I lift a shoulder, not sure how to deal with Ingrid in this strangely brittle, bitter mood.
“It was your grandmother, of course!” She claps her hands once, dramatically, like a magician revealing a trick. “Jezebel Sarkany, trueborn daughter of the Tenth and heir to Lilith, the first to be born in Blood.”
“My grandmother’s name was Belle,” I say uncertainly.
But Ingrid continues as if I hadn’t spoken, a faraway look in her eyes. “She was a good keeper, my sister, and an impressive Black Lady. Everybody said so. Only then, of course, the whole lot of them started dying, every last remaining member of the Black Clan, until only my sister remained.”
She laughs, a raw, painful sound. “Do you know what’s funny? Even then, I never worried. Not for a moment. I believed my sister was invincible, especially with your grandmother at her side, the first—”
She stops abruptly and grabs at her throat, as if choking on her words. When she moves her lips, no words come out. It’s only after she’s taken several deep breaths that she finds her voice again.
“Oh,” she says. “How surprising. So I am still bound. Some secrets are more important than others, clearly.”
I remember how Gunn had to fight his own body to break his vow of secrecy, and I make an impatient motion. “Just tell me what you can,” I say. “I already know that both my grandmother and your sister died. My mom told me it was an accident.”
“An accident? No. It certainly wasn’t an accident. The White Wh—” She chokes again, this time coughing until Gunn brings her a glass of water.
“The fact is, they died,” she says when she can finally speak, her voice now completely flat. “What’s worse, both of them left a child behind. My sister’s son, Gunnar’s father, was sent to live with his father’s family, but at first nobody was quite sure what to do with your mother, who was just a baby.”
I’m about to ask why my mother couldn’t have gone to live with her father, my grandfather, when I realize that I have no idea who my grandfather is. To be honest, I’ve never really ever thought about him before, which is strange as…
A speck of dust catches my eye, and I lose my train of thought as I watch it twirling and whirling and floating in the air between us, as aimless and light and beautiful as a dream. I blink a few times, realize that Ingrid is still talking.
“… thirty-five years old and still flitting around aimlessly, having fun and leading a normal, carefree life. And then—bam!—my sister is dead, my little nephew is shipped out, and there’s this orphaned baby girl that nobody had a plan for. What could I do? I was the last of the Waemundings, and in spite of my rebellious nature, I knew very well what I owed the family name.” She pulls her lips into a thin, bitter line. “So I stepped up to the plate, for the first time in my life, and I offered to foster the baby while the Order decided her fate.” Her lips stretch even further until it almost resembles a smile. “Big of me, right?”
I wait for her to continue.
“Do you know that all my life until that moment, I’d never once thought that I wanted to be a mother? I just never felt the instinct. Small children always seemed so unreasonable—selfish little brats one had to endure for the sake of the parents. And babies? Ugh. Snotty, smelly, and boring.” She waves a dismissive hand, the bangles on her arm tinkling loudly.
“I thought I hated children, but from the very first moment I held your mother’s pudgy little hand against my heart…” This time, when she falls silent, I know it isn’t because she’s fighting a vow of secrecy. “It was a love I could never imagine, a feeling so strong it totally consumed me. Who knew that the mother instinct could be so fierce, so overwhelming.”
She takes a few seconds to compose herself.
“By the time I realized I couldn’t let her go, it was already too late. Plans had been put in place; it was all agreed. They were going to send your mother to the Order’s headquarters in Rome, of all places, where she’d be raised by the Masked Ones.” She gives a strangled little laugh. “The Masked Ones! Can you imagine? My sweet little girl in the hands of those monsters?”
I don’t want to interrupt her story, even though I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“For the first time in my life, I was grateful for the magical blood in my veins. Not because I was suddenly a believer, you understand, but because I knew that, according to their own rules and regulations, nobody in the Order had a stronger claim upon a girl from your grandmother’s bloodline than a full-blooded Waemunding. If I claimed Black, I realized, nobody would be able to take her from me. She’d become my ward: mine to raise and mine to keep.”
Ingrid wipes a tired hand across her eyes.
“And so I did it. I went through their rituals and I pledged my soul to the Black Clan, not caring what I was giving up, because I wanted her. My baby. Once I became the Black Lady, I believed, nobody would ever take her away from me. I was the last of the Waemundings—they wouldn’t dare.”
Another forced, cynical little laugh.
“Only they did. They did dare. Over and over again, they tried to steal her from me, by fair means or foul. The Order can be tricky that way, you see. They’re a lot of clever people, with a lot of clever tricks, and I knew that if I wanted to keep my child, I’d better come up with some clever damn tricks of my own.”
She puts her hands together in that strange, prayer-like gesture again.
“And so I did the unthinkable. The one thing nobody expected. I contacted the Pendragons.”
“Why?” I ask in the long silence that follows. “Are they, like, leaders of a clan or something?”
Ingrid shakes her head. “Once, the Pendragons were one of the oldest and most powerful Bloodkeeper families the Order has ever known. But they were made Outcast a hundred and fifty years ago, after they broke one of the most sacred laws of our kind.”
“What law did they break?” I ask curiously when she doesn’t say anything else.
“Their transgression is so vile as to be unspeakable.” She gives a faint shudder. “Sufficed to say that they delved into the forbidden, and in the process they almost destroyed the very essence of all lifemagic on this world.”
I look at Gunn, hoping he’ll help me make sense of this. But he’s still acting tense and weird: fists clenched, jaw tightened, eyes flat and cold.
“Oka-a-a-y,” I say after the silence stretches too long, “so the Pendragons are really, really evil keepers who were kicked out of the Order centuries ago for doing something really, really evil. And you went to them when you wanted to keep my mother because…?”
Ingrid sighs. “Within the Order, no family has ever been hated as much as the Pendragons. But despite their greatest efforts, in over a hundred and fifty years, no keeper has managed to hurt as much as a hair on a Pendragon head. That family has its own magic—a strange and powerful one that relies heavily on the bloodmagic skill of Enthrallment. Over time they have made this town into a stronghold of their own—one so strange and uncanny that nobody can truly threaten them here. This entire town is brimming with their spells: spells of confusion, spells of illusion, spells to addle even the most able mind and leave the most determined enemy dejected and bewildered.”
“Seriously?” I ask skeptically, thinking what a boring and normal place this is.
“Yes,” Ingrid says. “Of course, even the protection of the Pendragons wouldn’t have been enough if I’d stood against the entire Order, but that was never the case. Most keepers accepted my bloodright to keep your mother. And the rest couldn’t touch me here.”
“But why did the Pendragons help you in the first place?” I ask.
“Oh, they weren’t helping me. They hate me, like they hate all keepers, but they absolutely revere the magic of your family—it’s because of their obsession with that magic that they became Outcast in the first place. They are drawn to your power, intoxicated by it, and they’ll do almost anything to keep you close to them.”
I shake my head, thinki
ng of all those years Jonathan never even looked at me. “This is so weird.”
“The deal we made was simple,” Ingrid continues. “I would bring my ward to live in their town, and they would keep the Order off our backs. It worked too. By the time those bastards in Rome realized what was going on, it was too late for anyone to do anything about it.”
She laughs harshly, unamused. “In retrospect, I think the deal we struck was almost as odious to the Pendragons as it was to me. They were so hungry for the magic, they would’ve done almost anything to stay close to a trueborn daughter, but I made them swear that they would never approach your mother, and later you. So far, they’ve been pretty good at holding up their end of the bargain—”
“Which is why Jonathan’s actions today are unforgivable,” Gunn interrupts his aunt’s story for the first time. “Jess is in danger. For them to break the agreement so openly—it’s a clear declaration of intent, Ingrid.”
“He didn’t hurt me or anything,” I say, trying to explain that weird moment. “To be honest, I felt kind of bad for him. In the end he looked really shaken and almost... sad.”
“The danger posed by the Pendragons does not lie in physical harm,” Ingrid says coldly. “It is their corruption we must fear. I put you in great peril by allowing you to attend school with that boy.”
“All the guy did was talk to me. I really think you’re overreacting.”
Gunn gives his aunt a hard look. “If it was up to me, we’d leave this town today.”
“Maybe,” she says. “At least let me speak to Jack Pendragon first.”
When she gets off the phone, Ingrid looks worried.
“The situation is more complicated than we thought,” she tells Gunn.
“Nothing about this is complicated, Ingrid. They broke the agreement and—”
“The little one practiced seamagic in the school’s swimming pool this morning,” she interrupts him with a tired sigh. “In front of over a dozen witnesses. The Pendragons had to use an Enthrallment spell to confuse their memories.”
“Shit.”
“Yes.” She rubs a hand over her eyes. “I don’t know, Gunnar. This is unexpected. You might have been right to start her training; it’s seems we’ve run out of time.”
“How bad was it?”
She shrugs. “Basic control of water.”
“What are you talking about?” I say. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You swam faster than humanly possible,” Ingrid says sharply, “and you stopped coming up for air.” Her tone softens when she sees my face. “Apparently, you weren’t so much moving in the water, as moving with the water: I’m told it bore you so fully that the pool is now almost half-empty.”
I open my mouth to argue, but in the end I don’t say anything. I remember how cherished I felt in the water, how totally safe and at home, as if I was carried by a greater hand.
“The truth is that we might have had a real problem if the Pendragon boy hadn’t been there,” Ingrid tells Gunn.
“Oh no,” Gunn says. “Don’t you pretend what he did was right. Can’t you see—”
“She was also shining, Gunnar. Very faintly, but still.”
“No.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Um… hello?” I ask.
“The shine is a side-effect of using too much magic,” Ingrid explains. “You’ll have to learn how to control it.” She looks at Gunn. “It took the combined power of the entire Pendragon family to Enthrall that little problem away, but even so there might be lasting damage.”
“Fuck.”
“Bad language is not going to solve anything, my boy. You need to teach the little one how to control her magic, and soon, or this will all end in tears.”
Chapter 13
For those of us raised within religions that promise eternal paradise or eventual rebirth, the ancient Norse myth of Ragnarok can seem startlingly bleak and grimly fatalistic. For Ragnarok predicts nothing less than the ultimate destruction of the entire cosmos and everything in it—not only the greatest heroes but also the gods themselves are completely obliterated. In fact, ultimately, not even the memory of their existence remains, for creation itself is undone. All that is left is the void.
Rather depressingly, it is this very outcome that aligns most closely with the Seaprophets’ visions of the final days, which may be why the Skykeepers have so often rallied to the cry of preventing Ragnarok in their bitter battles against the Wards of the Black Clan.
From Norse Mythology and the Order of Keepers (1965)
by Lady Sarah Jane Shawcross
I spend the rest of the day staring at blades of grass with Gunn, and the night feverishly tossing and turning, lost in horrible, graphic nightmares filled with blood and screams and fire.
In my dreams I am me but also not-me: my body a slumberous, scaled and venomous vessel of immeasurable power, my mind cold and detached like that of a snake.
In my dreams I am magnificent and terrible, and the brief lives of humans are of no concern to me. In my dreams I take what is mine and destroy what is not. It is an easy choice, painless, a power I wield without thought of consequence. What are these paltry deaths to me? In my dreams there is pain and death and blood, but the blood is not mine. Nor is the pain or the death.
I am beautiful and mighty. Invincible.
I wake up in a cold sweat at four in the morning, deeply disturbed by my subconscious mind. When I can’t fall asleep again immediately, I stumble to the bathroom, switch on the light, use the toilet, wash my hands. Then I take a glass and lean over the basin to fill it with water.
The terror hits me like a dark wave rising out of nowhere.
I am too afraid to lift my head, too afraid to look up. I don’t want to see myself in the mirror.
I am not what I think I am.
The horror of the thought ices down my spine.
Who will I see if I look at the mirror?
What will I see?
I need to turn off the tap but I can’t move. My hands seem far away, as if they don’t belong to me. As if they were never mine in the first place.
This is not your life.
I don’t know how long I stand there, caught in a horror so deep I can’t move, can’t even swallow. And the worst part is that there’s no escape.
How can I run away when the thing I fear is inside of me?
It is me.
I am the thing I fear.
Time passes. I don’t know how much. I am lost in a thick, empty white silence.
And then, finally, I find the strength to look up.
I look into the mirror and I see…
Me.
Just me. Plain old Jess: my face a bit puffy with sleep, my hair standing up in all directions, my eyes showing no trace of the terror I felt a few seconds ago.
I bring my face closer to the mirror, trying to see something that’s not there. When I’m about an inch from the surface I notice a new blackhead on my chin, but that’s it. I end up resting my forehead against the glass, my heart racing as if I’ve just run some race or survived some ordeal.
It’s me.
I am me.
I stand like that for a long time, trying to understand what just happened. Then I drink the water, turn off the light, and stumble back to my bed.
When I go downstairs for breakfast, I find Ingrid in the kitchen with a paintbrush in her hand. She greets me distractedly, fully focused on her task of prying the lid off a can of paint with the back of a spoon. This morning she’s dressed in a typically Ingrid ensemble of silver ankle boots, wide-legged black trousers, a feathery jacket over a white camisole, and a fake fur hat. As I put a piece of bread in the toaster and switch on the coffee machine, I wonder idly if in the entire history of the known universe there has ever been a more unsuitable outfit for painting the kitchen.
I watch her in silence for a while, not asking any questions. (From experience, I know that she tends to get a bit manic when she’s distressed. In the we
eks after my mom died, while I was lying in bed, crying and staring at the ceiling, Ingrid used a home-made stencil to paint the Waymond family crest on every wall of every room of this house.)
I’m buttering my toast when she speaks for the first time. “Do you like this color?”
“Sure,” I say, taking a bite.
“Good. Because I dyed your clothes blue too. It took most of the night, but they’re all done now.”
I choke, spitting crumbs everywhere. “You did what?”
“They came out beautifully; much better than I’d hoped. These modern fabric dyes are astonishingly effective.”
“Ingrid.” I take a deep breath, close my eyes and count to ten. “Please tell me there’s some kind of misunderstanding here. Because what I just heard you say is that you dyed all my clothes blue.”
“Quite right.” She gives a stiff little smile. “The last batch is drying in the laundry room. See for yourself.”
I get up from the table without another word. In the laundry I find my clothes spread out over several drying racks. They are dyed a rich, deep shade of blue.
All of them. Every single item. Exactly the same color.
Two pairs of skinnies. My favorite dress. All my T-shirts. Both white sweaters. My green silk top. My denim miniskirt. All my bras and panties. My favorite jeans. My printed skirt. All stunningly, electrically blue.
For a moment I can only stare. And then I feel my head exploding with rage like a cartoon character’s. “Ingrid! What the living hell have you done to my clothes?”
I storm back into the kitchen ready to kill my first senior citizen. But Ingrid doesn’t even look up from her painting job.
“I told you—I dyed them. Those in the laundry room were still a bit wet last night; the rest are packed away in your closet.”
I clutch at my hair. “The clothes upstairs…” I’m literally too scared to ask “… are blue too?”
“Of course. Please try to keep up.”
“Why in the name of all that is holy would you do something like that?”
“The Pendragons need reminding that we are not without friends or resources. I thought it best to send a very clear signal.”
Ordinary Girl (The Dark Dragon Chronicles Book 1) Page 13