Stiletto Read online

  Her voice was measured, and it was the same voice she used to talk to one of the children when they were having a hysterical breakdown over not being able to find a stuffed pony toy or getting kicked out of a game of hide and seek. I didn’t like her using it on me, and I especially didn’t like the way it made me feel calmer.

  “The thing is,” she continued, “your mother and Nelly didn’t have an opening like we have. Sienna has given us an opportunity. Let’s not waste it.”

  “I think you’re out of your mind.”

  “You can’t just not do anything,” Cate said.

  “I don’t even know why you’re here,” I said.

  Her eyebrows shot up, and I could see her wanting to argue, and I was torn between guilt over snapping at her and a hunger to do it again.

  Brendan put a hand on her knee and shook his head a little, which annoyed me even more.

  “Let’s assume we were going to move ahead with the plan,” Alec said. “Can we think of a better time to do it?”

  “It’s not about the timing, it’s about Rowan not getting murdered,” I snapped. “Rowan, no. The plan’s good, but I’ll do it.”

  Rowan snorted, and I shot her a glare.

  It didn’t seem to faze her.

  “You are the absolute last person in the coven who could pull it off,” she said. “I know you like to do stuff on your own, Scarlett. But you don’t get to do this one.”

  Suddenly exhausted, I dropped into the last open chair next to the fireplace.

  “It’s too risky.”

  “It absolutely is,” Rowan agreed. “I’m going anyway. I want to protect this house just as much as you do, and if I get killed, it’ll be less of a blow to the coven.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but the words died on my lips.

  She was right, awful as it felt to think about it. Rowan was a valuable member of the coven, and I loved her perhaps better than I loved most of my sisters, but the Stiletto line had been almost destroyed.

  I was the one Grandma and Mom had been training—in arranging the schedules, in making contact with other entities in the Glimmering world, in the spells that helped the Stiletto keep the coven running smoothly. Until I could pass that knowledge on to someone else, I couldn’t risk it being lost.

  At least, I couldn’t risk it too much.

  “I’m coming with you,” I said finally.

  “I assumed,” she said.

  It was a gesture meant to make me feel like I’d won, and I pretended I didn’t see right through it.

  “That’s that, then,” Rowan said, as if she hadn’t just thrown her fate to the winds. “We leave tomorrow night.”

  24

  “Don’t worry,” Alec said, putting a hand on my arm. “We’ll be there to protect her.”

  Brendan brushed past us in the darkened alley outside the mesmer club, checking Alec with his shoulder.

  “Sorry,” he said, clearly without meaning it.

  I grabbed Brendan’s arm and whirled him around to face me. My grip was stronger than I’d planned, and his eyebrows shot up.

  “What?”

  “This,” I said, waving a finger between him and Alec. “This thing here, whatever this is? It has to stop. Now. My mother was just murdered. I don’t have time to referee some stupid competition, especially when you both seem to think I’m going to end up as the prize.”

  I’d been trying to play nice with the two of them for too long. I didn’t have energy to keep it up. Politeness was for people who weren’t about to send one of their best friends into a vampire nest.

  “I’m no one’s prize,” I said. “Got it? Not yours. Not yours. So either you two figure out how to work together or I’m calling this whole thing off.”

  Cate clapped slowly. “Well said. Keep it in your pants, boys.”

  “You can shut up,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Rowan?”

  “I’m ready,” she said. She was dressed simply and wore no glamours.

  It wasn’t like glamours would have helped; Sienna could recognize us all beneath them. But I was nervous, knowing she was going in there without even the pretense of a disguise.

  No, not nervous.

  Terrified.

  I could recognize the fear. I could give it a name. But I couldn’t give in. If I stepped back now, I’d never find it in myself to step forward again.

  “Cate?”

  “Headed to the back exit.” She gave me a finger-gun salute that would have been stupid coming from anyone else. She slipped down the back of the alley and melted into the shadows.

  “Boys?” I said, mimicking Cate’s tone.

  “I’m ready,” Brendan said. “I’ve been ready all day.”

  Alec just nodded. The tiny camera hidden inside one of his shirt buttons winked at me, but only because I was looking.

  It was a Humdrum technology—not the kind of thing the Daggers usually used and not the kind of thing Sienna would be on alert for. I checked my phone, made sure the low-quality feed was live, and ducked back into the cover of the shadows. Rowan stepped out onto the street, Brendan and Alec behind her.

  I waited for a few long breaths. Cherry and Saffron, the two remaining Cardinals, were the only ones who knew where I was.

  If this went south, they had instructions to get the rest of the Daggers out and into hiding.

  I didn’t know what kind of hiding, and I didn’t know where. That was up to them. My not knowing meant they’d be that much safer if I ended up captured.

  I sank to the dirty alley pavement with the brick of the building against my back, put in my headphones, threw up a quick glamour of darkness that would hide my phone’s light from passersby, and watched.

  Rowan spoke to a bouncer outside a nightclub that had neon pink and purple signs in the windows. The bouncer frowned at her, and the soft silk of his voice was apparent even through the scratchiness of the hidden camera.

  “Can’t let you in without the password,” he said.

  “I’m here to see Sienna,” Rowan said, total confidence radiating from her. “You’re one of hers, right?”

  Alec wasn’t standing far enough back for me to see the man’s face, but his voice instantly changed.

  “My apologies, I misunderstood,” he said. “Lady Sienna’s guests are always welcome.”

  She had them calling her Lady Sienna now. It was so stupid it deserved laughter, though I couldn’t muster any.

  The image on my screen became erratic as the dim light of the club entrance was replaced by darkness interspersed with flashing lights. Music crackled in my headphones.

  Sienna might have power, but she didn’t have much imagination. Of course Brendan had been able to find her; what surprised me was that I hadn’t thought to look here first.

  It wasn’t a club I’d been to before, but I’d known about it for a while. It was one of many of the city’s illegal gambling dens. The man who had owned all of them, Joseph Brick, had sold off a few after he’d been imprisoned. But he’d held on to a couple, including this one, and word on the street was that he was still managing his empire from his prison cell.

  We might have destroyed most of Brick’s pack, but his dens were still thriving under Sienna’s care.

  The bouncer led Rowan and her bodyguards through the club. The large bulk of his back blocked most of the camera’s view, and then he stepped to the side and revealed a door with VIP written on it in thick gold letters.

  “Stay here,” he said and left them for a moment with the door shut in their faces. He came back and waved them in, and while the camera was too close for me to catch the look on his face, I did see the hunger written plainly on the features of other people in the room.

  They weren’t all vampires. There were some well-dressed witches here, and a few faeries in gossamer evening gowns, and the usual assortment of creatures that only showed their true faces in Glimmering spaces. But there were a lot of vampires, enough that I almost grasped the nec
klace hanging at my throat and messaged Rowan to get out of there.

  I gripped my phone more tightly and watched them approach.

  Sienna rose from her seat in one graceful movement, the folds of her blood-red gown spilling around her legs.

  “Rowan,” she said, her voice full of an artificial honey. “You’re the last person I expected to see tonight.”

  “I figured,” Rowan said. “No one ever thinks I’m going to surprise them. I’m tired of that. You said we had a chance to join you, and I’m taking it.”

  Her voice took on a hard edge, and for the first time I realized: Rowan could act.

  She stepped forward and reached out to Sienna as if for an embrace. Sienna held back and tilted her head curiously. Then she glanced up at Brendan and Alec, and her eyes narrowed.

  “Alpha,” she said coldly.

  “Bitch,” he said.

  Sienna’s eyebrows went up, and a few of the vampires around her moved in subtle ways; a slight shift of the feet here, a sideways glance there. She held out a hand as if to hold them back.

  “You want to join me, too?”

  Brendan scoffed. “Hardly. I’m here to make sure you don’t snap Rowan’s head off before she’s gotten her chance to speak. Then I’m out.”

  “To tell the Crimson Daggers how it all went down?”

  He gave her a disgusted look that I could just barely see in the corner of the tiny screen.

  “I’m not going back to the Daggers,” he said. “Place has gone to hell in the past few days, and I’m sick of dealing with Scarlett. She’s been leading me on. I’m done with it.”

  I’d helped him rehearse the lines, but they still made me wince.

  “We’re here as a favor to Rowan,” Alec said. “Once we know she’s safe, we’re headed out. Got a property east of here, and we’re clearing off the Dagger lands before morning.”

  Brendan took a small step toward Sienna. “And if you ever, ever come onto my territory again, you’ll wish I’d only killed you.”

  She smirked, and my tense shoulders relaxed. It never would have worked for Brendan and Alec to pretend to be on her side. Outright hostility was the only thing that could keep them safe.

  Sienna crossed one arm over her body and cradled her chin on the other fist. She observed Rowan, taking her in and silently waiting for her to crack.

  Rowan let her stare.

  Behind Sienna, the mesmer game had been suspended by the players watching at the unfolding drama with interest. Sienna noticed and glanced over her shoulder.

  “Play,” she ordered, and the dealer hurriedly shuffled tarot cards for the next round. Sienna turned back around and considered Rowan. “Why do you want to join me?”

  “The Stiletto’s dead,” she said. “I was only sticking around for Nelly. Now Scarlett’s in charge.” She shrugged. “I don’t hate Scarlett, but am I really supposed to think she’s going to keep us safe? Am I really supposed to go on whatever missions she thinks are right for me? She hasn’t even been training for the role a year, and, like, no offense, but it’s not like she was Nelly’s first choice.”

  Again, the words stung, and I was glad. It was good to feel something, especially when it meant Sienna just might buy the story we were spinning.

  “I don’t totally agree with everything you’ve done since you left,” Rowan admitted. “But you clearly want us to take sides, and—I mean, we grew up together. I know I don’t ever want to be on the opposite side from you.”

  “Especially without Nelly’s protection,” Sienna said, somehow making it sound like an insult.

  Rowan shrugged. When Sienna stayed silent, Rowan shuffled her feet.

  “I mean, yeah,” Rowan admitted.

  Sienna walked around the three of them, eying them up and down and checking their hands none too subtly for weapons or spells. Rowan held her hands up in surrender.

  “I’m not here to fight you,” Rowan said. “I just want to survive the next year, and to be honest, I don’t think I will if you decide I’m not with you.”

  “You’d give up the noble calling of Dagger, just like that?”

  “It’s not like anyone was going to name me Stiletto anyway,” Rowan said. “You know I always came in last in our age group. Well, me and Scarlett. I was raised to be a Dagger, but that doesn’t mean I have to be one.”

  She said this last little bit with defiance, and it was enough of a delicate touch to make it seem like she was coming to her own epiphany and speaking the truth for once.

  My faith in her wavered for a moment.

  I’d certainly felt like I didn’t have a place in the Daggers if I wasn’t going to be the Stiletto. I couldn’t imagine how it would have felt to know I wasn’t even in the running.

  “Give me your necklace,” Sienna demanded.

  Rowan didn’t hesitate. She tugged the tiny gold charm from beneath her shirt and lifted the slender chain over her head. The chain coiled into Sienna’s palm like a snake.

  “That’s a good start,” she said.

  Rowan nodded with a visible relief I felt like we hadn’t quite earned yet.

  Sienna looked sharply up at Brendan and Alec. “You can go.”

  “Not until she’s safe,” Brendan said.

  “She won’t be safe unless you leave,” Sienna said.

  The threat was impossible to miss, and, after a moment of exchanging glances and barely perceptible shrugs, Brendan scoffed.

  “Fine,” he said, like he’d never wanted to be there in the first place. “I’m done with you witches after this. Remember what I said. You leave my pack alone.”

  “Oh, for sure,” Sienna cooed, then rolled her eyes.

  I’d known this could happen, but seeing it happen—seeing them walk away and leave Rowan to Sienna’s mercy, seeing the door open and the cool elegance of the mesmer parlor get replaced by the strobing lights of the club—that was almost too much. I held tightly to my phone and did my best to ignore the silent screaming in my head.

  25

  Alec slipped into the shadows of the alley and walked silently toward me. A moment later, Brendan and Cate entered from the other side. They crouched in the darkness next to me, and I shifted my glamour so it would cover them, too.

  “They’re moving her,” Cate said in a low voice. “I saw her get into a car out back.”

  “I should have had Rowan wear the camera,” I said.

  “Yeah, and what if they’d found it?” she said. “Don’t give up now. I popped one of those good old Humdrum trackers under the rear bumper.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “It should be enough to tell us where she ends up,” Brendan said. “We can follow after they’ve stopped looking for anyone tailing them. We need someone watching the Dagger house just in case, though. If Sienna’s crew did see us, I don’t want her taking it out on them. Cate?”

  “On it.” She stood and, after a moment of listening, headed out the back alley and disappeared around a corner.

  Waiting was the hardest thing we’d done yet. The feeling reminded me too much of waiting for Mom and Grandma to come home, and it was a constant battle to shove back the knowledge that they never had—that the outcome of waiting was always a gaping hole that would never close.

  Finally, when the crawling of my skin and the screaming inside my head had become almost unbearable, long after the tiny dot on my phone tracking the car had come to rest, Alec put a hand on my knee.

  “I think we’ve waited long enough.” He looked up at Brendan, whose eyes were fixed on Alec’s hand, and I kicked Brendan gently to get his attention.

  He nodded. “I’ll check the ends of the alleys. Keep me covered.”

  I held up my hands and strengthened the glamour of darkness that cloaked us. He crept to the back end of the alley, glanced both ways, and then checked the front. Both times, he sniffed the air, his powerful werewolf nose telling him more about the environment than his eyes.

  “V
ampires reek,” Alec whispered to me as we watched Brendan. “The blood stench is hard to miss.”

  It was comforting, sort of. Brendan waved, giving us the all-clear, and I let the glamour lapse. We walked quickly down the dark street, hoods up, heads down. A slight drizzle had started; we seemed like ordinary Portlanders with our hoodies drawn against the rain.

  I unlocked Mom’s car, and we climbed inside, Brendan in the passenger seat next to me and Alec in the back. The car still smelled like Mom, like coconut sunscreen and warm coffee, and I immediately cracked the window to diffuse the fragrance with the scent of the rain.

  “We can’t take the car,” I said, buckling in. “Sienna knows all the Dagger vehicles. And my broom won’t support all three of us.”

  I wasn’t that good at flying anyways. It took mental control, and I was prone to distraction at the best of times. Now, with the weight of the coven and all the deaths pressing in on me, I didn’t trust myself to get an inch off the ground.

  “How far is it?” Alec asked.

  I handed him my phone, and he examined the map with its little flashing red dot. He wiped a couple of raindrops from the screen and handed it back.

  “I know the neighborhood,” he said. “I think Heir Olivia’s family lives near there. Lots of old fancy mansions. If we park a little outside the area, we can go in on foot. Might be fastest if you ride me.”

  I cringed a little at his phrasing, and his eyes widened. Brendan froze for a second, then laughed.

  “Wow, dude,” he said.

  “Not like that,” Alec said, face red. “I mean, I’ll shift, and you can, you know, I can carry you on my back.”

  Brendan kept laughing. “No way, man, too late.”

  A tiny smile tugged at the corner of my lips. The movement was like dry earth or old paint cracking in the heat, like this was something my face had forgotten how to do.

  “Keep it in your pants,” I said, mimicking Cate, and put my key in the ignition.

  I followed Alec’s directions to the edge of the neighborhood, and then we parked under an overgrown tree on a street lined with houses with equally overgrown gardens. Brendan jumped out first, ready to punch anyone who tried to attack us, but the street was dark and quiet. Alec raised his eyebrows at me via the rearview mirror, and then we climbed out, too.