by Emma Savant
No one had noticed. The cheerful cartoon music continued, and the adults fell into a conversation. I pushed again, opening the door one silent millimeter at a time, until light cracked through. And then I kept pushing until I could make out a figure.
It was one of the adults, a beautiful woman with dark skin and hair. She was scrolling on her phone and half-listening to an equally attractive blonde. Both women were elegant and sharp, as vampires tended to be, and also seemed bored. But I couldn’t make out the children, who were behind the door.
There was nothing for it. I kept pushing, slowly enough that the motion wouldn’t attract the vamps’ attention.
And then, with an abrupt jolt, I was flung backward by a protection charm I hadn’t sensed before. My body slammed against the stone wall opposite the locker rooms, and the world spun while I tried to get my bearings. By the time the stars cleared and I figured out which way was down, Sienna was standing over me with fire in her eyes.
“Look who dropped by,” she said.
Her voice was calm, and for a fraction of a second, I thought I might be able to salvage the moment. Then common sense caught up to me, and I shifted to a sitting position. A quick wave of my hand confirmed that whatever spell had knocked me backward had also destroyed my glamour.
“You have something you shouldn’t.” I scrambled to my feet, head still spinning a little. “I have a dozen Daggers in this building and law enforcement from the Waterfall Palace positioned outside.”
The lie slipped off my tongue easily, and I watched her believe it for only a second before she turned to her vampire boyfriend.
“Go find out if that’s true.” She smiled at me. “I suspect it’s not.”
“Shouldn’t matter,” I said. “Any decent person wouldn’t need the threat of violence to convince them to give up kidnapped children.”
“But you don’t think I’m decent, so it sounds like your expectations don’t apply to me.” She folded her arms. “It’s kind of cute that you thought you could get to the kids that easily. Dagger arrogance is so reliable.”
“What are you doing with them?”
“I’m starting up a blood farm,” she said, face bright and sarcastic. “Vamps have to feed somehow, so I’m tapping into a new market. I’m going to be an entrepreneur and make my own hours!”
She rolled her eyes, and I realized the question had been pointless. No matter what I asked, she wasn’t going to give me an honest answer—assuming she was doing any of this for a reason in the first place. For all I knew, she’d kidnapped the girls just to get back at me for putting her last boyfriend in jail. Or maybe it was for that time I’d gotten her arrested. Or maybe she’d just gotten bored.
I steadied myself against the wall and decided that this time, jail would be too good for her.
She punched me in the gut. I should have seen it coming, but my head was still spinning from the protection charm, and I dodged a second too late. I doubled over and stayed down there a moment until the spinning feeling cleared. Behind the door, children’s voices rose in excitement or maybe fear: What was that? I heard something. Open the door! Where’s Sienna?
I couldn’t risk the children getting in the line of fire. I stared at the floor, hands on my knees, and then I made a break for it.
15
My feet pounded on the cement floor, and then the echoing footsteps disappeared as I broke onto the open expanse of the Orbs field. I spun around and jogged backward, drawing Sienna out and away from the kids.
She strode toward me, raised a finger, and pointed a bolt of crackling lightning in my direction. I blocked it with a shield of white light, and she seemed almost surprised.
I’d never been much good at these witch duels, not in all the years we’d sparred together.
But I’d been practicing. And if she wanted lightning, I was happy to provide.
I kept dancing backward and felt into the air around us for water—from the air, from the grass, from the drinking fountains down the entrance corridor by the bathrooms. There wasn’t much available, but I pulled what was toward me and formed it into a shimmering bubble of water that hovered in the air. I launched it at Sienna, and it splashed around her, soaking her clothes and leaving her red-tipped hair soggy against her shoulders.
She looked down at herself, then back up at me. She started laughing.
“You got me wet?” she said, holding up a soaked arm. “What a powerful witch you’ve turned out to be.”
I smiled tightly. Electricity tingled in my fingertips. I might not have been the most powerful witch in the coven. I definitely didn’t share Sienna’s facility with magic. But I did have a brain and a cursory knowledge of sixth-grade science.
And I knew that water and electricity brought out the best in each other.
I shot a bolt of witch lightning toward her, and it connected. Dazzling white bolts sparked and crackled around her body, and she vibrated with the force of it. By the time she’d managed to get the electricity under control and sent it down into the ground, her hair was singed, and she was unsteady on her feet.
I’d had a slight hope that it might have been enough to kill her, but now it was clear I’d only made her angry. She ran toward me with fury twisting her face.
“You come into my house,” she snarled, and I didn’t have time to point out that this was, in fact, a privately owned sports arena before she’d raked her sharp nails down my face.
I grappled with her as flames shot from her fingertips and caught my sleeve on fire. I smothered the blaze against her still-damp clothing and tried to wrestle her hands behind her back. I had her almost trapped when motion in the corner of my eye distracted me.
Vampires were pouring onto the field like bats out of hell. Not one, not a few, but dozens, streaming from both players’ entrances and coming to Sienna’s aid.
Part of being a good Dagger was knowing your own limitations, and so I ran. I broke free of Sienna and pounded my way across the field toward the exit lined with its innocent burger counters, but there was no way to outrun them all. Hands pulled at my clothes, and strong fingers wrapped around my wrists.
A tall male vampire pinned my arms behind my body and marched me back to Sienna. I tried to gather enough magic to fight him off but realized before the flames had formed in my hands that it was pointless. There were too many of them, and I didn’t have the kind of weapons I needed to deal with the bloodthirsty undead. Even if I managed to take this one down, a dozen more would appear in his place.
I stopped struggling, and the vampire made me stop in front of Sienna.
“You’re dead,” she said.
The Dagger instinct to keep fighting resisted the words, but the logical part of my mind knew there was no argument to be made to the contrary. I was faced by my worst enemy and surrounded by her newest army of supporters, any one of whom would have been happy to make a feast of my blood.
So I stood straight and stared at her.
She might murder me. And then Alec would go back to Lady Fauna and get another braided cord, and another of my sisters would come to save the children and avenge my death.
I might not walk out of here, but someone else would walk in. That was what it meant to be a Dagger, to be part of a coven, and the knowledge let me stand tall even as fear roiled in the pit of my stomach.
“The kids are a handful,” Sienna said. Her tone was cool, despite her dripping clothes and singed hair, and she was back to acting like the queen of the world, the best of the Dagger novitiates, the apple of the coven’s eye.
I gritted my teeth and tried to wrench my arms free from the vampire holding them, and his grip tightened until the pressure of it ached against the bones of my wrists.
“A handful plus one.” She winked, like this was all a joke, and the coldness of it only made my anger burn hotter. “But you might be the worst of them all.”
And there it was, the implication that compared to her, I would always be a child, a young Dagger struggling to rea
ch my milestones, the last of my age group to be initiated into the coven.
It was true. I wasn’t as gifted as her and never had been.
But I was the future Stiletto in spite of it. Anyway, even if I eventually flunked out of the Dagger business entirely, I could still rest secure in the knowledge that I’d never kidnapped a bunch of little girls.
“I’m going to let you go,” Sienna said. “And then you’re going to go home and tell the coven where I am.” She smiled, a slow, creeping expression, and my heart pounded harder. “Please do. I’d love to see them all.”
Around us, the sea of vampires shifted, their black-clad bodies sucking in the light of the orbs overhead. A ripple passed through the crowd of amusement or hunger, I couldn’t tell which.
And then the vampire had let me go, and I was being shoved toward the exit. They pushed me down the hallway and up the stairs, and kept their icy breath on the back of my neck until I’d reached the top of the stairs. I slammed the maintenance door shut behind me.
16
Grandma draped a blanket around my shoulders, and Rowan handed me another steaming mug of tea.
“I’ve heard all I need to hear,” Ginger said. “Let’s go.”
She was only half joking, and it took Cerise’s gentle hand on her shoulder to keep her from jumping out of her chair.
The parlor was mostly empty. I’d reported the basics back to Grandma, and she’d called in the Cardinals—Mom and Saffron, and Cherry, whose face was drawn tight with worry for her daughters—and a few of the Daggers who’d happened to be home. Ginger and Cerise, whose schedules aligned as closely as the schedules of any Daggers couple could, had been off duty for the night but immediately abandoned their movie and popcorn when they’d heard what was going on.
I had pulled Rowan in. I knew she felt left out a lot these days. As the one remaining Dagger in our age group, she didn’t have anyone to train or study with. I was busy with Stiletto training. Autumn was in prison. And then there was Sienna.
“We found her, but we obviously can’t go after her,” I said.
Mom raised an eyebrow at me, but Cherry wrapped both hands around her knees and nodded. She was a powerful woman, but also a small one, and now it seemed like she would curl completely in on herself if she could.
“The girls were okay,” I said. “It sounded like they were, anyway. The vampires were handing out graham crackers, and Rosie didn’t sound scared.”
Cherry acknowledged this with a wan smile.
“We need a plan,” Cerise said. “We’ve done underground recovery missions before, and the stadium’s probably got all sorts of back entrances for crew and players.”
“I can’t believe she’s got them holed up at the Orbs arena,” Ginger muttered.
Of everything that had happened, this seemed to have personally offended her the most.
“We can’t go after her at all,” I said. “I didn’t get an exact head count, but she’s got more vamps guarding her back than even the coven can deal with.”
“Besides, she wants us to come,” Rowan said.
That was the sticking point, the one detail that wouldn’t let me get beyond the most cursory daydreams of how we might rescue the kids.
Sienna had let me go, which was a great big come-and-get-it message to the coven.
And if Sienna wanted us to go traipsing into the arena with our minds set on justice, that was the last thing we should do.
“We’ll only play into her hands if we mount a rescue,” I said.
A long silence met this, and while I could see Ginger getting restless, no one disagreed.
“I’m going to go for a run,” Cherry finally said. “Maybe exercise will knock a brilliant plan loose.”
“I’ll perform some divinations,” Grandma said. “We need some guidance.”
“I’ll help,” Mom said.
It was all we could do. Until a better option surfaced, we would continue training, continue carrying out our regular monster-hunting assignments, and continue practicing the craft that might give us a tiny edge over our wayward sister.
For me, that meant a lot of hours back at Carnelian.
In between the collection and the Miller wedding, everyone’s to-do lists had grown by a yard. I was designing, plus managing Grandma’s schedule, plus helping out in the atelier during every spare second, plus attending to the dozen tiny crises that managed to crop up every day.
I was running a length of custom lace up to Grandma’s office when an argument going on in the atelier caught my attention.
“Talk about overkill,” one of the sewers was saying to another. “I said a handful, not seventeen. That’s way too many pleats for one shoulder. The fabric looks like it’s exploding where it lets out.”
“I thought that was the idea?” the other sewer said. “It’s supposed to seem sculpted.”
“Not that sculpted.”
I ducked my head in to see what was going on and found Melanie, one of the senior designers, standing with her hands on her lips and lecturing Nicholas.
“It would be fine for some other house’s collection, but it’s not Carnelian’s style. Unpick it and start again.”
She caught me watching them and shook her head. I examined the offending pleats and had to agree. It wasn’t just that there were too many—they were also too wide, too thick, too much.
“I could see it for one of Stellora’s collections,” I offered. “Or even Fontaine. Mel’s right, though, it’s too much for us.” I tilted my head and squinted a little. “Actually, it’s not even too much for Carnelian, just this collection. It has a nice shape, though.”
Whatever intent I’d had of smoothing things over was lost on them. Nicholas set his jaw, probably irritated at being ganged up on, and Melanie just seemed smug.
Everyone was on edge these days, I thought, as I scurried back down the hall toward Grandma’s office, and I should probably try to mind my own business and not make things worse.
Outside Grandma’s door, I stopped with a jolt.
Then I turned around and looked back the way I’d come.
I said a handful, not seventeen.
It was the same thing Sienna had said, or almost. I closed my eyes and squeezed my memory for the words floating just under the surface.
The kids are a handful, Sienna had said. A handful plus one.
We’d thought seven children had gone missing.
But seven wasn’t a handful plus one, it was a handful plus two.
We had counted wrong.
I burst through Grandma’s door. She glanced up at me, eyebrows so high they nearly disappeared into her hairline, and froze with the phone in her hand. I gesticulated wildly at her while my brain tried to come up with words, and she narrowed her eyes a little and then raised the phone back to her ear.
“Josette, I’m going to have to call you back,” she said.
I was on the other side of her desk before the silver phone was back in its receiver.
“Drop everything,” I said. “I need a spell.”
17
A smoky form emerged over the table, its reflection shifting in the gleaming silver surface of Grandma’s desk. It sputtered out a second later.
“Rosie’s definitely with Sienna,” I said. “Which we knew, but it was worth a try.”
“Who’s next?” Grandma said.
“We haven’t done Sorrel, Alev, or Redda.”
“Sorrel next, then.”
Grandma poured a few drops of rosemary oil onto her desk. The oil pooled and gleamed, sending up a sharp fragrance. She closed her eyes and held her hand over the oil.
The pool of liquid shimmered, and a tiny tongue of blue flame started in its center. The oil burned up, sending a puff of delicate lavender smoke into the air, and when the last of the fuel was gone, the smoke changed shape. It shifted, twisted, and exploded into curls that quickly dissipated through the office.
I waved the smoke out of my face and sighed.
“Ma
ybe she has them all.”
“Don’t give up yet.” Grandma picked up the bottle of rosemary oil. “Impatience won’t get us answers.”
I fidgeted.
The next puddle of oil burned up like the first, and the same lavender cloud formed. It twisted, turned over, and I sighed again and waited for it to dissolve like the rest—or worse, turn into a skull, an image that would confirm my deepest terrors.
Instead, it formed a different picture. A tiny wavering image of Alev floated before us, her short curls framing her face like a halo in a Renaissance-era painting and her translucent body no taller than my thumb. I caught my breath and gaped at Grandma, whose face lit up with sudden excitement.
“She’s not with Sienna,” I said.
Grandma leaned in toward the tiny figure hovering in the air. “Can you take us to her?” she asked.
The wispy little image nodded and took a few steps forward. She turned to glance over her shoulder and waved at us to follow.
“You go,” Grandma said. “I’m needed here, but I’ll follow after you as soon as I can. Let me know where you end up.”
“Will do.” I turned to the smoky figure. “I have to get my motorcycle first from the parking garage.”
The apparition folded her arms and tapped her toe dramatically, as the real Alev might, and gave me a tight nod. I bit my lip and caught Grandma’s eye.
Once I had my bike, the tiny shade settled herself on one of my handlebars.
“You sure you won’t fly off?”
She gave me a look, as if to ask whether I was an idiot.
It wasn’t long before I realized she was pointing me in the direction of home. She was hard to see in the daylight, translucent and wispy as she was, but between my squinting and her frantic arm-waving, I was able to follow her gestures and turn whenever she ordered.
If we were going home, that meant Alev was probably hiding in the woods somewhere. I imagined her shivering in the damp forest, or lost beyond the bounds of Grandma’s property, and my heart sank at the thought of the condition we might find her in.