The Gateway Trackers Books 3 & 4 Page 14

“She spent the better part of our training shoving files on eligible bachelors under our noses,” Karen said, rolling her eyes. “We stopped going to restaurants with her, because we would always arrive to find two young men waiting for us. It didn’t get any better when we arrived at Harvard. Upstanding young man after upstanding young man was paraded past us—thrown across our path masquerading as chance encounters or else introduced as a friend of a friend. Each one was rebuffed on principle, I promise you, even the good-looking ones.”

  “Well, that sounds hasty,” Milo said, with every appearance of trying to sound reasonable.

  Karen smiled. “Perhaps so, but we couldn’t in good conscience abandon our teenage rebellion. Anyway, circumstances beyond our control soon put a stop to it.” No one replied. Karen was referring to the permanent incapacitation of our grandfather, the death of our grandmother, and the disappearance of our mother, none of which qualified as topics we wanted to revisit, and so didn’t require her to elaborate on them. “Anyway, with our Gateway Bound and our family in disgrace, no one cared very much who I dated after that. I met Noah my first year of law school and I didn’t bother to consult anyone regarding his suitability. And as for producing another Gateway . . .” Karen shrugged in a gesture that tried to play casual but instead made her look, for a moment, incredibly vulnerable, as though the subtle rise of her shoulders had shifted things and revealed a glimpse of aching heart between her ribs. “Well, little did I know that your mother had already taken care of that. And my body never would rise to that particular challenge, so . . . c’est la vie.”

  I shuffled my feet around beneath me, my insides writhing with guilt. Here I was, ranting about Durupinen being bred like cattle, and I’d completely forgotten about Karen’s struggle with infertility. Seriously, was there a point in life when I would stop walking around with my foot perpetually in my mouth, or was this a lifelong affliction?

  “Anyway,” Karen went on, “like most matters, it basically comes down to money, power, and politics. The ruling clans want to remain ruling clans. They don’t want to risk losing their position, power, or influence because they failed to carry on the line, just like the stories you’ve heard about kings and queens obsessing over producing heirs to their thrones.”

  “All that Henry VIII craziness, right?” Milo said with a shudder. “Bear me a son or off with your head?”

  Karen smiled. “That is one of the more famous examples, yes. The Durupinen are no different. That’s why it will be so wonderful to have a voice on the Council who doesn’t think the same way.” She nudged Hannah gently with her elbow. “Let’s add it to your official platform: no more outdated, sexist dating and marriage practices.”

  Hannah grinned. “That’s catchy. I’ll put it on some campaign posters.”

  “I’ll design some t-shirts,” Milo added. “Only you’ll have to belt them and wear them as off-the-shoulder mini dresses because t-shirts are so over.”

  “Okay, well, I’m glad you all think this is funny,” I grumbled. “But Róisín told me the Trackers are the ones who research the eligible bachelors. Did you know that? Did you know we are nothing more than anti-feminist foot soldiers? That’s not what I signed up for!”

  “Nor is it what you will be doing,” Karen said patiently. “The Trackers who handle the scouting are not field agents, like you and Hannah. They are trained in computer research and document analysis. But if you’re really so worried that you might unwittingly assist in marrying one of your classmates off to a millionaire, just talk to Catriona and make it clear that you want no part of it.”

  “Fine, I will,” I said, feeling more foolish by the second as Karen’s cool-headed logic began to prevail. “And I want to take an ax to that policy as soon as Hannah’s on the Council.”

  “Duly noted,” Hannah said, giving me a little salute.

  “Okay, then. Sorry if I overreacted, but . . .” and I brushed my finger on the outside of my bag, where Eleanora’s diary sat nestled amongst my art supplies, “you do realize that all this scouting nonsense is the reason Eleanora is dead? If the Council hadn’t scouted out that bastard Harry and if he hadn’t attacked her—”

  “Then her Calling abilities would have revealed themselves anyway, at another juncture, and poor Eleanora would have met the very same fate,” Karen said calmly. “Besides, Eleanora’s experience with scouting was very different than what it is today. The Council is not forcing arranged marriages on anyone, and clans are completely free to participate in the scouting or not, although,” and here Karen pursed her lips, “I have no doubt that some clans consider the practice just shy of compulsory, for social reasons. Still, your friend Róisín is not being dragged, kicking and screaming, to the altar, as Eleanora would have been. Scouting is antiquated and absurd, Jess, but it is not the root of all evil here. If we are really going to use this Council seat to make a difference, let’s try to keep focused on the real problems. Scouting is a symptom of the larger issues. If we resolve them, things like scouting will crumble by association.”

  I took a deep breath. “Fine. But if I get a whiff of a scouting assignment in the Tracker Office, I’m burning this shit to the ground.”

  “I can help with that, as I recall,” Hannah said with a mischievous little grin.

  Milo threw back his head and cackled loudly. My mouth dropped open.

  “Yes, Hannah! Yes! Have we finally arrived at a place where we can joke about this?”

  “We’ve thrown ourselves into the lion’s den for this election,” Hannah said, her grin fading just a little as she picked her speech back up off the floor. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to need all the laughs we can get.”

  11

  The Caller Speaks

  THE GRAND COUNCIL ROOM was silent, and yet it was buzzing with anticipation. No one moved. No one spoke. Every eye was trained on the diminutive figure standing at the podium in front of us.

  My heart was hammering against my ribcage. I was wrestling with a mad desire to pounce on everybody in the room and tear their eyes out for the way they were staring at her. I wanted to shield her with my body, to offer some kind of tangible, physical protection for her. But there was nothing I could do. She had to do this, and she had to do it alone.

  I wasn’t the only one on edge. Milo’s energy was so intense that the inside of my head sounded like a swarm of angry bees. Beside me, his figure was blurred at the edges, vibrating with the intensity of his nerves.

  “I know,” I said through the connection, replying to his unspoken and yet deafening exclamation. “I know.”

  “If you two do not calm down, I’m going to have to close the connection,” Hannah’s angry energy came thrumming through to us. “I’m nervous enough without piling yours on top! Seriously, pull yourselves together!”

  “Sorry,” Milo and I said through the connection, and together we made a concerted effort to calm ourselves down.

  We’d sat through four speeches already, because obviously Hannah was slated for last, purely to ratchet up our own unbearable tension. I told Hannah in a whisper that her first order of business if she won should be to find the person who set the speaking order and slap her.

  “I’ll get right on that, Jess,” she had replied through gritted teeth.

  Finvarra was noticeably absent from the proceedings, as was Carrick. This unnerved me more than I would have thought. Of course, we understood Celeste’s explanation that Finvarra was too ill to attend, that her condition continued to decline, and that we would all be kept informed if there were any changes, but I still felt unsettled. I’d been subconsciously counting on both Finvarra and Carrick to be there, silent but steady in their support for us. To see the empty space where they ought to have sat left me feeling almost panicked, knowing it surely would not be long before their places would be vacant forever. This realization was shouting to be dealt with, but I couldn’t do it—not then, not with Hannah’s speech about to happen. I turned my attention to the other speakers instead, desperate
for the distraction.

  The first speech had been given by an old Scottish woman we could barely understand through her thick brogue. Karen leaned in and told us that she was part of Moira’s clan—Moira was the eccentric old keeper of the Léarscáil—and that someone from her clan was nominated every time a seat came up, but had never been elected. She spoke for a rambling ten minutes about honor, duty, and the particular strength and resilience of her clan, which hailed from deep in the Highlands. She didn’t offer a single policy idea or make a single campaign promise. She capped it all by singing a strange little Highland song and toddled to her seat amidst scattered, befuddled applause.

  “One down,” Milo had muttered.

  The next speech was a barely concealed diatribe against the establishment. The woman, who was in her mid-40s, had violently purple hair (which, let’s face it, I could appreciate) paired with a degree of angst that had even me rolling my eyes. She railed at the Council and shook her fist quite a bit, and then tried to get us all to join in a chant of “New times, new laws!” which only a handful of people half-heartedly joined. Every single Council member looked as though she had been forced to eat something disgusting, and Celeste looked nothing short of relieved when the woman finally sat down. Milo followed her speech with sound effects of falling and exploding.

  “Is it me, or is the competition . . . not much of a competition so far?” I asked in a whisper to Karen. “Am I missing something here?”

  “You’re right,” Karen hissed back, with a hint of a chuckle. “It’s by design, though. The older, more influential clans buy up the loyalty of anyone who might put forth a real contender, or else nominate a candidate that will draw away a few votes from other, less-desirable candidates, but will ultimately lose.”

  The third speech was monotonal and uninspired, read by a middle-aged woman with her face a half-inch from the paper. It sounded, from what little I managed to pay attention to, like a steady stream of old-clan propaganda, promoting the purity of the old bloodlines and the importance of clinging ferociously to old traditions. I could appreciate that the speech was well-written, and that, in the hands of a fiery orator, it could have been rousing, and even inspiring, but for all the wrong reasons. It sounded vaguely authoritarian, but the woman delivering it was so devoid of authority, that the words just bounced off her audience and rolled away across the floor. The newer, less powerful clans responded to her speech with a stony silence. She did get some enthusiastic applause from the first few rows, though, as well as from the Council benches.

  “Some good old-fashioned authoritarian dogma, just for kicks,” Karen whispered, responding as though my thoughts had floated into her head. “This is what the party line sounds like. This is the kind of speech my mother used to give back in the day, although she delivered it much better.”

  “It’s kind of . . .” I hesitated, searching for the right word.

  “Disturbing? Elitist? Smacking of fascism?” Karen suggested.

  “Uh . . . yeah. All of those,” I said.

  “Too few, with too much power, for too long,” she muttered, her nose wrinkled as though a noxious smell was wafting under it. “The thought of inclusion or change both terrifies and unites them. It’s why it’s so hard for new clans to break into the ranks.”

  Diana McLennon was by far the most accomplished speaker of the group. Tall and stately, with a noble bearing and a powerful authority in her voice, she would have been the most impressive candidate regardless of the content of her speech. She commanded the attention of the room almost instantly, and many Council members and Durupinen in the rows around us watched her with satisfied smiles on their faces. She spent the first few minutes of her speech stroking our collective ego; she went on and on about the importance of our role in the living and spirit worlds, praising our commitment and our bravery and our selflessness.

  “If I hadn’t already decided to hate her, I’d like her,” I whispered to Hannah, in an attempt to wipe the tense look off her face. She forced a little smile but didn’t respond.

  Having thoroughly charmed her audience, Diana shifted gears to attack her competition, and it seemed that only one other candidate was worth her time.

  “We are well acquainted with the dangers outside of our sisterhood, and we have met them head on. But we must be vigilant—very vigilant—of the dangers that nest deep within the fold,” she said smoothly. Her eyes rested briefly on Hannah before she went on. “There is much we still do not understand about the fulfillment of the Prophecy. Have the repercussions of it truly passed? Have those involved truly left the past behind? We cannot be sure. Our failure to act when the Prophecy loomed before us is perhaps our greatest mistake. We were not decisive and we did not properly heed warnings that might have protected all that we hold dear. We cannot make these mistakes again. We cannot hope for positive outcomes; we must fight for them. We cannot consider opportunities; we must seize them. And we cannot allow guilt to guide us in a dangerous direction.”

  She glided to her seat, carried aloft by a tumult of clapping and adulation for the utterly predictable arguments she’d made. Not everyone was impressed, though. Many of the newer clans toward the back of the room sat with their hands folded in their laps, not even bothering to acknowledge Diana’s speech with a polite round of applause.

  And now, finally, here we were, watching Hannah take her place at the podium, watching her square her narrow shoulders and clear her throat. My God, she looked almost like a child up there. There was nothing childlike about her voice when she spoke, though.

  “I first want to thank Finvarra for the honor of being nominated for this prestigious position. I am sorry that she was not well enough to hear this speech today, but I hope that it would have met with her approval,” Hannah began, nodding her head toward the empty throne to the right of the podium.

  “I want to talk to you all today about identity. Most of you, from a very early age, knew exactly who you were, and what your destiny would be. I didn’t have that luxury. Growing up as a kid in the foster care system, my identity was always a mystery. Who was I? Where had I come from? Why could I see and talk to people that no one else could see? Would knowing more about where I came from help me to understand my gift—which I always thought was a curse—or would it always be an enigma? With no explanations to guide me, and no people around who would believe me, I invented wild theories about why I was haunted. I was being punished for something terrible I’d done in a past life. Or else that I hailed from a family of witches, and had been left here among normal people like a changeling in a fairytale. As I grew older, and my mind clung less and less to fantasy, I accepted what the doctors and foster families and therapists insisted was the truth: I was just crazy.

  “They didn’t use the word crazy, of course. There was a long string of medical terms and an even longer list of medications that I won’t bore you with. But once I had accepted it, it became part of my identity: I was sick. I was broken.”

  Hannah paused to take a deep breath, and when she did, I breathed with her, only realizing in that moment that I had been holding it. Milo was as still as a carved image, his tension so palpable that he actually seemed corporeal in the space beside me. On my other side, Karen was shaking with suppressed sobs.

  Hannah went on, her voice gaining in power and surety. “Then everything changed. My sister found me. Our aunt finally explained who we were, and why spirits sought us out. For the first time in my life, I knew, at least in part, who I was, but I was overwhelmed by that knowledge, because, as you all know, a great deal of responsibility comes along with it. Still, I was eager to learn how to help the spirits who had been plaguing me for so many years. At last, their pleas would not have to go unanswered. My sister and I embraced our heritage, but it did not embrace us back.

  “It was a struggle from the moment we arrived here. I was told by the very people who should have been my sisters, that I was a threat, someone to be feared, someone who should be locked up. I don’t blam
e you for believing it. I believed it myself. And in my confusion, I was taken advantage of. I was manipulated into fulfilling the Prophecy. Luckily, I had a wonderful sister by my side. She knew exactly who I was, and she helped me to see it, too. And that is how the Prophecy came to be thwarted. Because at the moment it mattered most, I could finally see the truth of who I was meant to be.”

  Hannah smiled at me. Every fiber of my being wanted to stand and whoop and cheer right there, but I knew the speech wasn’t over, so I contented myself with a silent fist pump.

  “Identity is a struggle because parts of it are always changing. There are so many factors to identity, and owning each one is important. I am a sister. I am a friend. I am a woman. I am a Durupinen. I am a Caller. But knowing when to cast them aside is also vital. There is a difference between who you were, and who you are, and there are many things that used to be a part of my identity that are no longer part of who I am. I am no longer a victim. I am no longer a threat. I am no longer a dangerous answer to a riddle you’ve all been trying to solve. The days of the Prophecy have passed, and I will no longer define myself by them.” Hannah turned her head and looked right at Marion. “And I will not allow others to define me by them either.

  “If you still see me in this way, you are stuck in the past, and the Northern Clans cannot afford to be stuck in the past. We must look forward in order to continue serving the spirit world to the very best of our abilities. I believe that the capacity in which I can best serve the spirit world, and the rest of you, my sisterhood, is as a member of the Council.

  “And so, I am inviting you all to look to the future with me, and see all the potential in it. We can take what we’ve learned and grow together, strengthening our bonds both to each other and to the spirits we serve. We can embrace new clans and new Durupinen and realize that the newness of their gifts is not a liability, but an asset. We can work through the old rules and policies that divide us, and find a renewed strength in our unity. We can provide better support for those who are struggling to come to terms with who they are, and help them on the days when their gift feels far more like a burden. We can unshackle ourselves from old rules that do not serve us in our modern-day mission, and realize that, just because our gifts are thousands of years old, our policies don’t need to be. Tradition is beautiful when it serves the present. History is crucial to understanding how we arrived at who we are today. But adaptation is the key to survival, and if we are to find our identity and our place in the world together, we must adapt. We must learn, and grow together so that in this new day, in this new time, our collective identity as the Keepers of the Gateways is strong, protected, and celebrated. I humbly ask for your vote, so that I may be a catalyst in building the future of the Northern Clans. I promise to work tirelessly for our sisterhood. Thank you for allowing me to speak today.”