“Oh.” I drop my hands, realizing suddenly how worried Dad will be. “I need to let my dad know I’m okay. Or Ryn. Wait, why hasn’t Vi found me yet? Oh, she might not even know about all of this yet.” I shake my head and rub my hands over my face. “I’m so tired. I just want to sleep and forget for a while that any of this happened.”
Chase stands. “You can stay at the mountain if you’d like. It’s the safest place to be. Protected against magical influence and tracking and all of that. Vi won’t be able to find you if you’re there, though. And if you’re not comfortable with me being there … I mean, if you’d rather stay somewhere else—”
“No, it’s fine, I—Gaius is also there, right?” Chase nods. “Okay. Yes, I’ll stay there.” Chase extends his hand to help me up just as I push myself to my feet. He ends up hiding his hands awkwardly in his pockets.
“Um, I can send a note with a messenger to your father,” he suggests. “Old school style. We can’t say where you are, of course, but we can at least let him know you’re okay.”
I nod. “Thank you.” We walk back inside and Chase closes the door behind us. I realize that I’ll probably never return to my own home again—that I essentially have no home now—and I wrap my arms around my chest to keep myself from falling apart again. As Chase pulls out the gold key for the faerie door, I look around and realize why part of this room looked familiar earlier. “This is the furniture from your old house Underground.”
“Yes. Luna’s furniture. It doesn’t fit in with everything else here, but I guess I’m too sentimental to get rid of it.”
“So … this is your house?”
“Yes. I’ve had it for some time, though I don’t use it much. It’s similar to a house my parents and I used to stay at during vacations when I was growing up. I moved the faerie door here after I vacated the tattoo shop, but before that, this house was completely separate from any of my work. I used to come here sometimes to just … get away.”
He unlocks the faerie door and we head through the vacuum of time and space to the entrance hall inside the mountain. We walk up the stairs and along a carpeted passage, where Chase opens a door to a bedroom. It looks similar to the one I wound up in last time after taking a nauseating trip back in time—four-poster bed, wardrobe, thick rug on the floor—but I can’t tell if it’s the same one. “Thank you,” I say to Chase. “I don’t know where I’d go if it wasn’t for this place.”
“Well, you’re intelligent and resourceful, so I’m sure you would have figured something out, but this way you don’t have to. One less thing to worry about.”
I nod. There are already too many things buzzing around my tired brain without adding the stress of finding a safe place to hide for the night.
“I’m sure the Guild will be watching your family closely over the next few weeks in case you try to contact them,” Chase says, “but I can probably organize a way for you to safely meet with them.”
“Really? That would be amazing.”
“It may take a little bit of time, but it’s definitely possible.”
“Okay.” I rub my hands up and down my arms. The air is colder here than at home. “Why … why would you go to all that trouble? I mean, I’m sure you have plenty of other stuff going on.”
“Well …” He takes a deep breath. “I’ve got a lot to make up for, haven’t I?”
I’m not sure if he’s talking about me specifically or the entire world, but either way, that’s an understatement.
“And … um … ” Chase looks down at the floor, then shakes his head. “Anyway, I hope you’re able to sleep.” He closes the door, and I’m left alone with my memories of the Guild turning on me and the knowledge that nothing will ever be the same again.
I go into the adjoining bathing room and clean the dried blood off my arm. Then I drag myself to bed. I have no idea where in the world we are or whether it’s night or day, but I want to sleep, sleep, sleep and hope that everything is somehow okay when I wake up.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Perhaps it was my exhaustion, or perhaps it was the fact that all the mystery, shadows and questions surrounding Chase were finally removed, but I managed to sleep without being woken by nightmares of the past. I opened my eyes to find that my world had not magically fixed itself while I was sleeping, though I didn’t feel quite as awful as I felt before I fell asleep. Chase was gone, but I wandered around until I found Gaius in an indoor greenhouse up another flight of stairs. As if sensing I was in desperate need of a distraction, he put me to work.
“Is this the right one?” I ask, holding up a large jar of clear liquid and walking between the rows of plants toward Gaius. He’s kneeling on the ground beside a prickly bush with dark blue thorns.
He looks up. “Yes, that’s the one. We’ll soak the thorns in there first.”
“Okay.” I sit beside him and unscrew the lid. The liquid within smells unpleasantly sweet. “What does it do to the thorns?”
“It draws out the poison, leaving only the beneficial compounds. After the thorns are dried, they’re then ground into a powder. You’ve probably used it before. The end product is called Blue Shade.”
“Oh yes. I think my mom uses it in some of her sleeping potions.” Sleeping potions that landed her in a prolonged enchanted sleep. Perhaps it’s best she wasn’t awake for all the drama that took place yesterday. She would have completely freaked out.
Gaius hands me a pair of tweezers. “Only the dark blue thorns,” he reminds me. “If they’re pale blue, they’re too young. Drop them straight into the jar.”
“Do you ever use the thorns as they are? With the poison still in them?”
“I don’t. Chase, however, has found them to be useful in conjunction with a blowgun. They have a temporary paralysis effect. Great when you don’t want your enemy running away from you.”
“That does sound useful.” The two of us continue removing thorns. After working in silence for some time, I say, “Thank you for letting me stay. I know it was … unexpected. I’ll be gone as soon as I figure out a few things.”
“Don’t be silly. You can stay as long as you like. There are plenty of rooms, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. And I’ll make you a key for the faerie door. I should be thanking you too, in fact. You passed on my message so Chase was able to find me. I’d probably still be locked up in Piker’s Inn if it weren’t for you.”
“Was it very horrible?” I ask carefully. “They were making you take abilities from people, weren’t they?”
“Yes. Not many. They located only four Gifted people in the time I was there. I’m not sure if we’ll ever find those people again, so for now, those abilities have been added to our collection.”
“Your collection?” I pull back from my task for the moment. “You mean you’ve taken other people’s abilities as well and kept them?”
“Yes. Our collection of Griffin Abilities, all stored within various objects, is in a room downstairs. Oh, they weren’t taken by force,” he adds quickly at the look of horror on my face. “They were all freely given up. Not every Gifted person wants to be different, and many of them don’t want to risk winding up on the Griffin List.”
“But why do you keep them?”
“In case people change their minds and want their magic back.”
“And you’re not worried you might run into the same problem you had with Saber’s time traveling bangle? Someone else getting hold of all of them?”
Gaius drops a particularly large thorn into the jar. “The only reason we had that problem was because Chase removed the bangle from the mountain. That’s how people found out about it. He obviously shouldn’t have done that.”
“It still seems dangerous keeping them all in the same place. What if someone breaks in here?”
“Well, good luck finding the right room in this giant mountain,” Gaius says with a chuckle.
I return to my work on the thorns, thinking about the size of this place. “How did you wind up l
iving in a mountain anyway?”
“It’s been in my family for centuries. Ever since Tharros—” He cuts himself off. “Oh, um, perhaps I shouldn’t talk about him. Given recent, uh, revelations, it might be a bit awkward.”
“It’s okay. It’s not like it’s a forbidden subject or anything just because of Chase. We should be able to talk about Tharros, and other history, without things getting awkward.” What I don’t add is that I’d rather talk about this than be left to depressing thoughts about my messed-up future.
“You’re absolutely right, Calla,” Gaius says with a nod. “We should be able to talk about these things. So, this place has been in my family ever since Tharros began his attempts to bring down the veil between the human and fae realms. People were building secret shelters and hideouts all over the place, and one of my wealthy ancestors decided to buy a mountain.”
“As one does in times of uncertainty.”
“Of course. He had a large part of the inside excavated so it would be habitable, which was a process that turned out to be rather lengthy. By the time it was completed, Tharros had been defeated and no one felt the need to live in hiding anymore.
“It wasn’t used much after that. It ended up being passed down to my father, who kept his dragon hidden here because he didn’t have a permit. After I lost my job at the Guild, I came here because I had nowhere else to go. That was back in the day when some of the Guilds had employee housing, so no job meant no house. Oh, careful, you almost got poked there. Here, put some gloves on. They’re a bit big, but you can shrink them.” Gaius digs around in the box of instruments, spray bottles and tubes sitting on the ground beside him until he finds a pair of gloves for me. “Then my father died in a dragon racing accident, so it was just me in this great big mountain. I did some odd jobs over the next few decades, but nothing that paid particularly well. So … that’s when I wound up using my botany and potions knowledge for less than legal means.”
“Oh. Really?” I finish shrinking the gloves and pull them on. “Are you serious?”
“I am. Illegal potions and ingredients and enchantments and all that. I even invented a few new substances that had never been on the market before. They became quite popular. I did pretty well for myself.”
“That’s … really … I would not have guessed that about you, Gauis.”
“You’re shocked. I can tell. But weren’t you just saying we shouldn’t feel awkward to talk about our history? Besides, I know your secret; it’s only fair you know mine.”
“Um …” If he’s referring to my Griffin Ability, it doesn’t feel as though it’s on quite the same level as an illegal magic operation.
“Anyway, it all got messed up after The Destruction. I was away from the mountain when our dear friend Lord Draven started that storm within the faerie paths, so I had no way of getting back here. I went from having a fortune to being homeless. And that is when …” He takes a deep breath and stops pulling thorns, staring past the bush at memories only he can see. He swallows. “That’s when I saw the real fruit of my work for the first time. I saw people who were nothing more than shells, barely existing, their minds utterly lost to their addiction. Lives ruined, long before The Destruction hit any of them.”
“Gaius …” I don’t know what to say. All I know is that my simple question has led us into far darker and heavier territory than I could ever have guessed, and I don’t know how to get us out.
“I know, I know,” he says, still staring somewhere past me. “I should have realized, right? I should have known the lasting effects my substances and spells were having on people. And I did, to a certain extent. I had a vague idea of it in the back of my mind, but it was never real. I simply produced the enchantments and potions, that was all. Then I sold them to distributors. I never saw the end users.”
“You don’t have to tell me this stuff, Gaius,” I say quietly.
With a sigh, he looks down at the jar of floating thorns. He tilts it to the side, examining it. “Yes, we can fit some more in here.” He returns to his work pulling thorns from the bush, and I’m about to ask if we’ve moved on to a different topic of conversation when he starts speaking again. “I never sold another spell after that. It made me sick to even consider it. When I eventually got back to the mountain after Draven had been defeated, I set fire to my greenhouse and my laboratory. Destroyed everything. And then, after plenty of time pondering what an awful person I had become, I decided to build another greenhouse, fill it with plants that would be useful in everyday potions, and send the resulting herbs and powders and other ingredients to where they were actually needed.
“Chase and I met some time after I got that up and running. He’d been looking for me for months. He knew about my Griffin Ability from the information Zell had gathered on the Gifted, and he’d thought of a way I could use it that would be helpful to others.”
“So he told you who he was, and you trusted him just like that?” I ask, my tone skeptical.
“He didn’t tell me right away. But from what he said he’d been involved in, I suspected he was high up in Draven’s circle. And it’s not as though I was innocent. I had ruined lives just as he had. Lives like … like Luna’s.” Gaius lowers his tweezers to the ground and screws the lid back onto the jar. Quietly, he adds, “I understood the need for atonement.” He packs the bottle into his equipment box and stands. I get to my feet, brushing sand off the back of my pants. The box floats ahead of us as I follow him to another part of the greenhouse where a mirror berry bush is growing. “Anyway, that’s how I wound up living in a mountain,” he says with a chuckle. “Bit of a long-winded answer, but there you have it.”
“Thank you for telling me. I appreciate knowing the truth.”
“Now you know I’m not such a good guy after all,” he says with a teasing grin.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” I look at my distorted reflection in one of the larger mirror berries. “Maybe there’s no such thing as good guys and bad guys after all. Not when the good guys fail to see what’s wrong, and the bad guys are the ones who end up helping you.”
“Ah,” Gaius says as if he understands. He pats my arm awkwardly. “Your guardians are not the bad guys just because they failed you. They’re trying to fix up all the mess in the world, and they don’t always get it right. They make mistakes too.”
“I suppose. That’s just not the way I imagined the Guild to be.” I clear my throat, deciding we need a change of subject. “Um, so, are we picking berries now?”
“Yes, just a handful. They’re part of an experiment I’m working on at the moment.”
Gaius fills a small bowl with berries, and I grab a few to munch on as we leave the greenhouse. Instead of walking back downstairs, we head right, and it turns out there’s a laboratory next to the greenhouse. Half of it is filled with potion ingredients and equipment. The other half is dedicated to the construction of various gadgets. The counters are covered in cogs, levers, pipes and various mechanisms I’ve never seen before. “I guess you had to rebuild this as well after you burned the previous one,” I say.
“Yes. I probably should have considered my options more thoroughly before setting fire to all of my equipment. I was rather annoyed with myself when I decided I still needed a laboratory after all.”
He places the jar of thorns and the bowl of berries on the nearest counter while I look around. “So the greenhouse and the lab are up here. The next floor down is for the bedrooms and your study—which is like another greenhouse—”
“Hey, it’s not that bad.”
“Not that bad?” My eyebrows lift. “Gaius, one day the plants in that study are going to take over completely. They’ll devour all the books and the furniture, and then they’ll move on to the rest of the mountain.”
Gaius scratches his head. “Now that you mention it, there is one shelf I haven’t had access to since the dragonwing snapping pods matured. I really should take care of that.”
“You should. Okay, so then below the bedroo
ms is the level with the faerie door and the mountain ledge entrance Chase brought me through the first time I came here.”
“The kitchen, dining room and living area are down there too.” He sets a balance scale down on the counter beside the berries. “And a storage room.”
“Okay. Is that all, or is there more?”
“There’s a lot more, actually, and there are other people who come and go, but I’m not sure I should be telling you about any of it, seeing as how … well, you might not be with us for that long.”
“And if I end up in the hands of the wrong people, you wouldn’t want them getting any important information out of me about this place.”
Gaius gives me an apologetic look. “Yes. You understand, don’t you?”
I nod, but I hate that that’s something we have to worry about. I’m curious about this mountain and I wish I could see all of it.
“Hey,” a voice says behind us. I look around and see Chase walking into the lab. “The secret ingredient you requested,” he says to Gaius, handing him a brown paper bag. Now that he doesn’t have a jacket on, I can see the new tattoo marking his right arm: a long feather, the top of which disintegrates into small black birds flying away.
“Oh, fantastic.” Gaius opens the bag. I lean closer to get a look at this secret ingredient. I’m expecting a vial of liquid or a bottle of powder or a bunch of exotic herbs, but instead Gaius pulls out a glazed piece of bread in the shape of a ring. He takes a bite, then holds it out toward me.
“Um …”
“It’s called a bagel,” Chase says. “I introduced Gaius to them a while back. Apparently he can’t survive without them now.”
“Mmsogood,” Gaius mumbles through his chewing.
I look at Chase. “And here I was thinking you were out on a secret save-the-world mission.”
“Oh, I was. I just picked this up on the way back.”
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