Sister Seeker

by Shelby Hailstone Law

  Sister Seeker

  Book 3 of the Halfsie Series

  Shelby Hailstone Law

  Thank you to all the members of my family who have continued to support my crazy dream of being a writer. To my sister, Bethany, who has been with this series from the start and who made me laugh with all her reactions to the plot twists. To my husband, Matt, whose suggestions for my characters always make them fuller people. To my cousins and aunts who have bought and devoured my books and brought them to school.

  And to my mom, who literally wrote the character names in the back of her second book. I made it easier this time, Mom. There’s a character guide just for you!

  It takes a village, and y’all are mine. Thank you for your support, for your patience, and for your willingness to listen to me ramble about worlds and people who don’t even exist. You must love me to put up with me like that.

  Chapter 1: Airport Rendezvous

  For having lived most of their lives on the run and underground, my friends in the Rendezvous were exceedingly bad at going undercover.

  Okay, so I was measuring witches by human standards to make that judgement, but considering how out of place Elaine and Andrew looked—something that never happened in a magical setting—I had to stand by that judgement.

  At the moment, we were waiting at the gate for our plane to arrive, which was in itself something that those two weren’t used to. And to be fair, even Tony, the other full-blooded witch in our group, seemed antsy about flying in an airplane instead of on the belts that Rendezvous agents always wore as part of their outfits so they had something long to use in place of a broomstick. Tony loved to fly and had been my flight instructor since the day I joined the underground rebellion, so his anxiety probably stemmed more from the fact that he couldn’t fly himself than anything else. He liked to go fast and pull off as many spectacular tricks as possible, and I somehow doubted he’d get the same ride on a commercial airliner.

  Other than that, Tony looked like he belonged at a human airport just as much as my friends Aaron and Izzy did—and Aaron and Izzy were both born human. Tony was pretending to be asleep—or maybe he was asleep—at the gate with one of those neck pillows propping his head up. His dark hair was scrunched up on one side where he’d drifted off, and he would occasionally startle when the announcer would say something about a gate change or security or whatever over the intercom.

  Meanwhile, Aaron, freckle-faced and redheaded, was watching the news as it played on the big screen above the gate, drinking in what was going on in the human world. He’d been pretty isolated from the rest of humanity since he went underground with me in the rebel Rendezvous organization and threw his lot in with witches. He was my best friend, and I appreciated his support more than I could say, but every once in a while, I remembered what he’d given up for me and loved him more for it.

  Nearby, Izzy was relaxed, book in hand, looking every bit the bored traveler. She had her natural hair cut close, curled about an inch off her head, since she knew we were going to a rainforest and didn’t want the upkeep of a longer length in the humidity. She had her feet propped up on her luggage and hardly glanced up at the rest of us. No one looking at her would suspect her of being part of a group, much less part of the Rendezvous.

  As for the rest of my team? Well, they tried.

  Elaine had never been good at fitting in with humans; I’m pretty sure she simply didn’t want to try. She usually wore mismatched clothes that looked like she had simply jumped into a pile of them and swam around until something stuck. But now, she was in jeans and a tee shirt, her long, black braid neatly done instead of falling out all over the place like it usually did. And that would have been a perfectly normal look if her body language wasn’t screaming that she didn’t want to be there, didn’t know what to do with herself, and didn’t like the large crowds of people.

  All of that could be explained away. Aaron had clued her into the secret password, and anytime someone asked if she was okay, she would simply mutter “nervous flier” under her breath, and that was that. She’d get sympathetic looks, sometimes even pats on the back—and once, an older woman had given her a few tips and tricks for surviving long flights, because she, too, had severe anxiety whenever she boarded an airplane.

  So Elaine, while she stuck out, was at least explainable. Andrew, on the other hand. . . .

  See, the thing is, Andrew was supposed to be Elaine’s bodyguard, her protector. He was usually armed to the teeth and ready to throw down with anyone who even looked at her sideways. But even if he could sneak his weapons through security with a spell (and he did, because why would he ever go anywhere without them?), I had to keep reminding him that he wasn’t supposed to have them, so he couldn’t rest his hand on his holster when he got nervous about the crowd sizes. But despite my warnings, I was pretty sure my auburn-haired friend was drawing attention in the wrong kind of way, and I kept throwing balls of wadded-up paper at him to remind him to behave.

  As for me, I was glad for the disguising spell that allowed me to look like the rest of the humans around me. Elaine, Andrew, and Tony could pass for humans easily enough by casting a spell to switch from the natural invisibility of all witches to a form that humans could see. (It would be kind of suspicious if my human friends and I were seen at an airport talking to the air.) But me? I needed an entire makeover.

  I was a Halfsie: half witch and half human. Usually, that meant I looked like a B-grade ghost. Stuck between invisible and visible, I looked like someone had started to make a person and then forgotten to color me in. So, yeah, on any normal day, I tended to draw stares. Before I knew what I was and joined Elaine in her bid to take back the throne from my evil father (long story), I would almost always get stopped on the street and asked about my appearance. They were always the same questions, too: Either people thought I was cosplaying or they thought I was sick. Not that I blamed them; those were the most obvious explanations when humanity didn’t know magic existed right under their noses.

  But seeing as my friends and I were trying to be more discreet, for this undercover trip, I looked more like Andrew, with reddish hair and blue eyes like his. Which was a shame, because my eyes were actually my favorite feature about myself; they were a sort of silver color that actually sparkled. They were the only part of me that didn’t feel, well, bland.

  Still, we were trying to blend in, so I had to put up with acting like Andrew’s sister and let my pride, small as it was, take the hit. My father had recently sent his Royalists after me and the rest of the Rendezvous group that had been hidden underground in the Appalachian Mountains, and after our hideout had been attacked and our freedom nearly forfeit, we were trying to fly under his radar. And since witches and humans didn’t usually mix if they could help it, that meant Tony had suggested taking an actual human-made airplane out to meet his friend, Theresa.

  And when Tony is the one suggesting a long flight that doesn’t involve his own speed demon style of zipping through the air, it’s a pretty serious trip.

  Actually, the whole trip was for my benefit, so I didn’t want to seem like I wasn’t grateful for the heightened security or for the fact that my friends were coming with me in force. After we had all recently been put through the grinder dealing with my father and my half-brother threatening our lives, sanity, and freedom, we all needed to stick together. We weren’t just thinking of tactics; the wounds of being separated and used as collateral against each other were still too fresh for any of us to even consider letting each other out of our sights.

  I knew that everyone in the group was keeping an eye on me. My brother, Christopher, had recently broken into my mind and used my amnesia against me, and we hoped that this trip to see Tony’s friend would give me better de
fenses against that.

  The problem was that I had hundreds of years of memories locked up by the spell my father had placed on my mind. And when my father and my half-brother wanted to keep me docile, they could simply use that spell to open up a memory—and then I was lost in my past, trapped watching a memory play before my eyes in real time. When I remembered my past organically, it came all at once, as if I had always known the information—which was true, even if the block prevented me from accessing it. But when my father or brother used the block as a weapon, I was completely blind to reality.

  I’d promised to help fight alongside Elaine and her rebels, but I couldn’t help anyone if I couldn’t see what I needed to help with.

  When I’d been in my father’s clutches, a spy named Ryan had reached into my head to help me find a way to distinguish between reality and my memories. Everything from my past now had a sort of smoky tint to it—and that did make it easier for me to fight to return to reality. But this was war, and we needed something stronger than a hazy hint to keep my mind safe if I wanted to fight back against the Royalists in any meaningful way. Not to mention we needed something that would help my friends feel even remotely safe trusting me not to zone out on them when they needed me to watch their backs.

  Tony said that Theresa was excellent at the kind of mind and soul magic that I’d been able to do on accident, but Elaine seemed reluctant to agree to the trip—and then when she did agree, she insisted on coming with me. I was glad for the protective detail, really, but I had to wonder what this Theresa could have done to make Elaine, of all people, nervous.

  Elaine, the rightful princess of the magical kingdom, was the most powerful witch I knew. I had seen her level entire armies and command the very forces of nature, all while she was holding back. She was fighting a temporal spell that wanted to age her several decades at once, so she could have been even more terrifyingly powerful if she wanted to be. If she surrendered to the spell, she would be old physically—but terrifying magically.

  Still, she would never do that, because she wanted the throne, and she was her father’s only daughter. She couldn’t get the throne and then immediately age so much that the kingdom would already be wondering who was next in line. She needed to stay young—at least until she took the throne and had a legitimate heir. After that, well, I didn’t know what her plan was, but I knew it would probably be a relief for her if she let go.

  That temporal spell she had to fight with every breath made her wary of anything related to Time, and apparently, Theresa’s twin sister was a Future Seeker, a sort of magical oracle. So that probably explained the paranoia.

  I actually had a Future Seeker living in my head, a girl named Lila that had been caught up in a temporal blast and had escaped into my mind while I was still attached to the spell at the time of the explosion. She had been a Future Seeker in life, and even if she was experiencing life the linear way through my eyes, she still had all the quirks of someone who had lived in Time itself. But I didn’t think of her as a threat. If anything, she had become one of my closest friends, even if she sometimes annoyed me with her obsession with romance. So I was torn between appreciating Elaine’s concern and wondering if she was going overboard generalizing her frustrations with Time to everything and everyone connected to it.

  Not that I could think too hard about Elaine and her weird relationship with temporal spells and her own physical age when I had a more important task: keeping Andrew from drawing security’s attention.

  “Stop being Soldier Andrew,” I muttered to him as I rebounded another wadded-up piece of paper off of his forehead.

  Andrew rolled his eyes at me as he bent down to pick up the paper and toss it with basketball-player-like precision into the trash. “I’m not sure what you want from me, Michelle. I am the way I am.”

  “You use that line all the time,” I pointed out. “I think that’s an excuse not to get any better.”

  I watched as Andrew straightened, though that was the only indication he gave me that I’d gotten under his skin. But I did notice that he also stopped drumming his fingers on his holster.

  You’re getting better at that, you know, Lila’s voice rang in my mind.

  At what?

  At leading.

  I couldn’t hide my flush of pleasure at the compliment. Lila had to know, since she lived in my mind, that I had been pretty self-conscious about my own role in the Rendezvous since the start. When I arrived in the Rendezvous, Elaine and her friends told me that I was prophesied to take down my tyrant father, but I felt dwarfed by everyone else. Elaine and her mastery of all three types of magic. Andrew and the ease with which he slipped into every battle, no matter the odds. Even Izzy, who was human and was only sticking with the fight because she was determined to give the Royalists a black eye after they forced magic into her blood in a cruel experiment, was more of a leader than I was. Izzy could get anyone to follow her; I’d even seen her win Elaine over in an argument. And Aaron could befriend anyone; he had a knack not just for forming friendships but for engendering loyalty with the same confident ease with which he could paint entire murals all over the walls of his room.

  Compared to my friends, I was just along for the ride. I tried to help where I could, but I didn’t feel particularly powerful.

  Leadership isn’t always about power, Michelle, Lila said, breaking into my thoughts.

  I couldn’t help but make a face at her; this was the downside of living with someone else in my head, even if I did, usually, get along with her. I could never have a totally private thought when it came to the arrangement I had with Lila. Sure, she helped to defend my mind and was working with me on destroying the monolith that hid my memories from me—but on the other hand, she liked to interject her opinion at the worst times.

  And I think you’re mistaking friendship with leadership, I argued. Sure, I’d been totally pleased with the compliment, and I wanted to learn how to step up and stand on equal footing with my friends. But I wanted to earn that mantle, too. I didn’t want anyone to give it to me until I deserved it.

  Can’t it be both? she shot back.

  I paused. She did have a point. I had seen King Peter, Elaine’s father, going through the Rendezvous and being that voice of friendship and comfort to so many people in the Rendezvous who needed it. Leaders needed to be kind.

  Leaders also needed to be powerful when there was a war on.

  Don’t get me wrong; I knew that people needed leaders to inspire and believe in them. But they also needed someone they could fight behind, and I didn’t know if I could cut it. I did my best work when I wasn’t even thinking about it, when I was reaching out to the elements in blind agony or rage. I could leave an entire army in my wake—but only at my most extreme moments.

  So, no, I didn’t think I was a leader. But I liked that someone did.

  Just then, the gate agent called for us to board, and my friends and I got up to join the line of people trying to hurry up and wait in the cramped space. Izzy, Aaron, and I made sure to space ourselves between the witches in our group, since they’d never had to fly the human way before. I could see Aaron ahead of me giving Elaine a sharp look as they boarded and she made a comment I didn’t quite catch about the way everyone was packed in like sardines.

  I mean, she wasn’t wrong.

  Thankfully, I had managed to snag Tony as my partner, so our boarding went relatively easily—much better than Izzy and the “why are you like this” mutterings we could hear behind us. (To be fair, I’m pretty sure that, at that point, Andrew was giving her a hard time because he could. He had a weird sense of humor.)

  Tony, on the other hand, had always been the easiest out of all of my new Rendezvous friends to get along with. He seemed to take everything in his stride and to radiate a sort of warmth and happiness that made it impossible not to like him. I knew Aaron and Izzy were jealous of my assigned witch for the flight.

  And yet this choice wasn’t just about who we would get along with
best. I needed to talk to Tony about this friend of his, because he expected me to let her waltz around in my head, and I had questions that needed answers before I could trust her to do that.

  Sure, I’d allowed Ryan to walk around my head before, but those had been desperate times. I’d literally been restrained and helpless and trying desperately to find a way to keep from losing touch with reality. Now, I had a lot more control over my situation, and I wanted to be prepared.

  So, once we’d gotten seated and buckled, I waited until after the flight attendants were done with their safety briefing (since I knew my magically-inclined friends had never gone through one of those and definitely needed all of the information they could get, if for no other reason than to ease their minds) before I turned to Tony.

  “Tell me why I should trust Theresa.”

  Tony’s eyebrows shot up as he turned to give me his full attention. He probably hadn’t expected the direct question, especially since he had been spending the last few days trying to convince Elaine to put aside her dislike of Theresa’s Future Seeker sister to approve the mission. In that time, I’d heard plenty of arguments about how powerful Theresa was, about how she would be able to help me with her knowledge of soul magic—but none of that suggested any kind of trust.

  I had wanted to talk to Tony alone about this for a while now, without dealing with Elaine and her predisposition to distrust Future Seekers, but I never had the chance. So now, I jumped at the opportunity. I even laid down a sound-suppressing spell so that no one could listen to our conversation.

  Tony met my serious expression with his own thoughtful one, and I could almost see the wheels turning. He had to know that I’d already heard all the arguments he’d given Elaine about Theresa’s power, about her abilities—but he also had to know that I’d seen the power that my family had and that Andrew’s family of mercenaries had, and neither of those families would ever have my trust. I needed more than an assurance that she could help me. I needed to know that she would help me without making things worse.