by Chloe Garner
Sasha was remarkably cool about it, the whole time.
Valerie was proud of her.
They got in and Susan lit a pile of stuff on the dashboard that filled the car with purple smoke for several seconds, and then the smoke was gone, as if it had never existed.
“So?” Susan asked as Grant turned the car around.
“I don’t understand,” Valerie said, putting on her seatbelt and slouching in her seat.
“What don’t you understand?” Grant asked.
“How are they the bad guys?” Valerie asked. “They were cool.”
“And really good,” Sasha added.
“You didn’t meet anyone, right?” Susan asked, and Valerie shook her head.
“No. We kept to ourselves, and no one cared.”
“For the record, if you set foot in that school without the prep work we did this morning, they would have pounced on you and no one would have ever seen you again,” Grant said.
“Still,” Sasha said, sounding dreamy. “To be able to go there every day…?”
“It’s a good school,” Susan said. “So is Survival School and so is Light School, but they put together the best of the best…”
“And their fundamental understanding of magic is better aligned with how it actually works,” Grant interrupted.
Susan sighed.
“I was going to avoid politics,” she said.
“Why?” Grant asked. “It’s all politics, if the definitions of the alignment of magics are politics.”
Susan sighed harder and nodded.
“Light, natural, dark,” Sasha said. “It makes so much more sense. Everything just… it just works.”
“Tannis knows, too,” Grant said. “So does your herbology teacher. Reynolds.”
“Yes,” Susan said, resigned.
“She knows. Too smart not to. But the Council says that it’s apologizing for dark magic users, trying to create another category, so they don’t tolerate anyone to teach it.”
“But they’re handicapping us,” Sasha said. “Everything I’ve ever known about magic… Why didn’t my mom tell me?”
“Don’t know if she knows,” Susan said, starting another cast. “Some people just make do with the Council-endorsed paradigm, and others don’t teach it because it’s impossible to go back.”
Valerie looked out through the back window as they pulled away from the school and onto the road again. Abruptly it went from a gorgeous campus to a chain-link fence around a gravel lot. She shook her head.
She would have never guessed.
“So we saw it,” she said. “I still don’t get it, though. Why are we here?”
“Know thy enemy,” Grant said, and Susan looked back at her.
“I gave you up to keep you safe, and Lady Harrington has done her best, but you are involved in all of this now. I need to make sure that you know what’s true and what isn’t, at least with the important stuff, so that you don’t let people lie to you and change who you are.”
“Then why am I here?” Sasha asked. “I’m never going to be a warrior.”
“Because they’d have leaned on you to make you tell them where she was,” Grant said. “And anything else you knew. We both assumed she’d told you things that we didn’t want the Council knowing.”
“What about Ethan?” Sasha asked.
There was a pause.
“Who is Ethan?” Susan asked.
“Ethan Trent,” Valerie said, wishing Sasha hadn’t said anything.
“Would that be Merck Trent’s son?” Grant asked, and Valerie nodded.
“Yes,” Susan said. “Older than you, or your grade?”
“Our grade.”
“One of the cursed,” Susan said softly. “When is his birthday, do you know?”
“Um,” Valerie said. “Why does that matter?”
Susan looked over at Grant, who shrugged.
“Up to you,” he said. “I didn’t know.”
Susan nodded, then turned in her seat.
“I was there, when Lan died. The head of the Pure. His death disrupted The Pure enough that the Council could get an upper hand and they ended the war. Didn’t do it right, if you ask me, but they ended it.”
“No politics, huh?” Grant asked, and Susan grinned.
“Sore spot. Anyway. I probably know more about the curse that is on the Council kids than anyone else living.”
“Why do they keep dying?” Sasha asked, and Susan turned her attention to Sasha once more.
“Who?”
“The Council brat pack,” Sasha said. “They keep dying.”
“Do they, now?” Grant asked. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“Hush,” Susan said. “Who died?”
“Patrick, Conrad, and Yasmine,” Sasha said.
“Surnames?” Susan asked.
“Colt, Rose, and Smith,” Sasha said.
Valerie had never known Yasmine’s last name.
“When were they born?” Susan asked quickly, and Sasha shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
“Why does it matter?” Valerie asked again.
“Because you were the first,” Susan said, looking at Valerie once more. I didn’t figure it out until… It was a day, between when I figured it out and when I ran. I just looked around and saw all of these women with their toddler children and the talk about what the kids were going to do when they grew up and started taking over the world, and… I figured it out. You were the first, the oldest, of the Cursed, and the next four… They are the rest of the five.”
Valerie blinked.
“What do you mean, I was the first?”
Susan licked her lips, then nodded.
“The curse was directed at me,” she said. “My daughter was destined to bear the weight of it, though I didn’t realize it was you until… then. I thought it was talking about my future. But you are my future. It hit me, and it bounced and it reverberated to the Council, and while everyone knew that the Council had been cursed, and their children had been cursed, no one figured out that it started with me. That you were the first among the cursed, and that the rest of the five were chronological. And I don’t know how they would have, without having heard the curse in the first place.”
“That’s why you ran off,” Grant said. “Without saying anything.”
Susan nodded.
“I thought I could get away from it. If I never let magic touch her… maybe the curse couldn’t take root and maybe I could just… If I pretended hard enough, maybe I could imagine that you guys would figure it out without her ever having to be involved.”
Grant looked at Susan for a long time, the car idling at a stop light, and he finally nodded.
“You did the right thing,” he said. “I’m sorry I doubted you.”
Susan licked her lips again, then looked around the headrest at Valerie once more.
“Tell me about the Trent boy,” she said. “Why is he important?”
Valerie shrugged.
“I like him,” she said.
“Did you tell him?” Sasha asked, remembering the point and pressing it. Valerie glared at her, and Sasha ducked her head.
“Some of it,” Valerie allowed. “A lot of it.”
“What did you tell him, specifically?” Grant pressed with a tone of urgency.
“That you were alive,” Valerie said. “That you taught me a bunch of stuff. That the Pure are trying to strip everyone’s magic, that I spent two weeks with you where I was also at school… Not a lot more, I think… I didn’t tell him about natural magic.”
“Oh, that helps a lot,” Grant said, exasperated. “I would have snagged him, too, if I’d known that you’d spill those kinds of secrets to one of the Council kids. The head of the Council, no less.”
“She doesn’t know,” Susan said. “She doesn’t know how the secrets work.”
“I trust him,” Valerie said. “He told me that he was spying on me to his dad, but he was going to stop…”
&nb
sp; “He told you that he was spying?” Grant said. “And you told him that I was alive and that you’d seen me? You know that you are virtually guaranteed to be the person who costs Gemma her life, don’t you? After all these years, I make contact with you once and you get my sister killed?”
“Grant,” Susan said sternly.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” Grant said, and Susan looked over at him.
“I’m telling you that you are a parent, and that you have to do better than that,” she said. “We’ll discuss it later.”
“I had to tell someone,” Valerie said. “It was all too jumbled up in my head, and I needed to talk it through, and Mr. Jamison wouldn’t talk to me about it…”
“Alan Jamison raises his ugly head again,” Grant said, and Valerie frowned, shocked.
“He said that you were his friend,” she said.
“Your father is a bad friend when he’s angry,” Susan said, and Grant glanced at her again.
“You put her there because Alan was there,” Grant said. “My own daughter didn’t go to Light School because your ex was at Survival School.”
Susan shot Valerie a look that was somewhere between alarm and anger, then pointed at Grant.
“I was never with Alan,” she said. “I was just closer with him than you for a while there, you remember?”
“Oh, I remember,” Grant said. “I remember us being in for two whole weeks, and you spending the entire time with him.”
“Because you were behaving like a jackass,” Susan said. “I trust him with my life, and I trusted him with our daughter’s life. I’m not going to apologize to you for that.”
Valerie and Sasha exchanged glances and tried not to squirm.
Grant pulled the car over.
“Do you not care about Gemma’s life at all, anymore?”
“I do,” Susan said, her voice even. “I never stopped caring about her. But there’s nothing we can do about it. And maybe she’s right to trust him. I think our daughter has considerable discernment, which isn’t something you would know.”
“I wouldn’t know because you stole her away when she was barely even talking,” Grant thundered.
“I think that Ethan would do anything for Valerie,” Sasha said, and the car fell dangerously silent.
“We’re forming a Council of our own,” Valerie said after a very, very long pause. “They’ve agreed to stop reporting anything about each other to their parents.”
“They,” Grant said, his voice thin.
“Shack, Ethan, Valerie, and Ann,” Sasha said. “Milton wants to join them, but he’s still torn. I think Ethan will talk him into it.”
Valerie wasn’t sure that this wasn’t spying and reporting to her parents, but she let it go. It had frozen the fight, and right now that was all she cared about.
“It’s the curse,” Susan said quietly. “They sense it and they’re reacting to it, even without knowing about it.”
“You can’t know that,” Grant said.
“When is Ethan’s birthday?” Susan asked, her voice gentle again. “Do you know?”
“December,” Valerie said. She’d missed it, being angry at him.
“And any of the others?”
Valerie looked at Sasha, and they both shook their heads.
“December has got to be early enough,” Susan said.
“It doesn’t mean she can trust him,” Grant said, and Susan shrugged.
“What’s done is done. How many times did we say that? We can’t take back our mistakes. We just have to move on.”
“I need to get Gemma out of there, if there’s still time,” Grant said, and Susan nodded.
“I’ll back your play, if you need me to. I can be very diverting.”
“I know you can,” Grant said. “What about them?”
“I can show them how field work really looks,” Susan said. “I don’t have to make a direct attack or go after something sensitive. I just have to make a big enough splash that everyone is looking the wrong way.”
“Who is Gemma, again?” Sasha asked.
“My aunt,” Valerie said quickly. “And high up in the ranks with The Pure.”
“Aunt,” Sasha said, and Valerie nodded.
“Privy to everything,” Grant said with a moment of hesitation. “If I pull her out all at once, without warning, she’ll never get back in.”
“Probably not,” Susan said.
“And we’ve upset three attempts at testing new casts in the last three weeks,” Grant said.
“She’s easily the most tactically viable player in the entire war,” Susan said. “But it was always a matter of time.”
Grant turned in his seat to look at Valerie.
“How much do you trust him?” he asked. “Your boyfriend?”
Valerie paused.
Thought hard.
Looked her father in the eye.
“I don’t think he is going to tell anyone anything,” she said. “He knows the politics, better than anyone else I know.”
“You think he can avoid telling them that you’ve seen me before?” he asked, and Valerie considered again.
“I think so.”
“You’re staking your aunt’s life on this,” Grant said. “I know that you didn’t much like her, but…”
“I know,” Valerie said. “She’s one of the good guys.”
“She would want you to leave her in place, if there was any chance,” Susan said, and Grant nodded, grim.
“I know,” he said, starting the car and pulling away from the curb again. “All the same, I think we ought to put up a big distraction, in case she gets wind of a rumor that she needs to get out.”
Susan grinned.
“Oh, I’m game for that.”
Valerie looked at Sasha, excited again, and Sasha looked back at her, eyes wide.
“I don’t think I like the sound of that.”
Pursuit
They changed cars.
There was some significant reason about why, but Valerie hadn’t understood any of the conversation as her parents had discussed it, and then she’d given up any hope of catching what they were talking about.
Grant pulled up to a dilapidated park, where a handful of vendors stood under tents, looking more like drug dealers than farmers, to Valerie’s eye.
“You guys understand what your job is?” he asked.
“Stay close to Valerie,” Sasha said, and Susan pointed.
“And look just like that. They aren’t going to be able to resist.”
They were bait.
And somehow neither of Valerie’s parents were that concerned by this.
Nor was Valerie, when it came down to it.
If either Grant or Susan had voiced hesitation, she would have been worried, but Grant said that none of the merchants at the park were going to be prepared to defend themselves against her, if she had to keep them back, so long as they were outside of their booths when it happened.
So.
All she had to do was either draw their attention from inside of their booths or get their attention enough to draw them out of their booths before they did anything to her.
So long as all eyes were on her and Sasha, Susan and Grant would have free rein to do whatever it was the two of them were plotting.
Which didn’t sound good, from the way they were talking.
They were too happy.
They’d done this kind of thing before - that much was obvious - but they hadn’t done it in a while, and they were goofy excited about all of the things they both knew how to do, and all of the new ideas they’d each had since the last time they’d done it.
Sasha was kind of losing her mind.
“It’ll be okay,” Valerie said, putting her hand on the door handle. “Just walk behind me and stay close. I’ve got this.”
“You don’t know what they might do,” Sasha hissed. “And you haven’t planned or prepared a defense.”
“Has, too,” Grant objected. “She trained with me for t
wo weeks, last semester.”
“And I’ve been training with Mr. Finn all this semester,” Valerie said. She saw the way resentment hit her father, and she kind of liked it.
If he’d wanted to be the one who trained her, he should have stuck around.
“So?” Sasha asked. “Mr. Finn gives you everything you’re going to need to work through one of his puzzles.”
“But I never do it right,” Valerie argued, and Sasha gave her a desperate look.
“Exactly.”
“Do we need a different plan, ladies?” Susan asked, and Valerie shook her head.
“Sasha could just stay in the car, if she wanted.”
Sasha jumped out.
“No. You aren’t leaving me by myself.”
Valerie grinned and got out, knocking on her mom’s window on the way past.
Sasha scrambled around the car to walk next to her, and Valerie shifted, keeping her head up and looking around.
Just like walking home from school.
If someone put their hands on her, she would make them regret it.
She just had more weapons now than she ever had before.
The vendors noticed her quickly, giving the two girls dark looks as they went past, eyes turning, feet shifting. Valerie looked over her shoulder, but the men weren’t following.
She stopped.
Sasha went on a full two steps before she accepted that Valerie wasn’t going any further, then she scrambled back.
Valerie turned to look at one of the stalls, sniffing the air and looking at everything the man had, sitting in baskets, hanging from under the roof of the temporary booth.
The colors.
She knew better than to group magical ingredients by color to represent lightness or darkness, but everything that Sasha carried was gold or tan or white. These were deep teal and redblack and slate gray.
It was beautiful, if you let yourself think it, but it was so different from the selection of stuff she’d been using in the dorm room, even different from the stuff she’d been maintaining for Mr. Tannis.
