Stiletto Read online

  I’d had a slight hope that it might have been enough to kill her, but now it was clear I’d only made her angry. She ran toward me with fury twisting her face.

  “You come into my house,” she snarled, and I didn’t have time to point out that this was, in fact, a privately owned sports arena before she’d raked her sharp nails down my face.

  I grappled with her as flames shot from her fingertips and caught my sleeve on fire. I smothered the blaze against her still-damp clothing and tried to wrestle her hands behind her back. I had her almost trapped when motion in the corner of my eye distracted me.

  Vampires were pouring onto the field like bats out of hell. Not one, not a few, but dozens, streaming from both players’ entrances and coming to Sienna’s aid.

  Part of being a good Dagger was knowing your own limitations, and so I ran. I broke free of Sienna and pounded my way across the field toward the exit lined with its innocent burger counters, but there was no way to outrun them all. Hands pulled at my clothes, and strong fingers wrapped around my wrists.

  A tall male vampire pinned my arms behind my body and marched me back to Sienna. I tried to gather enough magic to fight him off but realized before the flames had formed in my hands that it was pointless. There were too many of them, and I didn’t have the kind of weapons I needed to deal with the bloodthirsty undead. Even if I managed to take this one down, a dozen more would appear in his place.

  I stopped struggling, and the vampire made me stop in front of Sienna.

  “You’re dead,” she said.

  The Dagger instinct to keep fighting resisted the words, but the logical part of my mind knew there was no argument to be made to the contrary. I was faced by my worst enemy and surrounded by her newest army of supporters, any one of whom would have been happy to make a feast of my blood.

  So I stood straight and stared at her.

  She might murder me. And then Alec would go back to Lady Fauna and get another braided cord, and another of my sisters would come to save the children and avenge my death.

  I might not walk out of here, but someone else would walk in. That was what it meant to be a Dagger, to be part of a coven, and the knowledge let me stand tall even as fear roiled in the pit of my stomach.

  “The kids are a handful,” Sienna said. Her tone was cool, despite her dripping clothes and singed hair, and she was back to acting like the queen of the world, the best of the Dagger novitiates, the apple of the coven’s eye.

  I gritted my teeth and tried to wrench my arms free from the vampire holding them, and his grip tightened until the pressure of it ached against the bones of my wrists.

  “A handful plus one.” She winked, like this was all a joke, and the coldness of it only made my anger burn hotter. “But you might be the worst of them all.”

  And there it was, the implication that compared to her, I would always be a child, a young Dagger struggling to reach my milestones, the last of my age group to be initiated into the coven.

  It was true. I wasn’t as gifted as her and never had been.

  But I was the future Stiletto in spite of it. Anyway, even if I eventually flunked out of the Dagger business entirely, I could still rest secure in the knowledge that I’d never kidnapped a bunch of little girls.

  “I’m going to let you go,” Sienna said. “And then you’re going to go home and tell the coven where I am.” She smiled, a slow, creeping expression, and my heart pounded harder. “Please do. I’d love to see them all.”

  Around us, the sea of vampires shifted, their black-clad bodies sucking in the light of the orbs overhead. A ripple passed through the crowd of amusement or hunger, I couldn’t tell which.

  And then the vampire had let me go, and I was being shoved toward the exit. They pushed me down the hallway and up the stairs, and kept their icy breath on the back of my neck until I’d reached the top of the stairs. I slammed the maintenance door shut behind me.

  16

  Grandma draped a blanket around my shoulders, and Rowan handed me another steaming mug of tea.

  “I’ve heard all I need to hear,” Ginger said. “Let’s go.”

  She was only half joking, and it took Cerise’s gentle hand on her shoulder to keep her from jumping out of her chair.

  The parlor was mostly empty. I’d reported the basics back to Grandma, and she’d called in the Cardinals—Mom and Saffron, and Cherry, whose face was drawn tight with worry for her daughters—and a few of the Daggers who’d happened to be home. Ginger and Cerise, whose schedules aligned as closely as the schedules of any Daggers couple could, had been off duty for the night but immediately abandoned their movie and popcorn when they’d heard what was going on.

  I had pulled Rowan in. I knew she felt left out a lot these days. As the one remaining Dagger in our age group, she didn’t have anyone to train or study with. I was busy with Stiletto training. Autumn was in prison. And then there was Sienna.

  “We found her, but we obviously can’t go after her,” I said.

  Mom raised an eyebrow at me, but Cherry wrapped both hands around her knees and nodded. She was a powerful woman, but also a small one, and now it seemed like she would curl completely in on herself if she could.

  “The girls were okay,” I said. “It sounded like they were, anyway. The vampires were handing out graham crackers, and Rosie didn’t sound scared.”

  Cherry acknowledged this with a wan smile.

  “We need a plan,” Cerise said. “We’ve done underground recovery missions before, and the stadium’s probably got all sorts of back entrances for crew and players.”

  “I can’t believe she’s got them holed up at the Orbs arena,” Ginger muttered.

  Of everything that had happened, this seemed to have personally offended her the most.

  “We can’t go after her at all,” I said. “I didn’t get an exact head count, but she’s got more vamps guarding her back than even the coven can deal with.”

  “Besides, she wants us to come,” Rowan said.

  That was the sticking point, the one detail that wouldn’t let me get beyond the most cursory daydreams of how we might rescue the kids.

  Sienna had let me go, which was a great big come-and-get-it message to the coven.

  And if Sienna wanted us to go traipsing into the arena with our minds set on justice, that was the last thing we should do.

  “We’ll only play into her hands if we mount a rescue,” I said.

  A long silence met this, and while I could see Ginger getting restless, no one disagreed.

  “I’m going to go for a run,” Cherry finally said. “Maybe exercise will knock a brilliant plan loose.”

  “I’ll perform some divinations,” Grandma said. “We need some guidance.”

  “I’ll help,” Mom said.

  It was all we could do. Until a better option surfaced, we would continue training, continue carrying out our regular monster-hunting assignments, and continue practicing the craft that might give us a tiny edge over our wayward sister.

  For me, that meant a lot of hours back at Carnelian.

  In between the collection and the Miller wedding, everyone’s to-do lists had grown by a yard. I was designing, plus managing Grandma’s schedule, plus helping out in the atelier during every spare second, plus attending to the dozen tiny crises that managed to crop up every day.

  I was running a length of custom lace up to Grandma’s office when an argument going on in the atelier caught my attention.

  “Talk about overkill,” one of the sewers was saying to another. “I said a handful, not seventeen. That’s way too many pleats for one shoulder. The fabric looks like it’s exploding where it lets out.”

  “I thought that was the idea?” the other sewer said. “It’s supposed to seem sculpted.”

  “Not that sculpted.”

  I ducked my head in to see what was going on and found Melanie, one of the senior designers, standing with her hands on her lips and lecturing Nicholas.

  “It would be fin
e for some other house’s collection, but it’s not Carnelian’s style. Unpick it and start again.”

  She caught me watching them and shook her head. I examined the offending pleats and had to agree. It wasn’t just that there were too many—they were also too wide, too thick, too much.

  “I could see it for one of Stellora’s collections,” I offered. “Or even Fontaine. Mel’s right, though, it’s too much for us.” I tilted my head and squinted a little. “Actually, it’s not even too much for Carnelian, just this collection. It has a nice shape, though.”

  Whatever intent I’d had of smoothing things over was lost on them. Nicholas set his jaw, probably irritated at being ganged up on, and Melanie just seemed smug.

  Everyone was on edge these days, I thought, as I scurried back down the hall toward Grandma’s office, and I should probably try to mind my own business and not make things worse.

  Outside Grandma’s door, I stopped with a jolt.

  Then I turned around and looked back the way I’d come.

  I said a handful, not seventeen.

  It was the same thing Sienna had said, or almost. I closed my eyes and squeezed my memory for the words floating just under the surface.

  The kids are a handful, Sienna had said. A handful plus one.

  We’d thought seven children had gone missing.

  But seven wasn’t a handful plus one, it was a handful plus two.

  We had counted wrong.

  I burst through Grandma’s door. She glanced up at me, eyebrows so high they nearly disappeared into her hairline, and froze with the phone in her hand. I gesticulated wildly at her while my brain tried to come up with words, and she narrowed her eyes a little and then raised the phone back to her ear.

  “Josette, I’m going to have to call you back,” she said.

  I was on the other side of her desk before the silver phone was back in its receiver.

  “Drop everything,” I said. “I need a spell.”

  17

  A smoky form emerged over the table, its reflection shifting in the gleaming silver surface of Grandma’s desk. It sputtered out a second later.

  “Rosie’s definitely with Sienna,” I said. “Which we knew, but it was worth a try.”

  “Who’s next?” Grandma said.

  “We haven’t done Sorrel, Alev, or Redda.”

  “Sorrel next, then.”

  Grandma poured a few drops of rosemary oil onto her desk. The oil pooled and gleamed, sending up a sharp fragrance. She closed her eyes and held her hand over the oil.

  The pool of liquid shimmered, and a tiny tongue of blue flame started in its center. The oil burned up, sending a puff of delicate lavender smoke into the air, and when the last of the fuel was gone, the smoke changed shape. It shifted, twisted, and exploded into curls that quickly dissipated through the office.

  I waved the smoke out of my face and sighed.

  “Maybe she has them all.”

  “Don’t give up yet.” Grandma picked up the bottle of rosemary oil. “Impatience won’t get us answers.”

  I fidgeted.

  The next puddle of oil burned up like the first, and the same lavender cloud formed. It twisted, turned over, and I sighed again and waited for it to dissolve like the rest—or worse, turn into a skull, an image that would confirm my deepest terrors.

  Instead, it formed a different picture. A tiny wavering image of Alev floated before us, her short curls framing her face like a halo in a Renaissance-era painting and her translucent body no taller than my thumb. I caught my breath and gaped at Grandma, whose face lit up with sudden excitement.

  “She’s not with Sienna,” I said.

  Grandma leaned in toward the tiny figure hovering in the air. “Can you take us to her?” she asked.

  The wispy little image nodded and took a few steps forward. She turned to glance over her shoulder and waved at us to follow.

  “You go,” Grandma said. “I’m needed here, but I’ll follow after you as soon as I can. Let me know where you end up.”

  “Will do.” I turned to the smoky figure. “I have to get my motorcycle first from the parking garage.”

  The apparition folded her arms and tapped her toe dramatically, as the real Alev might, and gave me a tight nod. I bit my lip and caught Grandma’s eye.

  Once I had my bike, the tiny shade settled herself on one of my handlebars.

  “You sure you won’t fly off?”

  She gave me a look, as if to ask whether I was an idiot.

  It wasn’t long before I realized she was pointing me in the direction of home. She was hard to see in the daylight, translucent and wispy as she was, but between my squinting and her frantic arm-waving, I was able to follow her gestures and turn whenever she ordered.

  If we were going home, that meant Alev was probably hiding in the woods somewhere. I imagined her shivering in the damp forest, or lost beyond the bounds of Grandma’s property, and my heart sank at the thought of the condition we might find her in.

  But when I brought the bike to a stop on the driveway, the little figure pointed firmly toward the house.

  “You sure?”

  She nodded and jabbed her arm in the direction of the front door, so I scooped her into my hand and followed her instructions into the house, through the foyer, and up the stairs. Mom was on the landing, her tank top and headband damp and sweaty from her own training. She took one look at the tiny figure and opened her mouth.

  “This might be a really, really good day,” I said before she could speak, and she followed me up the stairs.

  Finally, we found ourselves in the attic. I slept up here, as did Rowan and a few of the teens, but only part of it had been turned into bedrooms. The rest was unfinished, used for storing holiday decorations, weapons we didn’t use much, and old furniture we might want again someday.

  I stopped at the door to the storage area and took a deep breath. Alev’s image pointed at the door and waved a hand, urging me to get on with it.

  The door creaked as I opened it. I flicked on the lights—two dim bulbs that didn’t do much to counteract the shadows that clustered in every corner and along the wooden beams overhead.

  “Alev?” I called softly.

  There was no answer. The smoke figure, though, had no hesitations. She jumped up and down in my hand and pointed toward a pile of old plastic storage bins and antique wooden trunks. I crept toward them, Mom following softly after me. A wisp of black hair stuck up from behind one of the boxes.

  The smoke image in my hand dissolved, and the last few tendrils curled toward the bins.

  “Alev, sweetie?” I said, stepping forward, my heart beating in fear of what I might find.

  The wisp of hair turned around, and then Alev slowly poked her head up from behind the bins. Her eyes were wide with fear, and she was in desperate need of a bath, but she was there.

  “We came to find you, baby girl,” I said. “You’re safe.”

  She darted out from her hiding place and launched herself into my open arms.

  18

  “I told them to run,” Alev said in a soft voice. She curled herself deeper into my chest. She was six, well past the age when most of the Dagger children would snuggle with me like this, but the moment we’d gotten her down to the kitchen, she’d climbed onto my lap and refused to budge. I handed her a cookie, and she took it and clutched it so tightly crumbs scattered down onto the floor.

  “You told who to run, love?” Mom asked.

  The house creaked a little, the ordinary sound of an old building settling, and she sat up straight and looked toward the door.

  “Your mama’s not home yet,” I said, pulling her in closer. “She’ll be here just as soon as she can.”

  Poppy was at her cover job as a graphic designer for a startup downtown. We’d called once, left a message, and then called again and caught her just as she was getting out of a meeting. Mom had ordered her sternly to drive safely and not do anything stupid, but I had a feeling she’d be home in
record time.

  “Who did you tell to run, sweetheart?” Mom was sitting at the table next to us, with her chair and body angled toward Alev. “The other girls?”

  Alev nodded. “We were all playing. Redda and Sorrel were supposed to be watching the babies. I think Sakura?”

  “Sakura and Coralie,” I said. “That’s right.”

  “And Redda said they were supposed to babysit us, too, but Flannery said we were too old to need babysitters. And so me and Rosie and Flannery went to a different part of the yard, and then we started playing tag, except Redda got mad at us for not letting the babies play.”

  I patted her back gently while she talked, the irrelevant details pouring out with six-year-old urgency.

  “So we were playing, and Flannery kept tagging us because she can run a lot faster, and so Rosie and me didn’t want to play anymore, and then we heard her.”

  “Who, sweetie?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought it was my mom, but Coralie thought it was her mom, too. And then Sorrel said it was her mom.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She wanted us to come with her. But it wasn’t one of our moms, it was Sienna. We saw her standing outside the gate, and she wanted us to come out. And we got scared, like super scared, and I told the girls to run inside and hide. Flannery said she was going to go hide in her bed, and Redda was going to try to hide one of the babies in the kitchen or maybe put them in a cupboard or something, and I ran. But Rosie didn’t; she went toward Sienna.”

  She swallowed hard. I kept patting and rocking her like she was a much younger girl.

  “Why do you think she went to Sienna?” Mom asked gently.

  Alev bit her lip. “I don’t think she got to choose,” she whispered. “I wanted to go to her, too. Sienna sounded weird and pretty, and it was like she was pulling us to her just by talking. It must have been a spell, and I didn’t know the right counter-spell.”