They’d apparently circled back.
I immediately screeched to a halt beside my friends as the beasts approached us, each step sending terror-filled vibrations into my heart. I couldn’t see Dragon anywhere. Was it possible they’d killed him? The thought made me sick.
“No eye contact,” Colson said, firmly staring at the ground. “Be submissive. Act like we’re not a threat. That’s the only way we’ll get out of this alive.”
“They’re so pretty,” Miranda cooed. Colson covered her face with one hand.
“Kid, we have a lot to teach you,” Asher mumbled. He too, was looking at the ground. My hands itched for my sword. To summon magic. Anything. It didn’t feel right to sit here and wait for death to greet us.
Hot breath enveloped me as the lead dragon extended his long neck and sniffed us all over. My flight instinct screamed at me to run. Beads of sweat ran rivulets down my spine.
“Down,” Colson said in a low voice, sinking to one knee.
“Colson, shouldn’t we…” Mia said.
“Down.”
We knelt. The lead dragon sniffed again. I smelled rancid breath. I risked a glance at the dragon’s teeth between its sneering mouth. They were rotted black, stringy with remnants of whatever it’d eaten last. Probably a deer. Possibly unsuspecting idiots like us.
The lead dragon suddenly pulled its head back and roared, spurting a stream of fire into the sky that instantly basted my face with searing hot air. I flinched but didn’t move.
The dragons began to back away.
Right as the Society burst out of the tunnel, and all hell broke loose.
The world became a top, spinning in a blur almost too fast for me to follow. I yanked Mia aside, simultaneously shoving Asher into Colson in an attempt to get us out of the crossfire as the Society fired off spells that simply deflected off the dragons’ tough scales. They thundered with rage, making my eardrums rattle. One of the dragons took to the air. Its wing flaps pummeled the nearest acolytes into the side of the plateau. Another took off, but now golden bands of light from another group of acolytes wrapped around one dragon’s snout and pulled it down, allowing them to try to subdue it. Through my daze, I felt a weak sense of admiration for the Society. As twisted as they were, they were relentless. Not even dragons were enough to slow them down.
Which was horrible news for us.
Mia and I sprang aside as a fireball blew up the ground where we’d stood, leaving a smoldering crater. We hunched low to the ground as we ran, dodging between the tangle of dragon legs, wings, teeth, and acolytes. Man and beast melded together into a single, screaming mass of violence. Nothing made sense.
I pulled Mia back right before she was nearly trampled by a rampaging dragon. An acolyte spotted us, but my freezing spell stopped him in his tracks right before an enraged dragon’s tail sent him soaring like a grand slam hit. I looked for where to flee next. Our options were rapidly shrinking, and even if we escaped we’d still have nowhere to go—
I caught the glint of gold.
I had only a moment to brace myself before a scaly head was pushing Mia and me up onto a ridged back. We landed with an uncomfortable bump that sent needles shooting down my legs.
“Hang on!” Asher yelled as Dragon flapped frantically, trying to break through the chaos and into the open sky.
I lodged my fingers beneath a couple of Dragon’s scales as he barely evaded a wave of hexes that threatened to take him down. At the front, just behind Dragon’s head, Colson deflected a killing spell that got too close.
“Wait!” I shouted over the growing roar of the wind. “Where’s The Cu—Miranda! We can’t leave Mira—”
“Here!”
Miranda’s tiny head poked out from the folds of Colson’s jacket. She offered me a terrified smile. “I’m okay. And warm!”
At least one of us was kind of enjoying this.
Mia and I fired off a few more spells toward the acolytes speedily shrinking below as Dragon picked up enough speed and soared over the fray. From this height, I couldn’t tell who was winning. One of the dragons was still pinned on the ground, but smoke and magic were thick in the air, obscuring everything.
All except for a single person.
Kasia’s eyes found me the moment she emerged from the tunnel. She observed the chaos distantly, as though dealing with dragons was nothing more than a slight inconvenience standing between her ultimate goal. I swore I saw her smile. She raised her hand toward us.
“Bank right!” I shouted, tugging as hard on Dragon’s scale as I could.
I had no idea if it did anything, but Dragon banked all the same, quickly gaining elevation. He gave a low grunt as something collided with his underside. I felt a tremor tear through his body, but he didn’t slow as he quickly gained altitude and soared into the open sky.
It was less than an hour before Dragon began to descend.
Honestly, I barely noticed we were flying. I was doing some flying of my own; or at least my thoughts were. About the Cursed One, the house, Kasia, the dragons. Kasia had found us somehow. She’d probably been tracking us this entire time, and like an idiot I hadn’t been more cautious. When I’d seen her in the forest, what had that been? A warning? A game she was playing? Had she actually managed to connect with me somehow? Regardless, our run-in had been too close, and now that we had the Cursed One—Miranda—she would continue to hunt us to the ends of the earth.
I gave a shiver that had nothing to do with the freezing temperature. In front, I watched Miranda huddle deeper into Colson’s jacket. Everything I’d come to believe about the Cursed One—which, admittedly, wasn’t much—had been turned upside down. How could it be a child? And what the heck were we supposed to do with her now?
“That’s good, Dragon, good. Easy does it…And…”
My sore thighs growled in protest as we jerked to a clumsy landing. Mia nearly faceplanted as we dismounted, her legs stiff. I had to catch Asher’s shoulder to keep him from stumbling.
“I think he was hit back there,” I said once I could stand straight. “I think Kasia’s spell got him in the belly.”
Colson frowned. He gently put Miranda on the ground and draped his enormous coat over her, its tail so long it looked like a coronation train. He approached Dragon and rapped on his scales. “Dragon, roll over. Roll over for me, buddy!”
Dragon immediately slathered him with kisses. So much for obedience. I was growing fond of the big guy, but he had about half the brain capacity as an overly inbred Labrador.
“Doesn’t seem too hurt,” Colson said when he managed to extradite himself from Dragon’s kisses. He eventually succeeded in coaxing Dragon on his side and checking his scaled stomach.
“Nothing,” he concluded after a minute. The ground shook as he let Dragon bounce up. “If she hit us, it wasn’t strong enough to hurt him.”
“Where’d he bring us?” Asher called. He’d hiked to the top of a hill overlooking a shallow valley. Night had fallen while we’d flown. Below, the lights of a decent-sized city were spread out like a bag of cast marbles, a faint domed glow over each house and well-lit street.
“I don’t really care, as long as it got us away from where we were,” I said, joining him. A slice of bitter cold wind cut through my jacket and I shivered.
“Yeah,” Asher agreed. He glanced at Mia and Colson, then to the bundle on the ground that was Miranda. His brow furrowed even more. “I’m not sure how Kasia found us, but I got the feeling she was—”
“Following us?” I said. “I got that feeling, too.”
“You know that means she could be doing it again, right?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to. I’d thought of that, and the fact that I wasn’t absolutely terrified by the prospect terrified me the most. Kasia had barely shown herself throughout the entire fight, relying on her identity-confused half-basilisk henchman and her rotating cast of disposable underlings. I wasn’t super savvy when it came to evil mistresses and their grand plans for total destruction, but it almost seemed like she was toying with us, biding her time for something else.
“We need to find a place to hunker down,” I said at last. “If she really was—or is—on our trail then we have to figure out what to do next.”
Asher pointed to a smear of gravel down below us. “A road. Somewhat maintained. It has to go somewhere. We need to stay out of the center of the city until we get our bearings.”
Agreed, we both returned to the others and Dragon, who was showing us a pretty good imitation of what a bouncy ball with wings might have looked like.
“I think he’s eager to go,” Colson said, failing to hide his grin.
“How’d you guess?” I said, following Dragon’s next excited bounce. Colson managed to calm him down just enough to mumble a goodbye, then unleashed the happy beast on the rest of us. I was (again; note my extreme enthusiasm) covered in slobber, as was everybody else. Dragon even snuggled his snout into the folds of Colson’s jacket, tickling Miranda’s face with the tip of his tongue. She gave a giggling laugh before squeezing his nose tight.
“I’ll miss you! Thank you so much!”
Dragon pulled away, and in a couple great flaps was soaring into the night. But none of us were looking at him. We were still staring down at Miranda as she continued to giggle, wiping her face with the inside of Colson’s jacket. An uncomfortable uncertainty spread itself taut like a steel wire between us.
“We should…go,” Mia said haltingly. I didn’t need to be told twice. Whatever we had to do with Miranda, we needed to decide soon. But it wasn’t going to be here, and I really didn’t want it to be now.
Colson pulled on his jacket and Miranda assumed her position in the crook of one of his enormous arms. Asher led the way down the hill. Soon we were crunching down a somewhat maintained gravel road. The city lights twinkled at our right, but Asher had made a good point. Until we could get our bearings and figure out where we were and who we could trust, it was best to stay out of sight as much as possible.
“There we go,” Asher said a half hour later.
I looked up from where I’d been coaxing my exhausted feet to keep going to find we’d reached the driveway of a dark cabin.
“I’ll check it out,” Asher said, and jogged up toward it. Mia swayed a little where she stood.
“So t-t-tired!” She yawned. “Haven’t slept since before we found—”
She cut off, eyes flicking to Miranda. The kid was fast asleep, drooling a little on Colson’s arm. For the first time it hit me how fast he’d taken to her. Don’t get me wrong, Colson was about as likely to purposefully hurt any of his friends as New York was to not have traffic. But the two of them already seemed attached at the hip. If they got much closer, it’d make it that much harder to…
To do what? We’d freed Miranda from the prison of that mansion, but that didn’t negate what she supposedly was. Or how dangerous she supposedly could be. And if she was still dangerous, that meant we had to do something about it.
Before I could think about that too much, Asher returned.
“We’re good. Looks like somebody’s vacant summer home.”
“Wonder why they’re not here now,” I said, kicking aside a small snow drift.
He took us back up the driveway and Mia used an unlocking spell to get us inside. The living room had all the rustic charm of a weekend getaway, from wood tones and a hand-carved table, to a stone fireplace and a Home is Where the Hearth is sign hanging above it. Gag me, please.
“Be right back,” Colson said. He trudged up the stairs, Miranda still crooked in his arm. I made sure to double-close all the blinds while Asher flicked on one of the lamps. I found a pamphlet for Oslo, Norway in one of the lampstand drawers along with a bunch of tourist brochures and contact information.
“Dragon didn’t take us too far,” I said, holding it up to them. Asher nodded.
“We can’t have a fire,” he said as Mia knelt in front of it. “Too much risk with the chimney.”
“Aw…” Mia gazed at it longingly before tiredly taking a seat in one of the chairs around the kitchen table. Asher and I joined her. I peered up the stairs where Colson had gone.
“Does anyone else feel weird about this?” I said quietly. “Like, that we’re doing something super wrong?”
“I’ve felt weird ever since we went inside that house,” Asher said. “What were we supposed to do? Kasia followed us, and if we hadn’t taken Miranda or…you know…”
I did know. The thought still turned my stomach.
“If we hadn’t done either of those things, then Kasia would have. We saved her.”
“We saved her only to do what?” Mia said.
My mouth was dry as I thought over a few of our options. “I think we…”
I heard the thumping sounds of Colson coming back down the stairs. “They’ve got a kid room that’s perfect for her. Poor thing’s out like a—”
He stopped when he saw us huddled together. He frowned. “What is it?”
“We’re trying to figure out what we’re going to do with her,” Asher said.
Colson snorted. He slowly approached the table. “Do with her?”
“And who she is,” I added. “What she is.”
“What she is,” Colson said, gripping the back of his chair so hard the wood started to splinter, “is a little girl we have to keep safe from the bad guys. Remember who they are? The Society?”
“Don’t act like I’ve forgotten!” Asher snapped, starting to rise from his seat.
“Asher!” I tugged him back down. A wave of exhaustion slammed into me, but I blinked a few times to clear my head. “We’re not saying she doesn’t need our help, Colson, but we don’t know…well, we don’t know. I expected, we all expected, something really different.”
“Something we were supposed to kill,” Colson said darkly.
“To stop Kasia from using it, yes.”
“We can’t do that now,” Mia said fearfully. “We can’t just kill her.”
“Nobody’s suggesting that anymore,” I said as Asher opened his mouth and Colson’s chair splintered some more. “Right, Asher?”
“Would you sit down?” Asher snapped at Colson. “You glowering over us isn’t helping anybody.”
Colson glared at him a moment longer before taking a seat, the poor chair letting out a protesting groan. He crossed his enormous arms over his chest. “You still think we should do it, don’t you?”
“Of course I don’t!” Asher said. “But we need to figure out what we can do. We can’t kill her. We can’t…I don’t know…How are we supposed to stop what she is?”
“You guys saw what she did in the cavern?” Mia said. “I know that tunnel wasn’t there before. And the house…” She collapsed her hands over each other, making little earthquake noises. “Just like that. Gone. What if it happens again? What if—”
“I don’t think she did that,” I said. “That was the last of the magic holding her there. She was like, I don’t know, the center pole that held the whole tent up. With her gone it collapsed.”
“That’s not exactly a good thing,” Mia said. “If she’s strong enough to keep all that together.”
“Not consciously,” I insisted, somehow sure I was right. “She has all this power, but she doesn’t know how to use it. Outside of that cavern I doubt she even could if she wanted to.”
We all fell silent. I racked my brains, trying to think of what else might give us a clue as to Miranda’s power.
“She’s just a kid,” Colson said after a bit.
“She’s a Supe,” I countered. “A kid Supe, but a Supe,” I added, when he opened his mouth to protest. “Plenty of Supes can control how they look. And if the Fae had anything to do with her then she could be part Fae herself. Who knows how old she might be.”
“Or how strong she is,” Mia said.
“Skylar’s right, she’s not in control of her power,” Colson said. “Her strength only comes from other people hurting her. Other than that, she’s just the same as you or me.”
“You don’t suddenly gain superpowers if you sacrifice any of us,” I said. “She’s got something special, something the Society’s going to do everything they can to get their hands on.”
Colson re-crossed his arms and sat back with a huff. I noticed Asher had been staring at the table, lost in thought.
“What is it?” I said, for some reason irritated that he had the nerve to be contemplative about what was freaking me out. “You look like you have an idea.”
“Maybe…You guys remember the legend of the ophiotaurus?”
“Bless you,” Mia said.
“Remember?” Colson said. “Try, ‘have you ever heard of’?”
“I don’t think we have the same leisure reading as you do, Asher,” I said.
Asher rolled his eyes. “It’s a Greek legend.”
I groaned. “Another one?”
“Another one. The ophiotaurus was a half serpent, half bull in Greek mythology.”
Colson’s eyes trailed to the stairs, clearly confused as he tried to reconcile how Miranda and a legendary monstrous hybrid had anything in common. Mia tapped her chin. “Okay…”
“Just stay with me,” Asher said. “In the legend, whoever burned the entrails of the ophiotaurus would be granted the power to bring down the gods.” He looked each of us in the eye. “You know where I’m going with this.”
“You’re saying Miranda’s like the ophiotaurus…” Mia said, thinking. “But not exactly.”
“Not exactly,” I added, “but kind of the same thing.”
Asher nodded. “The Cursed One must be a being of complete purity or pure innocence, so sacrificing it would be powerful enough to grant some kind of grand power.”
“From where?” Colson said.
“No clue.”
“It does make a little sense,” I said. “At least as much as anything else we’ve learned. And if the Fae were involved, who’s to say they didn’t add a little mythical poetic license in the mix when they were putting her away?”
I pushed my chair back, suddenly needing to move, to feel like I was doing something other than sitting around while a potentially ticking time bomb visited dreamland upstairs.
“You don’t think the Fae know…” Colson started.
“They can’t know we have it,” Mia said, sounding like she was trying to convince herself as well as us. “We haven’t seen them since the first few times the house showed up.”
“My dad said they’re currently away in another realm,” Asher said. “Maybe they felt the shift in magic, maybe not. Though you can bet they’ve felt it now that it’s escaped.”
“They won’t be here for a while, at least,” Colson said to Mia. “And even if they do, we’ll be ready.”
“Doing what?” I said. I held up the pamphlet for Oslo again. “If I remember right, we’re about half a day north of Copenhagen—”
Colson shook his head. “We’re not going back to the Academy there—”
“I’m not saying we are, but we can’t stay here for long either. Look.” I let out a long sigh. The promise of a lovely headache was driving an ice pick into the back of my left eye. “The Fae won’t be here for a little while, but they’ll be back in our realm once the spring hits. The Society’s after Miranda, and we can’t trust the Denmark Academy. We have to get her to New York. Lucien will know what to do.”
“Or he’ll know somebody who will,” Asher agreed.
“And to get there, we’ll have to…” Colson said, indicating I have an answer. “Probably can’t ride a dragon all the way there.”
“We’d…need a Farcast portal,” Mia said. “Or the ability to summon one.”
“If only it were that easy,” Asher said. “We don’t learn portal summoning until the fourth year of advanced studies. I don’t know about you all, but I haven’t read that far ahead.”
I’d actually toyed with the idea of us trying to summon one. Getting one open, as near-impossible as it might be, wasn’t the issue. Even short-distance Farcast portals had the uncanny potential to go disastrously wrong. In the rare chance we got one to stay together, it might not hold long enough for us to make it all the way through. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if it closed while we were still inside.
“There is one place that’ll probably still have a working Farcast portal,” I said.
Colson was up again. “We’re not going to the Copenhagen Academy.”
“Not yet we aren’t,” Mia whispered.
Colson looked between the three of us, then stormed upstairs, keeping his steps surprisingly light despite his anger. Probably so he wouldn’t wake Miranda.
“That didn’t go how I wanted it.” I sighed, pulling on the ends of my hair.
“I’ll go talk with him,” Mia said. “He’s just…he’s grown attached to her already.”
“We all have,” Asher said. “She’s just a kid caught in the middle of this craziness.”
He grabbed Mia’s hand before she went upstairs. “Nobody wants to give her up. Not to anyone. And none of us want to hurt her. Okay?”
“I get it,” Mia said. She gave us both a tender smile then disappeared upstairs.
Asher stood, like he too couldn’t bear to be sitting any longer. He began pacing between the open kitchen and table, arms crossed. My eyes lingered on the tattooed ring on his bicep. “So getting her home’s our best bet?”
“I think that’s the only chance we’ll stand,” I said. “We have to be on our toes. We can’t trust anyone, not until we get back.”
Asher nodded. “We’ll head into the city tomorrow. See if we can find anything there to help us.”
I really wanted to hope he was right and we’d find an ally there. But another feeling, a darker feeling, told me that we were more alone than we thought.