by Emma Savant
“You’re pretty tough,” I muttered, keeping my tone conversational and trying not to wince.
I didn’t like playing the part of a kidnapper, but it would be a thousand times worse if her scream managed to let these werewolves lock in on her. I remembered the words they’d used to refer to the people here, prime meat, and picked up my pace.
The girl’s mom spotted us, and I ran past her toward the house with the squirming child still in my arms. The mom sprinted after me, and once they were back on the patio, I shoved her daughter toward her.
“Draw the curtains,” I said. “Don’t lose sight of your kids.”
“Who are you?” the woman said. She cut herself off angrily, and added, “Never mind. We’re going home.”
I caught a hint of movement in the trees, something dark and enormous. I grabbed the woman by the arm.
“You won’t make it to the car,” I said in a low voice.
Her eyes met mine, and her hands gripped tightly around her child. I shoved her toward the door, where two kids were watching us with big eyes.
“Lock the doors,” I called as she stumbled through. “Lock everything. Don’t look or come out until I come to get you.”
The door slammed before I was sure they’d heard me. It didn’t matter what they saw anyway—at this rate, everyone at the party would need their memories erased.
I couldn’t wait to have that on my Dagger training record.
I had my blade out by the time I’d turned to face the shape in the trees.
It was a werewolf, there was no question about that now. The patio lights barely penetrated the dark shadows beneath the bamboo, but they were enough to illuminate a pair of fierce yellow eyes that flashed at me.
My heart pounded in my ears. One werewolf was bad enough. But I could feel more of them out there, and shadows shifted in the corners of my eyes as they crept out from under the trees.
There were at least six edging their way onto the lawn. Goddess only knew how many more would come after.
“Go home,” I ordered the wolf nearest me.
He was still a good twenty feet away, a distance that was nothing to a creature with such powerful legs.
He stepped forward. A growl started low in his throat.
I took a deep, steadying breath and let it out again. If they attacked—if they decided witch meat was as good as Humdrum, or were angry with me for ruining their sport—I wouldn’t even have time to scream.
18
The wolf growled again and took another step. Its paws were massive.
“These people are under my protection,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Go chase some deer.”
Did werewolves even hunt deer? The tiny part of my brain not preoccupied with the monster in front of me was bemused to realize I had never asked Brendan or Alec.
The werewolf bared his teeth, and another wolf snarled behind me. A tingle of fear ran down my spine.
“These are innocent people,” I said, as if that would mean anything to monsters like this.
One of the wolves in the yard howled, and painful goosebumps prickled across my skin. Deep in the stands of greenery, other wolves howled back, and then I heard the hollow sound of bamboo trunks crashing together as the werewolves raced toward the clearing.
Slowly, I inched my hand to the pocket of my jacket. The wolf in front of me snarled and took another step forward.
“I have wolfsbane bombs,” I said. They were tiny, barely more than smoke bombs, but I still cringed at using them after knowing the destruction similar weapons had wreaked on the Wildwood pack. “You can attack me, but you won’t be fast enough to stop them going off. Have you ever encountered wolfsbane before?”
The wolf growled but hesitated.
“It’s agony,” I said. “Your throat closes up. Your skin erupts with boils and lesions. Your eyes cloud over, and you don’t even notice because the pain is blinding.”
Brendan had told me all this, late one night while I’d been helping clear the opening to their den. I still remembered the tightness of his voice as he’d spoken.
I edged my fingertips a millimeter closer to my pocket. The movement was small enough that most people would never have noticed, but he had a werewolf’s eyes, and they missed nothing.
The soft thuds of more heavy bodies stepping into the yard behind me competed with the pounding of my heart, but I kept my gaze fixed on the wolf in front of me. I didn’t know if he was important in the pack hierarchy, but at least I had his attention.
“I don’t have a problem with werewolves,” I said, dagger still outstretched. “If you want to run free in the forests or form packs or even turn consenting people, that’s your business. But you’re here to hunt innocents, and I can’t allow that. If you want to transform, I’m willing to talk.”
The seconds ticked by. No one moved.
“Then you’re welcome to leave,” I said. I shifted my finger slightly down, and my fingertips grazed the edge of the pocket. “You get one chance, and you’ll be happiest if you take it.”
In a deft motion, I pulled one of the bombs out and held it up. The thing was small, no bigger than the palm of my hand.
Revealing it was the wrong choice.
The wolf snarled and jumped toward me, and I ducked and threw myself to the side at the same instant. I tightened my grip on the bomb an instant too late, and it rolled into the grass. I spun to face the wolf as death clouded the edges of my vision—
But he wasn’t coming after me. He lay on his side, twitching, a thick arrow sticking out of his chest. I blinked, hard, and the giant figures of several other wolves emerged from the trees, followed by the smaller, lighter figures of women pouring onto the backyard.
My sisters arrived, and the yard transformed in an instant to a battlefield.
Ginger tossed me a shining silver sword. I caught it by the handle without considering the danger of a miss. This was a reflex honed by years of training, and I didn’t have to think before I slid my dagger into its sheath and sliced the blade through the air and into the shoulder of the nearest werewolf.
Blood gushed from the wound and filled the air with its tang. The wolf yelped and red dripped from the gash and onto the grass. The creature bolted for the trees. I sensed the presence of another wolf behind me and spun. I drove the sword deep into its chest, then ripped it back out and turned to the next attacker.
Flashes of crimson and pink surrounded me as my sisters fought to defend the house. Robin stood next to the door, firing arrows at anyone who dared approach the building, and Mom stood at the edge of the patio with her sword flaring in the lights as she swung it with the precision of a master.
“Why didn’t anyone bring guns?” I shouted to Ginger.
She stabbed upwards and a werewolf’s full weight descended onto her blade, sending her skidding to one side. She shoved the creature with a quick spell and yanked the sword back out.
“Too loud,” she said. “The image you sent made it seem like we should keep things quiet.”
“Fair enough!”
I swung my sword. The pressure of the hilt shifted against my hands as the blade carved through muscle and bone. A shaggy leg fell to the ground, and the werewolf it had been attached to let out a horrible yelp and galloped clumsily toward the trees.
The battle didn’t last long. It couldn’t, now that we were almost evenly matched, with overconfident werewolves pitted against the decades of skill and precision that belonged to the Crimson Daggers.
The last wolf ran into the trees. Its hulking body smashed bamboo stems aside, and in an instant, it had disappeared into the darkness.
19
Stillness and silence overtook the yard. I dropped my weapon and bent over double to catch my breath. My heart still pounded, and my body flooded with tingling relief.
I stood and started laughing.
“Your timing could not have been better,” I said.
“Better would have gotten us here before you had a wolf on
top of you,” Ginger said. She wiped the sweat off her forehead. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I looked out at the giant werewolf bodies and limbs strewn across the lawn. There weren’t many of them, but even the two dead werewolves were large enough to make the yard seem filled.
My heart convulsed at the sight of the corpses.
Crimson Daggers didn’t kill if we could help it. But the mission came first, always, and sometimes protecting the innocent meant destroying the monsters we faced.
I didn’t mind so much when the monsters were things like basilisks and cockatrices. But these were people. Evil people, yes. The kind of people who would attack and murder and maybe even eat children, yes. But still people. Still dead.
“A cleanup team’s already been called,” Mom said, coming up beside us. “Erasers, too. Cherry said they’ll be here soon.”
I nodded. Erasers were a critical part of keeping the Glimmering world secret from the Humdrums. These specialists, highly trained in magic and psychology, would be able to wipe all memory of this incident from the minds of the people still huddled in the house.
“I’d better stay until they get here,” I said. “I told the Humdrums not to come out until I came for them.”
“You did good,” Mom said, surveying the yard. Her black hair was disheveled and falling out of its usual French braid, and she was flushed with the exertion of the battle. She turned a sharp eye on me. “I sure would like to know why you were here, though.”
I swallowed. “I’ll tell you and Grandma everything when we get back.”
“Related to the Straw job?” Mom said. “Grandma said there was a werewolf.”
“The Straw job, and a tip from the Wildwoods,” I said.
Ginger turned to frown at me. “This wasn’t their pack?”
“Of course not.” My voice was sharper than I intended, and I swallowed back my irritation.
She tapped on the handle of her sword. “Good.”
“It’s thanks to them that I found out about this,” I said. “I never would have figured it out without Brendan’s help.”
Ginger seemed to consider. After a long moment, she shrugged. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect that. It was decent of them.”
I opened my mouth to say that of course it had been decent, because they weren’t exactly an indecent group of people, and why did she insist on jumping to the worst conclusions anyway—but Mom put a hand on my arm and gave me a look. It wasn’t a warning, exactly, but it was a reminder: a reminder that I was the future Stiletto, and I had to stay calm and listen to the thoughts of my coven.
I swallowed. “It was,” I said. “Yes, I agree.”
Clancy swiped disinfectant across my skin and I winced. I hadn’t noticed how many scrapes I’d gotten until long after I’d talked to the Erasers and helped them round up the party guests. Now that I was back at the mansion, my body was busy alerting me to every cut and bruise.
Rowan handed me a cup of pills and a glass of water. “Painkillers.”
She’d taken to helping Clancy in the infirmary lately, and I was glad to see her. I didn’t get to spend much time with the other novices my age these days, and I missed her cheerful face and warm demeanor.
“Don’t you have a potion that will knock me out?” I grumbled, accepting the pills.
“I do if you don’t mind missing work tomorrow,” Rowan said. “With the way you’ve been pushing yourself lately, I figured you’d be mad at me if I gave you the good stuff.”
I groaned. She was right. I had an appointment with members of the Faerie Court tomorrow to show them some of the latest items in Carnelian’s showroom. I knew Grandma would hand the job off to Josette if I couldn’t make it, but there was no way I was about to give up something that interesting.
“You’re a bro.” I raised the tiny cup of pills in a mock toast and then downed them.
“Heard you did a good job out there,” Rowan said in an undertone. She tucked a gleaming dark curl behind her ear and beamed at me. “Blaze said you held your own, and Poppy told me she was impressed at how perfect your timing was when you called them all in.”
“I was almost too late.”
“But not too early,” she said. “Which meant everyone got five more minutes of peace and quiet, which we all appreciate.” She winked. “Lie down, and I’ll check on you in a minute.”
She moved to tend to Cerise, who was lying back on a hospital bed with a cold pack over one eye, and I fell back onto the crisp pillow behind me.
I let my thoughts drift as I stared up at the ceiling. We’d managed to fight off the wolves and save the Humdrums. It was a huge success, but my mind still raced with thoughts of what could have happened.
Those wolves were more dangerous than I ever could have imagined when I’d seen them in The Hideout. They had been hunting for sport. They had no qualms about attacking a party of children. The knowledge chilled my blood.
I thought back to the spike in unsolved murders and the rise in missing children that had been plaguing the city over the past few months. The Daggers had kept an eye on these crimes, as we always did, but they hadn’t seemed like something that couldn’t be blamed on ordinary factors. The incidents hadn’t been limited to just the Humdrum or Glimmering worlds, and there hadn’t even been a pattern in victims—not anything that stood out clearly.
But now, I thought, idly tracing back over the reports and rumors I’d been hearing, there was one correlation. It wasn’t anything I could prove, but I couldn’t help realizing that this trouble, nebulous and unconnected as it may be, had started around the same time a mysterious maybe-werewolf had started buying up clubs in the city.
I didn’t know for sure if the owner of The Hideout was connected to the werewolves. I didn’t know if the werewolves were connected to the murders and disappearances.
But I did suspect that the wolves of the Burnside pack wouldn’t shy away from that sort of thing, and the timing was enough to set red flags waving.
Red flags weren’t enough. I needed proof, and I needed to connect the disparate threads that wouldn’t quite come together.
I just didn’t know how.
20
The women from the Faerie Court were every bit as dazzling in person as they were in the tabloids and on the JinxNet. One of them, an elf woman with slanting, pale-green eyes and elaborate blonde braids, towered over me and walked like she was perpetually striding through an ancient forest. Another, a faerie with ivory skin, chestnut curls, and an impish face, flitted from one display to another like a butterfly. The third was a witch, Yvette, whose dark skin and eyes were a sharp contrast against her platinum hair and who seemed enamored with everything on display.
“Carnelian embraces witch culture in such a sophisticated way,” she gushed, fingering a blazer with a discreet elemental symbol design on the inner lining. “So many witch designers can’t seem to get past pentacles and cobwebs.”
“We try to bring subtle elegance to our designs,” I said. “You probably know Carnelian Hunter is a witch herself. She has strong opinions about how we can best reflect our Glimmering heritage.”
“You do a nice job with nature motifs, too,” the faerie said. She stopped to examine a mannequin in a bias-cut silk gown hand-painted with a leaf pattern all down the green skirt. “That’s part of what attracted Queen Amani at your last show, I think.”
I tried to keep my smile from turning into a huge grin. Grandma had been strategic about designing the last collection specifically to appeal to the Faerie Queen’s tastes, and it had paid off big-time. The queen had ordered several outfits from us after the show, and a new order had come in just last week for a gown for the Waterfall Palace’s annual All Hallows Eve ball.
“You mentioned you’re here for business attire,” I said. “We have some crepe jackets with a really lovely peplum silhouette that I think would be stunning on you.”
I led them through the showroom, walking slowly enough that they had time to see the clo
thes on the mannequins that surrounded us like sculptures. I stopped in front of a soft-pink jacket that flared out prettily at the waist.
The faerie, Isla, was as enamored as I’d expected.
“This color in particular would look beautiful with your skin,” I said. “I’d recommend a slight adjustment to the neckline, right here.” I pinched the neckline of the jacket to form it into a slightly rounder shape that would flatter her face.
She nodded, then got immediately distracted by a skirt on the mannequin behind this one.
I let her roam and turned to the other two. “We also have some gorgeous blouses made from mothman caterpillar silk. It’s a comparatively new material and it has a gorgeous drape and texture.”
They both handled the material and oohed and aahed over its iridescent sheen. It was a particularly lustrous fabric, as flowing as the lightest silks but totally opaque even in white. Isla ran over to join us, and she and the elf, Sage, looked through the color samples I offered while Yvette turned to admire a fitted velvet cocktail dress and cape, both in deep crimson.
Once they had seen everything, I led Isla and Yvette over to a sitting area and offered them champagne and petit fours to nibble on while Sage made her orders in the small office off the showroom. The elf seemed enchanted by everything Carnelian had to offer and ordered two evening gowns, several cocktail dresses, one winter coat, and shoes to go with everything.
I couldn’t even comprehend how anyone could afford to wear that much Carnelian couture without being involved in the house somehow, but I smiled and acted like this wasn’t a big deal and like we got orders of this size every day, while I privately bit my tongue and tried to imagine Josette’s face.
When I led Sage out to the sitting area so the next woman could make her order, I caught a snippet of their conversation.