Soul of the Sentinel Read online

  “Time away, what the hell does that mean?” Catriona grumbled, still deep in her read-through of my work.

  “I’m not sure what to call it,” I said, shrugging. “A leave of absence, I guess?”

  Catriona’s head shot up suddenly, as though my words had only just penetrated her concentration. “Are you telling me you’re quitting?” she asked in a voice that snarled with contempt. “Now? With everything that’s happening?”

  “I’m not quitting,” I said, trying to counter her anger with some calmness. “I just need to take a step back for a bit.”

  “I don’t need people to step back, I need them to step up!” Catriona cried, snatching a paperweight from on top of her desk and hurling it to the ground in frustration. “It’s utter madness here, Jess, in case you hadn’t noticed!”

  “Yes, I have noticed. I’ve just barely arrived back from the most dangerous Tracker mission you’ve ever sent me on, remember?”

  “Yes! And I’d think, given its importance, that you’d bloody well like to finish it!” Catriona shouted. Over her shoulder, a Tracker who had been about to enter the office from an adjoining room turned right around on her heel and walked back out again.

  “I do want to finish it,” I said. “Truly, I do. But there’s something else I need to do first.”

  “Are you going soft on me?” she demanded. “That mission into the príosún, was that too much for you? You might as well come out with it now, if that’s what this is about. I’m not in the business of coddling and hand-holding, and I can’t have Trackers on my team who can’t handle a simple undercover—”

  “Okay, first of all, there was nothing simple about that mission, and you damn well know it,” I said, firing up despite my best efforts to remain calm. “Secondly, I’m not going soft. I haven’t been scared off, if that’s what you’re thinking. But there is something really important I need to do here at Fairhaven, and I think it’s going to be incredibly time-consuming at first.”

  “And what is that, then?” Catriona sneered. “What could be so vital that you want to abandon the Trackers at the very moment when some of the most dangerous Necromancers in the world have scattered to the four winds and our own Caomhnóir have been breached and compromised? Not enough time to snog your boy toy now that he’s back from exile?”

  I could have reached across the table and slapped her, but I managed to swallow the impulse, which I must admit was uncharacteristically mature for me. Instead, I took a deep breath and replied. “It has nothing to do with me, or with Finn either. It has to do with Fiona.”

  This pulled Catriona up short. She pressed her lips together for a moment before replying, curtly, “What about Fiona?”

  “Have you been getting updated? About her condition?”

  “Not since she got back,” Catriona said, her tone a bit defensive. “I’ve had a lot going on. She was burned quite badly, wasn’t she? On her face?”

  “Yes,” I said, taking advantage of the temporary ebb of her rage to continue explaining. “I’ve been to see her every day, and she’s… well, the burns have affected her eyesight.”

  “How badly?” Catriona asked quietly.

  “Very badly,” I told her. “She’s not completely blind, but she’s close to it.”

  Catriona stared at me for a moment as though I had been speaking in tongues. Then she replied, curtly, “I had no idea.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m telling you.”

  “I haven’t even been down there to see her. Once I knew she wasn’t in danger of… I just didn’t bother to…”

  “You said it yourself, it’s been pandemonium up here these last few days.”

  “That’s not a proper excuse.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s an explanation. No one’s faulting you here, Catriona. This isn’t an accusation. I’m just filling you in.”

  “Blast it all to hell,” Catriona muttered, collapsing into her chair. She rubbed a hand wearily over her face, letting the information sink in. “That’ll devastate her, that will. She’s an artist, for Christ’s sake. How is she going to… blast it all to hell.”

  “Yeah, it’s going to suck, no doubt about it. That’s why I came to you. I think there might be some things I can do to make it easier on her, but it’s going to take some serious time and energy, and I’ve only got maybe a week until she’s out of the hospital ward.”

  “Let’s have it, then,” Catriona sighed. “What’s your plan?”

  I explained what I wanted to do. Catriona listened intently until I had finished, and then frowned. “Will I still be able to get a hold of you if I need you?”

  “Catriona, I probably won’t be able to leave the castle for the next week. Unless I’m sleeping, eating, or peeing, you will find me in Fiona’s tower,” I said.

  Catriona nodded grudgingly. “Right, then. Well, do what you need to do, then. I’ll rearrange some people to cover the offsite work I was going to assign to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said fervently. “It means a lot to me to be able to—”

  The office door burst open behind me, and Lucida stood framed in sunlight streaming in from the window across the hall. “I need to talk to you, Cat,” she hissed.

  I had seen Lucida around the castle several times since we had arrived back at Fairhaven, but the shock of seeing her freely roaming the halls didn’t seem to wear off. I’d grown so used to the idea of her being a convicted traitor locked behind bars that every sighting of her at liberty was like a punch to the gut.

  The weirdest thing about it was that I wasn’t even convinced she should be back behind bars. Lucida had been instrumental in my escape from Skye Príosún. Not only had she freed Fiona and me from our cells, but she had helped to rescue Fiona’s mother as well, and even used her Caller abilities to save Finn and the rest of the Caomhnóir from a legion of spirits who had been weaponized as Blind Summoners. Watching her and Hannah work together to overcome the Necromancers had been at once surreal and cathartic. It had felt like the beginning of something—like a door that had been opened just a crack, revealing a glimpse of light beyond it. I had no idea if Lucida intended to open that door wide, or slam it shut again, and I think it was the not-knowing that left me so unsettled in her presence.

  “Can’t it wait, Lucida? I’m up to my eyeballs in it, here,” Catriona said wearily.

  Lucida did not even spare me a glance. “If it could wait, I would have damn well waited.”

  “Well, what is it, then?” Catriona huffed. “What could be so pressing that—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me they were coming here?” Lucida cut in, her voice raw with what sounded like fear. Catriona heard it too, and it pulled her up short.

  “Who are you talking about?” she asked, her voice a cool and rational counterpoint to Lucida’s slightly frantic one.

  “You know full bloody well who I’m talking about!” Lucida snapped, but when Catriona continued to look bemused, she added, “The Caomhnóir! The Caomhnóir and the Necromancers from the príosún, the ones facing charges!”

  Catriona still looked utterly bewildered that a handful of shackled prisoners should cause her cousin such distress. “Yes, of course they’re coming here! You were a Tracker, Lucida, you know how it works. If a prisoner has to face the Council for questioning or sentencing, they stand before them here at Fairhaven. I know you’ve been in prison for a stretch, but surely you haven’t forgotten the bare basics of our judicial system. I mean, you went through it yourself, for God’s sake!”

  But Lucida seemed barely to have heard a word of what Catriona had said beyond that first “yes.” She began pacing the room like a caged jungle cat, clutching at her hair. “I can’t be here,” she muttered to herself several times before rounding on Catriona and repeating it. “I can’t be here! You’ve got to get me out of here when they come!”

  Catriona threw me an anxious glance before replying, “I can’t do that, you know I can’t. You’re under house arrest, Lucida. You can’t leave the grounds unless you’re cleared at your hearing, and that’s not for another two weeks.”

  “Well, talk to someone, then!” Lucida shouted. “You’re on the bleeding Council! Appeal to the other members! Get it moved up!”

  “Do you really think the Council will be inclined to change their schedule to suit the whim of a convicted traitor?” Catriona shot back, getting heated herself now. “If you ask me, it’s a miracle they’re giving you a hearing at all. If it weren’t for Hannah Ballard—”

  “What about Hannah?” I said, speaking for the first time and breaking a sort of spell that Lucida’s fear had cast over the room. Both she and Catriona stared at me as though I had just materialized out of thin air into my chair.

  “She lobbied for Lucida’s hearing,” Catriona said. “She was quite impassioned. Seemed determined that you should have a chance to be heard, even after everything you put the poor girl through.”

  I stared at Catriona. “Hannah lobbied for her? Hannah?”

  “Catriona this isn’t just some whim,” Lucida growled through gritted teeth. “I’m telling you now, it will not be safe for me here. You can’t let them do this, you can’t let them in the castle while I’m here.”

  “Lucida, just explain what you’re on about!” Catriona cried.

  “They’ll know I’m here! They’ll know, and they aren’t going to miss an opportunity to take me out of this equation,” Lucida said. She was pacing again, twisting her fingers together.

  “They won’t be able to touch you! Every one of them will be under lock and key, guarded twenty-four hours a day under the strictest of security protocols!”

  “Protocols they all know like the back of their hands because they used to execute them as part of their jobs,” Lucida said. “I’m telli
ng you right now, Cat, I am not safe here!”

  Catriona was looking at Lucida in frank alarm now. “Lucida tell me what’s going on. You were in the príosún, holed up with the Necromancers for years. If they wanted to remove you as a threat, they would have done it then. No doubt they had ample opportunity, especially if they were turning the guards.”

  “I wasn’t out then!” Lucida cried. “And who would have listened to me anyway, to the mad ravings of just another prisoner desperate to get out. But now that I’m here, now that there’s a chance I might have the Council’s ear again…”

  “But what are they so afraid you’re going to tell us that you couldn’t have told us years ago when you were first tried before the Council?” Catriona asked. She went still, and her eyes narrowed. “Lucida? What do they think you know?”

  Lucida met Catriona’s eye, and the look upon her face was… arresting. Devastated. She shook her head, her lips trembling. “Keep me safe, Cat,” she whispered, and slipped back out of the door.

  The intensity of her words left both of us unable to speak for a few moments after she disappeared through the doorway. Finally, I broke the spell by turning to Catriona and murmuring, “What the hell was that about?”

  Catriona shook her head. “I have no idea. She’s never… I’ve never seen Lucida afraid like that, not even when… well, I’ve never seen her afraid like that,” she finished. Then she turned her gaze fiercely onto me, making me feel as though I were being x-rayed. “Did she say anything to you in the príosún? Anything that might make you think that she was scared of something?”

  I tried to recall our conversations during that frantic escape, but most of it was an adrenaline-fueled blur of terror. “I can’t… I honestly can’t think of anything specific. She just really wanted to get out of there. She… talked a lot about how the Necromancers didn’t need her anymore—that they’d cast her off as worthless. And she also mentioned that, because they’d basically forgotten all about her, they weren’t careful about what they said in front of her anymore. That’s how she knew that they were planning to overtake the rest of the Caomhnóir.”

  “So then, it’s possible that she overheard something more than just the plan to overtake the príosún,” Catriona said, more to herself than to me.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Jess, let me ask you something. What is the point of taking over a fortress?” Catriona asked.

  “The… the point?” I asked. “I… I don’t know. To have somewhere to fight from?”

  “Ah, yes,” Catriona said. “But to need somewhere to fight from, you first need something to fight for.”

  I blinked. “I’m… not following you.”

  “Oh, come on, Jess, this isn’t rocket science. If all you want to do is escape, you don’t take over a fortress. You don’t create an army. There had to be another end game, a reason they wanted to take that location, and hold it. It’s the missing piece to this whole puzzle!”

  I felt like an idiot for admitting it, but I hadn’t realized there was a missing piece to the puzzle. I never questioned why the Necromancers were trying to take over the príosún. They were forever looking for ways to take what was ours, to undermine our abilities to protect ourselves and our gifts. Taking control of one of our most impenetrable sites and enlisting our guardians as soldiers was just another attempt to do that… wasn’t it?

  “You… you mentioned the archive there. We ran through it when we were escaping the príosún. You said before that you thought they might be interested in something that we stored down there—some artifact or piece of information?”

  Catriona bit her lip. “Yes, and we’ve been combing the archive ever since we took back the príosún. As far as we’ve been able to tell so far, nothing is missing.”

  “So then, you think they might have wanted to secure the príosún for another reason? Something we haven’t thought of yet?”

  “It’s possible,” Catriona said.

  “And maybe Lucida knows something about it?” I pressed.

  “Also possible.” Catriona sunk into her chair. “Blimey, what a clusterfuck this all is.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. “About Lucida, I mean.”

  Catriona gave a long, weary sigh. “What can I do? When all is said and done, she’s my blood and she’s asked me to protect her. I’m going to walk into the Council Room and make a complete arse of myself by putting forward her request. And then, when they all laugh in my face and tell me to sod off, I’m going to have to think of some other way to make her feel safe.”

  “Do you really think she’s in danger?”

  “I don’t know,” Catriona said. “I honestly can’t see how. But I do know this. The toughest most ruthless criminals I’ve ever seen in my life were broken within months of entering Skye Príosún. Lucida might be battered, but that place has not broken her. I’ve never seen her scared like that. If she says there’s something to be scared of, she may bloody well be right.”

  “Is… does this change anything? Is it still okay with you if I help Fiona out for a few weeks?”

  Catriona had sunk down so deeply into contemplation of the conversation with Lucida that it took a few seconds of staring blankly at me before she realized what I was even talking about. “No, no, do what you need to do for Fiona, but… just do it as quickly as you can, alright? And I still need you on call for an emergency.”

  “Thanks, Catriona,” I said. “It means a lot to me to be able to—”

  “Put it in a letter, duck, I’m drowning in it here,” snapped Catriona. She had already returned to her paperwork and was waving me impatiently out the door.

  2

  A New Ally

  I COULD HEAR MILO’s disappointed sigh from all the way across the main library reading room as I approached the table where Hannah, Karen, and Savvy were working.

  “Did you have to take all the make-up off, too?” he grumbled. “All that hard work. That smoky eye was flawless.”

  “Milo, who the hell gets contoured to go sit in a library?” I snapped. “Besides, those false eyelashes were making my eyes water.”

  Milo muttered something about libraries needing “more glamour,” but I ignored him, turning to the others instead.

  “So! How’s it going?”

  Hannah barely looked up from the paper she was highlighting, her nose only a couple of inches from the page. “It’s going,” she replied vaguely.

  Savvy gave a low whistle, and ran a hand through her newly-shortened hair. “Mate, don’t ask me. I can’t make heads or tails of most of this lawyer-speak.”

  “It’s coming together very nicely,” Karen added. “Hannah is being too hard on herself.”

  “I don’t want it to come together nicely. I want it to be unassailable,” Hannah mumbled, still not looking up.

  “Well, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?” Karen said with a wink.

  Karen had transferred to the new London office of her Boston-based law firm so that she could be closer to us. It seemed we had scared the hell out of her one too many times by getting into life-or-death situations and then neglecting to tell her about them. We’d meant to protect her—to keep her from worrying—but she’d only worried more when she realized what kinds of shenanigans we’d managed to stumble into without her knowledge. I still felt little pangs of guilt every time I saw her within the walls of Fairhaven, a place she’d sworn she’d never stay again, because I knew that she was only here for us. But that guilt was always swallowed up by a deep gratefulness to finally have an adult in our lives who was so dependably present.

  “Can I do anything to help?” I asked, dropping into a seat and gazing, rather unenthusiastically, I’ll admit, at the stacks of books, papers, and scrolls.

  “Here, proofread this,” Hannah said, tossing a packet at me. “Mark any typos you find with the pink highlighter.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said with a little salute.

  “Also, don’t tell me how many typos you find, because I’ve proofread it about twenty times, and if it’s still full of mistakes, I’ll probably burst into tears,” Hannah added in a slightly hysterical voice.

  I opened my mouth to reply, but then caught Milo’s gaze, who gave his head a tiny shake as if to say, “Don’t poke the bear.” Obediently, I dropped my gaze to the document. It was really for me and Finn that Hannah was doing all of this work in the first place, so honestly, I should probably just shut up and edit, if I knew what was good for me.