He tilted the page and Kaylee saw written in neat script: Summoning Urn.
“That’s from the djinn giant from the mall,” Kaylee said.
“The record of the first time the Convocation had it.”
“So what does this tell us?”
“Well, we know the Slayers aren’t strong enough in number to launch an all-out attack without massive magical backup. That means if they want to do something big it needs to be via a rare, powerful item. Specifically, one of these.”
Edwin flipped to a section in the back. This list had been decimated by thick, angry ink scratches.
“These particular items were recorded until the Convocation thought they were too dangerous to be kept on record. Lucky for me, when they decided to ‘destroy’ the evidence they probably used some lazy intern who didn’t care enough to do it properly.” Edwin shook his head. “I told my dad he should have made the internship paid. But at least it allowed me to do this.”
He ran his fingers down the parchment, as if tickling the page. Where his fingertips brushed, the ink blots drained away and flowed to the bottom margin, clearly revealing the words beneath.
“I see Baba’s been teaching you some seriously advanced magic,” Kaylee said. “Redacted documents are powerless against you.”
Edwin bumped her knee and Kaylee laughed.
“I have gotten better, believe it or not, and not just at reading.”
He was still smiling as he turned back to the book. Kaylee perched her chin on his shoulder. She wasn’t quite sure what compelled her to do it, but Edwin’s breath only hitched for a moment before he started reading the items listed aloud,
“Seal of Solomon, Book of Kells, Drake’s Drum, Smoking Mirror, Mjolnir—“
“Wait, you’re telling me the Convocation had Thor’s hammer Mjolnir? Really?”
“It’s possible,” Edwin said.
“Come on, Edwin.”
“This disbelief coming from a girl who will one day be able to sprout wings and a dragon’s tail.”
“I’ve always wondered about that. When I shift my tail, is it going to…you know, where does it come out…”
Edwin burst out laughing, and Kaylee had to clamp her hand over his mouth, shooting a worried look towards the door. “Quiet! It was a legit question!”
Edwin finished chuckling into her hand until she pulled it away. “Sorry, sorry. I guess no one ever explained it to you. When a dragon-kin shifts parts of their body, yes, it causes an actual physical change that affects clothing and space. Appendages off the dragon-kin’s physical body, like wings and a tail, aren’t actually physical. They’re made by magic so they don’t follow the exact same properties as a physical shift.”
“I’m…not sure I follow.”
“If you remember next time you’re with Randy, ask him to show you. Wings and a tail seem physical, but if you get a closer look they’re actually almost intangible. They don’t displace space, like the clothing you wear.”
“Except when you need to hit someone with them, or fly.”
“Yep, and because they’re not wholly physical, that’s why,” he snickered again, “we don’t see a bunch of trained dragon-kin running around with holes in the backs of their pants.”
Kaylee smacked him. “Point made.”
Still chuckling, Edwin pulled the book from her lap and flipped the page. This one was empty. “But after these rare items I’ve hit a dead end again. The problem is there’s no way of knowing which items the Convocation still has and which the Slayers still have access to. Just because the item is written down here doesn’t mean it wasn’t stolen or lost again.”
“Maybe you could ask Alastair.”
“He doesn’t even know I went to the Convocation Records. He’s okay with me reading from his library, but after last year he’s still wary about us getting more involved than we have to.”
Kaylee leaned back with a huff. “Clearly. He hasn’t sent us on another mission in months.”
Edwin drew his hand back from the page and all the crossed-out lines rushed back to their proper place. “I can’t ask Alastair, or Baba…”
“Nononono, don’t do that,” Kaylee said. “I like my limbs attached, thanks.”
“So I was thinking you could ask Randy. I know I mentioned it before, but I’m sure he wouldn’t go telling my dad.”
Kaylee thought about it. There was a chance Randy might have more insight, but he would definitely question what she was doing. Especially since he was still on her about the whole Brendan thing. If he didn’t think she was over that there was no way he’d allow her to continue investigating the Slayers.
There was also the fact Kaylee didn’t completely trust him.
“I can tell by your face that’s a no,” Edwin said. “I guess that means a trip to the Slag Heap.”
Kaylee raised an eyebrow. “I’m still not sure Damian will let us back.”
“Damian doesn’t have a choice. We need info and we’re going to get it.”
Edwin’s jaw was set, his eyes firmly planted on the cover of the book. His confidence caused a small flutter of admiration in her chest.
“You have changed,” she muttered.
Edwin leaned towards her. “What’d you say?”
“Kaylee?”
Kaylee had all of three seconds to shove Edwin off the other side of the bed and try to leap back into her desk chair before Reese opened the door.
“Hey, Katy-did, dinner’s—what are you doing?”
Kaylee slyly nudged Edwin’s book beneath the bed with her foot and continued leaning back on her chair, her lower body still sprawled on the bed.
“Uh, what are you doing?” Reese repeated.
“Relaxing. I’m combining the comfortableness of my bed with the ergonomics of my chair.”
Reese blinked. “Oookay. I guess you haven’t changed as much as I thought since I’ve been gone.”
His eyes jumped to the open window. In a second he’d crossed the room and closed it, staring out into the dark a second longer than necessary. He did a quick check around the room, as if something were amiss. Kaylee’s heart briefly stopped when his gaze lingered beneath the bed, then moved on.
“You shouldn’t leave it open like that,” he chastised.
“What?” Kaylee said, trying to ignore how close he’d stopped next to where Edwin was hiding. “You think some big bad monster’s going to come in and snatch me?”
“Yes,” Reese said simply. “Now come on down, dinner’s ready.”
He paused at the door, his hand hooked on the frame.
“Kaylee, you know you can tell me anything, right?”
Kaylee was taken aback. Reese had always been nice to her, but never the kind of brother to get overly sentimental. That he was even offering to have a true heart-to-heart discussion was a far cry from the kid who’d left for school only last year.
“I…guess I knew that.”
“I mean it. Anything.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Now hurry up, I’m starving.”
Kaylee listened to the thump of his feet as he went back downstairs. She jumped when the window once again closed behind her as Edwin left.
Chapter Ten
I’m telling you, it’s weird,” Kaylee said. “She hasn’t been here for two weeks.”
Jade finished adding the last few lines to her English report. She chewed the end of her pen.
“Jade?”
“Huh? Did you say something?”
“Dani. She hasn’t been to school in a while.”
Jade picked her head up from writing and took a look around the quad, as if Dani would simply appear now that they were discussing her. “Dani’s a human being, no matter how unnaturally happy she is. She probably got sick or something.”
“But you told me she stopped hanging around the Convocation recently, too.”
“Yeah, but again that could also be because she’s sick.”
“For two weeks?”
&nb
sp; Jade made a non-committal grunt and scratched out something else on her paper.
Kaylee sighed. She knew when she was fighting a losing battle with Jade’s concentration. “You realize you had, like, since Thanksgiving to do that, right?”
“Between Convocation meetings and extra practice, you mean.”
Kaylee opened her mouth, then closed it again. Extra practice, as in the Tamer test Jade was still prepping for. The time since Christmas had been so chaotic Kaylee hadn’t even had the chance to hang out with Jade and Maddox as much as she usually did.
“Here.” Kaylee took the pen and paper. “And it’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, not Something Crooked.”
“Thought that didn’t sound right,” Jade said, leaning back with a relieved sigh.
Despite Jade’s assurances that everything was fine with Dani, Kaylee found herself worrying about her through the rest of the day. It wasn’t like it was anything she could put a finger on, either. Dani hadn’t been in an accident (that Kaylee knew of). She actually could have been sick, but Dani’s demeanor had been off even before now, and Kaylee knew she wasn’t imagining that. Jade might not have believed her, but Kaylee couldn’t let it alone.
So right after school Kaylee found herself taking a long walk to the eastern side of Scarsdale where Dani lived. She’d been able to find her address from the staff credits in the Yearbook Club, one of the thousand school groups Dani was part of. Strangely, when Kaylee had asked the girls Dani usually hung out with, none of them could recall having ever actually visited her house.
Kaylee slowed as she reached Dani’s house, tucked in the deep bend of a cul-de-sac. From where she stood the front of the house looked pinched. All the shades were drawn. The grass was unkempt, and a car with a deflated tire and rust trailing down the sides sat unloved in the driveway.
Kaylee double-checked the address. This couldn’t be right. Not that Kaylee had thought much about Dani’s home up until now, but she had expected something brighter. Something more alive and similar to her neighbors on either side: Narrow stoops but with homely decorations, freshly tilled flowerbeds and blinds open to the world.
Feeling a bit intrusive, and with unease prickling at the back of her neck, Kaylee approached the front. She raised her hand to knock.
Someone sobbed faintly from inside.
Kaylee’s hand hovered an inch from the door. “Dani?” Her voice wavered. She forced it steady. “Dani?”
Silence.
Kaylee tried to make her arm move, but a strange power held it back; a feeling she never in a million years would have associated with Dani: Fear.
Kaylee tried to dismiss the emotion Dani was…Dani was sick, and Kaylee was here to see if she was okay, maybe fetch her something if she needed to feel better, as she had done a dozen times before for Jade.
There came a distant crash, followed by a cry of alarm, barely discernible through the door. Kaylee pounded on it.
“Dani!”
Waiting was agony. The next-door-neighbor’s flag snapped in the wind. In the distance a dog barked, but here, in front of Dani’s, Kaylee felt as if she was in her own universe, composed only of whatever noise she heard next and whatever would happen when that door opened.
If it ever opened.
There was the thump of feet crossing tile. Kaylee exhaled as a bolt was scraped back and the door pulled open a crack.
“Dani?” Kaylee ventured.
It sure didn’t look like it. The Dani Kaylee knew was a vibrant spirit; a ball of sunshine manifested in human form. The person who peered through the narrow space of wood and doorframe had red-ringed eyes and a haunted look, her face gaunt and tinged slightly gray. In an instant Kaylee knew this was no normal sickness.
“Kaylee?” Dani’s eyes widened as if she faced an oncoming train.
The door slammed shut.
“Dani! Open up!” Kaylee pounded again, but even that couldn’t drown out the pained scream that came from the other side.
Screw this. Kaylee took a quick glance around to make sure nobody was coming, then focused on drawing her magic to her shoulder. She could feel the muscles tighten, the bones beneath her skin knitting together as scales interlocked over it.
Kaylee backed up and rammed against the door. Once. Twice. Another scream inside and Kaylee pounded again, more frantic this time. It occurred to her that this was insane. That what she was doing was beyond illegal, but also that something on the other side of the door was terribly, horribly wrong.
Kaylee backed up again and put more force behind the next push. The door popped inward, bouncing against the inside wall, but Kaylee was already moving.
The first thing she noticed was the blood. Teardrops of it splattered in a morbid trail on the tile, stark against the white. Kaylee forced down her welling horror and followed the trail to the back of the house, to another door.
“Dani!”
“Don’t come in!” Dani screamed. There was another sob. With one turn of her claws Kaylee broke the knob and rushed inside.
Things clicked into place very fast. The dark looks Dani had had at school, the result of a secret, unwelcome discovery; scratching her arms, missing her normal activities. Hiding. Afraid.
And now Dani, kneeling in the center of the floor in front of her, beautiful aqua blue scales littering the carpet like diamonds, mingled with blood as Dani desperately tried to rip them off.
Chapter Eleven
Stop!”
A spray of water sluiced at Kaylee’s head, but her instincts took over and she dodged aside, the attack instead making a dent in the wall behind her. Kaylee slid beside Dani and gripped her claws. Dani tried to throw her off but Kaylee held tight.
At least until Dani gave another screech and a second blast of water slammed Kaylee in the face. She was thrown back into the closet, her head hitting a vacuum with a painful thump. When she looked up the other girl wore an expression of pure horror.
“Kaylee! Are you okay? I didn’t mean to—”
Her eyes moved back to her arms and Kaylee fought a sudden wave of nausea. It seemed Dani had been picking away at her scales for some time. Most remained, but there were small chunks of them missing, blood pooling from the shallow holes and mixing with the aqua blue.
“I have to get them off, Kaylee. This can’t be—I won’t let it be.”
“You won’t get them to go away like that,” Kaylee said. She crawled from the closet, one hand held reassuringly out in front, and kneeled across from Dani. Her heart was racing. Her mind whirled with a million different questions, but right now Dani needed her help.
“Watch.” Kaylee held up her hand, shifted it to dragon scales, then back. “Just breathe. When you first get them, they come out when you’re scared or get overly emotional.”
Dani choked a sob. “Overly emotional. Story of my life.”
“Breathe,” Kaylee repeated. She shifted back and forth again. “Think of pulling the magic back into your arms like a rope. Bring it in. Coax the scales to go away.”
Dani was still crying, but now her arms had gone limp in her lap. She took a shuddering breath. “It’s not working!”
Kaylee gently placed her hands on Dani’s arms. Dani winced, and for a moment Kaylee flashed back to the first time she’d grown her own scales. That fear that somehow everyone knew what was happening to her and that they’d find out at any moment. That she was nothing but a hideous creature they would only ever see as a freak.
You’re an abomination. You never should have existed.
“Focus,” Kaylee said, as much to herself as to Dani. “Breathe, focus, and coax them back. It’s your magic. Make it listen to you.”
Kaylee matched breaths with Dani. She concentrated only on that. Not the warm blood seeping through her fingers or Dani’s eyes darting from one covered window to the next.
“Breathe,” Kaylee commanded.
Dani closed her fluttering lashes. A moment later the scales beneath Kaylee’s fingers softened, then returned to
skin. Kaylee sighed.
“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
Dani turned her arms over. Kaylee tried not to wince at the numerous shallow gouges where the scales had been. She’d have to talk to Alastair right away to see if a Merlin healer could do anything to fix those.
“Do you have a first aid kit? Band aids? Anything?”
Dani continued marveling at her skin, as if she’d never seen it before. Kaylee snapped her fingers. “Dani?”
“What?”
“First aid.”
“Oh. Bathroom.”
Kaylee found the bathroom in a narrow hallway and stepped inside. She tried to ignore the blood-stained towels stuffed in the trash can and instead dug under the sink until she found a store bought first aid-kit.
It wasn’t until she tried opening the kit that she realized her hands were shaking. She gripped the sides of the sink to steady them and looked in the mirror. A terrified girl stared back.
Dani, a dragon-kin. Did Alastair know? Did he know what Dani was doing to herself?
Kaylee squeezed the sides of the sink harder until her shaking was reduced to nothing more than a slight tremble. Dani couldn’t see how scared she was. She was supposed to be the strong one. She’d get her friend through this and then…then Alastair could figure things out.
“Come with me,” Kaylee said when she returned to the other room. “We’ll patch you up in the kitchen.”
Dani, still in a daze, allowed Kaylee to lead her to the kitchen.
“This is going to hurt,” Kaylee said, turning on the water. Dani nodded mutely. She didn’t make a sound as Kaylee washed out the gouges the best she could, then dried them with a couple towels. At least a dozen times she wished Edwin were here. He was stupidly rational when it came to these sorts of surprises, plus he may have known some healing spells.
The cleaning done, Kaylee used up all the band aids, then finished with the rest of the gauze and tore the towels into strips to tie off the whole thing.
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