Crimson Daggers- The Complete Trilogy Read online

  I pressed my lips tightly together.

  “But someone has been killing members of my pack,” he said, and his voice was soft and tight like he was trying to hold the words back.

  I watched his shoulders rise and fall as he took in a deep breath, and put my hands between my knees so I wouldn’t give in to the temptation to reach out and touch him.

  “More than one,” he said. “Three. Three people have been murdered this year. Three of my people.” He turned to look at me, and his eyes were hard. “Tell me it’s not your coven.”

  I shifted on the rock and held his gaze.

  “Were your wolves attacking people?” I said. “People who didn’t want to be turned?”

  “No,” he burst out. “Have you been listening? We don’t—”

  I put a firm hand on his knee.

  “Then no,” I said. “The Crimson Daggers don’t go after people who are keeping to themselves. An’ ye harm none, do what ye will.”

  “That’s some religious thing, right?”

  “It’s a principle we follow,” I said. “We don’t attack people for living their own way. We take down monsters who would harm the innocent.”

  He made a choking sound and started to stand. I yanked him back down.

  “Monsters are determined by their actions,” I said. “We don’t go after werewolves or vampires or anyone else unless they try to hurt other people or the Faerie Court asks us to pursue someone they can’t catch. We don’t go rogue.”

  “Your grandma went rogue when she killed my dad.”

  “Your dad was about to assault a Humdrum child,” I snapped. Brendan opened his mouth, and I cut him off with a sharp wave of my hand. “Or maybe not. We don’t know. We weren’t there. But that’s what my grandma said.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t take her word for it.”

  “Then don’t.” I shrugged. “All I can tell you is the laws I was raised with, and one of the biggest ones is that we never, ever, ever use our abilities or training against the innocent. So no, if your wolves only turn people at their request, then my sisters didn’t kill anyone in your pack. Full stop.”

  “You really think they all follow the rules?”

  I thought about my sisters and my grandmother. I thought about Mom’s occasional silences when she got back from missions, and the way Grandma had never mentioned the Wildwoods.

  I knew the rules we claimed to follow.

  I also knew that I had only begun the path of a Dagger.

  He ran the back of his hand across his mouth and sat, shoulders hunched, gaze fixed resolutely on the plants. This time, I reached out to touch his shoulder.

  “Whoever killed your people is wrong,” I said. “And that sucks, and I’m sorry.”

  He nodded and kept staring. I put my hand back in my lap, and we sat in silence for a long moment.

  It was my chance to attack him, and I didn’t take it.

  “I’m sorry I kidnapped your grandma,” he said. “I was just trying to protect my family. I’ll do whatever I have to do to keep my pack safe.”

  “No, you won’t,” I said. “You’re not going to kidnap old women again.”

  He rolled his eyes at me, and a very small smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, I’m starting to think that was a bad move?”

  “No, you think?” I said. “You’re a moron.”

  “You should let Cate know that,” he said. “She’ll be shocked.”

  “I’ll tell her at dinner.”

  He quirked the corner of his mouth at me, and I let him go back to staring at the plants.

  34

  “Scarlett, move that out of the way,” Mom ordered. She stood over the table, wearing oven mitts and holding a heavy casserole dish. I gathered up the sketches and photographs that were spread out in front of me, and she set the food down. She gave Grandma the side-eye. “Mom, don’t you think you could work on this in your studio? Where we’re not going to be eating?”

  Grandma looked up at Mom over her glasses.

  “I was already in the dining room when Scarlett arrived,” she said. “It was convenient.”

  “It’s not anymore.” Mom shooed us away with the oven mitts. “Go. Wash your hands, both of you, and come back for food. You can’t design next year’s wardrobe without fuel.”

  We retreated to the parlor, and I spread the photos out again on the coffee table. I’d taken the pictures this morning so that Grandma and I could work from home, since she was supposed to be bedridden, but I barely remembered standing in Carnelian and snapping the photographs of half-finished muslins. My mind had been elsewhere, roaming the caverns of the Wildwoods’ den and thinking about what Brendan had said.

  “This, right here,” Grandma said, pointing at a bow on the sash of a cocktail dress. “This is too small. Tell Josette to make it bigger. It needs to dominate the silhouette.”

  I scribbled the note on the back of the photo, then looked up.

  “Grandma, how did they treat you while you were in the den?” I said. “The Wildwoods.”

  She pursed her lips and shuffled through a few more photographs.

  “Decently,” she said. “They weren’t foolish enough to push their luck, I think.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “No.” She blinked at me, her eyes large through her glasses. “I’m so sorry, darling. I could only imagine how worried everyone must have been. You especially.”

  “I was worried,” I said. “What about food? Did they feed you okay?”

  “The food was good,” she said, smiling slightly. “Better than I expected. They weren’t unkind. Or, at least, they weren’t unkind inasmuch as you can say that sort of thing while being held to ransom.”

  “Bit of a gray area,” I said.

  Grandma laughed, then grew solemn. “I wish I could say Pepper got off half as well.”

  “They didn’t kill her, though,” I said. “It was an accident.”

  “Yes. One she never would have had if she hadn’t been there to rescue me.”

  I could see the guilt on Grandma’s face, and the anger.

  I didn’t like questioning her like this. I didn’t like her answers, either. Not because I’d hoped she’d been mistreated and abused—I could never hope that—but if her words matched what Brendan had told me, that meant he might be telling the truth about everything else.

  “Grandma?”

  “Yes, sabre?”

  “Do the Daggers ever destroy people? Like, before they have a chance to go bad?”

  She set the photograph down and knitted her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

  “Like the werewolves,” I said. It was difficult to ask the question without revealing too much. I bit the inside of my cheek. “Like— Would a Dagger ever go after a werewolf in Wildwood pack, just because they might hurt someone? Even if they haven’t yet?”

  Grandma’s eyes seemed a little too sharp. I knew I should shut up and give her a chance to answer, but the anxiety of having her gaze on me like that won out.

  “I just keep thinking that this never would have happened to you if we’d considered them a threat and dealt with them in the first place,” I said. “You knew the alpha had a grudge against you. Would you—or any of the Daggers, maybe someone who knew about their issues with you—would they have tried to deal with the wolves?”

  “Before they kidnapped me?” Grandma said.

  I nodded. She touched a finger to her lips and thought. I couldn’t tell whether she was thinking about the truth, or just deciding how much she wanted to tell me, and I hated doubting her like this. I hated Brendan for even bringing the thought into my mind.

  This was my grandmother. She had taught everyone in this coven everything we knew about duty and honor.

  And as the Stiletto, surely she lived up to those ideals herself.

  “Part of being a Dagger is using your own judgment,” Grandma finally said.

  It wasn’t an answer. I drew my eyebrows together. “What does tha
t mean?”

  “Sometimes we have to act preemptively,” she said. “Which is something I hesitate to say to you, given your history of rushing in.”

  “I’m trying to get better about that.”

  “There are times when the threat a group like the Wildwoods pose is great enough that we have to act earlier than we usually might,” she said. “But when I say we, I mean full Daggers, not novices.” She gave me a stern look, and I relaxed a little.

  She was worried about me jumping the gun. And that meant she didn’t know why I was asking these questions. Which was good.

  But why was it good? I trusted Grandma more than I trusted anyone.

  Didn’t I?

  “Don’t worry. I was just curious,” I said. “I’m not going to go do anything stupid.”

  “I know where your curiosity leads, mon petit sabre.” She reached over and touched my chin.

  I grinned and pulled away. Under the smile, though, my mind was churning. The answer, no matter how she’d phrased it and tried to sidestep the question, was yes. The answer was that sometimes the Daggers did attack people who were just trying to live their lives.

  I hadn’t been chosen as my generation’s Stiletto. Was this why? I’d assumed it was because I wasn’t as good at sparring as Sienna, and my spells weren’t quite as strong as Autumn’s, and I didn’t show as much promise as some of the teenagers coming up behind me.

  But maybe it went deeper. Maybe I hadn’t been chosen because Grandma knew me too well. She knew I rushed in, and she knew I didn’t follow orders.

  Maybe she knew, in particular, that I wouldn’t follow orders if I disagreed with them—especially if those orders were to do things like murder members of the Wildwood pack.

  None of this made sense, and the discomfort of it was like a knot in my gut. Everything the Daggers did was supposed to make sense. The laws the Daggers followed had been rigid since my earliest childhood, and even when I’d lost the chance to follow in Grandma’s footsteps, I’d still known that Grandma and the Cardinals had chosen correctly, because they always did the right thing.

  But if they could make decisions like eliminating members of Brendan’s pack before they’d done anything wrong…

  My head felt like it was about to spin right off my neck. I stacked the photographs together and tapped them on the coffee table to align the edges.

  “We should eat.” I tucked the photos into a folder. “Maybe we’ll beat Mom back to the dining room before she starts shouting about dinner.”

  An instant later, Mom’s magically amplified voice bellowed through the hallways, warning everyone in the house that if they weren’t at the table now, she couldn’t guarantee leftovers. Grandma muttered under her breath.

  I stood, then held out my hand to help her out of her chair, although she didn’t need the help.

  35

  I pushed open the door of Forrest Designs. A bell rang, but Alec didn’t seem to hear it. He was hunched over a work bench, carving something with a sharp tool. The object in his hands was creamy yellow and smooth, and he seemed transfixed in trying to get a curve just right.

  I cleared my throat.

  Nothing.

  It seemed rude to interrupt him, and Goddess knew I needed a minute to think, so I sank down into a chair where I could watch him work and waited.

  Trying to apologize again to Sienna this morning had been an exercise in frustration. I’d hoped she’d be in a more receptive mood now that her arm was in a cast and healing rapidly, but she was furious with me. As far as I could tell, she was always going to be furious with me.

  I’d wanted to make things right. That was another rule of the Daggers, that we brought up concerns with each other and ended disagreements on a note of respect even if we didn’t always agree. Knowing your sister had your back could be a matter of life or death, and it was important for all of us to forgive and get along. I’d fought with myself for months to be civil to Sienna after she’d been named the Stiletto, but she didn’t seem willing to even try now that she was the one who’d gotten the raw end of a situation.

  A buzz startled me, and I looked up to see Alec using a dremel on what I hoped was the next clasp for the cape collection. I watched as he dug delicate lines out of the material, sending tiny curls flying with each tiny movement. Finally, he set the piece down to examine his work.

  I cleared my throat again, and he jumped. I wiggled my fingers in a tiny wave.

  “How long have you been there?” he said.

  “Not long,” I lied. “You seemed absorbed.”

  He blinked a few times, like I’d woken him from sleep. He gestured me over, then picked the piece off the table and handed it to me. The creamy material was light and delicate, carved with a tangle of vines and flowers, and one side was formed into a neat loop.

  “This one’s the jackalope antler,” he said. “This is the first half. The second will hook through the hole like this.”

  He mimed with his fingers. I rubbed the carving against my palm. It was smooth as silk and weighed almost nothing.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s overdue,” he said. “I was hoping to have it finished today, but it’s taking longer than I planned.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We still have a few weeks until the show.”

  “You guys really do cut it close, don’t you?”

  “That’s the industry,” I said. “Hey, listen. I met Cate.”

  It was the wrong segue. I knew it the instant the words came out of my mouth. His face drew tight with worry.

  “How?” he said. “When? Was she there when you got your grandma?”

  “I went back to the den,” I said.

  He opened his mouth, and I held up a hand before he could hit me with a lecture.

  “Brendan and I had a talk about the crap that’s been going down between our families,” I said. “He’s stupid, for the record, but I get why he did what he did.”

  “Because he’s selfish?” Alec said.

  “Someone’s been killing his wolves,” I said.

  Alec’s lips twitched, but he kept them shut.

  “He’s trying to get money so they can move somewhere safe,” I said. “That’s not the point. The point is, I met Cate, and she seems okay. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I’m sure she thinks she is,” he said. “Now that she’s been brainwashed.”

  “Listen, how well did you know the Wildwoods?” I said. “Like, about their beliefs and stuff?”

  “I knew them back when the old alpha was in charge,” Alec said. His face darkened. “Brendan’s dad. Guy was a madman. Tried to turn everyone he could get his hands on, desperate for world domination. Trying to be a dictator in his own little corner. Always ranting about werewolf supremacy. He was a piece of garbage.”

  I pursed my lips and listened as he spoke. He was angry, and I got the sense he was feeling even more than he was showing. Whatever Brendan had thought of his dad, my grandma’s and Alec’s stories matched up.

  “What about now?” I said. “Now that Brendan’s the alpha?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I cut contact with him right after it happened. Back when I knew him, he seemed like his own person. But then he turned Cate. How far can the apple fall from the tree, really?”

  “Cate asked to be turned,” I said.

  Alec scoffed.

  “She’s not unhappy there,” I said. “She actually seems like the only person who gives Brendan a piece of her mind, which is probably good for both of them. I get the impression she wasn’t happy back when you knew her.”

  “Everyone has their problems.”

  “Cate’s sounded pretty bad.”

  He looked up at me, his large eyes shadowed by long lashes.

  “She wouldn’t ask to be turned.”

  “That’s what Brendan told me, and I believe it after talking to her. The pack—it’s not a bad life, honestly. Whatever they’re doing out there, it’s working for them.
”

  “More and more of them every day,” he muttered.

  “They all asked to be turned,” I said. “Everyone I talked to. It’s, like, their belief system. Their law. They only turn people who want to be in the pack.”

  Alec frowned at me, and his eyebrows scrunched together. “Who told you that?”

  “Everyone I talked to,” I said. “I guess they could have been spinning me a happy story, but I’m trained to spot lies.”

  His eyelids fluttered, very slightly.

  “Like you,” I said. “You lie to me a lot.”

  He sat up straighter. “Excuse me?”

  “Relax,” I said, waving him off. “Maybe you don’t lie so much as conceal the truth. You know more than you’re saying about this whole wolf thing, and that’s fine. We all have secrets. But I can tell when you’re doing it. That’s the point. Brendan wasn’t trying to hide anything from me. Or if he was, he was a hell of a lot better at it than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  To be fair, though, he was good. I hadn’t realized who he was until I’d seen him in the woods.

  I closed my eyes and tried to push the thought away.

  “I don’t like talking about my past,” Alec said. “That’s all.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said. “But whatever your past was, I think you may have gotten the wrong idea about the Wildwoods. And Cate. She seems happy. I just thought you should know.”

  I stood. He did, too, and shoved his hands into his pockets.

  “I think maybe things were different from what we thought,” I said. I searched his face, looking for some kind of confirmation or disagreement, but his expression gave nothing away.

  36

  I had stayed busy at Carnelian ever since Grandma’s return, taking photos and coordinating everything between Josette and Grandma until enough time had passed that Grandma could go back to work without raising eyebrows.

  She dove in hard. It seemed like all she’d done in the wolves’ den was think about the collection, and now she was working at double-time to make reality sync up with her plans.