“What one witch lacks, she can scrape it out of another.” I almost spit wine into my lap with a chuckle. “Apparently I have issues with threatening knife violence. I’ll have to tell…” I cleared my throat, not at all sure I liked where that train of thought was headed, and squared my shoulders. “Tell me about my dad in all of this.”
“I already did.” Ty skated several loose fennel seeds across the table into a pile. “I got a letter from him a few days ago that mentioned Kason and Dimic’s. Someone else must’ve sent it.”
“Anything else?” I asked. “Any theories?”
“Not really. Just that I think you should go back to Kason’s house, right now, and give him whatever he wants in exchange for what he can do for us.” He fixed me with an imploring gaze. “For all of us. He’s our only hope. You know that better than anyone.”
I nodded, letting his words tumble through to the back of my head where some of them clicked into place. Others rattled around too loudly to ignore, even through my wine fog, and I would get to them soon enough. “Okay.”
He blinked, as if shocked it’d been that easy. “Okay.”
“Can I have my other sixty atern clicks now?” I asked. “That Devil’s Sun was a real bitch to summon.”
Ty’s mouth flattened into a thin line. “Deal’s a deal, Hadley. You’ll get the rest after Kason ends winter.”
I nodded, zipping my gaze to his atern and away again. It was turned inward, as it usually was, so no one in passing could read the display. It was nobody’s business, he always said. Including mine. How much power had he collected in the two years since I’d seen him?
“Well, I had to try.”
“About the Devil’s Sun…” His long lashes fluttered while he searched my face. “When did your magic get so dark?”
Since the need for revenge powered most everything I did, including researching the online version of the Witch’s Grimoire and all the different ways I planned to kill my family’s murderer. A lot.
“Since I decided not to put up with anyone’s bullshit.” I scooted out of the seat, laptop and wine bottle tucked under both arms, and stood. “Don’t forget to tip your waitress.” Then I left him there, but at the door, I turned.
He was pulling bills from a wallet, a thick one that he had difficulty closing once he’d finished paying. Before he glanced up to see me watching, I shoved out into the cold.
I braced myself against the biting wind, slanting my body into it, until I squinted at the boarded-up building next door. Wood planks crisscrossed the dingy second story windows, and behind one of them hung a faded and crooked Dimic’s Everlasting Ink sign.
Ty had been right about Dimic’s being abandoned. But that was the last thing I would ever believe of him. I didn’t know for sure why—only a feeling for now—but I no longer trusted my best friend.
9
With no hands-free ways to get inside Dimic’s Everlasting Ink and the risk of being caught by a roaming fae or a sketchy witch like Ty, I had to rely on magic. Not what I wanted to do, but I didn’t want the building to look like I’d smashed through the front door with my boots either.
I kept walking past the shop toward The Witch’s Tit, a tiny grocery store a few buildings down. Someone walked out the store’s door as I strolled inside. It always smelled like cleaning chemicals in here, as if the shopkeeper doused all the fruits and vegetables after they’d been picked through. Since we didn’t have much sunlight in eternal winter, this produce was grown on the edge of the city using special grow lights. I knew this random fact because Mom had been playing around with indoor gardening before she died.
I made my way toward the back of the store. Up the same aisle I headed down, a girl maybe just a few years younger than me carrying several hats and gloves towed two little boys behind her.
“I’ll die without something to eat,” one of them whined.
“You’ll die if you can’t stay warm,” the girl grumbled.
Already, both boys’ lips were tinged blue, and it was no wonder since their coats were thinner than mine. They needed new coats, not hats and gloves, but if they were anything like my little brothers had been, they outgrew their coats seemingly within weeks.
The girl looked at me warily as she passed, and a rogue glove slipped from her grip. I almost bent to pick it up for her with my shit hands, but one of the boys, the same who had complained, beat me to it. I wanted to say something to him when he popped up and glanced at me, to tell him to be nice to his sister, but my mouth had sewed itself shut. Instead, I gazed after them like a long lost memory.
That had been me two years ago, dragging along two brothers who annoyed the hell out of me but who I would’ve done almost anything for, during a store trip Mom had sent us on just to get us out of the house. I hoped what happened to my brothers never happened to that girl’s. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
At the back of the store, a wooden cart sat filled with small oranges. I squatted behind it out of view from the door and the checkout lady behind her register as if tying my boot laces.
“Invisibilia,” I whispered. My atern ticked down three. Twenty-five clicks left.
An icy chill scraped down my bones, but I hardly felt it on a day like today. I shuddered and bent in on myself to try to keep any warmth I had left contained as my body blended in with the produce around me. It was a little unnerving to not see myself, Nasty, or my wine, no matter how many times I’d done this before. I stood slowly, the cold making me feel old and creaky, and stepped out of the store, unseen.
Slipping around the back of the tattoo shop, I found snow drifts several feet high angling up toward the planks crisscrossing the second-story windows. It was better than the zero other options I had, so I tromped through, my boots sinking only a little because of the freezing temperature.
“Paravin,” I said, and both the window and planks vanished as easily as I had. My atern ticked down two more. I was going through magic like wine lately. Twenty-three clicks left before the poison spikes in my atern were released into my wrist.
I slipped easily inside a narrow hallway on the second floor lined with dirty white bricks and unfinished doors blocking off two rooms ahead. Behind me, the hallway turned right to somewhere unseen. My breath plumed out in front of me, marking me as a breathing thing no one could see. Good thing I was alone in here. Unless, of course, I wasn’t.
Mildew and wet wood clung to the air as thick as the silence. This place reeked of abandonment, yet I didn’t dare set Nasty or my wine down in case I was wrong. They were both invisible because they’d been attached to me when I said the spell, but I wasn’t about to take a risk I didn’t have to with the most valuable things I had.
I started forward to the two closed doors, stepping lightly, my breaths shallow. The first door on the left hadn’t closed completely, so I tapped it open with my boot and winced at the screaming hinges. I froze, listening. Still nothing but the wild pulse between my ears. I ducked inside the room.
A pile of loose bricks zigzagged up the far wall, and underneath the highest point was a toy rocket ship dangling from a thin string in the ceiling. It swung and twisted through the air, the plastic taking a battering from the wind that hissed through the walls. Kind of an odd thing to find at a tattoo shop, but Kason had said one of his last memories before being trapped inside houses included a child’s laughter. But Dimic didn’t have any children that I knew of.
I turned around, looking for some sign of why Dad had mentioned this place, and immediately spotted it on the wall near the door. A boxlike shape with unequal, unparallel sides, with one side extending out like a tail, had been drawn in black crayon. A shape that likely meant nothing to anyone else.
“Think, Hadley, you know this one,” Dad said in his deep, rich voice.
I blinked up at him over the heavy book he used to coax me to sleep even though it did the opposite. “The Corvus constellation?”
That correct answer had earned me one of his bear hugs I’d always
loved so much. When he wasn’t teaching me about hacking computers, he told me about the night sky, the stars, and the meaning of the constellations. Not ours—we could hardly see anything through the falling snow and endless cloud cover—but Earth’s. He’d always said he wanted me to dream beyond the snow, and I did. Constellations were kind of our thing, but after he died, I’d dreamed within the confines of our blackened house for the last two years. Likely not what he would’ve wanted. But he did want me to come here so I would see this drawing.
The Greek mythology behind Corvus meant… Ugh, too much wine sludged up my brain. Corvus. Corvus. Corvus was a raven, sent by Apollo to watch over his lover… I stared open-mouthed at the drawing on the wall, my heart thundering. And his lover fell in love with a human. And was that human trapped inside his house with a knotted tattoo on his back? No, but this couldn’t be a coincidence. Yet I still didn’t know how they were related.
I left this room and headed for the next, but the only things inside it were toppled bricks on one half of the room and a lone child-sized shoe on the other. The odd combination skittered up the nerves along my back. No symbols marked the walls, so I headed for the stairs leading to the first floor.
Papers littered the steps, and black ink bleeding through to the back of one of them caught my eye. I flipped it over with the toe of my shoe. A child’s drawing of a raven stared back with one eye.
Okay, Dad, I got it. No need to hit me over the head with this Corvus/raven stuff.
The myth said that when Corvus flew back to Apollo to tell him the news about his lover, Apollo freaked out and cursed the once silver bird’s wings black. I blinked down at my hands, at my blackened fingernails. The bird and I had a lot in common.
Downstairs, a lime green plastic-covered chair that looked like it belonged in an insane asylum—it even had leather straps—rocked back and forth from the steady breeze gusting in from the boarded front door. The wind also carried a voice from outside I didn’t recognize.
“Did she come here?”
I froze, the narcissistic part of me wondering if ‘she’ referred to me.
The voice sounded male and clipped, as if the person had better things to do than hang out at an abandoned tattoo shop.
“Where is she in regards to him?”
This guy, whoever he was, had to be talking about Kason and me. Sometimes narcissism ruled, especially when I was right. But I didn’t pat myself on the back just yet.
“Fine,” the guy said.
Thud-thud-thud. The large board that had taken the place of the broken front door jumped.
I backed away even though I was invisible, the taste of copper flooding my mouth as my heart lodged in my throat. But before I could make a flying leap toward the stairs, the board ripped away. I dodged past the chair and crouched behind the cover of an old wooden desk in the corner.
The door creaked open, and a bell above the door chimed softly as a rotten fish smell rolled inside. Fae.
I threw my arm across my face to muffle my loud breaths into the crook of my elbow. My shoulder dug into a metal handle on a drawer, but I hardly noticed. The lime green chair in the middle of the shop spun around wildly, likely because I’d smashed into it on the way here because I was part ninja. The wrong part. If this guy hadn’t suspected anyone else was here but him, he was sure second-guessing himself now.
Footsteps tapped over the dirty floor, spiking ice through my veins as they drew nearer. I rolled my lips tight against my teeth, but my heavy breaths still clouded the air. Invisible or not, I might still be detected. He probably could sense me whether he saw me or not. Even so, I took one more inhale, burning the fae smell into my nose for an eternity, and held it.
Tap-tap. Every footstep crunched dirt and grit into the grungy tiles like ground up bones. Drawing closer to the side of the desk.
Sitting low on the very tips of Kason’s boots he’d let me borrow, I dared a sliding step backward along the front of the desk and then one more into the empty cube where a chair might go. Invisible and out of sight. I hoped that was enough.
If the fae found me, I had no idea what he would do or whether or not he even knew I was Hadley Hawthorn, expert human finder and leaver. But he did know I would come here. And he would likely wonder about everything I knew.
Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Shiny black shoes stopped on the other side of the desk, so close I could’ve reached out and touched them under the gap, and familiar. Bile scorched the back of my throat, and tears leaked down my frozen face. I’d seen these same shoes before while hiding underneath my parents’ bed, the screams of my family long since faded. These pointed shoes with gold metal plating the toe and gold stitching sewn in a checked pattern up the gleaming leather had permanently inked my nightmares. They’d walked into my parents’ room, the owner whistling a chirpy tune. My family’s slaughter in the living room had been completed, and the owner of these shoes had searched for more blood. Mine.
Now, they stepped toward the stairs. My pulse pounded between my ears as the rest of my body stiffened. I’d wanted to know who the shoes belonged to for so long, had hacked the Isa fae computer system just to look at photos of their feet, but hadn’t found anything. Until now, here at Dimic’s Everlasting Ink, no laptop needed.
Paper crumpled from the direction of the steps, and I could’ve kicked myself for not picking up all the raven drawings. He might just think they were simple pictures, but maybe not. If he was looking at them, though, that meant he was facing the stairs, away from me.
I needed to know who he was, just a glimpse, so I leaned around the edge of the desk, my movements stiff and jerky.
Behind the dark curly smoke of his wings, black hair hung halfway down a pair of tuxedo tails. A gold atern flashed at his wrist that connected a thin chain with a gold ring on his middle finger. He exuded power and money, and that was just the back of him.
I’d never seen this fae in my life.
Who had he been talking to? Were they inside too? I ducked back, nearly losing my wine bottle tucked in my coat’s armpit.
The fae trekked upstairs and wandered around the rooms, and I briefly considered flying out the front door, mowing down whoever he’d been talking to. But having this guy here, walking around in those shoes while I stayed hidden once again, iced up my insides with the same terror I’d felt that night. I would wait until he left and sneak out the way I came. If he knew the constellations, saw the Corvus drawing upstairs, and pieced it together with the raven drawing, there was nothing I could do about that anyway since I wasn’t exactly sure what Dad was trying to tell me.
Finally, the fae swept down the stairs. Making sure I was still invisible, I peered out to see the front of the man who murdered my family. A long, black, silky beard elongated his face all the way up to his widow’s peak. His beady eyes bugged out of his gaunt cheeks. He walked out the front door, his tuxedo tails flying, and the bell announced his exit.
I stayed put with my face pressed against the front of the wooden desk just like I’d stayed under my parents’ bed for what seemed like hours after he’d left. Hours too late. Fear had crippled me, and if I’d crawled out sooner, I might’ve been able to do what Dad told me with his last dying breath, to take his atern and use his power to save the rest of my family. But I’d been too late.
Shadows deepened inside the store, and the cold coming in through the thin walls penetrated a deep ache into my bones until I convinced myself the man was really gone. I couldn’t stay here for hours, because once again, I might be too late for something, anything, that truly mattered. Besides, I wasn’t the same person who hid under my parents’ bed. Or maybe I was, but I didn’t want to be.
I scooted out from underneath the desk and stood, hissing at the pins and needles rippling down my nerves. Then I walked out the front of the building since there was no door now.
I needed to go back to Kason’s and beg him to let me inside so I could figure out this whole Corvus thing and how it might relate to him. Night fell hard
and fast around me as I walked the snow-packed sidewalks. Every once in a while between the breaks of howling wind, I stopped and turned to listen. I could’ve sworn the sound of shoes tap-tapping followed close behind.
10
I kicked at Kason’s front door, the rush of my heartbeat as loud as the wind, and jabbed my elbow into his doorbell without releasing it. “Let me in!” I spun around to make sure I hadn’t been followed even though I’d lost the sound of the tapping shoes in a neighborhood I’d never been to. I’d walked and walked in the arctic night to lose the tail that maybe I’d only imagined was following me.
Either way, once I filled Kason in on everything I’d found out, surely he would stop guarding his holy loins and fuck me already. It was his life at risk if he didn’t, after all, as well as thousands of witches who’d been dictated over by the fae for far too long. Because if the man who’d killed my family didn’t reappear, the Diamond Dogs would. And because the Diamond Dogs had funneled out my thoughts about Kason, they knew exactly who he was.
The door finally clicked open, and Kason leaned against the frame with an eyebrow lifted. He crossed his arms, his tight, black shirt sleeves pushed up to his elbows and the frayed edges of his jeans dragging over the tops of his bare feet.
“Why should I let you in?” he asked, his dark eyes flashing.
“I found out some things…” I said, barely able to push the words out between chattering teeth. “Things that still don’t make a lot of sense. Let me in, and I’ll try to explain.”
He shook his head. “We tried that already, remember? The last time I let you in, you brought a trio of winged dog friends with you.”
“Don’t be a dick.” I winced at the frozen rigidity in his expression even though it was totally justified. “I’m cold.”
He shrugged. “What if I’m not done fucking myself, Hadley? Are you going to throw another tantrum if I leave you out here?”
I reeled as if I’d been punched in the chest. The biting wind I was sure he could feel on his bare feet watered my eyes, so I closed them against it and his accusatory glare. He was provoking me, and yeah, I deserved it, but a tantrum? Is that what he thought of me, that I was just a little girl pouting and whining about everything that didn’t go my way?
Legacy: Faction 11: The Isa Fae Collection Page 9
