A Faerie's Curse

Chapter 14

Fourteen

I’m not thrilled about sneaking into the Guild, but Perry’s discovery sounds too important to miss. I grab a shoulder-length wig of black and pink hair from the costume closet and make my way to the Guild’s library as quickly as I can, aware of every second of Griffin Ability use. I release my illusion the moment I reach the back corner of the library where Perry is waiting.

“I’m so sorry” are the first whispered words out of his mouth. “I am so, so sorry. I didn’t know about your niece until just now when Gemma told me. I shouldn’t have called you. If you need to be with family right now or—”

“No. I …” I might need my family, but they certainly don’t want me around at the moment. “It’s fine. I don’t … I don’t really want to think about it, so the distraction will be good.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. So what was the urgency all about? What do you want me to see?”

“Oh, right. Come on.” He motions for me to follow him to a door I’ve never noticed at the back of the library. “I got stuck with storeroom reorganization duty on Friday afternoon because of some homework I didn’t finish.” He opens the door and ushers me into a dark room, pulling the door shut before I can get a good look at what’s inside. He snaps his fingers and raises a single flame above his palm. In the flickering light, I see desks and tables piled neatly on top of each other and shelf after shelf filled with boxes of cards.

“You organized all this?” I ask.

“Yeah. And I wasn’t allowed to use magic. Oh, and don’t make a noise on the floor, okay? Tiptoe.” He leads me between the desks toward the back of the room. “Anyway,” he continues in a whisper. “I was looking for my sound drops this afternoon and couldn’t find them. I last used them while I was tidying in here, so I came to look for them, and …” He crouches down. “Do you hear that?”

I lower myself to the floor and listen. “Voices? From beneath us?”

“Yes,” he whispers. “And if you look behind you and to the right, you’ll see none other than a hole that leads straight into the room below.”

I twist around and see a beam of light shining up from a roughly circular hole. I crawl toward it and lower my face until it’s almost touching the floor. “No way,” I whisper, looking down at the group of guardians gathered in a small but comfortably furnished room below. I count ten sitting in a circle around a coffee table, but I recognize only three of them: Head Councilor Bouchard from the French Guild, Councilor Merrydale, and Olive, my ex-mentor. The other seven guardians—assuming they’re guardians; some of them have covered their wrists so I can’t see if they have guardian markings—must be from other Guilds.

“… get it up and running, we won’t have to worry about incidents like this again,” Councilor Merrydale says to the group.

“I should hope not,” Head Councilor Bouchard says in that precise, accented tone I remember from when I was unfortunate enough to meet him on my first official day here. “It is distressing to think you may have an invisible Gifted fae running around this Guild unseen. Who knows what such a person could get up to.”

Crap, they’re talking about me.

“You said you didn’t see this person’s face?” asks a woman with hair shaved so close to her scalp I can barely make out the two different colors.

“Unfortunately not. I reviewed the recording after I failed to find the intruder. The person was definitely female, but I was unable to see her face.”

“What if it wasn’t an intruder?” the woman suggests. “It may be that one of your guardians here is an unregistered Gifted person.”

“That’s also a possibility,” Councilor Merrydale says. “In fact, we probably have more than one unregistered Gifted faerie working here, as do the rest of you at your various Guilds.”

“It’s disgraceful to think of,” someone else says, shaking his head. “Guardians working for the law while breaking it every day. You’d think they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves while lying to us like that.”

“Well, they do,” Olive says with a bored sigh. “Hence the work that’s going on downstairs.” She leans back in her armchair and crosses one leg over the other. “Can we move on to the next item, Head Councilor?”

Her disrespect stuns me, but Head Councilor Bouchard doesn’t seem to notice. He consults a scroll in his hand. “Hmm. Well, there is, of course, the Lord Draven matter, but as was the case with our last few meetings, the Seelie Queen has shared no new information.”

A jolt of surprise shoots through me. These must be the Guild members Angelica negotiated with.

“Probably a good thing,” the shaved woman mutters with a shiver. “As far as I’m concerned, he can stay imprisoned beneath the palace floors for the rest of his days.”

Nods of agreement come from the rest of the group, and a man who hasn’t spoken yet says, “I still can’t believe he—”

“It’s probably best not to dwell on that item,” Olive interrupts, “given that we have nothing new to discuss.”

“Yes, probably best,” Councilor Bouchard agrees. “Then the final item, as always, is this week’s surplus Seer visions.”

“I’ve collected them all,” Councilor Merrydale says, leaning forward and picking up a large stack of papers. “Including the ones Meira forgot to bring last week.” Across the table, the woman with the shaved head nods.

“Have they been checked?” Councilor Bouchard asks. “Anything still to come?”

“No, they’ve all expired. I checked each one.”

“Well, you know what to do with them,” Councilor Bouchard says with a dismissive wave of his hand.

Councilor Merrydale stands and moves to the fireplace, and I watch in horror as he tosses the dozens of Seer visions into the flames. As Head Councilor Bouchard calls the meeting to an end, I pull my head away from the peephole. “I’ve seen enough,” I whisper to Perry. We tiptoe our way out of the storeroom and back into the library.

“Did he burn those visions?” Perry asks me immediately. “I know there was a fireplace in there, but I don’t want to assume—”

“Yeah. He did. Did you, um, hear everything?” Did you hear about Lord Draven, is what I really want to ask.

“Bits here and there,” he says, “but not everything. I heard that last bit about the ‘surplus Seer visions.’” He makes quotes in the air with his fingers. “Can you believe that? They actually throw visions away. Was that the stack of papers on the table?” I nod and he lets out a low whistle. “That’s a lot. I can’t believe they know about that many things going wrong that they just don’t bother to fix.”

“Yeah.” I bite my lip and look around, keeping my eyes peeled for surveillance bugs. “If Zed knew about this, then I can see why he might not be so enamored with the Guild system.”

“Zed’s the guy responsible for the dragon disease?”

“Yes. He was trying to tell to me that the Guild system is messed up and that they don’t help nearly as many people as they could. He wanted to know how they decide who’s worth saving and who isn’t.”

“It’s probably random,” Perry says in disgust. “I doubt they put any more thought into it than that.”

“Look, I agree that this is wrong, but it in no way excuses the things Zed did. He is a despicable, worthless—”

“What? No, of course not. I’m not excusing anything.” Perry looks horrified. “Killing every guardian is not the way to go about this. The Guild should be training more guardians. Let non-faeries in. Or send all those extra visions to the Reptiscillan Protectors Institute. Don’t ignore and then burn them.”

I nod, staring at the floor as my mind ticks through possible solutions. “I wonder where they keep those surplus visions before bringing them to their secret meeting each week.”

“Why? What are you thinking?”

“It’s not a long-term solution to the Guild’s problem, but … well, I have a friend—a group of friends—who could make sure those visions are seen to instead of wasted. We’d have to find the visions first and copy them.”

“I’ll see what I can find out. I might even have to talk to … ugh. Pretty boy what’s-his-name.”

“I assume you’re referring to Rick,” I say. The Seer trainee Gemma has a crush on, which Perry is all too aware of.

“Mm hmm,” Perry says, looking as if he has a bad taste in his mouth.

“Well, I should go before I get caught. Thank you so much for showing me that. I’m not sure I would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself.”

“I know. Oh, wait. I have to tell you some other stuff.”

I peer around the bookshelf, then pull my head back and shuffle further into the shadows. “What is it?”

“Those two names you gave me to look up are both on the Griffin List. So whatever they’re doing downstairs with those people in boxes is related to Griffin Abilities.”

I nod. “The conversation I just overheard confirmed that. I think they’re trying to come up with a way to test for Griffin Abilities. I assume it would be mandatory for everyone to be tested.”

“That would suck big time.”

“Now that I think about it,” I say, “I wonder why they didn’t come up with a test ages ago. They know they can’t trust everyone to be honest enough to register themselves or their children.”

“They’ve probably been trying for a long time and just haven’t succeeded yet.”

“Probably.” I look around the bookshelf again. “Okay, so I need to—”

“Wait, just one more thing.” He grasps my shoulders as if to keep me from running away. “I know you told me to stop snooping around Olive’s things after you found out who really framed you for killing Saskia, and I did—sort of—but then I came across something yesterday. Remember I told you we found scrolls with non-Guild seals in Olive’s office?” Without waiting for my answer, he rushes on. “I found out who the seal belongs to. None other than—” he smacks my shoulders as if beating out a drum roll “—the Seelie Queen.”

“The—what? Are you sure?”

“Yes. I saw the seal in a textbook the other day.”

“Olive? My bad-tempered ex-mentor is receiving correspondence directly from the Seelie Queen?”

“Looks like it.”

“Maybe she was delivering the scrolls to someone else. Someone like Head Councilor Bouchard.”

“Why would these scrolls need to go through Olive then? Why not directly to Councilor Bouchard?”

“That’s … a good question.” I place my hands on my hips as I consider it.

“And another thing that’s weird about Olive is that she periodically disappears for half a day or so at a time.”

“How do you know this?”

“My mentor’s office is nearby. I notice stuff.”

“Okay, but that might have absolutely nothing to do with the scrolls from the Seelie Queen.” On the other hand, I add silently to myself, it might have everything to do with those scrolls. I don’t want to get too excited yet, but it’s definitely worth following Olive around for a day or two to see if maybe, just maybe, the place she disappears to is the Seelie Court.

Invisibility gets me safely out of the Guild without incident. I closely examine my level of fatigue when I arrive back at the mountain, but I don’t feel any more tired than usual. Could it be possible the witch was lying about her curse? I can’t forget that dream, though. The dream that ended with very real pain stabbing into my chest when I woke up. Perhaps I just didn’t use my Griffin Ability enough tonight to feel the curse’s effects.

Warm light illuminates the living room doorway along with the flickering shadows of a dancing fire. I walk into the room and find Gaius in an armchair. “Hey,” I say. “I might possibly have a way to get to the Seelie Court. I’m not certain, but I’ll investigate further tomorrow.”

He looks up at me. “Oh, that’s good. Excellent. Well done.” Though he smiles, his tone lacks its usual enthusiasm.

“What’s wrong? Is everything … Have you spoken to Chase yet?” I walk toward him and hold my hand out for the ring. It’s been far, far too long since I heard his voice.

“Calla,” Gaius says slowly, removing the ring from his pinkie finger and placing it on my palm. “I haven’t been able to get hold of him. It’s been over a day now and he hasn’t responded. We don’t know what that means, and we can’t assume the worst, but we need to be prepared for … well, for anything.”

A chill settles in my bones as I allow myself a glimpse of a dark future in which there is no Victoria, no brother who loves me unconditionally, and now no Chase. I shy away from the image with a shudder as I wrap my arms tightly around my chest and press my lips together. I don’t think I can speak, so I simply nod as Gaius reaches up and squeezes my arm. Trying to comfort me, no doubt, but when I look into his eyes, all I see is the same hopelessness I feel.