Deception of the Magician (Waldgrave Book 2)

by A. L. Tyler

  They didn’t talk about what happened. Griffin didn’t try to explain anything, or try to make her feel better by saying it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t tell him about Warren Astley, or anything he had told her. They just sat there, two people trapped together in their own minds, watching television late into the night.

  *****

  CHAPTER 12

  When she woke up the next morning, she didn’t know where she was. She was surrounded by a sea of clean, white linens and overly fluffy pillows. Light was streaming through the open widow on the far side of the room, illuminating everything in a bright, almost blissfully divine glow. The pale blue walls and the clean smell around her was confusing. She didn’t remember falling asleep in a bed. If she had dreamed, she didn’t remember it. She looked around and saw Griffin, sleeping in the other bed, and the last few days started to come back to her.

  It all seemed so far away from the hotel room and bed that she had been sleeping in, and she wondered if it had all been a dream. She seemed to be jumping haphazardly from one dream to the next constantly, never sure which reality she was supposed to be living in. She got up and went to the shopping bags Griffin had brought back the night before.

  He had bought her clothes, and she grabbed a new t-shirt and some jeans and went to the bathroom to change. Everything was the right size, and for once, Lena was grateful for Griffin’s stalker-like level of detailed knowledge. She checked the bandage on her leg, and saw that it needed changing as well. She went back out to the bags, hoping to find some new socks that she might be able to wrap around her cut to keep it clean, but found something much better—Griffin had bought bandages, wraps, tape, disinfectant, and gauze. She turned and looked at his sleeping form; how had he known?

  She changed her bandage and her clothes, then went looking for food. Pulling out a box of breakfast granola bars, she started to eat one as she settled back onto the couch and flipped the television on. She turned the volume all the way down so she wouldn’t wake Griffin up, and stared at the mute cartoon characters on the screen until he finally stirred and sat up.

  Lena looked over; he had his shirt off. He also had a wad of bandages tapped to his right shoulder. He looked around, confused, and then laid back down and brought his hand to his head like he had a headache.

  “Are you okay?” Lena asked, turning around to face him.

  “Yeah.” Griffin sighed deeply. “Could you close the curtains?”

  She got up and pulled the curtains shut over the window, throwing the room into darkness. “What happened to your shoulder?”

  “I was shot,” he said in a nonchalant tone.

  Lena spun around. He was still just lying there, a hand covering his eyes, acting as though they were discussing the weather. “You were…shot? Did you go to the hospital?”

  “No. I had to take care of things.”

  Lena walked over to the side of the bed, stunned that he could be acting so calm. “Get up. You need a doctor.”

  Griffin didn’t move. “I had someone look at it after we got the cars off the road. The bullet’s out, and it didn’t hit anything important, so just drop it for now. I’m not in the mood to fight with you. Is there anything else you’re going to need for the next half-hour or so?”

  Lena looked around the room. “No.”

  “Okay…” Griffin pulled himself up to a sitting position. “I’m going to take a shower. Then I think we need to talk about what happened, and what’s going to happen.”

  Lena nodded, and Griffin got out of bed, grabbed a few items out of the shopping bags, and went into the bathroom. Lena picked up her travel bag, emptied the contents onto her bed, and started sorting through it. It was all there; everything from her half-empty bottle of water to Ben’s letters, and even the same old paperback she had been toting around for well over two years at that point. Her cell phone battery was dead, and as was her luck, she had left the charger in her suitcase. It was all so familiar, and yet so foreign—as though all of it was just a prop used in a movie, and not a part of her actual life. She took great ceremony in organizing everything back into her bag and then started to unload everything Griffin had bought onto the floor for further inspection.

  There was an array of clothes ranging from socks to coats, three grocery bags of non-perishable foods, and two large backpacks. Lena stared at the backpacks for a moment, not sure why he would have bought them, then figured they were for the clothes; even then, it wasn’t like they were going to leave the hotel room. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around the hotel room; there wasn’t much else to do. Griffin was still in the shower, so she got to work folding her new clothes and putting them in drawers.

  Once everything was put away, she picked up the two backpacks, intending to throw them into the closet, but paused halfway. They were too heavy. She weighed them in her hand, then tentatively opened one of them up. Inside, there were several boxes of bullets and a gun wrapped in a blue towel. For a moment, all she could do was stare at the heavy piece of metal in her hand. Time seemed to tick by very slowly; Lena was almost sure she could hear the flow of the shower become sluggish.

  Why in God’s name was he carrying a gun? And where did he get it from?

  She carefully wrapped it back up, put it back in the bag, and set the backpack where she had found it. She backed away, as though she were afraid it would lash out at her at any second. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she stared at the bag; one of those things had killed Ava, and perhaps several others.

  The phone rang, and Lena almost jumped out of her skin. Perfunctorily, she picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  Silence on the other end. Then, finally, “Hello? Lena?”

  Lena sat motionless. How had the receiver gotten into her hand? She wasn’t supposed to be picking up the phone. No one was supposed to know she was there, and the voice, whose ever it was, wasn’t Howard’s. Panicked, she did the first thing that came to mind. “I’m sorry! You’ve got the wrong number!”

  She slammed the receiver back onto the dock with more force than she had meant to, then looked up and saw Griffin, standing in the frame of the bathroom door in a bathrobe, staring at her with wide eyes. “What were you just doing?”

  “Nothing!”

  “You were just on the phone.”

  “I—“

  “Are you stupid?! You know you’re not supposed to pick up the phone!”

  They stared at each other from across the room. The silence was only cut when the phone started ringing again.

  Griffin didn’t exactly glare at her. The look was one of deeply mixed emotion.

  “I...I’m sorry. It just sort of happened.” She said desperately.

  He walked over to the two backpacks and threw the empty one at Lena. “Put your clothes in it. We’re leaving.”

  He took the backpack with the gun back into the bathroom with him and returned uncharacteristically fast, out of his bathrobe and in the same clothes he had worn the day before. He started opening drawers and shoving clothes into the bag very quickly. Still only half done packing her own clothes, Lena looked over at him. He was afraid; she felt the adrenaline rising in her blood.

  “Howard said we should stay here.” She explained.

  “And I say we’re not staying here anymore.”

  “But if we keep the door locked…” Lena’s voice trailed off.

  Griffin kept packing. The fact that he seemed so determined to get out of the hotel as quickly as possible was terrifying—he knew what was coming. Lena didn’t, but she knew that there wasn’t much that really scared Griffin. He was usually so reserved and intimidating; now, he was a young man with wet hair in economy super store clothing, shoving what few possessions he had into a backpack that was slightly too small to fit them all. Among its contents was a gun and enough ammunition to arm a small militia. This wasn’t the Griffin that had asked her to dance a little over a year ago at the first dinner before Council meeting, nor was he the obnoxious tutor
who had forced hours of conjugations on her over the past few years; this was someone else.

  “Hurry up!” He snapped.

  As Lena stood frozen, he grabbed the bag from her and finished the packing. He shouldered what little luggage they had, grabbed Lena by the wrist, and was once again dragging her away. She turned and caught one last glimpse of the hotel door as it slowly drifted shut behind them. There was a quick check-out in the lobby, and then they were back in the car. Griffin made quick work of getting them on the highway, and Lena wasn’t quite sure what she was feeling. She wanted to believe that he was acting ridiculous, but she knew he wasn’t.

  She looked over at him from the passenger seat. He was staring stoically ahead, driving just over the speed limit, keeping the arm belonging to his injured right shoulder straight down at his side. He must have agitated the injury while carrying all the bags, because there was a red, wet spot forming on the front of his shirt.

  “We should pull over.” Lena cringed. “You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m fine. Let it go.” He growled, without looking over. “Where did the next letter come from?”

  For a moment, Lena wasn’t sure if she had heard him correctly. “What?”

  “The next letter. Where was it from?”

  Lena gazed at him in disbelieving awe. He actually wanted to keep looking for it. When she didn’t answer, he looked over at her quickly before returning his attention to the road.

  “I’ll take you home if you want. I’ll do whatever you want me to as long as you stop answering phones and living out this…subconscious death wish…that you seem to have. But I want to find it—this is the last chance. You know what’s at stake here.”

  She did. She was tired and confused, and more than a little emotional at the time being, but she knew Howard was never going to let her leave Waldgrave again. It was likely the Council was going to back him up on that decision for Lena’s own protection. If Griffin was right, and Master Daray was going to die in a matter of months, it was now or never. Finding the portal meant crushing a way of life, whether it was ever opened or not; but it also meant freedom. It was what she had set out to do.

  “Why’d you buy a gun?” Lena’s eyes snapped very quickly to Griffin’s face. He looked a little surprised by the question, but not entirely so.

  “I didn’t. It’s on loan from a friend of your grandfather.” He continued to look at the road, as though the answer was satisfactory.

  “No—I mean why. Who are we running from, Griffin?” Lena watched him carefully. “Or don’t you know?”

  After several tense seconds, he heaved a great sigh. “I’m not going to tell you. You can’t handle it.”

  “What, and you can? I’m not a child. You know, he had no problem at all telling me that Ava was killed…”

  Griffin looked over. “He told you that?”

  “Yeah.”

  Griffin continued shooting quick glances at her. “What else did he say?”

  Lena looked down at the speedometer. “You’re going ninety in a sixty-five.”

  Griffin glanced down and tapped the brakes. “It’s not important, alright?”

  “You seem to think it’s damn important!” Lena crossed her arms. “I’m not going to do this until you tell me what’s going on.”

  Griffin drove on. He turned the radio on for a while, then turned it off. Lena wasn’t sure if he was debating with himself or just thinking. Eventually, he started to talk.

  “This isn’t something you need to deal with. I can handle it.” He said.

  “And I’ll say it again, Griffin—I’m not a child. This isn’t your decision to make for me.”

  He glanced over at her several times, everything from annoyance to concern in his eyes. “A terrorist group is taking responsibility. It’s comprised of a number of human-borns that walked out on their households over the past few months, as far as we can tell. They’re being led by a radical calling himself Rollin King. His real name’s Rollin Miller, according to our records.”

  Lena thought for a moment; the name sounded familiar. “Rollin? As in the Rollin you kicked out of Waldgrave on cards night? Rollin of the former Corbett household?”

  “I told you he was dangerous…” Griffin shook his head. He squeezed the steering wheel hard. “I should have killed him when I had the chance.”

  Lena gave him an uneasy look. “That would have been…um, unnecessary.” Griffin rolled his eyes rather uncharacteristically as she said this—he probably felt that she was being too forgiving, or, as he frequently accused her, too feminine and sensitive. “Okay. What? I mean, why me?”

  “They’re human-borns, Lena, I don’t know.” Griffin muttered. “They probably don’t even know what they’re doing.”

  Lena mulled the information over. It didn’t make sense—of everyone she had thought had motive to kill her over the past few days, human-born Silenti were not on the list. They stood the most to gain, on many levels, from the safe return of the portal. There had to be some mistake; it couldn’t have been the human-borns. Even though Griffin didn’t give them much credit, Lena knew they were much smarter than anyone on the Council was willing to acknowledge. For the few brief moments that Lena had known Rollin, she knew he was very intelligent; he was very organized in thought and action, that much was clear. Lena studied Griffin’s face, searching for any trace of deception, and then finally conceded. She could have asked who else had been killed, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know anymore.

  “Tulsa.” She said finally. “The next one came from Tulsa. I’m going to need your phone again…”

  “Why?”

  “Howard’s going to worry.”

  “He’s going to worry more if you tell him what we’re doing. Trust me, he knows they would shove it right in the Council’s face if they manage to catch or kill us. Just like they did with Ava and the others.” Griffin set the auto drive and used his left knee to drive as he fidgeted with his bandages for a moment. “No news is good news. Howard knows that.”

  Lena gave him a pleading look. “Please, Griffin. Please. I can’t do this to him.”

  “No. If you tell him what we’re doing, he’s going to report it and they’ll head us off before we even get to Tulsa. So no.”

  Lena turned quietly back to face the landscape rushing past the car window. Howard was going to worry; he didn’t deserve it. It was an offense worthy of a permanent grudge, and Lena knew she would understand if he never forgave her for what she was about to do. For what she was already doing, really. But she was stuck between a rock and a hard place, because Griffin was right—if she told, he would stop them. And as much as Lena loved Howard and didn’t want him to worry, she needed to do what she was going to do. But still, it bothered her.

  Griffin pulled out his cell phone, dialed it, and then passed it to Lena. “Tell her we were discovered and I’m taking you to Phoenix—our parents kept a summer home there. The way she talks, it’ll get back to Waldgrave sooner or later.”

  Lena pressed the phone to her ear just in time.

  “Hello?” A female voice asked.

  “Hello?” Lena echoed.

  “Lena! Are you alright? No one’s telling us what’s going on…” It was Hesper. She sounded worried.

  “I’m fine. We’re fine.” She glanced over at Griffin, secretly cursing him. He expected that lying to her best friend was going to be any easier than not saying anything at all? Even then, Hesper had an unusual and inconvenient gift for spotting lies. “I’m with Griffin now, and—“

  “That’s what Greg said was going to happen! He’s doing much better now, we’re told. We just landed and we’re going to see him…We’ve all been so worried.” Lena breathed a sigh of relief; Greg was alive. She heard voices in the background. “What? Yes, it’s Lena. She’s with Griffin.” Hesper’s voice returned to the phone. “Serena says ‘hi.’ We’re all so happy you’re okay!”

  “Greg’s okay then?” Lena confirmed.

  Hesper spoke quick
ly. “It was a close call, but he’s going to make it. The Council’s been going nuts with all of this…”

  Griffin was starting to give her anxious looks. He tapped his wrist, and Lena tried to wrap it up. “I'm happy he’s okay…tell him I said ‘hi,’ and I’m thinking about him. We’ve had a little trouble, and Griffin’s taking me to the summer house in Phoenix.”

  Hesper paused. “Phoenix? We haven’t used it since I was, like, twelve probably. I thought they sold it…”

  Lena felt panic rise in her chest. “Griffin says it’s still there. I need to wrap this up, or Griffin’s going to get angry, so…yeah. We’re okay. We’re definitely okay, and we’re going to Phoenix.”

  “Okay.” Hesper stopped talking. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Lena glared at Griffin. Why had he thought this would work? “Because I really need you not to dig too deep on this one. Because I need you to do me a huge favor, and tell Howard exactly what I just told you. Okay?”

  There was another moment of silence. “Are you in trouble?”

  “Well, no…Just tell him, okay? We’ll be in Phoenix.”

  “Okay…Take care of yourself. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Lena rolled her eyes. Despite the many times they had said that phrase to each other, neither of them had ever listened. They said their goodbyes and Lena closed the cell phone. As she was handing it back to Griffin, it occurred to her that they should probably get rid of it altogether.