Something that felt like it was getting more and more desperate.
“I can ask Liv again, if she knows anything,” Pierce offered.
“As if she’d help me.”
“She’s not that bad.”
I shot him a look. “Who else would bother kidnapping a Vila?”
He frowned out the windshield. “Anyone who has discovered magic is real. Government? Cult? Government cult?”
I shivered. I’d take a Renard any day. “So maybe we’re being framed. But by who? And why?”
“Jackson’s in up to his eyeballs,” he said. “But he can’t afford to rent a house or whatever.”
“That’s my fault. I shot him with an arrow.”
“Because he was being a dick all on his own, remember? I don’t blame you for that, Ana. I’ll follow Jackson and see what I can find out.”
“You have to be careful, Pierce. The Renards aren’t good like you.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not that good.”
He totally was. And only a girl raised in the middle of a blood feud would see it as clearly as I did. I touched his arm. “Be extra careful.”
“I’ll be fine. I’m not magic, remember?”
He felt pretty magical to me.
I had to look away because I suddenly felt like blushing. For no good reason. He reached over to squeeze my hand but it was quick, friendly. I couldn’t read it. Should I even be reading into it? The person I’d usually ask about this sort of thing was Pierce.
“Let’s go through this logically,” I said, a little too loudly. “What’s the first weird thing that happened?” Besides the fact that I wanted him to still be holding my hand.
“Jackson?”
“Was that odd or just unlucky?” I thought back. “Jamie having her hair cut off at her own party was pretty strange. Even if her ex did cop to it.” I touched my own hair. “And it’s topical.”
“Topical? You’re like a walking thesis paper.”
“You have no idea.”
“I guess we should start there then. But don’t get your hopes up.”
He drove us to Jamie’s house, hiding his truck under a copse of cedar. “This is going to be really awkward if we get caught. You’d better post my bail.”
We scaled the wooden fence and tried not to fall into gopher holes or coyote dens as we made our way around the barn toward the pond. We went into the trees where he and the others had gone to find Jamie’s attacker. Dried leaves and pine cones crunched under our feet. Pierce stopped, crouching down to get a better look at the ground. “There,” he said. “See that? She came out of the woods over here, but there are shoe prints leading back the other way. This isn’t exactly a high-traffic area. They’re probably from the party.”
“If you say so.” I wouldn’t have seen anything if he hadn’t pointed it out. “Now what?”
“Now we follow them. If Jamie’s ex cut her hair at the party, why would he take off into the fields instead of back toward the road and his car?”
We followed the tracks into the back field. Well, Pierce followed the tracks and I followed him. The dried remains of a soybean crop rattled against our knees. Pierce pointed. “Something went through there. Might be deer, but let’s track it anyway.”
We crossed through the field to the back of the lot kitty-corner to Jamie’s farm. There were more soybeans and then a grove of trees where we lost the trail. The ground was moist and spongy, and the branches poked at us. The remains of an old barn slumbered in the long grass. “Look familiar?” Pierce asked.
I shook my head. “No, not really. You?”
“Nope. Let’s get closer.”
The house was a standard red brick bungalow. The porch was littered with pine needles, but there was nothing else to hint at the inhabitants, no lawn furniture or water bowls for pets. There was no sound, no movement. No lock on the sliding glass door.
The living room had a couch and broken venetian blinds but nothing else. There were no books on the shelves, no television, no racks of DVDs. There was an empty roll of packing tape on the carpet. I opened closets and drawers, but there wasn’t a single scrap of anything personal left behind that I could use as a clue, nothing but a little plastic Spiderman figure caught behind a bedroom door. No cousins in the basement, no cousins anywhere. Nothing to link them to the Renards and nothing to link them to anyone else.
Just an empty house.
“Figures.”
We went back to the truck, defeated. When Pierce climbed up into the driver’s seat, I noticed the blue and purple splotches crawling up his shoulder. It looked painful. I couldn’t fix anything else right now, but I could fix that. “What happened to your arm?”
“Jackson’s working out now,” he said. “Or watching YouTube Ultimate Fighter videos or something. He punches like a freight train.”
“Let me fix it.”
He touched my chin-length hair. “What about this?”
“I have a little magic left since they didn’t shave off all my hair.” Not much left, but some. Enough for this. Always enough for Pierce.
I pulled out a few strands and pressed them gently to the inflamed skin, along with arnica cream I had in my bag. “My apple tree, my brightness; ’Tis time we were together; For I smell of the earth; And am stained by the weather.”
The heat gathered until it glowed faintly through my hand, like a flashlight pressed against the skin. He sucked in a breath as the bruises washed away, fading to the last yellow-green stage of healing. An impossible wind teased at us, sliding between us.
“Thank you.” He touched his forehead to mine. “I miss hearing you sing.”
He was supposed to. That’s how magic worked.
I clamped my mouth shut on the next verse.
Chapter Ten
Ana
The days passed in a blur. I went to classes. I worried. I turned down Aunt Felicity’s herbal drinks designed to calm the nerves, because as far as I could tell they were made entirely of pink sugar and weeds picked off the lawn. We developed a rhythm, and even though it wasn’t a good rhythm, it was better than nothing.
I had Pierce back and that made everything else bearable. Even if I’d fed him magic cupcakes and now he didn’t seem to notice if I was standing too close or if our arms brushed. I noticed. We didn’t talk about Edward, beyond the fact that I’d mentioned we were no longer dating. We didn’t talk about Pierce kissing me, either. It was like he’d forgotten, but I still felt it there, sparking between us.
Luckily, or unluckily, we had about a hundred other things to talk about.
Starting with Jamie.
We cornered her in the hall before the first bell. “I have a quick question for you.”
She closed her locker door. “Okay.”
And I had nothing. I could parkour up her locker, run a fox to ground, sing up the wind, or smear magic blood on my face, but I drew a blank on subtle investigation techniques. What could I say? Swans didn’t generally do subtle.
“My brother lost my cell phone,” Pierce said smoothly. “At your party. We’ve looked everywhere, but he went off into the fields pretty far with a girl. Any chance you know who lives in the house just behind yours?”
I kept discovering these new facets to Pierce, even when I thought I’d known him as well as anyone could. He had this layer of confidence and calm that translated even under the worst my family threw at him. It was pretty amazing. Especially since I was pretty sure my technique would be to shake Jamie until she said something useful.
“It’s totally embarrassing,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Ms. Pritchard moved in there a few months back. You don’t know how awkward it is to live that close to a teacher.”
I couldn’t hear anything but my blood pounding in my ears. When Jamie went back to class, Pierce touched my arm. “Ana.”
“It fits,” I said finally, as I connected the dots in my head. “She was there when I took out Jackson fighting over Samuel. She was there when we found the swa
n. And at the dance. She’s part of this somehow.”
I was about to be expelled for dropkicking a teacher.
“Shit, wait up.” Pierce hurried after me, realizing where I was going. Ms. Pritchard taught history in the classroom at the end of the hall. The one with the window overlooking the steps to the student parking lot. Who knew what else she’d seen?
I barged inside and stumbled to a halt when everyone turned to stare at me, including Mr. Bhandari who was, most decidedly, not Ms. Pritchard. “Oops,” I said weakly. I turned and fled without bothering with an explanation. Whispers trailed behind me.
“We’ll come back at lunch and search her desk,” I told Pierce, marshaling my more bloodthirsty thoughts. I pinched the bridge of my nose, picturing swans flying overhead, able to pick out the rest of the pattern I was missing. “I have an idea!”
Pierce groaned. “I’m afraid to ask.”
“We’re doing a feature on our new teacher Ms. Pritchard for the school paper,” I informed him. “Which means we can ask lots of rude, nosy questions.”
The receptionist was at her desk in the main office, looking bored. I smiled my most academic smile. “Hi, sorry to bother you,” I said. “We’re doing a piece on Ms. Pritchard for the paper. Can we ask you a few questions?”
“Sure, honey.”
“What’s her first name? And is she local? Did she go to this high school when she was younger?” There, that sounded vaguely journalistic, didn’t it? So I didn’t take journalism and I didn’t even know where the school paper office was; it would have to do. The receptionist didn’t seem to think I was insane, so that helped.
We found out her first name was Leila. She had a son, around eight years old. She wasn’t from the area and really there were no other details. She was friendly and polite and she made the best coffee in the teacher’s lounge. She had no family in town. And she was out sick with the flu, possibly all week.
“She’s not sick,” a teacher I didn’t recognize corrected from where she was fiddling with the office printer. “She quit.”
“Do you know why?” Pierce stood behind me, brushing the small of my back. The heat of his body was grounding.
“No idea.”
The lunch bell rang and we decided to question Reed, Jamie’s ex, next. He just kept looking from side to side, guilty as hell. Pierce frowned at him. “Dude, you’re a terrible liar.”
It’s not like Reed was the one skipping classes to interrogate people. Reed shifted from foot to foot. “I have to go.”
I blocked his way. “It’s not like we can give you detention. We just need to know why you’d chop her hair off. It’s kinda weird.”
He looked at Pierce again, looked away. Pierce narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“And I don’t want to hurt you,” I returned pleasantly. “But I’m having a really bad week, Reed. Trust me, you don’t want to piss me off right now.”
He sighed. “Jackson paid me a hundred bucks to take the blame. I was drunk and jealous and it seemed like a good idea at the time.” We stared at him. He took a step back as if we were about to take a swing at him. “I changed my mind when I sobered up, but Jackson nearly dislocated my shoulder.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” He hesitated uncertainly, as if I was a teacher who had to dismiss him formally before he could leave. I waved my hands. “Shoo.”
He took off at a run.
Pierce raised his eyebrows at me. “Where the hell would Jackson get a hundred bucks?”
We waited until the hall was clear before slipping into Pritchard’s classroom. I went straight to the desk. It was covered in textbooks and pens. The top drawer held more pens and a pound of paperclips. I didn’t find anything personal, just ordinary teacher detritus.
“Nothing,” I said.
Pierce put his arms around me. I let myself lean into his hug. I felt right for the first time in days. I hoped he never let go.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “I promise.”
When I found Rosalita she was practically camped inside the fridge at Cygnet House. She raised her eyebrows over a stack of empty puddings cups. “What? I’m stress eating, back off.”
Sonnet rolled her eyes. “You should try stress-working-out instead. It’s more helpful.”
“Shut up.”
“There’s something we have to do,” I said.
“If it doesn’t involve chocolate I’m not interested.” She opened another pudding, shoving a huge spoonful into her mouth. “Samuel is being an ass.”
“Think breaking into the school would distract you?” I asked, biting into an apple.
She paused. “Actually, that sounds like fun.”
“Good, wear black.”
“Black is not my color.”
“How about prison jumpsuits? Is that your color?” Sonnet asked drily. “Because this is extremely illegal.”
Rosalita didn’t look worried. The security guard was straight and male, and she already knew she could sing her way out of trouble. He let her off campus all the time, even though it was against the rules. Still, she went to change and tied her hair up in a ponytail.
“Are the aunts okay with this?” Rosalita asked as we climbed into the van. “If I decide to care about that?” She took the front seat because she always did, and Sonnet drove because she always did, even though she hated the van. She wanted a muscle car, always had.
“Aunt Felicity caught me and fluttered, but she always flutters,” I said. She’d threatened me with wings that wouldn’t grow and cloaks stolen by foxes in the middle of the night. I didn’t tell her that was an empty threat. Instead I snuck away while Agrippina dosed her with whiskey. “Anyway, you’re the best with computers, and we need to find anything on Pritchard before it’s deleted or shredded or whatever they do when teachers quit abruptly.”
Rosalita looked smug. “I am pretty good.”
Sonnet and I exchanged a glance in the rearview mirror. I spent the rest of the ride clutching the holy-crap-bar as she decimated the speed limit with extreme prejudice. She only slowed down when we got to the edge of town and I reminded her that getting a speeding ticket right now would be the opposite of stealthy. I googled how to pick various kinds of locks until Sonnet pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine. “Arrows at the ready,” she said. “We already know this is enemy territory.”
Rosalita shivered but her eyes were narrowed. “If they try anything again I will shove an arrow straight up their—”
“Just learn to duck tranquilizer darts first,” Sonnet cut her off. “And stow your pride. This is serious.”
“I was trained just as well as you were,” she snapped back.
“Prove it.”
I sighed. “Would you both shut it? This is the least James Bond thing we’ve ever done, arguing before we even start.” I pulled my hoodie up over my hair and double-checked my pocket knives, the arrows in my bag, and one of the tranquilizer guns Aunt Aisha had ordered after I was kidnapped. No one asked her where she got them.
The school was dark, as expected, except for the security lights. There were no other cars parked inconspicuously or silhouettes of hunters on the roof. I didn’t know if they even did that. “Ready?”
Rosalita and I went first, Sonnet following with an arrow nocked to her bow. We circled around back, trying all of the doors. I wasn’t relying on an overlooked unlocked one, but I double-checked anyway. All of the windows were secured too. We ended up having to break one. Sonnet wrapped her elbow in her jacket and took great pleasure in the crack and clatter of glass. We pulled our hoods tight, covering our hair and faces. I didn’t know where the security cameras were, but I assumed there were a few, even in a small country town school. Luckily for us, there was no alarm system and no security guard at night.
The school echoed around us as we headed for the main office. The emergency exit lights over the doors and lockers gleamed off the linoleum floor tiles. The furnac
e hummed loudly with no other noises to mask it. Sonnet closed the window blinds in the office and then took up her position on the threshold. We ducked into the principal’s office attached to the main reception area.
Rosalita booted up the computer on the desk while I went to the file cabinet. I checked the websites I’d saved and ended up using my pocket knife to jiggle the lock open. Rosalita muttered and typed so fast on the keyboard she sounded like she was shaking a rattle. I opened up all of the drawers, but most of them were filled with permission slips and letters to the parents and report card templates.
“Pritchard takes a lot of personal days,” Rosalita said. “But I can’t really find anything suspicious.”
Frustrated, I slammed the last drawer shut. “There has to be something about someone somewhere!”
“Teacher’s lounge,” Sonnet called out. “They hang out and gossip or whatever. And keep it down, ninja.”
“You’re homeschooled,” Rosalita pointed out. “By an English literature fanatic nurse. How would you even know that?”
“I watch movies.”
We shut everything down and went up to the second floor. The lounge smelled like old coffee and cherry disinfectant. We searched everything, including the couch cushions. It wasn’t until I noticed the message caddy behind the door that we had any luck. The cubbyhole with Ms. Pritchard’s name had only a note with the dates of the next parent-teacher meeting and a scrap of paper stuck in the back corner. It looked vaguely familiar.
“Got something,” I said, wiggling it out. I finally got it free and held it up. It was a parking pass for the hospital. Aunt Agrippina’s car was littered with them. My stomach clenched nervously, positive this was something, even if I didn’t know what. “On the night of the dance, those guys who attacked us took off toward the hospital.”