Stiletto Read online

  Alec leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. A cat perched on the back of it shifted slightly at his movement, then went back to sleep.

  “We’ve doubled the patrol around the grounds. That might be enough.”

  “It’s not enough,” I said. “Nothing will ever be enough as long as she’s out there.”

  He reached out a hand, and I fought with myself for a moment and then took it. His fingers closed around mine, and our eyes met. His were steady and clear.

  I wavered, then let him tug me over to the couch. I dropped heavily on the cushion next to him, and he pulled me in and rubbed my arm.

  The fight left me like water pouring from a broken dam. I relaxed against him, too tired to keep shouting.

  “I’m just trying to keep everyone safe,” I said.

  “You will.” He kept rubbing my arm, and I leaned in, soothed by the gentle touch. Everything about Alec was mild, from his voice to the pressure of his hand through my jacket, and it softened me. “You said some people will be able to leave occasionally, right?”

  “Only if they have direct clearance from Grandma, and then it’s only me and a couple of other Daggers who she’s picked to go find Sienna.”

  “And for everyone else, it’s only a few weeks, right?”

  I snorted. “That doesn’t make it easy. Daggers don’t like to sit at home. And how many people will end up getting attacked by the monsters we’re supposed to be out there fighting?”

  I didn’t have good responses for any of their points, and in the end the only reason I’d won at all was that I was the future Stiletto and Grandma hadn’t voiced an opposing opinion.

  It didn’t feel like much of a victory.

  “Managing people is hard,” I said.

  “That’s why I always leave Brendan to it.”

  His voice trailed off after Brendan’s name, and I could tell he was wishing he hadn’t bought his cousin up. Abruptly, I drew away and straightened.

  “You okay?”

  I shook my shoulders a little, trying to brush away the lingering warmth that had come from his body against mine.

  “At least you’re not locked in the house,” he said. “You’ve still got the rest of the property.”

  “I’m not going to get a whole lot of Dagger work done out there.”

  “No, but you could go running,” he said.

  I frowned at him. I had already put a few miles on the treadmill today, just like every other Dagger. But a dimple was showing on his cheek, and the corner of his mouth was quirked upward.

  “You found a trail out back?”

  “Better.” He stood and held out his hand, and again, I couldn’t help but take it.

  He led me to the foyer and stopped at the coat rack beside the front door to grab my jacket. He held it for me while I awkwardly shrugged it on, then opened the door. A gust of cold evening air blew inward, carrying with it the smell of damp earth and moss.

  I gave Alec a skeptical look, but his dimple was still showing, so I fastened my jacket and stepped out into the night. He jogged ahead of me, and I followed him around the house and across the back lawn. We stepped under the shadow of the trees, which rustled overhead in the nighttime wind. I could barely make out their trunks in the watery light of an almost-full moon.

  “I can’t see anything,” I said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  I barely made out the pale outline of his grin in the darkness before his figure shifted. In seconds, his wiry human body had been replaced by one of sinew and muscle, and fur rippled across his limbs like satin in the moonlight.

  He turned to me, ears perked up. His enormous teeth and hulking body might have been terrifying to me once, but now the sight was familiar and safe.

  He swung his head around and nudged his snout against his shoulder, then dropped to a low crouch, like a dog eager to play, and gestured again.

  My eyebrows shot halfway up to my hairline.

  “You want me to climb on you?”

  His tail wagged. The limb brushed my face, and I got a mouthful of fur, and he inched away and looked at me with an apologetic tilt to one of his ears. I picked a coarse hair out of my mouth and gave him a skeptical look. He whined a little and pawed the ground.

  “How am I supposed to resist that?”

  The tail wagged again, and I dodged it this time. I grabbed hold of the fur at his ruff with both hands, then swung my leg over his back. His muscles rippled underneath me as he stood, and I got a flicker of the same unnerved feeling I’d experienced the first time I’d ridden a horse, back in the days when my forehead barely came to the creature’s knees.

  “Whoa.”

  He stilled and allowed me to shift my weight. I found my legs a place to rest just behind his shoulders, and I leaned forward until my body settled into place. I nestled my hands deep into his undercoat. It was warm and dry, and I allowed myself to bury my face in his fur for a moment and inhale his fresh forest scent.

  Then his shoulders tensed, and he took off.

  7

  Alec’s lupine muscles rippled beneath me, and the trees flew past so quickly they became a blur. He seemed to have an uncanny ability to judge every leap perfectly and to dart between the tree trunks in a pattern that kept the branches away from my face and didn’t seem to follow any particular trail or logic. I lowered my head farther against his neck, held on tight, and let the rhythm of his pounding paws take over.

  The minutes slipped away, and I fully understood for the first time why the wolves talked about running like it was as necessary to them as air. He flew over the damp earth with an agility that took my breath away, and we moved forward at a speed that left all possibility of thought behind us. It was like a roller coaster, but better, and I clung to him while the forest slipped away on every side.

  Finally, once we’d reached the very top of the hill and the edge of Grandma’s property, Alec thundered to a stop. He was breathing hard, and his rib cage expanded and collapsed beneath my legs like a giant bellows. He walked forward into a clearing between the trees and lowered himself carefully to the damp earth.

  I hesitated; as cautious as I’d been to climb onto his back, I was even more unwilling to get off. But I couldn’t imagine it was easy for him to breathe with me in the way, so I slid to the ground. My boots landed with a squelching sound. The overcast sky glowed with the pearlescent reflection of the city lights that twinkled far in the distance below.

  In an instant, Alec shifted back to his human form.

  “You kept your clothes,” I said.

  I knew it took more focus for them to keep the same clothing from one shift to another, but I realized as soon as the words were out that they’d been the wrong ones.

  “Would you rather I didn’t?” He winked.

  “Crap,” I said.

  He grinned, and I looked away as my face flushed.

  “So not what I meant. I just meant, good job focusing when you were out of breath like that?” My own voice was embarrassingly weak. I bit the inside of my cheek and folded my arms tightly across my chest, like that might somehow keep any more words from thinking they had a right to get out.

  Alec laughed. “It’s okay. I’m just teasing. I know you don’t like me like that.”

  A long silence descended, full of the tension of possibilities. He was waiting for me to agree or to contradict him, and I didn’t know how to do either.

  “I don’t have energy to like anyone like that,” I finally said, which was close enough to the truth.

  I stepped forward and climbed onto a large boulder sitting in the clearing. It was slick from the light drizzle that was still coming down, and the water soaked through my jeans and to my butt almost immediately.

  “It’s wet,” I said.

  The warning was excessive, given the rain all around us, but he ignored both my words and the rain and settled on the rock next to me. Down below us, through the canopy of the trees, I could just make out some of the lights of the city. Eve
rything looked glossier than usual thanks to the rain, and it was only a minute before I had to pull my jacket tighter around myself to shut out the cold.

  I could have just snapped my fingers and set up a warming spell, or conjured an umbrella. But I didn’t mind the rain. It felt real and raw, and cool after the heat of the house.

  “You shouldn’t lock down the mansion if you don’t feel like that’s the right thing to do,” Alec said after a long pause.

  I drew one leg up toward myself and stared out at the distant lights. “I don’t know what’s right. Grandma didn’t fight the idea, but I think she’s just trying to stay out of it as some kind of… I don’t know, some Stiletto test.”

  “Seems like a weird moment to test you.”

  I shrugged. “It’s never not weird. If it’s not one crisis with the Daggers, it’s another. This is just the first time I’ve been old enough to be in the middle of a crisis like this.”

  Well, not quite like this. Having to work against a former Dagger who was hanging around our property and threatening children was new. But the whole coven had gone on alert a dozen times throughout my childhood due to some enemy or another.

  It just felt different when I was the one ringing the warning bell.

  “Brendan says I need to take a hard line with the coven,” I said.

  Alec scoffed softly. “Brendan doesn’t know everything,” he muttered.

  I turned toward him. “Okay, spill it. What’s going on with you two?”

  He smirked with half of his face, the eyebrow and corner of his mouth both lifting in unison. “You really want to have that conversation?”

  It was a fair point. I pursed my lips and wrapped my arms around my knee.

  “Brendan is trying to do what you’re doing,” he said, his voice now more measured. “He moved the pack to your grandma’s lands because it was safer here. And he’s right. It is safer. But wolves aren’t meant to live in captivity, even when they do have a few acres to run around.”

  “Are the other wolves not happy here?”

  “They’re not unhappy,” he said, picking his words with caution. “But they’re hesitant. Brendan wants to protect us all from attackers. I get that impulse. I really do. I don’t want anyone in the pack to get hurt either.”

  He fell silent, and I let a few seconds tick by before prodding him. “But?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, sending his russet locks into disarray.

  “Being coddled like that makes us feel weak,” he said. “Wolves don’t like to feel weak. I don’t think Daggers do, either.”

  I thought back to the raised voices and folded arms that had filled the parlor, and the way my own heart had revolted at the thought of what I was trying to make them do.

  Alec took a deep breath. “I wish that rather than trying to shield us all from the outside world, Brendan had helped us get stronger.”

  “The Daggers are already strong.”

  “Strong enough to handle Sienna?”

  This was the question I’d been wrestling with for months. Every time we faced her, the answer seemed clear.

  “No,” I said. “Not if she still has help like she did in the maze.”

  “Then maybe, instead of locking everyone in the mansion, you need to make sure they’re prepared to take her if she comes back,” Alec said. “You guys train already, but maybe it would help to train for her, specifically. You know how she’s escaped before. You know how long it would take you to alert everyone if she showed up again.”

  The rain fell harder, and a distant bolt of lightning dazzled my eyes. The storm hadn’t reached us, not yet, but I could hear it coming in the rain thundering down on the treetops.

  I bit my lip, turning Alec’s words over in my head.

  “I know the holes in our armor,” I said at last.

  He nodded. “So fix them.”

  I snapped my finger, and a thin, translucent dome appeared over our heads. The rain poured down its nearly invisible curve, falling in sheets while we stayed dry underneath. We sat in silence and watched the approaching storm.

  8

  I finished the last touches on my sketch and saved the file. Grandma had finally shared her ideas for the next summer collection at this morning’s Carnelian meeting, and I’d been assigned to have twenty designs to her by the end of the week.

  “Nothing predictable, either,” Grandma had said sharply, eying the designers at the meeting. “The new creative director at House of Brick is already talking a big game about disruptive silhouettes and integrated charms. Whatever they’re doing, we need to do it better. I want elegance and I want brilliance.”

  Elegance and brilliance were just vague enough that I had no idea what she was actually asking for. Still, I hoped at least one of the designs I was about to send her would pass muster.

  I stopped to chat with another of the designers, then swung by the atelier to update Josette on a showroom appointment she had later that week with a member of the Sorcerer’s Guild. When I eventually brought Grandma her lunch, I was unsurprised to find her sitting at her desk, buried behind an absolute mountain of fabric sample books.

  “Put it by the fireplace,” she called, waving a manicured hand above the pile of fabric. “Do you prefer Chantilly or Alençon lace?”

  I stopped dead halfway through setting up her salmon salad and seltzer.

  “For a swimsuit?”

  “No, no, I’ve moved on to Dior Miller’s wedding dress,” she said.

  My mental image of the world’s most impractical bikini was instantly replaced by a gown. The Glimmering pop star had just gotten engaged to some foreign prince, and she’d been happy enough with several recent evening gowns that she’d decided on us for her wedding and bridesmaids’ ensembles. It was a huge win for Carnelian, but also meant Grandma was flitting back and forth between the summer collection and the wedding with no indication of which one had her attention at any particular moment.

  “For Miller? Chantilly. Or leaver’s lace, honestly.”

  Grandma made a noncommittal noise, and then emerged from behind the stack of books. Her chic, curly, silver-white bob was drawn back today with a wide scarlet headband that matched her ruby earrings. She pulled off her glasses and wiped them on her silk scarf as she approached.

  “How are things going at home?” Grandma asked. Her tone was casual. The focus in her eyes was not.

  She wasn’t asking because she needed to know. She was aware of all the extra training the Daggers were doing. She checked in with the Cardinals at every opportunity. And she’d been part of the new drills we’d implemented, ones that involved every individual securing the room she was in before checking in with Cherry, the Cardinal who handled everything related to our locations, day jobs, and overall safety.

  No, Grandma wanted know how I thought things were going, because a clear-eyed assessment of any situation was crucial to the job of the Stiletto.

  “Things are better than they were this time last week,” I said. “Everyone is pulling together, and the kids seem to feel more confident now.”

  “Do you think anyone is actually safer?”

  It was the question I’d been battling with, and I shrugged and dropped into a chair. “We won’t know until Sienna comes back. If she does.”

  “What do the Wildwoods think?”

  By the Wildwoods, she meant their alpha.

  “Brendan’s nervous about having his wolves on patrol all the time,” I admitted. “He hasn’t said as much to me, and I don’t think he’d admit to it, but he gets tense whenever we touch base on it. Hard to blame him.”

  Sienna had murdered members of his pack—members he was responsible for. I knew his failure to protect them weighed heavily on him, and maybe always would.

  “They haven’t found anything new, though,” I said. “I don’t know.” I sighed. “This might be a lot of fuss for nothing.”

  “It always feels like a lot of fuss for nothing.” Grandma settled gracefully into her seat and
reached for her lunch. “Until it’s something.”

  The words echoed in my head as I rode home. Thick gray clouds obscured whatever kind of sunset might be happening behind them, and the already dreary light dimmed sharply when my motorcycle passed under the canopy of trees that lined the winding streets leading to the mansion. I leaned forward, visions of the spicy chili and fresh bread Rowan had texted me about earlier dancing in my head.

  A heavy feeling of dread hit my chest before my brain could figure out the reason. I brought my bike to an abrupt stop outside the mansion’s gate.

  Half a dozen Daggers were out on the lawn, sweeping the area with flashlights and shooting wispy spells from the tips of their wands. The gate throbbed with a dull silver light, and when I reached out to touch it, a tingling pain shot up my arm and the light seemed to fritz and pulse. I drew my hand back, and a moment later, Ginger came jogging over. She was wearing pajamas, and her hair was tied back in the silk scarf she slept in, but everything else about her was alert to the point of mania.

  “Get inside,” she said sharply and opened the gate. “Quick.”

  Her eyes darted back and forth as I rode through the shimmering bars. Once inside, I stopped. The gate clanged shut behind me.

  “What happened?”

  My voice was at utter odds with the screaming inside my head. Something had taken place here, something terrible.

  “We don’t know yet,” Ginger said, even though of course she knew, of course I could guess, of course Sienna had come to destroy everything we’d been trying to protect. Ginger folded her arms tightly over her chest. “It might be nothing. Some of the children are missing.”

  My heart froze, and ice poured through my veins.

  “What do you mean?” I waved a hand frantically at her, as if I could pull meaning from her without having to tolerate the cumbersome weight of words. “What do you mean, missing? Did she take them? Are they hiding?”