I didn’t want to bring Katherine Shipton’s name into the conversation. There was a less rational part of me that desperately wanted Micah to be happy and stay with his family. We could watch over them. Plus, we didn’t really know for sure that she was involved in any of this—not 100 percent yet, anyway. Stirring any kind of panic based on our hunches would’ve been unproductive, to say the least.
If we got any later confirmation that Katherine had her skeevy fingers dipped in this pie, I’d be the first one to show up here again and take Micah away. But, until then, the kid had every right to enjoy his family. At least for a little while longer.
Wade’s shoulders dropped in what felt like defeat.
“Santana, can you have eyes on the boy at all times?” he asked her. It took a surprising amount of effort to stop myself from jumping around with sheer, unadulterated joy. At the same time, I felt guilty. I’d just screwed up his entire operation—I had a history in this field.
“Yeah, I can fuse one of the Orishas to Micah’s energy signature,” Santana replied. “I’ll set some traps for potential magical intruders. It’ll at least keep them busy till the Cranstons get out or until coven security gets here.”
Wade exhaled as he looked at the Cranstons. “For the time being, Micah can stay with you,” he conceded, prompting the little boy to cheer and run into his mother’s arms. Susan picked him up, showering him with kisses. “But should there come a time that we require Micah to move into the coven, even if just temporarily, you both need to be okay with that. If that happens, it will be only for his personal safety. Believe it or not, we’re not too crazy about separating children from their families.”
Susan nodded enthusiastically. “Thank you!” she said, her eyes sparkling with relief.
“He will need to be at the Fleet Science Center, every day, from eight a.m. until six p.m.,” Wade continued, his tone flat and firm. “Under no circumstances will you attempt to flee. We will know, and we will find you. Is that clear?”
This time, all three Cranstons nodded vehemently, making me smile.
“We’ll be careful,” Larry said.
“Needless to say, you will keep the existence of magicals a secret,” Wade replied. “It’s bad enough I’ve got a nightmare of explaining over Micah to do now. The last thing we want is human attention.”
“We will have eyes and ears on you, wherever you go,” Raffe said, adding his share of grave warnings. I’d softened the Cranstons up too much and too fast. He and Wade were both trying to make up for that. “We will know if you tell anyone. Should you break this arrangement in any way, you will never see Micah again.”
“Jeez, dude,” I grumbled. They weren’t going to have eyes and ears on them wherever they went; that was just tough talk meant to intimidate. The magical alarms in the house were enough.
“Shush!” Wade said. “You’re done talking for now.”
I gave him that much. After all, he’d agreed to break coven rules and go against Alton on this due to my persistence. He deserved to “put me back in my place.”
We left the Cranstons with instructions and details about Micah’s new life and expectations as a magical. Santana carried out her Santeria magic around the house, while we waited by the Jeep.
Wade didn’t even look at me. The silence was painfully awkward, but I was willing to put up with it. I’d walked out of that house with a major victory under my belt. Maybe I could bring about some positive changes to the San Diego Coven, after all. Micah felt like a good first step.
Six
Harley
I sat in the passenger seat, outside Micah’s house, watching the occasional car go by—families headed for the beach. Santana was inside, planting charms and traps for potential magical hostiles. Wade was outside leaning against the hood and gazing at the ocean as it rippled in the distance, while Raffe was in the back, behind me, playing games on his smartphone.
“You have to talk to me at some point, Crowley,” I said, craning my neck out the car window.
“I don’t have much to say right now. Pardon me if I’m more focused on how I’ll explain this to Alton,” Wade replied, then slid off the hood and got behind the wheel.
“I would say I’m sorry, but I’m not,” I mumbled.
“Of course you’re not sorry. You just messed up centuries’ worth of policies because you let your emotions get the better of you,” Wade fired back.
“And you went along with it!”
“She has a point,” Raffe interjected, still playing. “We could’ve just taken Micah and wiped Susan and Larry’s memories.”
“Yeah, and then we would’ve had to alter the boy’s memories, too, so he wouldn’t be traumatized or distressed. Then we would be the monsters,” Wade said. “This was supposed to go smooth and easy. Go in, tell the parents what’s going on with their kid, get the kid to understand that he’s better off with us, then wipe the parents’ minds and take the kid. Easy.”
“You make it sound easy,” I replied.
“I’ve done it before. It’s smoother when you ease the kid into it. Like I said, there are protocols in place. All you had to do was follow my lead,” Wade said, a muscle ticking in his jaw.
“Hey, if it doesn’t work out, I will be the first to admit my mistake, I promise.” I sighed.
“Good. Because if something happens to him, I’ll be looking at you,” Wade muttered, giving me a stone-cold sideways scowl.
That made me mad. “Nah, you don’t get to back out of it. We’re in this together. The four of us. We’ll all be ready if something happens. But Santana’s putting charms and stuff in the house, isn’t she? If Katherine or one of her buddies comes around, we’ll know. Won’t that help our mission to catch her?”
Wade stared at me for a half-minute, then smirked. “You’re okay with using the kid as bait?”
The realization hit me so hard, I was seconds away from changing my mind and charging in there to get Micah, whether he wanted to leave or not. But that conflict didn’t last long. I had to be pragmatic about this. Katherine Shipton was a threat, not only to Micah but to every other magical out there. If this could be used as a way to draw her out, might as well.
I wasn’t comfortable with the idea, but I wasn’t fine with telling Micah and his parents that we’d changed our minds, either. There had to be a limit to our monstrosity, as members of a coven. I knew better than most what it was like to grow up without parents. In the end, that mattered more than almost anything. Micah had a better shot at a healthy and happy childhood with Susan and Larry around. Even with mind-wiping and other magical tricks, the trauma of separation could still leave marks on a child’s subconscious. I didn’t want that for Micah.
The front door opened. Santana came out and dropped a small leather pouch in the flower planter next to her, then came to the car.
“We got a problem,” she said as she got in. “Found this in a trinket bowl in the lobby.”
She handed Wade a small business card. There was a symbol on its back—an eye in the middle of a triangle, framed by a circle, embossed in black. Wade turned it over and read the front.
“The Ryder twins,” he said. “From the San Diego Coven?”
“Yeah, the weirdest thing happened in there,” Santana explained. “I put charms and traps in place to alert us if anything happens and summoned an Orisha to keep an eye on Micah at all times. All that was fine, until I found this card. I asked Susan about it, but she had no idea. Neither did Larry. Or Micah. No one knew how it had gotten there. They don’t remember anyone else from the coven coming to visit. They only employ a babysitter once in a while, and occasionally the neighbors visit for a barbecue. That’s it.”
“Okay, that’s weird,” Raffe said, then took the card from Wade and sniffed it. I stilled as his eyes glimmered red for a split second.
“There are no Ryder twins in the San Diego Coven,” Wade replied.
“There’s no trace of anything or anyone on this,” Raffe concluded. “Normal
ly, there would be the scent of a person’s touch, at least. But there’s nothing. Which is even weirder.”
I didn’t have time to wonder about Raffe’s ability to track scents like a friggin’ wolf at that point. We had a bigger concern: who’d left the card? “Why don’t the Cranstons remember? Do you think their memories were wiped?” I asked.
Santana shook her head. “I had my Orishas scan them. There was no memory tampering.”
“So, someone snuck in and left it there?” I replied, even more confused.
Wade turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life, and he looked at us. “Or someone they know isn’t who they think,” he offered. “We’ll need to look into them. And we need to tell Tatyana and the others about it. Astrid can check our systems for the Ryder twins.”
“Have you ever heard of them?” Santana asked, checking the card again.
“No. But there’s got to be a reason why that card was left there,” Wade replied.
A thought crossed my mind, raising the hairs on my back. “Do you think it was left there for us to find?”
“Maybe. Thing is, it says ‘The Ryder Twins of the San Diego Coven’ on it, but that’s not our insignia. It’s different.” Wade said, then looked at Santana. “Call Astrid, send her a photo of the card, and ask her to check that phone number, too. Maybe she can trace it.”
“Should we call? See who’s on the other line?” I asked.
Wade drove us out onto the main road. “Not yet. Let’s see what Astrid comes up with first.”
In hindsight, leaving Micah seemed even more risky than before. At the same time, laying alarms in his house could help us, if those Ryder twins came by again. All of Santana’s charms were designed against magicals, so if any of them came in, even posing as friendly neighbors or whatever, we’d be notified.
Seven
Tatyana
From the moment Harley walked into the coven, I knew we had our hands full—and not really in a bad way, though the girl was a magnet for trouble. I liked the team she’d unwittingly helped form. We were all misfits in our way, but together we were stronger than most magicals in San Diego. I’d been looking forward to another mission with Harley on board. It was never boring.
Case in point, Santana called me to share some updates, sooner than I’d expected.
“We found a business card from the San Diego Coven—” Santana began.
“Was it from the Ryder twins?” I asked, turning over the card I had spotted in the Travis family’s seashell trinket holder.
I’d been going over things with Linda and Evan, Mina’s magical parents. Of course, we’d had no idea they were magical—they were new to San Diego, having moved here less than a year ago, and they’d yet to reach out to the San Diego Coven.
“You found one, too?” Santana asked. She sounded as uneasy as I felt.
“Yeah. Not good, huh?” I replied.
“It’s a little fishy, but we can’t exactly connect it to Katherine Shipton right now. It’s cause for concern, though. Are you still at the Travis house?”
“Mm-hm. Going over the details with Mina’s parents. How’s it going over there?” I muttered, occasionally glancing at Linda.
Santana chuckled. “Harley got Wade to leave the kid with his parents and make him attend coven classes like it’s a normal school. Granted, we had orders, but you know Harley. He should’ve seen this coming,” she added in a lower voice, as if not to be heard by the others in her crew.
I had to admit, it didn’t come as a surprise. It was one of the things I liked most about Harley, actually. Rules weren’t her forte, but she had a way of putting her foot down—and Wade conceded, which was quite a wonder to behold.
“He’ll get used to her eventually,” I said. “I’ll let you know how the Travis situation pans out once we’re done.”
“Good luck!” Santana replied, then hung up.
Astrid was already checking the database for the Ryder twins, using her Smartie tablet to connect and comb through the system.
The Travis couple were sitting on the sofa, pale and worried for their six-year-old daughter, while Dylan checked every corner of the living room and the rest of the house for any foreign charms or spells.
“Why didn’t you contact the coven when you first got here?” I asked Linda.
Mina was a special little girl, with Telekinesis, Water, and Air Elemental abilities. She’d begun manifesting all three from the age of four, making it difficult for her parents to keep her safe in an all-human elementary school. They should’ve entered their local coven, as per the magical laws.
Linda sighed, rubbing her face in frustration, as Evan decided to keep little Mina busy with a children’s book about a super-friendly dinosaur. In comparison, my childhood had been the stuff of nightmares. The Russian sorcerers, known as Kolduny, didn’t take their kids to the aquarium on the weekend, nor did they read us stories from colorful fairytale books. No, they took us to the graveyard to talk to dead people and made us read obituaries in the evening, to “understand the scale and permanence of death.”
I would’ve loved to have a dad like Mina’s. Evan seemed so kind and sweet, looking at her as if she were the very reason he was alive and breathing. But I had to make do with what I had, and, despite the distance and cultural differences, I did miss my mom and dad a little.
“We were Neutrals back in Baltimore,” Linda replied. “We were taking our time here, thinking that a new home and a new school would help keep Mina’s abilities under the radar for a little while longer.”
“You have to understand, we grew up in covens,” Evan added. “It was cold and impersonal, and, even though we were surrounded by magicals, we were lonely. There was no specific attention or affection given to magical children. There usually isn’t, and we fought hard to change that, but the Baltimore coven wouldn’t budge. We were allowed to leave and buy a house in the city, and we acquired our Neutral status without much of a fuss.”
“But then, Mina was born. We’d had fertility issues,” Linda said. “We didn’t think we could even have children. She was our little miracle.” She sighed, lovingly watching her daughter as she turned a page of her storybook.
I showed them the Ryders Twins’ card. “This was in the lobby with your keys. Who gave it to you?”
Linda reached out to take it. She turned it over, then frowned slightly. “They introduced themselves as Emily and Emmett Ryder. They came over a couple of days ago and said they were from the San Diego Coven. They were in the neighborhood and thought they’d stop by to say hello.”
“What else did they say?” I asked.
“Well, what every other coven magical says. They wanted us to come with them or to at least have Mina attend their magical training classes,” Linda said. “Which is why I was a little surprised to see you guys here, today. I found the coven’s persistence to be rather… odd.”
Astrid shook her head, her gaze fixed on the tablet. “The Ryder twins don’t work for the San Diego Coven. They’re not affiliated with us in any way.”
“Even the logo on the card… it’s wrong. It’s not ours, though it does claim to be ours. Maybe it’s done on purpose, to mess with us? I don’t know,” I added, then looked at Linda again. “You should bring Mina in. You know it’s time. Had it not been for the kindergarten incidents, we would’ve never been alerted in the first place.”
Evan let out a breath. “Maybe it is time, honey.”
“We’re not going to live in the coven!” Linda snapped. “I spent years trying to break free so I could have a simple life. We both did, Evan. We want something different—better—for our little girl.”
“I completely understand that, Mrs. Travis, but these are special circumstances,” Dylan replied, as he came back into the living room, then gave me a brief nod. “The house is clear. What did Santana say about the card?”
“There was one at the Cranstons’ place, too, but they had no idea who put it there. They checked the parents’ memori
es,” I said. “There was no tampering. Whoever left the card, they did it inconspicuously, either by sneaking in or pretending to be someone else.”
“But the Cranston kid is okay,” Astrid chimed in. “They laid charms and traps around the house and left him to be with his parents. Alton’s going to blow a fuse over this.” She chuckled.
“Yeah, we don’t usually let magical kids stay with their parents,” I muttered, then retrieved the card from Linda to examine it again.
“Do you remember what the Ryder twins looked like?” Astrid asked.
“A lot like each other, for starters. The only difference, apart from the fact that one was a woman and the other a man, was the hair,” Linda recalled. “Emily had short black hair, and Emmett’s was long, down to his shoulders. Both pale-skinned, with brown eyes… Nothing that stood out, really. They looked young, in their early twenties.”
“They were nice and friendly,” Evan replied. “They weren’t pushy or persistent. But they did say it would be safer for Mina if she went to live in the coven. Of course, we said no, not without us, and they said we could go with them, too.”
Dylan groaned, looking out the window. “What is their endgame? I don’t get it.”
My phone beeped. It was a text from Wade, which puzzled me. I read it over and over, five times, then decided to do what he asked. “Dylan, I’ve got a bag of charms in the trunk. Would you mind bringing it in, please? We need to rig the house,” I said.
He seemed confused. “I thought we were taking them all back to the coven with us.”
“Wade spoke to Alton about this. Turns out our director wasn’t all that miffed about Wade leaving a magical child in his human parents’ care after all. He said we should do the same with all the families on our list. Talk to them, verify the magical abilities, instruct them on emergency scenarios, and charm the hell out of their houses and cars,” I replied.
Harley Merlin 2: Harley Merlin and the Mystery Twins Page 6