“Harley, what happened? Where’d you go? Where are the Ryders? Jacob?” I asked her.
She took a few moments to respond. She described the entire series of events that led to her return through a wormhole, along with a paralyzed Wade. Jacob Morales was in the wind, as was Isadora Merlin—but to be honest, I was okay with that. They both seemed too valuable to be held down by any coven, and with Katherine Shipton still out there, I had a feeling they were better off hiding somewhere, as far away from us and Harley as possible.
Emmett Ryder was dead. His sister, Emily, was immobilized and disabled, somewhere in Waterfront Park.
Astrid checked her tablet for recent communications.
“There’s a team headed out there as we speak. The time-lapse bubble is still on,” she said.
One of the nurses came back to look at Harley’s wounds. She’d broken a couple of ribs, and she was covered in cuts and bruises. The Ryders were extremely vicious magicals, but, even without her Esprit, Harley had managed to pull through.
I had a feeling that the Dempsey Suppressor she had inside her wasn’t doing its job as well as it should’ve. It took an impressive amount of Chaos mojo for a magical to survive and even neutralize a hostile as powerful as Emily Ryder.
“The Ryders were one step ahead of us this whole time,” Garrett concluded as he picked Harley’s Esprit up from the floor and gave it back to her.
She gave him a weak and thankful smile, then put the ring-bracelet back on, its gemstones glistening in different colors as contact was reestablished with Harley’s Chaos. There were still a lot of unanswered questions, but one thing was clear to me: there was a vast conspiracy at work here, and it didn’t involve just the Ryders and Finch. Katherine had loyalists implanted throughout the magical world, and she was planning something of devastating proportions.
The magical kids on our list were still missing, including Micah Cranston. She probably had them. I wondered if we’d at all hindered her plans by taking out the Ryders and making sure she didn’t get her claws on Jacob.
It dawned on me then that I had a duty to help see this through. At all costs.
That included talking to my parents about Katherine Shipton and the Merlins. They weren’t just the joint directors of the Moscow Coven. They were part of the same generation as Harley’s parents, and they had to know a lot more about what had gone down almost twenty years ago, to set Katherine Shipton on such a destructive path.
Knowing what we knew now, including details about the Icelandic mind control curse, I had to try to get as much information from my parents as possible. We weren’t on the best terms, but my options were few to none otherwise.
Looking at Dylan, I found a sliver of inner strength and determination that I’d been missing. I needed it, because my parents really weren’t the easiest people to talk to. Personally, I dreaded the idea of reaching out to them.
But with the Rag Team by my side, I felt as though there was nothing that could stand in our way. Not even my cold and extremely complicated family.
Forty-Two
Harley
The next couple of days passed in the blink of an eye. I slept through most of my recovery process. Krieger used a combination of Wiccan spells and good ol’ medical science to help my ribs fuse and heal faster than the usual three to four weeks of gruesome pain.
The time I was awake, however, I spent mulling over everything that had happened.
Astrid texted me frequently, as the entire team was insanely busy with the cleanup and investigation surrounding the Ryder twins. I knew that Emily was in Purgatory, and that Emmett had been buried—with no ceremony whatsoever.
Jacob and Isadora were also gone. Still, I did get an email from Jacob once a day. Just the general stuff, though, nothing too specific. Lunch in Columbia. Souvenir shopping in Nigeria. Bird watching in Minnesota. That kind of stuff. He had, of course, made sure to send it to my personal email address, to avoid coven monitoring.
I got out of bed on the third day, wondering if Wade was feeling any better. I hadn’t seen him since he’d gripped the Time Stopper and turned into a living statue. I knew he’d survived the knife wound, but I was longing to see him again. Life just wasn’t the same without him.
The Smiths were recovering from a botched “home invasion,” and Ryann was back with them for a while. They were pretty shaken up, after all, and Mrs. Smith had sustained grave injuries. I told Ryann I was out of town with urgent work, but that I was going to see them soon. I was just working up the courage to look them in the eyes, smile, and tell them that everything was going to be okay—while knowing that their memories had been wiped. That they’d had a wonderful young man in their care for a while. That there were dark forces at work, looking to destroy everything that was good and innocent in my life.
I made my way through the coven’s ample hallways, my gaze wandering from one dragon statue to another. So fearsome and ferocious… yet just beautifully crafted slabs of stone. They were supposed to inspire a strong and secure coven. But they were nothing but an embellishment. We had traitors in our midst, and they’d played an essential part in what had happened to the magical kids we’d lost.
I was never going to forgive that.
Alton was waiting for me in his office. But he wasn’t alone. Wade was sitting in one of the armchairs, sullen and grumpy. Imogene Whitehall of the California Mage Council was standing by the edge of Alton’s desk. Astrid, Santana, Tatyana, Dylan, and Garrett were also present.
“Ah, look who made it back into the world!” Alton exclaimed, beaming at me.
I could feel his affection flowing through me and warming me up like a log fire in the middle of a snowy winter. I gave him a soft nod, then looked at Wade. He was guarded, but still, I knew he was happy to see me. A wave of relief crashed into me, and I understood that everyone present wanted me alive and well… and with them.
Technically speaking, there were two people in the room whose emotions I couldn’t feel—Garrett and Imogene, both Shapeshifters, I assumed. It was my clearest takeaway from this entire struggle, especially after my dinner with Wade and Garrett. The only ones whose emotions I couldn’t feel seemed to be Shapeshifters. But their expressions told me everything I needed to know. I was quite the sight for sore eyes, and that made me feel good.
“How are you feeling, Harley?” Imogene asked softly.
Santana, Tatyana, and Astrid greeted me with loving hugs. I was still sore from my bruised ribcage, but the fractures had fully healed. I felt as though I’d been run over by a truck, but, by this point, it wasn’t my first, nor was it going to be my last, round of injuries. Something else was coming. My instincts were flaring.
Not now. Maybe not tomorrow either. But, at some point in the future, I was going to hear from Katherine Shipton and her minions again. She’d yet to take me down, and I was positive that she was determined to strike over and over until she either got what she wanted or went down in flames. I was rooting for the latter.
“Good to see you, crazy girl,” Santana said. “Never seen anyone jump through a wormhole with your confidence.”
I smirked. “Well, you know me. Brave and suicidal mean pretty much the same thing in my mind.”
“It’s good to have you back,” Alton said, and motioned for me to take a seat in the spare armchair.
I settled into it, exchanging quick glances with Wade. Liquid sunshine poured through me, and I couldn’t help but smile as I shifted my focus back to Alton and Imogene.
“I wanted you all to be here for this briefing,” Imogene said. “I’ve done some digging through other covens, and I’ve come up with some troubling facts. Unfortunately, our Katherine Shipton nightmare is nowhere near over. I’m glad you all survived your encounter with the Ryder twins, but I’m afraid it doesn’t end here.”
“Do we know how or when they started working with her, or where the hell they’ve been this whole time?” Tatyana asked.
“We know that Katherine intercepted them as soon as the Albuquerque Coven ordered them to be separated, but we have yet to find out exactly what they’ve been doing, or who else is involved,” Imogene replied. “Isadora Merlin and Jacob Morales are missing, but we do have magicals out there looking for them. There’s an ongoing effort from multiple covens to track down the missing kids, as well. The ones who willingly joined Katherine have gone underground, but I’ve got some trusted sources in the deepest layers of each American coven. The moment one of them makes a move, I’ll know.”
My heart broke again as I thought of little Micah and the others like him. They’d been forced out of their family homes and dragged into Katherine’s darkness, forced to grow with her poison. My throat burned whenever I tried to imagine what that could be like. Children were innocent. They didn’t deserve this.
I exhaled. “Do we know what it is she’s planning, exactly? I mean, Finch said she was going to become a Child of Chaos, but how does one even do that? Is there an instruction manual somewhere?”
Where did one so much as begin to ascend as a Child of Chaos? It boggled my mind. Children of Chaos were elements of the very universe we inhabited. Darkness, Light, Gaia—mother of the natural elements to which we were connected—Water, Fire, Air, and Earth. Children of Chaos were threads of raw and unlimited power, permeating time, space, and matter itself. How did one even go around finding one?
The road there seemed impossible, if not simply fictional.
“There is certainly no manual,” Alton said, looking equally bemused. “She’s going to keep trying to recruit magicals, though. We’ve been looking into Finch’s statement, but we’ve yet to find something credible on the topic of Children of Chaos. Whether she knows something more or she’s just plain crazy, she clearly needs powerful magicals for something. At this point, our only hope is that Krieger finishes the magical detector. Without Jacob’s Sensate ability, we have no other choice,” he added, looking at me.
His doubt sent shivers down my spine. I braced for a rebuttal, since he probably knew I hadn’t made much of an effort to stop Isadora from taking Jacob away.