Instead, it was pitch black out there, the world locked in the darkness of the spell.
I sat down at the table with my coffee and tried to think through our next steps. The first thing we needed to do was figure out what reasons the emerald priestess would have for freezing the world at three in the morning. I’d learned early on in my time here in Peachville that three was a special time for the Order. It was when they performed all of their initiation ceremonies and when every portal had been created. There was something magical about it, and it was believed this was the time of night when the link between our world and the Shadow World was at its most powerful.
But if the entire world was frozen at this time, wouldn’t it still only be midnight on the West Coast? That meant whatever the priestess had planned, she was close.
Jackson walked into the kitchen and sat down next to me.
“How are you holding up?” I asked.
He shrugged and set his elbows against the table. “I can’t believe he’s gone,” he said. “I guess I knew I couldn’t keep the group together forever, but I expected him to be here with me for years, at the very least.”
I put my hand on his wrist and squeezed. We were all being separated from those we loved right now, and that was one of the hardest things in the world to endure, especially when you had no idea whether those people would ever find their way back to you.
“Do you want some coffee?”
He nodded and I turned slightly in my chair, concentrating on a cup I’d set out for him on the counter. I poured the coffee, stirred in a little cream and sugar, and floated the cup over to us.
He gave a small smile and wrapped his hands around the warm mug. “I keep forgetting you can do that,” he said. “You’re getting so good at psychokinesis. I remember when you could barely move one thing at a time, and that was only when you were angry.”
“Practice makes perfect,” I said, trying to be funny, but it came out flat.
“Hopefully they’ll find that hunter and be back soon,” he said. “But I get the feeling Lea’s got other plans.”
I studied him, my eyes wide. “What do you mean?”
“You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed her becoming more withdrawn lately?”
I shrugged. “I noticed, but that’s only natural considering what’s been happening between you and me.”
“We couldn’t very well expect her to live here with us after we got engaged, I guess,” he said. “But I hoped she would find a way to deal with it. I don’t know. I can’t help but wonder if there’s something more going on with her than we know.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I wish I knew,” he said. “But I’ve been friends with Lea for a long time—over two hundred years—and I’m pretty sure she’s been keeping something from us.”
I groaned and put my head in my hands. It felt like one bad thing after another. If people on our own team were keeping secrets, how were we ever going to defeat the Order?
“We’re having a bad couple of days,” Jackson said with a laugh.
“You think?” I raised my head and couldn’t help but smile. I was so grateful to have him here with me now.
“Let’s talk this through, then,” he said. “Who? And why? Those are the main questions that need to be answered right now.”
“Well, we have a good idea of the who,” I said.
“But we can’t be sure the attack on the Southern Kingdom is the same person.”
“No, but it would be a crazy coincidence for them both to happen on the same night if it were two different enemies, right? Even if it’s two different sisters attacking us, the timing is too close together for it not to be coordinated.”
“Good point,” he said. “There was something else that was odd about the attack in the Shadow World, too.”
“What?”
“First of all, none of the hunters who died left any kind of talisman,” he said. “Every time we’ve ever killed a hunter, they’ve had something on them that tells us which sister they belong to, right? A ring or a pendant of some kind. A summoning stone. But none of them were carrying one.”
“None of the ones we killed, anyway,” I said. “There’s still a chance the one Lea and Aerden are tracking down will have something on her.”
“Yes, but there’s more,” he said. “I recognized one of those hunters. When I couldn’t find Lea on the battlefield, I went looking for her. She was up in the trees fighting, and she believes that hunter was the one who’d been casting the shields and also bringing down the dome with her magic. She was incredibly powerful, and I would say she must have had some kind of special abilities with shields or barriers, which was why she was hiding where the rest of our guards couldn’t see her.”
“You knew her?”
“Harper, it was Mayor Chen, Lark’s mom,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”
My mouth fell open. “Oh my God,” she said. “That means someone turned her into a hunter after Priestess Winter died. She was here that day, fighting against us.”
He shook his head. “Who would have done that? And why? She was loyal to the Order.”
My ears started to ring and my blood pumped harder. “The same thing happened to Zara’s aunt,” I said. “She was obviously loyal to the Order, but she’d been turned into a hunter, anyway.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Which is part of what’s strange about that attack. We don’t have any real evidence about which priestess they were sent by today, but if two of them were part of the Winter family—”
“I think it’s happening to me, too,” Zara said.
I hadn’t heard her come in, and I jumped when she spoke. She stood in the hallway just beyond the entrance to the kitchen, her normal happy smile missing from her pale face. Something was definitely happening to her.
With all the fighting, I’d pushed it from my mind, not wanting to deal with it, but looking at her now, it was shocking how fast she was changing.
Her hair was mostly black, brittle and dull at the ends. Her skin had become almost translucent, thick black veins running across her hands.
“Zara, what’s going on?” I asked. I glanced at the chair next to Jackson and it slid backward across the floor. I stood and helped her to the chair. “What’s happening to you?”
She sat down, her head lowered. “I keep thinking about her,” she said. “I keep seeing her face over and over in my mind. The way she smiled when she saw me, like she was surprised and happy to see me or something. And the way she touched my hair.”
She began to cry.
“I don’t understand,” I said, my heart aching. “Why are you changing like this?”
“I think I’m turning into one of them,” she said through her sobs. “A hunter. I don’t know when it started, but it’s happening really fast, Harper. I’m scared.”
I felt like the breath had been knocked out of me. My skin tingled and my heart tightened.
“Zara, that can’t be it,” I said, not wanting to believe it. “We can reverse it. We’re going to figure this out.”
“My body is growing weaker by the minute,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what was going on, but when I heard Jackson say Mayor Chen was one of the other hunters, I just knew. I think that somehow, all of my mother’s bloodline is changing into them.”
“Why?” I asked, knowing no one had an answer. “Why would that happen?”
“A priestess of the Order has never died before,” Jackson said. “We never really considered the consequences that might have on her family line.”
“But why now?” I asked. “Why not six months ago? I don’t understand.”
Panic shot through me. How long did she have?
We needed to do something that would give us answers, instead of sitting around making guesses.
“Lea’s already searching for the hunter, your Aunt Mindy,” I said. “Maybe finding her will give us some answers. What else can we do?”
“I’ll contact Mary Anne,” Jackso
n said. “Maybe Rend has some kind of potion that can reverse this.”
He got up from the table and went into the next room to activate one of the communication stones he’d sent with them.
Zara lifted her head, her black hair falling around her face. “The iron cage,” she said. “It’s the only real clue.”
I nodded. “Yes, but that’s not going to tell us how to save you.”
“It gives us a starting point,” she said.
I didn’t understand what she meant. How would the cages give us a starting point?
Zara stood, pushing her chair back. “You said you had seen cages like that before in the basement of my mother’s house, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then that’s where we need to start,” she said. Fear made her lip tremble. “We need to go back to Winterhaven.”
Dust In My Hands
Zara and I decided to go alone.
Jackson didn’t like the idea of us going back to that evil place without him, but he agreed that there wasn’t much of a choice. We couldn’t leave Courtney and Sophie here alone to defend Brighton Manor, and we needed someone here in case there was another attack.
“We’ll be okay,” I said, wrapping my arms around him. I lay my head against his chest and took a few deep breaths, enjoying the warmth of him. “We’re just going to see if the cage actually came from the basement or if it was just another cage that looks similar.”
“I don’t see what kind of answers this is going to give us,” he said.
“It will at least tell us if someone else has been there inside the house,” I said. “Maybe they left some kind of clue behind.”
“That still won’t tell us what the emerald priestess is after,” he said. “And it’s dangerous to be going back there.”
“Every move we make right now is going to be dangerous,” I said.
“You’re weak, Harper. You’ve been through a lot in the past twenty-four hours. You need to rest. And Zara—”
“Right now, Zara needs us to do everything we can to try to save her. Maybe there’s something in her mother’s library that will tell us how to reverse the spell. What else can we do? We can’t just sit here. Besides, how could I possibly rest knowing Eloise and her daughter are trapped somewhere?” I asked. “You know me better than that.”
His arms tightened around me, holding on as long as he could.
Zara joined us in the upstairs hallway. “I’m ready,” she said. She’d changed clothes and gotten the butterfly pendant she’d given me from my room. She opened it and stuck the pin through the fabric of my black cotton tank top. “This should allow you to get inside and move around in there in case we get separated.”
“Be careful,” Jackson said.
“We will, I promise,” I said. I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him. “I love you.”
“I love you, too. I’ll see you soon,” he said. “You have a communication stone?”
I pulled it out of my pocket and held the ruby up for him to see.
He let out a nervous breath and nodded.
Zara and I ascended the narrow steps to the attic and paused inside the pentagram-shaped room at the top.
“I’m sorry you have to do this,” I said. “I know you haven’t been back there much.”
She took a deep breath and raised her shoulders. “It’s going to be fine,” she said. “Besides, this will give me a chance to grab those cute pink shoes I forgot to get last time I was there.”
She laughed, but it was no longer the singsong giggle of a child. There was a darkness inside her laughter now.
“Let’s go,” I said, panic fueling my footsteps. We had to do something. I couldn’t lose her, too.
I opened the door with a demon face carved into the front and walked into the Hall of Doorways. After avoiding this corridor for months, it was strange to be back inside twice on the same day.
We made our way through, Zara holding up an orb of glowing pink light to illuminate the symbols on the doorways. When we found the blue butterfly on the Winters’ door, she bit her lower lip and sighed.
“Here we are,” she said. “Home sweet home.”
I reached for her hand and held it tightly as I opened the door to her old house.
It creaked as it opened, the sound echoing through the hallway. The room inside was dark and cold. With no one living at Winterhaven, there was no one to turn on the heat in the winter months. I shivered and sat down in the center of the room.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“I’m going to explore as far as I can with my mind before we go down there,” I said. “Just in case someone’s already set up camp here or set some kind of trap for us. If I can, I’m going to try to get all the way to the basement room with the cages and see if I can tell if one is missing. If I can manage it, maybe we won’t have to go down there at all.”
“I didn’t know you could do that,” she said. “How does it work?”
“It’s something I learned when I was hiding out in the Underground,” I said. “If I focus, I can sort of walk around and see what’s going on without actually being there in physical form.”
“Astral projection,” she said. “I’ve heard of it, but never actually known someone who could do it.”
“It takes a lot out of me, but we can’t afford to take any risks right now.”
She nodded and glanced at the library door. “I’m going to see if I can find anything about what’s happening to me in my mother’s library,” she said. “I’ll meet you back here when you’re done.”
I crossed my legs underneath my body and put my palms on my knees. I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths, trying to shut out all my fear and worry, and focus only on the house itself.
After a few moments, I separated my mind from my physical body and floated down the stairs to the second floor. In this state, I couldn’t see colors and objects with complete clarity, but I could get a basic image of what everything looked like.
The doors to the many bedrooms on the second floor of the house were open, and after a quick glance inside, I didn’t see anything that looked out of place. I’d never been inside Priestess Winter’s bedroom, but when I came across the only closed door on the hall, I somehow knew it had been hers.
I couldn’t open doors in this disembodied state, but I could pass through them like a ghost.
I entered her bedroom, shivering at the overwhelming feeling of being cold, even though my body was still on the third floor.
The room was decorated in harsh bright whites and icy blues, the bed perfectly made. A crystal vase on the table held flowers that had long since withered and died. If I could have touched them, they would have fallen to dust in my hands.
I searched for any sign of a jewelry box, thinking that if I was an intruder or even a family member looking for valuables, that would be the first place I’d look. Any gemstones in this witch’s jewelry box could contain magical spells or abilities most humans wouldn’t know to look for. But after a couple of minutes of searching, I couldn’t find any jewelry at all.
Something struck me as I thought about the sapphire butterfly pinned to my shirt. A strange nagging thought I couldn’t quite place.
Why had Sophie had an emerald pendant in her jewelry box in Cypress?
She had grown up in a sapphire gate, not an emerald one. The scarab pendant could have been a gift from Eloise to welcome her to the emerald gates, but still, something about it disturbed me.
Not wanting to waste any more time, I made my way back through the door and down the hall to the grand staircase that led to the first floor.
One of the most powerful things about being in this ethereal form was that I could sense energy, especially if that energy was coming from another person. As I passed through the beautifully opulent rooms on the main floor, I searched for that energy. I was looking for any sign of life at all inside the house, but it felt empty and freezing cold, as if no one had been here for a very l
ong time.
I made my way to the kitchen and took a deep breath as I sent my energy down the hidden staircase to the basement.
Down a short hallway, I came to the ritual room. It was empty, just like the rest of the house. I stared down at the sapphire embedded in the floor. This was where it all began. This was the very first portal ever created, and it gave me a sense of satisfaction to see a long crack down the middle, a result of Priestess Winter’s death.
I pushed my energy down the hallway toward the room with the cages. The first time I was down here, there was a narrow wooden door closing it off from the rest of the house, but now, the door was completely gone, removed from its hinges, leaving a dark chasm of space.
I walked into the darkness, wishing there was some way to cast an orb of light down there, but as far as I knew, it was impossible to be more than an observer when I was exploring an area with my mind.
Goose bumps broke out along my skin as I stepped into the room and looked up the rows of iron cages hanging above me. The last time I had been here, I found my own sister trapped inside, the life draining from her body.
There had been twenty cages back then, filled with witches and other people who had somehow wronged Priestess Winter. I counted them now, and knew without a doubt that someone had been here.
Only seventeen cages hung from the ceiling, and I shivered. One of the missing cages was in Sophie’s room in Cypress. But where were the other two? And who did they plan to keep inside?
Just before I pulled my mind back to my body, I felt a tingle along my spine. An energy that hadn’t been there before.
When I turned back toward the cages, I saw the shadow of a woman in dark cloak inside the nearest one, the hood pulled over her head to hide her face.
I pushed my mind upward, frantic. Was this the woman from my dreams? Why was she here?
But when I reached the iron cage, she was gone. There was no trace of her inside.
I quickly forced my mind back to the attic, anxious to tell Zara what I had seen. I wanted to run downstairs to see if we could find the cloaked woman. Had she been here? What was her part in all this?
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