Stiletto Read online

  “Ms. Hunter wants me to start exploring seashell motifs for the summer collection,” he said.

  Unlike in the Humdrum world, Glimmering designers only held one major fashion week each year. But Grandma still had to create smaller collections to fill the Carnelian showroom, and we only had a few months before the butterflies of Glimmering society descended on us, demanding swimsuits and sun hats and evening gowns suitable for Mediterranean cruises or wherever rich people went in the summers.

  I made a mental note to check in with Grandma; I’d known we were on a deadline, but I hadn’t realized she’d gotten her vision clear enough to start commissioning pieces.

  “You can call her Nelly,” I said, for what had to be the fifth time. “She wouldn’t mind.”

  “I am not that brave.”

  I couldn’t blame him. Grandma was an objectively terrifying woman. She was the Stiletto, for one thing, which meant she was defeating monsters and leading a coven full of strong-willed women on a daily basis. She was also the brains and creative spark behind a rising fashion empire that clothed the Faerie Queen and Glimmering celebrities alike. And she was doing it all in her seventies, with the kind of energy that often left me staring in amazement.

  I wasn’t scared of Grandma, but I had to admit that anyone who was probably had the right idea.

  “You should come by my studio and see what I’m working on,” Alec said. The words sounded tense, and the answering flutter in my stomach suggested this was more of a personal rather than professional invitation.

  “I might,” I said. “I like watching you work.”

  “You’re welcome any time.”

  Rowan made a sound that was something in between a laugh and a snort. Alec’s forehead turned pink again.

  We were saved by the sound of footsteps pounding up the stairs and down the hallway, hard enough to be heard even through the thick carpeting.

  “Granny Nelly!” someone hollered.

  She came barreling around the corner and skidded to a stop just behind Alec. It was Camellia, who was around seven or eight, and who had the wide eyes and gaping mouth of someone who’d just had her first encounter with a poltergeist.

  “Scarlett!” she shrieked. “Scarlett, we have to go talk to Granny Nelly.”

  She was almost bouncing up and down, and I wasn’t sure whether it was from excitement or fear. I glanced at Rowan, who shrugged.

  “Why?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I have to talk to her. I have to tell her.”

  I bent down to try to get on her eye level. I held tight to the flower pot with one hand and put my free hand on her shoulder, which did exactly nothing to calm her down.

  “Tell her what?”

  “I saw her,” she said, eyes widening even more. “I saw her.”

  “Saw who, sweetie?”

  “Sienna,” Camellia blurted. “She’s at the mansion.”

  The basil buds in the pot burst into flames.

  4

  “Tell me exactly what you saw, sweetie,” Grandma said.

  She was sitting in her office in front of Camellia, who was standing and wiggling with excitement at having something so important to tell. Grandma took Camellia’s hands and gazed intently at her, and the girl seemed to calm down.

  “I was playing on the front lawn,” she said. “It was me and Alev and Flannery, and we were playing dragon hunters. And I looked up and I saw Sienna there on the grass.”

  “Where on the grass? Outside the gate?”

  Camellia shook her head and squinted. “Inside, maybe? Under the trees. I couldn’t tell where.”

  Grandma kept her face calm and hands gentle, but a muscle twitched in her back.

  I’d told her that we needed a fence with security cameras around the mansion. Spells and enchantments already guarded the place, enough that the air felt uncomfortably thick whenever we entered or left the property, but I’d figured extra help from the Humdrum world wouldn’t hurt. But a fence and security system would be too expensive to install and not do anything to stop a powerful witch, Grandma had said, so I’d stopped pressing her on it. Now, I wished I’d let my mouth run a little longer.

  “Did she say anything?” Grandma said.

  Camellia shook her head. “She wasn’t close enough.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She just watched us,” Camellia said. “The other girls didn’t see her. I told them to look, but they didn’t because they thought I was trying to trick them, and then Sienna turned around and left. I don’t think she wanted anyone else to see, but she waved at me.”

  Cold fear gripped my heart. The thought of my estranged cousin getting anywhere near the younger girls was enough to chill my blood. She and her crew of now-incarcerated werewolves had wounded plenty of my sisters when we’d tried to catch her in the Harvest Festival maze. I couldn’t stomach the thought of letting that happen again.

  Sienna wasn’t like other monsters we Daggers dealt with. Every girl in the coven would eventually have to face gorgons and wyverns and misbehaving vampires. That was our calling.

  But Sienna was a monster who knew us. She shared our responsibilities to the world and to our coven, or at least she had once. She should be here protecting the younger girls, not threatening them with her mere presence.

  Picturing her so close to Camellia and Alev and Flannery sickened me.

  “Did anything else happen, sweet?” Grandma said.

  Camellia shook her head. “She just looked at us, and then she left. She wanted me to see her. She wasn’t hiding.”

  “I’ll bet she wasn’t,” I muttered.

  Grandma shook her head slightly, shushing me. She squeezed Camellia’s hands.

  “Thank you for telling me. You did the right thing.”

  “Is she going to hurt us?” Camellia asked.

  “No,” Grandma said. “Not if you remember the Dagger rules. Can you tell me which rules will keep you safe?”

  “Trust my sisters,” Camellia said. “Remember my training.”

  “That’s right. And I need your help to make sure you and the other girls stay on the mansion grounds,” Grandma said. “Sienna can’t come here.”

  Camellia nodded solemnly. Grandma pulled her in for a hug and a kiss atop the head, then looked to Rowan to show her out. Rowan held out a hand and led Camellia from the room, starting up distracting chatter about what kind of cookies they ought to make tonight.

  I sank into the chair opposite Grandma.

  “You believe her?” I asked. “That Sienna didn’t come onto our grounds?”

  “I have to think that I’d know if she tried to break through,” Grandma said. “I suppose we could try to add another layer of protection to the house. Realistically, I don’t know how much more we can do.”

  “Fence,” I said. “Big tall one. Keeps Sienna out and the littles in.”

  Grandma shook her head. “A fence won’t do anything against someone like that. More magic might, but we can only put down so many charms. We want people to be able to leave the property.”

  I didn’t like it, but that didn’t change the fact that she was right.

  “I’ll talk to the Wildwoods,” I said. “Maybe they’d be willing to get a patrol going.”

  Grandma nodded and pushed her glasses farther up onto her nose. “It wouldn’t hurt to investigate further. The house has been so worked up since the Harvest Festival that I think it’s just as possible that Camellia’s imagination got away with her.”

  I propped my head on my hand. “Maybe.”

  “You don’t really think that, though,” Grandma said.

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  5

  I paced along the perimeter of the forest. Damp ferns and fallen branches hung with decaying leaves smacked against my tall boots, and rain dripped onto the hood of my jacket. I dropped another gleaming pebble onto the ground, then took another seven steps.

  A twig snapped, and I looked up just as
Brendan stepped toward me between two trees thick with moss. I hadn’t heard him coming, but that wasn’t surprising. As a werewolf living in this forest, he knew it probably as well as I knew the mansion.

  “The pack agreed,” Brendan said. “They’ll take patrolling shifts for the next two weeks.”

  A tiny knot of tension in my shoulders unknotted.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He fell into step beside me, and I muttered so I wouldn’t lose count of my steps. I dropped the next pebble and he crouched to examine it.

  “Some new spell?” he said. “Or are you trying to plant a garden?”

  “They’re rocks.” I handed him one to examine, and he held it up to the rainy afternoon light that barely filtered through the trees. “Enchanted, obviously. They’ll put another barrier around the perimeter.”

  “Of all Nelly’s land?” he said. “That’s going to take days.”

  “Yeah, it will.”

  I took another seven steps and nodded from Brendan to the ground. He tossed the pebble, and it landed with a soft thunk in the matted carpet of soggy leaves.

  The air was perfumed with the scents of rain and forest decay, and I stopped for a moment to breathe it all in. Being out here and setting this spell was tedious, but it still beat staying inside with the other Daggers. Word of Sienna’s appearance had gotten around, and the tension was thick enough to cut with a knife.

  After the welcome monotony of the last few weeks, I wasn’t ready to deal with all of this. I had been happy training the younger girls and arranging Dagger schedules. I wasn’t ready to face Sienna, or manage the fear and anger in the house, or be responsible for keeping my coven members safe.

  But that didn’t matter. Life had started back up again.

  I dropped another pebble and walked on. Brendan kept pace with me, his quiet footsteps gentle compared to mine, and his silent presence a welcome comfort.

  It wasn’t like I needed him here to protect me from Sienna. Not exactly. But I wasn’t ready to be entirely alone with my thoughts.

  “What about the other houses in the neighborhood?” Brendan asked.

  We were in a neighborhood, though it didn’t look like it thanks to the trees and bushes that obscured their homes. Grandma owned a large parcel of forest that stretched back in a narrow strip behind her house, most of it too hilly to build on. But down near the road we had neighbors on either side, although we could barely see one of their chimneys through the trees.

  I shrugged. “We’ve had some simple charms on those properties for decades, just to protect them from the liability of having a bunch of Daggers on their doorstop. But they’re mostly Humdrums, and it’s not like we’re all friends. Sienna won’t be interested.”

  “You know that or you hope it?”

  I let out a heavy sigh. “I hope. I don’t know anything right now.”

  We walked a few more paces, and I let go of the next pebble.

  “You’re doing the best you can,” Brendan said.

  The words were meant to be encouraging, but they filled me with frustration instead.

  “That’s the problem.” I stomped through a cluster of ferns. “The best I can do is not the best Sienna can do. We don’t know anything about where she is right now. Did she recover from what happened in the maze? Did we miss some members of the Burnside pack and now they’re back to working together? Was she actually trying to hurt the little girls or was she just standing there to tease me?”

  “Don’t let her get to you,” Brendan said. “Set your spells and trust that the patrol will catch her if she comes back.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “What else are you going to do?” he said. “Worry yourself to death? That’s not going to help you or your coven.”

  He was right, and it pissed me off. I tossed the next pebble down with too much force.

  “Scarlett,” he snapped. He grabbed my arm and yanked me to a stop. “You’re doing everything right. You can be mad at her, but don’t waste time being mad at yourself. You don’t deserve that.”

  His words were stern, and I smiled even as my stomach fluttered at the feeling of his hand on my arm.

  Someone’s footfall sounded behind us. I turned around, ready to attack, and Brendan dove to a crouch in preparation to shift to his werewolf form.

  Alec raised an eyebrow at us.

  “Jumpy, aren’t we?”

  I relaxed my stance, although my heart took another few seconds to stop pounding.

  “You’re just as tense as we are, admit it.”

  “Freely.” He glanced between Brendan and me, taking note of how close we were standing, and put a hand on the back of his neck. “You’re not going to feel any better when you hear what I found.”

  “It can’t be worse than what my imagination has come up with.”

  He conceded this with the shrug of a shoulder. “We caught Sienna’s scent up near the road. I had Cate track it.” Brendan nodded at this, and Alec added to me, “She’s got one of our best noses.”

  “In wolf form or human?”

  “Both, I guess?” Alec said. “The track led up into the property, but not as far as the gate.”

  I nodded. “That’s where most of the spells start.”

  “She was definitely standing where the kid said she was.” Alec put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “So there you go.”

  I tossed another pebble, silently praying that this last net of charms would somehow be the thing that kept her away from my family.

  My family.

  Sienna was my family. That monster was closer to me through blood than many in the coven, and it turned my stomach.

  I marched on through the forest, and Brendan and Alec fell into step beside me.

  “It gets worse,” Alec said.

  I looked sharply over at him. His face was drawn a little tighter than usual and he seemed reluctant to speak, but finally, he pulled a length of red fabric out of his pocket.

  “We found this on the lawn,” he said. “Next to a couple of boot prints. No track leading up to it, no track leading away, but it’s thick with her scent.”

  I snatched the fabric away from him and held it up. I recognized this scarf. It was from a recent Carnelian collection, the material knitted from spider silk and dyed with hand-raised blood anemones. It was a rare item, one Grandma had given to Sienna as a birthday gift.

  The sight of it sent prickles across my skin.

  “What do you mean, no track?” Brendan held out his hand for the scarf.

  Alec seemed to tense as I passed the fabric to Brendan.

  He raised it to his nose, inhaled deeply, and blinked a few times. “You think she jumped from the top of the fence?”

  “She shouldn’t be able to do that,” I said. “The spells shouldn’t let her in.”

  “Maybe there aren’t enough spells,” Alec said. “And I don’t think she jumped, unless she’s got some mad athletic skills we don’t know about. The prints were way too far onto the grounds. Must have flown. Maybe dropped it from above?”

  “You can’t drop things onto the grounds,” I said. “The protective wards won’t allow it.”

  I tossed another pebble. I hadn’t lost count of my steps, which was something of a miracle. It wasn’t a miracle that would last, so I stopped walking and counting and poured the handful of pebbles back into my jacket pocket.

  I took the scarf back from Brendan. It was gossamer-light in my hands. I couldn’t smell anything on it aside from the faint trace of an unfamiliar perfume.

  But there was no question as to its recent origins. This wasn’t something Sienna would have lost lightly. It was a Carnelian original, made from one of the most expensive fabrics the house had ever worked with. It was worth money—a lot of money—and Sienna wasn’t the kind of person to give valuable gifts away for nothing.

  If she’d left it on the mansion grounds, it was a warning.

  “No one who has evil intent toward any D
agger should be able to access that lawn,” I said. “Sienna least of all. Maybe she had someone else come in and drop it.”

  Alec considered this but shook his head almost immediately.

  “There aren’t other scents,” he said. “You witches have your own kinds of spells for figuring out who last touched things, right? I’m positive that if you performed one on this, Sienna would come up.”

  I tucked the scarf inside my jacket. “A spell like that isn’t a bad idea, anyway,” I said. “But if it’s hers, if she was the one to drop it—she was inside the grounds. Which means whatever enchantments we have up aren’t enough.”

  I remembered Grandma’s words, that if we laid down any more spells, people wouldn’t be able to get in or out. I winced at the thought of trying to break the news to the other Daggers, but there was nothing else to be done.

  “I’m going to finish this spell.” I dug in my pocket for the next pebble. “And then we’re going on lockdown.”

  6

  My blood ran hot in my veins as I paced around the parlor, and my fingers were itching to throw or punch something. I’d just spent half an hour battling objections from the other Daggers, who were almost universally aghast at the thought of being trapped on the mansion’s grounds for the next few weeks.

  It wasn’t like I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to be caged any more than the rest of them. But I also had to keep the youngest Daggers safe until we found Sienna. Everyone had finally come around to that way of thinking, but it chafed at me to have to argue for the kind of imprisonment that made my entire soul shrivel.

  “We’re dancing to her tune, again,” I said to Alec, who was the only one left. “It doesn’t matter what I do, or where I go, she’s always there. And now the entire coven is going to be locked up so we don’t have a bunch of murdered toddlers on our hands, because you know she wouldn’t hesitate to kill any one of us she could get her hands on.”

  The idea that someone I’d grown up alongside could be so evil unnerved me, but I didn’t have any illusions left after what had happened with the Burnside pack. They were pure predators. They had attacked Humdrum children’s birthday parties in hope of easy prey. If Sienna could stomach an alliance with them, she had lost any assumption on my part of decency or humanity.