Believing in Blue

by Maggie Morton

“I can’t believe there’s still no sign of Wren!” Torien’s voice held just as much worry as it had when he’d first discovered her missing, if not a good deal more.

  Sia’s mother Zyr placed a caring hand on his back, but Sia wondered if it would make a single bit of difference to Wren’s clearly distraught father.

  Wren had been missing at breakfast that morning. Sia, who had been invited over for the meal, had gone upstairs to investigate. After knocking on her friend’s bedroom door for almost five minutes, Sia called out, “I hope you’re decent!” through the door, unwilling to admit to herself that a small, embarrassing part of her hoped that Wren wasn’t.

  But decent or not, there was no Wren in her bedroom, or in the bathroom, or, after an hour or so of searching, anywhere on the mansion’s grounds, inside or out. So search parties had been formed, and Sia had joined her mom and Torien, a trio she regretted ending up in as soon as she saw the terrified look on Wren’s father’s face. It wasn’t that she didn’t care that Wren was missing, not even close to it, but the upsetting level of torment Torien was clearly experiencing was almost too painful for her to see. It had only grown worse the longer they’d searched.

  Now they were near Sia and Zyr’s home, and Sia began wondering what her brother might have baked recently. A loud rumble from her stomach told her why Kriss’s foodstuffs had come floating into her mind. She should have been concentrating entirely on finding Wren, but she knew she wouldn’t last much longer if she didn’t eat, and Torien needed to keep up his strength as well. “Why don’t you try to pick up her scent one more time?” Sia asked her mom. “Then we should probably get something to eat, the three of us, at our house. Before we pass out and lose our ability to keep looking,” she added, hoping her joke might bring a smile to Torien’s face.

  A pitiful-looking half-smirk appeared on his lips, but it was gone as soon as it had shown up, and he nodded dejectedly. “I suppose you’re right, Sia.” He sighed one of the most mournful sighs Sia had ever heard and then said, “So yes, we’ll kindly ask your mother to try one last time, and then we’ll just have to give in and fill our bellies, loath as I am to stop searching for my poor Wrenny.” Torien sighed again, then said, “And I suppose I can go ahead and start up to your home, so Zyr can focus fully.”

  In addition to her impressive talents with potions and charms, Zyr also had the magical ability to shape-shift into the form of a small, pale-blue cat with wings. She had this power in place of being able to take birdform. As a result of her unusual ability’s benefits, she might possibly be able to track Wren down. Her sense of smell was always heightened when in catform. Sia had brought along one of Wren’s worn and unlaundered robes so her mom could familiarize herself with the person she was trying to scent.

  “Should we start from here?” Sia asked her mom after Torien had disappeared around the street’s bend. She waited as Zyr did the necessary shifting into her smaller, furrier catform, and Sia picked up her mom’s now-the-wrong-size robe and folded it, draping it over her arm as she waited for the final tufts of fur to appear on her mother’s pointy ears.

  “I’m good to go now,” her mom said, and Sia watched as Zyr’s small nostrils flared, her shoulders bending down as she started to sniff the ground in front of her. “Let’s try heading back toward Torien’s. Maybe there’s some path we haven’t tried yet.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. After all, Wren isn’t familiar with our city, so maybe she was out on her own and got lost, or something like that?” Sia didn’t really believe what she was saying and watched doubtfully as her mom nodded her cathead and began walking away from their house, moving her head back and forth across the ground with long, audible inhalations.

  “Why don’t we go down that way?” Sia gestured toward Nectar Avenue, and her mom nodded again, turning left onto a narrow street lined with old, blue-brick buildings. No one had lived in this area of town for a while, and there was talk of tearing the dilapidated houses down and putting up a community garden and perhaps a playground in their place. Sia didn’t like how this part of the city was making her feel. She wished she hadn’t suggested they try their luck on this particular street. When they arrived at an alley after they’d passed by a few houses, Zyr paused, her left front paw dangling a few inches above the uneven cobblestones.

  “What is it, Mom? Do you…do you smell something? Do you smell her scent?”

  “Yes, yes, I think Wren was here, right at this alley’s opening. Follow me, Sia!” Her mom darted into the dark alley, and Sia followed her. She found herself in a short, narrow space between two of the street’s more shabby-looking homes. A few broken wooden boxes sat in one corner of the alley, and Sia saw a rat run off and take cover behind them, clearly familiar with the scent of cat that her mom must have been giving off. Not that it was in any danger. Zyr never ate rats: even as a cat, she preferred the food of the Winged Blue, as the rest of their people did when in their ravenform.

  “So?” Sia didn’t bother hiding the nervous anticipation in her tone; she knew her mom would be able to smell her nervousness anyway.

  She had to wait, though, while her mom gave the whole alley a thorough and vigorous nose-tour. “So,” Zyr finally answered, turning to look up at Sia, “she was definitely here. But she disappeared, somewhere around the far corner, where that rat is hiding from me, silly thing. And…and it gets worse.”

  “Worse? How does it get worse?”

  “I can smell something else in here, something that doesn’t smell like anything from the Winged Blue.”

  “Could it be that a Winged Red was in here with her? Do you think she got kidnapped?” If Sia had been the type to wring her hands, she would have started then, but instead, she steeled herself for the chance that her mom would state what she had already decided was the truth.

  “That’s one possibility, yes, a very likely one. Only…I don’t think this scent of Winged Red came from a person. It smells more like…more like magic, I think. And not our magic,” she concluded grimly.

  “Well, fuck.” Sia knew her mom didn’t like it when she swore, but she also knew she probably wouldn’t mind this time, considering the current unpleasant circumstances.

  “Yes, my dear, ‘fuck’ indeed.”

  “I think we should use one of your transportation potions to travel to the Winged Red’s world. I’ll go, and you, and Tor—”

  “No, that’s not a good idea.” Zyr shook her head as she spoke, as if her intensely emphatic tone hadn’t been clear enough on its own. “Sia, please put my robe on the ground and turn around so I can change back, and then we’ll take this news to Torien and formulate a plan. One that couldn’t possibly lead to my only daughter getting killed.”

  After her mom was in both her Winged form and her robe again, they hurried back to their house with the news. Torien seemed even more upset now that he knew more of what had probably happened to Wren, and Sia couldn’t blame him. There was no way Wren would be safe there, in the Winged Red’s world, all by herself. That was why, as soon as her mom had told her she couldn’t go try to rescue Wren, Sia had decided to do exactly that.

  After a quick lunch of sandwiches and a small glass of wine for Torien’s nerves, everyone returned to Torien’s except for Sia. She had to take the draught her grandfather had given her, as it had already come to be many hours past when she’d last been supposed to take a dose.

  Sia hurried up the stairs in the now-silent house, hoping to get back to Torien’s before the whole plan had been decided upon—and before she was left out of it entirely. But just as she reached for the bottle beside her bed, a vision hit her, and every inch of her bedroom was washed away as it took over her completely.

  She saw Wren lying in an unfamiliar, red-blanketed bed, and someone equally unfamiliar was kissing her. Except that Sia had seen her before, she realized, seated across the table from Wren in a red-walled room. She flinched as this vision became clearer, because it now had revealed exactly how gorgeous the young woman ki
ssing Wren was. Worse still was the fact that the woman’s wings weren’t blue, their shiny feathers the color of freshly spilled blood.

  Sia wanted it to end, but apparently whatever was making her watch all of this thought she needed to see more. Her magical vision continued with the sight of the woman with dark, wavy hair, from the last time she’d seen the future, standing on a balcony. The woman raised her fist into the air, and she shook it as she screamed out the words, “…and we will be victorious!” Her yell was followed by a loud roar, both applause and menacing yells coming from the hordes of armored Winged Red that filled the streets below the balcony where the woman stood.

  The vision seemed adamant on showing Sia one more thing before it ended; the last portion of it contained Piru. He was staring, glassy-eyed, into a mirror in the corner of his living room. The young woman who had been kissing Wren was looking at him haughtily through the mirror’s surface. “You are to stay out of our way when we reach Azyr, Piru. That is an order.”

  “Yes, mistress, I will do as you say. I will do whatever it takes to help you, once you arrive.”

  “I’m sure some pathetic little part of you would like to do otherwise. That’s half the fun for me, just so you know, Piru.”

  “Anything for you, mistress. Anything.” Piru sank down on one knee and bowed his head, and the beautiful, red-winged woman just tilted her head to the side and grinned, a small, assured chuckle escaping her ruby-painted lips as her smile grew wider and wider still. But Piru didn’t fight back, only bowing his head deeper and lower, until his forehead rested on the floor.

  It was then that, finally, the vicious stream of images ended. They’d left Sia so weak that it took the last of her remaining strength to find her way up from the floor and into her bed, where a deep, dreamless sleep dragged her down into its depths.

  Chapter Thirty

  It could have been either minutes or hours later when Sia awoke, but she didn’t need her usual large dose of strong coffee to keep her eyes wide open. No, that vision had done more than enough to give her the energy to get out of her bed, no matter how late the night sky told her it still happened to be. The moon’s golden beams painted her bedroom in its warm glow, the moonlight coming in between the curtains she hadn’t had the chance to close.

  Yep, that vision had hit her hard, but not hard enough to keep her down for long. And it had given her the knowledge she needed to decide what she had to do next—she had to rescue Wren, and she certainly wasn’t waiting around for Torien and the rest to continue making up their own minds about what to do.

  She was as quiet as possible as she sneaked down the hallway, and a quick listen against her parents’ bedroom door told her they were both still fast asleep. Good. That would make the rest of her plan all the easier. Past their bedroom was the closet-sized room where her mom brewed all her potions, which was where Sia was headed. She slowly opened the small door, hoping to silence the creaking sound it had made for years, ever since the race she and her brother had undertaken down the long hallway that had ended in tears for him and stitches for her. The door still bore a small crack near the lower left hinge, and her hairline still had the scar the door had given her in return.

  The door might have still groaned when she opened it, but she inched it open, so it was barely louder than a mouse might have been, and she knew there was no way it would wake her parents or her brother and sister-in-law, who slept farther down the hall.

  She waited until the door was fully shut to reach for the table lamp, and in the room’s complete darkness she bashed her shin into a chair. “Shit!” She just barely managed to catch the chair before it fell over, and she knew then that this room still had it in for her, even if her damaging its door had happened a good eleven years back. Spell rooms usually held grudges, or at least this particular one did. “I’d like to apologize again, Spell Room,” Sia said as she felt around in the pitch-black chamber for the lamp. The floorboards creaked, sounding somewhat like a sigh of annoyance under her feet as she found and then flicked the switch. “I know, I know, we’ve never gotten along, and I promise I’ll be out of here soon enough,” she grumbled softly.

  The heavy-based lamp barely brightened the room, but Sia could still make out the labels on her mom’s wall of potions well enough. “Now, where are you two hiding?” she said aloud. After a few minutes of rearranging the bottles, and one near-catastrophe when a container of Instant River almost fell off the shelf, she found what she was looking for.

  One bottle had a shimmering circle of blue on it, with the vivid images of many different locations flashing and alternating within the circle’s center. The other showed a woman fading in and out of visibility, dancing as she did so. “Thanks, Spell Room. All done in here. I’m leaving now.” The floorboards creaked again as she left, but this time their noises were more akin to the sound of someone rudely mocking another. Sia believed the humans called that a “raspberry.” I’m glad I’m leaving now too, you annoying, poorly built hovel of a room, she thought with a fair bit of irritation. She didn’t dare speak her thought aloud, though: who knew what the room might come up with, to get even for such a slight?

  Safely back in the hallway, Sia then crept down the stairs, her stomach aflutter with the worries her head alone couldn’t contain. Would she be able to return Wren home safely? Would she even survive her trip into the land of the Winged Red? Was she up for this immense challenge in the least?

  Her worries only multiplied as she walked down the empty, moonlit streets, until she was joined by a whole jeering crowd of anxious thoughts by the time she reached the alley where her mother had scented Wren.

  This was her first attempt at invoking a portal spell. She knew that all the Winged Blue’s magic, even from someone as powerful as her mom, could sometimes be quite iffy. And these were two rather powerful potions she had “borrowed,” so who could guess just how badly things would end up if something were to go wrong?

  But she couldn’t abandon Wren to the enemies of the Winged Blue. So she pulled out the stopper from the first bottle and lifted it to her lips, swallowing a few drops of the contents. Next, she unstoppered the second bottle and tipped out half of its shimmery, blue liquid onto the ground just in front of her. She didn’t wait for the first to take full effect, although she would have loved to. No, the portal potion had its own plans for her, perhaps plans that the unfriendly spell room had helped to construct: a swirling vortex of bright-blue smoke quickly encircled her and pulled her forward, just as she noticed that her arms were almost fully invisible.

  Well, at least the invisibility potion seemed to work, she was relieved to discover. Now she just had to pray that the portal potion would function correctly, too. She shut her eyes and filled her thoughts with pictures of Wren, from all the lovely time she’d spent with her. Moments later, she felt her feet gently make contact with what she fretfully hoped was the floor of Wren’s bedroom.

  Thankfully, the first potion had seemed to do the trick: she couldn’t see a single bit of her body. It was surprisingly challenging to put the stoppers back into the now-invisible bottles, but somehow she managed, and she gently placed them in her robe’s equally invisible left pocket.

  And it was very lucky that the invisibility potion had worked, because she now heard footsteps coming down the hallway. She barely had time to rush over to the far corner of the ostentatiously decorated bedroom before its door swung open.

  The first person to walk through the doorway was Wren, wearing a revealing, body-hugging red robe. It wasn’t the robe that made Sia delighted to see her friend standing there intact, but she couldn’t help enjoying the sight of Wren in such a flattering outfit, even if it happened to be the wrong color. Blue suited her better, Sia thought, and she frowned as she realized that Wren was probably wearing the robe willingly. She looked pretty happy, actually, and not bespelled in the least, her eyes clear and bright as she smiled at the next person to enter the room.

  And then Sia had to just stand ther
e, as silently as possible. The untrustworthy young woman from her vision had just entered the room, and now Sia had to watch her touch Wren in person, as the impossibly beautiful woman cupped Wren’s chin and pulled it slightly upward. Sia’s sudden burst of anger only grew as she was forced to watch Wren kiss someone other than her. Sure, it was fine if Wren kissed someone else, she told herself, but it was not fine if it was someone this evil, a clearly deceptive member of the Winged Red who had somehow won her poor friend over, won her over completely, it seemed. Sia knew she couldn’t do anything, though, at least not yet, and so she just clenched her fists and waited until the auburn-haired temptress finally pulled away from Wren’s lips.

  “I have to take care of something, but I’ll be back in about an hour, if you’d like,” she told Wren. It was obvious that she was expecting Wren to reply in the affirmative, her face empty of any doubt. Or any respect.

  But Wren clearly couldn’t see that, her face also free of doubt as she answered, “I would like that, Ember. Come back whenever you’re ready.”

  “Okay, see you soon.” The woman—Ember—paused before she let go of Wren, then pulled her back into her arms for one last kiss. Even worse than the last few, this final kiss seemed to involve some tongue. There was no way Sia’s mouth would ever feel clean again if that woman’s tongue had been in her mouth.

  Then the woman left, shutting the door behind herself, and it was just invisible Sia and Wren in the room, exactly as Sia wanted it. Well, minus the invisibility and the fact that they were in the land of the Winged Red, completely alone, without even the certainty that Wren would trust her after all that Sia had seen.

  But Sia knew she had no other choice. “Hi, Wren,” she said, and Wren spun in her direction toward the sound.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  “Who the hell is in here?” Wren growled. She didn’t sound all that scared, which surprised Sia. Wren’s apparent bravery caused some pride to well up in Sia’s currently invisible chest.