by Emma Savant
“You’re okay,” Alec whispered. He put a hand on the small of my back. The touch was just enough to bring me back to reality.
But this was reality. Grandma was there at the front of the line, looking a little worse for wear but as strong and angry as when I’d seen her last. And Mom was behind her, with her dark hair bound in a tight braid and her shoulders drawn proudly back. And behind her—I counted their heads, searched their faces, strained to see the face of the smallest child who was being carried in the arms of a vampire.
They were there. They were all there.
Tears jumped to my eyes, and my skin tingled, and it took Alec wrapping his arm around me and pulling me in to keep me from collapsing completely.
“It’s them,” Brendan said, as if he could see the way my brain couldn’t quite accept what was there in front of my eyes. He put an arm around me, too, and then he and Alec tried to subtly jostle each other away from me.
This was enough to bring me back, and I swallowed a sudden hysterical laugh and swatted them both away.
“Come on, guys,” I whispered. “Read the room.”
Joy swept through me, an irrepressible feeling that made me afraid I was going to start screaming, and so I bit my knuckle instead and focused in on what was happening below.
I couldn’t give in to happiness. Not yet. It ran the risk of making me stupid, and I’d need all my wits to get out of here with them in tow.
“This just became a rescue mission, didn’t it?” Brendan said.
It wasn’t a question, and I didn’t bother with an answer. I leaned forward until my nose pressed against the lattice.
Sienna stood, her gown pooling around her just as it had back at the club. She was wearing the same dress here, but now she had on a necklace dripping with rubies and was crowned with a matching tiara. She surveyed her assembled subjects—I couldn’t think of them as anything else—and held up a hand.
“Tonight a new member will be born into our clan,” she said. Her voice echoed through the room.
I could barely catch Rowan’s profile from here, so it was impossible to tell how she might be feeling. She stood up straight, and she didn’t fidget or seem like she was trying to find a way to run.
“State your name for the assembled clan,” Sienna ordered.
“Rowan Hunter,” Rowan said.
“You seem surprised to see our prisoners,” Sienna said.
Rowan hesitated. “I believed they were dead. Yes, I’m surprised.”
“Is it a happy surprise?”
Rowan was silent for a long moment. I held my breath, and then Rowan seemed to straighten a little.
“I’m glad they’re alive,” she said. “It doesn’t change my decision.”
“You only wanted to join me because you thought Scarlett didn’t have it in her to lead.”
Mom shifted a bit in her shackles, though I couldn’t make out the expression on her face from here. My shoulders tightened as I silently urged Rowan to find the right words.
“This feels like a trap,” Brendan muttered.
Alec shushed him.
“I have the utmost respect for Nelly Hunter,” Rowan said.
My shoulders tensed a bit more as Rowan nodded toward Grandma, whose face was unreadable.
“She recognized my potential when I was young and adopted me into her family. I’ll always be grateful for the home we shared.” She looked at Sienna, emphasizing the we. “But I’ve felt like I didn’t belong in the coven for a long time now. I definitely trust Nelly more than I trust Scarlett. I also can’t ignore that she managed to get herself kidnapped twice in the last year. I think she was a strong leader once. But she’s getting old.” Rowan’s shoulders lifted and fell as she sighed. “My decision hasn’t changed. I think you’re the better leader. I want to follow you.”
Sienna put a hand to her heart, and I had no idea whether she was touched or just sarcastic.
“That makes one member of my old coven with common sense,” Sienna said. “My own mother wouldn’t follow me here, but you did. That counts for something.”
Rowan nodded, but Sienna wasn’t done.
“But I demand commitment. You swore your loyalty to the Daggers once, too, and see where you are now.”
I scoffed at the irony and the arrogance, but Rowan stayed calm.
“I swore allegiance to the line of succession in place during my initiation,” she said. “I’m still loyal to the end of that line.”
Brendan nudged me. “She is still on our side, right?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell.
But I knew Rowan, and I’d decided to trust her.
“I’m not giving up on her just because she knows how to think on her feet,” I muttered.
Sienna put a thoughtful finger to her lips. “I have to be honest,” she said, and I bit back a snort. “The Daggers are devious. This might all be some trick.”
“It’s not a trick.”
“Then you’ll be willing to prove it,” Sienna said.
The words were sharp, cutting, and Rowan stiffened just a little. The she nodded, so deeply it was almost a bow.
“I’m here to follow you,” Rowan said. “I’ll do whatever you ask.”
“It’s not about what you’ll do,” Sienna said.
She snapped a finger. Instantly, two vampires stepped forward and grasped Rowan’s arms, one on each side. Sienna nodded, and they dragged Rowan past the dais, past Grandma and Mom and the children, and toward the small door.
Alec put a firm hand on my shoulder, and I swallowed the shout of warning that had risen to my lips.
Far below us, Rowan held her head high and let herself be taken.
28
I was halfway down the corridor before I realized I’d moved. Then Brendan’s hand closed around my arm.
“Wait,” he whispered, directly into my ear.
The closeness of his lips sent tingles across my skin.
“We have to go get her,” I whispered frantically. “I’m not sure what Sienna’s plans are, but they can’t be good.”
“Getting ourselves captured won’t help,” Brendan said. “There are still a hundred vampires down there. We can’t take them all on at once.”
“He’s right,” Alec said, although he didn’t sound as certain. “Once whatever this is has ended, we can go down and try to find Rowan and the rest of them.”
“How long are we going to have to wait?”
“You’re a Dagger,” Brendan said. “You can be patient.”
I cut my eyes at him, but he wasn’t wrong. I blew out a sigh.
“All right, fine. Where do we hide? These look like bedrooms, and I don’t want to be here when the sun comes up.”
“You think they’re full of coffins?” Brendan said. His glance toward the doors was a little too curious.
“I think I’d rather not know,” Alec said.
We continued down the hallway, always keeping one eye on the events downstairs. A vampire guard herded Grandma and the others back through the little door, so we moved quietly toward that side of the building. There was another stairwell at the end of the corridor, and this one led up into one of the building’s towers as well as down toward the throne room.
Alec snuck up the stairs, searching for a good hiding place, and quickly came back down.
“Abort mission,” he said, drawing a hand across his throat. “There’s bats in the belfry.”
“Bats-bats or vampire-bats?” I said.
“I have no idea and don’t plan on finding out,” he said. “I vote we keep ourselves away from the prying eyes of any species.”
“Agreed,” I said, just as Brendan snorted.
“You’re scared of bats?” he asked.
“We should all be scared of any creature that might report us to Sienna.”
He seemed to see the sense in this, and we continued around the corner to the hallway that looked down to the back of Sienna’s throne. There was a small closet there, just before the corridor gave wa
y to a dead end. It was unlocked and full of dust and the kinds of discards that always seemed to fill the corners of old houses like this. I settled in the back between two broken chairs, and Brendan and Alec managed to find seats on crumbling boxes labeled things like Electrical Cords and Magazines/Books in pretentious calligraphy.
Every half hour or so, we took turns darting out of the closet and across the hall to see what was happening below. After a while, Brendan started playing some shooter game on his dimmed phone, and Alec began flipping through one of the old magazines from the box underneath him. I couldn’t imagine being able to see the text in the dim light coming from the crack in the door, but his canine eyes were better than mine.
I just sat and waited. I tried to imagine how the building might be laid out below us, where Rowan and the others might have been taken, what could be happening to them. They weren’t pleasant thoughts, but they kept me alert and on edge, and by the time Alec reported, after taking his turn, that people were starting to leave the gathering downstairs, I was keyed up enough to feel like I could maybe take them all out by myself.
I didn’t, of course. I just pressed my back against the wall and stayed silent as footsteps came up the stairs. It was early morning by now, and it seemed like these vamps, in addition to living in a stereotypical house, also maintained a stereotypical sleep schedule. Doors in the hallway opened and closed, and unintelligible voices floated down the corridor toward us.
Finally, the footsteps and voices stopped, and it seemed like the house had gone to bed.
“What’s the plan?” Alec asked, so quietly that I wouldn’t have heard him if I hadn’t been so on edge.
I crouched between their seats, resting my elbow on the box Brendan sat on. He shifted a little to make room for me, then shifted back so we were touching.
“We stick together.” This seemed like the one nonnegotiable to me—the one way to make sure that one of us wouldn’t get captured while we were trying to rescue the current prisoners. “I’m hoping we’ll find Mom and Grandma first.”
Their names felt like bubbles coming out of my mouth, delicate parcels of hope and joy and excitement that would burst at the first wrong move.
“They’ve probably been here longer than Rowan,” I added. “They’ll have a better sense for where we can find her, assuming they’re being held separately, and they might know how we can get out of here without getting caught.”
“Sounds solid to me.” Brendan started to stand, but I tugged him back down.
“We’re getting the Daggers out,” I said. “And only the Daggers. Sienna isn’t who we came for.”
“We’ll get the Daggers out first,” Brendan answered, which was not what I’d said.
I grabbed his hand and yanked him in closer to me.
“We’re getting the Daggers, and then we’re leaving,” I said. “You were right. There are at least a hundred vampires in this place, and we’re not going to risk our lives going after them tonight.”
“This morning,” Alec pitched in, less than helpfully.
“You’ll get your chance to deal with Sienna,” I said. “You can’t be stupid about it.”
Brendan grumbled, and I wasn’t sure he was going to agree, but then he swore under his breath.
“You’re right,” he said. “I know. I just—if she realizes we escaped, and she moves the whole operation, we might not find her again.”
“That’s true,” I said. “It’s a risk we need to take. It’s a risk I need you to take. Can you do that?”
He was silent a long moment and seemed to be wrestling with himself in the darkness.
“He can do it,” Alec finally said, and Brendan, reluctantly, nodded.
29
This old mansion wasn’t as creaky as Grandma’s house. I realized, as we walked through it, that the building wasn’t that old. It was just designed to mimic antiquity. The bones underneath were young and solid, which made it a lot easier to sneak through the hallways without causing the kinds of creaks and squeaks that might give us away.
We made our way back to the first floor and found an entrance to the throne room. It was almost pitch-black inside, and I realized for the first time that there were no windows or skylights or any other access to the outdoors. We slipped quietly along the edges of the room, Brendan in the front with my hands on his shoulders and Alec keeping watch behind me.
The small door the prisoners had disappeared to led to a narrow, curving set of stairs lit by a single dim bulb and filled with the damp odor shared by all cellars. I made sure our glamours were secure, and then we snuck down the stairs, one dangerous step at a time, until we stopped in a huddle and peeked around the final corner.
A vampire was standing guard in front of a few prison cells, or at least making half an effort to do so. He lounged in an armchair that had been dragged downstairs for the purpose and tapped quickly on his phone, which was clearly set to some game or other. Behind him, all six children were grouped in the largest cell together. Someone had brought a few thick rugs down to put on the cell’s cement floor, and a television at one end of the cell played a cartoon with the sound turned down low. A few of the children were sleeping; the ones who were awake looked exhausted, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because they’d been kept up half the night for Sienna’s display or because they’d simply been worn out by their captivity.
Mom and Grandma each had their own cells, and they hadn’t been gifted with old rugs or cartoons. They both sat on the bare cement with enchanted shackles around their wrists. Someone had attached particle board to the bars on either side of the cells so they couldn’t see each other or the children. Mom was sitting in tranquil meditation, and Grandma was in the middle of her usual morning yoga routine. I wanted to laugh and cry all at once at the sight of her transitioning to a plank in these dismal surroundings.
I looked back to Brendan and Alec, and Brendan wiggled his fingers at me in a poor imitation of magic. I smirked and turned my attention to the guard.
He was easy enough to knock out. A quick drawing of earth energy into my hands, a visualization of sleep pouring like sand into his eyes and heavy clay filling his limbs with the weight of exhaustion, and he was out. His head lolled back. The phone dropped from his hand onto the cement, and he started snoring.
“So dignified,” Brendan muttered.
Mom’s head jerked up at the sound of his voice. In an instant, she was on her feet and at the edge of her cell with her hands around the bars, scanning the room for whoever had spoken.
Grandma was slower to respond. She pushed her plank into a downward-facing dog pose, then stepped her hands back to her feet and stood with a stretch.
“Scarlett,” Mom whispered, her voice carrying in a hiss across the room.
I stepped out from behind the cover of the stairwell, and her face instantly flushed with concern and relief and other emotions I couldn’t untangle. She shoved a hand through the bars and reached for me. I was across the room in an instant. She wrapped her arms around me as best she could, and I reached through the bars and tried to squeeze her. It was awkward and clumsy and easily the best hug of my life.
“We thought you were dead,” I said, and I didn’t recognize my own voice. “She told us she’d killed you all.”
“I know,” Mom said. “Or at least I divined.”
“Couldn’t you have sent a message?”
She shook her head. “She took our necklaces first thing. And these don’t help.” She held up her wrists and shook them. The shackles slipped up her arm.
“That sucks.” I held a hand over one of the shackles and tried to figure out how to break them loose. It took only a few moments for the cold energy of ice to skim across my palm, radiating from the shackles and freezing Mom’s abilities. I counteracted the ice with fire, bringing as much heat to my hand as I could muster and directing it all toward the cuff.
It clicked and sprang apart as the metal dissolved. Mom flinched away and rubbed her wrist, where a
small red burn had blossomed, then held up the other wrist.
I couldn’t force the cell itself open with a spell, but Alec was right behind me and had the good sense to rummage through the guard’s clothes for the keys. He got Mom’s cage open while I helped Grandma get free of her own chains.
She wrapped her arms around me the moment she was out and squeezed like she was trying to get every last bit of air out of my lungs. And then she let go, suddenly all business, and she and Mom helped me collect the children. They were all sleepy-eyed and disoriented by the sudden change of plans, but the older girls helped us soothe and gather the little ones.
“I have to find Rowan,” I said.
“She’ll be upstairs.” Mom closed her eyes, and I kept my mouth shut so she could focus.
Her eyes moved back and forth beneath her eyelids, and then she opened them.
“She’s in a parlor on the first floor, I think.” She rubbed her wrist. “Sienna’s with her.”
“Can you get the kids out?” I asked. “I’ll go find Rowan.”
Mom nodded, and Grandma put a hand on my shoulder.
“I’ll come with you.”
“No,” I said. “Sienna can’t know you’ve gotten free. As far as she knows, I think you’re all dead and won’t have come looking for you.” I jerked my head toward the still-snoring guard. “He’ll be out for at least another hour, which buys you an hour to get out of here while I pretend Rowan’s the only one I’m after.”
“Then we’ll see you at home,” Grandma said. “Be careful. Don’t trust anyone.”
“I know who to trust,” I said.
“Then we’ll get these babies back to their mothers.” Grandma picked up Coralie and patted her back. “You make sure you come home to yours.”
30
It wasn’t hard to find Rowan, not once Mom had pointed us in the right direction. The parlor was near the front of the house, almost beneath the closet we’d hidden in earlier, and it was the only room in the house where anyone seemed to be awake.
We hugged the wall outside the room and listened to the voices from behind the closed door. There were several of them, all talking in low tones, and laughing sometimes in a way that made me think whatever was happening inside wasn’t exactly funny. Alec cautiously lowered himself to the floor and tried to look under the door. He twisted his head, squinted, and then held up three fingers.
