Chapter Eleven

Ana

Pierce wasn’t answering his phone.

Fear nibbled at me when he didn’t show up at the pond or at school. I hovered around his locker until a teacher threatened me with detention if I didn’t get to class. I cornered Eric by the washrooms. “Have you seen Pierce?”

“Not since last night. Both he and Jackson were gone when I got up this morning.”

I tried not to let him see the alarm his words caused me. I felt cold and hot at the same time. Pierce had said he was going to follow Jackson. What had gone wrong?

I took off without saying anything else when I saw Liv stop at her locker. I practically tackled her, forcing her into a nearby empty classroom. “We need to talk.” She shook me off, scowling. “Have you seen Pierce?” I said before we could get into another round of Your Family Sucks.

“Maybe he’s avoiding you.” She smirked.

“Maybe he’s missing.”

“What?” She paused, narrowing her eyes at me. “My family didn’t take him.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“We don’t bother with humans. Anyway, what if your family is behind it?”

“They’re not.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“We don’t have time for this. Can you track him or not?”

She stared at me for a long moment before finally nodding once. “I can try.”

I made a gesture of impatience.

“Not with you here. As if I’d show Renard magic to a Vila.”

“Oh my God, like I give a crap about that right now. Use your pendulum or your nose or whatever. Find Pierce.” I stormed out into the hall where I paced and tried not to grind my teeth into stumps.

It was when I thought I would lose him, that something might happen to him—that’s when I knew. That’s when my whole body knew.

Liv came to the doorway, pale and wide-eyed. “I can’t find him,” she whispered. “Not a trace of him anywhere. And Renards can find anyone.”

Pain bristled along my spine exactly like feathers poking out of my skin.

The more I thought about Pierce, the more my spine felt like it was made of cracked glass.

I took off without a word. I couldn’t let Liv see me like this. She might figure out what was happening, she might tell her family. I looked over my shoulder, terrified I was growing wings in the school hallway. My shirt was damp with sweat all along my vertebrae, but there was nothing else. I ducked into the girls’ washroom and splashed cold water on my face and on the back of my neck. It helped a little.

I didn’t go back to class; instead I snuck into the family van to wait for my ride home. I was burning up, feverish and weak but electrified at the same time. There was pressure under my shoulder blades, as if they were lifting off my skeleton.

I lay on the backseat and pretended that everything wasn’t falling apart, pretended I could still breathe. Growing wings could wait. Pierce and Mei Lin and the others couldn’t. And with Pierce gone, I was the only one who really believed this wasn’t just a Vila-Renard fight. I had to keep it together.

Pierce is okay, I chanted to myself. He was clever. He’d find a way out. Or I’d find a way in. Either way, he was okay. He had to be okay.

I must have fallen asleep because suddenly half a dozen cousins were peering down at me. “You skipped?” one of them asked in disgust. “If you’re skipping class now, I’m definitely skipping tomorrow.”

I sat up gingerly. I felt a little light-headed but otherwise normal. My spine didn’t feel like it was wrapped in barbed wire. I’d over-reacted. Well, about the wings maybe. I was still full-on freaking out that Pierce was missing.

When we got back to Cygnet House, everyone was preparing for the full moon dancing in just a few hours. No one wanted to run out of magic, not now. With my short hair, I’d have to dance twice as hard. I didn’t want to be a scabbard without a sword, as Aunt Aisha always put it.

Morag was already soaring above us. Aunt Felicity was wearing seven crocheted shawls and drinking tea from a vase for some inexplicable reason. Agrippina stood in the garden, staring hard at the sky. It was her first full moon without her cloak.

I felt funny again, but not nearly as bad as I had earlier at school. I just felt prickly, like I was full of thorns. Impatiently, I looked outside again but the moon hadn’t risen yet. The sooner I could hoard more magic, the sooner I could go back to hunting for Pierce and the others. I was climbing out of my skin by the time the moon rose in a pale purple sky. I ran out with my blue cloak. It felt different, lighter. More like wings.

No, I couldn’t think like that. Dance. Find Pierce. Find my family.

Cousins streamed through the garden, out toward the hills. I made it as far as the back field before stumbling. Pain shot up my back and exploded out of the top of my head.

Transforming into a swan wasn’t supposed to hurt this much. It was something out of a fairy tale—shouldn’t it be pretty? I abruptly remembered my fairy tales and wondered if I would even survive this.

Especially since I no longer had any feathers to complete the ritual.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening.

Not now and not like this.

The moon was so bright it cast shadows all around us. Dancing was training, just as much as learning to block a hit and shoot an arrow. I dragged myself up the hill, refusing to acknowledge the pulses of fire under my skin. If they knew I was growing wings, there’d be ceremonies, a cloak to sew, panic that I had no feathers, too much time spent not searching for Pierce.

As it was, we were spending too much time not dancing.

My cousins were clustered together, whispering nervously. “What’s the problem?” I asked, teeth chattering even though I was pretty sure I radiated heat like summer asphalt. “Let’s go already.”

“We can’t,” Rosalita said quietly. She held up the bottle of the Renard blood we smeared on our foreheads to keep us hidden.

It was empty.

We stared at each other, blond hair and white dresses gleaming in the moonlight.

Agrippina staggered between the trees from the direction of the house. “The shields are down! Run!”

Too late.

The foxes had arrived.

And they weren’t alone.

Everything happened at once.

The Renards streamed out of the forest, trailing red hair or red tails. Knives flashed. Orange light flickered wildly from the bottom of the hill. I smelled smoke. Cygnet House was burning. We were exposed, surrounded. Was my dad okay?

The sky filled with white shadows and the sinister hiss of swans. Enormous wings beat a war drum, and beaks broke through skin, leaving jagged gashes and blood. The Renards fought back with daggers and snarling foxes racing low through the grass.

Aunt Aisha abandoned her swan shape even though it made her vulnerable. Her black eyes gleamed, and her brown skin was dotted with tiny down feathers like snow. She was beautiful and fierce and at least two of the Renards paused, distracted by the naked warrior woman staring them down. Aisha was a force of nature, even for us.

When she began to sing, the air changed. The grass went flat around her. There was blood and feathers under her feet. I managed to deflect a tranquilizer dart with a song that was more shouted than sung. The wind sent it into the bushes. My eyes stung, prickling with debris and dust. My spine felt like it was re-forming again, pulling my shoulder blades like they were clay to be molded. I fought the swan as desperately as I was fighting everything else. The little cousins were crouched together, Morag circling over them with a bloody beak. The adults were fighting each other, mostly ignoring them. It all felt wrong.

And Renards didn’t use tranquilizer guns. They used their teeth.

But the people at the dance used those darts. I dropped lower in the tall grass, searching through the thistles for the direction they were being fired from. There was only the silhouette of black trees and the hungry orange light too busy with its own appetite to help me.

“This way,” Aunt Felicity hissed at me. She waved her arms, shawls fluttering like her stolen wings. I wasn’t sure what she was actually trying to do until I saw one of the aunts sneaking behind her through a hole in the undergrowth. They were escaping to circle round and attack the Renards from the back. We’d circle all night, beaks and teeth and blood and fur. I was so tired I wanted to lie down in the chicory flowers and give up.

I clenched my teeth against the hundred little betrayals attacking my body and edged closer. The grass slapped at me, caught in between too many different songs. A few of the Renards were walking in circles now, bewitched. Darts flew from behind Aunt Felicity, but none of them hit her as she swayed in her own strange flying-dance. I moved slowly, trying to stay invisible. I had to see who was using us against each other, who was winning. I climbed a tree, noticing a van idling in the field at the bottom of the slope.

I jumped down, crawling first toward Liv and Jude who’d been beaten back by giant wings. There were bruises already forming on their faces. Blood dripped from Liv’s hair. “What are you doing out here?”

She spun, snarling. “Well, we’re not here to chat, Vila.”

“I get that, but why now? How’d you find us?”

“We always search on moon nights. And your wards must be down because we finally found you, swan.”

I stared at her, momentarily forgetting the battle boiling around us. Our wards were never down. “Don’t you think that’s a little strange?” I finally asked. I needed her to listen before she was lost entirely to the fight.

Because I knew what I had to do.

“Are you going to talk me to death, Ana?” Liv snarled, eyes flashing green.

I used the pain constricting inside me as fuel. I wondered if my eyes were burning, because they felt hot in my skull.

“You couldn’t track Pierce,” I said. “So track me instead.” I tossed my bow aside. “Do it now.”