by Laynie Bynum
“Autumn.” Kai snapped her fingers to regain my attention.
“Sorry,” I said looking back to her. “What news?”
She gave a conspiratorial glance over her shoulder before she leaned in. “There are people willing to help. Outside.”
I quickly snapped my head to the fence, to the world beyond that always seemed out of reach. I strained my eyes, hoping to see someone—anyone—who’d be able to help us.
“Not out there,” she hissed, gripping my shoulder to turn me back to face her. “Outside.”
She watched me as if waiting for me to make sense of her implication. I only shook my head, unable to make the connection.
Sighing, she leaned in close. Really close. I could feel her warmth, unexpected in this cold place. Even her breath was hot against my chilled skin.
“There are people who knew Winter who are ready to help you.”
I almost stumbled. “Who? How?”
“Shh,” she hushed me harshly. “Seriously Autumn, you’d think you of all people would know the meaning of discretion.”
She was right.
“I’m sorry. Please… tell me.”
The look she gave me was part sympathetic, part pity. I didn’t know which I disliked more. “Alright, so, I’ve figured out how we can contact my connections and hopefully get some answers about your sister.”
My heart thudded a little louder. “How did you do this?”
Something glimmered in her bright eyes. “I have my ways.”
I remembered her absence at dinner the night before, which also reminded me what I did during that dinner. My attention returned to the yard, and it was as if he knew I was thinking about him.
Xander was already walking our way, people clearing out of his path as he moved by them. His smile was cocky as he approached. “You two look like a couple of gossiping schoolgirls from across the yard.”
Kai glared. “Yeah, well it isn’t gossip that concerns you, mageslayer.”
I put my hand on her arm to reel her in. Maybe Xander was just the help we needed. Maybe in order for all of my questions about why I was here and how to get out to be answered, I needed all of us to work together.
Xander held all of the answers about the dark magic I’d used and whether or not I actually belonged in this terrible place. And probably more too. Possibly he could help me identify the spells that had wounded Winter and who could have done it. He was obviously pretty high in that circle.
Kai held the answers to why I’d been driven to that extreme in the first place. About the secrets Winter had been hiding. About the things she was planning. About why anyone would want to kill her.
And now, through her and Xander, it was possible I finally had my own connections to find out the who and the why… now I just needed them to work together.
“Xander, can you give us like… two seconds?” I asked as I pulled Kai away from him and to the other side of one of the nearby picnic tables.
He put up his hands, motioning to the area around us. “Not like I have anything better to do. Clearly.”
I grinned back at him and continued to pull Kai away until he wasn’t in earshot.
“What the f—” she protested.
“Just hear me out, okay?”
She huffed and crossed her arms in response.
“He may have the information we need.” Information I needed, more like. But still. “I think it isn’t a horrible idea to let him in on what we may or may not know.”
Kai sneered at me. “It is exactly a horrible idea. You cannot trust him, Autumn. He’s Guild through and through.”
“Look, I just… I need answers about Winter’s death, okay? I need to know what happened. I need to know if I could have helped.”
Kai’s eyes softened, the edges of her mouth pulling down. “I know,” she said quietly. “I know you do. But he isn’t the way to get it. Just trust me please.”
I snuck a look at him as he tucked his hands in the pockets of his uniform and moved the tip of his boot in a circle in the dirt. He looked so boyish; it was almost enough to forget the inhumane things he’d done as part of the Guild.
Almost.
“Fine. What was it you needed to tell me?” I asked, turning back to Kai and squaring my shoulders.
She leaned in close again, the sensation of human interaction making the nerves in my body light up after what seemed like forever in a place that only bred isolation. “I got a message out. The Grey is designed for mages, not sprites. And especially not sprite royalty. They overlooked that the water lines connect to the sea on the other side of the prison. I may not have powers here, but I still have this.”
She flipped her hair as if she was in a shampoo commercial. “No matter where I am, a single strand of hair is all I need to connect to the High Council.”
“How does that work?” I asked, looking over her marine-hued mane.
“Consider it a perk of water sprite royalty. Speak into the strand and send it on its way. The water and the magic do the rest.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, about that royalty thing. I feel like that was something you could have mentioned earlier.”
“It’s not exactly something I flaunt. Sprite royalty is notorious for sucking up to the Guild.” Her movements were getting quicker, her motioning more spastic, ss if she was trying to shed off a skin that had grown too small. “But it’s not the point either way. The point is, there are people out there that are willing to help us.”
Hope fluttered in my chest, a dangerous and unwelcome feeling in my current situation. “Help us how?”
Kai’s voice lowered even further. “Get us the hell out of this place.”
“Who?”
“I told you, I have my connections.”
Yeah, apparently connections like my older sister. “Seriously, who?”
“Before all of this—when I was working with Winter—I’d taken on an assignment in the rebellion. We needed information from someone inside the Guild. Our information team identified a high-Level officer who was likely to give us that information.”
Information team. Assignment. The rebellion. How deep did this thing go? What had Winter gotten herself involved with? “Sounds a bit James Bond.”
She winked and then grew serious again. “Hudson Frost isn’t exactly your typical Guild Rep though. He’s… kind.” Her vision darted to Xavier in the distance. “Not arrogant.”
“So how can Handsome Ice or whatever you just said help us now?”
“He knows the Grey inside and out. He’s in charge of the enforcers. Out there and in here. Or, at least, he is for now. Once they find out what he’s been planning he’s screwed.”
So we couldn’t trust Xander who was in the same boat as us, but we could trust the source of all of this. I was wary. More than wary. As much as I hated it, I started to wonder if I could even trust Kai.
I’d rushed in headlong due to her connection with my sister, but how much did I really know about this princess of the water sprites?
When I didn’t react to her statement, Kai grew impatient, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “Aren’t you going to ask me why he’s so willing to help? Or what he’s planning?”
I swallowed hard, trying to shove down my doubt. It was worth trying to find out all the information I could. I’d take it all in and then decide what I could believe. “Fine, I’ll bite. Tell me why he’s going to help.”
She smiled, although it didn’t reach her eyes. “You’ll love this part.”
I doubted it. Not with the way I was feeling. Not with the desire to get back over to Xander pulling me further and further away from her.
“So, back at home. You guys had a ward—Annie?”
Every muscle in my body stiffened. “Lucy.”
“Ah, yeah. Well, he’s still there with her. Says he watched them take you.”
So this Hampton Icicle was the dark stranger who came in that night. I tried to contain my disappointment. “He’s the one who sen
t me here.”
Kai waved a finger in my face. “Uh-uh. That would be your dear Lucy. According to Hudson, she was extremely freaked out and didn’t think they’d actually take you. But she’s the key, Autumn. All this time, she was Winter’s proof.”
“What does that even mean?” I said a little louder than I intended. I whipped my head around, and found an empty spot where Xander had been standing just moments before. I guess he’d grown tired of waiting for us.
Dammit.
It was a tug of war between finding out why I was here and finding out if I’d ever be able to leave. At the end of the day though, the need for survival would always win out. And in this place, survival meant escape.
I’d seen the hollow look on the faces of those who’d been here too long. The bruises on their skin. The hunched way they held themselves. They’d been broken. Over and over until they submitted to the Grey’s rule. As if the walls themselves were enough to drive a sane man mad.
Even inside the Grey, the whispers about its legendary status were relentless. It took everything from you until you were a husk of a person. It was both a source of unmeasurable power and a not unlike a vampire siphoning your life source.
“It means,” Kai said, holding on to the last syllable a beat longer than necessary, “that Lucy never had a potion in her life. She was never assigned a mage class. Never stepped foot into a guild hall.”
I knew this. Lucy’s parents had been so destitute and addicted to earthbound drugs that it was a miracle she’d survived, much less with her magic still intact. And once she came to us, Winter had been insistent that we did not report her to the Guild because they’d try to take her away and the last thing any of us wanted was for her to become their ward.
We’d seen plenty of mage kids go into their system and come out terrifyingly warped and far different than they were when they went in.
“What’s your point?” I was growing frustrated at the way she wouldn’t just get on with it. I wanted her information, but a tiny piece of me was hoping I’d still have time to find Xander after our conversation.
“Lucy is proof that there is no such thing as a black mage or a white mage. You’re all just mages. The Guild decides your magic based on your potential for rebellion. Those who show resistance are stripped of their dark powers so they can only heal. Those that are obedient are allowed to keep the destructive powers so the Guild can use them for their own devices.”
What she said made no sense and I didn’t have the mental capacity to begin to wrap my mind around it. Toward the end of his life, my dad often rambled about the same things. And Winter and I would listen intently. But where had that gotten us? Murdered and in prison. Frustrated, I turned to walk away. “I can’t… deal with this right now. It doesn’t make sense, and I need to be done with this conversation.”
“Doesn’t make any sense? Think about it again. Think about everything Winter sacrificed for this.”
She didn’t even have to raise her voice to make her point. I stilled but didn’t turn around. Winter and I were rogues, but this was bordering on conspiracy-theory-obsessed vagrants shouting about the coming apocalypse on the street corner.
“Winter was convinced,” Kai continued. “So much so she started the rebellion. We owe it to her to continue this. And to do that we need Hudson and Lucy’s help.”
I slid a hand over my face and took a deep breath before I turned to face her. At this point, I didn’t know what Winter would have wanted. She had left me out of all of this. Never once did she speak a word of it. And getting involved had only dug me into a hole so deep I couldn’t see the light above me. I’d lost everything I’d ever known.
But somehow, I knew the only way to get it back was to keep digging until I reached the other side, wherever it would lead.
Somehow, going insane was my only hope of retaining my sanity.
“What do we need to do?”
Kai perched on the edge of the picnic table. “First order of business is finding an alternative food source. They put dampening potions in the food. That’s why we can’t use our magic here.”
I folded my arms. “They stripped us of our magic when we went through booking. Big scary empty room. Disembodied voices. I’m sure you remember.”
“Bullshit,” she said, sticking her tongue out. “It was all just for show. They’re terribly dramatic, the Guild. The real stuff is in the food. Baked right in with whatever glop they’re serving us. And then there are inhibitors on our cells just in case. But they aren’t big enough to go around the entire prison. There are dead zones, but they rely too heavily on the food and our fear.”
“Good to know, I guess. You still aren’t telling me how this helps us get out of here.”
“That is still a work in progress.”
I closed my eyes against the harsh sunlight and tried to think. “I still want to get Xander involved. I’m pretty sure he could help us.”
“You don’t know who he is, Autumn.” There was a warning in her voice. Something more than just not wanting him involved in our schemes. Something dangerous.
“And you do? Then tell me. What am I supposed to be so scared of when it comes to him? You know, beyond that whole former Guild assassin part.”
“The resistance has had eyes on him from day one. Raised by the Guild. Extremely powerful magic. And he had absolutely no qualms with doing their bidding, no matter how gruesome. He’s a killer, Autumn. A paid, contracted, cold-blooded murderer.”
“You know that for a fact? Have you seen him kill?” He’d all but admitted as much, but I still couldn’t fathom the soft, quiet man I’d met could be worthy of such a nasty reputation.
“I don’t have to. I’ve seen the reports. I know what he’s capable of.”
“Sounds like someone who might come in handy on our side then.”
“He will never be part of the rebellion, Autumn. His blood runs thick with Guild poisoning.”
“Let me talk to him, at least. They threw him in here. He’s got to be somewhat resentful. Maybe enough to join us.”
Kai rolled her eyes and shook her head from side to side, but didn’t protest. “Tell him nothing about Hudson. You will not risk his life and mine because you can’t get over some too-cute for his own good bad boy.”
“I never said—”
She got up off the picnic table and headed for the door. “You didn’t have to.”
Chapter Eight
“Took you long enough,” Xander said when I finally found him sitting in the grass, leaning against the chain-link prison fence.
“Kai never shuts up,” I said bitterly. I knew I shouldn’t be mad at her— she was only trying to help get us out of the Grey. But the realization of how little I knew about my sister, and how much more she seemed to know than me, was starting to grate on me more than the bad prison food.
He laughed and I tried to imagine him as sinister as Kai said he was, but it still didn’t add up. “You two get everything worked out? She seemed kind of keyed up.”
“Yeah, we're good.” I sat on the grass beside him, picking a dandelion from the space in between us and plucking at its yellow petals. It was strange for such a beautiful, natural thing to grow among all the concrete and metal.
“You’re unique, ya know,” he drawled after a few moments of silence. “Not just because you haven’t taken the potions, but because—well, I don’t know a single white mage who would have tried that sort of spell. They’re all pretty, I don't know, stuck up and entitled. Righteous. Holier than though, if you will.”
“Well, that is mage-ist.”
The corners of his mouth turned up into a smile as he looked at me from underneath his long lashes. “Why aren’t you scared of me, Autumn Quinn?”
I shrugged. “What’s there to be scared of?”
He looked out at the crowd of people blatantly keeping their distance from him. “Nothing. But try telling them that and they’ll laugh you out of the yard.”
I watched him for a
moment and tried to gauge what Kai had told me versus what I was seeing. It was best to get the hard conversation out of the way. “I heard you were raised by the Guild.” Even if I didn’t want to believe Kai, I’d be an idiot to not find out as much as I could about him before trusting him with anything vital to our escape.
“Raised is a bit of an overstatement. I was a ward, yes. But they were never a family to me.”
“I’ve heard some rough stuff about their system. That it breaks you. Kind of like this place.”
“Well, I guess that is a bit ironic. Turns out, I’m here because it didn’t break me.”
I turned to face him. “What happened?”
His muscles went rigid as if my gaze on him was a weight he couldn’t bear. “I think you could have pulled it off,” he said instead of answering my question. “That’s what you wanted to know yesterday, right?”
The bluntness of his response and quick change of subject had me spinning, my train of thought derailing and coming to an abrupt halt. “Really?”
“Yeah. I’ve heard whisperings of white mages being able to pull off dark spells in certain situations. Between the fact that you’re a rogue and the intense emotions you were feeling, I’m pretty certain if anyone could have done it, it would have been you.”
I thought about the sight of Winter’s chest rising and falling. Breath coming into her lungs and leaving. I was almost there. She’d almost been back.
I was so close...
We sat for a moment in silence as the revelation hit me with full force. Xander waited patiently, plucking grass from beside him and tying the blades together.
“You aren’t the only one to think that, you know,” I said after I found my voice again.
“Think what? That you could have done it?”
“That white mages and black mages aren’t so different. That they can do each other’s spells— any spells, for that matter.”
He shifted toward me, tucking one leg around the other. “You really are like your sister, aren’t you?”
I sat up straight and tried to appear certain and confident even though I wasn’t. “Don’t tell me you’re still so indoctrinated in the Guild that you can’t see it being a possibility.”