Shattered Souls (The Toren Series, Book 1)

by Lola StVil

  Just as I’m about to give up hope, Fish squeals again and I wonder what she’s found now. I turn and my stomach does a flip when I see the gold box she’s holding. It’s about the size of a CD case but a little deeper. It’s marked with a series of raised engravings.

  “That’s it,” I say.

  She hands it to me. I go to open it.

  “Really?” Fish says. “The great unveiling can’t wait until we’re out of here?”

  Reluctantly, I force the box into my inside jacket pocket, making sure it’s safe.

  We head out of the vault. Fish closes the door behind her.

  “We’ll have ten seconds to get down the hallway once I reactivate the lasers,” she tells me.

  She quickly reprograms the keypad and we sprint along the hallway. We reach the safe zone and I check my watch. Thirteen minutes. That gives us two minutes to get away, which should be enough.

  We reach the staircase.

  I am about three or four steps up when I hear Fish make a gargling choking sound. I turn back and there she is, her face turning blue, an orange snake wrapped tightly around her throat.

  The snake Quo has woken up sooner than we expected.

  I reach out and pull the snake away from her throat, throwing it to the ground and stamping on its head.

  Fish bends double, coughing, as I fire a ball of light behind us, hoping to slow the snake Quo down.

  Fish forces herself back to upright and waves her hand at me.

  “Go,” she whispers in a raspy voice. “Go left at the top.”

  “I need urgent assistance at the vault,” the voice of the snake Quo says from behind us. “Intruders. I repeat, I need urgent assistance at the vault.”

  Damn! He’s calling for backup.

  I am pretty sure that the disturbance caused by my team is as good as over by now, and within minutes, Fish and I are going to be surrounded unless I do something, but I don’t know what.

  Fish, who seems to have recovered from being strangled, and even appears to be enjoying herself, runs at my side as we leave the staircase and the hallway widens out.

  “This way,” she says, getting a couple of steps ahead of me. “He’s not following and we can lose the others in the tunnels.”

  She hurtles around a bend, and stops short. I have no time to stop and I crash into the back of her.

  We are caught. It’s all over.

  I almost cry with relief when I recognize Nix.

  “Go,” he says, urging us onwards. “I’m going to dart off that way when the guards approach and lead them away from you.”

  “You’ll get yourself killed,” I protest.

  He shakes his head.

  “I won’t. I’m going to double back to the ballroom. They won’t fire on me in there. And then I’ll explain how I got lost and then the guards came so I panicked and ran.”

  It isn’t a perfect plan by any means, but it’s the best we have.

  “Thank you,” I say, pulling Nix into a quick embrace.

  Fish and I take off running again.

  “We can avoid the tunnels now,” she pants. “We’ll go straight out of the back door.”

  I follow her as she sprints through the hallways and leads me to the back door. We slip out and run through the grounds.

  We don’t stop running until we are out of sight of the castle.

  None of the team are here. They are probably somewhere inside being lectured about how to conduct themselves in public.

  “Your father is gonna flip when he finds out what you’ve done,” Fish comments as she throws herself onto the ground and sits panting.

  I sit down beside her, glad of the chance to get my breath back a little.

  “It’ll be worth it to get rid of the Drin,” I tell her, and I mean it.

  It would be worth anything to free myself of this curse.

  “If I was you, I’d be taking that potion pretty quickly, just in case a lone guard has spotted us or anything,” she says.

  I suspect it has more to do with the fact she wants to collect her prize and leave, but she is right. I didn’t go through all of that just to lose the potion.

  I pull the box out of my pocket. I hold it in both hands and smile at Fish over the top of it.

  “This is it,” I tell her.

  I release the small clasp on the box and push the lid back. It only takes a second to open, but it seems like hours. I look on, eager to take the mixture that will solve all my problems…

  The box is empty.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING

  I sit in silence with the team as the four adults lecture us. Emmy, Rage, and my parents. All of whom I’d be willing to bet have done things just as stupid in their time, because sometimes, you have to take a risk to get results.

  Except this time, I took the risk and didn’t get any results. I want to scream and curse and break things. I want to shake the four of them: make them understand that any punishment they can come up with will be laughable compared to the punishment of the box being empty.

  It was my last hope of getting rid of the Drin. My last hope of being on the team. My last hope of being with Summit. And now all hope is lost. They still think standing before me rattling on about what we did can make me feel worse.

  They have no idea.

  My parents have been mostly quiet. They just dish out the disapproving looks and nod along as Emmy talks to us.

  “I don’t know what you were thinking, and quite frankly, I don’t want to know,” Emmy goes on.

  I didn’t hear the part that came before this declaration. I just know she’s been talking for a while and no one from the team dared to interrupt her.

  I was locked in my own thoughts, but now I’m caught up in her words. Her words sting much less than the feeling of lost hope inside of me, so I keep listening.

  “You all disgraced us last night. Between fighting and causing a huge scene and stealing from the royal family, you should all consider yourselves lucky it’s just us having this conversation with you all.”

  Nix glances at me, trying to suppress a grin. I roll my eyes in the adults’ direction. It’s not that I don’t respect them—I have a huge respect for Emmy, Rage, and my mother—but it’s not like they’re telling us anything we don’t already know.

  I’m sure I could make them understand if I told them why we did what we did, but there’s no way I’m having that conversation now; not when it didn’t work.

  Maybe they were right and it was stupid.

  Not because it was risky, but because it didn’t work.

  You have to appreciate the irony that a group of people who are willing to let us go off and try to find the pieces of the Marcon Pendant are the same people who are lecturing us on taking a much lower risk.

  Emmy is still going on about how we’ve let ourselves down and disappointed them.

  “What do you think your parents would all say if they were here now?” she asks, giving it a moment to sink in.

  RJ and Ryder sit glaring at each other, and Parker looks straight at Emmy like she’s in a lecture and wants to learn something.

  Only Summit looks affected. She cringes when Emmy asks about our missing parents. The only person who wasn’t even a part of the plan is the only person who is being upset by this. She looks lost. I can only imagine her wondering what Silver and Pry would say about this.

  It doesn’t seem fair.

  Emmy fixes each of us in turn with a look that even The Face would have been proud of.

  “Rage, do you have anything to add?” she asks. “Maybe you can get through to them.”

  Rage stands up and slowly paces in front of us. He seems to gather his thoughts for a moment.

  “I could stand here and tell you all that we’re disappointed, that you embarrassed yourselves and you embarrassed us, but I have a feeling you all don’t care about that. So here’s the deal—you are meant to be the best of the best. But what you did was a dumb ass move. It made you look like ama
teurs. It’s one thing to go off and do it—your mistake was getting caught. At least your parents were better at being discreet.”

  He sits back down. Somehow, in those few sentences, he made us all feel worse than the full lecture from Emmy had.

  Emmy and Rage share a quick glance that’s full of hidden meaning, and something tells me that was their intention all along.

  My mother speaks up next. “We’ve discussed it, and we think the best course of action is to ground you all for the foreseeable future. That means you come straight home after school. No socializing at all.”

  That gets a collective groan from the group.

  “It will give you all time to reflect upon what you’ve done. And the rest of the time will be taken up by extra homework, which I’m sure Mrs. Greenblatt will be only too happy to provide.”

  My father stands up and I can’t help but roll my eyes. Here we go.

  Mr. Morality himself.

  “I agree with everything that’s been said so far, but your stupidity in stealing from the Whitehalls only might have gotten you killed. When two team members fight amongst themselves, it will almost certainly end up with someone getting killed. I’m sorry to single you two out, but this needs to be said.”

  He breaks off and looks at RJ and Ryder in turn. Ryder looks down at his lap and RJ glares back.

  “You never attack each other. Ever. That’s the most important rule.”

  Rage and Emmy cock a knowing eyebrow at my father. I feel like they’re hiding something, but will bet my soul that’s a story from another lifetime.

  Both RJ and Ryder blurt out their excuses at the same time, so neither of them are heard. It doesn’t matter. My father doesn’t accept excuses.

  He holds up a hand for silence and reluctantly, RJ and Ryder stop shouting.

  “If you have a disagreement, you talk about it like civilized angels. Is that clear?”

  They both nod, but I’m not convinced either of them actually agrees.

  “We have some things to discuss,” my father says, addressing the full group again.

  “I trust your team won’t cause any trouble in the next ten minutes. Be ready to leave when we’re done.”

  “Well, that went well,” Nix says when they leave.

  It breaks the tension in the room and we all laugh a bit.

  “Look, man,” Ryder addresses RJ, “I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am about the way things went down with Sabrina. If I could take it all back, I would. I know I should have told you, but I couldn’t bring myself to.”

  “Because you knew I’d be mad?” RJ asks.

  Ryder nods. “Yeah. I knew you’d be mad, but more than that, I knew you’d be hurt.”

  “And yet you did it anyway,” RJ points out.

  “I know. And all I can do is apologize.”

  RJ shrugs. “Well, I probably shouldn’t have reacted the way I did.”

  “So we’re cool?” Ryder asks.

  RJ snorts. “I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did, but that doesn’t mean we’ll ever be cool again. You betrayed me.”

  He stands up.

  “I’ll be outside.”

  Parker glares at Ryder again. He puts his head down and stares at the floor. I try to catch Summit’s eye. She still doesn’t know why we did what we did. I want to explain it all to her, but we haven’t got time right now. It would still be good to able to tell her that I did have a plan though: that what we did was for a good reason.

  She gives me a half smile and turns to Parker and asks her a question about homework. It doesn’t say a lot for my chances with her when she’d rather talk about homework than look at me.

  The adults come back into the room before I can even begin to work out a way to get her to understand what happened.

  “Let’s go,” my father says.

  Nix and I follow my parents and Rage out of Emmy’s place after exchanging a quick goodbye with the others.

  Rage disappears as soon as we’re outside. I hang back a bit, wanting some time to think. My father notices me falling behind. He motions for my mother and Nix to go on ahead and waits for me.

  “I get why you did it,” he says.

  “No you don’t,” I snap.

  “You know, Lucas, you can stay mad at me or choose to forgive, but I want you to know something. Sometimes, we do crazy things for love. Don’t ever think I don’t understand that.”

  He speeds up again. I surprise myself by responding honestly.

  “I thought if I got whatever was in that box, I could cure my Drin.”

  He slows down again and falls into step beside me.

  “The box was empty for a reason, Lucas. The Whitehall family wasn’t given a miracle cure for grief. They were given the gift of understanding. There is only one cure for grief, and it can’t be found in a vial.”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Time,” he states.

  “Great. The one thing I don’t have.”

  “What’s going on, Son?” my father asks me gently.

  “I’m in love with Summit, but every time I go near her, my Drin fires up. I’m afraid that if I don’t find a cure for it soon then I’ll lose her.”

  “Does she feel the same?” he asks.

  I nod. “I think so.”

  “Well, you have nothing to fear, Son. Summit comes from a long line of feisty women. Women who fight for what they want. And get it. There’s no way that girl’s walking away from you.”

  ***

  I’m alone in the library at home. Two weeks have passed since we all got grounded, and none of the adults are giving us any slack. We’re all still very much in disgrace.

  I stare out of the window, taking in the greenery and the dull sky. The scene reflects how I feel. Flat, gray, and miserable.

  The door opens and Nix strolls in.

  “Sabrina tried to patch things up between RJ and Ryder today,” he says, walking over to me and taking the chair beside mine.

  RJ and Ryder are no closer to patching things up than they were on the night of their fight, and judging from Nix’s expression, whatever Sabrina did hasn’t changed that.

  “RJ and I were heading to class earlier and Sabrina came over. She asked to talk to RJ alone, but he insisted whatever she had to say I could hear. Talk about awkward. Anyway, Sabrina told RJ that she did love him once, and as much as she tried to hold onto the feeling, she just couldn’t stop her feelings for Ryder getting stronger.

  “He didn’t take it too well, and snapped at her, saying that Ryder encouraged her. Sabrina insisted that wasn’t the case, but honestly, I think she was just making it worse. He got really mad and demanded to know what had gone on between them.

  “She didn’t say much, and he asked if they’d slept together yet. Well, you can imagine how that went down. She slapped him and stormed off.”

  I wince. What was RJ thinking? As if she’d answer that, and even if she did, I doubt RJ really wanted to hear any of the details.

  “Ouch, so they’re no closer to putting this whole thing behind them then?”

  Nix shakes his head.

  “I don’t see any way for them to move forward. RJ won’t let it go. I think the only way he’d be able to even begin to forgive Ryder is if he ended things with Sabrina, which he isn’t going to do. And if he does end up doing that, then he’s going to resent RJ.”

  “What a mess,” I comment.

  “Yeah.”

  Nix stares into space. He fidgets restlessly in the chair, suddenly looking anywhere but at me.

  “What did you really come in here to talk to me about?” I ask.

  “What makes you think it wasn’t exactly what I’ve just said?”

  “Gossip isn’t really your thing, Nix.” I laugh awkwardly. “Just spit it out.”

  I could do with something to take my mind off Summit and the fact I can never be with her. I’ve barely even seen her at school. This grounding thing is really getting to me.

  “Dad has Fish,
” he answers with concern. “He knows she was involved in stealing the box.”

  I raise my eyebrows. That’s news to me.

  “How the hell did he figure that out?”

  “From what I overheard, a shoe was found hidden beside an open window. The guards thought that must have been how the thief got in. Keep in mind that they have no idea you were involved, and Dad wants to keep it that way.

  “They had a Quo with tracer powers track down the last person to have worn the shoe. It was Fish of course. And now Dad has her locked up. He’s gonna let her take the fall for the whole thing.”

  “She won’t talk,” I say.

  Much as Fish has very few morals, Sellers are known for their secrecy, and Fish is no exception.

  “I know,” he says, almost pained. “That’s not what I’m worried about. She’ll be locked away forever for stealing from the Whitehalls.”

  I remember the strange scene that played out between the two of them the night we got the box. What am I missing here?

  “What is going on with you two?” I say, softening my tone.

  “Nothing,” he insists

  I eye him up and down as if to say I know you’re lying.

  “I just don’t think it’s fair that we let Fish take the blame for this and spend her life locked away when she was only trying to help us.”

  “Help me you mean,” I correct him.

  “No. Us. We’re a team, Lucas. And for a while there, Fish was one of the team, and we help our own.”

  I know he’s lying. This isn’t about how Fish got caught. There’s more to it than that. Regardless of Nix’s reasons for coming to me with this, I know he’s right.

  “I’ll talk to Dad,” I say.

  “When?” Nix presses.

  “No time like the present,” I say, standing up.

  Nix and I find our father in his study. I knock on the half-open door. Dad looks up and signals us to enter.

  “So, you have Fish,” I say, trying to sound accusing.

  It isn’t a question, but he answers with a nod anyway.

  “Luckily for you, we managed to track down Fish and the Whitehalls see no reason to think anyone else was involved,” he tells me.

  “So you’re going to pin it all on her and leave her to rot, even though you know that she was only helping me?” I ask.