,” Nina said as Eli frowned again. “Pryce, you obviously have to stay here.”
“Why obviously?”
“You’re unbonded,” Nina pointed out. “Won’t he know something’s up?”
“Not if he doesn’t see me,” Pryce said smoothly. “I’d like to be there with you. As a backup to your backup. Please.”
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