The Gateway Trackers Books 3 & 4

by E. E. Holmes

  “Grand? Over-the-top? Aristocratic?”

  “Yeah, all of that,” Savvy said. “It’s a bit much for a girl from the East End.”

  “I didn’t think there was anything that was a bit much for you, Sav,” I said, nudging her with my elbow. “Usually you’re the one who’s a bit much for everyone else.”

  Savvy winked. “Truer words were never spoken. Still…” She glanced up again.

  “Savvy, listen to me,” I said, taking her by the shoulders and turning her fully around to face me. Her feathers danced around on her head. “I’m going to be honest with you. I’m barely convincing myself to walk through those doors. There’s a good chance I’m going to hide under the first tablecloth I find. I don’t know if I can do this. So, I’m going to need every ounce of your too-muchness, do you hear me? I need your too-muchness to overflow and fill me up, too, because I honestly can’t do this without you.”

  Savvy blinked once, as though shocked, then slowly, a grin spread over her face. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkled with more than just her quintessential impishness.

  “For you, mate, I will be the very Savviest of Savvies,” she said, clapping me on the back so that I stumbled forward.

  “I knew I could count on you,” I told her. “Now, let’s get this over with.”

  We followed a group of chattering young women in evening gowns into a cavernous grand foyer. A grand staircase swept down into the room, its elaborate railings and wide landings festooned with garlands of white blossoms. Over our heads, glittering crystal chandeliers hung suspended from the gold-gilded ceiling, and elegantly clad people strolled the balconies, the light glinting off of their champagne flutes and opulent jewelry. We’d barely cleared the threshold of the door when two waiters descended upon us, thrusting glasses of champagne into our hands.

  “Drinking before the ceremony has even begun,” Savvy said with a sigh of satisfaction. “I take it all back. This is my kind of party, after all.”

  I didn’t reply, but took a sip of champagne instead. The bubbles leapt at my nose, tickling the tip and leaving their heady fragrance lingering in my nostrils. It wasn’t unpleasant.

  “What did I tell you about the fascinators!” Milo hissed at me, stamping his foot in frustration. “I told you you should have worn it! Everyone’s wearing them!”

  “I wasn’t going to wear that stupid thing on my head!” I grumbled back at him. “It looked like a bird’s nest!”

  A bird’s nest that would have blended right into a sea of unusual headwear, it seemed. Everywhere I looked, feathers and tulle sprouted from heads like plants out of a garden.

  “Come on,” Milo whined. “It’s right in the car, we can still go and get it…”

  “No!”

  A flock of women scurried past us, laughs tinkling like expensive cutlery. I didn’t recognize any of them. Each of them wore an almost bored expression, as though they regularly circulated in atmospheres of such lavishness.

  “The Lightfoots… they don’t actually live here, do they?” Milo whispered to us as he took it all in.

  “No,” Hannah said, and she almost sounded relieved. “It used to be a private home to a Lord or an Earl, but nobody lives here anymore. It’s open for tours, and you can rent it for events, if you have enough money.”

  “Yeah, and you could probably let our flat for the next five years for what it cost them to use the place for a single night,” I pointed out.

  The crowd seemed to be slowly making its way through to a room at the far end of the entrance hall. The doors had been thrown wide and a pair of young girls, no older than ten or twelve, by the look of them, were handing out silver-tasseled program booklets from the baskets that dangled on their arms.

  “Here’s a wedding program for you, bride’s side on the left, please,” the girl said, beaming toothily up at me.

  I smiled at her, wondering, as I did so, how she knew whether we were there for the bride or the groom. Then I saw her give half a glance and a slight nod to Milo, and it dawned on me: this girl was a future Durupinen, probably a relation of Róisín’s, and so the presence of a ghost in our party was a dead giveaway—pun intended.

  We filed into seats near the back of the room—Hannah wanted to sit closer to the front, because she saw a number of other Council members seated there, but I dragged her toward the back, preferring to skulk as much as was possible in such public circumstances. I tried not to gawk at the opulence of the space, but failed that particular challenge. My mouth hung open as I marveled over the arched windows, the painted frescos, and the flower-draped canopy under which Róisín and her fiancé would shortly tie the knot. As I turned to take my seat, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored panel on the back wall and experienced a moment of shock.

  I hadn’t bothered to pay much attention when Milo and Savvy were experimenting on me like a make-up lab rat—preferring to close my eyes and go to my happy place—and so I hadn’t experienced the full effect of my new look until that very moment. I looked… well, pretty damn glamorous, minus the dumbfounded expression on my face. My hair had definitely never looked so silky or my curls so tamed. Milo had Savvy do something to my face called contouring, which I didn’t understand but, from the look of it, was a form of black magic performed with foundation that gave you someone else’s face. And while I still hated the torture bra and the shoes for the little sartorial sadists they were, I had to grudgingly admit, Milo was right: I looked damn good.

  Slowly, the room filled up with guests, all murmuring quietly to each other behind their programs, waiting for the ceremony to begin. We saw Siobhán walk in, accompanied by a woman I didn’t know, but who looked so much like her that I knew it must be her sister. Close behind her, Seamus on her arm, was Celeste. She swept the room with her eyes, nodding graciously at the many guests who sought to greet her. As she turned to shake hands with an older woman, her eyes drifted over the heads of the assembled guests and landed on me.

  I froze. So did she. I might have imagined it, because I was so hyper-sensitive to seeing her, but I could have sworn that Celeste’s cheeks flushed slightly as she blinked and looked away. There was no doubt how quickly she broke eye contact, or that she pointedly avoided looking in our direction again. So maybe there was a bit of guilt there, after all. I squeezed a tiny drop of pleasure from that possibility and chased it with another sip of champagne.

  Somewhere in one of the balconies above us, a string quartet began to play, and the remaining guests who were still milling around took it as a cue to hurry into their seats. The doors at the back of the hall had been pulled closed, and six men in tuxedos with tails walked in a line from a side door up onto the platform at the front of the room. The man at the front was tall and handsome, though with a definite air of snobbery that I could scent even from the back row. He looked down his nose at the crowd, a satisfied smile on his face as though he was being presented with some kind of prize.

  I supposed, depending on how you looked at the whole marriage thing, he was.

  The music swelled, and the doors at the back of the room opened. A woman in an elegant blue suit and matching fascinator was escorted up the aisle first—I could only assume it was the groom’s mother. Next, Patricia Lightfoot, all smiles and nods, swept up the aisle on the arm of a barrel-chested young man I thought might be a Caomhnóir. Behind her, a pair of dark-haired girls, no more than five or six years old, floated past in dresses that looked like puffy little clouds, dropping fistfuls of bruised flower petals along the pale pink runner that covered the floor. Then a parade of bridesmaids processed past in blush-colored dresses, clutching their bouquets and smiling ingratiatingly at the upturned faces. I recognized every one of them from my Apprenticeship days at Fairhaven, including Olivia and Peyton.

  The last of the bridesmaids to saunter up the aisle was Róisín’s twin sister Riley, whose dress was a deeper shade of pink than the others. As she took her place at the corner of the canopy, all heads turned to the back of the room
once more, where, to the sweeping melody of the quartet, Róisín appeared framed in the doorway.

  A collective gasp rose up, and it was plain to see why. Róisín, a very pretty girl on a normal day, was a flawlessly airbrushed bridal magazine advertisement come to blushing, beaming life. The delicate lace of her dress clung to her body like a second skin and trailed out behind her in a long, sweeping train. Her inky curls were frosted over with a lace-edged veil that brushed her bare shoulders and cascaded to the floor behind her. She clutched the arm of a rather diminutive man with a black goatee and a reserved expression, whom I could only assume was her father.

  Her form dissipated into a blur as tears filled my eyes and refused to be blinked away. They were tears that I would not properly be able to explain to myself in that or any moment, born of grief and longing, of fear and jealousy for things I had never wanted and yet somehow wanted desperately, all crashing together inside of me in a storm I was not sure I could weather. I took my seat, tears still falling, smiling politely on the outside as, on the inside, I battled the very real possibility that I would simply wreck and sink into the depths.

  38

  Stolen Moment

  “YOU RECKON I COULD FIT this whole cheese display in my purse?” Savvy asked, with every indication that she intended to try, regardless of my answer.

  “Not unless your purse is secretly the TARDIS,” I told her.

  She snorted appreciatively and loaded up her plate again. “Listen to you, dropping Doctor Who references like a proper Brit. Blimey, they could at least make these plates a bit bigger. I mean, bloody hell, I’ll have to make twenty trips up to this table before they bring out the salad.”

  I snatched a piece of puff pastry off a passing tray and popped it into my mouth. It was full of melted brie and some kind of jam. I watched longingly as the tray bobbed away through the crowd, strongly considering tackling the waiter carrying it.

  “Yeah, this food is incredible,” I agreed. “Should we find our table so people can bring us more of it?” I was feeling antsy, lest someone mistake our standing around as an invitation for mingling or—God forbid—dancing.

  I scanned the crowd as we walked, looking for the peacock feather on the top of Hannah’s head. I spotted her near a grand piano, nodding earnestly along to whatever Siobhán was saying to a small knot of listeners. She looked so poised and professional, such a far cry from the girl I met four years ago—a girl so battered and bruised by her gift that she had endeavored to make herself all but invisible. Everything—everything we had been through up until this point was worth it just to see her grow and bloom even from the very ashes.

  “You know what’s weird?” I said.

  “Reckon I know plenty things that are weird,” Savvy replied.

  “I haven’t seen Marion anywhere, have you?” I asked.

  Savvy froze mid-bite as this realization hit her. I watched as her eyes raked the sea of chattering faces, watched as she, too, came up empty.

  “Huh,” Savvy said and gave a large swallow. “What do you suppose that’s about, then?”

  “I have no idea,” I said slowly. “I figured this would be exactly the kind of event she’d love to be at. Seated prominently, so she could lord it over people.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Savvy agreed. “You reckon she wasn’t invited?”

  I shook my head. “No way. Peyton’s a bridesmaid. Patricia is Marion’s best friend. There’s no way she wasn’t invited.”

  “Huh,” Savvy said again. “Well, I’m stumped.”

  So was I. It just seemed inconceivable that Marion wouldn’t be present. As unpleasant as it would have been to see her, it gave me a jumpy, nervous feeling not to see her, like she was absent only so she could appear suddenly. I half-expected her to jump out of the wedding cake, dripping from head to toe with frosting and smugness.

  My eyes wandered from the wedding cake to Róisín, who was floating around the middle of the dance floor with her new husband like a feather on the breeze. They looked like a Hallmark commercial, gazing sappily into each other’s eyes and kissing repeatedly as the photographer bobbed and weaved around them, clicking and flashing madly for the perfect timeless image.

  “I’m about to go into sugar shock over here,” Savvy said, as though reading my mind.

  “Yeah. The schmaltz levels are reaching maximum capacity,” I agreed. “I’m kind of glad, though. Like, at least they look genuinely in love with each other. I had my doubts, because of the whole Scouting thing, but…” I shrugged.

  “Yeah. I dunno, I might give it a try myself,” Savvy said thoughtfully, popping an olive into her mouth.

  I nearly choked on a cheese puff. “You want to what?!” I sputtered.

  Savvy shrugged. “I dunno, mate. Have you seen the men I date?”

  “Not often, no,” I said. “You don’t usually… well, they don’t last long, do they?” I said awkwardly.

  “Too right they don’t,” Savvy agreed. “If London were a barrel, I’d be scraping the dried-up dregs from the bottom and trying to mold them into a half-decent bloke.”

  “Yeah, well, wandering into pubs at one o’clock yields a lot of dregs,” I said. “Why don’t you try a dating app or something, if you want to meet someone?”

  Savvy glared at me as though I’d said something offensive. “Not bloody likely. I like to see the goods before I sample them, thanks very much.”

  “Well, I’d trust my cell phone before I trusted Scouting,” I said.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right. ‘Sides, I don’t reckon anyone on their eligible bachelors list is any match for Savannah Todd, even on her best behavior,” Savvy said, suppressing a burp and cracking her knuckles loudly. “Fancy a drink?”

  “No, I’m good,” I said.

  “See you in a bit, then,” she replied, and marched straight for the bar, where a small knot of men fell over themselves scattering to make room for her.

  I watched her for a moment, chuckling as she knocked back a whiskey like it was water, and then turned, meaning to fill my plate again. My elbow caught someone’s shoulder and I dropped my plate to the floor with a resounding clatter.

  “Oh, shit,” I muttered, stooping quickly to pick it up and straightening again. “I’m so sorry about—”

  It was Peyton, with three other bridesmaids all trailing behind her like a flock of sour-faced flamingos. Olivia was among them as well, though she was looking determinedly at her shoes.

  “—about that,” I finished in a murmur. The crash of my plate seemed to reverberate four years into that past to the very first time I’d interacted with Peyton Worthington—also, coincidently, in front of a food display.

  “Watch where you’re go—oh!” Her expression morphed from annoyance to shock as she met my gaze. It was clear that she hadn’t recognized me until that moment. She took me in from head to toe, her mouth agape in unflattering disbelief.

  “Jessica, I… I didn’t recognize you,” she gasped.

  “Uh, yeah. Milo did it,” I said awkwardly, my hand flicking in Milo’s general direction where he hovered near the dance floor, basking in the glow of expensive fabrics on display. I couldn’t be sure whether he’d heard his name or simply felt the surge of my nervous energy through our connection, but his head snapped up like a shark scenting blood. He appeared at my side before I could even register his disappearance from the dance floor.

  “I felt a compliment coming on, so I came to take full credit,” Milo said tossing a protective arm around me, calming my nerves with a wave of cool, unruffled energy.

  Peyton blinked and recovered herself, hoisting an ingratiating smile onto her face. “Yes, well, kudos to you, Milo. You truly are a miracle worker.”

  I swallowed a nasty retort. It did not go down easily. I forced a smile. “Yes, he’s very talented. Róisín told me that you got married last summer. Congratulations.”

  Peyton’s smile widened, and she shrugged. “Thank you. It’s been an—um—eventful year.” She dropped her h
ands to rest on her abdomen and I saw, with a start of surprise, something I had not noticed when she had glided down the aisle, for her elaborate cluster of hydrangeas had concealed it. Beneath the delicate swath of peachy-pink fabric of her dress, a tell-tale curve and swelling of her belly—

  “Holy shit!” I said again, and then pulled myself together. “I… wow, I… had no idea… uh, congratulations… again,” I stammered.

  She looked deeply satisfied, as though we were looking at each other across a chess board and she had just achieved a checkmate. Behind her, the other girls were mirror images of her smug expression—all but Olivia, who was still looking anywhere but at me. “How kind of you,” she fluttered, then went on with a note of steel in her voice. “I must say, I’m surprised that you had the nerve to show up here today, but impressed as well. I’m glad you’re able to enjoy this moment for the brief victory it is. Your clan had been wallowing in disgrace for so long, after all. But the tide of politics is fleeting. It ebbs and flows, and it can bury you in an instant. You mustn’t get too comfortable.”

  I felt my smile turn to stone on my face, and had to grit my teeth to get my response out. “That sounds like advice your mother could have used a few months ago. You really ought to be saving some of these pearls of wisdom for her, you know. Then she might be able to show her face at some of these functions.”

  “Oh, yeah, about that,” Milo said, chiming in with a simpering smile on his face. “Word on the dance floor is that Patricia asked your mother not to come, as a favor to Róisín. Seems like Patricia was afraid that your mother’s propensity for scandal might upstage the bride.”

  I feigned a devastated expression. “Damn. And I was saving my first slow dance for her. Guess I’ll have to clear my dance card.”

  Peyton’s face had gone pink with humiliation. “My mother plays the long game, Jessica,” she said in a dangerously quiet hiss. “Do you honestly believe that knocking a few stones from the top of the tower will have a lasting effect on the foundations our clan has built? How very droll.”