“Well, if I do nothing else right for the rest of my life, at least I’ll know I successfully interfered with the mass killing of thousands of innocent people.”
Zed lets out a long sigh before standing. “My friends are very angry about your interference.”
“Ah, the lovely friends who’ve deluded you into hating the wrong people. So you decided to summon me, tie me up, and deliver me to them?”
“Of course not,” Zed says, looking genuinely upset. “I know you’re not the one who’s at fault here. You thought you were doing the right thing saving everyone.” He lifts his hand, and I feel myself slowly rising from he ground. He walks through the forest, his hand pulling me along by an invisible thread of magic. “I do wish you’d kept your interfering ways to yourself, though, because now we have to do something that’s going to make you very upset.”
I struggle and kick, but it only causes me to roll around in the air. I pull repeatedly at the ropes around my wrists, hoping to loosen them. “You don’t have to do anything, Zed.”
“I do. People have to pay for the suffering they caused us.”
I give up my useless struggling, deciding to save my energy. And it’s then that I realize, with chilling clarity, exactly where we are: in a part of Creepy Hollow very close to Ryn’s home. My throat goes dry and shivers run along my skin. “Zed? Where are we going?”
“As I said before, Calla, this doesn’t have anything to do with you. You’re a good person, a sweet girl. But the fact remains that your brother and his wife left me and dozens of other people to be tortured and locked up in a dungeon. Those of us who got away before The Destruction only had to survive the torture. Those who didn’t had to commit atrocious acts they had no control over.”
I don’t bother to answer. I’m already lowering the barrier around my mind and picturing a group of guardians running toward us. They shout at Zell, raising their weapons and firing at him. He falters, but then he shakes his head and laughs. “You and your illusions,” he says, continuing to walk straight through the imaginary arrows and sparks. “I know exactly how you work. Show me whatever you want. I won’t believe any of it.”
“Zed, please,” I say, my voice desperate. “It wasn’t Ryn’s fault. It wasn’t Vi’s fault. They told the Council about Zell’s prisoners as soon as they could.”
“And what did Head Councilor Starkweather and the rest of her Council choose to do? Nothing. Telling the Council resulted in nothing. Your brother should have freed us while he was there.”
“But he couldn’t get everyone out—”
“Why not? He got you out easily enough.”
“There wasn’t time. Zell was already there. He—”
“There was time to break open another few cages at least. Then we could have fought him and got everyone else out.”
“How?” I twist in the air, trying to get closer to Zed, trying to make him see sense. “You all had those metal bands blocking your magic. If Ryn had let you out, Zell would have stunned you and locked you up again.”
“Not all of us. He couldn’t possibly have fought all of us. No, the fact is that your brother only cared about saving you, and because of his selfish decision, the rest of us had to suffer. Gifted people did terrible things they never wanted to do. And what did the Guild say when it was all over? Did they apologize for abandoning us? No. They labeled us ‘dangerous’ and tagged us so we’d never be truly free again. And none of it was our fault!”
“They didn’t tag you,” I point out.
“Because I’ve been hiding from the Guild ever since. I’ve been living like a coward in the shadows, waiting to take vengeance on those who ruined my life.”
“No you haven’t!” I yell. “You were fine until those guardian haters twisted your brain into thinking you needed to do this. And it wasn’t my brother who ruined your life, it was Zell!”
“Well, it’s a little late to go after him, isn’t it.” Zed stops in front of Ryn’s tree. I feel my feet slowly lowering until they touch the ground. Now that I’m upright, I see a crackling ball of power floating above Zed’s hand. He must have been gathering it while we were walking. “You don’t have to do anything more than knock, Calla. That’s the only reason you’re here. They’ll never open a doorway for me, but they will for you.”
“Please don’t do this,” I whisper.
Zed separates his swirling ball of power into two smaller spheres, one above each palm. “Your begging isn’t helping.”
“Please, they don’t deserve this. They didn’t do anything—”
“Just knock, Calla. And no illusions,” he adds as he steps to the side. “You can’t run away while your hands and feet are tied, which means the only way any illusion can end is with you and me still standing outside this tree. Except I’ll be a whole lot angrier than I am now.”
I swallow and stare ahead. “You can’t make me do this. The worst thing you can do is kill me, but then you’ll still be stuck outside this tree.”
Zed sighs. “Do you really have to be so dramatic?” He bends in front of me and blows against the bark until the knocker appears. He lifts it, knocks a few times, then steps to the side. “And don’t even think about—”
“DON’T OPEN!” I yell. “IT’S A TRAP!”
“Dammit, you stupid—Fine. We’ll do this the hard way.” In a second, Zed is behind me, holding a sphere of crackling, sparking power against either side of my head. And when Ryn—my loyal, caring, protective brother—comes to the wall and looks through a peephole, he will open a doorway because he’d never leave me out here on my own with someone who’s threatening to hurt me.
I squeeze my eyes shut, expecting Zed to take his fury out on me at any second, and shout, “Seriously, Ryn! Do not open a doorway. He’s going to—”
“Calla!”
My eyelids spring open as Zed’s right hand shoots forward. Ryn, standing in the doorway with a glowing guardian dagger in one hand, collapses onto the floor. A gasp sounds from somewhere behind him, followed by Vi shouting, “Ryn!”
And suddenly, I remember the tracking spell that will set off an alarm in the Guild if I enter this house. I jump forward on my bound feet and throw myself through the doorway just as one of Vi’s knives flashes past me and Zed’s second ball of power flies the other way. I land on top of Ryn and struggle to look up. I hear Zed’s cry of pain behind me. Raising my head, I see Vi collapse against the couch and flop onto the floor.
“Well,” Zed says, crossing the threshold. “I expected that to be far more difficult.” A glittering knife smeared with blood clatters to the floor beside me. A second later, it vanishes.
“Wait,” I say as Zed walks past me. “Wait, please. What are you going to do to them?” I roll off Ryn and manage to sit up.
Zed stands in the center of the room, looking around. He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a knife.
I start to lose it. “Nonono, Zed, please. Please don’t kill them,” I beg. “Please, please, please. You don’t have to do this.”
“I know,” he says. “I didn’t come for them.”
“But … then …”
Zed looks at me, then uses his knife to point first at Ryn and then at Vi. “These two people destroyed lives. Now I will destroy theirs.” With that, he crosses the room and climbs the staircase.
Then it hits me.
Victoria.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
“NO!” I scream. “Don’t touch her, don’t touch her!” I fight desperately against the enchanted ropes. I pull my legs up and work at the knots around my ankles, but they’re so tight they don’t budge. I writhe and tug and twist but it’s so damn useless. “Zed! ZED! Don’t do anything to her, PLEASE!” I roll and squirm my way toward the stairs. I have no way of cutting these ropes and no plan of any sort, but I can’t just sit here. “Zed, please,” I sob. “Please don’t do it, please don’t do it.” How can he think that taking a life so pure and innocent could possibly right any kind of wrong
?
Before I reach the stairs, footsteps descend. Zed appears at the bottom, carrying a wrapped up bundle of blankets in his arms. I can see Victoria’s perfect little face, her closed eyes. She’s still asleep despite all my shouting. “Zed, what are you doing?” He walks past me without a word. “Where are you going? Where are you taking her?” He steps over Ryn, still lying across the open doorway, and disappears into the night. “ZED! Come back!”
Another wordless cry of rage and desperation leaves my lips—and that’s when the guardians choose to show up. Four of them, rushing into the house with weapons raised, each one jumping over Ryn as if touching him is against the rules of some game they’re playing. “It’s her!” one of them shouts.
“Don’t touch her,” another says.
“Please,” I gasp. “Go after that man who just left. He has the baby!”
“This is a bit of an odd situation,” one of the guards says, taking in my stunned brother and sister-in-law, and then the enchanted ropes around my wrists and ankles.
“Please!” I yell. “Didn’t you see him? He took Victoria. He’s getting away.”
“As if we’d believe anything you say after the exit stunt you pulled at the Guild,” one of them says. “Bloomhove, Crawdale, check upstairs.”
“Does she have to touch us in order to make us ill?” another one mutters as two of the men head for the stairs. “What if she’s doing it already?”
“ARGH! You guardians are so useless!”
I squeeze my eyelids together and tell myself to breathe, to calm down. You can do this. You can get out of here. I open my eyes. Only a guardian blade can cut the glittering ropes that bind me, and there are two guardian swords pointing directly at me. I concentrate on projecting an image of me sitting in the same spot I’m already in. Then I move. Quietly, inch by inch on my backside, toward the nearest sword. Making sure to keep myself concealed, I raise my arms over the sparkling blade, hold my breath, and pull my arms down quickly. Then I lean back and freeze.
The man jerks away. “What just happened?”
I look back at the image of me sitting in the same spot and give her a confused expression.
“I don’t know,” the second guard says. “What are you talking about?”
Now for my ankles. I stand slowly, wondering how I’m going to make this happen.
“Hey, she was right!” one of the men upstairs shouts. “The baby’s gone!”
Both guards look to the stairs. I grab the nearest guard’s hand and swipe downward with the sword, slicing the rope and cutting into my left boot. Then I turn and run.
I leap over Ryn and dash into the forest, the excess pieces of glittering rope falling from my arms and ankles. “Zed!” I shout. Where is he, where is he, where is he? He’s probably long gone through the faerie paths, and I’ll never find him, and we’ll never see Victoria again, and Ryn and Vi will never forgive me. A sob rises in my chest, and I have to stop running so I can breathe. Why did I ever let Zed escape the Guild? Why?
I’ve barely moved any real distance from the house, but it’s so pointless to run anywhere that I don’t. I’m too late. I’ve failed. Which is why, when I notice the figure kneeling on the ground nearby, I believe for a moment that I’m imagining it. Zed wouldn’t stop right here, would he? I step quietly toward the figure—and it is him, his hands hovering in the air above the tiny body wrapped in blankets.
“Hey!” In a rush of anger and fear, I push my hands through the air toward him. My released power slams into his chest, knocking him onto his back. He rolls and jumps to his feet. “What have you done?” I demand, closing the distance between us while keeping a shield up. I need to get myself in between him and Victoria.
“Nothing. She’s fine, I swear.”
“She’d better be.” I drop the shield and throw a stream of flames at him.
“You don’t want to fight me,” he says, deflecting the flames with a swipe of his hand and sending a cloud of sand my way.
My shield is almost instantaneous; the sand blasts against it before vanishing. “I do, Zed. I really, really do.” I push at the air. A cloud forms between us, impairing our view of one another. His sparks zoom through it, heading straight for me. I drop down as they pass, then jump up again, showing him an image of me leaping across the branches above him. He aims for the trees instead. My cloud becomes a flock of birds, screeching and pecking, and the image of me in the trees jumps down and swipes at him. Then the birds shift into real blades, slicing at him as he throws up a shield, and the illusion of me morphs into imaginary blades that pass through his shield with problem at all.
From magic to illusions and back again, I throw everything I can think of into a confusing mess, flicking from image to image to image. He doesn’t know what’s real and what’s imagined, what he needs to block and what he can ignore. And with every new illusion, I move another step closer to him. Keeping part of my mind focused on the projections, I raise my hand and shoot a stream of sparks at the nearest branch. It splits and falls to the ground beside me. I lean down—fire and bats and raining blood—and pick it up—shards of ice and pieces of bone—and swing it at Zed’s head with all my might.
He falls to the ground and doesn’t move.
I drop the branch and run back to Victoria. With a final glance over my shoulder to make sure Zed isn’t moving, I scoop her up and run. She starts crying as my feet pound the forest floor and my running body jerks her up and down. It’s the most welcome sound in the world right now.
Ryn’s doorway is still open because nobody seems to have moved him yet. I jump over him into the house—and find at least twenty guardians pointing their weapons at me. I freeze. Victoria continues to scream her tiny lungs out.
“What have you done to the child?” a guardian demands. The one who was giving orders when the first four arrived.
My eyebrows pinch together as I say, “I did what you should have done and rescued her.” I move toward the nearest piece of furniture—an armchair—and lay the unhappy baby carefully down on it. Then I step back with my arms raised. “If you’d like to redeem yourselves,” I add, “the man who stole her is lying unconscious in the forest not too far from here.”
No one says a word. No one moves. Far too many weapons are pointed at me. I breathe slowly and calmly, giving myself just a few seconds of rest. Then, with one last effort, I push my final illusion out as fast and as far as I can. Blackness. Everywhere. All-encompassing.
I turn around and run blindly as cries of confusion erupt behind me. I trip over Ryn. Something skims past my right arm before I hear a heavy handled weapon clatter across the floor. Something sharp slices across my shoulder. Footsteps move toward me. I pull myself over Ryn and into the forest. Shifting the illusion from one of darkness to one of invisibility, I tear between the trees. I zigzag and duck under bushes and finally come to a stop on the other side of a fallen log.
I hear no voices or footsteps. I tilt my head back against the log and allow relief to flood my body. “She’s okay,” I murmur to myself. “She’s okay, she’s okay.” Ryn and Vi will wake up soon, and they’ll find their little girl safe, and everything will be fine.
My eyes slide shut. I’m exhausted. Mentally drained. Cuts and burns mark my arms from the magical fight with Zed, and blood oozes from a wound on my shoulder where an arrow or blade didn’t quite miss me in the darkness just now. I cup my hand over it, sending a tiny bit of healing magic to the spot.
I wish tonight was over, but it isn’t yet. I left Chase in the bottommost Wishbone River with two fallen companions and who knows what other threats. I have to go back. I have to help him. I pick myself up, open a doorway, and drag my tired limbs into the faerie paths.
I walk out of the darkness onto the tangled moonlit bank of the top river where the four of us waded into the water earlier. If only wishes really did come true here, and I could wish my way to the bottom without having to pass through every river above it. The thought of all those whirlpools makes
me want to cry. And what if he isn’t there anymore? What if it’s all over and he’s back at the mountain? But what if it isn’t over and he’s locked in a battle with Amon and Angelica’s men?
I press my hands against the sides of my head, trying to ease away the coming headache. I decide to check the mountain first. It’ll be quick. Faerie paths, lakeside house, faerie door, mountain. I can be there in under a minute. I turn around to find a surface on which to write a doorway.
“Hello.”
My breath catches at the unexpected sight of a woman leaning against the boulder that marks the beginning of the whirlpools. Unease curls around me. I flex my hand, wondering if I should grab my knife from my boot.
“I thought you might come back at some point,” she says, pushing away from the boulder and moving toward me. It’s her hair that gives her away first, long dark locks mixed with silver cascading over her shoulders.
Angelica.
I feel as though I’ve been immersed in ice-cold fear. “H-how did you get out of Velazar?” I ask, taking a step back.
“Calla, right?” she says, ignoring my question. She wipes her hands on her prison overalls before crossing her arms over her chest. “You’re the one who spoke to me with the telepathy ring, claiming to be working with my son to free me. The one Amon told me he tried to get rid of. The one who showed up beside the third Seer’s bed when she awoke.”
“How do you know about that?”
“I’ve been keeping an eye on things.” She chuckles, as if she’s said something amusing.
“How did you escape Velazar?” I demand.
“Oh, I didn’t escape. The Guild let me go free.”
“What? They would never do that.”
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