by Emma Savant
Still pale, still struggling under the effects of the wolfsbane, he nodded. I reached out and squeezed his arm.
Sienna saw me the instant I started to rise. She gestured at me to sit back down, and when I didn’t obey immediately, she held out her dagger toward Grandma.
It was a threat, and I didn’t have time for it.
“We’re not doing this,” I said.
I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. Sienna hissed at me to shut up, so I got louder.
“You’re not going to hurt my grandmother,” I said. “Or my mom. Or any more of my friends.”
“Don’t make me deal with you,” Sienna said. She held her dagger out toward me. “You know I’ll win.”
“I know you usually win when we go up against each other,” I said. “So get over here and fight me, because I’m not going down without one.”
45
Sienna rose and glared at me. Another strand of her dark hair fell from its braid, and she shoved it behind her ear.
I strode to an open spot on the floor between a drafting table and a cupboard filled with thread. I gestured at her to come at me.
She didn’t need telling twice.
She hurtled toward me dagger-first, and her silver blade gleamed in the pale blue light from the windows. I dodged the strike and brought my arm up to block hers. She twisted the dagger around and up, and the blade narrowly missed my jaw as I jerked backwards.
I stabbed my own dagger toward her gut, but she blocked the movement with her arm and shoved my blade to the side. The dagger began to slip between my fingers. Heart pounding, I managed to tighten my hold just before it fell from my grasp.
Sienna stepped back, putting distance between us. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and her face looked pale blue in what little light crept through the windows.
“This is a waste of time.” Her lip curled up in a smile. “Not that I’m not having fun.”
“You attacked my grandmother,” I said.
“She’s my granny, too.”
“Act like it,” I snapped.
She jabbed in toward me, but I’d seen her coming and was out of the way of her blade before it got close to my neck. We bobbed back and forth, each looking for weaknesses and openings and the subtle movements we’d both been trained to identify from our earliest childhoods.
She raised her hands and tried to throw a spell at me, but the magic she had used earlier had drained her. Lightning crackled from her fingertips but diffused in the air between us. It made the hairs on my arms stand up but didn’t do any real damage.
That was something.
I slashed downwards, aiming for her throat, but she blocked me with her dagger arm and grabbed my other wrist with her free hand. She twisted, hard, and my body was forced to spin. We struggled back-to-back for a moment, and then I pulled free as she jumped up and brought her blade down. It narrowly missed my wrist. She swung again, arm wide.
Her weapon was a problem. I had to get it away from her.
She seemed to have the same thought, and now all her energy was centered on knocking my weapon out of my hand. She kicked and punched, everything focused on breaking my hold on my knife.
I swept my knee up to her chest. She coughed as the air was knocked out of her lungs, but it wasn’t enough to loosen her grip. She fell backward, and her body slammed onto the drafting table with a shudder. I managed to nick her arm with my blade, and a spray of crimson blood spattered across the floor.
Full of a sudden rage, she flew at me. The contact of her elbow against a pressure point in my arm sent a shimmer of pain along my muscles, and my dagger flew from my grasp. It clattered to the floor and slid underneath a cabinet.
Sienna’s eyes caught a new fire, and she moved toward me with the silver edge of her knife sharp in the morning light.
“You should have just done as you were told,” she said.
“So should you.”
Her blade narrowly missed my throat. My heart pounded, and my body felt electric with adrenaline. I could see every movement as though it was in slow motion, and I dropped to a crouch to avoid the next swing of her arm.
With a sudden burst of energy, I dove for her legs, and she yelped as her balance gave way to gravity. Her body hit the floor with a sickening thud, and then I had her pinned.
She knew how to get out of that one, though, and she lifted her hips like we’d practiced a hundred times before. I tried to resist when she rolled, but the force of her body was enough to pull me around, and then I was the one beneath her. I scrambled backwards like a crab before she could drop her weight fully onto me, and kicked her arm as she swung the dagger toward me again.
“I don’t have to kill you, Scarlett,” Sienna said. She crouched on the floor, the distance between us not quite enough to let me relax. “You can disappear. I’ll let you go this time. It’s a good offer. You should take it.”
Anything that stupid didn’t deserve a response. I jumped to my feet and moved toward her, my eyes locked on her dagger and my thoughts racing.
She ran around the drafting table and kept it as a barrier between us. I could see her mind sifting through all the possibilities as quickly as mine was.
“You shouldn’t have pulled out your dagger until you were ready to kill me,” I said. “Have you forgotten all your training?”
“I’m trying to give you a chance to leave,” Sienna said.
“Why? Murder seems to be your thing.”
“I kill werewolves for fun,” she said. “Not my sisters. I won’t kill Grandma or your mother unless I have to. I won’t kill you unless you make me. I’m giving you a chance to get out of here and never come back. You never really wanted to be a Dagger anyway.”
The words cut as deeply as any knife. I had wanted to be a Dagger. It was all I had ever wanted, to be a Dagger and to follow in my mother’s footsteps as the Stiletto. She had stolen that path from me.
But she would not steal my grandmother.
I jumped onto the table. A piece of fabric that had been lying there caught under my boot, and my feet skidded across the flat surface as I tried to scramble over it. I slid to the floor and faced Sienna, my bare hands my only weapon.
But my bare hands might be enough. She had tired herself out with those flashy spells in the kitchen.
I hadn’t.
I raised my palms toward her and summoned the power of earth. I imagined soil pouring from my hands and pooling around her feet, rooting her to one spot.
Sienna’s eyes widened, and she looked down. Her legs twitched, but her feet didn’t move. I darted in and slammed my arm down onto her elbow, and it buckled.
Quickly, before she could recover, I wrestled the dagger away and threw it across the room.
I looked back just in time to dodge a punch. In the corner of my eye, I saw Autumn rush toward Sienna’s dagger, and then Alec moved toward her. Noticing them was enough to make my concentration waver, and I felt my spell holding Sienna to the floor dissolve.
She kneed me in the stomach, yanked her wrists from my grasp, and then, so quickly I couldn’t track what was happening, she managed to spin and slam me to the wall.
She rammed her forearm up against my throat. I choked, and my body spasmed with a cough that couldn’t go anywhere.
“I gave you a chance,” she muttered, her face inches from mine.
I struggled, but my body was caught up in trying to breathe, and I couldn’t prevent her from placing both hands around my throat.
She pressed her thumbs inward against my wind pipe.
I was so stupid. I knew this move. I’d practiced it over and over for years. I was supposed to drag my chin down before she could get her hands in this close. I was supposed to grab her by the wrists, pull her in toward myself, and kick. Or I was supposed to hold on to one of her wrists and jab up toward her nose, or elbow her in the chin, or do something that would get me out of this position. I knew twenty different ways to get out of this hold, and I couldn’t make my body
do any of them.
I looked wildly around, but my attention didn’t fix on anything until I saw Grandma’s still form lying on the floor. She looked peaceful and asleep.
My grandmother would never be peaceful in a situation like this, and she would never be asleep on the morning of a big show.
Watery light from the predawn glow outside had filled the room with a soft wash of purple, and the space around us was tranquil and familiar and every bit like home. Behind Sienna’s bloodshot eyes and snarling mouth, Grandma’s mood boards for the Fashion Week show lined the walls, and fabric swatches of red and silver peeked out from cabinets and sewing tables. On the windowsill next to me, one of Alec’s wooden clasps and a long hat pin sat atop a veil of sheer scarlet fabric. All these items had been discarded in favor of others, and now they were lying here and waiting for their chance to be used in some future show or collection.
The edges of my vision dissolved into blackness, and Sienna’s rage-filled face seemed to fade in and out. I stared at her. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.
My hands flailed uselessly, and as the darkness crept in on me, my fingers banged against the edge of the windowsill. I inched my hand along the slick painted wood until I felt fabric, and a wooden clasp, and a long, thin shard of metal.
I had never imagined I would have to kill one of my sisters.
But I was a monster hunter.
Whatever anyone else might think, I was a Dagger, and I knew my mission.
I grabbed the pin from the windowsill, brought it down to my waist, and plunged it upwards into Sienna’s stomach.
Her eyes widened, and her mouth fell open in shock. Her hands dropped to her sides, and light flooded back into my vision.
I shoved her away from me, and she tumbled backwards. Her head hit the edge of the drafting table with a loud crack, and then she lay still on the floor with her eyes closed and blood pooling behind her head and oozing through her shirt.
Stars sparkled through my vision as oxygen found its way back to my brain, and I grabbed the edge of the table to keep from falling over.
I looked up toward Alec, my heart banging against my rib cage. He had Autumn’s wrists tied tightly behind her back with a length of ribbon and was staring at me, his face still drained of blood but his eyes fierce and shining.
I clenched the edge of the table.
“Tie her to a chair,” I ordered. My voice rasped, and every breath hurt. “I’m going to go find one of my sisters.”
46
I took a long drink of honeyed tea from my thermos. The lights above the catwalk flickered on and off while the lighting crew made their final checks, and I pressed a finger between my eyebrows and tried to send healing energy to the headache that throbbed through every inch of my skull.
“Take this,” Clancy said, handing me a small vial of some healing potion. When Grandma and I had both insisted on coming to the show today and carrying on as usual, she had fought tooth and nail and then insisted she come with us to Carnelian. Now, she tucked a strand of bright-red hair behind her ear and felt for my pulse.
I jerked away. “I’m fine,” I said.
I wasn’t fine. The hoarseness of my voice and the pain radiating through my head was evidence enough of that.
But I would be fine eventually, and in the meantime, I would grit my teeth and pretend eventually was today until the show had come to its dazzling conclusion.
Clancy pursed her lips at me.
“Drink that,” she ordered, and then slipped away backstage to tend to Grandma.
I downed the potion in one swallow. The herbs in it were bitter and burned all the way down, but it was a soothing kind of burning that felt like something was working. I followed the potion up with more tea and then sat in one of the silver chairs alongside the catwalk while I waited for the effects to kick in.
Alec slid into the chair beside me. He was still pale and looked like he was recovering from the flu, but his new clothes were in one piece, and his hair had been brushed into something that resembled human hair better than it did wiry fur. I handed him my thermos, and he took a long swig of the hot tea.
“Brendan is here,” he said, handing it back.
“About time.”
“He came as soon as he could,” Alec said.
The tone in his voice made me glance sharply up at him. His jaw was tight, and his face seemed drawn. I asked the question with my eyes, and he bit his lip before answering.
“The wolf den was hit pretty hard. Eleven people killed, almost everyone injured.”
I put a hand on his knee. “Cate?”
“She’s okay,” he said. His eyes flooded with tears, which he quickly blinked back. He took a deep breath and stared resolutely at the shining white catwalk. “Brendan’s okay, too. They were on a late-night grocery run with a couple other people when the attack happened.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head but didn’t seem to be able to say anything else. I leaned in toward him, and he sagged a little bit toward me.
“You said he’s here?”
“Him and Cate,” he said. “They want to talk to you and Nelly.”
I nodded. Clancy’s medicine seemed to be doing something, because the pain throbbing in my skull felt dulled. It was still there, but muffled, as if the potion had drawn a heavy comforter over it.
Grandma was in better shape than any of the rest of us. She was rushing around backstage, adjusting collars and straightening hems and appearing as sleek and chic as ever. Her lips drew down into a sympathetic pout when she saw me coming.
“You should be in bed,” she said.
“I know.” I leaned in so the model nearest us couldn’t hear. “Brendan Wildwood is here. He wants to meet with you. I told him to wait in your office.”
A shadow crossed her face. She handed a pincushion off to one of her assistants, and we made our way to the elevators. Once the doors had slid closed and the elevator lurched into motion, she looked over at me.
“Clancy says Sienna will be in recovery for a while, and then she’ll join Autumn in prison.”
It was a statement of fact. Her voice and face gave nothing away.
“I’m sorry I had to attack her.”
“I’m not.”
Grandma adjusted the collar of her lace blazer. The black lace contrasted sharply with the white cocktail dress underneath it, and her ruby earrings peeked out from under her curls like drops of blood.
I was glad it wasn’t blood. I was glad it hadn’t come to that.
“You’ll need to be careful,” Grandma said, staring straight ahead. “Sienna doesn’t seem like she’ll put up with prison for long. Watch your back.”
Before I could ask what she was talking about, the elevator stopped and the doors slid open.
Brendan and Cate were already sitting in Grandma’s office with Alec standing beside them. Cate got to her feet as soon as we walked into the room. Her light-brown hair was loose today and curled around her face. She walked toward us and held out a hand.
“Cate Gray, ma’am,” she said. “Beta of the Wildwood pack.”
Grandma shook her hand, and Cate met Grandma’s eyes with her head held high.
“It’s a pleasure,” Grandma said. “Nelly Carnelian.”
“I know who you are,” Cate said. She wasn’t smiling, but her eyes were soft and inviting.
Whatever Alec had told Brendan and Cate, I got the impression they knew the whole story of what had happened last night, and how angry Grandma had been when Mom had woken her from her drugged sleep.
Brendan had gotten to his feet, too. He crossed the room and stopped a few feet from Grandma. She closed the space between them and held out her hand.
“Mr. Wildwood.”
“Ms. Carnelian.”
They shook, and the moment that hung in the air for the space of a few heartbeats as a new future opened in front of us.
“I’m here to discuss a truce,” Brendan said. “I don’t pla
n to seek retribution for what happened last night. My cousin tells me it wasn’t your doing.”
“But it was my responsibility,” Grandma said. “And I will make reparations.”
She gestured at the armchairs and sofa that sat in front of the fireplace at the opposite side of her office from her desk. We all moved over and settled in. Grandma sat last, and she looked around at all of us: Brendan, with his shoulders tense; Cate, who leaned toward him as if trying to sense what he might need; and Alec and me, together on a sofa and both more than a little worse for wear.
Brendan told us what had happened to his pack. Sienna and Autumn had used magic to break past the den’s security barrier—a basic defensive spell, Brendan said, that a wizard friend had cast for him and that wasn’t a match for Sienna’s abilities. They’d thrown fifteen bombs into the wolves’ home, with a spell that evenly spaced the explosions along the main corridor.
“The smoke filled the place,” he said. “Most of my pack dropped before they could clear it.”
“There aren’t a lot of windows,” I added quietly.
“That was supposed to be for security,” Brendan said. His lips were pressed into a thin, hard line. “We don’t want to be watched.”
“Where are your injured being treated?” Grandma said. “The hospital? A clinic?”
“We dug a new den that will work for now,” Brendan said. “We’re treating people in one room and living in the other.”
“We can’t imagine doctors at the Glimmering hospital will want to treat this many werewolves,” Cate said.
“Fear of contamination isn’t what it was,” Grandma said. “I’ll make some calls to let the hospital know you’re coming. Any bills will be charged to me.”
Brendan listened, hazel eyes downcast. I could see his pride fighting the idea even as his responsibility to his pack tilted him toward accepting it.
“It’s not charity,” I said. “A Crimson Dagger assaulted your family.”
“That’s not your fault,” he said.
The words were grudging, and he seemed to have difficulty getting them out. But he meant them, too, and my heart ached at his willingness to come here and extend a hand of friendship.
