Harley Merlin 7: Harley Merlin and the Detector Fix

by Forrest, Bella

  Ouch.

  “You need to chill out, Wade. Seriously. I don’t know what’s up with you, but it needs to stop. We’re supposed to be working together here. So just put up or shut up. Harley’s dealing with a lot right now, and she doesn’t need this crap, especially not from you.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Are you okay? Do you know what’s wrong?”

  I shook my head. “No idea. My heart is racing so fast.”

  “Is it the chains?”

  “I don’t—” I stopped midsentence. My heart was thumping harder the farther into the network of passageways we got. Could it be? It was the only thing that made sense. This had to be the pull of my parents’ Grimoire, getting stronger with every step I took toward it.

  “What’s up?” Garrett peered down at me.

  “I’m not sure yet. Just let me test something.” I carried on walking, with them following behind. Sure enough, my heart raced faster with every step. Reaching the end of the hallway, I felt a strange pull, leading me off to the right. A solid wall sat in front of me. At least, it looked solid at first glance. Taking a breath, I stepped right up to it, only to find that it was an optical illusion that parted the moment I walked through.

  “How did you do that?” Garrett stared at me, with Wade standing impatiently to the side.

  I smiled. “It’s the Grimoire, leading me toward it. We don’t need any tracking spells or gimmicks to find it. The closer I get to the book, the stronger the bond is getting. Remington was right. I’m linked to it, by blood, and it’s calling out to me. I guess it can do that, now that I don’t have the Suppressor anymore. My heart and my Chaos are open to it, and that bond is strong as heck.”

  Wade shook his head, the blueprint in his hands. “It’s not reliable, and it’s only a theory. I’d rather trust hard facts than some ‘bond’ you think you have. I know where the Grimoire is—it’s obvious if you look at the blueprints. And it isn’t this way.”

  He didn’t stop to let us respond. Instead, he kept going down the open left-hand hallway without us, leaving Garrett and me to exchange a worried look. It was almost like Wade was working against us now. And, at the moment, he was walking in the opposite direction, putting even more distance between us, in both senses of the word.

  “We’d better go after him before he falls down a hole or something,” Garrett said.

  I nodded and followed Garrett down the left-hand hallway, my heartrate slowing as we did. It was like a painful game of Marco Polo, and Polo was down the corridor we’d just walked away from. Garrett broke into a sprint to catch up with Wade, and I did my best to run after them, despite the ache in my bones.

  “Wade! Wade, would you just stop?” Garrett barked. “You’re going the wrong way.”

  “Who says I am? The blueprints don’t lie, Garrett.” He whirled around, narrowing his eyes.

  “We should listen to Harley. She’s got some link to this thing. If she says it’s the other way, then I’d stake my money on the fact that it’s the other way. Blueprints aren’t always right.” Garrett grabbed Wade’s arm and tried to yank him back. “So, come on, stop being an ass.”

  Wade tore his arm away from Garrett. “Don’t you dare touch me.”

  “Then stop acting like a child.” He tried to grab for Wade again, but Wade lashed out at him, shoving him hard in the chest. Garrett staggered back in surprise, his expression quickly morphing into a mask of anger as he lunged back at Wade. He swiped a blow at Wade’s jaw, grazing his chin as Wade leaned back. A second later, Wade threw a punch right at Garrett’s nose, but he ducked back just in time to avoid any serious damage. After that, all I saw was a blur of fists and bodies as the two of them wrangled with each other.

  They’re going to kill each other.

  I sent out a powerful wave of my reverse Empathy, feeding the tendrils of it right into their minds. Just like my childhood pal Peter Pan, I forced myself to think happy thoughts, even though they were going at one another like animals. I thought of the good times we’d all shared as part of the Rag Team. I thought of Astrid and the way she smiled at Garrett whenever he walked into a room, and I thought of the first time Wade had kissed me in the Luis Paoletti Room, splitting the thoughts and the emotions and pouring them into the right brains.

  Garrett stumbled into the wall, bent double as he calmed down. His eyes had taken on a faraway look, a small smile on his lips as he sank into the emotions I’d pushed into him, spurred on by memories of Astrid. Wade, on the other hand, was having some kind of violent reaction to the reverse Empathy. He sank right down to his knees, holding his head in his hands, tears rolling down his face. I hadn’t pushed any sadness into him, so I had no idea why he was acting like this. It was almost as if he was feeling the opposite of the emotions I’d put into his head.

  This isn’t right.

  Curious, I switched up the emotions I was sending toward him and thought of something angry instead. I focused on the way he’d snapped at me before and powered the emotions I’d felt right into him. The anger and frustration and confusion. Immediately, his face changed, his mouth curving up into a loopy smile. A soft laugh rippled from his lips, his eyes twinkling as though he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Yep, there was definitely something strange going on with him. Something magical that was messing with his head.

  Determined to keep him in a better place, I changed the emotions to a wave of enthusiasm. No sooner had it hit him than he sank into a dopey silence. Realizing that wouldn’t do much good, I tried a small amount of panic. He blinked up at me, very calm and collected all of a sudden.

  “What did you do?” Garrett asked, coming around from his bout of reverse Empathy.

  “Stopped you guys from killing each other. Now, come on, help me with him.”

  Garrett took Wade by the arm and pulled him to his feet. He stood up obediently, his whole manner subdued, letting Garrett drag him back toward the right-hand corridor without a word. I glanced into Wade’s eyes, holding his face to keep his head up.

  “You’re behaving really weird, Wade,” I said. “Is everything okay? Do you feel odd? Do you feel like you might be under a spell or something?”

  He stared back listlessly. “Nope, I’m fine. I feel fine. I’m just under a lot of pressure.”

  “Are you sure? Because you’re acting like you’re under a spell.”

  Garrett nodded. “She’s got a point. This isn’t like you.”

  “What would you know about it? You can’t feel what I feel,” Wade replied woozily. “I’m fine, honestly. I’m my usual self, just a bit on edge. I’m surprised you aren’t the same, considering the situation we’re in. I got a little aggravated, that’s all.”

  “A little aggravated?” Garrett snorted.

  “I shouldn’t have swung at you, I admit it. I’m sorry. I’m just worn out and nervous, nothing else. No hexes. No spells. Just good old-fashioned stress and some annoyance that we’ve been put in this position. It’d be enough to make anyone feel weird.” He folded his arms across his chest, swaying slightly.

  “So, you do feel weird?” I pressed.

  “I just feel tense, that’s all,” he answered. “Now, can we get on with this?”

  Even if something was going on with Wade, we had no choice but to keep going, grab the Grimoire, and get the hell out of here. I could deal with this magical weirdness later. Krieger would know what to do, for sure. I could send Wade back to the SDC with Garrett, where they’d take care of him. But who’d done this to him?

  One freaking guess…

  I kept trying to convince myself that it might have been the Chains of Truth, mushing up his brain and switching everything around by accident. But that didn’t make sense. His behavior had started changing way before that. Then again, it didn’t make any sense that Katherine had done this to him, either. How would she have even gotten close enough?

  Eris Island. My stomach sank. Katherine had captured Wade, and there’d been some time before he ended up in her office wit
h Finch—plenty of time to plant something, if she’d wanted to. A ticking timebomb, to divide and conquer. And if she’d really done this, she’d gone right for the jugular, trying to put distance between me and him to screw with me.

  “What did you do to zombie boy?” Garrett nodded to Wade, who was walking along in a daze.

  “What I had to.”

  “Do you think he might be a security risk?”

  I swallowed my own fears about that. “It doesn’t matter. We can’t fix him here. We need to keep moving for now.” The Grimoire’s pull was getting stronger with every step we took.

  Thirty-Four

  Harley

  We passed through the eerie darkness of the right-hand tunnel, but it was getting harder to keep going. Whatever this beacon was, pulling me toward the Grimoire, the wrench of it was becoming unbearable. My heart couldn’t take it, and neither could my lungs. Not that it was exactly a bad sensation, it just felt totally overwhelming. It was like the excitement of every Christmas, every birthday, every special event, thrown together in a shivering mass of nervous energy, bouncing around inside of me like an overzealous pinball in a machine. There was so much of it flowing through my veins that I could have cried, or collapsed in hysterics, or leapt the height of the Empire State Building.

  After what seemed like a lifetime of trekking through this place, the tunnel finally ran out. My heart felt it before I saw it. It was like that lurch of seeing the guy you were crushing on walking into a room and making eye contact with you when you thought he had no idea who you were. The guy I was crushing on was still trailing along like a zombie, but my hold on the reverse Empathy was dwindling, thanks to the jacked-up joy going through me.

  A door was tucked away in the darkness. I approached it cautiously, noticing faint lines carved into the thick, black metal. I got closer. A pentagram had been etched into the surface of the door. Those were par for the course in magical society, so I wasn’t too surprised. The other thing etched into the door, however…

  Slap bang in the middle of said five-pointed star was a handprint, barely noticeable unless it caught the right light.

  “What’s this for?” Garrett peered over my shoulder.

  “I guess this is how we get in.”

  Wade frowned. “What do we have to do with it?” He’d been a little more like himself since the fight in the hallway, but I knew that relied on me keeping up my reverse Empathy. I fought to hold on to the tendrils of it, even now, with my heart about ready to jump out my throat.

  “Put your hand on it, maybe?” Garrett tilted his head to get a better look. “Trouble is, we don’t know what the risks are. What if it’s the wrong hand? What if it has to fit exactly? What’ll happen if we don’t get it right?” This was like the Truth Troop all over again.

  “My guess is death.” Wade chuckled weirdly.

  A soft drumming peppered the air, and I lifted my finger to my lips. “Hush for a second.”

  They fell silent. I glanced around, listening for the sound I’d just heard. Even with them quiet, it took me a while to pick it out again. A steady beat thudded out a familiar rhythm—the rhythm of a heartbeat. Only, it wasn’t my heartbeat that I could hear. It seemed to be pounding from somewhere beyond the walls, Jumanji-style.

  As I looked back at the door, the oily glaze of the walls surrounding it started to contract and relax, pulsing exactly the way a heart would. It moved to the beat of that sound.

  “The coven knows you. It knows the scent of the Merlin bloodline…” A whisper hissed past my ear, making my head whip around so fast I almost gave myself whiplash. But there was nobody in the hallway but us. No spirits, no ghosts, just us. The Grimoire’s pull was getting way stronger now, and I half suspected it was the very thing giving me these scary hallucinations.

  “Everything okay?” Garrett eyed me. Could he not see and hear what I did? Apparently not. Otherwise, he’d have been freaking out, too.

  I nodded slowly. “Just thinking.”

  “Well, could you hurry it along? No pressure or anything, but these tunnels are weirding me out. They definitely knew what they were doing when they built this network. Nobody would be mad enough to willingly come this way into the coven.”

  Nobody would be mad enough? It hit me. My father had been the New York Coven’s director at one point. Of course he’d have known about these tunnels. With Katherine after him, it stood to reason that he might have charmed an escape route for himself. And maybe the hand and pentagram are part of it. It would definitely explain these crazy reactions I was having.

  “Wade, can you put on your shades and tell me if there’s a charm here?” I asked.

  He slipped them on. “Yep. Right there, where the hand is.”

  Before they could stop me, I put my palm flat against the groove of the imprint. The moment my skin touched the metal, which felt oddly warm, a creepy red glow pooled out from my hand, filling the lines of the pentagram. They lit up a brighter ruby red, each point bursting with a tiny explosion that sent out a flurry of scarlet sparks.

  The heat beneath my hand started to burn, but not in an unpleasant way. It was more like an icy tingle, spreading from the center of my palm out to each of my fingers. Five more of the tiny explosions bristled at my fingertips, with the ruby light sinking back down into my skin and running right up the length of my arm.

  I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to achieve. The door wasn’t opening, and my hand was stuck in place.

  The snaking line of red light tingled up the back of my neck and darted right into my brain. My head filled with a bombardment of memories. Not my memories, but the memories of my mom and dad—a hurricane of precious, intimate moments. There were so many of them, flashing through my head.

  I saw my mom and dad at the altar, gazing into each other’s eyes. She wore a white lace gown that pooled down a set of steps like a silky waterfall, while he looked sharp in a three-piece suit, a grin fixed on his face. I saw them sitting together on a bench in Central Park, my mom stealing a lick of my dad’s ice cream. I saw them laughing at the terrible taxidermy in an exhibit in the Natural History Museum, my dad pulling a face to make himself look like the poor otter in the glass case beside him. My mom’s laugh rippled through my head like the sweetest music. He caught her in his arms a moment later, kissing her, both of them smiling like loons. They looked so young and carefree and in love that it damn near broke my heart.

  I saw them arguing in their apartment on Park Avenue, with my dad pointing at the dishwasher and asking why my mom had stuffed it so full. He said it had to be precise, or nothing would get clean, and she said he was being ridiculous. I watched her storm out, only for my dad to follow a couple minutes later, to hold her in his arms and brush the hair back from her face. I saw my mom crying on her bed, her knees tucked up to her chin, because her period had come again. “What if it never happens?” she’d asked, and my dad had gone to sit beside her, cuddling her close. “It’ll happen when it’s supposed to, and whoever she or he is, they’ll be worth the wait,” he’d replied.

  I saw my mom get out of the car on some distant, dusty highway, walking with her hands shoved in her jeans’ pockets. My dad drove after her, the car crawling at a snail’s pace, for half a mile before she gave up and got back in. I had no idea what they’d argued about, but even in their stony silence, I could tell how much they loved each other. Then I saw her lying on their couch, her stomach swollen with me, with my dad sitting beside her, his feet up on the table. He was flipping through TV channels, one hand resting casually on my mom’s leg. Nothing special was going on—it was just a snapshot of their life together as it had been before Katherine had stolen it away from them.

  I couldn’t hold on to every single image, but there’d been a lot of laughter, a lot of tears, a lot of bickering, and a lot of love. It was remarkable in its ordinariness, although there were the obvious magical elements eking through: the two of them forging spells together, and testing out their abilities, and training side
by side, both before and after they were a couple. The surge swelled in my head, like a gigantic data dump right in the middle of my brain. I hoped it would stay there so I could make more sense of it later and go through the memories with the time, attention, and patience they deserved.

  As the rapid slideshow came to an end, my hand broke away from the handprint, followed by the soft click of the door as it swung wide.

  I turned toward Garrett and Wade, smiling so wide I thought my cheeks might fall off. That smile faded the moment I saw Wade. The Pentagram’s surge had broken my reverse Empathy, and he was looking at me like he wanted to kill me.

  Panicked, I struggled to regain control as Wade lunged for me. Garrett tried to yank Wade away, but Wade turned on him, launching a blast of powerful Fire right into his face. Garrett staggered back and let go of Wade, covering his eyes with his hands to get out the embers. Wade sprinted right for me, his hands outstretched, grasping for my throat. He snarled in my face as he tried to squeeze the life right out of me, the veins at his temples throbbing, like blue-tinged slugs embedded in his skin.

  “Wade!” I croaked. His thumbs were pressing down on my windpipe, his fingertips burning with Fire, forging a coil of liquid heat around my throat.

  He’s going to murder me. He’s actually going to kill me!

  With my nails digging into his hands, I battled to peel his fingertips away from my throat. Gathering my Chaos into my palms, I sent out my own blast of Fire to singe his hands, but he barely flinched. I sent wave after wave, but it had no effect. He was too hellbent on killing me to feel pain, and I was holding back. I could’ve killed him with my own Chaos, if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t have the strength to do it. And if I used my Earth ability, the tunnels might come crashing in on us.

  All I could do was stare into his wild eyes and thrash and kick and forge Fire with every breath I had left. His weight was crushing me down into the floor, my windpipe buckling under the pressure of his thumbs as they dug deeper. The heat of the fiery coil was getting hotter, and I had visions of it cutting right through my neck.