by D. G. Swank
The pain in my chest ebbed a bit, and I was able to take in a controlled breath.
“Who would want them?” I asked, struggling to keep the panic at bay. Panic wasn’t going to do any of us any good now.
Rowan picked up her phone and started scrolling through it, like she was searching her autodial numbers for inspiration. Hell, maybe she was. Her eye caught something on the screen and her breath hitched.
“Phoebe,” she said, her voice trembling. “What day is it?”
“October ninth,” I answered, sure as anything. We’d been taught to perform the fortification rituals for the Book of Sindal on the new moon, without fail. Our power intensified during the new moon, and it was known to all magic-bearers that it was the best time for destroying or banishing unwanted forces. We carefully charted the moon’s phases and planned our schedules accordingly.
Rowan turned her phone to me, shaking her head. “Phoebe, this says it’s just past midnight on the eleventh. We’ve been knocked out for over twenty-four hours.”
Chapter Four
Horror shot through my body, turning my blood to ice.
“Twenty-four hours,” I whispered, scarcely believing the words coming out of my own mouth. “That’s… she could be… I mean, who knows where. Rowan, we have to go,” I sputtered, staring at my sister with wide eyes. “Now.”
I darted to the front hall closet. My coat, which I’d neatly hung the last time I’d been conscious, had been torn from the closet and now lay limply on the floor like an animal’s carcass. I shuddered at the images that came to me unbidden, bolstered by the memory of that animal’s dying scream I’d heard yesterday, and plucked my coat from the hardwood floor. I was not that animal. Not now. Not yet. I spun back to the living room and stopped in my tracks at the sight of my sister sitting at the kitchen table, slowly and methodically pulling a notebook and pen from the drawer tucked into the underside.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
“We can’t go anywhere, Phoebe, not until we have an idea of who did this and how.”
Our sister was missing, and Rowan’s solution was to sit at our table like Lois Lane drawing up a to-do list on a Monday morning. Typical.
“Think about it,” she continued, her expression and tone the very definition of calm. “The reason the Small Council entrusted the Book of Sindal to our protection is because nobody knows it’s here.”
I had a flashback of our mother, who’d always gone into what we called Serenity Mode whenever she was especially upset or stressed. Her voice would go soft and a bit higher, and her features would slacken. It was her way of coping. In this moment, Rowan was her copy.
“And if anyone did know it was here, they shouldn’t have been able to get to it,” I supplied, responding to her calm aura.
“The expression triangle, combined with our family’s blood magic and what the two of us contribute, should have protected it,” she continued. “Unless someone figured out the book was here...”
“...and found out everything about our protections and figured out a way to circumvent them,” I finished.
“Right. So I think the answer to how they took it could tell us who is responsible.”
Rowan’s thing was Serenity Mode. Mine, apparently, was constant motion. I couldn’t sit still for another second and settled for pacing instead of bursting out the door.
“If they knew enough about the book to steal it, they also knew enough about Celeste to know that they would not want to mess with her unless they absolutely had to,” I said as I paced from one end of the living room to the other and back again.
“Unless they thought they could control her,” Rowan said. My pacing seemed to have set her scribbling, and she was frantically jotting notes. “The problem is they would also know enough about her to know we’d do anything to get her back, making her the perfect bait to get the two of us in the same place as her…”
“… and if they have blood from all three of us, they can open it,” I finished.
“Yeah,” Rowan said.
I bit my lower lip, my mind wandering back over the past several weeks. The anger. The incident at work. The therapy. The question of whether Celeste could have played a role in this rose again, but I banished it.
Celeste was troubled, sure, but she was on our side. She was still a Whelan. She would never betray us, or the book.
“But only a handful of people know they would need our blood,” Rowan said. “I would think they’d have taken all three of us if they knew.”
Fear swamped my thoughts when I tried to imagine what was happening to my sister. Was she scared? Had they hurt her?
Rowan must have still been connected to my thoughts because she slammed her pen on the table and slowly rose. “Phoebe. Thoughts like that won’t help anything.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Who do you think did this?” she asked with a shaky voice. “What if it’s someone from the Small Council? We had to fight so hard to get them to leave the book here.”
“Well, not all of them…”
“… but more than a few. They didn’t want us to have it. And who else even knows it actually exists?”
I shuddered at the memory of how hard we’d had to lobby to keep our family relic where it belonged. Where it was safest. On our property, safe in an expression triangle cast by one of the strongest witches of my acquaintance, buoyed and fortified by our blood connection to the power and the land. Cushioned by the power I drew from our ancestors, deep in the earth, and Rowan’s impressive glamouring talent. All of our powers were fortified by the strength of our coven bond. The book had been on our land for over two hundred years, and in our family even longer. We’d all agreed the Whelan sisters wouldn’t be the ones to lose possession of it.
The ironic part was that we had done that very thing.
Rowan latched on to the idea that someone in the Small Council might be responsible. “The Salvage brothers were vocal about their reluctance to let us keep it. They pretended they weren’t behind the efforts to block our possession of it, but I know they were,” she said, shaking her head. “And I suspect they wanted it for themselves.”
“Well, the whole Atchison clan glared at us during every single one of our arguments,” I said. “I don’t trust a single one of the people who opposed us.”
The Valerian Small Council was comprised of thirty-one members, and twelve of them had been opposed to us keeping the book. As far as I was concerned, all twelve dissenters were suspects in the kidnapping of Celeste and the book.
Rowan nodded. “I’m certain there were others who opposed us, but their loyalty to our parents swayed their votes to our side.”
At the time, the three of us had brushed off their opposition as something to be expected. Of course the Small Council didn’t want to leave one of its most closely guarded possessions in the hands of two women who weren’t old enough to buy alcohol and one who wasn’t even considered an adult. Our mother’s death—followed quickly by our father’s—had forced their hand.
Claiming our rightful role as the book’s protectors had given us a sense of purpose. We’d felt powerful, like we’d stepped into our rightful place in history. Like we’d reclaimed our connection to our mother’s family and legacy.
The three of us had agreed privately that we wouldn’t give up the book, or our ancestral duty to protect it, no matter what the Council decided—something Rowan had then shared on the record. The reaction among the Council members that day had been vocal and, in hindsight, expected—the book belonged to witchkind, not the Whelan sisters.
In the end, the Council voted for us to keep the book, but there was no doubt in my mind that the members present that day never forgot how presumptuous and haughty we’d been. We’d been so sure that we were right. We’d never be able to live down how wrong we were, or how we’d acted that day.
Now that the book was gone and one of us along with it, I feared our youth would come back to bite us. Whether some
one on the Council was responsible or not, surely the Council as a whole would blame us. They’d think it had been an inside job, just as we had briefly considered.
From the wary look on Rowan’s face, she was thinking the same thing. She was pale too, and on that observation, our baser needs occurred to me. “We should eat something,” I said. “Before we go.”
Rowan’s hand ghosted over her stomach. “I couldn’t keep anything down. Could you?”
She had a point. I normally could find room in my stomach for anything, anytime. Now there was a sort of twisting pit in my gut.
Minutes later, we slid into the heated leather seats of her SUV without even discussing where we were going.
“Not making fun of me for butt-heating now, are you?” she asked. Her voice was shaky, and I knew she was making the attempt at humor for me. The burden of being the oldest sister was normally something Rowan bore beautifully, but the older we got, the easier it was for me to detect cracks in the façade.
“Nope,” I said as I wiggled my yoga-pants-clad butt into the rapidly warming leather.
“Protocol Thirteen,” Rowan said, holding her phone out to me. “And plug your phone in before you do anything else.”
I froze. No one had called a Protocol Thirteen since our mother died.
“You’re sure about this? We still need to consider that someone on the Valerian Small Council might be behind this.”
“I know, which means we need to do this by the book…no pun intended.” Rowan met my slightly raised eyebrow with a confident stare. “For one, the rules state that we have to. Two, the people behind this might expect us to cover it up. They might arrange one of their random inspections, knowing that the book is gone. But three, this affects the entire Valeria community. There are good people on the Small Council, and we have to trust them to help us.”
I might not like it, but everything she said made perfect sense. “Okay.”
“I get it, though,” she said, softer now. “This is going to be ugly, but it’ll give us a chance to try to sniff out who’s responsible. Protocol Thirteen calls all the Small Council members to attend—the ones who want to help and anyone who might be guilty. Maybe you could find an empath near the city. That way you can at least get a rough idea of who might be responsible.”
She was referring to my ancestral magic talent. If there was an ancestor, however far up on the family tree, buried in close proximity, I could access their talents from the grave. The ability to draw magic from distant relatives was incredibly useful when we wandered from our home base and family cemetery. Like now, when we had to leave in the middle of the night to hunt for our kidnapped baby sister.
Breathe in and out, Phoebe. It’s gonna be okay. I ran through my mental database of the ancestral powers I’d sensed or accessed throughout my life. There were a lot near Columbus, but I couldn’t remember which areas of the city they were on. “Yep, I’m pretty sure there’s one really close to downtown,” I bluffed. My white lie was rewarded by Rowan’s shoulders relaxing just the slightest bit.
There was silence for a time. I pulled my cashmere wrap tighter around myself. I could have changed into something less comfortable and more grownup looking, but if one of the Council members was the person who’d kidnapped our sister and stolen the Book of Sin, I didn’t want to look fierce and capable. I wanted to look scared and vulnerable. I wanted them to think I was the sitting duck.
I worried at my lower lip, thinking that now was the time for us to really talk about Celeste. At least, how the Valerian Small Council might see the situation.
“Ro…”
“Bee…,” she echoed after I paused for a few extra seconds.
“You know they’re going to blame us for this. Our main argument to keep the book was that no one could break our protections. They’ll accuse Celeste, and maybe they’ll think we’re complicit too.”
She remained silent, her eyes locked on the wheel. Obviously she thought the same thing.
“Plus, our leader is the most powerful aura reader in generations,” I added. “We’re not going to be able to keep our recent family, um, issues a secret. It’s going to look bad for Celeste.”
She pushed out a sigh. “I thought about that. But appearances are deceiving. She’ll see that too.”
In true Rowan fashion, we weren’t going to keep talking about the potential for something to be bad. Pretend the monster isn’t there and it disappears. She used that theory when Celeste and I were little and had been scared of the dark, but as adults, it didn’t quite hold up.
“The longer we wait, the worse it looks. You make the call. I’ll start driving toward town.” She held the phone out to me once again.
This time, I took it. Rowan threw the car into gear and my empty stomach lurched as we started to drive.
Sometimes I thought about how ridiculous it was that, with all the talents the witches and mages in our community possessed, we still relied on cell phones, with their ridiculously fallible batteries and patchy networks. But in a world where we tried our best to blend in, some things just were.
I punched in the sequence without hesitating, the five numbers as ingrained in my head as 9-1-1 was to nonmagic children in America.
“Good evening, Valerian Council emergency access line. Are you aware that you’ve dialed the code for Protocol Thirteen?” The man on the other end of the line sounded impossibly bored.
It made sense. While men possessed magical talent, their talents tended to be weaker than women’s. If you were a mage working for the Council, phone operations might be the most exciting job you could handle.
“Yes, I’m aware.”
“So you’d like to activate Protocol Thirteen? You’re sure this is a situation that can’t be handled by local authorities or the Protective Force?”
I bit my tongue against the snark that was just begging to fly out. “In this case, the local authority is the Small Council. The situation pertains to their own directive. They’ll want to be notified as quickly as possible.”
“Oh…” His tone changed from bored to anxious. While most small council matters were secret, everyone knew their directives meant serious business. “Um… certainly. Please hold.”
Well, that perked him up.
I rolled my eyes and glanced toward Rowan. “Honestly, how many witches does he think accidentally dial a Protocol Thirteen?”
Rowan laughed, gripping the steering wheel tightly as she navigated the dark, twisting roads toward Columbus, Ohio. “Maybe a few of them manufacture emergencies to see how the Small Council works.”
“Maybe.” But it didn’t seem smart. The one time we’d been privy to a Small Council meeting, I’d gotten the impression they would not handle frivolous instigations lightly.
It was a little funny that the largest concentration of witches and mages in North America circled this Midwestern town that desperately wanted to be a city. That twenty miles away from where the Valerian Large Council met monthly, cows and horses grazed in pastures. Homeowners mowed their lawns with riding lawnmowers and some towns still had a milk delivery service.
Presumably, they’d chosen this area for just that reason—it was an unassuming place for witches and mages to assimilate into nonmagical society. Plus, it was close to our property and the book, which was the main reason the Council wouldn’t relocate, whether anyone was willing to admit it or not. Maybe that was the thief’s motive for stealing it. Some of the younger members might want to move it to a more exciting location, and our carelessness would give them reason enough to justify a move.
“Ms. Whelan?” The mage returned to the line. He must have an aural talent—the magical equivalent of caller ID.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Please report to 34 West Broad Street.”
“Thank you,” I said curtly before hanging up.
I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, battling the still-present physical pain from the loss of my sister and the book. The distance between my tem
ples felt like it was connected by an ever-tightening wire, and I talked myself through breathing exercises, trying to force my jaw to loosen. I had no idea what was going to happen over the next few hours, days, or even weeks, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be a sunny, pleasant walk in the park. Walking into it with a migraine would only make it worse.
Rowan’s tight voice broke through the heavy silence. “What’s this guy do—”
My head jerked back and to the right with a sudden impact—a violent crunch of metal, the squeal of rubber tires scraping over asphalt, pinching pain instantly invading my neck. Rowan’s scream shook my brain and one word played on a loop through my thoughts. No.
No, no. This cannot be happening. Not now.
These twisting roads had caused our mother’s death when she’d flipped her car on a rainy night. Our father had heard the news, suffered a heart attack, and died the next day. Our parents had orphaned us. Rowan and I couldn’t leave Celeste all alone. She needed us now more than ever.
There was no way this was an accident.
“Phoebe, get down!” Rowan screeched, her hands still in a death grip on the steering wheel. Somehow, she’d managed to keep driving.
My brain took a couple seconds to process the unmistakable sound of gunshots and the sensation of glass shattering over my head. In the next breath, I wriggled down in my seat.
Forget breathing exercises—they were impossible while screaming. I was in full-on fight-or-flight mode, which was probably what made me stupidly lift my head to assess the situation.
I looked out my window, at the car that had just slammed into us. The gunmetal gray SUV was even larger than Rowan’s, and much boxier—basically a tank. It probably hadn’t suffered more than a scratch, and it was still on our tail. I whipped my head around and caught a glimpse of its carbon copy in our left side rearview mirror before it sped past us.