| |
“Bastian, you are the kindest soul I have ever met,” Tess said, “and I know you want to prove yourself to be a worthy Kairos member. What’s a little fudging the rules when the world won’t be kind to you back?”
There was a lot to unpack, but all I could focus on was the first word: “You called me Bastian!”
Tess’s jaw clenched in disbelief. “That is your takeaway from everything I just said?”
“Wow,” Em breathed, her eyes widening in surprise. “You’re right, Bas. Where is our beloved Prickly Tess?”
“Prickly?” Tess looked between us again. “Is that what you call me?”
“Beloved,” I repeated quickly. “Usually, you only call me ‘Hayes’ or ‘Hey, you.’ I told you only the people I care about can call me Bas.”
Em pried the spellbook from Tess’s hands gently to take them, making Tess focus on her adopted sister. “That’s why we came to see you.”
“Because I’m being civil to Ba—Hay—” Tess sighed in defeat. “Bas.”
I beamed, then sobered. “We haven’t talked about our arguments. Something changed since we returned to Ophir, and I’m just confused.”
Tess sighed again. “I know I haven’t been acting like myself lately. I don’t blame you. I’ll explain.” She paused to eye us critically. “After you both bathe. You’re getting sand everywhere.”
I was suddenly aware of all the grains itching in multiple places. “Understandable. We’ll be back.”
Em and I bathed in the separate “bathhouses,” the River Jehona’s magically healing waters, drawing out any lingering tiredness from my body. I rushed to my room to change and then met up with a damp-haired Em in the hallway.
But we didn’t get very far to Tess’s room before Leysa cut off our path, with Tess trailing behind her, expression unreadable. I refrained from blurting out, Are we in trouble?
“Hello, young, troublesome ones,” the Kairos co-leader greeted with a gleam in her reddish eyes. “You’re called to a meeting.”
Em and I fell in step beside Tess as we followed Leysa to one of the meeting caves. I glanced at the girls, knowing they felt the same sense of wariness. Meetings were usually just for the important adults. What would they want us three for? If it was about things we gleaned from the “adventure,” we had already gone over those. They’d squeezed us dry of information.
But it was pointless asking Leysa; she was just going to give a cryptic or sarcastic answer. I loved Leysa like a family member, but sometimes, she was too odd to be helpful. Every time I interacted with her now, her words echoed in my mind from the first meeting we had when I returned to Ophir just over a month ago about Galen’s protection spell over the Davians’ farm.
“It’s because everyone wanted both your parents’ heads lopped off, Bastian. With them dead, they want to take out their revenge on you.”
That ended up being very true. And if there was even a note of doubt about it, no vampire needed the excuse of my dead parents’ acts to want revenge on me. Ending Redfang earned my own bad reputation.
I heard Koen’s voice before we reached the meeting cave, but I couldn’t make out his words yet. Rhetta responded, making him laugh under his breath. My heart lifted. If there was anything good in the vampire-infested world, it was Koen and Rhetta Blackwood.
We walked into the wide, circular cave decked out in furniture to make it less inhabitable and cave-like. Koen, Rhetta, Sloan and Wren Roland, and Vidar were all waiting at the long wooden table. Em perked when she saw the empty chair between her parents and settled there. They both leaned in to kiss her cheek.
“Sit here, Bas,” Koen called, pulling out the chair next to him. “I promise I won’t kiss you,” he added wryly as I accepted the offer.
I laughed, but before I could quip back, Leysa cleared her throat from her seat beside Vidar. Tess sat between Sloan and Rhetta.
“We are here to discuss the activity you three have stirred up in the past month,” the co-leader announced, meeting our gazes with a pointed look before continuing, “Since the Redfang coven’s abrupt destruction, several covens within a six-day radius from Balmoral have made themselves eerily scarce. The news reached Amate in Sanlow, and she dispatched an army scouring for more underground cattle farms. So far, we’ve counted five villages burnt to a crisp.”
Shock rattled me to the core as I gaped at Leysa. In my peripheral vision, I caught Tess and Em’s horror plain on their faces. They were thinking the same thing I was: Our actions made Amate send out her army to destroy entire villages?
“The reason we haven’t sent you three on missions is not just because you’re walking targets,” Leysa went on, “but because the Kairos suddenly has it easy. With Amate parading around, we don’t need to kill or flush out nests if someone as powerful as she does it.”
Em gasped in realization. “That’s why there haven’t been as many patrols as usual. No wonder everyone’s antsy.”
Leysa nodded. “Ciel knows the location of old Ophir. We need as many forces as possible here just in case she invades again.”
The invasion of Ciel’s forces was what started the whole adventure in the first place. Because of that, the Kairos had to move to the backup camp—which was just further into the endless network of tunnels beneath the surface of the Izan Desert. It wasn’t much of an uprooting, thankfully, and kind of funny. The vampires thought they flushed us out when all we did was just move a few tunnels down.
Vidar spoke next, his voice as deep as the caverns, making his words foreboding. “Vampires, witches, and humans alike can feel a storm brewing. A civil war is on the horizon; it’s believed that vampire covens are teaming up to lead an attack on Sanlow to dethrone Amate.”
“Well, that got worse fast,” Em muttered.
“There are still too many unknowns to list,” Vidar said, vibrant green eyes fixing on each of the gathered hunters, “so all we can do now is continue careful reconnaissance and shore up our defenses. If a civil war breaks out, the Kairos and those it protects can still get caught in the crossfire.”
Tess raised her hand and asked quietly, “Do we know if they plan to attack Dawnhaven?”
The room was quiet for just a moment as Leysa and Vidar exchanged glances. Everyone here knew what Dawnhaven meant to Tess. The witch city was her ancestral home, and her family was one of its founders. More than anything, she wanted to return to the stronghold and reclaim her birthright as a member of its oligarchy system. Witches believed no one witch should hold a title; a city was better run by multiple sound minds with their people’s best interest at the forefront.
I tried to catch her eye, but she studiously kept her attention on the leaders. Tess was prickly because of me. To return to Dawnhaven, she had to prove herself free of any connection to a vampire—or even a half-blood vampire. The witches of Dawnhaven were purists, but if you were to think better of them, they were just trying to protect the one thing vampires couldn’t touch or destroy. Any kind of connection to a vampire was an invitation for a spy, as far as they were concerned.
To be accepted into Dawnhaven, Tess couldn’t be friends with any of the half-bloods in Kairos, including me—especially me. The city would never open to Tess if they knew she was on good terms with the son of Cirillo Kaladin.
She was mean to me to push me away, break any ties to one another, and make it easier for her to leave me behind and pursue her destiny. So why was she suddenly not trying to push me away anymore?
It struck me then: had she given up on that dream?
I would have confronted Tess right then and there, had Vidar not responded, “That is also unclear. It is on our radar to keep track of.”
“Why are they here?” Rhetta asked worriedly, reaching to rest her hand over mine. I hadn’t realized I’d braced my palms on the table as if ready to jump to my feet and say something crazy.
Sloan, ever the fretting mother when she wasn’t being a badass healer, looked sharply at Leysa with rich green eyes. “What do you have planned, Leysa? Do not send them back out into that hellscape. They’re just kids—”
“Kids,” Leysa interrupted with a scoff, flashing her half-inch-long fangs at her old friend, “who instigated a potential civil war between vampires! They lost Galen Shayla’s spellbook and whipped Death-how-knows many covens into a bloodthirsty frenzy. Do you think it matters what age they are? All of Kairos is in danger because of—”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Leysa,” Koen snapped as the girls and I ducked our heads in guilt, his hazel eyes blazing as fiercely as his sister’s. “They didn’t lose anything. It was stolen, and that’s no fault of theirs. For all we know, there could be one or two covens affected by Redfang’s demise. Don’t make it seem like they rallied the former Cardinal Four.”
A chill ran down my spine at the title: Moros, Bloodfrost, Elarian, and Rhidian. These were the four covens that ruled Sanlow with bloody might. While Cirillo was the only one killed, the other three leaders managed to escape Amate’s rampage and flee. The Kairos lost tabs on them years ago, which still shamed Leysa; losing the location of the three most dangerous vampires in the world spread a sense of fear through the organization. She swore to protect them, and yet they went so deep in hiding she couldn’t find them again—one of them being her vicious half-sister, Tanith Taran of Elarian.
It occurred to me how much weight was bearing down on Leysa’s shoulders. She helped grow the Kairos from just an idea Galen had to a revolutionary group to the meticulous organization it is today. Just twenty years ago, the Kairos was a ragtag collection of Sanlow rejects. Now, it was army-sized.
And I put that all in jeopardy.
As if reading my mind, Rhetta gave my hand a squeeze. I glanced at her. The encouraging light in her dark green eyes bolstered my self-esteem. “What you did was admirable, Bas,” she began, but Leysa cut her off,
“It was. No one has ever taken down a coven like that before. Ever. That means no one could have predicted the fallout. And so here we are.”
Vidar looped an arm around his mate’s waist. “Calm, Leysa,” he murmured.
“I’m perfectly calm,” she hissed at him. To Sloan, she growled, “What I have planned for them is an opportunity to right their wrongs.”
“They’ve done nothing wrong,” Wren objected, jumping into the argument, which surprised everyone. He was a talented healer and, personality-wise, nothing like his wife or daughter; he was soft-spoken and non-confrontational. “Stop painting them like rebels.”
Sloan’s tone was level and cautioning. “You are not sending them off on some futile quest to find the book. There are no leads. They have already paid for whatever mistakes they might have made. Right now, as Vidar said, we need to focus on shoring our defenses—”
“The spellbook needs to be found regardless,” growled Leysa. Sloan’s jaw clenched at being interrupted a second time. “Three weeks have gone by. They are here now to share ideas of where it could be. We know Bastian is the key to unlocking it. Maybe he has a sense of how to find it.”
Everyone looked at me suddenly. I jerked out of a daze. It was beginning to feel like I was experiencing the whole argument completely out of my own body. “What? No. I can barely use this thing right.”
I glared at the purplish tattoo of overlapping triangles on my wrist. The imbricatis marked me as an official, full-fledged member of the Kairos and granted me the ability to teleport myself and others to different places via a token. But after two weeks of training, I still couldn’t get it right. Either I didn’t transport at all, or the token went up in flames as some kind of misfire.
Leysa’s mouth thinned. “Master it before it gets anyone killed. Meeting adjourned before we’re really at each other’s throats. We will convene tomorrow night.”
