by Eva Chase
“We take the bus into the city and get ourselves noticed near the Assembly, right?” Naomi said. “How long do you need us to keep up the distraction?”
“I don’t want you getting caught,” Rose said. “Be subtle about it—they’ll be keeping a close watch for us anyway. And ditch the bus as soon as you can tell they’re onto you. That’ll convince them we’re in the city for sure. If you don’t use any magic after that, they shouldn’t have an easy time tracking you. I’ll get in touch as soon as I know what we’re doing next.” She managed a slight smile. “Maybe I’ll be telling you we’ve already transmitted the damning information to every other witching family in the country.”
That was the end point of our plan. Get some files from Frankford that gave a larger scope and more details on the conspiracy Gabriel’s recording hinted at, then send them to every witching person on Rose and Naomi’s combined Contacts list. All set up and ready to go—the second we had the files, we could send them off.
“Let’s get moving then,” Gabriel said. “They might already be tracking the illusion you just cast on Ky.”
The gravel on the road rattled under our shoes as we hustled to the minivan. Gabriel hopped into the driver’s seat, Rose beside him. I squeezed into the middle seat.
Seth dropped into the seat next to me. His gaze lingered on me. “It is really weird seeing you like that.”
I laughed. “What’s even weirder is I don’t feel any different.”
“I guess that’s good.” My twin hesitated and then knuckled my shoulder lightly. “You look after yourself in there, all right? I’m sure you can handle it. Treat it like it’s a video game. You’ve beaten enough of those.”
I rolled my eyes at him with a smile. “Thanks for the pep talk. I do occasionally venture out into the real world without causing any catastrophes.”
“I know.” His expression turned even more serious than was usual for Seth. “You’re the smartest guy I know, Ky. If anyone can get past these people, it’s you.”
He had to be itching to take on that responsibility himself. Seth wasn’t good at letting other people head into the line of fire while he hung back. I gave him a light nudge with my knee. “I promise to be careful and not do anything you wouldn’t do.”
That got me the chuckle I was looking for. “I hope you do a whole lot of things I couldn’t do,” he retorted.
The minivan slowed as we got close to the estate. “You’ll need to roll down the window and give the security camera a look at you,” Rose said. “Gabriel, park right inside. As long as we’re not here too long, the employees should buy that Frankford asked the taxi to wait for him.”
“Just popping in to pick up an important document I needed,” I murmured, as much to myself as to confirm to them I remembered this part of the plan. I was going to have to do a little talking. The trick would be keeping it to a minimum.
When we stopped at the gate, I rolled down the window on cue. My throat tightened as the camera whirred to point at my face. But no one came running out yelling about imposters. The gate hissed open, and we were in.
Rose turned to clasp my hand. “We’ll be right here waiting for you,” she said. “Grab whatever you can quickly and then get out of there.”
I gave her what I hoped looked like a confident smile, ignoring the pounding of my heart. “Not a problem.”
The thump of my feet against the drive sounded way too loud, but no one reacted oddly to that either. Move confidently, act like I owned this place, I reminded myself. Because as far as any of the staff who saw me knew, I did. I gripped the briefcase I’d stashed my tools in and marched onward.
The door opened as I reached the front steps, and my pulse stuttered. A tall skinny man I assumed was some sort of butler stood on the other side.
“Master Frankford,” he said. “We weren’t expecting you today.”
I pitched my voice low and gruff, as if I had a bit of a cold, and coughed a couple times for good measure. “Left something behind. Just popping in to grab it.”
He glanced past me to the taxi down the drive. My body tensed. But he just nodded and stood back by the door as I strode in, his expression bland. Hopefully Charles Frankford wasn’t usually the most gregarious of guys, because I wasn’t going to be making small talk while I was here.
I did have to appear to have some idea where I was going. “Has my office been cleaned recently?” I said in the same rough voice.
The butler’s gaze darted to the stairs. Okay, so Frankford’s office was on the second floor, to the right it looked like. That gave me a decent start.
“I believe so, sir,” he said.
“Good.”
I strode up the stairs without looking back, forcing my hand not to grip the banister too tightly. What would Frankford’s people even do to me if they realized I was an imposter?
Better not to think about that. So far, so good.
On the second floor, I found myself faced with an open landing lined with a few doors on either side. None of them screamed office at me. But no one else was around up here. I could do a little trial and error.
The first door I tried opened into a bedroom. The second, the knob jarred. My heartbeat kicked up another notch. Rose had said the office would probably be locked magically. Thankfully she’d given me a little tool to deal with that. Frankford would have had a bespelled key. I had a bespelled stick that was going to serve the same purpose.
As I glanced around, a cleaning woman ducked out of one of the rooms farther down the hall. I coughed into my hand as if I had a sudden tickle in my throat. To my relief, she scurried on into the next room over without a word to me.
I palmed the stick from my pocket and poked the end of it into the keyhole. The magic Rose had imbued it with shuddered through my fingers as it expelled into the door. The air quivered in turn. And the deadbolt rasped over. A smile crossed my face.
Frankford hadn’t bargained for a foe like my consort when he’d come after us.
I eased open the door and shut it behind me the moment I’d crossed the threshold. The office was all modern chic: glossy black shelving units and desk, bold geometric pattern on the rug. The desk was bare except for a small notepad and a pen holder, but an external hard drive sat on one of its side shelves. Ah ha.
I sank into the desk chair and popped open my briefcase on the desk. With the click of a couple of cables, I’d hooked the hard drive up to my laptop. I tapped my foot against the floor as it loaded.
Several of the folders I could see were password protected. With my fingers racing over the keyboard, I’d broken into them in a matter of seconds. But all I found were financial transactions that didn’t look especially incriminating. A bead of sweat slid down the back of my neck as I dug deeper into the drive’s files.
There was something else here. Hidden folders that no one was supposed to even realize existed, that no one was supposed to find unless they’d already known to look for them. Most people wouldn’t have noticed the subtle signs.
I poked and prodded at that elusive segment. If I could just get a grip on it, carve my way in…
There. I let out a ragged breath and flicked through the contents of the folder I’d just snapped open. My eyes widened. Meeting minutes—names—discussions about The Cliff and what use to make of the demonic presence there. Files on witches who’d been roped into “helping” control those demons. Jackpot.
I didn’t have time to do more than skim the first few pages. Almost giddy, I fumbled to send the entire folder straight to Rose’s tablet which she’d have at the ready in the minivan. I’d already set up my phone as a wifi hotspot and connected the laptop to its signal…
But the signal was dead. I frowned and typed a few commands. Nothing. I pulled out my phone and winced at the visual on the screen—not even one bar. No service.
Shit. Frankford must have some kind of shielding, magical or technological, around this room—maybe even around the whole house—to cut off cellular signals from
outside. No wonder I hadn’t been able to detect his home network from afar. No one could sneak in, and no one could sneak his files out.
Unless they simply picked them up and carried them.
I considered grabbing the hard drive and stuffing that straight into my briefcase, but my gaze settled on a glyph marked on its top. Damon and Rose had told us about a book of incriminating notes that had burst into flames when they’d tried to take it out of the owner’s house, back when we’d simply been trying to prove what her stepmother had planned for her consorting. I couldn’t take the chance that Frankford had left a similar self-destruct mechanism on this drive.
My hands whipped across the keyboard to transfer the files onto my laptop. The copy progress bar crept along way too slowly for comfort.
A hand rapped on the office door. “Master Frankford,” the butler called in. “There’s a call for you on the home line. A representative from the Justice division named Compton.”
Why was the Justice division calling here, now? I couldn’t worry about that. I just had to keep going.
There was no chance anyone would believe I was Frankford if all they had was my voice, no visual to distract them. I coughed into my hand.
“I’m just finishing up here. I’ll call back on my cell in the taxi.”
“Do you already have her number, then?”
“Yes, I do.”
He seemed to buy it. His footsteps whispered away. The progress bar crept and crept and—there, it was finished copying.
I shut down the hard drive, disconnected the cable, and stuffed all of my gear back into the briefcase. It was done. I’d done it. This whole crazy mission was almost over.
My fingers curled tight around the handle of the briefcase. I strode out into the hall and down the stairs. Confident, calm. Like I belonged here. Not like I was dying to bolt for the front door and the car waiting beyond it.
My feet had just hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs when a sound carried in from out front that made my blood run cold.
The rising rumble of several car engines converging around the estate.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Rose
At the growl of engines behind us, I jerked around in my seat. Beyond the iron bars of the fence, so much like our gate on the Hallowell estate back home, a squad of navy blue cars was roaring into view. Shouts carried from other directions around the estate. My pulse hiccupped with a jolt of fear.
“What’s happening?” Seth said, shifting in his seat. At the same moment, the front door of the house burst open and Kyler, still with the illusion of Frankford’s face and build on him, dashed down the front steps. I wouldn’t have been completely sure it was him if I hadn’t felt his own panic through the consort bond between us.
“Start the engine!” I said to Gabriel, but the words had barely left my mouth when figures charged around the sides of the house toward Ky. Enforcers.
“No!” I shoved the door open, my heartbeat thundering in my skull so loud I hardly heard the yells for Ky to stop or the screech of tires coming to a sudden stop just outside the gate. Our cover was blown, clearly. But if I could just get us out of here—
One of the enforcers thrust a blast of magic at Ky that made him stagger, the illusion shattering. He shot a panicked look at another enforcer just steps away and whipped back his arm to hurl the briefcase he was carrying toward me. “It’s all on there!” he shouted.
An instant later, the enforcer tackled him to the ground with her arms and a burst of magic. The briefcase landed with a thud by my feet. I was too busy summoning a spell to try to fend off Ky’s attackers to reach for it, but Jin scrambled out of the minivan and grabbed it.
“Here!” Gabriel said, holding out his hands. Jin tossed it to him and ducked back inside.
“Whatever Ky found, get it ready to send,” I said. The rush of wind I sent at the enforcers who’d surrounded him only made them stumble. Not enough for him to break free.
I gathered all my focus onto the spell that had knocked them out before, but a fresh attack came from behind, searing hot bolts raining down on us. I cried out and swept out my arms to create a magical shield around the minivan. Damon had leapt out, pistol in hand, firing into the crowd of enforcers who were pushing past the opening gate.
More magic battered the shield. I couldn’t do anything except keep summoning more energy of my own to bolster it. If I let down my guard for an instant, it might crack. Even as it was, a sliver of a spell pierced through and struck Damon in the hand, scorching his fingers and warping the gun.
He yelped and gripped the trigger, but the pistol didn’t fire. With a muttered curse, he charged at the nearest enforcer and slammed the pistol at her head.
I cried out, too late. The enforcer fell at Damon’s blow, but he’d stepped outside my shield. Three more fell on him, sharp strands of magic tightening around him. Another huge spell battered my magical barrier. My spark pinched as I threw out more energy to hold it in place.
If I stopped working on the shield to try to break Ky and Damon free, I might lose the rest of us to the enforcers. They might not have wanted to risk killing us before, but they didn’t seem to care much now. They just wanted to stop us. Apparently I wasn’t quite as essential to the portal families’ plans as Dad had suggested.
“Halt!” a voice rang out. The battering of spells eased off. I spun around, raising my hands to launch into a new magicking.
A steel-gray-haired man in a trim suit stood in the midst of the enforcers by the gate. He shook his head at me. “I wouldn’t do that.”
Charles Frankford. A grim smile stretched across his angular face. “We have two of your consorts,” he added. “Make another move and you’ll have two fewer than you did before.”
Several other figures I recognized came up beside him. The hawkish man who’d been with the enforcers in Manhattan, who’d come to interview Aunt Ginny. Frankford’s wife, Helen, who had her arms poised as if she’d been helping with the magical attack—and maybe she had. And then other witches and their consorts from among Dad’s associates.
It wasn’t just their squad of enforcers who’d come out to stop me. The families themselves—the ones tied to that awful portal, I had to assume—had arrived to defend their secret.
“I have the files,” Gabriel said from inside the minivan. “They’re ready to send to the full list. Just give me the word.”
Frankford’s expression tightened. “If you spread even one document you’ve stolen from my home, you can watch your consorts die right now.”
One of the enforcers pinning Damon to the ground produced a bespelled baton from his belt and held it to Damon’s temple. Across the yard, an enforcer squatting over Ky formed a searing bolt of magic in her hand, aimed over Ky’s heart. My breath stopped in my chest. I held out my hand to motion for Gabriel to wait.
“If you kill them, we have no idea how that could affect me,” I said. “I thought you wanted me alive and at least somewhat functioning.”
Frankford folded his arms over his narrow but solid chest. “If you send out those files, whether we have you or not won’t matter anymore. You ruin us, and you’d better believe we will ruin you. You and every member of your family—your cousins, your aunts—and every one of your consorts as well. I might even enjoy observing what happens to a witch who loses not one but five recent consorts, one by one.”
I swallowed thickly. After seeing how brutally his people and their enforcers had attacked us this time, after witnessing the magnitude of the secret they were defending, I believed him. He would see all of us dead if he could. Spark save me, what was I supposed to do?
“Don’t worry about me,” Damon yelled, his voice muffled against the grass. “Do what you’ve got to do. Burn them all down, angel.”
If only it were that simple. The enforcer on him jabbed his head with that baton, and Damon sucked in a pained breath. I flinched.
I’d brought my consorts, my cousins, everyone into this conflict. If
it’d been just my life, maybe I would have made the sacrifice to expose what Charles Frankford, my father, and the rest of them had done, but I couldn’t give up on everyone else I cared about. There had to be another way.
My thoughts tripped back to something else Damon had said, after the last time we’d faced off against this faction. Mutually assured destruction. The threat of exposure was plenty of leverage all on its own. I didn’t even know for sure if what Ky had found was enough to completely destroy Frankford’s group and what they’d been doing, but the Frankfords obviously thought it could be. That was all I needed to shift the balance.
I turned back to Charles Frankford, my chin high. “If you attack us again, my consort will send the files we found to every witching family in North America. If we expose you, you’ll kill us. We’re at a bit of a standstill, aren’t we? What if we made a deal that gets us both out of this mess?”
Frankford cocked his head, looking skeptical. “I’m listening.”
“We could make a binding oath,” I said. “We both agree to the conditions, and we both accept magical compulsion to follow them, to ensure we don’t break that contract.”
“What ‘conditions’ would you want?” Helen Frankford asked. Her pale eyes were icy.
I kept my gaze on her and her husband, but at the corner of my eye I saw Damon squirm, the enforcer jab him again, the spasm of pain running through his body. My jaw tightened. I had to think carefully, clearly—not let my emotions rush me. If this was going to work, if it was really going to protect me and my loved ones, I had to construct the terms of the binding perfectly.
“I will swear that I and my consorts will not share or speak of the files we obtained with anyone. In return, I ask that you swear to ensure that no harm comes to me, my consorts, or my family from you or any families or Assembly employees associated with you, by your hand or at your orders. We must be absolved of any criminal charges currently active against us. And I want to be named the official head of the Hallowell estate.”
