“Your first year at the academy, I think. Be careful with that. Don’t hurt yourself.”
“I can handle a sword.”
“Accidents can even happen to the Voice,” Rylie said.
Deirdre frowned, leaning further out of the tree. Had she heard that right? Why would Rylie have called Marion the Voice? What was that?
Marion swung the sword through the air. Rylie grimaced.
“I’m sorry. I’ll stop.” Marion took a few things out of her pocket and set them on a nearby rock—a handful of change, some stones the size of her fingernails, a few gems. She also set her treasured cell phone on the rock.
“Any credit cards?” Rylie asked.
Marion rolled her eyes, and in that moment, she looked so much like a typical teenage girl. Not a powerful witch of angel descent. “
Mère
won’t let me have one.”
“Good. I don’t want you to fry anything when you cross over.”
“I’ve done this a few times,” Marion said. “I know what I’m doing.”
Once she patted down her pockets to find everything was gone, she held the hilt of the Ethereal Blade in both hands, tipped her head toward the sky, and closed her eyes.
Rylie backed away.
“I have it,” the mage girl said. “I’m ready.”
And then she was gone.
Just like that—one moment, she stood in the clearing, and the next, she didn’t.
Both Marion and the sword had vanished.
Rylie bit her bottom lip, gazing at the empty patch of ground where she had been standing moments earlier. She glanced up at the sky. Sighed.
She turned and walked away, leaving Marion’s possessions on the rock.
Deirdre didn’t understand what she had just seen.
It wasn’t weird that Marion could disappear like that. The girl had designed magic powerful enough to bind a bunch of Alphas together for the election. Being able to vanish was some petty David Blaine stuff.
The fact that she’d taken the sword—that was weirder.
Rylie vanished down the path, but Deirdre didn’t follow this time. She was a lot more interested in the cell phone sitting on the rock with all the other contents of the girl’s pockets.
Deirdre dropped out of the tree silently. It hurt less to land than when she had jumped out of the cottage. The healer’s magic was working underneath her bandages, mending her wounds, taking away the pain.
Marion’s phone was an old thing, maybe as old as the world. It was slow to turn on, and once it did, she saw that the icons were clunky and big. The screen was scratched as though it had been rolled down a cliff a few times. She might have been important enough to orchestrate the election of the nation’s most important gaean, but her mother still wouldn’t let her have a new cell phone.
Deirdre opened the text messages, curious to see whom Marion was always chatting with.
The most recent messages were passed between people who seemed to be classmates, judging by the inane content. There were texts about homework, finals, and going to the beach. Marion seemed particularly fond of texting cleavage shots to contacts with boys’ names.
It was so ridiculously ordinary that Deirdre would have laughed if her heart hadn’t been pounding.
She was getting close to something more important than jailbait pics. She was sure of it.
A quick swipe took her to older text messages. She found a conversation between Marion and Gage Cicero there.
Gods.
Deirdre should have known better than to read it, yet she still tapped his name, bringing up the text. There were no cleavage shots or anything inappropriate there, but the content was equally inane. Marion had asked Gage some questions about Rylie’s whereabouts, pushing for information about when they were traveling, when he would be home, when they could hang out with Rylie’s son Benjamin again.
The kind of messages a brother and sister might have shared.
Those messages terminated abruptly the day that Gage had left with Deirdre to infiltrate Stark’s asylum. She remembered throwing his cell phone in the trash at a gas station so that they wouldn’t be able to be tracked.
She should have left the phone with him.
Deirdre scrolled back up to the top. The most recent thread of messages was to a contact listed as “ECF,” but it was an entirely one-sided conversation. Marion sent messages to ECF. Long messages, mostly describing the mundane details of her week, and a few pictures of Rylie’s family. But ECF never replied.
The last message to ECF said, “I got the sword. Want it back?”
Deirdre lowered the phone, staring at the churning waterfall as she rolled those words over in her mind.
Want it back?
ECF couldn’t be Rylie. They had just been talking, and that text message had been sent while Deirdre was in the tree. ECF was someone else. Someone who used to have the Ethereal Blade. Brother Marshall?
The Godslayer?
“It couldn’t be,” Deirdre muttered.
Marion was too young to have known anyone who impacted Genesis like that, especially the notorious Godslayer. She would have been…what, three years old when the world ended? Four years?
But Deirdre couldn’t shake the idea.
She needed to know who ECF was.
Deirdre went through Marion’s other accounts—her email, which was sparse, her photo cloud, and then her social media. She had a lot of social media accounts. Pretty much every site that Deirdre had ever heard of, Marion had an account there. Even old stuff like Instagram and Facebook.
She also had an app for a blogging platform that Deirdre didn’t recognize. It looked old, though. The icon was even clunkier than most of her others.
Deirdre sat on the rock to read her most recent posts.
Marion treated the blogging platform like a personal diary. Skimming the last couple of posts was pretty boring. Marion talked about the election like it was a particularly obnoxious chore, something she was doing to help out Rylie, not because she wanted to.
But even though she only talked about it in passing, the details were really specific.
Like, Rylie’s travel itineraries kind of specific.
Horror dawned over Deirdre as she read deeper, looking for more dates and times. Marion’s interest in politics was obvious, no matter how casual she tried to be about it. She even talked about Deirdre a few times. Not by name—she had codes for everyone. Rylie was Wolfy. Her mate, Abel, was Grumpy—that gave Deirdre a laugh. Deirdre was described as Scary Girl. She wasn’t sure if she should be flattered or insulted by that.
All Marion and the pack’s personal information was just sitting there on the internet, on some distant server. Who knew where that server was located? Who knew who could have had access to it?
Deirdre checked Marion’s settings. It was all private. Only she and a few other people should have been able to read it, including Gage’s account.
“MyWords,” Deirdre said. That was the name of the blogging platform. MyWords.
She ran a quick internet search on it.
According to the encyclopedia article, MyWords had been founded before Genesis—about twelve years before. Well before Deirdre had been using the internet. It was a very old site, and it had been large in its heyday. Its IPO had netted the founders billions of dollars and allowed them to retire young.
It took a little more digging to find that the founders were named Gabrielle and Haywood Stark.
No way.
Sascha Stark had mentioned that his family had gotten rich in the dot com boom. He hadn’t said how. An early blogging platform could have been a great way to earn billions.
Deirdre set Marion’s phone down slowly on the rock, her hand trembling.
“Oh my gods,” she said.
It answered so many questions.
Now Deirdre knew why Marion was always playing with her phone. She was writing lengthy, detailed, intensely personal blog posts about her life.
Posts that should have been secret, but weren’t.
Rylie and Deirdre had been wondering for months how Stark had such intimate knowledge of the pack’s movements. He’d even known that Rylie was going to be at the United Nations to meet Secretary Friederling. They’d expected that he had an informant he was protecting.
That was because Stark
did
have an informant.
He had access to Marion’s blog.
“Oh my gods,” Deirdre said again.
“Hands above your head.”
She reacted instinctively, obeying the order.
Deirdre turned slowly, still holding Marion’s phone. Abel stood behind her. He was accompanied by a half-dozen members of the pack in their human forms, a trio of wolves, and Vidya.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“I know how to beat Stark and Rhiannon,” Deirdre said.
“I knew we should have taken her phone away years ago,” Abel said. “It’s not right, letting a fourteen year old have internet all the time. Rots the brain.”
“She’s not our daughter. That’s not our decision to make.” Rylie held the phone away from her, pinched between forefinger and thumb, like it was something rotten.
“Did you read it?” Deirdre asked, pacing across the stage where the inauguration would be held the next day. “She wrote about the security vulnerabilities at the sanctuary, which was how Stark got in to attack that first time. She’s been writing about your movements. She’s been sharing
everything
.”
“In her defense, she thought nobody was reading it,” Rylie said. “And since she wrote in code, Stark never realized that Deirdre was Scary Girl, so she didn’t expose that particular vulnerability.”
Abel snorted. “Kids these days.” He stepped back to allow a pair of technicians to run wire past him. They were connecting screens on either side of the stage, which would show Rhiannon’s enlarged figure to the audience as she took over as Alpha.
“But it’s good,” Deirdre said. “This is great, in fact! It gives us a plan of attack. We can make Stark do anything we want by writing a post on Marion’s account.”
Rylie bit her bottom lip, gazing thoughtfully at the circle of power that witches were casting among all the wires. It was the ritual space, the platform for the magic that would give Rhiannon and Stark control. “We’ll have to be careful about it. Spurring Rhiannon to attack means…well, we’ll be spurring her to attack. It could easily turn into a bloodbath.”
“It’s okay if we control the violence, though,” Deirdre said.
“Maybe.” Rylie sighed, dropping the phone to her side. “It’s good that you found this. We’d be up a creek if you hadn’t. Even so, Deirdre…I had you in that cottage for a reason.”
“What, so I wouldn’t hear about the Voice? What
is
the Voice?”
“You don’t—” Rylie began.
Deirdre cut her off. “Why did Marion take the Ethereal Blade? Where did she go? Who is ECF?”
Abel glanced around, as if worried someone would be listening. They were surrounded by pack members. People working for the sanctuary. People who should have been allies.
But both Rhiannon and Stark could compel shifters, and they couldn’t trust any of them.
“You can’t ask those questions,” Abel said.
Deirdre wanted to fight, to push against them. To demand answers.
But maybe they weren’t pushing back because they wanted to punish her or keep secrets.
Maybe there were answers Deirdre just shouldn’t have.
She took a few deep breaths, closed her eyes.
“Okay. Fine.”
Rylie reached over to hug her. “Thanks.”
“Whatever,” she said, trying to pretend her burning cheeks had to do with her phoenix rather than shame. “Anyway, Stark and Rhiannon’s biggest weakness is pride. They have goals, but nothing so big as wanting to be important. That’s where we can hit them. I just…I don’t know how exactly to stop them.”
“Shoot them in the face,” Abel said. “Both of them. Like to see them retaliate against our kids when they’re both dead.”
Rylie laughed, as if her mate had said something cute. “I’m not convinced a bullet to the face would kill Stark.”
“We shouldn’t kill them unless we find their daughters first,” Deirdre said. “They’re naiads. Rhiannon’s drawing all of her power off of them, so she’s got to be keeping them somewhere safe. If we kill her, we might never find them.”
“Why do you care?” Abel asked.
Rylie slapped his arm. “Stop it.”
“I know
you
care, you big stupid bleeding heart,” he said. “But what about you?” He glared at Deirdre. “They’re not your kids. They’re not your problem. Think of all the people you’d save if you just killed the Starks—unless you don’t actually want this Everton guy dead.”
Deirdre didn’t meet his eyes.
She wanted to tell him that she wanted Stark dead, but she was too tired to lie.
“Don’t be a dick, Abel,” Rylie said.
“You need my dick,” he said. He meant it to sound as bad as it did. He grinned when Rylie snorted. “That’s what I thought.”
They were so cute it hurt. It literally hurt. Deirdre hated them a little. “Alona and Calla Stark are naiads,” she said again. “They’re among those I want to protect. Not just shifters, but
all
gaeans.
All
people.”
“Idealists are gross,” Abel said, taking the phone out of Rylie’s hand. “Sometimes you just gotta shoot people in the face. But all right. We’ll need to get them to attack before they reach the inauguration, or else we’ll have lots of dead shifters around. They’re gonna be pissed when they realize what we’re doing. Real pissed.”
“And what is it we’re doing, exactly?” Deirdre asked.
He started to type a post on Marion’s phone, his thumbs clumsy on the touch screen. “We’re gonna need a decoy. Someone to look like Melchior.”
“Like how Rylie was in disguise at the cathedral?”
“Just like that,” Abel said. “If we disguise a member of our pack as Melchior, then when Rhiannon tries to kill him, it’ll break the oath for the unseelie faction. The Starks lose protection. We arrest them, and the second place winner gets inaugurated instead.”
The second place winner—Rylie Gresham, who had actually won the vote.
Deirdre dug her fingernails into her palms. “Is Marion’s magic that stupid? Rhiannon won’t know that the Melchior-decoy is part of your pack, so she won’t be deliberately violating the oath.”