Without warning, Valkyrie stood on the brakes. The car behind her halted immediately, maintaining the six feet of space between them perfectly. Valkyrie threw the Jeep in reverse and floored it. The car behind her sped backwards without missing a beat.
Valkyrie hit the brakes again, pulled the Jeep off to the side of the road and got out. The car pulled up next to her, and she was utterly unsurprised when it revealed itself to be a silver Porsche Spyder. The door opened and Meredith emerged, outfitted in surprisingly practical clothing—for Meredith, at least.
“That was fun,” Meredith said. “We should do it more often. Though maybe you could get something that drives faster than a turtle waddles.”
“This turtle has ground clearance and four-wheel drive.”
“That’s about all it has.” Meredith sniffed. “At least it’s a stick shift.”
“I thought I told you to leave town.”
“What, and miss all the fun? You said we were friends again. I want to help.”
“I get that I’m unfamiliar with the friendship concept, but I think friends just call.”
“I did. I texted, too. Your phone is dead.”
“No, it’s n—” She pulled her phone out and tapped at the screen.
“Dead,” Meredith said sweetly.
“So you decided to lurk at the end of Random’s driveway waiting for me to leave?”
“I wasn’t lurking, I was listening to an audiobook and doing my nails.” She waggled her fingers, the tips of which were now a pastel green. “What do you think?”
“They look like mint ice cream.” Valkyrie hated mint ice cream. She finally caught up to the fact that Meredith had been lingering by Random’s driveway and her brain did a one-eighty. “Wait, how did you know I was at Random’s?”
“As though I couldn’t have guessed you’d be there. But if you must know, I heard all about the earlier drama from Julian. Did Random seriously teleport you out of the Warded Room?”
“Julian? You talk to that asshole?”
“As a matter of course, no. But he’s still hoping I’ll sleep with him someday so he tells me things. Now talk to me about teleporting. Was it sexy? Did you fuck Random’s brains out after?”
“There is nothing sexy about teleporting.”
“You definitely fucked him, though. You’re blushing. I reiterate that I do not want that dress back.”
Valkyrie pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t have time for this. I’m not out on a lark, Mer. I’m about to steal from the Council so I can try and kill my father and you’re following me so you can talk about boys and—”
“Ha,” Meredith said, a note of triumph in her voice. “So we’re stealing something before murder, then?”
Valkyrie narrowed her gaze. “How did you do that?”
“You’d be surprised the things people will start saying when they want you to shut up about something else. Let me help, Val.”
“No. Leave town.”
Meredith crossed her arms. “No.”
“I am trying to keep all of you safe. Why does no one see that? Why is everyone so damn determined to get dragged into hell with me?”
“Because we care about you. Because you’re not the only one capable of doing things. The rest of us may not be you but we’re not helpless. I don’t really have the right to be pissed because we’re just now friends again, but if I were Siren or Jace or Random, you’d best believe I would be. Does Random even know you’re gone?”
“No. And if you dare tell him and something happens to him I will never forgive you. I don’t have time for this.” The only head start she had on Random was however long he would naturally stay asleep. Drugging him was pointless—his Aspect would just clear it from his system, and the use would alert him to the danger. She hoped he was still mostly tapped out from teleporting them earlier, but the rate at which he regenerated Aspect was as seemingly random as his use of it, so she couldn’t be sure.
She needed to move, and the only expedient way of doing so appeared to be giving Meredith what she wanted. “Fine. If you insist on landing in the Council’s dungeon next to me, get in the damn Jeep. Your car couldn’t drive over a rock without scraping the undercarriage.”
Meredith gave Valkyrie’s vehicle a disapproving wrinkle of her nose, but she tapped the Porsche, which then took on the appearance of a dilapidated Toyota Corolla, and jumped into the Jeep’s passenger seat.
“What’s that phrase?” Meredith asked, her voice entirely too chipper. “Something about good friends bailing you out and best friends helping you bury the body?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. If I may ask, where are you planning on burying Elijah’s body if you do kill him? I should warn you I’m not very good with shovels.”
Who would have thought pretty, perky Meredith would have such a macabre underside? “You’re really stuck on the whole killing thing, aren’t you?”
“What? I’m living my parental-murder fantasies vicariously through you. So fill me in. What are we going to steal? And for love of the goddess, why?”
This was the problem with having people in her life. They constantly wanted to know things. How was it she’d successfully kept her connection to the adnexus under wraps for nearly two decades and in the last twenty-four hours she’d told her lover, the woman who had raised him, and now it seemed she was going to tell her best friend? Because if Meredith insisted on coming, she should know what she was getting herself into.
If Valkyrie had hoped telling Meredith that they were breaking into Council headquarters to steal illegal magic would convince the woman to bail on the excursion, she was sorely mistaken.
“That is fucked up,” Meredith said, her voice still cheerful.
“Thank you for describing my life so succinctly.” Valkyrie pulled the Jeep onto the forest road that led to the Council’s headquarters.
“I can’t decide whose childhood was worse, yours or mine.”
“Is it a competition you’re keen on winning?”
“I’m just trying to cope with the horrors I’ve experienced through the liberal application of humor.”
Valkyrie shifted her gaze from the winding dirt road long enough to give her a dubious look.
“I’m just repeating the explanation my therapist gave me,” Meredith said innocently.
“Does it work?”
“Gallows humor?”
“Therapy. Well, either one, I guess.”
“No to therapy, and sort of on the humor. I mean, I only went to therapy once, but it was boring, and the therapist just lied to me a lot. Sometimes being a Truthfinder sucks.”
“Were you holding hands with the therapist?” Truthfinders required a physical connection to a person to actually tap into their truth-telling abilities.
“As if I needed to. Growing up as a Truthfinder means you can spot most people’s bullshit a million miles away, no Aspect needed. Trust me, she lied a lot.”
Valkyrie pulled up right beside the cabin that served as the Council’s headquarters. She didn’t bother to turn off the lights or kill the engine.
“They don’t have any security?” Meredith asked.
Valkyrie shrugged. “As far as anybody knows, there’s nothing in there to steal. If they put a guard on it, they’d only alert people to the fact that there’s something worth having inside. Besides, if the Council hasn’t unlocked it, the front door doesn’t open for anyone but a councilor.”
“It’s still beyond bizarre that you’re a councilor.”
“I’m not actually a councilor.”
“You know what I mean. So what do you want me to do?”
“Mask my trail so a Tracker can’t find it and drive the getaway car?”
“No way, I’m coming in with you.”
“Meredith, I’d like to think I know what I’m doing, but I am about to steal a magical artifact hidden in a secret room. It will be dangerous. There’s no point in us b
oth going in. If I don’t come back in half an hour, leave.”
The cheery façade slipped and Meredith’s eyes filled unexpectedly with water. “Please don’t die, Val. I don’t—I’m not doing so hot on my own. You dragging me out on your damn recon missions has been the only thing holding me together. I don’t have anyone besides you and I’m a selfish bitch. I don’t want to be alone.”
There was naked truth in Meredith’s voice, in her words. Every emotion Valkyrie had buried too deep to feel—anger and terror and bleak hopelessness—was mirrored on the other woman’s face. They were sisters, her and Meredith. Maybe not by blood, but by experience.
Valkyrie did something she never in a million years would have thought she’d do before that moment. She leaned over the gear shift and hugged Meredith. Meredith clutched her back, so fiercely Valkyrie felt every bony edge of her. Clearly, the woman needed calories from something other than gin. If Valkyrie survived this mess, she was going to sic Random on the woman. His cooking was impossible to resist.
“We both know I’m too mean to die,” Valkyrie said.
Meredith huffed out a laugh, and they broke apart, awkwardly retreating to their own sides of the Jeep.
“And you know you have more than me. You have Jace and Siren.”
“The man I should have married and his wife?”
“They like you,” Valkyrie insisted. “And you have Random, too.”
“Maybe. But they don’t understand me. And as for Random, you’re delusional if you think he’ll ever speak to me again if I let you get killed.”
All this talk of death was making Valkyrie paranoid, making her think of all the things she hadn’t said to Random. “Look, if something does happen to me, tell Random I—”
Meredith’s eyes rounded.
“Oh, never mind.” It would have sounded like a bad movie line anyway. If I don’t make it, tell Random I love him. She jumped out of the Jeep.
“You love him?” Meredith finished.
“Yeah,” Valkyrie said, her throat tight. “That.” She opened the Jeep’s back door, pulled out the backpack holding the box and slung it over her shoulders. She felt the little tendrils of Random’s magic in the lining of the box and it bolstered her, like she had a tiny piece of him here with her.
She stopped in front of the cabin’s door, pulled out a dagger and made a small nick on her chest. She’d never understood why characters in movies slashed open their palms every time they needed blood for something. Instant healing wasn’t a thing for anyone but Siren, so why anyone would go around intentionally injuring one of their most useful appendages was a mystery to Valkyrie.
She rubbed her hand against the nick, smearing blood over her palm, and then pressed it to the cabin door. The magic of the door’s ward-lock reacted to her, tested her, tasted her, the blood on her palm flashing in a hot sizzle before it turned black and crumbled off. The ward-lock clicked open. Valkyrie swept inside and went straight for the door opposite the reception desk. It opened onto the stone stairwell she’d followed earlier that day to reach the Warded Room.
As far as most people knew, the Warded Room was the last stop on the stairwell, the lowest level of the Council’s headquarters. Valkyrie knew better. On the landing she turned left, past the Warded Room to the alcove that housed the faceless statue of Aspect Society’s nameless goddess.
If anyone needed proof that that goddess had been made up from a man’s imagination, she thought those two features should have done it. Nameless and faceless, a blank female slate upon which to write in whatever a man wanted. Typical.
She shrugged the backpack off and set the box on the floor, opened it to reveal the vials of of blood inside. She barely remembered the day that had wedded her fate to the Council’s. She’d only been six, and she’d already been in somewhat of a haze as she came down here.
All she really remembered was that the other councilors had only spoken to her father, as if they hadn’t realized she was even there. They couldn’t have realized she was there, or they never would have let her go into the room below this statue.
How to open the room—that part she remembered. It was as easy as the ward-lock had been, only it required five offerings rather than the one.
She opened each vial and poured the blood over the statue’s head. The cold marble drank the liquid in, red vanishing into the white. She swiped her thumb through the nick on her chest and added her own blood to the goddess’ figure. Her crimson fingerprint faded into the stone.
The ground shuddered. The statue sank below the floor, then slid aside to reveal another, narrower staircase. No lighting illuminated the passageway. She summoned a globe of Aspect light and placed it to hover above her right shoulder. Then she threw the empty blood vials into the backpack, picked up it and the box, and descended.
The staircase was carved so that it brought an individual directly beneath the Warded Room before it turned into a spiral and wound down another twenty feet. The press of the earth was a heavy weight around her. She wasn’t quite claustrophobic but she’d never like small, deep spaces, and she had a feeling that dislike could be traced back to the room that resided at the staircase’s base.
It was small and circular, approximately six feet in diameter, its only feature the stone pedestal at its center. The adnexus rested atop the pedestal, a golden scepter with a dark, blood-red jewel at its apex.
As in the Warded Room, symbols were carved on the room’s walls and floor, a continuation of those above. Here, like there, this space was built to contain and shroud, to hide both the existence and nature of the magic that dwelled within it.
That magic reached for her, thin, smoke-gray ropes unfurling from the scepter. Valkyrie snapped a shielding ward into place on instinct but it did no good. The magic that came for her was of her, in part, and it slid through her barriers as if her shield was no more than mist.
The tendrils curled over and around her, dark and viscous. Her fingers twitched, wanting the reassuring hilt of a weapon in her hand, but a blade would do her no good here. This was not the kind of magic that could be fought with the physical. And she didn’t need to fight it. All she needed to do was get the scepter in the damn box.
She set the box on the floor and flipped the lid open. Then, because she was Valkyrie and she needed a blade in her hand whether it was useful or not, she wrapped her left fist around the sword pendant that rested in the hollow of her throat and stepped up to the pedestal.
The tendrils of magic undulated more wildly about her, the adnexus excited by her nearness. Five items clung to the scepter’s shaft, held there like metal to a magnet. She recognized the one she must have given it all those years ago. A rose-gold band with a star sapphire at its center. It had been her mother’s, and though she’d been too young for such jewelry, she’d liked it so much that her mother had given it to her.
She’d thought she’d lost it. All she’d known was that she’d woken up one morning to find it gone, and when her mother had asked her where it was, she hadn’t had an answer.
She reached for the ring. She wanted to rip it free, but as soon as her fingers brushed the cool metal she felt a jolt of connection—to the scepter, to the ring, to the adnexus. If she removed the ring, she removed her connection to the Council. If she removed her connection, she died.
So even though her fingers ached to reclaim what was hers, she stretched them wide and grasped the scepter instead. She tensed, expecting the tendrils of the scepter’s power to strike at her. Instead, they ceased their wild roving and brushed against her almost lovingly, leaving oily streaks against her skin. It was unpleasant, but it wasn’t the annihilating force she’d expected after Ella had warned her that no one individual was meant to hold the adnexus.
She turned to place the scepter in the box. As she did, her Aspect slid over it, and through it she felt the adnexus’s connection to the other councilors. The knowledge hit her, so simple she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before, and she paused with her hand
over the box: she held the Council’s adnexus. She’d been so focused on discovering a way to dissolve her own attachment to them that she hadn’t considered simply dissolving theirs.
She hadn’t known it could be done before she’d held the scepter in her hands. Without the scepter, it would indeed take four councilors acting in concert to destroy a fifth. But she held the physical embodiment of their connection, held the magic that made their bond possible. Magic they had all agreed to be bound with. Their promises, the physical tokens of their willingness, were all here. She could simply...take them.
The tendrils of the adnexus stroked against her face, whispering how the feat might be accomplished, whispering that she was the one who deserved this power. She had been tricked into it when she was too young to understand its meaning. She had suffered as it took from her again and again to heal the wounds of others and she had never once been on the receiving end of its benefits. Even now, the Council would try to kill her if they came to know of her connection to them.
Why not kill them, instead? Pull their power into the scepter? She felt the points where the others were bound, felt the edges of their Aspects, and sipped at them. Their Aspect flowed into the scepter and then into her, a heady mixture that hit her like a jolt of adrenaline-soaked euphoria.
This was the power she needed, the piece of the plan she’d been missing. Draining the councilors wouldn’t kill Elijah, because he wasn’t bound to them correctly, but with the power of the Council contained in one vessel, in her, she could not fail to end Elijah and Danvers. Random would be safe.
Random.
Reality slammed into her, cold and hard. She was sucking the Council’s power into the scepter. They would all die. Random’s aunt would die. He would never look at her the same. He would never want to touch her again.
She halted the influx of the Council’s Aspect and dropped the scepter—or tried to. The power of the adnexus flowed over her, coercing, promising. Lassitude stole over her.
She shouldn’t drop the scepter. It was the way to gain her freedom, to save Random. He wouldn’t need to know how the Council had died, wouldn’t need to know—
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