“So it could have been any one of two or three hundred people?” She looked at Dorian. “And I assume our Sidhe guest is still in residence?”
“Puck? Of course. So swamped in iron he wouldn’t even be able to touch his magic.”
“So there is at least one other out there with his shaping abilities, and we have no idea what shape they’re wearing now.”
“But there’s been no activity on the monitors,” said Dorian. “And I thought we plugged all the leaks?”
Simon shifted uneasily. “We did, sir.”
“Then how can we have another escapee?”
“Perhaps,” the tiny Indian woman suggested, “there was always more than one. We assumed Puck was working alone because he was the only one we saw, but there may be others out there who have managed to hide their aether from us. Perhaps many others.”
Dorian paled. “Surely not. The walls are still strong. This is madness.”
He realised we were all staring at him, and managed to force a smile. “At any rate, I’m afraid this is bad news for you, young ladies.”
Uh-oh. “Why?”
“Everyone you saw last night—virtually anyone you know—could potentially be a Sidhe. Unless we can discover who it was, I can’t let you have any contact with anyone outside this organisation until your parents come home. Your mother would kill me if anything further happened to you while you were under my care.”
“No contact?” I repeated. Surely he couldn’t mean none at all. I had a very important phone call to make, as soon as a certain floppy-haired boy might be awake. “What about the phone? We can still talk to our friends on the phone, right?”
He was already shaking his head before I’d finished. “No, no, no. I know you young people think the world will end if you are parted from your phones and your tweeting and what-have-you, but I’m afraid I must insist. In fact, I’ll ask you to hand your phones over right now.” He coughed, as if broaching a delicate subject. “Your mother did warn me not to … ah …” Trust us? “… leave anything to chance.”
To my surprise, CJ handed hers over without a quibble. In fact, she hardly seemed to have listened to a word that had been said. I felt my own face heating as I tried to hang on to my anger and my dignity.
“I really don’t see how a phone call or a text is going to do any harm.” I clutched at my phone. I had to talk to Zac. He was the only bright thing left in my world.
Dorian held out his hand, his smile turning chilly. “And that is precisely why you need to be guided by me. You know nothing about magic.”
Everyone was staring. Face flaming, I smacked the phone into his palm. Maybe he was right, but he didn’t have to be such a jerk about it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CJ lay on the lounge in the guest quarters, a book propped against her raised knees and the TV burbling quietly in the background.
“Are you okay?” I let my fingers rest against her arm, not wanting to make her feel worse with a shower of diamonds.
“Fine.” She didn’t take her eyes off the book.
I hesitated. Clearly she wasn’t fine; neither of us was. I was itching to know what was happening in Paris, but Mum wouldn’t even arrive there until tomorrow. I was starting to feel we’d got off lightly with our toads and diamonds. Poor Dad was a bear. What if he stayed that way forever? That sick feeling you get before exams churned away in my stomach, making me wish I hadn’t eaten quite so much breakfast.
I tried to focus on something positive instead. I could still talk to Zac. Mobiles weren’t the only phones in the world.
“You know, we could always use the landline to call someone.”
Though all my numbers were in my contact list, including that precious one for Zac. Still, I could look up his home number in the White Pages online—or just ask on Facebook. There were plenty of computers I could use in the building, and Sona would give me his number.
CJ shrugged. “You can if you want. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
I could see her point. Ashleigh would enjoy any conversation about last night a hell of a lot more than CJ would, and who else would she call? Not Josh, that’s for sure.
But what if Dorian was right? How would I know if the boy I’d been kissing was the real Zac or a Sidhe impersonator? It’s not as if they came with warning labels. And he had looked different last night; I’d thought so the minute I laid eyes on him standing on my doorstep. Older, more mature, and about five billion times hotter. Had that really all been the suit and a good haircut, or was it magic?
I sighed. And then there was Mum to consider. We were already well and truly on her bad side. How pissed would she be if we got ourselves into more trouble through not doing what Dorian said? As if she didn’t have enough on her plate already, with Dad to worry about on top of everything else. Would it really kill me if I didn’t speak to Zac for the next two weeks?
Part of me started jumping up and down screaming yes! God, yes! He’d been the only good thing about last night, the start of something wonderful. I couldn’t wait to pick up where we’d left off. Surely I would have known if it wasn’t the real Zac kissing me? He’d been so kind, just like his normal self. Would a Sidhe impersonator have bothered to tell me he liked frogs? And then I remembered the way he’d admired Miss Moore. Would a boy who was falling for me have been quite so blatant in his admiration for someone else? God, this was doing my head in.
“Do you know how many fairy tales there are involving bears?” CJ slammed her book shut and glared at me.
“Um … no? What are you reading?”
She showed me the cover—it was a book of fairy tales from around the world. “I checked that one Mum mentioned—East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Guy gets cursed, turns into a white bear by day, only turns human at night. His wife’s not supposed to see his human form, so they always go to bed in the dark. Only one night she lights a candle and peeks, and then of course everything’s screwed up and he has to leave. She goes on this epic journey to find him and save him from marrying an ogre.”
“Does he turn human in the end?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s going to help us. We’d need a whole bunch of old women to give us golden presents and a ride on the north wind.”
“Damn.”
An ad for a current affairs program came on.
“Tonight we have an exclusive interview with a QANTAS stewardess who was on the flight with the man who became an ogre.”
The footage we’d seen before, of poor Sergei bursting out of the arrivals gate roaring and confused, played again, followed by the now-familiar “Snow White” shots, and a brief close-up of my face, screwed up in anger, with a frog caught in mid-air. I shuddered. Was there ever a more unflattering way to become famous?
“We ask the question: is there a magic war going on? Don’t miss our in-depth coverage at 7:30 tonight.”
Ad break over, the morning chat show resumed.
“And in breaking news,” the sleek hostess informed the camera, “we have unconfirmed reports of the sudden appearance of a polar bear in central Paris.”
“So it’s not just an Australian thing?” her co-host joked. “That’s a relief! I was starting to feel persecuted.”
“Apparently not,” she said. “We’ll bring you the latest on that as soon as we know.”
A polar bear. Poor Dad. My stomach coiled into an anxious knot. Mum would still be on the plane. What had happened to him?
“What else did you find?” I grabbed CJ’s book and scanned the table of contents. Just about every culture had a story involving a bear. There was everything from Goldilocks and the Three Bears to the Greek myth of Callisto, who was turned into a bear and ended up in the sky as the constellation Ursa Major. “Wow, there’s so many. How are we ever going to find something to help Dad?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But we have to try. We can’t just sit around here and hope that someone figures it out.”
I felt so helpless; I couldn
’t stand to sit still any longer. “It would help if we knew which fairy tale it was.” But how could I find out?
I left CJ hunched over the book and went out into the corridor. It was mainly office space up here, plus the guest quarters and the library. Dorian had rooms here, too, but I’d had quite enough of him for one morning. I got into the lift, telling myself I’d go down to the ground floor and see if Emmet had made any progress with our collars, but I punched the button for Basement instead.
The vault was down here, and other areas I hadn’t explored yet. I stepped out of the lift and shivered. It felt colder, probably because it was underground. There were none of the big arched windows that let the sunlight stream in to the upper floors. Here I felt closed in, the stark corridors lit by fluorescent bulbs. My feet tapped down tiled floors, no plush carpet here.
I peeked into several rooms whose purposes I couldn’t guess, though they were fitted out like some kind of laboratories. There was a room with a keypad at the door for access. I tried the handle, but it was locked. When I put my ear to the door I heard the hum of computers through the wood. Perhaps that was where they kept the servers.
Or maybe it was something completely weird. Dorian was right: I knew nothing about magic, and even though these people didn’t have magic as such, they had some strange set-ups, and all these tools that combined their potential for magic with the aether stored in the vault. I’d been reading in The Gilded Cage about the way they’d created the prison that kept the Sidhe’s world anchored here in Australia, with them trapped inside—or supposedly trapped; that didn’t seem to be working so well any more. Probably the explanation made a lot more sense if you understood magic; there were a lot of references to things I didn’t understand, like aetheric flows and condensors. From the description I gathered that condensors came in several sizes, and I had the feeling that that odd box on a tripod I’d seen in the vault the day they’d interviewed Puck was one. Whatever they did, they seemed to be bad news for Sidhe.
Just ahead was the corridor that led to the vault, where they stored all the remaining aether, as well as any magical items the seekers found in their travels. If I was completely honest with myself, this was where I’d really been heading the whole time. The place itself fascinated me—it held aether, the raw material of magic—but more than that I wanted to see its new resident again.
I’d seen him on Mum’s computer screen, during the hook-up when Dad and Dorian questioned him, and that brief moment in the corridor. Admittedly, he’d appeared disappointingly normal, but I knew that appearances couldn’t be trusted with the Sidhe.
Maybe I could trick him into telling me which fairy tale had attacked Dad. Maybe, if I could just get the chance to talk to him, I could find out something useful, something to help Dad and Kerrie and poor Sergei—and even us. What was behind all these attacks? I couldn’t shake the feeling there was more to it than simple vengeance for locking them up all those years ago. If that was all, why had Puck been hanging around the Cathedral when he was captured? And yet the warders seemed so certain that the Spear the Cathedral protected was safe. How did they know?
I rounded the corner and stopped short. A young woman I didn’t know sat on a chair outside the double doors that led to the vault. She sat up straighter when she saw me, the look of boredom on her face replaced with speculation.
What should I do? Of course they would have a guard on the vault now that Puck was in residence. She wasn’t going to let me go wandering in. But if I left now it would look really suspicious. Even standing here like this was making me look guilty as hell.
Oh, well. As long as I could manage not to blush I could probably talk my way out of trouble. I started towards her again.
The doors behind her were made of heavy glass, with big rounded metal handles. The room behind them wasn’t the vault itself—that was another room further on—but a big area full of work desks and odd machinery. Apparently the whole area was specially fortified with iron and “dampener”, whatever that was, to prevent any aether leaking out. So Gretel had said, when she’d given us a quick tour. Several smaller rooms opened off the main one, most of them full of Sidhe artefacts, safely locked away where they could do no harm. They’d converted one of these into a temporary cell for Puck, and all the dampener stopped him from accessing the aether in the vault, which was a relief. I could just see his cell from the main doors, but I didn’t have time for more than a quick glance before the guard rose and blocked my view.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I was just looking for Warder Bhutra. Have you seen her?”
The woman’s eyes widened at the sight of diamonds dripping from my lips. I was getting better at catching them now; it was a pain to have to go scrabbling around the floor picking them up.
“You passed the lab back in the main corridor. She might be there. She hasn’t come down this way this morning.”
She was having trouble meeting my eyes, too distracted by the gems glittering in my hand. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and saw Dorian come out of one of the side rooms beyond the glass doors.
He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him, and hurried over to where I stood with the guard.
“What are you doing?” His voice was curt as he shut the door behind himself. He sounded even crosser than when he’d taken our phones that morning. Bet he was already regretting having promised to keep an eye on us.
“Just … looking for Warder Bhutra.” Even to me it sounded lame.
“Well, go look somewhere else. You shouldn’t be poking around on this level, particularly not so close to the prisoner.”
Why, was Puck going to bewitch me through the walls? And if so, shouldn’t Dorian be worried on his own behalf?
“What were you doing in there?” I asked, craning to see around him. Was that room he’d come out of the one where Puck was being held?
“I visit the prisoner every day, not that it’s any of your business.”
Okay, so it was.
“Just for a chat?” That seemed like an odd risk to take.
“If my chatting can help us, then I’ll keep doing it,” he said. “Where’s Simon? I thought he was meant to be keeping an eye on you?”
Oops. Hope I hadn’t got Mr Grumpy in trouble. That would be him and Kyle in less than twenty-four hours. Good job, Vi.
“Don’t you need to lock that?” I asked, gesturing at the door into Puck’s cell.
“It’s iron. He can’t touch it.”
Well, that was interesting. So I wouldn’t need a key to see Puck. I could just walk right in—if I was brave enough. Or stupid enough. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes.
He took my elbow and marched me back toward the lift. Gretel and Ronnie came out of the room I’d picked as the server room. Sure enough, I glimpsed banks of high-powered computers and servers with their lights blinking green and red as the door closed behind them.
“Oh, Gretel!” Dorian clutched at her like a drowning man. Please save me from this nosy teenager. “Would you mind taking Violet upstairs with you? And see that she doesn’t come back. I don’t wish to be disturbed.”
Without waiting for an answer—though I suppose you can’t really say no when the boss asks you to do something—he turned and headed back towards the vault.
“Ah—okay?” she said to his retreating back. Then she grinned at me. “What were you doing?”
“Nothing. Just looking around.” I wasn’t about to tell the truth, even to Gretel. She’d report me and there would go any chance of talking to Puck. “I don’t think he likes me.”
“Dorian doesn’t like most people,” Ronnie said cheerfully. “Don’t take it personally.”
Then she headed the other direction while we turned toward the lift.
“Sorry,” I said to Gretel as the lift pinged and we got in. “You’ve probably got a million things to do. I seem to be getting in everybody’s way.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She grinned as I fumbled diamonds. My hands were getting pretty full now. Should have brought a bag with me. “You need a hand there? I was going to head upstairs and grab a coffee soon anyway. You want one?”
Gratefully I offloaded a handful of diamonds onto her. I wasn’t a big coffee fan, but I went with her to the kitchen anyway. At least she was a friendly face.
They had a big café-style coffee machine on the bench, all gleaming steel and glass. Coffee seemed to be brewing or percolating or whatever it did all day. I grabbed a juice from the fridge, while Gretel closed her eyes and breathed out an ecstatic ahhhh! after her first sip. Must have been good coffee.
“So where’s your sister?” she asked, inspecting me over the rim of her cup.
“We don’t always hang together just because we’re twins, you know.”
She held up a placating hand. “I know, I know. I’m a twin too, remember?”
“Sorry. I’m a little stressed.” I pushed my diamonds into a neat pile on the wooden tabletop; they glittered under the bright kitchen lights.
“I know.” She smiled sympathetically. “We all are, but I guess you’ve got more reason than most, huh?”
“I feel so useless!” I burst out. “Just hanging around here doing nothing while everyone else is trying to save the world.”
“How’s CJ? She stressed too?”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t you be? As if everything wasn’t bad enough already, now poor Dad’s a polar bear. It hasn’t been the greatest twenty-four hours.”
She gave me a sympathetic look. “I heard about the collars. How did that happen?”
I gave her a brief rundown of our last twenty-four hours. I even told her about kissing Zac, and how I was still tossing up whether to try contacting him or not. By the time I was finished the pile of diamonds had grown considerably. If they’d been real I probably could have bought a small island, or maybe a nice private jet.
“Look, I’m not going to tell you what to do.” Well, that made a nice change from the rest of the adult world. “But if it was me, I wouldn’t call him. Truly. Just in case. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here, but it’s dangerous. You’ve seen what the Sidhe can do with just a little opportunity. Let’s not give them any more. Come with me—I want to show you something.”
The Fairytale Curse (Magic's Return Book 1) Page 20