by Lish McBride
“One of the younger goddesses took pity on the cold and naked humans. She thought that, maybe, if they had a bit of the sun, then they would never be cold, and the light would keep them safe. So one day, when the Goddess and the Great One were sleeping, the young goddess changed herself into a fox, because they are the most cunning and the most nimble. The young goddess journeyed to the center of their temple, where the gods kept the great tree, the center of their world. She broke a small limb—the tiniest she could manage—from the great tree, and ran to the sun. Just as the limb caught fire, the other gods woke up, angry at her sacrilege. They chased her away from the sun, but she was too quick for them. As she ran, sparks trailed in her wake, creating the stars. She had brought the sun down to the Earth and given it to the humans, so that they might prosper. As a punishment for her violation, the Great One made her shape permanent. From that day forward, she would always be a fox.”
Katya leaned a little closer, her voice a whisper. “And then what?”
Ezra grinned. “And then the joke was on them, because everyone knows that foxes are the pinnacle of creation. Their curse was by far the greatest gift they could have given her.”
I patted her shoulder. “You will soon learn that’s pretty much how all fox myths end. They think they’re the be-all, end-all of everything.”
Katya laughed, her cheeks rosy. When she was done, she nodded at the doctor. “Okay, I think I’m relaxed enough now. You can take my blood.”
Dr. Wesley held up several small vials. “Already did. I might have to hire Ezra full-time. That was very effective.”
Katya blinked and looked down at her arms. Sure enough, there was a second bandage, a mirror to her earlier one. “How…?”
Ezra kissed her knuckles. “I told you. Fox. Pinnacle of evolution. We can steal the blood from your very veins and you won’t even notice.” He gave her a little wink, and she blushed.
Lock and I sighed and double-checked our wallets. Ezra had been holding Katya’s hands the whole time, I was sure of it, but with Ezra, better safe than sorry.
I held my hand out. “I had a wallet.”
Lock followed suit. “As did I.”
“Sorry, Doc, better check your pockets,” I said.
The doctor finished labeling the vials and set them on the metal tray. “I don’t carry my wallet when I’m working.” Her lips pursed as she looked at her arm. “I did have a watch, though.”
Ezra sighed and let go of Katya’s hands. He dug into various pockets and returned our stuff to us. “You guys are no fun.”
“But we’re no fun with wallets,” Lock said. “And I find my life runs much smoother that way.”
*
THE DOCTOR left to run her tests. There was nothing much we could do at the clinic. We peeked in on Sid and Bianca, peering through a window of thick plastic the only way we could see them. They were officially quarantined and sedated. Sid slept restlessly, tossing in the hospital bed. Bianca looked far more disturbing. She barely moved, her cheeks flushed with the fever. She looked very ill.
I put a shaking hand over my mouth, as if that would contain my horror over the situation. Quarantined with a disease we had no cure for. A fungus that, as far as we know, struck hard and fast and, with the exception of possibly Katya, didn’t leave survivors. Of course I’d known all this before now, but there’s knowing it in an abstract way and then there’s seeing your friends actually suffering, which caused things to really sink in for me. It made it far more real than it had been. And it had already been too real.
What were we going to do? As deadly as everything had been so far, I hadn’t really believed us to be in danger. When you dodge things like this your whole life, you start to think you’re invincible. With each barely escaped-from scrape, you get a little more cocky. Even after losing my mother, I’d fallen into that trap, and I’d thought that it extended to everyone I knew. With Venus gone, I’d grown even more complacent. She’d been my bogeyman for so long that once she was gone I relaxed. I shouldn’t have. Now two of my friends were lying in separate quarantine rooms, both of them marked for a painful death.
I fought things. You wanted someone brought to heel, something to go away, or to inflict a lot of damage, you sent me. I burned things for a living. But what good was I against something like this? You can’t fight a disease with your fists, or with fire. I was useless. Sid and Bianca needed a healer, not a destroyer.
Lock took one of my hands. Ezra took the other.
“We’ll get them out of there,” Lock said.
“Of course we will.” Even though Ezra’s voice was certain, I knew he was worried. But that was how he worked. If you acted like it was true, you could make it true.
“We just need a direction.” Now it was Lock’s turn to sound certain.
“Right. Absolutely.” It was my turn to fake it. We could do this. We just needed a little more time. And all Sid and Bianca had to do was hold on that long.
*
WHEN WE got back to the cabin, Sylvie was already half-asleep on our couch, curled up in a warm blanket.
“I’ve been trying to make her go to bed,” Fitz said, his tone disapproving. “But she won’t budge.”
“Sylvie, why aren’t you in bed?” I asked. “You’re knackered.”
Sylvie blinked owlishly at me. “How can I sleep while they’re in the hospital?”
I snorted, going into my room to grab pajamas for Katya. “What good is your mighty brain if you don’t sleep?”
I clambered back down into the living room, handing Katya the pajamas. “Sylvie, when do you need to go home, anyway? Your parents will get worried eventually, and we need to know how long we can stretch their patience. You can only sleep over for so long before they start asking questions.”
She blushed, burying herself deeper into the blanket nest. “I can stay for a while longer.”
My eyebrows shot up. “And how did you manage that?”
Fitz perched on the arm of the couch. “I don’t know why Sylvie is ashamed. Her plan was a cunning one. She has the mind of a kelpie, she does.” He patted her head affectionately. “I am sure you have kelpie in your family tree somewhere.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that particular compliment, so I ignored it. Leave it to Sylvie to get adopted by a kelpie. “Sylvie?”
“I may or may not have asked my auntie Fi to give my parents a call,” she mumbled. “They think I’m staying with her, so I can continue my work here. Well, my mom thinks I’m staying with her. She went a little overboard with dad. When they hung up, he didn’t remember he even had a daughter, but Auntie Fi assures me that’s only temporary.”
“You had your half-siren aunt sing your parents into submission?” I shook my head. “Two days and you’re already tricking your parents and operating in morally gray areas.”
Lock tousled her hair. “Welcome to the Coterie.”
Ezra kissed her cheek. “I knew you’d be a quick study.”
I gave up, rolled my eyes, and started helping Sylvie up. “That’s it. Time for bed before you really start to spiral down to our level.”
I assigned Katya and Sylvie to my bed. Fitz checked the room, looking under beds and in the closet. Once he deemed the place safe for Sylvie, he left to go wherever it was that Fitz slept. With Bianca in the hospital, the couch was free. I tried not to think about that too much. Ezra took a fox bed, and Lock grabbed a sleeping bag and took the floor. We were all exhausted. The rabbit bed was empty; Olive and Ikka had probably headed to the hospital to be with Sid or home with the drove, putting their energy wherever they thought it would be the most helpful.
I woke up when Cade came home, though he tried to be quiet. The bookstore wasn’t open long hours, but there were some little things to take care of after it closed. The dwarves were finishing up the last few renovation details, account books had to be gone over. I think it was hard for Cade to spend so many nights alone, and though his house was full at the moment, we’d been running arou
nd all the time. So he’d been taking more meals with Duncan and the crew. While it didn’t totally remove my guilt at being gone so much, it did lessen it.
He tiptoed through the cabin, leaning down to pull Lock’s sleeping bag up and kiss me on the forehead. He paused when he saw I was awake, and sat on the edge of the couch. We chatted quietly, getting the other up to speed.
“Snails?”
“Yup.”
“Sylvie?”
“It’s less shocking if you think about it,” I said. “We both knew Sylvie had the capability to be an evil genius.”
“The problem with intelligence like Sylvie’s is that if the wrong person guides it, a beautiful gift can be easily twisted into something ugly.” He tucked a lock of my hair back. “Like your gift. If we’re not careful, Sylvie is going to come out of this afraid to use her ability. She has a good heart. Someone took advantage of that. We need to make sure we get her to understand that it wasn’t her doing.”
“Yes, it was.” Sylvie was perched at the edge of the loft, her bare legs dangling through the wooden bars of the railing. Her hair was tousled and her face flushed from sleep.
“Sorry if we woke you, Sylvie,” Cade said. “We were trying to be quiet.”
She waved him off. “I was already having a hard time sleeping. Sometimes I can’t get my brain to stop, like when it’s puzzling over a problem—it will keep cycling and cycling until it’s done.” She swung her legs back and forth. “Only this time, I thought at first I couldn’t sleep because I was upset, but that wasn’t quite right, either. And then I figured it out.” She gripped the bars. “I’m mad. Not angry or upset or a little peeved. I am downright furious. How dare that man take my good intentions and turn them into poison!” She balled her fists and got this defeated look, and I knew right then that the problem, beyond everything else going on, was that Sylvie wasn’t used to being angry. It was a foreign emotion for her—she didn’t know what to do with it, whereas anger was an old friend to me. It was a currency I traded with often. But Sylvie didn’t have my practice and she didn’t have my gift and she was frustrated.
“You’ll find him, won’t you, Ava?”
“We sure will,” I said.
“Then you and Lock and Ezra will rain fiery vengeance down on him?”
“I think Ikka will want in, but we absolutely will do that if that’s what you want.”
She leaned into the railing. “What did Cade mean about your gift being twisted into something ugly? Your gift is amazing!”
Struggling to put it into words, I looked to Cade to see if he’d help me out. He very pointedly crossed his arms and stared back. He wanted me to voice my problem myself. Ugh, he’d probably been reading parenting books again. “He meant what I can do. It’s pretty much a one-trick pony. I can’t grow things, like Lock. Or shift, like Ezra, or start my own impromptu snowball fights, like Katya. My gift can only really hurt.”
Sylvie tilted farther into the railing so that I could only see part of her face. “That’s not what he said. Cade said it had been twisted into something bad, not that the gift was bad. You’re not a one-trick pony, and not everything you can do hurts people.” She held up her index finger. “You made the cool fire dragon.” She held up another finger. “You thawed Katya’s coffee.”
“Yeah, but those aren’t big things, or even really that helpful.”
“You helped me get to sleep and Katya feel better. Those are good, positive, soothing things. I bet if you really think, you’d be able to list more.”
“You burned the rosemary for me,” Lock mumbled from his sleeping bag on the floor. “And warmed my hands at the hospital after Katya tried to freeze them.”
“See?” Sylvie sounded like her usual self now. “You just don’t think about these things—you don’t agonize or get upset, so you hardly notice them. I want you to promise me you’ll think about what I said. I know you too well to expect you to just go along with my obviously superior argument.”
I sank into the couch. “Fine, Sylvie. I promise.”
She nodded and moved to go back to bed, stopping herself before she pulled her legs all the way back through the bars. “As far as the Thomas thing goes, it’s not that I’m a big believer in this kind of thing, you know. I don’t believe in revenge. But some evil, it can’t be changed or taught. It just has to be stopped. All the kelpies. That ogre. The weres. Bianca. Sid. Katya’s family.” She shook her head. “He can’t come back from that.”
“Can we be sure he knew about those things?” Lock asked, his head still buried.
“When you came to confront him, he ran. It wasn’t a surprise. He knew what you were talking about. He either did this all on purpose, or accidentally and then decided to not tell anyone. Either way, he knew. He knew and did nothing.”
Cade and I stayed silent, letting her work through these thoughts. But that was enough. Sylvie nodded once more to herself, then went back to bed. Cade kissed me good night and took himself off to sleep shortly after that. I sat in the dark and tried to list all the times I’d used my gift where it helped someone instead of hurting them. Since I tended to do it without thinking, it was hard to remember, but it was still a surprisingly long list.
*
WE CAUGHT a few hours’ sleep before my phone went off, waking me up. It was a short call. Alistair certainly wasn’t mincing words. “I’m texting you an address. Thomas’s houseboat. I want you and your team out there now.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” I said. “How are Sid and Bianca?”
There was a heartbeat of silence before Alistair answered, his voice a growl. “If that witch has a cure, his death will be quick. That’s the best he can hope for.”
Okay, then.
I rolled out of bed, making a small flame appear in my hand as I did. I blew on it, sending it up into the air. I needed to find my pants, and I didn’t want to wake up Sylvie and Katya in the process. The light from the living room went right into the loft.
Lock crawled out of his sleeping bag and began pulling on clothes. His bleached hair was mussed from sleep, and he’d put his T-shirt on backward. It’s one thing to see people when they are groomed and primped and think they are beautiful or handsome. They’ve had time to prepare a face they’re okay with showing to the public. But when someone just wakes up and their breath probably stinks and their hair is a mess—to see them in that state, well, it’s an intimate thing. I’ve seen Lock in just about every state imaginable during my years with the Coterie, and you can pack a lot of weird into a Coterie year. And I have to admit, as much as I like to see public him, it’s messy Lock that makes me pause. Yes, he had bruised circles under his eyes and dark stubble on his chin. But there was a softness to his face, an openness and vulnerability that wouldn’t be there when we left the cabin. This Lock, this was mine. My heart creaked as I remembered that wasn’t true. He could have been mine if I hadn’t screwed it all up.
“Your shirt’s on backward.”
Lock cursed and turned his shirt around while Ezra sat on the couch and attempted to pull his shoes on. It wasn’t going well. There was a muffled sound as the back door opened and Fitz came in from outside, naked except for a damp pair of boxers.
“Why are you in your underpants?” I asked.
“Because the swim trunks chafed.” He slipped around me. “I’m here to keep an eye on the girls while you’re out. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the tub.” He didn’t wait for any kind of response before letting himself into our bathroom. “Good night.”
“Is he going to sleep in my tub?” I asked.
“Looks like it.” Lock settled his shirt back on, this time wearing it correctly.
“Did you guys hear the call?”
“I heard a call,” Ezra mumbled before flopping face-first onto the couch. “You guys can handle it. I can tell.”
Lock jabbed him with his finger. “You’re going. Alistair said the whole team, so we need the whole team. We have a timeline on this, remember?”
&
nbsp; Ezra didn’t look up from the pillow, just held up one finger to let Lock know exactly how he felt about this field trip, life-or-death situation or not. You can guess what finger he used.
20
I WOULD HAVE MADE A HELL OF A KELPIE
WE TRIED TO MAKE it out the door without Sylvie and Katya, we really did. Though we got ready quickly and quietly, they heard us. And once they found out what we were doing, they wanted in. At first Fitz was on our side of the argument, until I mentioned that we were venturing onto a houseboat in Portsmouth, and then forget it, because now he wanted to drag in the kelpies as backup. Which was actually a good idea. Which meant Sylvie and Katya were going, too, because though Fitz liked Cade, he didn’t see him as much in the way of protection. We argued long enough that Olive and Ikka were able to meet us at the house and pick us up in the drove van. We were going to be lousy with backup, but I understood. Everyone wanted to help. No one was comfortable sitting around.
I’d never seen Olive look scared before. Surly, annoyed, scathing, and blank—these were the faces of Olive. The way she carried herself usually, it was like watching a grown-up in a little girl’s body. But tonight, as she gripped Ikka’s hand, she looked her age. The jaded facade fell away, revealing a terrified and worried kid.
“Are you sure you guys wouldn’t rather be with Sid right now?” I asked. “We’d all understand.”
Ikka shook her head. “I’m more useful to Sid helping you guys than I am pacing around that tiny waiting room. Besides, Alistair is handling that just fine on his own. He’ll keep us updated. And his pacing will be more efficient without us getting in the way.”
“What are we going to do once we get there?” Katya asked, climbing into the van.