by Ella Summers
Then she pulled out her crossbow, shooting at the wave of guards sweeping toward us. The bolts, spelled with some of Bella’s potions, exploded. Guards toppled over, clearing a path for us. We sprinted through the opening before it closed. The guards were too busy with the aftermath of Calli’s explosions—and the arrival of Jace’s soldiers—to follow.
The long hallway led us to another tower in the castle. There we found a room that held a small metal cage. Sallow-faced teenagers filled it, their bodies pressed against the bars. The kids were crammed in so tightly that I couldn’t even tell how many of them were in there. I didn’t see my sisters.
Frustration, fear, and outrage flashed hot inside of me, but I couldn’t focus on the prisoners just yet. I had to worry about Hardwicke’s guards first. They stood in our path, each one in a fighting stance. They’d been waiting for us.
As they unleashed their magic on us, I came to one unsettling realization: it wasn’t just many kinds of supernaturals working together here; it was people who each possessed many different kinds of magic. Were there so many more Legion deserters than we’d thought?
I broke through their ranks, leaving Calli and Bella to deal with the remaining guards. I had to get to Hardwicke. I cast a wall of air magic right in front of his nose. He slammed against it and bounced back, falling hard on his bottom.
“Where are my sisters?” I demanded as he jumped to his feet, dusting off his suit.
He shot me a derisive glance. “Get lost.”
I strode forward slowly, each step pulsing with rage. He thought he could kidnap my sisters and sell them into slavery?
“Give me the key to the cages,” I ground out.
Something akin to panic flashed across Hardwicke’s face, and then he attacked me so fast I barely had time to react. He was very strong, certainly not what I’d expected from his fancy suit and shiny watch. He moved with the speed and strength of a vampire, casting a continuous storm of elemental spells at me. He followed that up with a potent telekinetic blast. Before my breakthrough training session with Ronan, the spell would have broken a few ribs; as it was, it only knocked the wind out of me.
Hardwicke continued his attack, his magic more varied and powerful than any of his guards’ spells. He grabbed me and bit down hard on my neck. Pain exploded from the bite. His fangs dug in deep, tearing my flesh. Blood poured down my back.
I knocked him away from me. This had gone on long enough. Anger burning my blood, I went on the offensive.
“I will drain your delicious blood to the last drop,” he taunted me. “But not before I find your sisters, wherever they’re hiding in my cages. I will drain them first. You will watch me suck the life out of them.”
Fury crashed inside of me, like waves against a rocky cliff. Hardwicke’s arrogant smirk faded. He stared in shock at my hair. Shock gave way to wonder as my ponytail began to glow. He froze, his eyes wide, mesmerized. I grabbed my handcuffs and secured him to an iron ring on the blood-stained brick wall. It didn’t take much imagination to picture what went on in this prison. My pulse racing, my breaths heavy, I lifted my sword in the air.
Bella and Calli came up behind me.
“Leda, your hair,” Bella said quietly.
I drew in a few long, calming breaths. “Just a moment.” I took a final deep breath, and the glow faded from my hair.
I snatched the keys from Hardwicke’s belt and tossed them to Calli. She went to the cage, opening the lock. The prisoners walked out on shaky legs. There were ten. No, this couldn’t be all of them. There were supposed to be twenty-six, not ten. Where were all the other missing teenagers? Where were Gin and Tessa?
Fear and anger exploding like fireworks inside of me, I marched up to Hardwicke. Without delay, without formalities, I slammed the hard hammer of my siren magic against his mind.
“Where are the other prisoners you took? Where are Gin and Tessa?” My voice was a horrible, deep growl, stomping down with the force of a falling boulder.
Hardwicke gasped in fright.
Dissatisfied with his answer, I locked him inside my magic and squeezed down, trying to force the truth out of him. I was using the style of siren magic that Faris had used on me—forcing, not encouraging; brute force, not finesse. My magic was an iron cage, my rage a fire burning through Hardwicke. The rush of power was like nothing I’d ever felt before. This was how you crushed minds.
“Your sisters were taken separately. They were put aside,” Hardwicke said in a dull, emotionless voice.
“Why?” I demanded.
“We are building an army, and we need your sisters.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“My allies and I. We call ourselves the Pioneers. We’re revolutionaries, freedom fighters. We’re creating a new order outside the gods and demons. The revolution is coming.”
To anarchists, the revolution was always coming. Over the centuries, many extremists had tried—and failed—to revolt against the gods. But there was something different about these Pioneers. And that something was their magic.
“Are you deserters from the Legion of Angels?” I asked.
“No, only Davenport has ever been a soldier. We have a few supernatural allies, but most of us are people of the Earth.”
In other words, mortals, mundane humans with no magic.
“And yet here you are, wielding magic like a soldier in the gods’ army,” I said.
There was something all-too-familiar about this. It reminded me too strongly of the incident with Stash’s army a few months ago, when supernaturals had suddenly gained more powers, taking on all the abilities of Legion soldiers.
Except Stash’s army had been freed and they were all back to normal. Not to mention, Hardwicke wasn’t crazy like Stash’s people had been. Well, at least not crazy as in feral. He could communicate beyond primitive grunts and growls.
“How did your people get their magic?” I asked him.
He pressed his lips together, resisting the pull of my compulsion.
“How did your people get their magic?” I repeated, clamping down my magic on his mind.
His mouth trembled. He was shaking against his handcuffs like a fish on a hook. The words finally exploded out of his hard lips. “We took a potion that gave us all this magic.”
“All at once?”
“Yes.”
I looked at Bella.
“That shouldn’t be possible,” she told me. “There is no magic bullet. The only potion I know of that can bestow humans with supernatural powers is Nectar. And it doesn’t give anyone all those powers at once.”
In fact, we took Nectar bit by bit, one dose at a time, usually over the course of years. Nectar, the food of the gods, was pure poison. It killed people who didn’t have enough magic potential to absorb it. Legion soldiers had to train hard to increase our chances of survival. This mystery potion Hardwicke claimed existed sounded too good to be true.
“I want to see this potion,” I said to Hardwicke.
“We don’t have any of it here.”
A convenient lie or simply good security? In either case, it was a big, fat dead end.
“What do the Pioneers want with my sisters?” I asked him.
“Your sisters are special. We need their unique magic.”
Just like the elemental I’d questioned had told me. What the hell was up with my sisters’ magic? They’d never shown signs of having any.
“Where are they?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
And he was even telling the truth. There wasn’t anything left of his mind to fight me.
“Who has them?”
“I don’t know.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, Calli raised her gun and shot him in the head. He didn’t die immediately, his powers keeping him alive. So she just kept shooting until he stopped moving.
I spun around to face her. “Why did you kill my prisoner? Again. I was getting somewhere with him.”
“He knew nothing mo
re, and he was a threat,” she said calmly.
“A threat to whom? He was cuffed to the wall.”
She didn’t respond.
“This is about Tessa and Gin, isn’t it? About their magic? You know what they’re all talking about. You know why my sisters are being hunted.”
“Not here. Not now.”
I glanced back and watched Jace’s team enter the prison room. No one followed them in, so they must have neutralized all of Hardwicke’s forces.
“Have you seen the deserter?” Jace asked.
“He got away.”
Jace frowned at me.
“There was a whole army between him and me, and he was already escaping out of the window.”
His mouth narrowing into a hard, tight line, Jace glanced at the dead man chained to the wall. “Who is that?”
“Hardwicke, the former leader of this castle.”
The little vein in Jace’s temple bulged with irritation. It looked ready to pop. “Damn it, Leda. I needed him. The Interrogators could have gotten something out of him.”
“I’m sorry. There’s nothing I could do.”
“You could have not shot him in the head six times. He was chained up. He wasn’t going anywhere.”
“He had the strength of a vampire and the magic of an elemental. He was about to break free of his chains. And he had a fireball in his hands.”
It was a big fat lie, but I didn’t waver in my conviction. As long as I’d been the one to fire the shots and I claimed it was in self defense, the Legion couldn’t do much. Sure, Colonel Fireswift could threaten me, but he wouldn’t kill me.
But if Jace found out that it had been Calli who’d shot Hardwicke, he’d be forced to report that back to his father. Colonel Fireswift would then throw her to the Interrogators until they found out why she’d done it. Calli didn’t shoot people on a whim. She’d done it because she was scared—scared for Tessa and Gin, for what would happen to them if anyone found out about their mysterious magic. I wished she’d at least tell me what was going on.
“I interrogated him,” I told Jace. “He is part of an organization called the Pioneers.”
“The Pioneers.” He repeated the word like it was tainted.
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Yes. They’ve been around for years, hiding in the shadows. Their goal is to overthrow the gods and rule the world. So far, it’s been nothing but big talk and treacherous promises. They haven’t actually acted until now. What’s changed?”
“They’ve figured out how to bottle magic that a mortal can drink, creating a potion with all the benefits of Nectar, and with none of the risk of instant death.”
“That is not possible,” Jace stated.
“Are you so sure about that? You fought Hardwicke’s guards. You saw for yourself that it is possible.”
He clenched his jaw. “It should not be possible.”
“What is and what should be are two entirely different things. If things were as they should be, monsters wouldn’t roam the Earth, and I’d be a millionaire.”
He shook his head at me. “You’re taking this situation too lightly.”
“Right now, Jace, I’m exhausted, not to mention scared out of my mind that something’s happened to my sisters.”
His eyes panned across the room. “They’re not here?”
“They’re not here. And they’re not the only prisoners still at large.”
“I’m sorry. We’ll get them back, Leda,” he said, so low that his soldiers couldn’t hear.
“Thank you,” I whispered back.
“Load the kidnap victims and the Pioneers into the truck,” he said, louder this time.
His soldiers had already gathered the prisoners together and put the surviving guards in chains. I didn’t like them much, but I couldn’t deny that they were efficient.
As soon as Jace and his team left the room, I turned to confront Calli—but she was already gone.
It wasn’t until we were back on the train to Chicago that I got a chance to speak to my foster mother. Bella and I found Calli ordering a strong cup of coffee in the onboard restaurant.
“We need to talk,” I told her. “Follow me.”
I led her and Bella to an abandoned train car. I put up some anti-spy Magitech, then turned to face Calli.
“Time to fess up. You’re going to tell us what the hell is going on with our little sisters.”
Calli sighed. “It’s a long story.”
I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. The train rumbled and shook over the tracks, filling the heavy silence.
“Gin and Tessa were taken for their magic,” I prompted her.
Calli’s face was grim.
“You never told us that Tessa and Gin had magic.” I looked at Bella. “Did you know?”
“No.”
“Calli, what’s going on?” I demanded. “What are Tessa’s and Gin’s powers? What is making people hunt them?”
“I don’t know what their powers are,” she said. “But this isn’t the first time they’ve been hunted for their magic. Many years ago when the girls were very young, hardly older than toddlers, the warlords of the wild magic lands, beyond civilization’s borders, went to war over them.”
18
Calli's Story
“It was fourteen years ago,” Calli began her story. “I had a job that brought me to the Sea of Sin, a vast savannah where monsters roam and the world’s most vicious warlords call home. I’d been tasked to recover a magical treasure at the so-called Paragon Temple, an old gold mine abandoned centuries ago. I got the treasure out, but while leaving the ruins, I was besieged by monsters and forced to flee.”
Growing up, Calli had told us many tales of the wilderness back from her younger days. They always started a lot like this: with a job that went horribly wrong.
“The monsters drove me to the edge of the savannah,” she continued. “To escape them, I ran into a jungle. The beasts did not follow me. I knew that meant whatever lived in the trees was far worse than the monsters, but I had little choice. So I traveled through the jungle, looking for another path out, hoping to evade the monsters and find a way around them to my truck.
“While wandering through the jungle, I soon realized I was not alone. The infamous human warlord Hellfire had claimed this place as his own. I hid from his patrols, taking cover up in the trees. The soldiers were hunting someone. Two escaped prisoners, I overheard. I assumed they were prisoners taken during Hellfire’s battle with the Rogue King, another warlord in those parts. Apparently, the Rogue King took issue with Hellfire’s territorial claim to the jungle.
“I knew I had to get out of there quickly, before I was caught in the crossfire of this battle of the warlords. As soon as the patrols passed, I hurried off, and not a moment too soon. As I fled, I heard the clamor of the two war bands clashing—bullets and blades, magic and machines. I ran away from the battle as fast as my legs would carry me. And that’s when I found them, two girls no older than four years old, curled up under a gum tree.”
“Gin and Tessa,” I said.
Calli nodded. “They looked so small, so scared. They were holding to each other tightly, afraid to let go. When they saw I didn’t belong to a warlord’s band, I managed to coax them out of hiding. They told me they’d escaped Hellfire’s camp.”
“Gin and Tessa were the escaped prisoners Hellfire’s patrols had spoken of, the ones the soldiers were hunting,” Bella said quietly.
“Hellfire’s soldiers weren’t the only ones hunting them,” Calli told us. “The Rogue King had started a war with Hellfire over them. These two little girls had been out there in the jungle for months, fighting to stay free every second since their escape. They had killed beasts for food. They had killed soldiers to survive. Two young innocents, no longer innocent.”
“How awful.” Bella’s voice shook.
The thought of these two little girls—my sisters—having to go through all that made me sick to my stomach. “Yo
u never figured out what their magic is?” I asked Calli.
“I grabbed their hands, and we ran out of that jungle as fast as we could go. I never saw their magic,” she replied. “The warlords had spent months hunting them—and fighting each other—over Tessa and Gin, so I knew their magic had to be very rare and powerful. The girls didn’t want to talk about their magic or what had happened in the jungle. They shuddered whenever I asked, so I stopped asking. They spoke in hushed whispers of terrible black beasts in the jungle, so vicious that even the warlords’ bands shunned them.
“From those short tales, I gathered that they each possessed a different kind of magic. They’d met in a warlord’s laboratory, the atrocities they’d lived through creating an unbreakable bond between them, a bond stronger than blood.”
“In all these years, they’ve never spoken of their magic,” I said.
Guilt flashed across Calli’s face. “They were four years old, and they were fighting for their lives in a monster-infested jungle. They were far too young to have lived through all that. Those warlords had stolen their childhood from them. On our way across the plains, they fell asleep in the truck. As they slept, looking so sweet, so innocent, I swore I would find a way to give them a normal life, the life they deserved. So when we got home, I carried their sleeping bodies to Zane.”
My brother Zane was Calli’s first adopted child. He’d been with her longer than any of us.
“I asked Zane to use his magic to block the girls’ memories of their early life, to block their suffering so they could live normal lives,” she said. “They were so young, and memories fade easily at that age.”
Bella took Calli’s hand and squeezed it. “I would have done the same thing. The two of them had seen too much.” Her voice caught in her throat. “They’d killed too much. They never would have grown up to be the sweet, happy girls they are now, girls full of hope, innocence, and fun. You gave them a chance at a bright life, not one tainted by blood and fear.”
Calli looked at me. “You don’t agree with Bella.”
“You meant well, Calli, but secrets have a knack for not staying buried. And now the secrets of your past have come back to haunt us. The Pioneers have found out about Gin and Tessa, and now they are hunting them down too. What else are you hiding from us?” I asked her. “What else do you know? Did you know about Bella’s origin as well?”
