The Grift of the Magi

by Ally Carter

  “But what will this do to the money?” the new earl had to know.

  “My father is dead!” Lady Georgette pulled herself away from Hale long enough to slap her cousin across the face.

  “Lady Georgette, please!” Agent Bennett said. “I know you must be upset, but we’re all stuck here together, at least until morning.”

  “There’s the Range Rover,” Fletcher said. “We could get out in that. I say we load up and head to London. We have to get to the bottom of this. There is a lot of money, and—”

  “Shut up, Fletcher!” Lady Georgette snapped.

  “It’s Greymore now,” he told her and she actually recoiled. Her cousin was colder than all the ice in Scotland.

  “I’m finished,” Lady Georgette said and turned. “I’m finished with…all of you.”

  And then she was gone, into the darkness and the shadows of the upper floor without even a candle to guide her through the home that had sheltered the members of her family for hundreds of years.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” Agent Bennett told Irina who had started to cry. Silent tears. Real tears. Even Gabrielle seemed to feel it.

  “Mr. Hale,” Amelia turned to him. “I’m afraid this is not going to help your charity’s reputation.”

  Hale nodded, cold and stark. Kat knew that he was feeling everything and choosing to show nothing.

  “At least the storm will slow down the story, take the majority of the headlines,” Agent Bennett said. “Perhaps we can minimize the damage.”

  Hale turned back to the frosty window. “The damage is already done.”

  “Perhaps everyone should try to get some sleep now,” Kat said. She reached for Hale’s arm, knowing they would need it.

  *

  Kat was aware, faintly, of the opening and closing of doors, of candlelight flickering and growing dimmer as it disappeared down dark halls.

  But mostly, Kat noticed the warmth of Hale’s hand in hers, the slight pressure on her waist as he guided her toward the double doors and the coldness of the patio outside.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised to see Gabrielle already standing there, one heavy coat around her shoulders and another in her arms.

  “You’ll be wanting this,” Gabrielle said and handed it to her. Kat took it, but, mostly, Hale was what kept her warm as he led her through the ankle-deep snow and the darkness.

  There was a bench at the edge of the formal gardens. Hale scraped off the snow and ice, and Gabrielle laid out a blanket, and that is where they sat, Hale’s arm around her shoulders. It was late, and Kat was tired, so she leaned against him.

  When Angus sat down beside her, no one said a word. Not even when Hamish and Gabrielle sat on the other side.

  They were all as still as statues as a light flickered inside the dark castle, floating down the stairs like a fairy or a ghost.

  When the door opened, Kat sat up. And waited.

  “Now?” a voice asked from the shadows behind them.

  Hale waited a beat. “Now.”

  It only takes a second for the world to change sometimes. For up to become down, right to become left.

  Dark to become light.

  First, there was a click and then a light so bright it felt like instant day filled the darkness. The spotlight’s glare shone upon the mansion and the grounds, leaving dark shadows and a lone figure, almost glowing in the light, one hand held up to block the glare.

  “Hello, Lady Georgette,” Hale said. “Leaving without me?”

  “Scooter?” she said, but her voice had lost that dreamy, little girl quality. “What are you…”

  Kat could tell the moment when Lady Georgette’s eyes began to adjust against the glare of the spotlight, when she was able to see the people who sat between the house and the garage, waiting.

  “Scooter, oh, I was just going to—” The dreamy quality was back again.

  “You weren’t going to leave without saying goodbye, were you?” Hale asked.

  Lady Georgette shook her head. “No. I just couldn’t stay in that house with my father’s…body.”

  Her voice broke. Her hands trembled. She made quite the pretty picture, but Kat couldn’t help but ask, “That father?”

  The side door was opening, and Irina was there, the earl leaning on her arm, moving slowly but moving just the same.

  “Georgie girl…” The earl started, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing—as if he’d rather be dead in truth than witness this.

  Georgette gasped and brought her hands to her mouth, and the bag she was carrying landed in the snow.

  “If my egg is in there—” Hale started toward her.

  But Lady Georgette spun in his direction. “Your egg!” she snapped and the sweet little girl act was abandoned forever. “Your egg was stolen in London and the whole world knows it!”

  She expected outrage, Kat could see. Georgette was looking for a scene. Nothing could have surprised her more than when Hale pulled a newspaper from his coat pocket and held it out toward her.

  “Do they?” Hale asked. “Because this is a copy of yester-day’s London Herald.”

  She looked at the headline, but Kat knew it wouldn’t make any sense.

  “Yesterday’s real London Herald, that is. The secret’s still safe, Lady Georgette. Whatever buyers you found on the black market for that egg are never going to believe that it’s authentic. Not with another one being photographed and paraded over London like the queen.”

  She looked at the headline: LONDON CHARITY GETS MAGI MIRACLE.

  “I don’t… How?”

  The snow was falling softly, shining in the too-bright light, so Kat yelled, “Simon?”

  “Yeah?” The voice came from the shadows again as the garage doors opened.

  Only then did Lady Georgette seem to realize that there was a boy in the garage, sitting behind a bank of laptops and very complicated equipment.

  “I think we can turn the electricity back on,” Hale said, and in the next moment the mansion sprung to life like a Christmas tree, lights shining through every window.

  Systematically, the lights that covered the grounds came on one by one, shining on the scene that, until then, had been invisible from the house.

  There were huge banks of scaffolding covered with hoses and fans, a very complicated pulley system and something that Simon had patented when he was seven and was now used in nine out of ten big budget Hollywood movies.

  “You can kill the snow too,” Kat said, and instantly, the fans stopped blowing and the hoses stopped running and just like that the storm was over.

  “But…”

  Too late, recognition dawned in Lady Georgette’s eyes. She grabbed her bag from the cold ground and bolted.

  “Get out of my way,” she shouted, but Hale was bigger, stronger, angrier.

  “Give me my egg.”

  “It was never going to be your egg. It was mine. It should have always been mine. I’m his daughter. He bought it for my mother. But…no. I wasn’t even good enough for that, especially once she came along.” She glared at Irina who didn’t as much as blink. She’d heard worse in her life. And often. But Lady Georgette had been sitting on these words for most of her life, if Kat had to guess.

  Nothing was going to stop them now.

  “If I’d been a boy, then I would have been his real heir, then I would have been good enough, but I wasn’t. I was never…”

  The earl eased closer, leaving Irina behind and drawing on some deep reservoir of strength. “Georgie…”

  “My name is Georgette!” his daughter yelled. Tears streaked her cheeks and Kat wondered if her heart was so cold it might freeze. “It’s a girl’s name, Father. For a girl. For your daughter. And you would have left me penniless if you’d had your way.”

  “That’s not true. I wanted you to have the Hale heir.”

  “I don’t want some wealthy husband. I want what I deserve. And I deserve this.”

  “No.” Kat eased for
ward. “You don’t.”

  “Give me the egg, Lady Georgette,” Agent Bennett said from the shadows, and Georgette spun.

  Kat could see her calculating angles, wondering if it was too late to run.

  Then “Director Hoyt” appeared on Georgette’s other side. Except he didn’t look like Director Hoyt. In fact, he looked remarkably like the sketch of the thief her contact in London had hired to steal the fake egg in the first place.

  “Hi, nice working with you,” Bobby said to Georgette, but the girl just shook her head, as if trying to find her way out of this nightmare.

  “It’s no use,” Agent Bennett said. “We’ve tracked the sales, you know. You’ve promised that egg to some very bad men, Georgette—three of them if our sources are correct. It’s genius, really, when you have this many fakes lying around. Were you going to give the real egg to any of your buyers?” Amelia asked, and Kat could see the answer in the girl’s eyes: of course not. That was her mother’s egg, and Kat knew better than anyone she’d never sell it to the highest bidder.

  “Run, and Interpol will be the least of your problems,” Amelia finished, but Georgette was long past caring. About her father. About her family’s pride. And maybe even about her egg.

  Maybe the only thing she cared about was her life.

  She looked like a queen when she turned to her father and said, “You want your precious egg, my lord. Fine.” She dropped her bag and pulled a bundle from among her clothes. Black cloth was wrapped around it.

  Around and around like a shroud.

  Kat watched the dark fabric pool on the snow-covered ground at her feet. It looked like a black hole that was getting ready to swallow her up. But then there it was, in her hands.

  Spotlights shone down upon gold and emeralds and rubies and it looked like someone had shrunk Christmas and put it inside one glistening, glimmering orb.

  Even Kat had to gasp at its beauty. At long last, their search for the missing Egg of the Magi was over, but Kat didn’t feel victorious.

  “Merry Christmas,” Lady Georgette said. Her voice was as cold as the ice on the ground and her arm was as steady and strong as Kat had ever seen as she pulled back and hurled the Gold Egg of the Magi into the ice and the snow.

  She was running, Kat knew. The Bagshaws were giving chase and Agent Bennett would lock her in handcuffs and throw away the key. But Kat could do nothing about that.

  So she watched the egg fly through the air, tumbling end over end, rubies and emeralds catching the light, making the sky look like a kaleidoscope of moving color against the backdrop of wintry white.

  Inside the mansion, the music must have come back on with the electricity because carols filled the night, a haunting sound.

  And yet the world seemed to be in slow motion. Kat only knew that she was moving.

  She was running and sliding and…falling.

  And she wasn’t quite fast enough, Kat realized as the egg landed on the ice two feet away.

  And shattered.

  *

  “Hale?”

  Kat saw her breath fog in the chilly air. There really was a storm coming—that part hadn’t been a lie. She had simply asked Simon to move up the timeline a bit. And if it came with a side of chaos and isolation, all the better.

  They were never going to find the real egg—not in that massive castle. Not in time. And their plan had worked, in a way. It just hadn’t worked well enough.

  She should have put Angus and Hamish to following Lady Georgette sooner. She should have known the girl would rather see the egg shatter than see anyone else benefit from the gift her father had purchased for her late mother.

  Kat should have known that pain better than anyone, recognized it for what it was. But Kat was too blinded by jealousy, too worried about losing the boy to pay too much attention to the girl who might have been her rival.

  “Hale, are you okay?”

  She saw him stop moving. Even though the electricity was back on throughout the castle, the lights were off in Hale’s room. He moved by the light of the fire to the bed and Kat noticed the suitcase that lay open there, waiting and half-full.

  “Going somewhere?” she asked, trying to tease.

  “London,” was his answer. “Someone will have to talk to the press. The auction will have to be canceled. The charity isn’t to blame, but that’s the thing about blame: it doesn’t always land where it belongs. Ms. Evans shouldn’t have to face it, so I… I have to go to London.”

  “There’s a storm coming,” she told him.

  “I know,” he said, shutting the suitcase with a snap, then jerking it off the bed. “I had Marcus call in a helicopter. We’ll be in London before it hits.”

  He started past her.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get the gang, grab my stuff. It might take Simon a little while to pack up, but—”

  “Stay.” Hale stopped in the doorway and turned to her. There was mistletoe overhead, but he didn’t look up. He didn’t smile or tease or seem in any way Hale-like as he looked at her, almost like he didn’t see her at all. “You should stay with your family. It’s Christmas.”

  “Hale.” She took his arm before he could leave.

  You’re my family, she thought but the words just didn’t come.

  “Thanks for trying, Kat. Really. Thanks for everything. It almost worked.”

  He forced a smile, then leaned down to give her one quick kiss on the forehead before turning and walking away.

  In the distance, the blades of a helicopter spun and snow began to fall for real this time, and Kat stood in the middle of a castle, fighting the feeling that someone had just stolen more than Christmas.

  Day of the Auction

  London, England

  The Magi Miracle Network had an angel, it would seem. Despite the late notice and the lingering storm, almost everyone who was anyone had managed to come to the auction of the year.

  Kat stood near the door, a very nervous Elizabeth Evans by her side.

  The woman’s color was better, and her hands had stopped shaking. The earl had promised a sizable portion of the insurance settlement (the egg had shattered, after all) to keep his daughter’s name out of the papers. And since the egg was still technically the earl’s property at the time his daughter had stolen it, even Interpol had very little say in the matter.

  But the fact remained that the Magi Miracle Network had been promised a miracle of its own, and Kat, it so happened, was in the miracle business.

  “Are you sure about this?” the charity’s director asked one final time.

  And Kat smiled. “Trust me.”

  Kat stayed near the door, away from the crowd and the spotlight. She didn’t really belong in that kind of room with the well-dressed, well-educated, well-heeled elite. She belonged at Uncle Eddie’s kitchen table. Which was just as well. Since it was the only place she really wanted to be.

  “Why are they here?”

  When Hale appeared at Kat’s side he sounded frantic and afraid, two things Kat had rarely seen in him. “Why are these people here?” he shouted. “I did interviews. I made phone calls.”

  “Hale, calm down.”

  “I can’t calm down. As if it wasn’t bad enough to have to announce that it was…gone. Now we’re going to have to do it again to people’s faces? All these people came out two days before Christmas for this?”

  “Hale!” Kat cried just as a man in a tuxedo moved to the front of the room.

  “It should be me,” he said. “I’m Hazel’s heir. This is on me.” He ran a hand through his dark hair, still windblown and cold and dotted with snow. “I’ll make the announcement.”

  But Kat’s hand was on his arm, and the man at the front of the room was already speaking, his big, deep voice booming through the room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the Magi Miracle Network I thank you for attending this evening. It is my distinct pleasure to bring you this, one of the Eggs of the Magi.”

  With a flourish, he whi
sked a black velvet covering off of a pedestal in the center of the room. The pedestal spun slowly, and as it turned, lights caught rubies and emeralds, bits of green and red in a field of gold, and nearly a hundred of the most elite collectors, gallery curators and art experts in the world practically gasped.

  “That doesn’t look like a fake,” Hale nearly whispered.

  “It isn’t,” Kat said. She couldn’t help but hold her breath as he turned to her.

  “Now note in your programs, ladies and gentlemen that there was a mistake in the earlier press clippings,” the emcee went on. “What we offer you tonight is the Frankincense egg. I repeat, of the three priceless Eggs of the Magi, tonight we give you the once in a lifetime opportunity to own the egg dedicated to the second of the Magi’s gifts: Frankincense.”

  “Why does that man have your egg, Katarina?” Hale asked as if he didn’t already know the answer.

  “I can explain.”

  But Hale was shaking his head. Anger radiated off of him in waves. “No.”

  “Hale, I wanted to do it!”

  “Kat, I never asked for this!”

  “I know! You would never ask for it. That’s what makes you you. But do you have any idea what it’s like to be with someone who could buy anything at any time? This is my gift to you, Hale. Let me give it.”

  In the background, people spoke, and a low murmur accentuated with the occasional gasp filled the room, but the auction was a world away. It was almost like Kat and Hale were still children and in his family’s country house. She was still trying to make off with his Monet and he was still trying to follow—two people born on opposite sides of a wall. Two people both longing for life on the other side.

  “Kat, that was your mother’s egg.”

  “Yes. And now it’s going to help your grandmother’s charity.”

  “Hazel’s dead. She’s gone. But you’re still here and you loved that egg, and…”

  “I can always steal another one?” she tried to tease, but Hale didn’t think anything was funny anymore.