Harley Merlin 4: Harley Merlin and the First Ritual

by Forrest, Bella

  “I won’t tell them for a while,” I agreed. “I’ll give you some time to come up with your own way of breaking it to them, but that’s not an indefinite silence. You can’t just sweep it under the rug.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “I’m feeling quite tired, actually. I’m not kicking you out or anything; I’m just going to go to sleep now, see if that makes me feel any chirpier.”

  He smiled and leaned over, kissing me on the forehead. “Goodnight, little one.”

  “You haven’t called me that in years,” I said, surprised.

  “I miss it,” he replied. “Now, get some rest. I’ll come back in a few hours and check on you.”

  I stared at him as he went, trying to muster some kind of nostalgic happiness at being called that name again. It reminded me of long car journeys when I was very little, when he’d take me out of my car seat and carry me to my bed. It reminded me of him reading me stories at night, and of baking on a Sunday afternoon. He was terrible at it, but he did it because I wanted to. It reminded me of happy times, but I couldn’t feel anything. I could recall the memories, but they held no emotion whatsoever. I couldn’t cry, couldn’t smile, couldn’t laugh. My heart went on beating, but it might as well have been dead.

  Turning over in the bed, I closed my eyes and pulled the covers up to my chin. As soon as darkness slid beneath my eyelids, a thousand screaming nightmares burst into my head. I tried to open my eyes again, but they were fixed shut. I was trapped in the gloom, lost amongst the souls surrounding me. I heard voices in the black oblivion, begging me to let them cross over to paradise. I heard the lapping of water, somewhere in the distance, and the cries of the desperate, asking for my dad’s mercy—asking him to bring them back, the way he’d done with me. Somehow, a crack had opened between the underworld and the real world, and I was the gateway.

  I came back wrong, I came back wrong, I came back wrong…

  It took a long time for sleep to come, and when it did, I wasn’t even sure I was sleeping. The nightmares stayed, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get my eyes to blink awake.

  * * *

  Had I been able to, I would’ve cried at the sight of the sun streaming in through the infirmary windows, waking me up. The nightmares had been chased away, and the voices had disappeared, though I still couldn’t get rid of the weird, empty feeling inside. It looked as though sleep hadn’t exactly healed me, nor had it brought back the missing part of me. That was still lost out there, somewhere I couldn’t find it.

  Feeling achy and sore, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and hauled myself out. Physically, I wasn’t too bad: a bit unsteady, but nothing was peeling off and I wasn’t visibly decaying. I had a tendency to dwell on the zombie aspect of the resurrected, considering I sort of was one. A sentient, more or less fully functioning one, but a zombie nonetheless. I padded over to the chair in the corner of the room, where fresh clothes had been laid out. Throwing them on, I wandered to the door of my hospital room and peered out. The place was empty, except for one solitary, pacing figure.

  Garrett…

  “Oh… you’re up,” he said as he saw me. “I didn’t think you would be for a while.”

  “Yeah, I’m feeling much better.”

  “What’d the doc say?”

  I shrugged. “My tests all came back negative. I am, as they say, in perfect health, aside from the fatigue and near-death flashbacks.” I leveled my gaze at him. “What are you doing here, Garrett?”

  “Alton came to visit you a while ago. He said that, if you woke up before ten, I should bring you down to his office—but only if you’re feeling up to it. I need to be there, too, but I thought I’d wait a little longer before I checked in on you. Didn’t want to bother you if you were sleeping.” He looked flustered, running a hand through his hair.

  I nodded. “No problem. Let’s get down there now.”

  “You don’t have to, if you’re still feeling sick.”

  “It’s fine, Garrett. I’ll be just fine.”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “You sure? You look dazed.”

  “Honestly, I just need to take a walk and clear my head. If I feel poorly again, I’ll come right back.” I made to walk past him, but he grabbed my arm, pulling me back.

  “Can we talk for a minute?”

  “What about?” I asked, exhausted.

  He took a deep breath. “You. Me. All of this mess.”

  “You made your perspective on that very clear. We don’t have to talk about it again.”

  “Astrid… I carried your dead body in my arms yesterday. I held you, and I was praying to any god that would listen to keep you in the land of the living. I was begging for you to hold on,” he said, his face contorted with pain. “It showed me something. It showed me that none of the other stuff matters. We argued, we had some big issues, but I care about you so much. I don’t want to lose you. If we can fix this… well, I want to. I think this is worth fixing.”

  My mom’s words came back to me, echoey and strange. If something is worth fixing…

  “I don’t know if now is the time,” I replied stiffly. I couldn’t feel anything.

  “It’s just that…” He trailed off, clearly struggling to put the right words together. “You remember I told you that I’d been to visit Finch in Purgatory?”

  “Yes.” What does that have to do with us?

  “Well, I didn’t just go there to get some kind of closure. I actually went to tell him that Adley was dead. I figured he ought to know,” he explained. “It was pretty bad, as you can imagine. The guy was totally torn up about it. Back then, I didn’t think I could ever imagine what that might feel like, but then yesterday happened. I understood, then. I felt it—that unbearable grief. It made everything else seem insignificant. And then you came back, and I realized that I had a chance that Finch won’t ever get—I’ve got the chance to make this work.”

  I looked at him, willing the emotions to come… but they didn’t. “I’m sorry, Garrett. I can’t talk about this now. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I need to sort my head out first.”

  “If you don’t feel the same, I’ll understand.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not that. The thing is… I don’t feel anything.”

  “What?”

  My chest gripped, as though a weight was sitting on my ribcage. “I’m hollow inside.”

  “I don’t understand.” He looked worried, as if this was entirely because of him—as if he’d been the one to hollow me out and leave me empty. I wanted to reassure him that it wasn’t the case, but the words evaded me.

  “Forget it, I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” I said. “Can we talk about this some other time? I’m finding everything a bit… uh, overwhelming right now.”

  He nodded. “Sure, of course. I should have waited until you felt better.”

  “I do care though, Garrett.” At least, I think I do, somewhere deep down.

  A wave of relief washed over his face. “You do?”

  “I never stopped.”

  “So… another time?”

  I forced a smile onto my face, the action strange and almost unnatural. “Another time.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I will be,” I lied. I had no idea if I would be.

  “You don’t have to come to this meeting if you want to stay in bed.”

  “I want to. I’ll be fine.” With that, I walked through the infirmary and headed to Alton’s office, with Garrett in tow. After what my father and I had discussed last night, I wondered if this might be on the same subject. It was just as likely to be a debrief over what had happened yesterday.

  I walked in to find the rest of the Rag Team already gathered, all of them swiveling around to look at me as I entered. Expressions of concern greeted me, changing to surprise as they saw Garrett behind me. He moved swiftly over to the far side of the room, by the desk, a worried look on his face. I made myself smile at him, and he smiled back. />
  “Astrid! How’re you feeling?” Harley asked.

  “Sleepy but okay,” I replied. “I’m a little hungry, too.”

  “For brains?” Raffe joked, getting a swift smack in the back of the head from Santana.

  “That’s not funny, Raffe,” she chided.

  I smiled stiffly. “I don’t know, I thought it was pretty funny.”

  “It’s good to see you on your feet again,” Tatyana interjected.

  “Yeah, you had us worried for a minute there,” Dylan added.

  Garrett held my gaze. “Really worried.”

  “Can I get you anything?” Wade chimed in. “Coffee, water, something to eat?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll get all that later. I just came to hear what all the fuss was about.”

  “Well, I was about to begin, so your timing could not be more perfect,” Alton said, his voice tight and strained. “Please, take a seat.”

  I did so, Raffe making his chair available for me, the invalid. I thanked him and sank into the soft cushion, letting it take my weight for a while. I hadn’t been lying about the tiredness—everything felt heavy and uncomfortable, my bones creaking.

  “I haven’t been entirely honest with you all,” Alton began, keeping his head up. “You see, the reason we managed to get the children back had nothing to do with the discovery of a magical medallion that could lead us to Katherine’s associates. In fact, it only led to one place, and that location was given to me by Katherine herself. I made a deal with her, to get the children back, as I believed it was the only way to stop her from killing them, and taking their Chaos for herself, or using them as weapons in her war.”

  I glanced at the others, trying to gauge their reactions. Harley looked stunned, Wade looked horrified, Santana looked about ready to explode, Raffe looked blank, Dylan looked confused, Tatyana looked furious, and Garrett looked downright murderous. I couldn’t blame Garrett for being the angriest amongst them—my father had accused him of being a traitor for so long, when it was actually Alton who was the traitor. Hypocrisy at its finest. I wouldn’t have been shocked if Garrett had socked him in the face, right then and there, though I hoped he wouldn’t. Alton was still my father, regardless of what he had done. The group stood in silence, waiting for Alton to continue.

  “I agreed to exchange Quetzi for the children, with the hope that Quetzi would be strong enough to escape and evade Katherine,” Alton said. “The spy wouldn’t have left the coven with Quetzi; I had a fail-safe in place to ensure that, but… I didn’t expect Quetzi to want to fight her, face-to-face.” He paused, taking a shaky breath. “Am I sorry for doing it? Yes, in many ways. Do I think it was worth it? I’m not sure. It has come to my attention that there were more children being held at the facility. In which case, my actions have been fairly futile. Although the children we rescued are alive and well, which is always a victory, however small.” His voice trembled, his hands riffling through papers as a means of distraction from the emotion in his words. In a way, it was hard to watch.

  “This is a joke, right?” Harley choked out.

  Alton shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  “You sold out to her? What the actual hell, Alton?” Harley looked about ready to implode.

  “There is one more aspect to it,” he replied quietly. “Katherine threatened to kill Astrid if I didn’t comply, and I could not have that happen. You all know this by now, after yesterday, but she’s my daughter. I could not let Katherine murder her and take away any chance I might have of resurrecting her.”

  “There must have been another way,” Santana interjected. “Couldn’t you have tried to entrap her, while you were making the exchange? Couldn’t you have bluffed?”

  “That was part of my initial plan, but she used her spy wisely. I wasn’t allowed to know of their identity, and we never met face-to-face. It was all done through transmissions and orders,” he explained.

  “The Bestiary… was that you?” Raffe gaped in horror.

  To me, that was definitely the worst part of it. Anything could’ve happened if the spy had sabotaged the place. My father had put his trust in a foolish place, and I could only partially understand why. My life wasn’t worth that risk.

  “In order to cover Quetzi’s escape, some mayhem needed to be created. I didn’t expect it to cause quite so much chaos, but everything was swiftly resolved thanks to yourselves and Tobe, and the security teams who helped in getting the beasts back in their boxes,” he said.

  “You realize you could have lost your job then and there, if the Mage Council had found out about it? You understand that, yes?” Tatyana cut in coldly. “You would be in Purgatory right now, no matter what your reasons were.”

  He dipped his head. “I know. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen—well, not quite like this, anyway. I didn’t mean for Quetzi to die, and for Katherine to sap his energy. I was supposed to stop it all before it got that far.”

  “So, you messed up?” Garrett muttered. “Believe me, I can understand not wanting to put Astrid in harm’s way, but you can’t know that Katherine will keep her promise. Now that she’s all super-powerful and stuff, what’s she going to do? Ritual number two will be the first thing on her mind, and none of us know what that entails.”

  “We’ll have to figure it out,” Harley shot back. “We can’t give up because of this. The Librarian knows all of the spells that have ever been written, and she’s in Katherine’s grasp. Our next action should be to launch a rescue for her. If we want to stop Katherine, we need this Librarian.”

  “There is one more thing,” Alton announced. “I wish it weren’t so, but it may make your next steps more difficult. However, I can see no other option. I must make amends for this deal.”

  The Rag Team stared at him expectantly.

  “I have decided to step down as director of this coven,” he said, surveying the room with concerned eyes. “I will announce the news of my resignation to the rest of the coven this afternoon. In the meantime, the Mage Council have already been informed and will send an appropriate substitute for me, until a permanent director can be found. I don’t know who that substitute will be, but they will be suitably qualified for the role.”

  “Tell me this is another joke?” Harley yelled. “You’re upping and leaving us now?”

  “I have to.”

  Tatyana shook her head. “You have made a grave mistake, but what if this new director prevents us from taking measures against Katherine? You know how everyone feels about the SDC. They’ll take it out of our hands.”

  “Can’t you save it for a while?” Dylan said. “Put it off until this is over?”

  Alton sighed. “That would be dishonest. I’ve lost your trust, and this can’t work without that. You’ll always be wondering if I’m still making deals with her.”

  “We’ll forget about it,” Raffe promised. “Temporarily.”

  “You can’t do this to us,” Santana added, her expression cold.

  “It has already been done,” Alton said.

  I looked at him. “Wait, did you tell the Mage Council what you did?”

  He cleared his throat. “I didn’t. I simply handed in my resignation, and said I no longer had confidence in my abilities to run the SDC. I was trying to protect you, Astrid. I know I did wrong, but I don’t want to go to Purgatory for it.”

  “So, you want us to cover for you?” Harley asked.

  “It’s a big request, and I will understand if you don’t want to. However, I can continue to be your eyes if I am allowed my freedom. I can still help, just not in an official capacity.”

  “You don’t have to do this, Alton,” Santana urged.

  He smiled. “I do. It is my duty.”

  Garrett folded his arms across his chest. “I think it’s a good idea. He’s right; we can’t trust him. It might be a pain in the ass, but at least we’ll know we’re not being lied to,” he said. “Then again, it doesn’t affect me much... I guess this is as good a time as any to te
ll you all, since Alton has just announced his resignation. I’ve been given my own assignments by the LA Coven, now that Stella and Channing aren’t here anymore. So, I’ll be leaving the Rag Team, and working independently with the LA Coven and some of the security teams here.”

  I sat up straighter, surprised he hadn’t mentioned this earlier in the infirmary. “What’s your assignment?”

  He flashed me an apologetic look. “I can’t tell you. It’s top secret from the LA Coven.”

  “There’s no such thing as top secret when you’re in my coven,” Alton said firmly.

  “Well, it isn’t your coven anymore, is it?” Garrett fired back, his eyes burning with anger. My father had the common sense not to retaliate, no doubt realizing just how furious Garrett was, after all the accusations and the body cams. “Oh, and we’ll all be taking these things off now. I don’t want to hear a word of disagreement. There’s no need for us to wear them anymore, so you can shove them where the sun doesn’t shine.” He tore off his body cam and threw it in the trash, an icy smile of victory turning up the corners of his lips. Even then, Alton didn’t move a muscle. He had no leg to stand on.

  With the two most important men in my life leaving the group and the coven, respectively, I started to wonder what might be on the horizon. There were going to be a whole bunch of drastic changes and, given my current state, it was going to be even harder to deal with. Without Alton as director, even the day-to-day running of things—the tiniest idiosyncrasies—would get an overhaul. This place had been a huge part of his life for so long, and now he was stepping away from it, because I’d urged him to. I worried about his future. Plus, without him here, it would feel strange—he’d been my solid link to the coven. I’d always felt apart from the others in this place, but now I felt completely alone. A human in a crowd of magicals wasn’t a comfortable place to be.

  Then again, this was the only place I belonged. This was the only place where someone like me fit in. Besides, if I was going to have any hope of recovering from whatever was going on inside me, being here was where I needed to be.