I pushed open the heavy double doors and froze on the threshold. The space beyond was eerily empty and quiet, the beds vacant and neatly made. I let the doors fall closed behind me and made my way through to the ward at the far end. It was our equivalent of an ICU, and I’d been here a couple of times before. After the gargoyle incident, this place had been teeming with victims of the attack, myself included. Still, hospitals freaked me out.
Slipping into the smaller room, I peered through the dimly lit gloom. There were no harsh strip lights here, only the soft glow of bedside lamps, illuminating the empty beds. A scuff of bare feet on linoleum made me pause. Someone stood in the middle of the room, their shadow barely visible.
A shiver of fear ran up my spine as a zombie-like groan wheezed through the air toward me. I flipped the light switch, and the main lights blinked into life.
Krieger stood in the central aisle. He gazed at the walls and the beds, but nothing seemed to register. It was as though he couldn’t quite focus on his surroundings and didn’t know how he’d managed to get there in the first place.
What the…
“Dr. Krieger, are you okay?” I asked. My eyes darted toward the mottled, warped skin of his bare arms. He was wearing a hospital gown, though the back had mercifully been tied shut. I couldn’t tear my gaze away from his arms. The flesh had been severely burned, raw patches glistening in the cold light. By the looks of it, he’d tugged away his bandages, exposing the tender wounds beneath.
He turned around with a weird, fixed smile on his face. “Everything is just fine,” he replied, in his Germanic lilt. I was instantly reminded of clowns at kids’ birthday parties, with their fake smiles and too-bright voices.
I approached him slowly. “Are you sure, Doc? You don’t look too good.” I glanced at his arms again. “What happened to you?”
“Nonsense, I am perfectly well,” he said cheerfully.
“I’m going to go and get someone. Don’t go anywhere, okay? I think your meds might be messing with you.” Something was clearly off about him, and I wasn’t about to wrangle him back to whichever room he’d come from. Not on my own.
I turned to leave, only to hear the rustling shift of his body as he lunged toward me and wrapped his clammy hand across my forehead. His fingers and thumb dug into both my temples. Every cell in my body screamed to break free, but my limbs wouldn’t listen. It was like a blockade had been put up between my muscles and my mind, stopping them from communicating. I couldn’t move at all, everything frozen in one position.
“What do you plan to do about Katherine Shipton?” he asked, in an icy voice that didn’t seem to belong to Krieger at all.
“We plan to find the powerful children and stop her from using them in her attempt to become a Child of Chaos,” I replied, the words tumbling out of my mouth unbidden. He might as well have cracked my skull wide open with a can opener and scooped out the intel he wanted.
“Stop!” a female voice shouted. Someone burst into the room through a door at the far end of the ICU. With my body half twisted, I couldn’t see who it was. A moment later, I heard boots pounding on the linoleum, Preceptor Bellmore’s face coming into view shortly after. It didn’t feel like Krieger had any intention of stopping or letting me go.
Preceptor Bellmore scanned the room, settling on a pitcher of water that stood by one of the beds. Her Esprit glowed as a twisting pillar of liquid rose out of the glass jug, mixed with a healthy dose of ice cubes, and swirled toward Krieger. It careened in a tumbling orb into the side of his face, splashing down with a spray of ice-cold water that hit me in the back of the head. I wanted to cry out in shock at the freezing cold pellets biting into my skin, but Krieger had yet to relinquish his hold on me.
As Preceptor Bellmore brought another orb of icy water down over his head, soaking him completely, his hand loosened on my forehead. Regaining my senses, I ducked away from him and staggered forward, clawing breath into my lungs. He blinked rapidly and stared at his palms as though they belonged to someone else. Slowly, he raised his gaze to me, a bemused look glinting in his eyes.
“Are you kidding me, Krieger? I was gone for five minutes!” Bellmore chided. “You promised me you could stay awake for five damn minutes, if I left you alone. I guess it’s my fault for believing you, huh?”
Krieger dropped his gaze, looking ashamed. “I thought I had control. I was reading a rather interesting book to help with the magical detector project—I was right in the middle of a fascinating chapter, and then… well, I suppose I ended up here. I don’t remember leaving my bed. I don’t know how this could have happened.” He glanced at me again. “Oh, Harley, please accept my humblest apologies. I hope I didn’t scare you too much. I was not in control of my faculties.”
I shook my head, blinking in confusion. A few seconds ago, I was sure he’d done something to me, but now… I couldn’t remember anything from the last couple of minutes. There was a slight throbbing in my temples, but that was it. Did I hit my head? I had a couple of hazy memories of walking into the ICU and seeing him in the central aisle, but after that—well, that was anyone’s guess. And hey, why is the back of my shirt soaking wet?
“What did you do?” I asked. “I can’t remember anything. You were standing right there, looking at something, and then… I don’t know what happened. I can’t focus on it. Did you throw water at me?”
Preceptor Bellmore shook her head. “The water was my doing. I had to stop Dr. Krieger from digging into your memories, and cold water seems to be the only thing to snap him out of it. Well, short of smacking him on the back of the head with a blunt object and knocking him clean out,” she replied, with a wry smile. “You forgetting everything that happened is exactly how the curse works.”
Now that’s freaking creepy.
“Not to be rude, but can one of you tell me what the heck is going on? I’m coming up empty here.”
“Someone in the coven, likely one of Katherine’s spies, managed to break into my office while I was sleeping and put a mind-control curse on me,” Krieger explained. “It’s the kind of spell that’s used to create spies out of normally loyal insiders—the perfect cover. You see, I didn’t know it had been put on me until Bellmore found me wandering the halls one evening. The cursed individual is unaware that they’ve been cursed.”
Bellmore nodded. “Whenever he goes to sleep, the curse is activated, and he sleepwalks. That’s what he was doing when I found him. The curse makes him seek out people of interest—people the curser has told him to reach out to, from a list whispered when the spell was first put in place. He then places his hand on their forehead, the way he just did with you, which immobilizes them. After the person is frozen, the spell sinks into their mind and forces them to tell him the truthful answer to any question he might have.”
“I am then able to erase the memory of the incident, thus gaining all their secrets without them even knowing they have been spilled,” Krieger added reluctantly. “Now, given that the whole thing involves many complex spells, all mixed together in the body of one curse, it is incredibly taxing on my person. Indeed, it would’ve taken an exceptionally skilled magical to conjure a curse like that and set it loose within me. Few possess the stamina for spell-work of that magnitude.”
I know of one. I’m just not going to think about it. Nope.
I frowned at Krieger. “Wait… does that mean you’ve been trying not to sleep all this time?”
“Yes, exactly. I’ve been trying my hardest to stay awake.”
“But that’s days, Dr. Krieger!”
“Yes, indeed it is.”
Bellmore smiled tightly. “I’ve been babysitting him, so to speak, to stop him from falling asleep. When it hasn’t quite worked, I’ve also been here to subdue him every time he’s fallen under the spell.”
“Does that mean you’ve been awake for days, too?”
She nodded. Well, that explains the massive dark circles under your eyes. I could pack for six months with bags like those. I wa
sn’t being unkind; she just looked completely exhausted. I’d thought the same thing back at Dennehy’s, though now it made a lot more sense.
“Can’t you restrain him?”
Bellmore shook her head. “We’ve tried everything, believe me. Staying awake for days on end is the last resort in a long line of ideas. Whenever I tied him down, he simply broke out with his magic. You see the burns on his arms?”
“Yeah.”
“Krieger is a Fire Elemental. He kept burning the restraints off, to the point where I’ve gone through four pairs of Atomic Cuffs, all melted now.” She sighed, sitting down on the edge of the nearest bed.
“Wait, what? He can burn through Atomic Cuffs?”
She nodded. “There’s something in that curse that allows him to do it. It’s insanely powerful—terrifyingly so.” She glanced at Krieger with sad eyes. “I’ve been trying my damnedest to break the curse, but nothing has worked so far. You’d think the lack of sleep would kill him, but this spell is keeping him strong, no matter what. I, on the other hand, can only do so much in a state like this. Even with eight hours of sleep, I haven’t been able to do a single thing to break it.”
I looked at the two weary souls, wondering how they’d been left on their own like this. “What does Alton think about all of this?”
Now, I understood why he’d been keeping Krieger’s illness on the down-low, since no one else in the coven knew about this weird turn of events. Not a single soul had mentioned insomnia, or their foreheads being grabbed, or a crazy-strong curse that nobody could break. This was clearly need-to-know, and I’d just walked in at the wrong time. Still, I was pretty peeved at Alton for keeping a secret like this, though all my mind could say to that was, hypocrite. Right now, I was the reigning queen of secrets.
A stilted silence settled between us.
“Let me guess, Alton doesn’t want the rest of the coven to know, so he’s leaving you to figure it out?” I asked.
Bellmore shrugged. “He knows I’m capable, and I can understand his reluctance to disclose this. If word of it got out, there’d be mass panic. Nobody would know who’s been compromised, and everyone would become a suspect. Dangerous things happen when people start to become suspicious of one another, especially when some decide to take matters into their own hands. Folks like me would be first on the kill-list.”
“Shapeshifters would be the first targets, huh?”
“Precisely. Alton doesn’t want any more paranoia about spies leaking into the coven. Warning everyone to be extra vigilant is all he’s willing to do, at this point. He’s confident we can find the spy in our midst, and so am I. The trouble is, we need more time, and that time is running out.”
“All of this is why you were acting so weird at Dennehy’s, right?” I asked. “You wanted to keep Krieger’s condition a secret?”
Bellmore nodded. “I wasn’t exactly expecting to see people from the coven there. In fact, that’s why I went to Dennehy’s in the first place, so I wouldn’t run into anyone. Bad timing on both our parts, I guess.” She glanced at me curiously. “I know why I was there, but why were you?”
“We were looking into something for Alton.”
She glanced at me with suspicious eyes, prompting me to change the subject, pronto.
“Have you had any luck tracing the curse back to the culprit?” I asked.
“None.” She propped her head up with her knuckles. “Nobody else in the coven has shown any signs of being cursed, so it’s not like there’s a specific trail or a pattern to follow.”
Krieger cleared his throat. “Anyway, what’s brought you to the infirmary? You don’t appear injured, aside from two very minor contusions on either side of your forehead. My fault, I fear, though they will fade within the hour.”
I almost felt guilty mentioning it. “I wanted to come and talk to you again about removing the Dempsey Suppressor. We’re struggling to come up with any leads on these kids, and I’m convinced that if I just had my full strength, I could do more to trace them.”
Krieger sighed. “I worried that might be the case.”
“So… you can’t do anything?”
“I am deeply sorry, Harley, but it seems rather unlikely that I’ll be able to help with the Suppressor’s removal right now. I’m extremely sleep-deprived, for one, which is not conducive to surgical procedures. And two, Preceptor Belmore is concerned that I may have been permanently compromised. I would not want Katherine knowing more about you than she already does, should the curse ever overtake me and force me to share my intel with its creator.”
I realized that Alton was probably going to have to hire a new physician, if the curse couldn’t be lifted. Krieger had been compromised. And yet, the thought of having to go through all the Suppressor stuff again, with a new physician, worried me. I had hopes for Krieger.
I shuddered at the thought. “How would they do that, if they wanted to?”
“They can summon me at any time and have me recite whatever I’ve learned. I would not even know that I had done it,” he explained.
“I can see why they chose you,” I muttered, feeling on edge. For us, Krieger was an especially dangerous choice for a spy, since he had access to everyone in the coven and knew all of their abilities, thanks to the Readings. Including mine…
Krieger nodded slowly. “Yes, it would appear that whoever did this chose very carefully. I know a great deal, and I have access to everyone’s records. I know their strengths and weaknesses, and what talents they possess. I have been utterly compromised. It is my deepest shame.”
“Hey, you didn’t do this to yourself,” I replied sharply. “This isn’t your fault.”
“No, but I failed to be more vigilant.”
Bellmore sighed. “Dr. Krieger, this isn’t on you. Yes, you’ve been compromised, but you’re taking pretty hefty steps to fight it. You get points for that.” She turned to me, her amber eyes narrowing slightly. “Now, we’re going to need your assurance that you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone. I hardly think I need to tell you why.”
“I’ll keep my mouth shut about Krieger’s curse,” I promised. “The coven is crazy enough right now without adding to everyone’s panic.”
“We’re grateful for that,” she said quietly.
“No problem.” I didn’t want to mention it out loud, but this whole thing made me feel really uneasy, to know that anyone in the coven could be controlled or impersonated. We’d been worried enough about a spy who might be able to Shapeshift. If that person could Shapeshift and had the means to control minds, we were royally screwed. I hated getting downhearted about things, but what else could I do when faced with such a crap-storm of insane hurdles?
“Are you okay?” Bellmore asked.
“Yeah, I was just thinking about something that happened while we were out investigating,” I said, keeping it vague. “I don’t know if Alton mentioned it, but someone attacked us while we were working, and they were impersonating you. We knew it wasn’t you because they were weaker, and their mask slipped for a second, but it’s kind of concerning that they used you like that… whoever they were.”
She turned her gaze away for a moment. “Alton told me about it, yes,” she replied, after a pause. “I’m just glad that you knew me well enough to recognize that it wasn’t me. I might be a Shapeshifter, but I’d like to think that doesn’t immediately make me guilty of every crime.”
“You must get that a lot, huh?”
A tight laugh rippled from her throat. “It’s all too easy for people to suspect or condemn those who are different, simply because they possess a power that others don’t. We don’t choose to be this way; we are born with the abilities we have. And yet, people judge us and fear us because of something we have no control over.”
I reddened, looking away. I’m sorry, Sloane… I’m sorry that I’m guilty of that very thing, where Shapeshifters are involved.
Just because I couldn’t read someone didn’t mean they were inherently bad. I’d c
ome to this realization a long time ago, but I’d let my fear and suspicions cloud my judgment, regressing me to former thoughts that weren’t valid in any way. Looking back at Bellmore, I vowed to do better. The spy was a Shapeshifter, we knew that much, but that didn’t mean all the Shapeshifters were spies.
Twenty-Five
Santana
I’d hoped a couple of hours in the coven pool might make me feel better, the soothing water washing away the sick feeling that had been nagging me since coming back from New York. Unfortunately, my body seemed to have other ideas. With my stomach still churning, and my skin drenched in a sheen of cold sweat, I dressed in comfy clothes and padded along my curve of the living quarters to find Raffe.
If he likes me in a slinky bikini, then he can damn well like me in sweats and a t-shirt, looking like death warmed over.
My last few peaceful laps of the pool, without Harley spraying pillars of water at me or creating tidal waves, had proven pretty useful in getting the mental juices flowing. The Children of Chaos had already been playing on my mind, ever since our little trip through the mirror, but I kept fixating on one particular point: Erebus, the Child of Darkness. A nice, non-threatening title if ever I’ve heard one. I’d seen him mentioned in the spell that Harley had been reading. Plus, the creeping, unsettling black fog whipping around her had been a damn good indicator of who was involved in the spell.
A memory came back to me, floating through my mind on a wave of tranquility. There’d been a book in Astrid’s room—one of the texts we’d been reading through during our gossip sessions. At the bottom of one page, there’d been a footnote in an embossed text box. It had mentioned djinns and how they were directly connected to Erebus. According to that book, a djinn’s powers were fueled by Erebus’s energy, and so these demons could be called upon to help perform the incantation that would summon him. It could be done in other ways, but using a djinn as a sort of gateway appeared to be the easiest method. It was only after a peaceful swim that the pieces started to make sense, coming together in my mind.
Harley Merlin 3: Harley Merlin and the Stolen Magicals Page 25