Harley Merlin 18: Persie Merlin and Leviathan’s Gift

by Forrest, Bella

  “An hour. I promise.” I kept hold of his hand. “I love you, Wade.”

  “Not as much as I love you.” It had become our signature goodbye, even if I didn’t agree. I loved him more than I could put into words, but it had stuck over the years.

  I kept glancing back at him until I turned the corner of the hallway beyond. There, I unleashed a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Keeping secrets from Wade was a bad habit I’d picked up over two decades ago, before I realized that working together yielded better results. It didn’t feel good to be doing it again.

  I’ll tell him once I’ve made a decision. I set off along the corridor with my mind racing. I wanted a career change and a more ordinary existence. But was that even possible? With Leviathan’s curse on Persie, ordinary seemed further away than it had ever been. For now, with everything in flux, I just needed some time to think and put things in perspective. Figure out what was possible and what was a pipedream. And that required alone time.

  Some twenty minutes later, I reached my office. I was about to pass my hand over the magical lock, when a sliver of moonlight stopped me, spilling onto the floor where I stood. My heartrate skyrocketed. The door was already cracked open. And I hadn’t left it that way. A lot might have slipped my mind lately, but I always locked my office door.

  Raising my left palm to defend myself, I pushed the door. Slow and steady, to avoid disturbing whoever had snuck inside. A shadow slunk around by my desk. Smaller than I’d expected. But they were evidently searching for something. I heard the rustle and scrape of drawers opening and closing. Meanwhile, the snitching moonlight glinted on silvery hair and a unique barrette of crossed feathers, an Esprit I would’ve known anywhere.

  “Genie?” I flipped on the lights.

  The girl stood up sharply. Whipping around to face me, she looked like a deer in headlights. All big eyes and mortified expression. And frozen to the spot.

  “What are you doing here?” I prompted, trying to mask my shock with authority.

  She patted her pockets unconvincingly. “I was looking for my purse. I left it here earlier when I was studying magical history with Persie for some extra credits. I didn’t even realize it was missing until I tried to buy this bag online. It’s got my credit card in it, and this was the last place I remember having it.”

  “You must really want that bag.” I hadn’t been a secret agent for two decades for nothing. Very few lies got past me. As fibbers went, however, Genie had all the hallmarks of an expert. Her tone was strong and steady, and she’d masked her initial panic quickly. And there was just enough embarrassment and awkwardness in her tone to fox lesser lie detectors.

  “The sale ends at midnight,” she replied, without missing a beat.

  I checked the device on my wrist. “It’s ten past now.”

  “Is it?” She feigned disappointment. “I thought I could get back in time. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to wait for another sale.” She scurried toward me, with the obvious intention of skirting past me and out the door.

  I held out my arm to stop her. “What were you doing in here, Genie?”

  “I told you.” She stood her ground. “If you find my purse, give it to Persie and she’ll pass it back to me.”

  “We both know there’s no purse in here, Genie.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “There’s a purse, but I don’t know where I left it. Maybe I didn’t leave it in here after all.” A faint smile tugged at her lips. In the agency business, we called it “duper’s delight.” “I know this looks bad. I wasn’t prying or anything, just looking for my purse. My dad will kill me if he finds out I lost it.”

  Adding details to gain sympathy. A+ for effort. But my instincts gave her an F for the truth.

  “Maybe we should give him a call and get him to help us look?” I called her bluff. But she barely flinched.

  She shrugged. “He’ll be asleep, but if you want to wake him up, that’s your choice.” Cool as a cucumber. No signs of stress whatsoever. “Before you decide, can I ask you something?”

  I frowned. “I suppose so.”

  “How come you’ve got so many college brochures? I thought you didn’t want Persie going away to study.”

  Very clever, Genie. I would’ve been impressed if this were a training exercise. But it wasn’t. It was my life. And we were two liars caught in a web together. If either of us revealed the truth to the other, we’d both be in trouble. Unless…

  “I’m guessing you found my junk drawer while you were looking for your purse. I visit a lot of covens and colleges for work, and I get handed a lot of literature.” She could lie well, but I had more experience.

  She nodded thoughtfully. “What about the non-magical colleges? And all of the… continuing education programs?”

  Well, so much for that. Genie knew that brochures geared toward adults or changing careers definitely wouldn’t be for Persie.

  My pursuit of a normal life had branched off toward neutral territory on occasion. At least in my thoughts. We would still have ties to a coven, but we’d live outside of it. That sort of thing. Another reason I’d kept it secret from Wade until now. He hadn’t gotten tired of the magical life like I had, and I didn’t know how it would work to have one of us in one world and the other in a totally different one. And, until I made a decision, there wasn’t any reason to hash it out. I might not choose to go down that route. Pretty much the only thing I knew for certain was that I couldn’t carry on like this forever. I didn’t want to. The roles of Mom and Harley, so intertwined for the last eighteen years, had started to splinter again. And there would come a time when she didn’t need me anymore. If I didn’t make a change for myself one day soon… then when?

  “It really isn’t any of your business, Genie.” I switched to parent mode. “You say you weren’t prying, but it sounds like you’ve done your fair share of rifling through my things. Why I have those has nothing to do with you. But what you’ve done is an invasion of my privacy. Not to mention the breaking and entering.”

  Genie smiled. “You’re right: it’s none of my business. And it can stay between us.” She took a test step forward. “Besides, I can’t find my purse, so I don’t need to be here anymore. I must’ve left it somewhere else. Ditzy old me.”

  There’s nothing ditzy about you, and we both know it. She’d backed me into a corner. I had my ideas about the future, but I was nowhere near ready to tell anyone about the brochures and my potential career prospects in the field of counseling. And I definitely wasn’t ready to admit that the magical world had lost its appeal. There’d be outrage and confusion. My legacy would become a rope to hang myself with. A Merlin who didn’t want to be involved in magic anymore was like a Nobel prize-winning scientist quitting to become the head of a flat Earth society. I could already envision the pleas from O’Halloran and the UCA. They’d try to persuade me to stay, offer me more money, and I’d buckle and accept. Stuck in an endless cycle until I finally retired at seventy. If I lived that long.

  “You’re smart, Genie.” I sighed quietly.

  She fluttered innocent eyelashes at me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “There’s such a thing as being too smart for your own good.” I couldn’t resist one little swipe.

  “I’ll bear that in mind.” She walked right past me and paused on the threshold, looking back over her shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I think it’s good to change things up. Sometimes, it’s exactly what a person needs. And… I hope you find something that fulfills you, if… certain things don’t anymore.”

  She scooted off before I had chance to respond. But I had no doubt that her parting words were genuine, a backhanded message of encouragement that included Persie in the subtext. I had all these thoughts about changing my life completely, yet I hesitated to give Persie the same freedom because she was young and inexperienced with the world. Genie had called me out in the subtlest way.

  Drained and reluctantly impressed, I crossed to my desk and sat down. A
ll the drawers lay closed, and it didn’t look like anyone had been rummaging at all. But my secrets had been discovered, and for the second time in a week.

  “What do I do about this?” I said to the empty room. I clearly had to have a longer, harder think about my career prospects so I could reach a concrete decision. But that fell away to the sidelines as more pressing matters infiltrated my thoughts.

  It’s not like I can shadow Persie for the rest of her life. She would end up hating me. Katherine had coerced and manipulated Finch into staying at her side, and look what had happened there. Obviously, I wasn’t Katherine. I was nothing like her. And I wanted that to continue in every way. My overprotection of Persie came from love, not bitterness. But what sort of life would she have with this new ability? How could I balance her protection and freedom with keeping people from getting hurt—her included?

  The Everest of motherhood loomed ahead of me, and I had no idea where to even begin climbing it.

  Twenty-One

  Persie

  We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation. Without Thomas Edison, we probably wouldn’t have recorded music, movies, or lightbulbs. And maybe I wouldn’t have stayed up all night beside one such lightbulb, cramming the Basani Institute’s syllabus and entry requirements into my overtired brain. Through the magic of digital technology, Kes had fed me all the information I might need. And I mean all of it. Videos, photos, messages, emails, voice messages, pinging and pinging across my phone for my bloodshot eyes to try and process. All from underneath the rudimentary tent of my bedsheets, reminding me of happy childhood evenings spent with a book and a flashlight.

  At seven o’clock on the dot, I arrived at the dragon garden. My feet dragged along in a zombie shuffle, and my mom and dad had received grunts and groans when they’d said goodbye before heading to work. My mom had been a little short herself, though. Even after her morning coffee. I guessed it had something to do with whatever she and Dad had been working on, aside from me and my Purge beasts.

  “Kill me now.” Genie lolled against the dragon fountain which gave the garden its name. Clear water should’ve spouted out of its roaring mouth. Instead, a faint trickle ran down the brownish algae that sludged over its jade green scales. Not its original shade, by the looks of it. The copper or bronze underneath had oxidized over time, with no one to give it love and attention, or a routine cleaning. Honestly, I thought it suited the design. The dragons I’d seen in my monster dreams were always some shade of green… occasionally red or black, but the green ones had the nicest temperaments. Like living mood rings.

  “I take it you were up all night, too?” I sat on a crusty old bench.

  She groaned. “So many messages. I had to turn my phone off.”

  “You can’t fault his enthusiasm.”

  “I can and I will.” Genie tipped her head back and closed her eyes toward the sun.

  I laughed and looked around the garden. Tucked away in a lesser-walked area of the coven, it didn’t get as many visitors as it should’ve. The flowerbeds and flagstones were snarled up with weeds, but the trees still bore plump, blushing peaches and a few pink-tinged lilies grew by the wall that looked out over the national park.

  “Morning!” Kes’s chipper voice cut through our sluggishness.

  Genie visibly flinched. “Not so loud.”

  “Sorry.” He kept right on grinning. “How did you both do with studying last night?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Genie replied sullenly. “I squeezed in what I could, and I’m hoping it’ll be enough.”

  Kes dumped his backpack on the rim of the dragon fountain. “It’s mostly a physical test, so a lot of that stuff probably won’t come up, anyway.” He continued to talk, oblivious to Genie’s death glare. The dramatic irony amused me. “Think of it like an obstacle course. We’re talking Physical Magic, Curses, Monster Biology—things you’ve already learned in class, with a few off-syllabus extras.”

  “We need him,” I reminded Genie, with a chuckle. She looked about ready to dunk him in the fountain for keeping her up all night for no reason. “And it doesn’t hurt to revise old ground, to keep us sharp.”

  Kes turned around and finally noticed Genie’s wrath. “What did I say?”

  “That I should’ve gotten a good night’s sleep,” she replied drily.

  “Oh… right.” He lowered his gaze like a wounded puppy. “I guess I got a little carried away.”

  Genie skimmed her hand through the fountain pool and splashed water at him. “No baking frownies on my watch, kid.” She smiled. “Persie’s right. I never listen in Monster Biology, so I needed a refresher course.”

  His eyes brightened.

  I moved to more important matters. “Did you bring the charged Ephemeras?”

  He delved into his bag and took out two orbs. “All juiced up and ready to go. It took me a while to figure them out, but I got the hang of it.” He rolled up a sleeve to show a few puncture marks in his forearm. Poor kid had turned himself into a human pincushion for us.

  I thanked him and took mine, lifting it to eye level. A small vortex of bronze energy spiraled in the central glass canister, somewhere between gas and liquid. And the Atlantean detailing took my breath away. Intricate Kelpies and sea serpents in mortal combat, twisting and chasing across the metal surface, destined to never catch each other.

  “How do we use them?” I looked at Genie.

  She demonstrated like a pro, holding the orb in her hands and pressing on the panels at each pole. On one end, a harp-shaped symbol. On the other, the curve of an olive wreath. Bronzed light jumped out and slithered into her palms, disappearing to join the ranks of her other abilities. Meanwhile, she kept pressing, and the orb shrank to the size of a marble.

  “Travel size.” She flashed me a winning smile. “Make sure your right hand covers the harp, and the left covers the olive wreath. Press down as hard as you can, and… you should be good.” I noticed a hint of hesitancy in her voice, bringing back a question I’d spent most of last night avoiding.

  What if the Ephemera doesn’t work for someone without any magic? I didn’t know if my shiny new curse let me into the magical club or not. Although, the point of an Ephemera was to briefly give an ability to someone who didn’t have said ability. And I didn’t have any, so maybe I qualified anyway. I just hoped we weren’t missing the small print.

  Taking my Ephemera, I followed her instructions. The orb budged under the pressure of my palms, sort of like a Rubik’s Cube shifting rows. A second later, the same bronze light leapt out into my hands. It took everything I had not to drop it on the ground as a sharp pinch stung at the center of each palm. Reminiscent of getting too close to a flame.

  I yelped.

  Genie lunged forward. “Did it hurt you?”

  “It just gave me a shock.” I pretended to act cool. “I’m not used to it.”

  Kes peered at me as if I were his latest test subject. “How do you feel?”

  With the orb shrinking in my hands, I tried to feel around for the new Chaos. Disappointingly, I didn’t feel much different. A bit… wired, perhaps, but I put that down to the tank of coffee I’d downed before leaving the house. Although… maybe there was a hint of something. A subtle thrum that hadn’t been there before.

  “A bit jittery,” I replied, “but not in a bad way.”

  Kes grinned boyishly. “Cool.”

  “Who are our victims, then?” Genie’s demeanor relaxed. I realized she must’ve been a lot more worried about me than she’d let on.

  He pushed his ginger curls out of his eyes. “Whoever you like. As long as we know who they are.” The curls fell back, but he left them there. “You know, this would’ve been way simpler if I had my dad’s ability. No need for Ephemeras at all. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the Mimicry develops when I hit eighteen.”

  “How about the Catemaco-Levis?” I suggested. “They’re away in Mexico this week for Santana’s cou
sin’s birthday.”

  Genie shot me a bemused look. “Again? I swear, they’re in Mexico more than they’re at the SDC.”

  I shrugged. “She’s got a lot of cousins.”

  “Well, it sounds like our best shot,” she agreed. “But won’t people wonder what we’re doing here if we’re supposed to be in Mexico?”

  “They only left about an hour ago, so we’ve got a window. We can just say we had to come back for something if anyone stops to question us.” My mind whirred with solutions, the caffeine kicking in.

  Genie beamed at me. “Perfect. Persie the Problem Solver strikes again!” Suddenly, she clapped her hands together excitedly. “Please can I be Marius? Might be my only chance to get in his—”

  “I’m going to stop you right there.” I tilted my head at Kes and stifled a giggle. “We’ve got young’uns present.”

  Kes grumbled under his breath. “That’s okay, I know everyone has a thing for Marius. My sister talks about him all the time.” He did a perfect imitation of her voice. “Oh, Mom, you should see the way his hair tumbles down so perfectly. His eyes are so pretty—they’re like two pools of liquid chocolate, and I want to dive right in. Did you know, he doesn’t even work out? His muscles are all natural.” He pretended to dry heave.

  Genie snorted. “You could make a lot of money impersonating people.”

  “It wouldn’t be fair. I’ve got an advantage.” He Shifted into a frankly horrifying split-body situation: the head of Diana and the boyish figure of Kes. Enjoying our reaction way too much, he tossed his hair around like he was in a shampoo commercial. He Shifted back a moment later, looking appalled with himself. “Remind me never to do that again. It seemed like a funny idea.”

  Genie and I applauded regardless.

  “Now that we’ve all been mentally scarred, let’s get back to business.” I laughed and hoped he didn’t feel too embarrassed. “Genie, you can be Marius, as long as you promise not to make inappropriate jokes. I’ll be Azar, and you can be Cy, Kes. Does that work for everyone?”