None of them spoke to her as they loaded into Eli’s car and drove back toward the apartment, and this fact alone told Nina she’d offended them by not allowing them to make their case. Am I being stubborn? She shook the thought away angrily. It shouldn’t matter, because this is my life. My heritage and my community. It’s my destiny, she thought. The only thing I’ve ever been meant to do.
Eli’s Porsche wove through traffic quickly, and they reached the apartment in what felt like no time at all. As they slid into a parking space, Nina was hit with an abrupt chill, as if she’d been pushed into an industrial freezer and locked inside. It was more than cold—the chill bit at her muscles and tugged at her heart, instilling her with an inexplicable sense of fear and foreboding. As everyone unbuckled their seatbelts, the feeling intensified, and her breathing quickened.
“Wait,” she said aloud, sounding as desperate and alarmed as she felt. “Don’t get out.”
Rachel touched her arm and peered at her closely. “What’s up? You look... spooked.”
Nina couldn’t put words to what was happening in her body and mind. Something was pressing just at the edges of her consciousness, and as she tried to see what it was, it slipped away, out of reach, only to come back and hover on the edge of her awareness again. She could see flashes of images, but they were too quick to focus on, and she was forced to build a puzzle from the jagged pieces her brain was trying to hold on to. There was one especially familiar piece, one she saw almost every day—what was it? A window? A wall?
Pryce and Eli had both turned around, clearly worried.
“Miss Henry,” Pryce said gently, his voice sounding like it was coming from the end of a long tunnel. “You’re shaking. What’s going on?”
The door. The front door, she thought—and just like that, she saw it clearly in her mind. I’m at the front door.
(But you’re in the car, a small voice said. You can’t even see the door so clearly from here, it’s too far away.)
But she could see the door clearly right now, in her mind; not only could she see the door, she could smell the coat of fresh paint on the railing outside, put there days before after the tenants complained of its ragged appearance. Something was wrong with the door, however; it seemed lower, shorter than before. Then the view of the door was obscured by a gloved hand, one that was decidedly not hers, and also likely male, due to its size and shape. Nina watched as the hand slipped a silver tool into her lock and fiddled with it, remaining steady and sure until the door popped open.
What’s happening? Is someone breaking into my house?
The door opened and she took in the hole the enormous arrow had left in the drywall. She felt a frisson of fear, remembering how close it had come—but she also felt a surge of amusement come along with it. It felt alien, not only because she was far from entertained by the event, but because it didn’t feel like her emotion at all. It felt like she was in someone else’s body, watching them go through the motions of breaking into her apartment.
Why?
The next moment, the picture changed. Again, she was experiencing feelings and sensations that seemed separate from her. She was sitting on the couch, vaguely uncomfortable with the way her body was positioned, and there was a faint ticking sound in the distance. For some reason, that ticking sound filled her with a panic so intense that she couldn’t breathe for a moment, then she was standing up, heading for the door, not caring if she fulfilled her mission or not—
(Mission?)
—but the fireball consumed her before she got a chance. It was born from the ear-splitting roar that took over her hearing a second before, and the white flames engulfed her, melted her vocal chords before she could cry out in agony.
“Nina! Nina, wake up!”
Someone slapped her, hard, across the face, wiping the vision from her eyes with the help of a pulse of their own power. Stars blossomed before her pupils, and the car slowly faded back into existence as she came to, covered in sweat and breathing as fast as her lungs could manage. Rachel’s face was as white as a sheet, and she was sprinkling something over her head that smelled like sage and roses. Her homemade reviving powder, Nina realized.
“It worked,” Eli said tensely. “Thank God.” He leaned close to her from the driver’s seat. “Your eyes are back to normal, too. They turned grey. Solid grey.”
Nina looked around at the faces turned toward her, trying to understand what had just happened. “What... what?”
“You were screaming,” Rachel said, her voice shaking. “You sounded like you were being killed.”
Nina closed her eyes and remembered the ball of fire. “I was. I was being killed.” She opened her eyes in time to see them trading horrified looks, and instead of being discouraged, she launched into an explanation of what she’d just seen. I have to make them understand.
“I was opening the door to the apartment, only it wasn’t me. It was someone taller, and it was probably a man. I walked in—broke in, actually—and sat down, and a second later I heard ticking.” She swallowed, wincing at the rawness of her throat. “I tried to run, but there was an explosion. I felt it melting parts of me.”
Everyone was speechless. Rachel put her reviving powder away and took out a jar of something that smelled like mint, smearing it on Nina’s lips before she could refuse it. A wave of calm washed over her, and her heartbeat slowed to normal; she sat up in her seat and looked around at them, trying to see if they had any idea of what had just happened to her.
“What was it?” she demanded, looking from Eli to Pryce.
The men looked at each other, fear written in their gazes. When they looked back, they only shrugged.
“You can’t have been asleep,” Eli said. “Your eyes were wide open.”
“Was it a vision?” Rachel asked. “Our mom can get visions around her crystal ball. Her eyes run white when it happens.”
“We don’t have clairvoyance anymore,” Eli said, shaking his head.
“Not for centuries,” Pryce added thoughtfully. He was looking closely at her again, and Nina felt that he was analyzing her. “Not true clairvoyance.”
“Right,” Eli said, nodding. “We have flashes of intuitions, but not visions.”
“But isn’t Nina special?” Rachel asked.
Eli looked at Rachel, his eyebrows raising. “You’re right, I suppose she could have some emerging powers the rest of us haven’t. But it wouldn’t make sense for that to appear until after she’s bonded with the Greater Horde. I think it may have been some other power, mixed with the pressure and anxiety she’s been feeling. Power does strange things to us when we’re still coming into it.”
Pryce was smiling his slow, lazy smile. “Unless,” he said softly.
Nina was gazing at him. Unless what?
But, as she remembered their brief conversation in the hotel, she thought she might know what he meant.
Movement caught the corner of her eye. Nina turned her head, feeling dizzy, and saw a man wearing a deep purple sweater lined with gold thread and tight black pants climbing the stairs that led to her apartment. The others followed her gaze, and panic was mounting inside her again until Eli halted it with a single sentence.
“He’s wearing Council Guard clothes! He’s here!” Eli started to open his door, but as he did, Nina’s sense of foreboding came back. She watched the man pause at the door, then start to fiddle with the knob.
“Wait!” She knew that figure...
They all turned to look at her as her eyes narrowed. “That’s Anders Weber. He’s in my Ceremony Prep class.” Why is he pretending to be part of the High Horde?
For some reason, Eli sighed in relief and laughed. “Nina, this is great news.”
“How is it great news that notorious horndog Anders is impersonating a Council Guard?”
Eli turned around in his seat. “I’ve seen that man, too. He’s not impersonating—he attained his Guard status about two years ago, and I happen to know he reports directly to Eka for assignments. Which means that Eka placed him here to keep an eye on you, knowing that you’d be important to us. Anders knows the lay of the land, so he’s the best guard to send. Plus he’s probably already been doing security checks. The Council has been looking after you, after all.”
Pryce looked at him like he’d grown another head. “Really? Because she almost got shot yesterday.”
Eli’s cheeks colored. “Well, you saved her from that, didn’t you? No harm done.”
Pryce started to respond, but Nina shushed them. Anders had just gone in.
Rachel heaved an exasperated sigh. “Nina, why can’t we get out and go up? I don’t like the thought of creepy Anders in there alone, Council Guard or not.”
Nina shook her head. “No.” Fifteen seconds had passed, and she was still feeling as nervous as she had before. “Wait.”
Eli smiled. “All right. Though I’m sure—”
His words were cut off by an ear-splitting explosion. The car was filled with screams, and Nina watched a bright white flame swallow the top right side of the building, reaching up into the sky momentarily before settling back down to eat at the walls and ceiling. It continued to burn white, pale as bone, and seemed to be contained to her apartment only, though it wasn’t shrinking or slowing down.
That’s not normal fire.
“What is it?” Rachel whispered.
“Fairy bomb,” Pryce said, his voice hollow with shock. “A bomb containing magical fire that stays within a set boundary as it burns. Someone must have laid a trap before we got here.”
Eli started the car and reversed out of the lot without looking, sending the passengers crashing into each other as he righted the car and went speeding down the road, burning rubber as he moved forward. Nina was still trying to process what had just happened, and she saw Eli was having trouble, too.
“Holy shit,” he was saying under his breath. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit…”
Pryce looked at Eli in concern. “You gonna be okay to drive? Want me to take over?”
Eli just shook his head and squeezed the wheel more tightly. His knuckles were white. Nina felt a surge of sympathy for him—clearly he’d known Anders more than she had, and his death was going to grate on him more harshly.
Pryce turned around and looked at Rachel and Nina. “Well, I guess you can’t go home yet.” He looked at Eli again, eyeing him warily. “How long do you think it’s going to take before the Council finds out one of its guards was just murdered?”
“Not long,” Eli said haltingly. “Guards are easily trackable because of their communication stones.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror and met Nina’s; his gaze was heavy with anguish. “They have little rose quartz chunks that lie in the Council’s chambers, and they flash when there’s a problem. Eka or Lylah or Osrik will be able to find them through the bond and see that…” He inhaled sharply. “See what happened.”
Nina still couldn’t believe Anders had been a plant. Were there others? It made sense that there was more than one, if she was really important enough to be watched; obviously, though, they’d been instructed not to reveal themselves, and maybe not to even befriend her. Is that why Anders was so repulsive? To throw me off the scent?
She thought of Joey and how intense he’d been the day before her reading. Was Joey a plant, too?
Rachel took her hand and squeezed it. “Nina, are you okay?”
Nina looked at her sister dazedly. “I don’t know.” I got someone killed, she said to herself. That was a real vision. I could have stopped Anders, but instead I watched and said nothing. A man who was sent to protect me is dead, because I couldn’t work out what the fuck was happening with my own powers.
The men in the front seat must have felt the miserable energy she was struggling to contain. Pryce turned and looked at her, green eyes filled with compassion.
“Nina, this isn’t your fault.”
It wasn’t his sentence that calmed her; it was the fact that he’d called her by her first name for the first time since they’d met. She felt the hysteria that had been mounting start to recede, leaving a much more manageable wave of fear and indecision.
“What do we do?” she asked, feeling helpless. “Where can we go?”
“The Council was supposed to protect us,” Eli said. “I can’t believe this. Will they send another guard? Will they investigate now?”
“Why don’t you ask them?” Pryce said, his voice more gentle than it had ever been. “Like you said, they’re bound to know what happened already. Give them a call, explain, and see what they say.” His tone was like that of a teacher talking a child through a complicated math problem.
Nina knew Eli was shaken because instead of being upset that he was being addressed like a third grader, he nodded rapidly and smiled. “Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll pull over right now and call them.”
The car swerved to the shoulder violently and skidded to a halt. Rachel shot a worried look at Nina, but Nina just shrugged. She’d known Eli only a little longer than her sister had, so there was no way of knowing if the Reader was going to be okay. Pryce seemed to be far more composed, and that made her wonder how many chaotic situations he’d been in. It made her a little uneasy—he was unbonded, but still powerful enough to hide his energy from Eli. He was mysterious, but obviously interested in her. He also seemed to be a dangerous man who knew more about her past and power than she did. All of these things scared her, but the fact that she still wanted to get to know him better scared her more. He didn’t make her feel safe in the way Eli had, but Nina wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing.
Eli had used his phone to call the Council and was waiting on hold for Eka. He chattered excitedly for a moment, then abruptly stopped speaking after a few sentences. Nina saw his eyes in the rearview mirror; they were glowing vibrantly as he spoke to Eka, but the glow started to fade as the older dragon spoke.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I understand.”
Rachel smiled at Nina hopefully, and Nina couldn’t return it. Her sister couldn’t read dragon energy, and she didn’t see the way Eli’s face had changed during the conversation. Nina was unsurprised when Eli hung up and reported back to them.
“They know about the explosion,” he said dully. “Anders was supposed to wait outside, they said. They’re sending someone to investigate, and Lylah is putting Joseph, the local horde leader, on alert. But they can’t send more guards. They’re stretched too thin, because the stone’s started to darken more quickly than they anticipated.”
Nina felt like she’d been stabbed in the heart. “Does that mean they’ll need me sooner?”
“Maybe,” Eli said as he put the car back on the road. “But, Nina—you just proved to us that you have some clairvoyance. That means you’re more powerful than we thought, and it ups your chances of retaining your powers.”
Pryce looked at him skeptically. “Doesn’t it also mean that the Council was wrong about new powers not emerging until after bonding?”
“No,” Eli said stubbornly. “Well, maybe. Nina may be a special case.”
“I may not stay alive long enough to do it,” Nina interjected. “It may not even matter.”
Pryce turned around in his seat. “Nina, I think you need to know something. I was going to wait until you’d ask more about what brought me here, since I saw that you were so bent on taking that offer, but this might be a better time to bring it up.”
Nina sat up straight and leaned forward, intrigued. “What is it? Is it about my parents?”
“Yes,” Pryce said. “About them and the Outcasts.”
Rachel was leaning forward, too.
“Many of the Outcasts weren’t told everything about the prophecy, for security reasons. Almost none of us got to hear your mom’s full prophecy, because the reading machines we built went berserk trying to read your mom’s blood. She brought a vial of your blood just after you were born, and she and Jasper tried the same thing with our platforms. They only heard the whole thing once, and then only told a few people. It took me years to piece together all that I have, and by the time I gathered all the information, no one wanted to be as proactive as they were in the past. People kept dying in the pursuit of more pieces of the puzzle.”
Rachel looked impressed and a little confused. “But you wanted to keep looking?”
Pryce smiled. “Not out of some sense of nobility—purely selfish reasons. I didn’t want dragonkind to die out. I wasn’t going to let some sick fucker destroy a family so they could usher us into apocalypse. The last piece of the prophecy I was able to uncover was regarding something called The Heart.”
Nina locked gazes with Pryce. She is the head and the heart, the prophecy said. “I’ve heard that term before.”
“In the watered down prophecy,” Pryce said, nodding. “But in the original, it’s phrased a little differently, and it stated that you had a heart—a heart of a jewel, to be exact. I consulted some of our stone technicians to see if they could help me out, and they told me it probably meant a large piece cut from the center of a powerful stone. It took me a solid year to find out that they were talking about the Rose Quartz.”
Nina remembered the photo the Council Guard had showed her; she recalled thinking that the enormous hole in the Rose Quartz made it look like a ring. “What does the missing chunk have to do with this?”
Eli inhaled sharply and nearly swerved into the next lane. “Without its heart, the jewel isn’t able to cleanse itself. I remember my mother teaching me about stone maintenance, telling me that stones that were damaged in their centers were harder to maintain than any others. It’s something to do with concentration of power.”
Nina’s heart started to beat more quickly as it ran ahead of Eli’s explanation, trying to reach the right conclusion. “That’s why the quartz is failing. Its heart is missing.” She frowned. “Doesn’t the Council already know that?”
“Probably,” Pryce allowed. “But they obviously don’t know where it is, or they’d be using your power to make the stone whole instead of trying to get you to cleanse it.”
“So I’m supposed to get the heart of the Rose Quartz,” Nina said slowly. “And reunite it with its body.” She shook her head. “I don’t have it, though. Did the original prophecy say where it was supposed to be?”
Pryce’s expression turned pained. “I don’t have that information,” he admitted. “I only have parts of the prophecy, since I wasn’t allowed to hear it, and almost all of the people who did hear it are dead now, while the others are even deeper underground than I am. The last thing I did before I came to you was put in a request to our chief archivist—the person who obtains copies of all of the prophecies the Council keeps. I thought he must have the original, too, but he didn’t have it.”
“Shit,” Nina said. “Who else might have it?”
Eli spoke up then. “As far as I know, the only people who would have the original are people who have electronic records of the prophecies, since it’s impossible to scrub those from the database completely, but their systems are guarded by magic as well as technology.”
“Who do we know who has access?” Rachel asked.
Nina knew who.
Joey.