Copper Veins

by Jennifer Allis Provost

  She turned toward the wall, wiping her face with her sleeve. “Well, Micah?” she asked over her shoulder. “What shall we do with the beast?”

  Micah summoned the silverkin, who appeared in an instant. “Remove this creature to the dungeon,” he ordered. The silverkin hauled the shapeshifter away, leaving the rest of us standing in the sitting room, minds reeling over what had just occurred.

  “The manor has a dungeon?” Sadie murmured. “Who knew?”

  “Sure does,” I murmured, remembering our other unwanted guest. “And boy, is it getting full.”

  30

  In the chaos that followed the shapeshifter’s removal, we truly acted like we’d lost it, and let’s face it, the Corbeaus have never excelled at keeping it together. Max was swearing a blue streak, alternating between grumbling about Juliana’s presence at the manor and our family being infiltrated by our false father. Even Sadie—calm, even-tempered Sadie—trembled with rage. As for me, I wondered, loudly, how any of us were dumb enough to fall for that routine, especially me. Through it all, Mom just sat there, staring at her hands.

  “I guess Dad really is gone,” I murmured to Micah, watching Mom’s forlorn form. “At least that jerk wasn’t him.” Micah grunted, silver brows drawn low over his eyes. I wondered if he’d even heard me.

  “What do we know of shapeshifters?” Micah asked suddenly. I blinked at him, since really, we mortals knew very little of them. “A shifter, even a strong one, can only hold a false form for a day, perhaps two. Then the edges blur somewhat, and he must be in the presence of his target again.”

  “All the times he just disappeared, taking those stupid walks,” I concluded. “He was going off to look at a picture of Dad. He couldn’t do it here, since we’d wonder why he was staring at a picture of himself.”

  “Not a picture,” Micah said, shaking his head. “A shifter cannot assume the form of anything other than a living creature.” Micah stared at Mom as he spoke, her head rising as she understood.

  “Beau’s alive,” she gasped.

  “And within walking distance of the manor,” Micah said.

  “We must organize a search,” Mom said. “We will canvas the area, knock on every door if we have to, but I will find my husband.”

  “Why don’t we just talk to Juliana?” Sadie asked. When Max and I both glared at her, she elaborated, “I mean, she is a Peacekeeper. She probably knows a thing or two.”

  “A sound plan,” Micah murmured while I grumbled about how I’d rather stick a fork in my eye than speak to Juliana. In spite of my opinions, a few of the silverkin were sent to fetch her. Not five minutes later, they escorted Juliana into the parlor.

  “I would like to know where my husband is,” Mom demanded without preamble.

  “I don’t know where he’s being held,” Juliana said, “but Mr. Corbeau is alive. He was captured a few years ago, when he tried to break into the Institute.” She turned toward Max, but looked at his shoulder rather than his eyes. “Max, do you remember when iron warriors attacked the Institute?”

  Max nodded. “How could I forget?” he murmured. “He really was trying to rescue me?”

  “He was,” Juliana confirmed. The shifter hadn’t lied about everything, then. “He enlisted Ferra’s assistance, but she betrayed him and turned him over to Mike.”

  “Why would Ferra do that?” I asked. “Shouldn’t she have been against Mike, too?”

  Juliana shrugged. “She wanted to eliminate any metal Elementals more powerful than her. So, she handed Mr. Corbeau over to the Institute, then removed all of the metal from the surrounding area so Max wouldn’t be able to escape.”

  “The shapeshifter,” Micah prompted. “What made them send that abomination to my home when they did?”

  Juliana’s eyes widened—based on the anger in Micah’s eyes, he was less than pleased that an imposter had been sent to the manor. Mom was rather unpleased as well. “The decision was made when the drones spotted the rest of you at the Hall of Records, when you got married,” Juliana replied. “Congratulations, by the way,” she added with a nod toward Micah and me.

  “Thanks,” I muttered while Micah stated, “We were glamoured. There is no way your drones could have recognized any of us.”

  “It was you they recognized,” Juliana said. Micah began to protest, but she raised her hand, and just like that silenced the Lord of Silver. “You were wearing the same glamour that you wore to the Promenade. The exact same glamour that you were wearing when I met you at Sara’s apartment.”

  Micah opened his mouth only to snap it shut. He did always wear the same human guise, that of a tall human man with brown hair and gray eyes. I’d named him Mike Silver.

  Max leaned back in his chair, his hands laced behind his head. “You mean Mr. Perfect screwed up?”

  “Not now, Max,” I hissed, then I turned back to Juliana. “So, you identified Micah for them?” I accused.

  “I didn’t have to,” she retorted. “After your little stunt at the Promenade, everyone was on the lookout for him.”

  “But how did they know he was the Lord of Silver?” I demanded.

  “Remember when you wrecked the Institute?” Juliana asked, and I nodded. As if I could have forgotten. “Micah was beside you the whole time, supporting you. Everyone, even Peacekeepers, knows who the Lord of Silver is. Then you show up at the Promenade with a man whose image wasn’t recorded anywhere, and a few weeks later that same mystery man trots into a Hall of Records with four other unrecorded individuals and requests a marriage ceremony. It wasn’t too difficult to connect the dots.”

  “I guess it wasn’t,” I mumbled, chancing a look toward Micah. He was frowning so hard I worried he’d give himself a hernia, and he was so mad the tips of his ears were pink. By contrast, Max looked as happy as I’d ever seen him. “Was that the plan all along? Wait for me to get married and send a fake father to kidnap me?”

  “Not the marriage part. As soon as we dug our way out of the Institute, they started looking for suitable candidates to impersonate your father.”

  “We or they?” I asked. Juliana blinked, so I elaborated. “Which is it—are you one of them or not? Are you a traitor now?”

  “They’ve thought that I was a traitor for a while,” she mumbled, dropping her eyes. “Now it’s just official.”

  “And we should believe you why?” I pressed. “For all we know, you’re just feeding us more lies.”

  “I never wanted to lie to you,” Juliana said.

  “Then why was I working that sham job?” I demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me where Max was, I don’t know, ever?”

  “Who do you think put those plans on your computer?” Juliana shot back. She was trembling, fists clenched.

  I blinked. “Why didn’t you drop a hint, so I knew where to look?”

  “If I’d known it was going to take you a fricken’ year to check the files on your own computer, I would have tacked them to your forehead,” she retorted. “Seriously, Sara, you didn’t even need Internet access.”

  “It was against the rules,” I snapped. Juliana glanced at her upper arm meaningfully. Though we couldn’t see it beneath her shirt sleeve, Juliana sported a half-moon-shaped scar over where her tracking chip had once resided, right over her bicep. It had been my idea to cut the chips out of our arms, a teenager’s way of thumbing her nose at authority. And no, we hadn’t followed the rules in the slightest.

  “Well, why did you come here with the shapeshifter?” I demanded, trying to shift focus away from my apparent thick-headedness.

  Juliana’s gaze flickered across my face, then dropped to stare at her hands. “It returned to headquarters and was going to tell Mike and Langston that it was unable to sway you.”

  “Sway me?” I repeated.

  “Sway you to leave Micah and go back to the Mundane realm,” she explained. Micah’s fingers clenched around my elbow, but he remained silent. Before I could point out what a stupid plan that was, even for Peacekeepers, Max spok
e up.

  “That’s crap,” Max said. “Mike wouldn’t have sent you here to talk to anyone. If anything, he would have wired you and asked you to dig for information.”

  Juliana stared at Max for a moment before replying. “Mike didn’t send me here—the shifter never filed his report. I faked orders, intercepted the shapeshifter, and told him to bring me here.”

  When we all stared at her, open-mouthed, she continued. “I mean, after you wrecked Langston’s rally, he was furious. I really thought he was going to kill me that time, but you know how he doesn’t like to get his hands dirty. He figured that, if you guys weren’t on to the shapeshifter yet, you would be soon. So, when the shifter checked in talking about how no one was buying his act, I knew I had to do something.”

  Max’s expression, which had been furious, softened a bit. “Did he hurt you?” he asked.

  Juliana shrugged. “No more than usual.”

  “Easy words coming from the one working with Peacekeepers,” I said.

  “Cut her some slack, Sara,” Max said. “Jules has been through a lot.”

  Great, now my own brother was siding with the enemy, and one that he should be hating at least as much as I did. Here he was, telling me to give the one who’d experimented on him for years some—

  Wait. What had he called her?

  “Jules?” I asked. Juliana’s head shot up, her eyes wide and panicked. You see, Juliana has a thing about her name—it’s Juliana. Joo-LEE-Ah-Na. Not Julie, not J, not anything but Juliana. If you referred to her by anything other than her full name, she’d either flat-out ignore you or give you a verbal tongue-lashing.

  Max had just called her Jules, and she hadn’t even flinched. More significantly, she hadn’t corrected him. Which meant that he’d called her that before.

  Which meant that she had let him call her that.

  Mom couldn’t care less what Max called Juliana, and she’d had enough of our debates. She grabbed Juliana’s shoulders and demanded, “When did you last see my Beau?”

  “A few weeks ago,” Juliana replied. “He was transferring facilities. He was an even worse prisoner than you,” she added with a nod toward Max.

  “My Beau,” Mom murmured. “Scrappy as ever.”

  “Transferring facilities?” Micah repeated. “In which world?”

  “This world,” Juliana replied. “He’s been here since his capture. They couldn’t risk Mr. Corbeau contacting his allies in the Mundane world.”

  Micah rubbed his chin and smiled. “Then I know where your father is.”

  31

  As it turned out, there was only one human-run establishment within walking distance of the Whispering Dell—the Museum of Human Triumph. Everyone, both human and not, knew about it since it was the only edifice built by human hands that existed in both the Mundane and the Otherworld.

  “No,” Max said when I mentioned it. “There are two. The Peacekeepers just want you to think it transcends the veil.”

  Just another lie told to us by our government, then.

  We traveled across the metal pathways to the museum—for some hard-to-accept reason, we had taken Juliana along for the ride. Max had insisted that she come, and Micah agreed that having someone who knew their way around a Peacekeeper facility might be useful. I’d ended up relenting, but not because I particularly wanted her to come along. I just wanted to hurry up and find Dad.

  We also made one small stop to depositing what was left of the shifter outside the village gates. Mom had insisted that the creature be blinded.

  “Strike its eyes out,” Mom had said. “I do not want it to ever torment a grieving widow again.”

  Max had taken care of that.

  After we had gone as far as the metal path could take us, we trudged along a packed dirt road. It hadn’t rained in some time, and our footfalls were stirring up miniature dust devils. Micah led our little procession. Mom strode beside him, asking him all sorts of questions about Mundane museums and shapeshifters. I lagged behind, partly because I was still pretty beat after my adventures with the Queen’s Lace and partly to eavesdrop on Max and Juliana.

  “So you hid some intel on Sara’s computer,” I heard Max saying. “Not bad, Jules, not bad at all.”

  “It was the only thing I could do,” Juliana murmured. “I knew Sara was the only one who could help you, but I couldn’t tell her outright.”

  They walked in silence for a few minutes until Max said, “You never betrayed me.”

  “No,” Juliana said, “I never did.”

  “Then why were you defending Langston back at the rally?” Max asked. “Is what Mike said true?”

  “Mike pretty much just spouts lies,” Juliana murmured.

  “Then you’re not marrying him?” Max pressed. She must have given him a look, because he continued, “Mike said you and Langston were getting hitched.”

  “Oh. That.” I glanced backward and saw Juliana chewing on her lower lip. “That won’t be happening.”

  “Why not?” I asked, dropping back so I was beside her. “You two looked so happy.”

  Max reached behind Juliana and whacked my arm, but I ignored him. Juliana stared at me for a moment before she explained. “Mike just says that to get the crowds riled up,” she mumbled.

  “What about the baby?” Max pressed.

  “What baby?” Juliana retorted.

  “At the rally, Mike implied that you were pregnant,” Max explained.

  “That…that was another lie.” Juliana raked her fingers through her dark hair and looked straight ahead. “No babies or weddings are in my future, not with Langston or anyone else.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “You’d look good in white.” Juliana stopped and stared at me, unsure if I was taunting her or paying her a compliment. “I mean it. Just like that portrait of your mom in the dining room.”

  Juliana nodded, but her eyes were wary. Before either of us could speak further, Micah announced that we had arrived.

  Before us stood a dilapidated concrete structure. It looked like it had been abandoned years ago, or at least long enough for vines to partially obscure the windows and doorways. The walls bore ugly black stains and part of the ceiling had fallen in.

  “This is the Museum of Human Triumph?” I asked, staring at the crumbling concrete and rotting doorframe. There wasn’t even a door, just a few splinters where one might have been. “You’d think they’d mow the lawn.”

  “This facility doesn’t have a regular maintenance staff,” Juliana offered. “It’s very difficult to maintain a magic-free space in the Otherworld.”

  I felt my brows travel halfway up my forehead, but Micah said, “She is correct. The land itself will try to destroy such places, with the ground attempting to swallow the structures. The vines and trees will rip it apart, if they can.”

  “Maybe that’s why it’s concrete,” Sadie mused.

  “It’s concrete because most Elementals can’t affect concrete,” Juliana said. “Even stone Elementals have a hard time manipulating it. The Institute only lasted as long as it did because of the wards set around the perimeter.”

  I stared at Juliana, simultaneously wanting to ask her more about what the Peacekeepers had done to my kind and slap her for speaking about us in such a detached manner. In the end, I decided to just push ahead. Finding Dad was far more important than her questionable loyalties.

  “Come on,” I said, picking my way through the underbrush. “Dad’s waiting.”

  We crept inside the museum and soon learned that the interior was just as dilapidated as the exterior grounds. The museum looked nothing like the Institute, which was a bit of a surprise. It also didn’t look like any museum I had ever been in, what with its rows of small, cell-like rooms. This place looked more like a containment facility than a repository of art and history, but it wasn’t like the high-tech laboratory Max was kept in. This museum was nothing but plain stone.

  “This way,” Juliana said, indicating a left turn. “The cells are always dee
p inside, where there aren’t any windows.”

  I shuddered, my own captivity still too fresh in my mind. Then we were in the offshoot corridor, and we darted as one back to the wider hall. Three armed Peacekeepers were standing in our way, and they had their plastic guns trained on us.

  “Trap,” I shrieked as Micah shoved me behind him. I wasn’t having that, not after what had happened with Old Stoney, and I yanked Micah’s arm until he was standing beside me. Before I could ask Micah how we should combat plastic, Mom raised her hands.

  And the plastic guns disintegrated.

  “What the…” I murmured, clutching Micah’s arms. “How did that even happen?”

  “She’s going to kill them,” Sadie whispered, her eyes trained on the Peacekeepers. Mom had somehow wound the three guards together, their arms and legs now resembling Celtic knotwork.

  “I never kill when I can make an example,” Mom said. She flicked her wrist, and the knotty guards were flung halfway down the corridor. “Now, let us find my husband.”

  Mom stalked down a dusty corridor, leaving the guards, who now resembled pretzels more than anything else, whimpering.

  “Come along, children,” Mom ordered. “My Beau is waiting.”

  We followed Mom down the corridor, stepping over the knotted-up guards in the process. I could have been wondering how long they’d stay like that, if there were more guards up around the next bend, what would happen when one of them had to pee. Instead, all I could think about was what Juliana had said back at the manor.

  Juliana had been the one responsible for all the confidential information on my work computer, the very same information that had led to me finding Max and freeing him from his living hell as a Peacekeeper lab rat. The very same information that would have meant Juliana’s death, had anyone caught on to her.

  All this time, I’d thought that she’d betrayed not only me, but my entire family. Juliana really had been my first real friend at a time when most either avoided me because I was rich or because I was the weird girl who dyed her hair the color of mud. But Juliana had never been like that—she’d always liked me for me, not just for my outer appearance. Then, I saw her working at the Institute, reading printouts about the experiments carried out on Max, and I’d felt like a fool.