by Nicole Maggi
I could feel the magic seething from the room. The door practically hissed with power. I put a hand up to it, but Bree swatted it away.
“Don’t.” She swung to face me. “I need you to transform only for a moment. All I need is the energy burst that happens at the moment of shifting—that’s what will fuel the spell.”
I wondered what would have happened if Nerina had been here. Had Bree seen what she transformed into? That would have been an inconvenient shock.
Bree positioned herself in front of the door. “Are you ready?”
“Are you?”
She grinned at me. “Always am, sweetie darling.” She raised her hands, palms down. “Now.”
I pulled myself apart and watched my body crumple to the marble floor as I soared toward the ceiling. My wings beat with joy of their own volition; despite the crazy dangerous thing we were doing, it was still exhilarating to transform and be free. I flew in a small circle, the tips of my wing feathers grazing the ceiling. My aura filled the hall, bouncing off the marble like sunlight through a prism. I took a little dive and rose again, blood pumping through my veins. This was my life, my reason for—
“Okay. You can transform back,” Bree said.
I blinked. The door was open. With a twinge of sadness, I sank back into my body and stood. “That was fast.”
“With ten seconds to spare.” She jerked her chin toward the camera, still facing away from us. We hurried into the room and shut the door.
We leaned against the door for a moment, surveying this forbidden room that it had taken an ancient spell to get into. It didn’t look so special. File cabinets lined one wall, and a sleek computer sat on a small desk in the center of the room.
Bree reached into her pocket and fished out two miniature flashlights. She handed one to me. “Get to work.”
“What are we looking for?”
“You start on the files. I’m gonna see if I can get into the computer.”
I aimed my little light toward the cabinet immediately to my right. I expected the files to be locked, but when I pulled on the drawer, it slid right open. “Guess they figured the magic on the door was enough security.”
“Or the spell broke the magic inside the room too,” Bree said without looking up from the computer.
I made a face at her back and stood on tiptoe to peer into the drawer. It was filled with boxes of pens. I slammed the drawer shut and was about to move to the next cabinet when I paused. Why would the Guild use up space in their precious magic room with pens? That made no sense. I rolled out the drawer again. When I looked inside, it was filled with staplers.
“Bree,” I said, “there’s a spell on these cabinets.”
She straightened and walked toward me. When she was a foot away, she stopped. “I can feel it now,” she muttered.
“Feel it?” I had felt the magic on the door but not in here. It must have been a subtler spell, a kind of magic that only someone with skill could undo. I stared at Bree. Was that what she was? Was that what she was doing with Nerina every night? Was Bree . . . a mage in training?
“Stand back,” she said. “I want to try something.”
I moved behind her and watched her raise her hands to the cabinet. Her lips moved without sound. The cabinet flashed, and Bree stumbled back a step. “Shit,” she said.
“I hope no one saw that.”
Bree swung around. “I’m doing my best, okay?”
“Hey, I could just leave,” I said, even though I really couldn’t. “I didn’t have to come.”
She clenched her jaw and faced the cabinet again. This time she placed a palm flat against the beige metal and murmured something under her breath. The drawer sighed with a wisp of silver smoke. Bree pulled it open. “That’s what you’re looking for,” she said.
I gripped the sides of the drawer and looked inside. Several leather-bound manuscripts, yellowed with age, were piled side by side. I drew out the one on top. On the front cover, the word L’oliveto was stitched into the leather with green thread. The Olive Grove. I rifled through the other books. The Waterfall. The Redwood Forest. There was one for each site.
I looked around; Bree was at the last cabinet, unlocking its magic. I waited until she was done. “Hey, what do we do with the stuff we want to take with us?”
She pointed to a small pile of crumpled reusable grocery bags on the floor next to the desk. I grabbed one and was about to put the manuscripts in it when I thought of something. “But aren’t they going to notice these things are missing?”
“Leave that to me,” she said, moving back to the computer.
Great. I shook my head a little and stacked the manuscripts into the bag. The next cabinet had three drawers, each labeled alphabetically. I opened the top one, marked A-F. It was filled with manila folders, a name listed on each tab. I picked one at random—Abrams, Jeffrey. There were so many folders jammed in the drawer that it was hard to get it out, so I just jerked it up enough that I could peek inside.
Abrams, Jeffrey. Called: July 9, 1997. Animal Form: Mountain Lion. Site: The Waterfall.
And then below it, stamped in large block red letters, one word: Deceased.
I pulled my fingers off the folder as if it had bitten me. I clenched my hands into fists for a moment. Then, quickly, I shoved the folder back in place and pulled out another one.
Arconi, Stephen. Called: February 28, 1962. Animal Form: Cougar. Site: The Waterfall. Deceased.
I slammed the drawer shut and rolled out the middle one so hard it almost fell off its hinges. A quick trip through the folders in that drawer and the one below told me what I’d suspected after reading Stephen Arconi’s file. These were records of all the dead Malandanti from the Twin Willows Clan. I leaned against the cabinet, trembling. Would Jonah someday be one of those files—his life reduced to two lines in black and white?
I breathed in deep through my nose to quell the sudden queasiness in my gut. I swallowed hard and went to the next cabinet. My fingers shook as I reached for the top drawer.
“Finally,” Bree said.
“What?”
“I’m in.” She pulled a flash drive out of her pocket and plugged it into the side of the computer. “Download in progress.”
“Downloading what?”
She crossed her arms. “Nerina might think magic is the way to bring down the Guild, but I think a good, old financial reckoning will do the trick.” She grinned. “I’m about to have every little dirty financial secret they have in my hands.”
It was smart. I had to give her credit. My thinking leaned toward Nerina’s, but Bree could be right. And hey, it was my idea to bring her in. So I could pat myself on the back a little bit too.
I turned to the filing cabinet. This one was filled with manila folders too, but they were significantly thicker than the one-sheet folders in the Deceased file. I thumbed through the tabs, looking for something that might offer a clue to what was inside, but most of them had generic labels, like Correspondence or Payments.
I closed the top drawer and tried the middle one. A dividing tab in the center caught my eye. Dissenters. The folders behind it were all labeled with names. I saw it almost immediately. Jacobs, Lidia.
My fingers couldn’t pull the folder out fast enough. The card stock sliced my thumb, but I ignored the stinging pain and flipped the folder open. The first sheet was an overview, with several typed lines:
Did not attend initial meeting
Did not attend supplemental meeting
December 4: Visit paid at home. Resistant. Reason for failure unclear.
December 6: Reckoning
Conclusion: Possible Benandanti connection. Monitoring.
I felt sick. December 6 was the day our barn had been destroyed. They were watching my house. They were watching my mother. Jonah had warned me, but this was black-and-white proof in my hands. I took a deep breath to steady myself. This was why I was here, to find this stuff out so I could protect her. I shoved the folder into an empty bag and d
ug back into the drawer. I pulled out all the files in the Dissenters section and stuffed them into the bag. I didn’t stop to look through any of them; it didn’t matter whether I knew the people or not. All of these people needed to be protected.
The last filing cabinet was marked Current in spidery handwriting. I opened the bottom drawer. There were no written labels on the tabs, but the folders were color-coded. Three-quarters of the folders were purple, while the rest were green. I slid out a green one. There was a header at the top of each piece of paper in the folder.
Wolfe, Jonah.
My whole body shook. I dropped to my knees beside the drawer. “Bree.” It came out as a croak. I cleared my throat, which throbbed with heat. “Bree.”
Within a breath, she was by my side, kneeling next to me. She pulled one of the other green folders and shuffled through the papers. In total silence, we each took one folder after another, flipped through it, then shoved it in the bag. Bree was about to open the last folder when the computer behind us pinged, making both of us jump. “My download is done,” she muttered and got up to retrieve her drive.
As I stuffed the last of the Jonah files into the bag, it hit me. This cabinet was marked Current. If the other one was filled with the previous Malandanti of the Twin Willows Clan, then this one contained . . . the identities of all the current members.
My heart was everywhere in my body, thudding in my throat, my chest, my gut. I reached for a purple folder. As I was about to pull it out, a light beamed in through the door’s frosted glass window. Without thinking, I ducked low, flattening myself on the floor.
“Shit.” Bree scrambled over to me. “It’s one of the guards, making his rounds.”
“What do we do?”
She craned her neck to look at the door. The glass was still lit by the guard’s flashlight. “He shouldn’t even be looking at this room. The spell should repel him.”
“Which spell—yours or the Guild’s?”
“The Guild’s—” She froze. “My spell undid their magic. He can see the door now.”
Ice-cold fear flooded my veins. We inched backward on our bellies until we were hidden by the filing cabinet. I barely breathed while the light flickered off the walls. After what felt like an endless number of minutes, the light retreated, and the room was dark again.
“We have to go. Now.” Bree jumped to her feet and hustled to the desk to gather her stuff. I dashed to the filing cabinet and looked at the top two drawers. What secrets did they hold? Who were the other Malandanti? There was no time to look. I grabbed a thick, purple folder out of the bottom drawer at random and rolled it shut.
At the door, Bree stopped me and faced the room. She raised her hands and whispered a few words that sounded strangely like Latin. I felt a shudder pass through the walls and the floor.
“Now they won’t see the missing files,” she told me. “They won’t even know to look for them.”
We cracked the door open less than an inch. The guard was nowhere to be seen, but he had to be somewhere on this floor. I focused on the camera down the hall. It faced away from us.
“Come on,” Bree whispered.
We ran on tiptoe until we were right under the camera. It felt like the longest minute in the world, waiting for it to change direction away from the stairwell. At any moment the guard could come back . . .
The camera clicked and began to swivel. We covered the distance to the door in two steps. I took one last look down the long, marble hallway before Bree shut the door behind us.
We ran down the stairs at breakneck speed and flung ourselves out onto the street. We didn’t stop running until we were around the corner and out of sight of the Guild building. Only then did I slide to halt and bend over, panting to catch my breath.
Bree pressed one hand to her side, the other against her cheek. “We did it,” she gasped. “We did it.”
I straightened. We looked at each other. Both of us broke into smiles at the same time and then, to my utter shock, Bree Wolfe hugged me. “Thank you,” she whispered.
My face felt hot and prickly. “Hey, you’re the one that got us in. All that magic you did—that was amazing.”
She pulled away from me and rolled her eyes. The mask of toughness that she always wore fell back down on her face. Still, she had dropped it for that one moment . . . and for me. She peered down the street. “Now we just have to figure out how to get home.”
We walked to a bus stop a few blocks away. There was one last bus out of Bangor; it would drop us off a couple of miles out of Twin Willows, but we could walk that. After what we did tonight, we could do anything.
It was only when we were settled into our seats on the warm bus that I remembered the purple folder. My stomach turned over and over as I found the bag it was in and pulled it out.
“What is that?”
“It was the only other file I was able to grab from that last cabinet. I think it’s got another Malandanti identity in it.”
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense.” Bree reached for it at the same time my fingers found the edge of the folder. We opened it together.
The words on the front page swam in my vision for a moment before making sense.
Called: June 2, 2001. Animal Form: Raven.
I searched up the page until I reached the header.
Webster, Pratt.
Chapter Seventeen
The File
Alessia
It all made sense. The reason he was allowed into all the executive meetings. The way he acted like Mr. Wolfe’s boss, instead of his assistant, when they were alone. A long time ago, the Lynx had suggested that Mr. Wolfe was the puppet, and someone was pulling his strings. Now I knew who that was.
We lugged all the bags from the bus stop through Twin Willows and back to the farm. The whole world was hushed at this witching hour, but I still imagined eyes on us everywhere. Monitoring. Was someone staking out my house even in the middle of the night?
All the things I’d learned in that room swirled in my head, so many threads of information that I couldn’t weave them together at all. The Dissenters . . . Jonah’s file . . . the seven ancient books detailing each of the sites . . . and Pratt. Pratt Webster was the Malandanti Raven. Pratt Webster was Jonah’s Guide.
When we got to the farm, we headed straight for the woods and the stone wall. I couldn’t keep anything in my house, not if the Guild was spying on us. It was safer to keep it underground in Nerina’s lair. I only wondered what she would do when she came home and found her coffee table covered with stolen files.
After we’d dumped everything out, I texted Heath. It didn’t seem right to keep him out of the loop. By the time he descended into the lair, we were surrounded by stacks of papers and folders and a pile of the leather-bound books.
“What is all this?” Heath asked. “Where’s Nerina?”
“We reclaimed the Redwood site,” I said.
“And broke into that room at the Guild,” Bree said.
Heath looked back and forth between me and Bree. “I think I need a drink.”
We lost track of time. It could have been three in the morning or twelve noon; I had no idea. We worked in silence, carefully passing papers, talking only when there was something vital to say.
I showed Heath the file on Pratt Webster first. It was all there, telling us what we’d suspected. He was the head of the Twin Willows Clan, and Mr. Wolfe was his Guild lackey. He was the boss, even if his official job description was Assistant.
After setting that aside, we started on the Dissenters files. Lidia’s file was frustratingly thin; if they did have a tail on her, they hadn’t had time to record it in the file yet. Three-quarters of the way down the stack, Heath paused. “Alessia.”
I looked up. He handed me a file and kept his focus on me while I flipped it open.
Salter, Edward. Owner: Salter Hardware and Dry Goods.
Prominent figure in Twin Willows. Well-liked by neighbors. Friendly with mayor. Relationship with Li
dia Jacobs (?)—cross-reference with Jacobs file.
Confrontation with Wolfe on December 13. Later that night Salter was seen on the grounds of Lidia Jacobs’ farm, tracking the Panther into the woods with a shotgun. The Boar headed him off before he reached the Waterfall.
Visited by the Rabbit on December 14. Memory erased. Disappeared for two weeks as a result of memory loss.
Current status: Has returned to Twin Willows and has not been a problem since.
The Rabbit. Was that their code name for their mage? Had his true identity been in the top two drawers of that last cabinet, the drawers filled with answers we would never get to? It couldn’t be helped. The odds that we’d ever get back into that room were about as good as a snowball’s chances in hell. But now I knew exactly why Mr. Salter had been targeted. He’d seen Jonah that night, the night of the blizzard when they were both snowed in at my house. And he’d probably heard a noise, the sound of Jonah leaping from the guest bedroom window onto the roof of the garage and then to the ground . . .
I swallowed hard. As a non-Benandante, Mr. Salter wouldn’t have been able to see Jonah’s silver aura. All he would’ve been able to see was a huge deadly panther skulking around the house of his best friend. He’d probably gotten the shotgun from his truck, the only thought to protect me and Lidia, not knowing he was really hunting a human being.
I rubbed my face. It was an awful thought, but the Rabbit had actually done us all a favor by erasing his memory.
“There’s a file on the mayor here,” Bree said.
“What does it say?” Heath asked.
Bree ran a finger down the page. “Name, personal stats, how long she’s been mayor . . . Well, well.” She raised an eyebrow. “She filed a letter of complaint against the Guild with the EPA.”