by E. E. Holmes
“How long will you be gone?” I asked.
“I’ve requested five days off,” Fiona said. “It’s a complicated process,” she added, seeing the incredulous look on my face.
“How can I possibly wait that long to find out if you’re all safe?” I asked in a tiny voice.
“You listen to me, now. If I can fend for myself, it’s nothing to what Mr. Carey can do. He’s smart, wary, and highly skilled, Jess. If I can warn him, or speak to him, I will, but just know that you are wasting your worries on him. Wouldn’t be surprised to get there and see that he’s foiled the whole plot single-handedly, to be honest.”
I gave a laugh that was half a dry sob. “If anything happens to him…”
“I know. But it won’t,” Fiona said. “We won’t let it.”
We stared into each other’s eyes for what felt like a long time, until I felt some of her grim determination seep into me, filling me up where the fear had gnawed at my insides.
“No,” I said finally. “We won’t.”
3
Marching Orders
SAVANNAH TODD LOOKED UP as I stumbled into the dining room the next morning and clicked her tongue.
“Saints alive, Jess, you look—”
“I know, I know!” I snapped. “I look awful. I’m thinking of having it printed on a shirt, just so I can save people the trouble of having to tell me every time I walk into a room in the morning.”
“Sorry, mate,” Savvy said, clapping me on the back, so that I knocked into a tea cup with my elbow and spilled half of its contents into the saucer. “I’ll just keep me trap shut, shall I?”
“Where’s Tia?” Hannah asked, sitting down and pulling a basket of muffins toward her.
“She and Frankie are off in the library already,” Savvy said with a grimace of disgust. “They’re helping each other study for exams. I’m glad they get on so well, but bloody hell, the things they do for fun.” She shook her head, bewildered.
I was grateful that Frankie was at Fairhaven to keep Tia company, and that Tia seemed to be recovering from the shock of finding out that the boy she had been dating, Charlie Wright, was actually a Necromancer hell-bent on destroying me and the rest of the Durupinen. As was her custom, throwing herself headfirst into work seemed to be Tia’s favorite form of therapy. I was just happy that she’d decided to do it here, rather than fleeing halfway around the world. I wouldn’t have blamed her in the slightest if she had, and I’d told her so.
“On a scale of one to never-talk-to-me-again, how mad are you at me?” I had asked her only the day before, as we sat in the still and the warmth of the Fairhaven gardens at sunset. It had been less than forty-eight hours since Charlie had been revealed to be a criminal mastermind, and Tia had been walking around with a dazed expression, as though trying to figure out whether the entire world was a dream or not.
That dazed look turned to one of surprise as she looked at me, as though I’d said something strange instead of something totally reasonable.
“What do you mean? Why would I be mad at you?”
I raised one incredulous eyebrow. “Tia, you’re supposed to be a genius. Surely you can figure this out. I encouraged you to pursue a guy who turned out to be a dangerous maniac.”
“You didn’t know he was a dangerous maniac,” Tia said.
“I should have,” I muttered.
“I should have, too,” Tia said. “But he fooled both of us, and a lot of other people, too, by the looks of it. I’m not going to let him further victimize me by blaming myself or you, when I should be blaming him.”
She sounded so reasonable. So rational. So healthy. What was it like, I wondered, to have a brain that worked like that—organizing and dealing appropriately with feelings instead of alternately ignoring and drowning in them?
“So, you aren’t jumping a plane and heading back home to America?” I asked her.
“If you had asked me two days ago, I might have said yes,” Tia said, shaking her head as though she were already ashamed to have harbored such a feeling. “I was ready to pack a suitcase and get as far away from here as possible.”
“What’s stopping you?” I asked. “I wouldn’t blame you in the least.”
“Because, if there’s one thing I despise more than making a mistake, it’s making the same mistake twice,” Tia said firmly.
“What do you—?”
“I ran from it last time,” Tia said. “I told myself I was being bold and brave and all of that, coming here, but what was I really doing? I was running away. I was hiding. I wasn’t dealing with things, I was burying them.”
I squirmed uncomfortably. “And you wouldn’t have done any of that if I hadn’t told you to.”
Tia reached over and squeezed my hand. “This isn’t my way of blaming you, Jess. That’s not what I mean.”
“But you should be blaming me!” I cried. “This was all my idea, and, just in case you needed another good reason to hate me, here’s one: I wanted you here for me, not for you. Well, I mean, I told myself that it was for you, but I’m selfish. That’s something you should know about me by now. I’m selfish and I don’t think things through, and then I hurt people that I love.”
“You’re not selfish,” Tia said softly.
“Yes, I am! I am the queen of selfish. I should get a sash made. And a tiara,” I replied. “I mean, listen to me right now! I started this conversation because I wanted to know how you were doing and somehow, though the power of my mystical selfishness magic, I have made the conversation about me!”
“Jess, stop,” Tia said, and she looked stern now. “You didn’t force me to come here. You barely had to convince me. It was my decision and I don’t regret it. But I can’t buy a plane ticket and leave the country every time something bad happens to me, or everything I’ve worked so hard for will just fall apart.”
“So… you’re not leaving?”
“No, I’m not leaving.”
“It’s not just the selfishness, Tia,” I said, determined to say every terrible truth aloud. “I put you in danger.”
“Charlie put me in danger,” Tia corrected me.
“Charlie put you in danger because of me! Being my best friend is dangerous! I don’t want anything to happen to you, and now, with all this Necromancer stuff brewing again… Maybe it would be better if you were leaving.”
Tia looked at me for a moment, her face blank. “You want me to leave?”
“No, of course I don’t.”
“You don’t want to be my best friend anymore?”
“What?! No! I will always be your best friend, but I don’t want you to get hurt, and just being around me has gotten you hurt.”
Tia gave me such a harsh look that I shrank back a little. It was like being in a principal’s office. “Jessica Ballard, you listen to me right now! I don’t care how good your intentions are! I don’t care how much you are trying to protect me! If you ever try to break off this friendship, I will never speak to you again!”
I considered this. “If I try not to speak to you again, you… won’t speak to me again?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Tia said. “And I don’t care if it doesn’t make any sense. You know what I mean. There’s nothing those Necromancer fucks could do that would make me give up our friendship. Nothing.”
I blinked. “You… you just said fuck.”
Tia raised her chin defiantly. “Yes. Yes, I did. And I’ll say it again, because when a guy uses me to try to kill my best friend I get to say whatever I want. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
I laughed incredulously. “You realize this is just more proof that I’m a terrible influence on you, right?”
Tia smiled and shrugged. “So be it.”
§
“Jess? Are you even listening to me?” Savvy’s voice cut straight into my thoughts with all the finesse of a blunt ax.
“What? No, sorry, I spaced out. What did you say?”
“I said Phoebe’s looking better this morning. Not so restless.
Her eyes still look creepy, but she sort of mumbled at me when I was visiting her and she squeezed my hand twice.”
“She did? That’s great! I’ll stop over and visit with her when I go see Flavia later.”
Flavia’s recovery had progressed as well over the last few days. Although she was not yet fully conscious, her eyes had cleared of their silvery quality and she had been responding to simple requests from Mrs. Mistlemoore and her staff—squeezing their hands and wiggling her fingers on command. Mrs. Mistlemoore couldn’t fully explain why it was taking Flavia and Phoebe so long to regain their abilities to communicate, but she had her theories.
“Twisting the Spirit Sight has disconnected them from their bodies,” she had told me only the previous night. “My guess is that it will take them some time to accept where they are, and for their spirits and their bodies to work in tandem again.”
“Is there any chance that they won’t accept where they are?” I asked.
“Of course. Anything is possible. But the Durupinen blood is strong. I would not dare to underestimate it. The Necromancers have always done so, and it has always been to their detriment.”
Yes, the Durupinen blood certainly was strong—strong enough to pull me from my bed and out onto a castle ledge in my sleep.
I looked down at the food on my plate. I knew I would probably feel better if I ate it, but I was so exhausted that I felt queasy just looking at it. I took a sip of coffee instead.
“Will you… you’ll come with me tonight, right?” Savvy asked.
I looked over my coffee cup at her to see her face crumpled in an effort to force back tears. That evening was Bertie’s funeral service. I put my cup down and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Of course, I will.”
“We’ll all be there,” Hannah added gently. “For him and for you.”
Savvy didn’t answer aloud, but gave a quick nod of thanks. The corners of my own eyes began to burn, and I knocked back the rest of my coffee in one gulp, hoping to eclipse the burn in my eyes with the burn in my throat.
Bertie. Poor, loyal, hopeless Bertie. I still remembered how absurd he had looked in the line of strapping young Novitiates who had just begun their training when I first arrived as an Apprentice Durupinen at Fairhaven. He was short and chubby, his chest thrown out so that he looked like a small child playing at soldier. And he knew it. He had tried so hard to live up to his duty, and all he had ever gotten for it was unrelenting shit from all sides. No one had taken him seriously—not his superiors, not his fellow Caomhnóir, and least of all, Savvy. But he had committed himself nonetheless, determined to prove himself, charging into situations he had no business facing. None of us had ever seen a Caomhnóir funeral service, but knowing our long-standing traditions for pomp and ceremony, I was sure that it would be an impressive display.
“What about Phoebe?” Hannah was asking.
“What about her?” Savvy sniffed.
“Well, are they going to try to… I mean, she can’t really go to the funeral, can she?” Hannah asked.
“I wondered that, too,” Milo said. “I didn’t know if maybe she had to be there? For like… ceremonial purposes?”
“Yeah, well, they can well and truly sod off with all of that,” Savvy replied sharply. “I ain’t been told nothin’ about ceremonial anything, just when to show up, and that’s going to be bloody hard enough. And I’m sure as hell not going to risk Phoebe’s recovery by dragging her from her nice quiet bed to something like that. I’m not even sure if she knows that Bertie’s dead.”
Milo’s eyes widened. “Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought of that.”
Neither had I. Because Phoebe was still unconscious, there was still a lot about the circumstances of Bertie’s death that we didn’t know. I supposed the Trackers might have been able to figure out more of the details from working over the crime scene. I supposed, too, that I might technically have access to that information, seeing as I was a Tracker myself, and personally tied to the case as another of Charlie’s victims. But I was in no hurry to dig any more deeply into the terrible details of what we’d found on the other side of that hotel door. In fact, I felt like I was spending a solid part of my time trying to erase what details I had seen from my memory. On the increasingly rare occasions that I was able to sleep undisturbed, I often found myself staring at the horrific scene in that room on the second floor of the Hotel Royal, unable to look away or even blink.
I shuddered. Jesus, my mind would soon be more full of things I was trying to forget than things I wanted to remember. That couldn’t be healthy. I should probably be in therapy, but then, after my last brief run-in with psychiatric help, it was clear that Durupinen and traditional therapy didn’t mix. Maybe there were Durupinen therapists? I should probably look into that, but, knowing me, I’d just throw it on that giant pile of “things I should do” and forget about it.
I was so good at adulting.
“I’d better get going,” Hannah said, grabbing a muffin from the basket on the table and wrapping it hastily in a napkin.
“Where are you off to this morning?” I asked blearily.
“Don’t you remember?” Hannah asked, raising her eyebrows significantly. “I’m meeting with Keira this morning. She wants to discuss my proposal.”
Her words felt like a slap in the face, waking me up and clearing my head. “Oh, that’s right! That’s today? Sorry, I’m completely out of it. So… she already read it? The whole thing?”
“Yup,” Hannah replied, and drained her glass of juice in two long swigs.
“Well, did she… I mean… do you have any idea what she thought of it? Did she give you any hint?”
Hannah considered this. “She sounded… intrigued. She definitely has questions, and she said she was going to bring along the research she compiled from when she wrote her own proposals about Durupinen–Caomhnóir dynamics. I’m not convinced that she’s sold one way or the other, but I won’t know for sure until we meet and talk it through. She didn’t laugh me off, so it’s a start. I wonder if it would be a good idea to bring one of the Caomhnóir on board to back the proposal,” she added thoughtfully, more to herself than to me. “It seems disrespectful to consider changing all the rules without even consulting them on what they might like to see happen, if anything. But I don’t even know where I would start on that front.” She fell into deeper thought, pulling the napkin away from her muffin so that she could nibble at the top of it.
Hannah was using her newly won seat on the Council to introduce legislation that would overhaul the rules about how Caomhnóir and Durupinen were permitted to interact. There were a hundred good reasons to do this, but only one that really mattered to me at the moment. Romantic relationships between Durupinen and Caomhnóir were forbidden, and had been for centuries. Our own parents had briefly engaged in one such forbidden romance, and the fallout had destroyed our family before we’d ever had a chance to become one. And now, of course, that same law had torn Finn and me apart. Changing the law was the only chance Finn and I had of seeing each other again, and so, for me, this wasn’t just politics as usual.
“Wait for me, I’ll walk with you,” I told her, jumping up from my seat.
“You haven’t even eaten anything,” she said, scowling at me with an expression that made her look exactly like our mother. The sight of it made me want to hug her until my arms hurt. To appease both her and our mom in her, I reached into the same basket of muffins, pulled one out without looking at it, and crammed half of it into my mouth.
“See? Eating. Let’s go,” I mumbled.
Hannah rolled her eyes. “I have no idea what you just said. We’ll see you later, Mackie! Bye, Sav!”
Savvy waved a hand at us and returned to her breakfast. I turned and got one last look at her as we exited the double doors into the entryway. She looked forlorn, her usual sparkle dulled and diminished as she poked at her plate with her fork.
“You think she’s okay?” I asked Hannah.
Hannah turned back, lookin
g momentarily confused, then followed my gaze. “Who are you… oh, you mean Savvy? Yeah, I think she’ll be okay. She’s just… she needs to find a way to stop blaming herself.”
“What if she can’t?” I asked under my breath.
“She will,” Hannah insisted, as though she could will it to be true if only her voice was confident enough. “It will take some time, and we’ll all need to be there for her, to help her when she gets in her own head. But she’ll be okay, Jess. Savvy’s resilient.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding along. “Yeah, she is. She’ll be okay.”
Yeah. We’d all be okay. Right?
§
“Jess! There you are!”
I’d barely taken a few steps when a sharp voice echoed down the hallway. I looked up to see Catriona marching toward me, her trademark stiletto heels clacking resoundingly on each step.
“Have you been looking for me?” I asked turning on my heel and walking back to meet her.
“Only all over this godforsaken castle,” she said with a toss of her magnificent blonde hair. She came to a halt and crossed her arms, waiting for me to close the distance between us, with a look of exasperated impatience on her face.
Catriona usually looked at me this way, like I was a permanent inconvenience blundering around in her orbit. She was supposed to be my mentor in the Trackers’ office, but for all the mentoring she’d actually done, you’d think she thought the definition of “mentor” was “one who rolls her eyes with great frequency.”
“You might’ve tried the dining hall,” I said dryly. “You know, that big room where people eat their breakfast every single morning right around this time? Because that’s where I’ve been for the last forty-five minutes, along with the rest of the people who need food to live. Unlike you, we can’t all subsist on snark alone.”
Catriona didn’t bother to dignify my sass with a response. Instead, she watched me with one eyebrow arched nearly to her hairline as I closed the last few steps between us.
