“I’m the reason he didn’t go after Ren,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “He didn’t want to risk leaving me and Mom. He thought he’d done enough damage to Corrine, but he never got over it. He wanted to get Ren back so much. It’s all in here.”
She rustled the pages.
“I’m sure he did,” I said. “But I don’t blame him for wanting to protect you. Ren didn’t know anything about this. He still doesn’t know the truth. He thinks Emile is his father.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why we have to go back.”
“I don’t know if he’ll even want us to come for him,” I said, remembering the way he’d thrown me across the room. “He might want to stay. Like the others.”
“Do you really believe that?” she asked.
I didn’t answer; I couldn’t. The truth was I didn’t know. I wanted to believe that Ren could be saved, but I’d seen how the Keepers could break Guardians. My own brother had almost killed us because he’d been manipulated by our old masters. Could Ren believe anything other than what they’d told him about his past?
My gut kept twisting and untwisting.
Adne’s gaze pierced me. “We have to try.”
I sucked in a quick breath. “Adne, how can we? We barely made it out.”
She flipped over, sitting up and swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. “That’s why it will work now. There’s no way they’ll expect us—and we’re only trying to find Ren.”
“But how—”
“We’ll locate him. I’ll open an inside door like last time. We’ll grab him, come back. It will be over.” The words tumbled out of her mouth. Her eyes were shining.
“Locate him . . . how?”
She cleared her throat, casting her eyes down. “Um. I noticed. Well. That ring you’re wearing.”
“My ring?” My hands went to my chest, the fingers of my unadorned hand covering the others.
“You were promised to him, right?” She didn’t look up. “Did he give that to you?”
“Yes, but . . .” I was about to explain that rings weren’t part of a Guardian union. That Ren had given it to me on his own because he was . . . because he was what? Trying to tell me he loved me? Showing me he wanted our union to mean something more than following orders? It was as if my own thoughts threw me against a brick wall, leaving me breathless. I couldn’t finish.
Adne didn’t notice. “Then we can use it to find him.”
I ignored the pounding of my own heart, trying to focus on what she was saying. “The ring can find him?”
“If he gave it to you, it will have a connection to him. I can use that to pinpoint his location.”
“How is that possible?”
“The ring will hold a thread,” she said, looking up at me with a thin smile. “We follow the thread through Vail until it reaches him. That’s when I’ll open the door.”
“Does that really work?”
“It’s how we found Shay.”
“Oh.” My palms had begun to sweat.
“I know it’s a big risk, Calla,” she said. “But from what I’ve seen—and to be honest, from how freaked out Shay gets about him—I know you care about Ren. You can’t want to leave him there.”
I managed to get out a cracking whisper. “I don’t.”
She stood up, twisting her fingers through her long mahogany tresses. “He’s my brother, but I don’t know him. This isn’t about me. It’s about my dad.”
She took the last page of the letter, handing it to me.
Only two words had been inked on the ivory surface.
Save him.
My eyes were burning. I looked up at Adne, the page shaking in my hands.
“I have to do this, Calla,” she said. “Will you help me?”
The trembling had moved up my arms and into my shoulders, but I nodded.
She blew out a long sigh, her muscles relaxing.
“Thank God.”
“Who else?” I asked, stretching the page toward her. I couldn’t look at it any longer, those lonely words staring up at me, tearing a hole in my own heart.
“No one else.” She frowned. “It’s just you and me.”
“You think we can pull this off?” The odds weren’t in our favor, even if we had help.
“No one else will let us get away with this,” Adne said. “If we mention it to anyone, we’ll have a chaperone 24/7.”
I frowned. “Maybe some of my pack.”
“No,” Adne said. “We only have a little time to spare. We need to move now; we can’t afford to have a recruiting session.”
“What do you mean now?” The hairs on my neck were standing up.
“I mean today,” she said. “Well, tonight, back in Vail.”
“That’s insane!” I couldn’t stop myself from shouting.
“Things will be a mess back there and the Keepers are probably still focused on Denver.” Her deadly calm voice made me gape at her. “We can slip in and out without notice, probably more easily than we could at any other time.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Okay, that was logic. Crazy logic, but still.
“Can’t we at least take Connor?” I asked. I’d feel better with another fighter along, and Connor already knew about Ren, plus he seemed to back Adne up on almost everything.
She shuddered. “No way. He’s the last person I could ask to help us.”
Fear made me lash out. “What the hell is up with you guys anyway?”
She took a couple steps back. “What do you mean?”
“Half the time you’re fighting, but then I think you’re secretly making out or something!”
She blushed, then went pale, finally turning her back on me. “There’s nothing going on with Connor and me.”
I pressed on. “That isn’t the way he acts.”
When she turned around, her eyes were hard. “Calla, you are coming in mid-scene here. You have to understand Connor and me to get what that’s all about.”
“How about reviewing the first act for me?” I asked.
She shrugged, walking to the stereo to flip through her CDs. “I was eleven when my mother died.”
I straightened abruptly, unsure how to respond. I’d been goading her and now we were talking about dead mothers.
Adne continued, “Connor came to the Haldis team right after she died.”
I came to stand beside her. “Adne, I’m sorry. You don’t have to explain.”
She ignored me, fiddling with the stereo, skipping several tracks on the album. “He was only sixteen. Not unusually young for a first assignment as a Striker, but he was by far the closest person to my age. He brought me through the worst of it. He never left me alone. Teased me constantly. I went through a terrible awkward phase the same time we lost my mom. All arms and legs and no ability to use them properly. Connor gave me a hard time, but I needed it. Kept me from thinking about my mother. He didn’t give me a moment’s peace.”
She grimaced. “And a moment’s peace would have killed me then.”
I watched emotions run over her face like passing shadows. She closed her eyes, smiling.
“At night he would sneak into my room and tell me ridiculous stories about the Roving Academy until I fell asleep. It kept the shadows at bay. Being alone at night would have been unbearable. He was my best friend, all the way up until I started training here.”
“Did you have to come back to Denver for your assignment?”
“No.” She didn’t look at me. “But I wanted to. The Academy trained me to be a Weaver. I never wanted to be anywhere but Denver. The Haldis team has always been my family. I belong with them.”
She dropped her head, her dark hair veiling her face.
A moment later she laughed, wholly herself once more. “The first thing Connor said when I saw him after he’d been at the outpost for a few months was, ‘I see you got breasts, congratulations. I hope you know how to use them.’ ”
“You’re trying to tell me that’s hi
s way of just being friends?” I asked.
She arched an eyebrow at me. “Do you take his comments as a serious come-on?”
“I guess not,” I said. She was right, sort of, but somehow the way Connor hit on other girls seemed different than what he said to Adne.
“Exactly. With Connor that sort of talk is just his MO.” She smiled at me, but her words had a nervous edge. “Though Silas did make it worse.”
“How’s that?”
“I lost a bet with him and he made me kiss Connor.” A slow flush climbed up her cheeks. “It definitely gave Connor more ammunition to use against me.” She reflexively squared her shoulders, as though ready for a challenge.
I smiled at her aggressive posture. “Why would Silas make you kiss Connor?”
Her laugh darkened. “Because Silas is a brilliant intellectual but not that creative. He hates Connor and so couldn’t imagine anything worse for himself than having to kiss Connor. So he made me do it.”
“I see,” I said, scrutinizing her face. “And you kissed Connor?”
“Yes.”
“And?” I couldn’t see her expression as she turned her back on me, searching for a particular track on the Raveonettes album. She remained silent as the song began, swaying to the music.
“And nothing.” She held her palm out. “Connor’s not coming. You gonna hand over that ring?”
I ground my teeth but pulled the ring off my finger, dropping it into her grasp. With its weight absent, my hand felt strangely bare. I clasped my fingers tight, trying to ignore the emptiness that made my bones ache.
Adne drew a single skean from her belt, resting its sharp point on the edge of the white gold band. She closed her eyes, drawing slow, long breaths. I stood perfectly still, not daring to take any breaths of my own. The air around her seemed to thicken, shimmering as if someone had flung gold dust over her.
Very slowly she began to draw the skean away from the ring. As her hand moved, a single, thin line pulled away with it. A tiny golden strand.
Her eyes fluttered open and she smiled slowly. “There it is.”
The breath I’d been holding whooshed out of me.
She glanced at me. “It’s okay, Calla. I know what I’m doing. A location thread weaves a window; we can’t go through it, but we can see what’s on the other side. Now we’ll be able to find him.”
I nodded, but my legs were shaking. “What if he’s not alone?”
“That’s the point,” she said, handing the ring back to me. “The thread will lead us to him, and we’ll have enough time to decide if he’s in a place we can get to him or if we have to wait. Okay?”
“Okay.” I was relieved she wasn’t insisting that the two of us could take on an entire Guardian pack.
Adne began to move her arm in a slow circle, around and around. The golden thread grew longer, swirling into a slender spiral in front of her.
“You want to watch this?”
I sidled closer, peering over her shoulder. The spiral was shimmering, stretching into a slender cone. In the distance I could see the other end of the thread moving, lengthening. I began to see shapes flashing by the spiral, blurry and unfocused. It was as if we were soaring through the air at incredible speed, moving too quickly to make any sense of the terrain. I squinted into the spiral, which now pulsed with bursts of light, trying to glimpse anything familiar. I thought I made out a tree, then a steep rock face. The outline of buildings. All at once the spiral shuddered, the golden light clearing, giving us a view of a pine-covered mountain slope, wilderness interrupted by a swath of clear-cut forest.
“Do you recognize anything?” Adne asked.
I nodded, though my body felt like it was turning to stone.
“He’s here,” she said, peering into the spiral. “But I don’t know if he’s alone. Considering it’s the middle of the night in Vail, anyone who’s there would be sleeping.”
“He’s alone,” I murmured.
“Are you sure?” She glanced at me, frowning. “If you are, I should open a door right away.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the window Adne’s thread had created, leading us to this place. To Ren.
“I’m sure.”
Adne closed the door and turned to me.
“What is this place?”
Without the gleam of the portal, the sliver of moon hanging above us cast only a little light on the clearing. Half-built structures formed a semicircle around a paved cul-de-sac with a dry fountain at its center. Foundations had been poured, now only gaping holes in the ground, and wooden beams rose at different heights toward the night sky. Here was the legacy of the Haldis pack: skeletons of houses, carcasses of lives that might have been.
My throat felt like it had been stuffed with cotton. I had to clear it several times before I could speak.
“This was where my pack was supposed to live. We were going to move here after the union.”
“Really?” She frowned, and then her eyes went wide. “Oh.”
I bit my lip, nodding.
“Where do you think he is?” she asked, gazing at the silent construction site.
I pointed at a structure on the crest of a short rise, the only completed house on the lot.
“There.”
“Are you sure?”
“That was supposed to be our house,” I said, unable to look at her.
“Oh, man.” She put her hand on my arm. “Calla, I . . . I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay,” I said, though I didn’t feel as confident as I tried to sound. “No one else will be here. This place has been abandoned. The pack it was being built for no longer exists.”
“Right,” she said. “So how do you want to do this?”
I stared at her. “You don’t have a plan?”
“My plan was to find my brother. I did. The end.”
“But we have to convince him to come back!” I couldn’t believe I was managing to whisper, considering my rising panic.
“That’s why I brought you along,” she said, gazing around the abandoned plots. “And was that the right call or what?”
I bared sharp canines at her, but I didn’t argue, turning back to gaze at the house fifty yards away.
“If I were to suggest a plan,” Adne said slowly, “I’d say you should go talk to him. Howl if you get in trouble. Or scream. Whatever works.”
“Thanks,” I said, sparing her a dark look.
“I’d be happy to go,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “But he doesn’t know me. You’re the one he cares about. You’re the one who can bring him around if he thinks the Keepers are telling the truth. You are the only one, Calla.”
“I know.” The reality of this scene was settling into my bones, making them ache. This was the only chance I had to make up for leaving Ren behind. If I ever could.
Cold winter air covered my body like a cloak. Its chill slipped beneath my skin, restless, already battling the tiny spark of hope crackling in my veins. In the short time since I’d joined the Searchers, I learned the true cost of the Witches’ War. Its casualties no longer strangers—Lydia, Corrine, Monroe, my mother, even Ansel—the weight of their deaths and my brother’s loss were now chained to me like an anchor threatening to drown me in a dark ocean of fear and regret.
This place was as quiet as that kind of death. Choked with the skeletal remains of my former life, casting twisted, ghoulish shadows. They posed no real threat—only snatches of the past, painful memories that clung to me like cobwebs.
Hope was real. Burning brighter than the stars that hung above us in this empty winter night. Corrine and Monroe were gone. They’d sacrificed everything for their son. And he was here. It was too late for them, but Ren could still be saved. And I was the only one who could save him.
This is only about love.
He was out there. Alone. Waiting for me in a house where only the ghosts of our past were welcome.
Staring at the wreckage of the life we could have had, I knew it wasn’t a
bout love or Shay or the Searchers now. It was about sacrifice—and redemption, loss that could have new meaning.
Hope. A second chance. Ren could help us win this war. Together we could make the blood, the grief, the pain worth something. I knew I couldn’t leave him behind again. Not now and not ever. Even if it meant I’d end up sacrificing myself as well.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Three cheers for the Wolfsbane pack! Charlie Olsen, Richard Pine, Lyndsey Blessing, and the fabulous team at InkWell Management have been priceless navigators, always keeping this ship on course. Without the wit and wisdom of Michael Green, my sojourn in the world of publishing wouldn’t be half as enjoyable. The insight and sharp eye of Jill Santopolo deftly shaped this book into beautiful form. Jill—thanks for sharing adventures in writing and trapeze with me! Penguin Young Readers Group have become like family: Don Weisberg, Jennifer Haller, Emily Romero, Erin Dempsey, Shanta Newlin, Jackie Engel, Linda McCarthy, Katrina Damkoehler, Amy Wu, Felicia Frazier, Scottie Bowditch, Courtney Wood, Anna Jarzab, Julia Johnson, and all the fantastic sales reps. Thank you for the work you do and for cheering me on.
So many labors of love made this book possible. Thanks, always, to my amazing critique partner Lisa Desrochers. One of the benefits of being a writer is gaining so many exceptional writing friends: Cynthia Leitich Smith, Becca Fitzpatrick, and Kiersten White—I’m so grateful for your kindness and enthusiasm. To my parents, Darrel and Patricia Robertson, for possibly being even more excited about my books than I am. For my brother, Garth, for never letting me give up. And for Will, who lit a fire inside me that will never go out.
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