by W. J. May
It never failed to astonish Aria, how a virtual castle had managed to evade the prying eyes of the outside world. The huge private acreage that surrounded it certainly helped. It was impossible to see it from the highway. Between that and the stone wall that circled the perimeter, supernaturally enhanced to deter unwanted visitors, the school had operated in relative privacy thus far.
There had been a few incidents, of course. A few rowdy frat boys or obsessive bird-watchers who managed to make it inside. On the rare occasions that it happened, they were detained in the cafeteria while someone made a hasty phone call to Natasha Stone.
The enchanting ballerina, who doubled as part-time PC agent, would drop whatever she was doing and head down to the school. Magically erasing all those troublesome memories of levitating teenagers, and wolves eating pizza, and all those other things they should never have seen.
I wonder what they’d think, Aria mused to herself, still gazing out the window. I wonder what the rest of the world would think if they knew.
A restless fidgeting caught her eye and she glanced over to see Lily tugging involuntarily at the hem of her shirt, fingers lingering on the fabric, almost like she could feel what was underneath.
“It takes a while to get used to it,” she murmured, trying to set the girl’s mind at ease.
She remembered the night she’d gotten her own tatù.
As with all other pivotal life moments, Benji had come over to see it through. The two of them had gone up to the roof, for some inexplicable reason, impatiently awaiting the moment the ink would appear. She’d rolled up her shirt and clung onto the chimney, while he stood behind her with a mirror in one hand, a camera in the other, and a flashlight in his mouth.
The plan had been to immortalize the moment forever, but despite their best intentions the two best friends’ brilliant ideas always seemed to go awry. In this case, the battery died on Benji’s phone. Aria remembered cursing like a sailor, waving her arms and calling down all sorts of vile oaths as he tried to shock the poor thing back to life. That’s when the tatù appeared.
They’d been mesmerized.
In a way, it was reminiscent of her mother’s. Rae Kerrigan was known far and wide for the shimmering fairy inked on her back. It may have been the symbolic image of all magic, but the fairy was delicate. Fragile. All-powerful, but with a knowing little twinkle in her eyes.
Aria’s was a bit different.
While concept of the fairy remained, hers had wings of ice blue fire—blurring with speed, shimmering with power, bursting right out into the world. You never knew quite what you were going to get with hybrid ink, but in her case her father’s ink had enhanced her mother’s.
It was dynamic, even in stillness. Charged with anticipation. Borderline unsound.
Of course, the ink had a way of spilling into the girl.
Born with a virtual powder keg at the tips of her fingers, Aria had trouble balancing the line between brave and reckless. Between destruction and success. Control was an issue, and since that fateful night on the roof various parts of her life had tasted the power of that volatile fairy.
Cars had broken. Doors had been pulled off their hinges. An entire wall of the kitchen had melted beyond repair. It got to the point where her parents were forced to stage an intervention.
Certain sets of ink were banned.
Lots of them.
The next morning, Uncle Kraigan, a walking repository for every set of ink on the planet, was called to remove the most dangerous tatùs. In an act of comradery (also because Aria would only pick them right up again), Rae removed the tatùs from herself as well. Things like lava, cellular deterioration—things that could only ever be used to take a life—were eliminated completely. Other things—ink that was almost as dangerous, but her mother needed for work—was an honor system.
Aria was never to use them. Not ever.
And she hadn’t. Not a single time.
Lily had a slightly different situation...
Born at exactly eight-thirty just a stone’s throw away, the days leading up to her birth had been a bit of a conundrum for her father. As neither mother nor baby would be making a conscious decision as to when it was happening, there was no way for him to be ready.
Of course, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try.
Rumor had it he stayed up for three days straight—half in the present, half in the future, trying to determine the exact moment his daughter would be born.
Then he fell asleep... and Angel went into labor.
Getting a tatù was usually a private moment, but the four families were bonded closer than blood. The second the ink had appeared on her skin, Lily had showed the rest of them. In a way, it looked a lot like one of her beloved watercolors. Two watchful eyes in the midst of a swirling sea.
“It’s beautiful, Lily,” Angel had murmured, giving her a tight squeeze.
Julian’s eyes glowed with pride from across the room.
Only one person hadn’t been swept away by the magic. From the corner of her eye, Aria had seen her little brother staring with a heartbreaking expression in his eyes. He smiled quickly the second he saw his mother watching, but Rae had seen it all the same.
“That’s going to be you one day,” she whispered, leaning down to kiss his cheek.
The sadness was back, but he tried to be casual—lifting a shoulder in a shrug.
“Maybe. Probably not.”
As fate would have it, that was the one thing his merciless older sister never had the heart to tease him about. Since he was a kid, James had been terrified he wasn’t going to get the tatù. The day Aria turned sixteen and the ink appeared on her skin, he’d given her a huge hug of congratulations then vanished upstairs and cried until dark.
“I wouldn’t worry about powers if I were you,” Rae said with another squeeze. “Something tells me you’re going to be just fine...”
She shared a quick look with the others.
They did that a lot.
“I hope I get used to it,” Lily said quietly, bringing Aria back to the present while resisting the urge to pull up her shirt again and make sure it was still there. “I keep thinking something’s going to happen. That I’ll feel different.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Benji said sagely, resting his shoes on the divider between their seats. “The ink develops in time. You can’t force it.”
Jason shot him a quick grin. “Did you get that off a fortune cookie?”
There was a pause.
“...I got it from Carter.”
The car slid into the nearest available parking space and the five friends stared up at the school with a bit of trepidation. Most of the lights were off, but a few were still glowing. No doubt vengeful teachers prowled just behind them, searching for truant students to catch.
“Why is it that all your presents involve breaking curfew?” Lily murmured.
Aria shot her a quick look, but held her tongue.
In reality, her present involved a bit more than that. But the girl was fairly rule-conscious and had a psychic father. Best not to reveal too much early on.
“Because they’re the best presents,” she said excitedly, pushing open her door. “Come on!”
Benji immediately followed. The rest of them followed after that.
Quiet as a whisper, she led the friends over the shadowy lawns—stopping whenever possible to throw in a flip or a cinematic roll. It got to the point where she was on the verge of sound tracking the whole thing on her phone, though that would kind of defeat the purpose.
“You know what we need,” she whispered, pressing herself against the trunk of a tree before peering covertly around the other side. “Beanies. In all the spy movies, they wear beanies.”
“Stop it,” Benji warned. “You sound like my mom.”
“If you’d just learn to project your invisibility, then we wouldn’t need beanies,” Lily shot her a sideways look. “And we could safely break curfew all you want.”
Aria resisted the urge to challenge the notion of ‘safely breaking curfew’ and gave her friend a sudden shove. “Aw, sorry Lily. You didn’t see that coming?”
The girl pulled herself up with a rueful grin. “I’ve had the ink about six hours, give me a break.”
Jokes aside, they continued forward with the utmost care.
They were allowed to leave school for the weekends—especially considering who their parents were, especially for special events. And few events were more special at Guilder than your sixteenth birthday. But as long as they were on school grounds, they had to follow school rules. Madame Elpis might have celebrated her seventieth birthday, but she was always watching.
The five friends made their way quickly and quietly across the lawn, pausing in surprise when Aria came to a stop in front of the library.
“The library?” Jason whispered. “What are we doing here?”
Aria shrugged coyly, quietly opening the door. “Wait and see...”
The building was never locked, but it wasn’t frequented by the students. Even less so now that Ms. Penz, the librarian, had retired a few weeks before. Still, the friends proceeded with great caution, shutting the door carefully behind them before following Aria through the rows of shelves to the stairs that led to the second story loft—a forgotten wasteland even less attended than before.
It used to be busy at all hours of the day and night. Reserved only for those students who had already been recruited to work for the Council. There were tables scattered with half-completed research assignments, stacks of books piled on the floor.
When Aria was a child, she’d always imagined herself spending a lot of time in that loft. She knew that her parents had. Half of the books and papers littering the floors were probably from them. But when the PC stopped recruiting students until after graduation, it had fallen out of use.
The piles of books were forgotten. A broken espresso maker sat in the corner.
“Okay...stop.” Lily’s hand shot out, grabbing Aria’s sleeve. “What are we doing here?”
Instead of answering, Aria swept through the tables to the tiny door that was carved into the far wall. One so slight, you almost couldn’t differentiate it from the surrounding stone.
Unlike the rest of the retired loft, this door still loomed large in the minds of the students. It was gossiped about, speculated about, even dreamed about at one time or another.
It led to the restricted section of the library. The place the PC stored all their archived files.
Better you be caught setting fires in the kitchen than seen trying to get anywhere near that door. Not that you stood a chance of opening it. Not unless you happened to possess...
With a little smile, Aria reached into her pocket and pulled out a key.
“Happy birthday.”
Chapter 5
“How did you...”
Lily trailed off as the friends stood in the doorway, staring in awe.
It was a tiny little room, cramped for space, with a rickety table in the middle that was half-buried under a mountain of files. None of the antiquated computers against the wall were working; it was as though someone had simply forgotten to pull the plug. But even they were hardly visible given the amount of loose paper littering the room.
You couldn’t walk without stepping on it. You couldn’t breathe without inhaling the dust. It was as though someone had slowly unraveled a tree, one unfortunate layer at a time.
Given the hype of the place, the room itself was rather anti-climactic. But you’d never know it from the looks on their faces. The friends had reached the Promised Land.
“Okay...best present ever.”
Aria shrugged casually, trying not to look smug. “I thought you’d like it.”
Benji gave her a solemn clap on the shoulder, while James mumbled reluctant admiration under his breath. Even the unimpressible Jason was impressed—taking a step closer and gazing around the stacks of paper with wide eyes.
“I don’t get it...” he murmured. “Nothing’s online?”
The PC had their own system for that sort of thing, a closed network that Luke had designed himself. Every Christmas, as a matter of tradition, the students of Guilder tried to hack into it.
They’d been thwarted every time.
“Not this stuff.” Aria took a step beside him, staring at the papers beneath her feet. “My dad told me once that it isn’t proprietary information, just confidential files that the Council wouldn’t want people to see. The day of the fire, someone stayed behind to evacuate the whole thing.”
“Didn’t do a very good job putting it back, did they?” James commented, shifting aside a dilapidated file with his shoe. “Let me tell you, from everything I’ve heard about that fire it sounds like the whole thing was severely mismanaged. I mean—how did the school bell end up rocketing halfway across campus to knock the astronomy tower to the ground? How is that even possible?”
Aria simply shook her head. She had actually been there—or so she had been told. She and Benji had been about five at the time, while Lily was just two. There were a few distant memories, blurred by time and overuse. A spattering of vague recollections, but nothing concrete.
Sometimes, she swore she remembered the fire perfectly. That a man with dark hair had blasted a hole in the wall and carried her to safety. That a giant bell had fallen from the sky, but he’d caught it with one hand. Other times, she swore he’d been covered in foam.
That’s when she knew she was dreaming.
“Who cares how organized it is?” Jason murmured, bending to pick up a stray leaflet by his feet. “This place is a treasure trove.” His eyes flickered around the four corners before glancing down at Aria with a little wink. “Nice work, Wardell.”
She smiled tightly and looked away.
Meanwhile Benji was already waist-deep in case files, having abandoned the table and chairs entirely, stretched out in a corner. While it wasn’t clear what he was reading, the page had absorbed him completely. His electric blue eyes had widened to take up almost half his face as they flew across the page. His lips were moving silently, committing every word to heart.
Lily and James took one look at him before dropping down where they stood and doing the same—devouring each forbidden page like inmates starved of food. There were gasps of surprise, barks of laughter; every now and then, James would frown and look something up on his phone.
“You sure you really want to know?” Jason teased Aria quietly, glancing down again to stare into her eyes. “Maybe it was banned for a reason.”
Her eyes lit up as she stared over the room. “Maybe it was...”
THREE HOURS LATER THE friends were still reading.
“Okay, this is insane,” Benji said suddenly, breaking the long silence.
Aria hadn’t quite figured out how to conjure coffee, but they’d gotten the espresso-maker working an hour before and the floor around him was littered with empty paper cups.
He jabbed a finger at the file in his hand. “This one has them flying in from Rome in the morning, infiltrating a Venetian museum via underwater jet-ski, only to somehow end up debriefing Carter in Barbados over drinks that night.”
He was breathless just saying it. Then he jabbed at the paper again.
“And they did base-jump from the top of K2. My mom always swore they didn’t.”
Lily waved a similar paper from across the room. “This one’s all sharpie. The only word that isn’t redacted is ‘yak’.”
James glanced over with a grin. “I bet that’s one of my mom’s.”
Aria smiled along with the rest of them, but kept her eyes on her reading. For longer than she could remember, she’d dreamed of getting her hands on these reports. Of getting a glimpse into that fantastical world that had been kept carefully hidden from them for so long.
But now that she’d finally discovered it...she felt almost defeated.
They were SO young. They did these things when they were SO young.
It was one thing to grow up hearing the legends of your parents, it was quite another to read the details of them on a page. Each story was more unbelievable than the last. Each victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Whether it was her father—free-falling onto a helicopter to stop a royal abduction, or her mother—a woman who’d brought warlords and dictators to their knees.
Sometimes their objective was very specific. To take down a particular drug cartel, a human trafficking ring, or the CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company. Other times, it broadened as they came together to combat more natural disasters. Distributing medicine to an AIDS-riddled country, rerouting an entire river so it flooded the plains of a drought-stricken land.
Taking down assassins, operating as assassins themselves. Posing as everything from interns to scientists, from models to pilots. In one report Gabriel had gotten an urgent text from Julian then drove straight to King’s Cross Station, arriving just in time to stop a runaway train.
Just seven friends, but they’d changed the course of history. Saved countless lives.
The world owed them a debt of gratitude. But the world would never know.
“My dad developed his ability so early,” Lily murmured. “The things I’m reading...he’s doing them at sixteen, seventeen years old.” She flinched almost imperceptibly, then shot Aria a pointed look. “The age I’m at now. Younger than you.”
Aria met her gaze for only a moment before turning deliberately away.
Yes, she’d seen that, too. And yes, she felt just as devastated.
The most exciting thing that had happened to the friends in recent memory was when a convenience store they often visited was robbed. The thrill was overwhelming. They’d snooped around for days, looking for clues. It turned out that the store clerk’s son had forgotten his key.
“What about you?” She deliberately changed the subject, turning to where Jason was reading in silence, lying down on a stack of shelves. “Finding anything good?”
Jason wasn’t going to find his mother in the files. Natasha hadn’t joined the agency until just a few years after he was born. But it would be hard to read about the history of violence and intrigue in the supernatural world without stumbling across the name of his father...several thousand times.