by Emma Savant
He held out a hand, and I gave the binder back to him. He flipped through the pages, so quickly I suspected he had the book memorized and was just using it as a prop. His gaze caught on a few images, and he scribbled in his notebook, then let the binder drop shut with a dull thud.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” he said. “Unicorn horn, moon-wrought silver, and silver-cast leaves. Lots of leaf imagery, because faeries can’t get enough of trees. And stars. Stars will provide a link between Carnelian’s pentacle brand and the Faerie Queen’s star crest. I’m also thinking we should set the toadstone in behemoth leather and make that one massive, just to carry home the point, and then I’ll do a few others in jackalope antler and dragon scale to give you some options. I’m exploring a technique of weaving sphinx whiskers together, so maybe one of those if I can get the finishing details right? But I can’t make any promises. And then we can throw in a few wooden clasps, just to bring the whole feel of the collection back to trees.” He tapped his pen sharply against the notebook. “How’s that sound?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Finally, I shrugged.
“It sounds like you know what you’re talking about,” I said. “How long is all that going to take? Fashion Week is in two months,” I said.
“I can do it in two months,” he said. “I expect she’ll need to see them before then, so I’ll try for three weeks, but realistically you won’t have the last of them for six.”
That would cut it close, but we were always working on pieces up until the very last minute. It was part of the business. I nodded my approval.
“I can let you know as I finish the individual clasps so you can have them as they’re ready,” he said. “I’ll send you a quote for the finished product and will need a deposit of half that up front.”
He stood and went into a back room, then came back holding a folder and clipboard with several sheets of paper on it. He handed the folder to me.
“This is our standard contract. Return it with the deposit, and I’ll get started.”
I stood and held out a hand. He shook it. I noticed a smudge of blue paint in his hair and bit back a smile.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” I said.
I had done business with him, and it had been a pleasure. I’d represented Carnelian honorably and I’d done what Grandma had sent me out to do.
I may have been the world’s worst Dagger, but I wasn’t a bad assistant. I might have even been a good one. I was the only person Grandma trusted with things like this. Maybe I couldn’t follow her as the Stiletto, but I might be able to follow her as the head of Carnelian someday, if I worked hard enough and didn’t screw it up.
I was going to resign, I realized with a jolt. I was going to be the first Dagger of my generation to give up my place in the coven. The thought flooded me with pain—and relief. Yes, it would be embarrassing, and yes, things would be awkward around the other Daggers for a while.
But I wasn’t meant to be a Dagger. I’d made that abundantly clear. Sienna had made it abundantly clear. My mother, and my grandmother, and everyone who had watched me botch my mission and then land in jail, knew as well as I did that walking the path of the Daggers wasn’t my destiny.
I would hand in my dagger, and I would be done with this.
I clutched the folder to my chest and marched out of Forrest Designs. Now I just had to tell my grandmother.
11
I felt as though a weight had been lifted. Not just from my shoulders, but from my head, my heart—and most particularly my ankle, where the stiletto dagger from my initiation was strapped under my boot.
It wasn’t for me, this life, and fighting against it hadn’t done me any good. I was going to throw myself heart and soul into my work at Carnelian, and maybe, just maybe, that would be enough to stop the ache in my chest that had started the day Sienna had been chosen to follow in Grandma’s footsteps.
My phone buzzed as I entered the mansion. It was Brendan. He’d been keeping my phone busy these past few days, and my heart leapt every time he messaged me. It wasn’t just that he was gorgeous and funny and a little bit dangerous. It was also that he thought I was great—that he’d been able to see what I meant to do, even when the reality didn’t shake out like I’d planned.
It was nice to have someone on this planet who cared about my intentions and not just my screwups.
Brendan: Catching a movie tonight at the GlimPlex. You want to join me?
Of course I did. I typed back quickly.
Scarlett: Dunno, what movie?
Brendan: Not telling. Let’s just hope you’re not scared of demons.
Scarlett: Been summoning them since I was six. Never seen one on the big screen worse than the dude I accidentally called up last year. Lmk what time and I’ll be there.
I had a date.
He wouldn’t call it a date. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who acknowledged dates as anything other than two people “hanging out.”
And I didn’t care what he called it, because I knew full well we’d both be there for each other, not the movie.
Guys like Brendan were another reason to give up the Dagger business, and a compelling one. Being a Dagger came with sacrifices, but it also came with unchangeable rules that flowed through our blood like our magic. Daggers had only daughters. That was just the way it was and had been for as long as history remembered. And Daggers didn’t have romantic relationships that lasted with men.
We couldn’t. Our work, our lives, and our loyalties were all tied up in one another. There wasn’t room for anything else, and, as I’d seen over and over again, men didn’t want to be in relationships with women who could only give a tiny fraction of themselves.
Daggers dated whoever they wanted, but they only settled down with one another. Anything else was just asking for heartbreak.
I had never thought boys were enough reason to give up being a Dagger. And If I’d had a knack for the coven’s work, or had been chosen as a future leader, my personal life wouldn’t have mattered. But if I was going to fail as a Dagger anyway, I might as well embrace everything a more conventional life had to offer.
And if that meant embracing hazel eyes and a quick wit and shoulders like a god’s? Even better.
I took the steps slowly. No matter how firmly I knew what I wanted, I had no idea how to convince Grandma I’d thought it through. It wasn’t like I couldn’t leave the coven. It was just that nobody did, and especially nobody who was related to the Stiletto by blood.
At least Mom wouldn’t take much convincing. She was so disappointed in me that we’d barely had a conversation all week. She was probably just waiting for me to come to the conclusion the rest of them had likely arrived at back when my initiation kept getting delayed: I wasn’t meant to be part of their group, no matter who my grandmother was.
Grandma’s office door was closed, and a few soft voices spoke inside. I figured she was meeting with some of the Daggers about a mission, or on the phone with someone at Carnelian. The ceiling above me creaked me as one of the Daggers walked through her quarters, and the soft whisper of the pipes started when someone turned on water elsewhere in the house.
I could still live here, at least. Even if I wasn’t a Dagger, I was close enough to one that it would make sense for me to stay, especially if it meant I could always be here to help Grandma in her studio.
The future played out in front of me, full of Carnelian and fashion shows and spreadsheets and a normal Glimmering life.
It wasn’t what I had always dreamed of. But I could find new dreams. Maybe Grandma would approve of that. Maybe she’d think that was even better. Maybe they’d be relieved that I’d quit before they’d had to fire me and would be proud of my maturity in coming to this decision on my own.
I took a deep breath, knocked, and pushed the office door open.
More pairs of eyes than I’d expected landed on me, hot and sharp. None of them belonged to Grandma. Mom was here with the other Cardinals,
Cherry and Saffron. Ginger was here, too, and Blaze, and Cerise. Roux sat in the corner with her knees apart and leather boots splayed across the corner of the rug, and Pepper stood near the window with her hand resting against the frame.
I froze. There was no reason for them all to be here. Blaze didn’t even live at the mansion and only showed up for rituals and events and sometimes to crash if she was in the neighborhood, and Roux lived here but mostly only came home to sleep.
And something was wrong. I felt it in the air, and in the way they had all tensed when I’d opened the door.
“Where’s Grandma?”
Mom stepped forward. “We’re in a meeting.” She waved me out, but Cherry touched her shoulder and shook her head.
“She may as well know,” she said. “They’ll all need to know.”
My blood, which had been warm with eagerness and nerves a moment ago, chilled in my veins. My stomach turned over. No one was sitting in Grandma’s chair behind the desk.
“Where is she?” My voice was sharper than I meant it to be. I swallowed and looked around, waiting for an answer that none of them seemed to want to give.
Mom had to be the one to speak up. She was the Stiletto’s heir, and that, I realized, as my stomach flipped over again, was important right now.
“Grandma has been kidnapped,” Mom said.
It was a ludicrous word, kidnapped, but I felt the weight of it down to my bones. I took another step into the room, and the door fell shut behind me.
“When?” I said. “How?”
“Why is the question,” Blaze said. Her short platinum hair stuck up at odd angles, like she’d been running her hand through it over and over all day.
“We don’t know why,” Mom said. She was shorter than me, but her power filled the room. Her power, and her anger. “She was taken outside Carnelian on her way to the car. Her attacker got Poppy out of the way before she realized what was happening.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s at the infirmary,” Mom said. “She’ll be fine, but they knocked her out cold.”
“Who?” I demanded. “Who is ‘they’?”
Mom picked a piece of paper off the table. It was thick, handmade paper, scribbled with heavy black writing.
We have Carnelian Hunter in our possession for crimes against our kind. She has long owed us a debt, and the time has come to pay.
You will leave GG1,000 in unmarked bills in a case in spot #305 of the parking garage adjacent to the House of Carnelian’s downtown office.
You will make no attempt to track these bills, our location, or our individual identities. You will engage in no retaliation against our Pack. You will not contact law enforcement of any kind. You will not notify the Faerie Queen or her representatives of this situation.
Failure to meet all of these requirements will result in the execution of Carnelian Hunter for her crimes. You have three days.
At the bottom was a signature: a series of seven sharp slashes in the rough shape of a paw print.
12
I lowered the paper. “A thousand galaxies?”
Grandma had the money. But it was all tied up in Carnelian and the coven, and how on earth were we supposed to be able to collect that all in three days? A thousand gold galaxies was close to a million dollars in Humdrum cash. It was a mind-boggling sum.
“They can’t get away with it,” Blaze said. “No one crosses the coven like this.”
“It’s the Wildwood Pack,” Ginger said. “No one crosses them, either.”
“But it looks like Nelly did.” Blaze pounded her fist against her palm. “So how are we going to take them out?”
I read over the note again. The words were crystal clear, the black lines standing in sharp relief against the pale paper. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and my other hand ball into a fist.
“We can’t go after them,” Mom said, her voice cutting through the murmurs that had started up. “They’ll kill her. We can’t mess with the Wildwoods.”
“They shouldn’t have messed with the Daggers,” Blaze retorted.
Mom shot her a silencing look, and Blaze clenched her jaw and kept her next words to herself.
None of this made sense. I threw the paper back on the desk. “Who are the Wildwoods?”
Sienna cleared her throat and shifted from one foot to another. “I’m sorry, why is she here?” she said. “This is Dagger business.”
“She is a Dagger,” Ginger said, an edge to her voice.
Sienna softened. “I know,” she said. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I meant this is a conversation for those of us who are in a position to make decisions. Do the novices need to be involved in this?”
“Everyone needs to know,” Mom said, but there wasn’t the kind of reprimand in her voice I might have hoped for. “We all need to be on high alert. If they don’t get what they want, we’re fools to think they’ll stop with Nelly.”
She must be terrified. Mom was tough, but she loved her family as fiercely as any of us, and her own mother was the one in danger. Her face stayed hard, though, and her jaw was set as if with steel.
She was a Dagger, and she was the leader at times like this. There was no room for personal emotion.
“Scarlett,” Mom said, in a voice that meant an order was coming. “Assemble the rest of the Daggers. Emergency meeting, lounge downstairs, one hour.”
“Teens and kids, too?”
She shook her head slightly. “Yes on the teens. No on the children. Have Phoenix and Ember watch the younger ones in the playroom.”
“Consider it done.”
I wanted to stay and ask a million questions. But if Mom could swallow her fear, I could swallow my impatience.
Every current or future Dagger above the age of twelve wore or carried a small brass dagger charm on her person at all times. I pulled my own dagger necklace from where it usually lay forgotten beneath my shirt and wrapped it tightly in my palm. When the metal was warm enough that I couldn’t tell it apart from my skin, I opened my hand and whispered, “Emergency meeting at the mansion in one hour.”
No matter where they were, everyone with a charm would be hit with a sudden knowledge that they needed to go to headquarters. I called Phoenix and Ember, two of the teenagers, and told them they were on babysitting duty, then went down to the lounge to make sure there were seats and tea for everyone. Rowan was already there, and her big brown eyes widened when she saw me.
“What’s going on?” she said. “Why are we having a meeting?”
I couldn’t form the word kidnapped. I shrugged instead. I loved Rowan; I couldn’t be the one to give her such shattering news. “Guess we’ll find out. Would you go make sure there are enough snacks in the playroom?”
She nodded and disappeared.
We had our disagreements and squabbles, but nobody could pull together in an emergency like the Daggers. Before the hour was up, the coven had arrived, many with their young daughters in tow. The children were safely gathered in the playroom, where they’d watch movies and play games while the adults talked, and the teens huddled together in the lounge as if they’d find safety in numbers.
Mom stood in front of the room, her hair pulled back in a French braid almost as tight as the lines on her face. She told everyone what had happened, and the shock of it rippled through the space like something physical. There was a chorus of questions, all ones I wanted the answers to myself, and Mom waved a hand to quiet them.
She read the note aloud in its entirety, then looked up, her eyes hard. When she finished, there was a brief silence.
Autumn, ever the polite one, raised her hand. Mom nodded at her.
“Who are the Wildwoods?”
Mom pursed her lips. “They’re a werewolf pack,” she said. She spat the words, and that was enough to tell me that these werewolves weren’t the kinds of respectable Glimmers who managed their condition and participated in civilized society. They were the kind of werewolves we hunted—the kind who’d g
one off the rails, who gave in to their most violent instincts and didn’t let anyone stand in the way of their bloodlust.
“Why Nelly?” Rose said, a woman with soft brown hair and eyes like flint. She was another of the Daggers in the age group just above me. “They kidnapped her from outside Carnelian. Does this have to do with Nelly as she exists in the outside world? Or is this a fight with the Stiletto?”
“We don’t know,” Mom said. “I suspect it’s something to do with her work as a Dagger.”
“Chances are good,” said Carmine.
All eyes turned to her. She was the second oldest of the Daggers, not quite Grandma’s age but close. She’d been in the coven longer than almost anyone and knew Grandma’s history like I knew Rowan’s or Autumn’s.
“Nelly was assigned to deal with some werewolves when we were young,” Carmine said. “This may be a long echo from those years. At any rate, assuming they were after the Stiletto seems more likely than them being after the elderly owner of a fashion brand.”
I bristled. It didn’t seem like a fair description. But then, if anyone was allowed to call Grandma elderly, it was Carmine.
Something about the whole thing didn’t sit right with me. Not many people knew that Nelly Carnelian was anything but a fashion designer. Even werewolves seemed unlikely, given that Carmine seemed to be talking about something that had happened decades ago.
What if I’d let something slip while I was tipsy at Gilt? What if someone had overheard, or seen my dagger, or somehow pieced together who I was and who my grandmother must be?
I couldn’t blame myself. Not for sure. But I couldn’t smother the terror that this was all my fault, too.
“We’re going after her, right?” Roux said.
Mom looked irritated but let out a short sigh. “We are,” she said.
A murmur passed through the room, and she held up her hand again.
“It’s dangerous,” she said. “And not my initial suggestion. However, after conversation with the other Cardinals, it’s also our best option. It’ll take too much time to liquidate so many of our assets.”
