CHAPTER 30
I thought the news about Archer would really upset people, but the opposite ended up being true. Instead of freaking out that L’Occhio di Dio had been inside our school, everybody seemed relieved that the mystery behind the attacks had been solved and that life could finally go back to normal. Well, normal for a school like Hecate, which meant the shifters could go outside at night again, and the faeries were allowed to roam the woods at sunrise and sunset.
A few days later, Mrs. Casnoff pulled me aside and told me that Jenna would be coming back, and my dad would be arriving a week or so after that.
I should probably have been excited to finally meet him, but all I felt was nervous. Was he coming to Hecate in his official capacity, or was it because I was his daughter and I’d nearly been attacked? What would we talk about?
I called Mom one night to talk to her about it. I hadn’t told her about Archer. It would’ve only scared her. I just said there’d been some trouble, and Dad was coming to check it out.
“You’ll like him,” Mom said. “He’s very charming and very smart. I know he’ll be thrilled to see you.”
“Then why hasn’t he tried to see me before? I mean, I get when I was little you didn’t want us hanging out. But what about after I came into my powers? You’d think he could’ve spared a visit somewhere in there.”
Mom got quiet before finally saying, “Sophie, your dad had his reasons, but they’re his to tell, not mine. But he loves you.” After another pause she asked, “Is there something else going on?”
“I’m just really swamped with school,” I lied.
I tried to be happy about seeing Dad, but it was hard to be enthusiastic about anything. I felt like I was moving underwater, and anything people said to me seemed muffled and distant.
On the other hand, I found myself suddenly popular. I guess nearly getting murdered in the cellar by an undercover demon hunter is all it takes to make people want to be your friend. Who knew?
I made that joke to Taylor one evening at dinner. Ever since that night in Casnoff’s study, she’d been a lot friendlier to me, now that she finally realized I wasn’t a spy for my dad. She laughed. “I didn’t know you were so funny!”
Yeah, I was a regular laugh riot. Maybe because making jokes meant that I didn’t burst into tears.
I watched people gather around Elodie and cluck over her sympathetically, murmuring how heartbroken she must be. She wasn’t talking to me, and I missed her. It sounds weird, but I really wanted to talk to her about Archer. She was the only person who was feeling the same thing I was.
I’d stopped meeting Alice in the woods. Mrs. Casnoff had been true to her word and put about a dozen new protection spells over the house, so even Alice’s super-powerful sleeping spell didn’t work anymore. I could’ve just snuck out, but I had a feeling that was what Elodie was doing, so I left her to it. I mean, I’d stolen her boy-friend, even if it had been only temporarily. She could have my great-grandmother. Not exactly a fair trade, but as far as amends went, it was the best I could do.
Besides, I wasn’t sure if I trusted myself with Alice anymore.
Looking back on it, a tiny part of me had been thrilled when that spell on Elodie’s dress had started working. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her—at least I don’t think that I had—but there’d been a definite rush knowing I was capable of a spell like that.
Where would that thrill end?
My attraction to the dark side wasn’t the only thing occupying my thoughts. I thought about that night in the cellar constantly. I kept coming back to Archer pulling out that knife. He’d had plenty of time to stab me and run. So why hadn’t he? I kept turning that question over and over in my head, but I couldn’t come up with a scenario that gave me the answer I really wanted; that Archer wasn’t an Eye, that it had all been a horrible mistake.
A week after Archer left, I was perched on my window seat, flipping through my Magical Literature textbook. Even though he’d been cleared, Lord Byron wasn’t coming back to Hecate. I got the impression he’d said something really rude to Mrs. Casnoff when she’d asked him back, because she pursed her lips a lot when she said we’d have a new teacher. It ended up being the Vandy. I’d thought she might be a little nicer to me after she’d rescued me from a killer, but other than canceling my cellar duty for the rest of the semester (all three weeks of it—really big of her), she showed no signs of softening. We already had three essays due by Friday, which was why I was attempting to find something in the stupid textbook that half interested me.
I’d just started to read a paragraph about Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” when movement out on the lawn caught my eye. It was Elodie walking purposefully toward the woods. I guess she and Alice had decided the brooms were a little too attention-grabbing.
I told myself that I wasn’t jealous, and that it was fine Alice hadn’t made any attempt to contact me in the past few weeks. Elodie was a better student anyway. I glanced over to the closet, where I’d stashed Jenna’s lion, Bram. I’d had to hide it a few days after she’d left because it hurt too much to look at it. Last week I’d hung the necklace Alice had given me around Bram’s neck for a similar reason. Not like I needed it to keep me awake anymore anyway.
I was still looking at the closet when my door opened.
“Miss me?” Jenna asked with a grin. I don’t know which one of us was more shocked when I burst into tears.
She was across the room in an instant, wrapping her arms around me and leading me to my bed. She hugged me while I cried.
Jenna reached behind her and pulled a box of Kleenex off my desk. “Here,” she said, handing it to me.
“Thanks.” I sniffled into my tissue. Then I let out a deep shuddering breath. “Whew. I feel better.”
“Rough couple of weeks, huh?”
I glanced at her. She looked the best I’d ever seen her. Her skin was still pretty pale, but there was a light rose flush on her cheeks. Even her pink stripe looked brighter.
“Did they fill you in?”
Jenna nodded. “Yeah, but I can’t believe it. Archer really didn’t strike me as the secret demon hunter type.”
I snorted and wiped my nose again. “You or anybody else. You were with the Council. Are they freaked?”
“Big time. From what I heard, Archer and his whole family disappeared off the face of the earth. No one knows what happened, but it seems pretty clear they were all in on it.” Jenna ran a hand through her hair. “It’s crazy to think he was hiding that all this time.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking down at my hands. “It just sucks because . . .” I sighed.
“You hate him for what he did, but you miss him,” Jenna finished.
I looked up at her, surprised. “Exactly.”
She reached up and swept her hair to one side, revealing a pair of light blue puncture wounds just below her ear. “I know a little something about falling for the enemy.”
With a sad smile, she let her hair fall back.
I shifted on the bed to make more room for her, and we both leaned back against my pillows.
“So tell me about London.”
Jenna rolled her eyes and kicked off her shoes. “I never even got to London. The Council has a house in Savannah they use when they have stuff to do at Hecate. I just hung out there while they asked me a bunch of questions, like what vampire made me, and how often did I feed. I’m not gonna lie: it was pretty scary at times. I was sure they were bringing in Buffy at any moment to give me the ol’ stake and shake.”
I choked on a laugh. “The what?”
Blushing, Jenna looked away and rubbed one foot on top of the other. “It’s just this thing this girl there said.”
“A pretty girl?” I asked, bumping shoulders with her.
“Maybe,” she said, but she was grinning from ear to ear. All I could get out of her was that the girl’s name was Victoria, she worked for the Council, and she was a vampire too.
“They have vampires that work for the Council?”
“Yeah,” Jenna said, more animated than I’d ever seen her. “They work all sorts of cool jobs, mentoring younger vamps and acting as security for VIPs in the Council.”
“Speaking of which, you didn’t run into my dad by any chance, did you?”
Jenna shook her head. “Nope, sorry. But I overheard Vix say he would be out here in a few days.”
“Vix?” I asked, doing my startled eyebrow thing.
Jenna blushed all over again, and I laughed. “Wow, does Bram know he might have to share you soon?”
“Shut up,” she said, but she was still smiling. “Hey, where is Bram?”
“Saved him for you,” I said, hopping off the bed and going to the closet. I fished Bram out from underneath some laundry and tossed him to Jenna. She caught him with a smile. “Ah, Bram, how I’ve miss—”
Her expression changed, and I watched that pretty flush seep from her cheeks as she stared at the stuffed lion.
Or, more accurately, at the necklace around his neck.
“Where did you get this?”
“The necklace? It was a present.”
“From who?” She raised her eyes to mine, and I saw real fear in them. An uncomfortable prickling sweat broke out on the back of my neck.
“Why? What is it?”
Jenna shuddered and pushed Bram away from her. “It’s a bloodstone.”
I crossed the room and picked up Bram, pulling the necklace over his head.
The large flat stone looked nothing like a bloodstone. It wasn’t even red.
“It’s black,” I said to Jenna, holding it out to her, but she scooted back against the headboard.
“That’s because it’s demon blood.”
Everything within me went completely still. “What?”
Jenna reached into her blouse and pulled out her bloodstone. The liquid inside was pitching and rolling, like there was a storm inside the tiny capsule. “See?” she said. “There’s white magic in my stone. It only reacts like that if black magic is near. And that’s some seriously dark stuff, Sophie.”
Her fingers were clutching her necklace so hard her knuckles were white. “It did this the day of the ball too,” she said, her eyes still on the pendant in my hands. “When you got that dirt out. I should have said something then, but you seemed so happy with the dress, and I thought black magic couldn’t make something so pretty.”
I was barely listening to her. I was remembering that Mrs. Casnoff said no one knew how Alice had become a witch. How she had only spoken to me after Chaston was attacked, how much more alive she’d seemed after Anna.
And Elodie’s face when Alice had given her her necklace.
Elodie was with her right now.
I dropped the necklace, and the stone cracked against the corner of my desk. A drop of black liquid seeped from the crack and sizzled on the floor, leaving a small burn mark.
I was amazed at how stupid I’d been. How naive.
“Jenna, get Mrs. Casnoff and Cal. Tell them to go to the woods, to Alice’s and Lucy’s graves. She’ll know where that is.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, but I didn’t answer. I just ran—the way I had the night I’d found Chaston.
I plunged into the woods, branches scratching at my face and arms, rocks cutting my feet. I was only wearing pajama pants and a T-shirt, but I barely felt the cold. I just ran.
Because now I understood how Alice had been corporeal, how she had all that power even though she was supposed to be dead. That black magic ritual Alice had gotten caught in hadn’t turned her into a witch: it had made her a demon.
You too, my mind whispered. If that’s what she is, that’s what you are.