by Louisa Lo
I was so lost in my own thoughts that I turned a corner and almost ran into someone. That someone caught me by the shoulder.
“Megan! How did you get in here?” Enid asked incredulously. She was in a classic navy Chanel suit and held a clipboard. She looked like she’d just come out of a meeting.
“Enid! I thought you were on vacation.” Man, was I happy to see her. Maybe she could talk to the Council on my behalf. They’d listen to her a lot more than they would to me.
“The board had an emergency meeting about a temporary staff placement, and I was called in.” She smoothed down her skirt, removing a piece of lint. “I’m going back to Cancun now. There is an advantage to being a supernatural. Sunny destinations are always just a finger snap away.”
“So the board members are still close by?” I looked around. The hallway was as empty as before. “I need to talk to you. And to the board. It’s urgent,” I said.
“Sure.” She took in my disheveled state and seemed to understand right away that something was wrong. Her expression turned serious as she gestured towards one of the many reading rooms lining the hallway. “Let’s go in here for some privacy.”
I went into the room, and Enid shut the door behind us. I quickly explained the whole situation, everything from seeing the so-called prince at the ball to connecting him to the Greys, to Esme’s disappearance.
After a long moment, Enid said, “Your father is too deep under cover. No one can reach him. Not in time, anyway.”
“What about the Council? There must be something they could do. They pretty much have an army of vengeance demons at their disposal.” I wrung my hands and wished I could wrap them around somebody’s neck, preferably someone associated with the Greys. I hated this helplessness I was feeling.
“Megan, you know how they are. They’re not going to spring into action without any proof. Why don’t we wait for at least another twenty-four hours to make sure Esme is really missing?”
That was not the answer I needed. I might hate the fact that Esme was skinnier and smarter and prettier, but at the end of the day, she was still of my blood, and I loved her. There was no way in hell, and I meant that literally, I would just let them take her.
“You’re supposed to mentor me, not tell me to drop it and hope for the best. You’ve said many times that I should trust my instincts. I’m telling you now—they’re on full red alert.”
“Megan—”
“Forget it. I’ll go after her myself.” I started for the door.
Enid sighed. “So they were last seen in purgatory.”
I halted. A tiny hope rose within me. “Yes.”
“And you’re going to go after her?”
“Yes.”
“Even if it means running on limited power, risking your life, and offsetting the feeble balance between your competing natures?” A rueful smile touched Enid’s lips.
“Yes, yes, and yes!” I screamed. “What’s going on here? I thought you liked Esme.”
“I like her. I do. But you can’t just go after her. They are using her as bait.”
“Bait?” I asked in utter confusion. I never thought of that before. “Really?”
“Yes. Can’t you see? They took her so you’d go after her.”
“What makes you think that? What would they want from me? Do you know something I don’t?”
Enid didn’t seem very interested in answering my questions. “But you won’t go after her now, will you? You’re not going to fall for their trap.” She gave me the look of a teacher expecting her student to give her the desired answer.
She must not have checked my grades recently.
My tiny hope died, replaced by sheer anger. “And why won’t I? Because I oughta be smarter than to take the bait? I oughta have a better plan?”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“No. You won’t go after her.” Enid shook her head. “You won’t go to the High Monks of Greys because you’re my prize to bag, not theirs.”
“Wha—”
Quick as lightening Enid pulled out a long, silvery whip and started cracking it my way. The whip struck with intense electricity, chipping chunks off the hardwood floor with each hit and singeing the air with blistering menace.
I jumped back, avoiding getting a new hole in my shoe by half a centimeter. I darted behind the room’s various furniture. Lucky for me, the old-fashioned reading room consisted of many heavy upholstered chairs, bookshelves and coffee tables. I managed to stay just a little ahead of Enid’s progressively faster cracks. Barely.
“Wait, you’re a bad guy?” I cried. “Come on, you let me pass the last semester. You let me into the co-op. I thought I meant something to you.”
She didn’t answer. Not that I expected her to. I was nowhere near being her match, so my best bet was evasive action while looking for a way to escape. My priority in life for the next minute, which felt like an hour, narrowed down to avoiding the next whip, the one after that, and then the one after that.
I didn’t scream, just concentrated on being as agile as a cat, leaping, rolling, and cartwheeling between objects that could serve as shields. That wasn’t because I was brave. Oh, no. I would have loved to have taken the time to be hysterical, but I knew it would be pointless. I could sense that the immediate area was cloaked in a mute spell. Enid must’ve activated it the moment she’d closed the door behind me. Maybe my combat training was kicking in, but more likely after a night of worrying, I was too drained and shocked to freak out. My heart was already galloping, and my mouth had gone completely dry, whatever moisture left in it when I entered the building now gone. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t breathe through my nose.
And I couldn’t stop my hands from trembling. I almost twisted my wrist on the last cartwheel as my shaking proved too great for a stable landing.
“Are you too scared to confront me?” Enid was homing in on my location, as most of the furniture was now charred, cracked, or had outright disintegrated. “Fight back, you sorry excuse for a half-breed! You’ll never be rid of the stink of your mother’s blood.”
How dare she insult my mama.
I thought I was calm. I thought I was too cool to get mad. But the ice in my veins thawed without warning, and in its place was wild fire. A burning so fierce it was as if there were a thousand army ants biting the tips of my fingers and toes. I dug my nails into my palms and curled my toes in pain. I could feel the moment I snapped and tapped into my emotional side.
My trickery side.
I’d always tried to control it, hide it. But it was always there. And now, I let it rip.
Nobody insulted my mama.
Above my hiding place behind a grand piano, Enid’s face appeared. She raised her whip for a final blow just as I weaved a spell of entanglement around her. I wrapped her up good, like a silkworm in a cocoon.
Problem was, she was my mentor and knew my fighting style way too well, trickery magic or not. She blasted out of the cocoon and directed the whip my way again. This time she threw the whole thing at me, and in midair it warped and transformed into a silver web, catching me from my left side and pressing me against the reading room’s oak-paneled wall.
For the second time in a matter of months, I was caught in a silver web. From my last experience, I already knew that struggling was futile, so I glared at Enid instead. Well, it was more of a semi-glare, as I couldn’t actually see her that well from my cheek-squashed-against-the-wall angle.
“Come now, Megan. You’re telling me you can’t even break this little web? Well, you’ll just have to sit tight while I kill you—”
There was a thud, and Enid went down. Hard. I tried my hardest to turn my face towards her to take a look, and almost cranked my neck when the silver web was suddenly dissolved.
“Ouch.” I dropped to the ground and looked up, a word of thanks to my rescuer on the tip of my tongue.
Grandma Aequitas held her signature bejeweled staff over Enid’s cracked-open skull. For al
l the matriarch’s fantastic magic, she got the job done with a simple quick whack of her favorite walking stick.
For the first time in my life, I saw something other than perfect composure on her face. It was dismay with a hint of smugness. “Oh dear, I might’ve hit her a little harder than I intended.”
***
As if in a dream, I let Grandma pull me to my feet and push me towards the window of the reading room. My brain was having a hard time processing what I’d just witnessed. My formerly beloved mentor, dead. All that blood and goo spilling from her skull, some of which was sticking to my top; there was no coming back from that. Not even for a mature supernatural.
The demonic campus ground, a mix of grass carpet and gothic structures basking in the morning summer sun, spread out before me. I felt no warmth. Just numbness.
Then Grandma pushed me out of the window.
“Ahhh!” I barely had time to let out a scream, let alone close my eyes as the pavement rushed up towards my face.
I found myself landing on an ottoman, bouncing off it, and sprawling on the dark carpet underneath. It was thick and smelled like lemon-scented cleaner.
I turned my body and stared at the ceiling of a dimly lit bedroom. I wasn’t at the university anymore.
Grandma jumped off the ottoman and landed on the carpet with the sleek grace of an ageless jungle cat. “We should be safe here. I constructed this portal in secret ahead of time so it wouldn’t create a ripple of power in the Concord for others to detect. It’s one of the many I installed…”
“Hold on. Hold on.” I held up a hand. “Go back a little bit. What’s going on? How come Enid went psycho on me? How did you know where we’d be? And, hello—a little warning before pushing me out the window!”
I was probably a little less respectful than I ought to be, but someone had just attacked me. Again. And my half-sister was missing. I think I was entitled to a little hysteria.
Grandma ignored me and pressed a button on the wall. “Aidan, we’re back. We’ll stay in my bedroom for now.”
I looked around in surprise. This was Grandma’s bedroom? A contemporary black-and-white design with utilitarian blinds and a streamlined bed. I was expecting, I don’t know, the Marie-Antoinette-style, overdone luxury fluff or something like that.
Grandma continued as if installing unlicensed portals all over the campus and jumping through one after icing a long-time colleague was an everyday occurrence. “Before I jumped, I put a heavy glamour over Enid’s dead body, so we’ve got a bit of time before they find her. Now—”
“Hey, slow down—”
“—the purgatory trail has already gone cold, but there’s another way to find Esme.”
That pulled me to a full stop. “Whoa. You know about her?”
“I do,” Grandma said carefully, rearranging her suit dress as she sat down on the carpet and gestured for me to do the same. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the old woman was a little nervous.
“Oh, right, then.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Don’t you want to know how I found out about Esme?” There was now a hint of challenge in her eyes.
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s go. We have to get to her now.” Why the hell was she getting all comfy and settled, for Hade’s sake? I couldn’t afford to get comfortable. I could feel Enid’s blood and brain stuff starting to dry against my flesh, and it was creepy and gross and I just wanted to keep moving so I had no time to freak out and hide in a hole for a week. Then what would happen to Esme?
“But in order to do so, you have to understand how I found out about her kidnapping,” Grandma said with maddening calmness.
“Why?”
“Sit down and I’ll explain. I was able to get a glimpse of her in the scrying stone. She’s trapped somewhere. Unconscious but unharmed at the moment. It could change quickly, of course.”
“Then let’s—”
“If you’re going to have a snowball’s chance in hell of rescuing her, young lady, you have to hear me out.”
“Alright.” At least Esme was okay. For now. I sat down just a little too hard on my bum, but I didn’t give Grandma the satisfaction of a wince.
“I wouldn’t have gotten any satisfaction from that,” she muttered.
“What the—” I tried to jump to my feet, but Grandma’s hand grabbed hold of my arm and pulled me back down. Then, before I could yank my limb back, Grandmother did something she’d never done before.
She leaned over and tugged a piece of hair behind my ear.
As if to prove that she indeed could read minds, she whispered, “I’ve touched your hair before, don’t you remember? And no, not reading minds, as in plural form. With everyone else I only sense impressions, but with you I can read your mind. Even from some distance away. That’s how I knew you were in trouble in that reading room.”
She looked me in the eyes and muttered a chant under her breath.
A veil lifted from my conscious mind, and I was six months old again. Cuddled by a younger and happier Grandma as if I was the most precious thing in the world. She sang a long-forgotten nursery tune while stroking my newborn peachy fuzz. Then the memories sped up, and I was a little older, just moved from my crib to a little princess bed.
And trapped there, by an equally tiny silver web. My chubby legs tried to kick out but failed. Dazed, I wondered if that was why I had faint memories of sleep paralysis episodes from my childhood. My adult mind might’ve translated my infant experience into something that it could comprehend.
Mom’s scream of terror filled the room, and Dad was struggling with someone in the background.
A hooded someone.
More images flew by, and Grandma was alone with Dad in my bedroom, with me dozing off in the little princess bed. I was drooling all over a teddy bear with a red heart embroidered on its chest. The silver web was absent, but there was the word Impure written on the wall in lime green ink.
“She’s going to be okay,” Grandma said. “See, not even a scratch on her body.”
“The bastard used a silver web.” Dad’s voice shook.
“Are you sure?” Grandma frowned.
“I’m dead sure. The web was made from silk only the uni-spiders from the Grimmian Forest could produce. This is a signature ensnarement of the Greys. I read about it when I did my minor in vengeance history.”
“Why would the Greys want anything to do with our little Maggie?”
“Their mandate is to bring back Absolute Evil and to keep the vengeance bloodline pure. You saw what they wrote on the wall. They think my child is an abomination. A freak of nature not deserving of a place in society.” Dad’s knuckles whitened. Alright, that kinda explained his lifelong overprotectiveness towards me.
“This is worrisome, considering the other trend I’ve been seeing.” Grandma started pacing the room.
Dad’s head lifted sharply. “What other trend?”
Grandma sighed. “Nick, you’ve been out of the loop because of this boycott of your marriage. There’ve been whispers of an old, dark power rising. The members are made up exclusively of vengeance demons. They’ve been doing some quiet recruiting on every level of our society. And they’re gaining ground.”
Dad palmed his forehead. “You think this old, dark power is the Greys.”
“After what happened tonight, yes, that’s what I fear. And they’re elusive. Even with my connections, I know close to nothing about them except what’s in the history books.” Grandma’s face was one of deep frustration.
“How are we going to fight it if we don’t know who to trust? How are we going to protect my daughter?”
Grandma straightened herself. “To begin, we cancel her Rite of Acknowledgment.”
“How’s that going to help anything? Without the Rite, she won’t even get a proper vengeance middle name. It would be like announcing to all the planes that you consider my child no better than a bastard.”
“That’s the point. Think, Nick. If I recognize her
officially, that’d only fuel whatever animosity is coming her way. Legitimacy in this old family means being in the society paper. A seat on the Council when she grows up. How would that sit with the fanatics? As an outcast, she’s got a shot at being left alone. There are always rumors whirling around saying we’re fighting because of your new wife. Well, let them believe it. It’s a good thing the Acknowledgment hasn’t been announced yet.”
“You know what kids will say about her in school one day.”
“Better that than to be targeted,” Grandma said fiercely.
My bedroom dissolved, and a montage of my childhood experiences of bullying and isolation formed in my head. But now those memories were re-synced with that of Grandma’s to show a blind spot I’d been enchanted not to notice. Amazingly, it even provided me with her inner thoughts that were associated with the memories.
Grandma, cloaked from view, looking pained when no one joined me at the grade school lunch table.
Grandma, who conjured the wind to land a nice, fat lump of bird poop on ten-year-old Cousin Fred’s blond locks, after he called me “Fatty Maggie.”
Grandma, who’d pretended to favor Esme in order to keep tabs on me.
Grandma, who showed up at my Becoming, the vengeance demon Bat Mitzvah. Staying invisible, she stood proudly behind my dad as I read from a dusty old demonic text, a tear falling from her eyes.
Grandma reached over and wiped a tear off the present-day me. She stared at the single teardrop and smiled. “I put my tear from the Becoming into your pearl pendant.”
“Oh.” Not as store-bought as I thought, after all. Demon tears were potent magic. They could make a dagger’s aim true and a shield impenetrable.
Grandma laughed. “No, not so store-bought, after all. But it looked cheap and tacky enough to make people think it was. The truth is that I got the pendant sculpted by the high priestess of the Baltic mermaid-witches herself. Add that to my own tear, and the pendant is worth ten times more magic than the standard pearl earrings I gave to all my other grandchildren.”
“If it’s so powerful, how come I nearly got killed by Dan Pillar?”