by Kat Howard
He stood alone at the front of the crowd, his hands fisted at his sides, the bones pressing white against his skin. “I couldn’t not be here. I didn’t want to be, but I couldn’t stay away.”
“She’s better than he is,” Sydney said, her voice matter-of-fact. “Your sister. She’s smart, and she’s strategic. Bryce thinks he has twice the talent he actually has, and he underestimates everyone else.” She moved her hand until the back of it was—just—touching Ian’s.
“She used to do this thing when she was little, when she was just learning magic,” Ian said, his eyes never leaving Lara, who stood in solitude at the front of the room. “She called it setting booby traps. She made little pockets of magic that would be triggered when you’d do something like open a door. They’d go off, and you’d be covered in glitter or feathers or something ridiculous, and she’d cackle like a tiny witch. I’d set them off on purpose, just to hear her laugh like that.
“But the best one—my dad was having a dinner party. Very fancy, Heads of Houses, all that. Lara heard ‘party’ and didn’t understand why she couldn’t go. So she—I still don’t know how—made a booby trap full of tiny frogs and set it to go off when my dad sat down in his chair. They hopped everywhere—the plates, the water glasses, people’s laps . . .”
The beginnings of a laugh escaped Sydney, and she bit down hard on the inside of her mouth to keep the rest of it in. “I think I might like your sister.”
“I think you would,” Ian said.
The challenge began.
It seemed at first as if Lara were doing nothing but standing still. It happened, sometimes, magicians who did not understand the gravity of a mortal challenge until they were in the middle of one and froze. Bryce was visibly casting something—his hands and mouth were moving, and the air around him was shaking. He flung something unidentifiable at Lara, tossing the spell like a softball. But beyond raising a hand to deflect whatever it was, she did nothing.
The crowd rumbled, feral and hungry.
Ian drew tighter and tighter, tension vibrating through him. Sydney watched neither of the men, her focus completely on Lara’s hands. “Oh, I do like your sister. I like her very much,” she whispered.
Ian turned and stared at her in shock.
“Just watch,” Sydney said.
Then Bryce wiped his arm across his forehead. Red smeared across his skin and his sleeve. As if that was a cue, blood dripped from his hairline, his eyes, his ears—faster and faster until he ran with red, the floor slick with it beneath him. In less than a minute, he had collapsed on the floor. In less than two, he was dead.
Lara straightened her cuffs, then left the room without speaking to anyone. Ian watched her go. Only when he could no longer see her did he look for his father.
Miles Merlin had not been in attendance.
• • •
When Miranda walked into her office the next morning, Sydney was waiting behind the desk. “Don’t bother to check your wards. I took them down after the House let me in.”
“The House let you in.” Miranda’s left hand flickered against her side.
“I asked it nicely, and it opened its door right up.” Sydney lips curved up, an expression so bright and fake that it was the funhouse version of a smile, and she batted her lashes. “And don’t bother with that spell you’re starting either—I could stop your heart before you finished casting. You’ve seen my magic, so you know that’s true, and you’re smart enough to know that if I wanted you dead, it would have been a spell waiting in here for you, not me. So why don’t you trust that all I want is a civilized conversation, and have a seat.”
“I suppose you have some reason for your theatrics.” Miranda settled into one of her own guest chairs, her back pin-straight, her legs crossed at her ankles. She took her time, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from her skirt, brushing invisible lint from her jacket. She glanced up at the mirror, but it was frustratingly blank. The House was not going to offer her any clues. They would have words, later, about why it hadn’t warned her, and—more important—about why it had let Sydney in to begin with.
“I have a message for you. I wanted to be sure it was delivered.” Sydney slid the envelope with the challenge in it across the desk.
Miranda left it untouched.
“The challenge was Shara’s directive. She says it’s to allow me revenge, though I’ve never heard of the House caring about any of the children who were tossed into it being allowed to take vengeance on the parents who abandoned them there. There are so few of us, though, so I could be wrong. Anyway, with Dad already dead, you’re it. Mom.”
The color drained from Miranda’s face as Sydney spoke, leaving her pale as her silk blouse. “I don’t find that at all funny.”
“Neither did I, when I found out. Shara doesn’t tell us which Houses gave us away. ‘You’re all Shadows now. That’s all that matters.’ She’d say that over and over to those of us who survived long enough to ask. I think it was to make us feel like we were special, instead of like we’d been thrown away.
“But to be able to leave, to be able to convince the House that I was strong enough to walk through its doors and survive crossing that threshold, well, that took time. There were tests to pass, secrets to be learned.
“I learned a lot of them. Though I do wonder: Was it because Grey was the boy and you’re just conservative enough to think that those feudal guys were right about primogeniture, or did you flip a coin to decide which of your kids Shadows would grind up and use for magic?” Sydney drummed her fingers on Miranda’s desk.
“You.” Disbelief and hope warred in Miranda’s voice. “Alive.”
“Yes. Me. Alive. Sorry, Mom.” A quick, casual shrug. “Why else do you think the House let me in?”
“What you’re suggesting is impossible.” Eyes not leaving Sydney’s face.
“I’m surprised you admit that. I thought people like me were the fairy tale you all told yourselves about Shadows so you could feel better. ‘But some of them get out!’ I mean, there have only ever been two of us. Verenice and me. And it’s not like the rest are on extended vacation somewhere. But, you know, two is more than one, so that means some of us got out.”
“Shara promised me. I begged her. I bribed her. And she promised me she would tell me if my daughter made it out,” Miranda said.
“Shara says a lot of words that sound like promises. I’ve learned it’s smarter to not believe any of them that aren’t written down. Shadows does love its contracts.” Acid in Sydney’s voice. “Like I said, the House let me in, and yes, I did things the old-fashioned way and gave it my blood, but if that’s not enough, I can prove who I am now, if you’ll agree to the casting.”
“A Perdita spell?” Miranda asked. She didn’t see how the House could be wrong; she was terrified that it was right.
“Seems appropriate.”
“Fine. I assume you have something sharp.”
“Always,” Sydney said. She spoke a word that shattered against the air and drew a fingernail over the pad of her thumb. The skin parted in a precise line. She squeezed three drops of blood onto Miranda’s desk, then held out her hand to her mother. Miranda’s hand shook in hers as she repeated the action. Sydney said a line of poetry, and the scent of lilies filled the room.
The comingled blood turned gold.
Miranda stepped backward once, again, until she stumbled against her chair and sat down. “I begged her to tell me.” She closed her eyes. “I’ll decline the challenge.”
“No,” Sydney said. “You’ll accept it. And you’ll require that it be held soon.”
“Ian could kill you.”
“Unlikely,” Sydney said. “Besides, do you honestly think Shara would let me keep walking around if I went against her wishes? Let me make this easy for you, since you don’t seem to have much of a handle on her character: She wouldn’t. She’d see me dead in a blink. I’m still bound to Shadows—I still owe interest on the debt you sold me into, so when she says ‘jump,’ I don’t eve
n need to ask how high, because my muscles are already coiling.”
“Your father.” Miranda’s voice sounded as if she were speaking from very far away, perhaps even from the past.
“What?” Sharp as the spell that had pooled blood onto Miranda’s desk.
“Your father was the one who took you to that place. He told me you were stillborn. I didn’t find out what he had done until the most recent Turning.” Anger, still. “I wasn’t going to give away any of my children. I had planned to find some unwanted infant and pay our debt with it. But he said family blood kept the magic purer. Stronger. He did this.
“I killed him for it, during a challenge. I made sure a spell went wrong.”
“That’s all well and good, but in the end, it doesn’t matter who walked me through the doors and left me there. Someone did. And you may well have killed him to make yourself feel better, but it’s not like you took yourself over to Shadows to ask for me back, now, is it?” Sydney asked.
Miranda’s face was her answer.
“Exactly. Let you know if I got out, but you weren’t about to try to pull me out early. Not and have to suffer for your magic. And you still use Shadows’ magic—this entire House reeks of it. I made you dance, just like almost every other damn magician the night of the first challenge. You can say you wouldn’t this and you’re sorry that, but words are easy, and your actions say otherwise. So forgive me if I don’t reach out for a hug. Mom.”
“I’ve just found you again.” Tears in Miranda’s eyes.
“And what? I’m supposed to believe you feel some miraculous connection to me? That you feel bad about what I went through, what I suffered to get here, and now you want to make amends? Your entire world is built on suffering—the fact that I lived through it changes nothing about that.”
“That is the way our world is,” Miranda said. “You can’t change that.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Accept the challenge, Miranda. If you want some kind of relationship with me, that’s where it starts.” Sydney got up and walked out of her mother’s office.
The House said nothing as it closed its doors behind her.
• • •
Miranda sat in the quiet of her office after Sydney left. After some time had passed, she stood up, walked around the desk, and sat in her own chair. She gathered up the desk pad and threw it away—the blood from the Perdita spell had ruined it. It would have to be replaced. Then she straightened the items on top of her desk, making sure they were precisely where she wanted them.
She did not ask the House why it hadn’t warned her that Sydney was there.
Miranda picked up her pen and wrote “accepted” in even script on the challenge. On the line for choice of magic, she wrote one more word: “mortal.”
Then she took the ruined desk pad back out of the trash. The proof of the results of the Perdita spell would be necessary. She picked up the phone and called her lawyers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I’m so pleased you had time to meet with me today,” Miles Merlin said. “And thank you for being willing to come here, to the House, instead of to my club. I have some rather delicate news that I wanted to share, and I really felt that it was better to do so here, where we wouldn’t be disturbed.”
“Of course,” Grey said. He would have preferred the Mages’ Club, where they could have been seen together, but he’d still been thrilled to get the invitation. This was exactly what he’d been waiting for. For someone to acknowledge that he had value as an ally. The fact that it was Miles Merlin, his mother’s biggest rival, just made it sweeter.
“Though, just because we’re in more personal surroundings doesn’t mean I can’t offer you a drink. You’re a Scotch man, am I right?” Merlin set out glasses.
“Neat, please.” Even more flattered then, that Merlin had gone to the trouble to find out what he drank. This was the beginning of his return to his rightful place, to the inner circles of the Unseen World. While he waited, Grey looked around the room. Screens and monitors covered the walls, scrolling data, flashing images. Something happening everywhere, and everything up to date and top of the line. It looked like power—like the sort of room he wanted for himself.
“Very different from House Prospero, isn’t it?” Merlin asked.
“It is. But this—this feels more like the future. I’m more comfortable in a House like this.”
“I suspected you might be.” Merlin handed Grey his drink. “I asked you here because I—well, first because I’ve been very interested in your progress through the Turning. As you know, my own son and I have had a disagreement and parted ways, but he hasn’t chosen to do what you’ve done. He hasn’t chosen to strike out on his own, to attempt to establish his own House. I would have preferred it if he had—I could at least respect his ambition.” The last as an aside, a secret confessed between friends.
“Once I left Prospero, I always knew I’d work to establish myself as a House at the next Turning,” Grey said, glossing over the fact that his leaving Prospero hadn’t been voluntary, making it seem instead like a choice made through ambition.
“No thought of reconciliation with Miranda, then? Although, I suppose you wouldn’t, not after what happened.” Merlin shook his head, the image of a man remembering something he’d rather forget.
Grey set his drink down. “There was a binding to silence put in place over the disinheritance.”
“Oh, no, no. I don’t mean that. I’m not referring to any of your actions. I mean what she did. To your father.” And now Merlin looked at Grey straight on.
“To my father?” Grey’s hand went to the shoulder that had been hurt by the magic that killed his father.
“Yes, of course. That’s right,” Merlin said. “You were there. I apologize for mentioning it. I don’t want to bring up bad memories. I shouldn’t say anything else.”
“If she did something to him, I want to know.”
“I don’t have any concrete proof, of course, or I would have done something officially. But you and I, we’re men of the world. We both understand that sometimes official isn’t the best way to go about doing things.” Merlin poured more Scotch into Grey’s glass. “But, as you remember, the party was at House Prospero. And the mirror, well, I’ve heard it was one of your mother’s. I don’t know why she would have allowed something of hers to be used in a challenge like that. Unless.”
“Unless she had done something to it,” Grey said, his face growing hard. “If she had sabotaged it because she wanted my father dead.” It made—in the haze of his memory and the unhealing wound of his anger at Miranda—a kind of perfect sense.
Merlin rested his hand, briefly, on Grey’s shoulder, the same shoulder that bore the scars from that misfired spell. “I’m only sorry I can’t tell you more. That I can’t be the one to help you reopen your disinheritance or somehow get back what is rightfully yours. But with so much at stake, I couldn’t stay silent—I know what it is to have family betray you.”
“I’m glad you told me,” Grey said, tossing back the last of his drink. “I’m his son. I should know. And you’re right—sometimes official isn’t the best way to go about doing things. It’s too rigid—too easy.”
“You would think,” Merlin mused, more to his glass than to Grey, “that someone who had interfered in a previous Turning would guard against that sort of thing, but sometimes I think success blinds people. They become complacent. Too sure of themselves. It leaves them open to mistakes. Or to surprises. Challenges are so fraught—you never can be sure of what will happen at one.”
“It’s a Turning,” Grey said. “Mistakes do happen.”
Merlin’s eyes sharpened like a hawk’s. “They certainly do. Though if there is anything I can do, officially, don’t hesitate to ask. You’re so close to Ian’s age—I feel like if I could help you, well, it would almost be like helping him. Plus, I have a vested interest in making sure that the kind of people who make it through the Turning—either to establish Houses, or as
heirs of Houses that already exist—really do represent the best of the Unseen World. Magic should be for those who deserve it.
“Will I see you at Prospero’s next challenge?”
“You know,” Grey said, “I had already intended to be there, to show my support for Laurent. But now I think it’s even more important that I go. Though won’t that be difficult for you, with Ian representing House Prospero?”
“The thing about a duel is, you never know what might happen in the course of it,” Miles said. “And if something does go wrong—we’re certainly having enough issues with magic that such a thing might be possible—you never know what might happen or who might be affected.”
“That,” Grey said, “is a very good point. Thank you again for meeting with me.”
“Certainly,” Miles said. “I found it very instructive.”
• • •
Grey didn’t bother with small talk. He’d picked the first girl alone at the bar, dropped a spell into her drink, and had her outside within five minutes.
There wasn’t time, not now. He needed more magic. The Beauchamps-Prospero duel was in two days, and he had plans for that evening.
The girl stumbled as he shoved her around the corner, into an alley. Once she fell, he hauled her through the rotting garbage and slush behind a dumpster. The stench was unbearable, but it meant they’d be less likely to be disturbed.
She didn’t struggle, didn’t fight. Just lay there, eyes blown wide with shock as he ripped the bones from her hands. He suspected he’d been too heavy-handed with the spell, not that it mattered one way or the other. It’s not like he wanted her to wake up when he was finished.
The last bone came loose with a pop and a spattering of blood. He tucked it in his pocket with the rest, then said the words that would steal her breath. She’d go quietly, and he’d be gone.
He had magic to plan. He had a House to take back.
• • •
“Getting the challenge was bad enough,” Ian said, pacing through Verenice’s library. “But Sydney won’t talk to me at all. At all. I’ve texted and called and emailed and nothing. Not one response. And this isn’t a question of who has the best spell. This is a mortal challenge. One of us dies at the end. I have no idea how to handle this.”
