by Chloe Garner
“Cold, for you to rather she die than work with us,” Mrs. MacMillan said.
He needed leverage.
He wanted Valerie back.
Wanted her back now.
But they would use everything that had happened as a pretense to go against her mom’s stated intentions for her, to usurp guardianship and award it to the Council, and whisk her away.
He licked his lips.
“She’s a natural,” he said. “You can’t hold her. She’ll get out. And if she has to escape from you, she won’t come back here. She won’t come back anywhere.”
Lady Harrington nodded.
“I can’t imagine trying to contain that young woman.”
“It would be for her own safety,” Mrs. MacMillan said. “We are all concerned about keeping her safe. The things that the Superiors won’t do to get ahold of her and try to neutralize Susan? She is in danger.”
“She held the demons out of her room,” Ethan said. “She defused a bomb. It seems like she’s the only one not in danger, and then only because of him.”
“There is a hole in the defenses here,” Merck said. “We are going to have to discuss shutting the school down.”
The room went very cold again, and Lady Harrington shook her head.
“This is not the time nor the place for that conversation. Within the confines of her room, Valerie is safe until we determine the correct plan to move forward. I believe that we can mount a significant defense against and surrounding the magic that Elvis Trent planted in the girls’ dorm wing, and that we could make it through to the end of the semester before ripping everything out down to the foundations to remedy it.”
“Won’t work,” Elvis muttered.
“Who taught you to do that cast?” Ethan asked, looking at his brother. Elvis turned the corners of his mouth down, smug, and Lady Harrington held up a hand once more.
“Not this conversation, Mr. Trent,” she said. “Please refrain.”
Ethan glanced at her, then turned his head away.
“You’re suggesting that you take responsibility for her until we figure out what to do about the school and the hole in your defenses that can’t be closed,” Merck Trent said.
“I’m suggesting that she would be much more willing to return here, knowing that we have found the source of the attacks and are working toward a plan to amply ward the known issue with the defenses. More importantly, I’m suggesting that your son would be more willing to aid in our search for her.”
“Martha Cox is going to find her eventually,” Ann’s dad said. “Just let her work. We don’t need help from anyone here, at all.”
Ethan sighed.
“I can find her faster than Mrs. Cox can,” he said. “And I don’t like her being out there. I will help Lady Harrington find her, but only under the condition that she stays here.”
“I can’t promise that, regardless,” Merck said. “If we have to shut down the school…”
Would he really shut down the entire school just to justify taking Valerie?
It was possible.
But.
This had been her condition, not his.
If they tried to box her up… Well, he could find her again, so long as she gave him another cast to do it, and he’d come break her out, if she hadn’t already done it for herself.
“I’ll do it if you promise to let her stay here as long as you keep the school open,” Ethan said.
And what was his father’s promise worth?
They both knew.
Just as much as it had in it for him.
How was he going to sell this as not a complete push-over?
“Can Lady Harrington guarantee her adequate supervision, so long as she is here, to keep her safe?”
“Oh, she won’t like that,” Lady Harrington murmured. “I will have one of the teachers posted at the end of the dorm wing at all times. Mrs. Gold is already there, and you already know what she’s capable of.”
“Not enough,” Merck said. “Two teachers posted on the hall and one at each classroom.”
Ethan closed his eyes, wondering if he was even going to tell Valerie about the terms, if he wanted her to come back at all.
“Very well,” Lady Harrington said. “But you should not underestimate the capabilities of this faculty. We’ve made steady progress even as we’ve been trying to purge the original cast, itself.”
“Won’t work…” Elvis murmured.
No one even looked at him this time.
“All right,” Merck said, looking at Ethan. “Tell me how you would find her.”
Ethan shook his head.
“No. You leave. You take him with you and you throw him down in the Darkness where he belongs for what he did. Lady Harrington can help us figure out how to track down Valerie.”
Merck looked at Mrs. MacMillan.
“Are you happy with that?” he asked. She took a very long moment, then nodded.
“It will put this very unhappy chapter behind us and allow us to refocus our energies where they belong,” she said. “I am quite disappointed, though, in both boys for not stepping forward that they had important knowledge. They should not expect to go unpunished for withholding it from the Council.”
“A conversation for another day,” Lady Harrington said, standing. “If that will be all.”
There was a general shuffling and untangling as all of the adults made their way out of the room. Merck and Mrs. MacMillan went to stand on either side of Elvis’ chair.
“Don’t make this more of a scene than it already is,” Merck said, and Elvis shrugged, standing.
“You’re making too big a deal out of her. She’s a nothing. Doesn’t know any magic, and way too dark. She isn’t one of us.”
“She is a tool to be utilized by the Council at our discretion,” Merck said, a low growl. Ethan wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be able to hear it or not, but it hardly came as a surprise. That was how Merck always talked about the war, at home.
Always.
Finally, it was just Mr. Tannis, Mr. Benson, Lady Harrington, and Ethan and Shack in the room.
“Mrs. Young, you can retire for the evening,” Lady Harrington said, going to stand at the open door. “Mr. Benson, Mr. Tannis, will you do final rounds, please? I expect we are going to have to endure shenanigans tonight after letting everyone loose today.”
“Are you sure you don’t want us here?” Mr. Tannis asked. “If this is going to be complex magic…”
“I will resummon you, if I have need of your talents,” Lady Harrington said, waiting for both men to leave, then closing the door and going to sit at the table again.
It was possible, just possible, that she looked a shade tired.
“I certainly hope, after that display, that you have a promising lead on Valerie?” she asked, rubbing her temples with her fingers.
“I can find her,” Ethan said. “She gave me something and she told me what to do with it, and… Apparently I’ll just go straight to her.”
“She handed you a tracking spell?” Lady Harrington asked. “How intriguing.”
Ethan checked his watch.
It was almost eleven.
“I don’t know where she is,” he said. “Or how far away it is. And once I use the cast, I don’t know how long it will last.”
She nodded.
“We could leave now, but it has been a very trying day, and driving through the night is not something I would choose without compelling reason.”
“I don’t like her being out there,” Ethan said.
“We should go now,” Shack said. “Everyone is looking for her. We need to be the first ones to get there.”
Lady Harrington nodded, then roused herself and nodded again.
“Very well. You are correct, and I am simply overtired. I will regain myself in the car.”
“Oh,” Ethan said. “I wasn’t going to… It was just going to be us.”
The woman looked at him with clever eyes and shook her head.<
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“No. Not on the trip when we intend to bring her back. I will not let you meander off on your own once more from under my nose.”
“No one meandered,” Ethan said.
“Though I was thinking maybe we could stop and get some food,” Shack said. Ethan twisted his mouth and nodded.
“Yeah. We should do that.”
Lady Harrington sighed and rose.
“Then, gentlemen, shall we go?”
Valerie looked out the window, then went back to weaving strands of the curtains together with bits of throw pillow.
Her mother had lived in this little shack on the beach a lot of times. Valerie could feel it, the way the magic in the place curled around itself tightly, woven into the very fibers of the limited permanent fixtures.
It was something, and she was weaving it into more.
Just not fast enough.
Martha Cox was in the kitchen, working with a much more ample supply of ingredients, and while Sasha had tried to go take things from Martha’s supply, Hanson’s mom had rebuffed her aggressively, telling her that Sasha and Valerie should have been in a back room, and that there wasn’t any way that Martha was going to hold off the Superiors on her own, either way.
“I don’t care what art project she’s got going on up there,” Martha had said, and Sasha had relented.
Valerie might not have, but her hands were busy.
“What next?” Sasha asked.
“Are there any hangers in the closet?” Valerie asked.
“Let me check.”
Valerie nodded, counting weaves.
She’d never been the arts-and-crafts type of kid. She preferred being out and exploring, but it wasn’t entirely unlike some of the things she and Hanson had built as kids, fortresses and castles and swords. It was just a matter of getting the pieces to lie right.
Only, now, there was magic involved, not just gravity, and everything got ten times more complicated.
She could do this.
She had to do this.
She tugged at the curtain once more, then opened the window a fraction, tucking the end of the long braid under the window and closing it again. The tail of curtain threads now formed an X across the window, one from each side, woven in with fabrics from all over the house that were touched routinely.
It was like the seaweed, but not like it, and Valerie was moving too fast to think about it more than that.
“People,” Sasha said. “I see people.”
Valerie nodded.
“Let your cast down,” Martha said from the kitchen. “Or else they’re going to just blow us all up through it and not have to do anything but watch from outside.”
“Don’t know if you’ve heard, but they do want me alive,” Valerie said, tying bits of this and that to the coat hanger and hanging it from the curtain rod.
Something twanged and clicked, a loop of magic she hadn’t even been planning on creating springing into being, and she looked up at the hanger.
A coat hanger.
“They want a rumor that you’re still alive,” Martha called. “Even if they don’t manage to save your life from the cast, your mom thinking you might still be alive would be enough.”
“Ma,” Hanson yelled from the bedroom. “Would you… just…”
“Just telling them like it is,” Martha yelled back.
“They can hear you,” Sasha hissed, ducking below the window.
True enough, there were four adults out there in the front yard, hidden in among the trees and creeping toward the house. They were dragging something along between them, sort of sweeping up the magic from the house and pushing it in tighter and tighter. Valerie could feel it like a physical pressure, though she didn’t know what they intended to do about it. The force it was going to take to keep going forward would build and eventually one of the… Oh, yup, that was it. Eventually, one of the magics would break, and they were betting it was hers.
Well.
That just wasn’t going to happen.
Valerie ran back to the kitchen, looking at what Martha had laid out on the table.
“That’s all defensive,” she said.
“I went to the School of Magic Survival and I spent the rest of my adult life following around your mom,” Martha said. “It’s not like I have a lot of experience with anything else.”
Valerie twisted her mouth to the side, coming to look at one of the casts.
They had a dry, textbook feel to her for reasons she couldn’t have explained.
“If you…” she started, and Martha slapped her hand.
“We are outgunned in every way possible,” the woman said. “They are going to come through that door, and if you want any hope of turning back the first volley of attacks on us, you will leave those alone.”
It occurred to Valerie for the first time that this might not have just been temper.
Martha Cox was afraid.
“We don’t die here,” Valerie said, and Martha looked up at her, giving Valerie her full attention for just that moment.
“Oh? Is that so? How would you know? What could you possibly have up your sleeve to prevent it?”
“If you knew that we were in that much trouble, why did you even come?” Valerie asked.
“Hanson was in here,” she said. “I knew it the minute I stopped the car. This is where he would be, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” Valerie said. “You left him, though.”
“He was safe,” Martha said. “He was safe until the minute he decided he was going to come try to beg for your forgiveness, for betraying you. You’re the one who got him killed. He could have gotten a scholarship. Baseball? Basketball? Maybe even football.”
“Ma, I’m not that good,” Hanson called.
“Yes, you are,” Martha yelled back. “And you could have gone to college. Lived a normal life.”
Valerie looked at the door.
She needed sand from the threshold.
“He isn’t going to die, and neither are any of us,” Valerie said. “That isn’t how this ends.”
“You don’t know anything,” Martha muttered. “People just fail to come home all the time. Your own mom could be dead by now, and you wouldn’t even know it.”
“This is how I work,” Valerie said. “I don’t know what it means, but this is how I work. They aren’t coming through that door.”
Martha put her hands down on the table.
“So I should just sit back and let the master work then?” she asked.
“Would have been more helpful if you’d given me your stuff ten minutes ago,” Valerie said, then opened the door and took a handful of sand from just outside of it, closing it again quickly as the power of her casts whooshed out the door like a balloon.
Worth it.
She went back to the front window, pouring the sand across the sill in a solid line, then running her hand across it to flatten it.
Sasha stood at her elbow as Valerie started drawing symbols in the sand.
She used her little finger to do it as intricately and as small as she could, glad of the wide windowsill to work on.
The symbols from the door at the apartment.
The one over the window in her room.
The ones carved into the bottom of Susan Blake’s shoes.
The one Susan had drawn on Valerie’s backpack her first day of first grade.
A dozen symbols, and there were more.
“More sand,” Valerie said, all but a whisper, going to the window in the kitchen and brushing the dust off of it as Sasha ran for the door.
More sand, more symbols, more pressure.
The men with the rope out front were trying to crush her, but Valerie… Valerie wasn’t the type to crush like that, and her mother had trained her.
She didn’t even know how, but Susan had trained her exactly how to do this. Every symbol hidden all over the house came back to her and she stepped back, looking at them.
“Don’t breathe on them,” she said, g
oing to the side door and beginning to trace out the main protection symbol there.
“What is that?” Martha asked as the door began to scorch under the potency of the magic. “Is that dark magic?”
“No,” Sasha said. “It’s fire magic, and it’s one of Valerie’s strengths.”
Valerie didn’t look over, but she wanted to.
Sasha said it with such matter-of-factness, like she’d known for some time.
Valerie was shocked at it as a simple revelation.
She was good at fire magic.
Yes.
That was true.
She felt the symbol click into place and she started drawing the next one.
“How far away are they?” she asked, and Sasha went to look. Valerie heard the girl squeal as she ducked back behind the window, but Valerie only hoped that Sasha had managed not to disturb the sand.
They were close.
Close enough for Sasha to see their faces, and for them to see hers.
Valerie focused on the second symbol, letting her hand work over it and over it and over it as the door smoldered and smoked, leaving a char in the painted wood.
They fit like lock and key, the two symbols.
“What is that?” Martha asked again.
“My mom taught me,” Valerie answered, going back to look out the window.
“She didn’t teach you anything, I thought,” Martha called, and Valerie shrugged.
“I guess I was wrong.”
The men were struggling against the rope, a great, long trawling thing with tendrils dragging along behind it in the yard, like a gutted-out fishing net.
Her magic was holding.
It was strong.
She saw the closest man, one who took a moment from yelling at the others to look at the window, and she met his eye.
He was an adult, maybe older than her parents. He had a grizzled chin and a scar down his face, and he had rough hands - he was close enough for her to see it from here.
He’d been in the last war.
And he was looking her in the eye through the window of the beach house as he tried to break through the defenses and come… to take her? to kill her? It didn’t matter.
She was going to stop him.
He took out a gun and pointed it at her, and she stepped out of sight, watching the men on the other end of the rope struggle.