by E. M. Moore
I scanned the names, wondering who to start with. “I wonder how all these guys got this job.”
“Maybe it’s like a SPAWN thing? It was necessary to have all those extra people in Salem when we were younger.”
I smiled at the mention of SPAWN. When my brother and his friends were younger, an evil coven, even more evil than the one my friend Gigi belonged to, decided to wake the ley line. My father had just put my grandfather in a nursing home because he thought he was losing it. Turns out he was just fighting a fae and accidentally set the house on fire. Who knew? Well, anyway, that left Salem without a full-fledged guardian. Damen and Jake and some friends had to step up fast before Salem was overrun by evil magical beings. Back then, we weren’t as civil with each other as we are now. Well, I should say, we were civil with each other until someone decided to blow up Stonehenge with a magical bomb.
“Eenie meenie miney moe?” I asked, pointing to the call buttons.
Jake ignored me and pushed the top button. No one answered. We went all the way down the buttons and no one came to the door.
“Maybe they’re all out on patrol?”
“It’s possible. But Cas, maybe these guys were there when the bomb went off.”
My head reared back. “Yeah, but we would have heard about that.”
“Would we?”
His eyes were dark and questioning. Fear in the form of anger balled in the pit of my stomach. “I don’t know. You’re the Elite. Are they fucking alive or not? Why is everything a big ass secret?”
A bush at the side of the building rustled at the same time the weyfinder in my bag vibrated. Both Jake and I crouched into fighting positions. I drew my Damascus out and pointed it at the leafy offender. “Come out or I’ll sink this into you.”
The bush twitched some more until a teenage girl stepped around and showed herself. The weyfinder went even crazier. I peeked just inside the flap. “Fae,” I said.
The girl frowned. “How did you—?”
“Instinct,” I said, interrupting her. “Why were you acting all creepy behind the bushes?”
“I didn’t know who you were. Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“A fae,” she snapped. “If you think I’m giving you my name, you’re freaking crazy.”
Jake interrupted what I was about to say. “We don’t need your name, young one, only what you’re doing here.”
“Young one? I’m seventeen.”
I wanted to laugh, but couldn’t. I’d been like that myself when I was seventeen. Also, this chick may have been seventeen for fifty years. Being called young would get old fast.
“I’m Cas,” I said, sheathing my Damascus. “I’m the Ley Line Guardian from Salem, Massachusetts.”
“No, you’re not,” she said. “Damen is the Ley Line Guardian from Salem. Can’t there be only one of you? I mean, it’s Salem.”
My heart skipped a beat and I was in front of her in two seconds. “You know my brother?”
She didn’t cower back, but stood her ground. “I met him briefly. I don’t know him, know him.”
“He’s missing and I need to find him. That’s why I’m here.”
“Yeah, him and a bunch of others—” She motioned toward the five names on the side of the door. “—are missing. No one knows if they died in the blast or where they are.”
“Damen didn’t die in the blast. He sent me a message that he’s been captured by the people who set off the magical bomb.”
Young One’s lips thinned. “That’s not good.”
“It’s better than dying in the blast. What can you tell us about what’s been going on around here? Is there anyone we can talk to who might know something?”
Jake put his hand on my shoulder. I twisted to look at him. He was smiling at Young One who looked weirded out by the sudden interruption.
“What Cas is trying to ask is if you’ve been living here a long time?”
Young One shook her head at Jake and turned her attention back to me. “Things were getting strange quick when your brother first got here. There was so much energy in the line it was making everyone act crazy.”
Jake folded his arms across his chest and stood straighter. I ignored him. “Were you impacted?”
“Yes,” she nodded her head toward the guardian house. “They protected me.”
I nodded. “That sounds like what happened at Salem except we fixed it.”
“Nothing got fixed here. First it was the line acting funny, but now that they’ve blown the damn thing up, magic is everywhere, but it’s not the same kind of magic. It’s just the magic that makes you feel like you can do anything. It’s also bringing in people who are just a little magic. They’re being drawn here.”
A different type of magic? Now that was strange. It wasn’t the type that made them act like they were on magical crack. Good for us. Except with all the newcomers, things could get hairy quickly. “Have any other Elites come through here like Jake?” I asked.
He stiffened and I smiled at his discomfort. “Yeah. A group. They acted like they were know-it-alls, too.”
“Are they still here?”
“No, they left. Didn’t stay long either. Long enough to visit this house and realize no one is here.”
“Is the portal in the house?”
“Yes.”
Jake’s jaw twitched. He was most likely thinking what I was. How did she know where the portal to Command was? She must have been close with the ley line guardians here. We didn’t advertise secrets like that unless we really trusted someone. As soon as I thought it, I noticed Jake physically relaxing. He must have come to the same conclusion I had.
“Listen, Young One.”
Young One rolled her eyes. “If we’re going to keep talking to each other, can we please come up with a different name? That one is horrible and I’ve heard a lot of bad ones in my day.”
“How about…?” I started.
“Damen called me B—”
“--arbara,” Jake and I finished for her.
She took a step back and gave us each a funny look. I laughed. “That’s what he called every female fae he came across. If he ever has kids, his first girl will be Barbara.”
“I liked him,” Barbara said. “He was a nice guardian.”
“Do you know anything about where he was last seen?”
“All I know is they were going over to the George Hotel to talk to some people.”
Jake gave her an inquisitive look. “How do you know all this? It sounds like you were pretty involved in guardian business.”
She glared at him. “I just know.”
Chapter Ten
The George Hotel was a big white building laced in brown and white trim. It just looked old, like the rest of the UK I’d seen. All the modern buildings were left behind in London. It was cool. Kind of like Salem, you felt like you were taking part in history in places like this.
Amesbury being the closest town to Stonehenge, it saw a lot of activity. That’s why they had five Ley Line Guardians compared to Salem’s one and a half. Me being the half. To non-magic folk, Stonehenge was a mysterious ancient site that had a lot of theories attached to it. Did it have something to do with the solstices? Or the druids? I’d even seen Stonehenge on an episode of Ancient Aliens. All that was cool, but really, the humans had no idea what they were talking about. They were just grasping at straws.
Stonehenge was magical because it sat on the most powerful ley line in the world. Salem shared the ley line, but the ley line was more powerful here than in Salem. Ley lines were tricky like that. Some places were dormant while other places on the line attracted magic likes bees to honey. Stonehenge might as well have been a honey-making machine.
The ancients knew what was up. They felt the power here. That’s why they placed the rocks on the strongest point in the line and used it as a ritual place and where they celebrated their ancient holidays. Even non-magical folk could feel the undercurrent of magic there. They may not be
able to place it. They may not even realize it, but underneath, it’s like a constant flowing stream for them when they’re there.
Barbara flicked me in the shoulder. I spun toward the backseat and she craned her neck toward Jake. “The Elite’s been trying to talk to you.”
“Oh, sorry.” I sat back in the seat and faced Jake. “What did you want?”
He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “You with us again?”
“I was just thinking about Stonehenge. It’s so sad that the bomb blew it up.”
“Are you nuts?” Barbara asked.
“What?”
“Where the hell have you been?” she asked. “Stonehenge isn’t gone. It’s still there, all old and shit like it was. The magical bomb didn’t blow anything up. It just blew a freaking hole in the line. It almost felt like a tremor, one hell of a magical tremor. The humans barely even registered what it was. I think there was like maybe one news story the day after that said something about a slight tremor.”
“Slight tremor my ass,” I said. “I was there. I felt it.”
It was her turn to raise her eyebrows at me this time. “You were there?”
“Yeah. We were at ground zero. The blast hurt…my friend. He was in the infirmary for a couple weeks.”
“But you’re forgetting that it was a magical blast. It didn’t ruin the monument or anything. Only magical people felt the blast the most. The guardians here felt it too, but the blast wasn’t the major problem, it’s going to be the aftermath. Think about what happens when you get a bunch of repressed people together.”
“Repressed?”
“Oh, don’t go all Elite on me now, Guardian.”
Jake sighed. “Can we just check out the damn hotel, please? I really don’t want to get into a political conversation. Okay?”
Barbara huffed and flung the back door open, slamming it as she stepped out on the sidewalk.
“She still acts like she’s a teenager,” I said.
“Why is she even here?”
“She was one of the last to see Damen. She’s leading us here, isn’t she?” I pointed out the car window to the George Hotel. “We never would have known they came here if we hadn’t met her.”
He put one hand on the door handle and paused. “If nothing comes of this though, we ditch her.”
“Fine,” I said, throwing my own door open.
The inside of the George Hotel matched the outside. The bar area was filled with any liquor you could imagine and a lot of the locals were partaking. After all, it was a Saturday night. I walked up to the long wood bar and leaned against it, looking for anything out of the ordinary.
“Are you serious?” Barbara asked. She looked at Jake. “She’s serious, isn’t she?” She rolled her eyes and grabbed my arm and walked me toward the coat closet.
This fae was really starting to piss me off. She reminded me of Troian when I first met him. I’d wanted to punch him in the face, too. Come to think of it, I did catch him with my Damascus. I cringed just thinking about it. The iron in my blade must have hurt.
As soon as Barbara entered the closet, the back of the room spun open as if it were on a magical hinge. Barbara and I walked through the opening. I looked back at Jake. He had to duck through the small entryway to keep from hitting his head. As soon as we were in the secret part of the George Hotel, Barbara let go of me. “Now this, is the bar,” she said, her face glowing.
It looked the same as the other one, except everything was just a little off. People seemed on edge in here. They looked at us with curious glances, sizing us up, wondering what our business was. Sometimes I was jealous of the ignorance of humankind.
Barbara sat down at a small round table. The bartender nodded at her and she held out three fingers. She kicked a chair out right in front of me so I sat. “What did you order us?” I asked.
“The special. You’ll like it, unless you’re as stuck up as he seems,” she said, eyeing Jake.
“He’s cool when you get to know him.”
She shrugged as if that wasn’t even a thought on her radar. I wondered what her past experiences with Elite were. She wasn’t swinging around pom-poms in Jake’s presence.
“So, this is where they would’ve came that night,” Barbara said. “They were going to see what kind of information they could get about the ley line from some magical folk.”
“And you didn’t see them after that?”
“Nope.” She cleared her throat and then looked away. “Not a thing. After that… Well, that’s when the Elite’s showed. By that time your precious Command had figured out that something had happened to our guys and they needed to send in some help. Except, that wasn’t it. At least, not that I could gather at first. They were never here to police the city when they first came. It wasn’t until some of the magical folk went bat shit crazy that they started taking them out. They waited for them to organize, get supplies, the works.”
“Seems odd,” I said.
“Why do you say that?” Jake asked. “We wouldn’t strike preemptively.”
“Are you kidding? That’s all you do.” The bartender came over with our drinks. Barbara thanked him and then turned her murderous gaze back toward Jake. “You calm things down before things get started. That’s your job and no one faults you for it. That’s how I can live here in relative peace. But this wasn’t that. They just sat back. They had to have known what was happening. Even the humans were getting weirded out. They played ignorance. They knew the magical folk were getting ready to fight, but they sat back and did nothing. Now look what’s happened. We’ve got a big ass hole in the strongest point in the most powerful ley line in the world. Dumbasses.”
She threw her green drink back and chugged it. I eyed the one in front of me, thinking about what Barbara said. She was right.
I took a sip of the drink. It was damn good.
“What do you think?”
I looked up and found Jake staring at me. What did I think? That was a tough one. “You have to admit it’s kind of weird, Jake. Elite got sent in to Salem when we needed help. How come the same thing didn’t happen here?”
“We sent Elite here.”
“But from what it sounds like, they didn’t do anything. They waited until the magical folk organized. You saw what it was like in Salem. Can you imagine if we would have waited to act? It would have been a disaster.”
Jake chugged his own drink and slammed it back on the table. He scanned the room and then froze. “Holy shit. It’s Guardian Velo.”
“Velo?” I turned, glancing at the back of the room. “The guardian from the meeting?”
I didn’t even have to hear Jake’s yes, to know I was right. The guardian stood in the back of the room with four or five others around him. He was gesturing wildly, looking more crazed than he had at the meeting, but still determined.
“I wonder what he’s doing here,” Jake said.
“He’s been here on and off for a couple weeks,” Barbara said. “Keeps spouting off about your precious Elite. I kind of like him.”
“We should go talk to him.” I started to stand, but Barbara grabbed my arm.
“Now’s not a good time. They’re meeting over there. They’ve been having these meetings a couple times a week to talk about how the Elite should help the rest of us out. How they should be actively exploring who set the bomb off and where the next one’s going to hit. They talk a lot of things that make sense.”
“And?”
“And what?” Barbara asked.
“Why don’t you join them?”
Her lips tipped up. “Because I think they’re full of shit. It’s just talk. So what? We’ve got a few pissed off Guardians who are willing to stir shit up. What’s that helping? What are they doing besides talking? Nothing that I can tell.”
“And you’ve looked, haven’t you?”
“No one else is,” she said with a pointed look toward Jake.
The veins popped out of his rigid arms. Jake was close to having enough of her.
She was giving us some good information, though. “Do you think Damen and your guardian friends ran into the same thing when you were here?”
“Fray—” She shook her head. “This hasn’t been a guardian friendly town in a while. The ley line guardians had the hardest job with very little respect. They were good at it, too.”
“Were good at it? What do you think happened to them?” Jake asked.
Barbara pushed her empty glass away from her. “All I know is they’re not here right now.” She stood and walked toward the corner of the room. Her slight frame looked hunched over, defeated.
I looked toward the back of the room. My jaw about dropped on the table. I saw a familiar blond head and green eyes shining in the ceiling light above the table Guardian Velo had just been speaking to.
Chapter Eleven
Jake followed my gaze. “What the fu—?”
I stood, cutting Jake off. I walked toward the back of the room where Barbara said they had their little meetings at and didn’t even wait to see if Jake would follow. He would.
“Hey,” I said.
I’d never seen a more surprised look on anyone in my life. Not even when Damen had to explain to Mom what we all were and why they had to retire in Florida.
His green eyes moved to look next to me at the same time I felt Jake’s presence. Troian glanced at me and then went right back to Jake. His beautiful features morphed into that ugly cunning look all fae had. “Ahh,” he said, “So, we finally have an Elite presence here. And just what is it you’re going to do for us, Shifter? Huh? Are you going to tell us which spot in the line has the next X on the map? Or, are you here to give us the names of the fictitious taskforce?”
Guardian Velo stood next to Troian. “Look at them. They know nothing. What is your purpose here, Guardians?”
Troian chuckled darkly. “This is the best the Elite have left to send. One shifter and a…pathetic Ley Line Guardian.”
A figure rose from the shadowy end of the table and stood back, but I barely registered his movement. My gaze focused on Troian. “Pathetic Ley Line Guardian? Are you…on something?”