"How did you find this place?" Aislinn asked, pretty much killing any hope for a nice family moment. "It's warded against your kind."
"There's a spot about three feet across in the northwest corner," Call answered. "The wards are broken there. I can fix them if you want." Aislinn was obviously taken aback, but she recovered quickly. "No need. I'll send Finley out to redo it tomorrow morning." Since the Brannicks were descended from a powerful White Witch, some of them still had residual powers. Apparently, this was the case with Finley. "You can go help her," Aislinn added, to Izzy. "It's time you learned to make wards."
"As for how we found you," Dad said, "it wasn't easy. Call told me that he'd sent you to the Brannicks, but when he tried to use his magic to get a lock on you..."
"It was like you had just disappeared," Call said. "No locator spell worked, no tracing hex."
"It was the Itineris," I explained. "It didn't know what to do with me now that I'm de-magicked." Dad nodded. "I suspected as much. Anyway, we've spent the past few weeks making our way here. Call didn't think it was wise for me to travel by Itineris in my...current state, so I'm afraid we've had to travel the old-fashioned way."
"It took you three weeks to fly from England to Tennessee?" Aislinn asked, raising an eyebrow.
"We didn't come here right away," Call answered, crossing his arms over his chest, a scowl on his face. "There was a lot of other stuff to deal with."
"What kind of stuff?" I asked.
Dad rose to his feet and started to pace. "After the Brannicks and ll'Occhio di Dio attacked Council Headquarters in the spring, there were only five Council members left."
"That wasn't us," Aislinn retorted. "Or The Eye, for that matter."
Dad stopped his pacing and stared at her. "What?"
Briefly, Aislinn told Dad the same story she'd told me last night, about suspecting that the Casnoffs had set the fire themselves, only to blame it on their enemies. When she was done, Dad seemed to have aged ten years. "I wish I could say that that's preposterous. But after what I've seen Lara Casnoff do...In any case, the other three members of the Council were killed when Thorne Abbey was destroyed." I'd seen one of those three, Kristopher, killed, but it was a shock to learn the other two, Elizabeth and Roderick, were gone, too. "Lara and I are the only members still remaining," Dad continued. "I'm"-he gestured to his tattoos-"not exactly useful. I'm also dead."
"What?"
"A few days after Thorne Abbey burned down, Lara Casnoff called a huge meeting in London at the mansion of some bigwig warlock," Call said to me. "I was able to do an invisibility spell and get in. There must have been hundreds of Prodigium there. Anyway, that's where Lara made the big announcement that your dad had been murdered by The Eye." He nodded toward Aislinn. "With the help of the Brannicks." Aislinn swore under her breath, and Mom lowered her head.
"Okay," I said slowly. "Look, I get that that's bad, but can't you just pop up and be like, 'Hey, here I am! Totally not dead!'"
"I could," said Dad, "but if it suits the Casnoffs' purposes for me to be deceased, something tells me I wouldn't stay 'totally not dead' for long."
"What do you think the Casnoffs' purposes are?" Mom asked.
Dad glanced at her, then over to me. "To terrify the Prodigium population to the point where using demons seems like the only course of action.
They have Daisy, and they may have managed to corral Nick. There haven't been any other attacks linked to him." The same night the Casnoffs had used Daisy to fight The Eye, Nick had gotten loose and gone on some kind of rampage. The thought of it still made me shudder.
"Did she say anything about the demons at this big meeting?" I asked Cal.
He shook his head. "Not specifically. All she said was that she and her sister had a plan to rid the world of the Brannicks and The Eye once and for all."
"Speaking of-" Dad broke in. "Sophie, have you had any contact with Archer Cross?" Every eye in the room was on me, and I had this bizarre urge to cover my face. I knew everything I was feeling was painted all over it. "No. I thought maybe..." I turned to Cal. "Did you see him? When you went in to get Dad at Thorne Abbey?" It's not like I expected Call to go, Yes, I did. In fact, I was keeping him in my pocket. Here you go. But when Call met my eyes and said, "Your dad was alone in the cell when I got there," the words physically hurt.
You're lucky, I reminded myself. Your dad is here. So is Cal. And Jenna is safe. What were the chances that you'd get everyone back?
"The cell door had been broken down," Call continued, "so your dad and I figured The Eye took him."
"You don't remember anything?" I asked Dad.
A rueful expression was on his face as he shook his head. "I was unconscious, I'm afraid." Shoving my hands into my pockets, I said, "I'm sure you're right. He's probably with The Eye." And they were either still keeping him as their pet warlock, or they'd found out about the two of us working together, and killed him. Either way, Archer was gone.
That thought was so painful, so loud inside my head, that it took me a minute to realize Dad was still talking. "...certainly not the only one to have vanished."
Aislinn had retreated back to the doorway, arms folded over her chest. "So the Cross boy is gone, and both those Casnoff women," she said, ticking off the names on her fingers. "As well as their demons."
"And Graymalkin Island," Call said, so softly that at first I was sure I'd misheard him.
"Wait, what?" I asked.
"Hecate Hall and the island it was on are gone," Dad said.
"How is that even possible?" Mom asked from her spot on the couch.
Dad glanced back at her, and once again something passed between them. "No one knows," he said at last. "But a few days after Thorne Abbey burned down, the entire island seemed to vanish into thin air. One minute it was there; the next, nothing but empty ocean. It's my belief that it's not really gone, but that the Casnoffs are cloaking it for some reason."
"You think that's where they are?" I asked, once I'd found my voice again. I was remembering that feeling I'd had the day Cal, Jenna, and I had left Hex Hall. A premonition had come over me that we'd never go back. I shivered a little now remembering it.
"It makes sense," Dad said. "Graymalkin Island was where they were raising demons. It's been Anastasia's home for years. I can't imagine they'd just abandon it. And..." Dad trailed off, rubbing his eyes again. He went to move back toward the couch but stumbled. Mom leaped up and caught his arm while Call moved to his other side. Together, they lowered him back to a seated position.
"The travel has wiped him out," Call said. "I've done protection spells on him, but he's still pretty weak."
"Please don't speak of me as though I weren't here," Dad said, but the exhaustion in his voice canceled out any snappishness.
"That's enough for tonight," Mom said, and I noticed that she hadn't taken her hand off Dad's arm.
Aislinn nodded. "I need to tell Finley what's going on." A muscle worked in her jaw, and she muttered, "And have a word with Torin. You two," she said to Dad and Cal, "stay tonight. In the morning, we can decide where to go from here." It cost her something to let them stay. I could see it in the tightness around her mouth. I think Dad saw it, too, because he gave a respectful nod.
"Thank you, Aislinn."
"They can use the tents," Aislinn told me. I'd forgotten about those-the weird canvas structures extra Brannicks had used, back when there had been extra Brannicks. I thought about mentioning the cots in the basement, but maybe Aislinn wasn't down with too many Prodigium under her roof.
Aislinn left the room then, Izzy trailing after her. As soon as they were gone, Dad leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes. "You should stay in here tonight," Mom said to him. "Those tents are barely livable, and after all you've been through..." She cleared her throat. "Anyway, neither of you needs to brave the great outdoors tonight."
Dad just nodded without opening his eyes. But Call shrugged and said, "I'm used to sleeping outside. Besides, you guys probably need, uh, family time."
He turned to go, but as he did, Dad said, "Sophie, why don't you show Call to his accommodations? I wanted to speak to your mother in private for a moment."
"Oh," I said, shoving my hands in my pockets. "Okay. Right." The last time I'd been alone with Cal, he'd kissed me. It had definitely been a kiss of the "We Might Die, So This Is Just Us Saying Good-Bye (Maybe)" variety, but still. He was, technically, my fiance (you know, as if Prodigium aren't weird enough, they also have arranged marriages). Being engaged brought a whole new level of weirdness to my and Cal's friendship.
Call gave one quick glance back at me, and even though I couldn't be sure, I thought his gaze fell on my mouth for just a second. I tried hard not to gulp, and when he left the room, I followed him.
CHAPTER 10
Call and I made our way from the main house to the tents in silence. I'd stopped in the kitchen to grab one of the battery-operated lanterns the Brannicks apparently hoarded. My shadow and Cal's stretched out in front of us, nearly entwined, even though we weren't walking that close together. My thoughts were still so wrapped up with Archer that I didn't even see the semicircle of structures surrounding the compound until we were practically on top of them.
What the Brannicks called "tents" were actually pretty solid buildings. The roofs were made of heavy canvas, but instead of being on the ground, they were situated on wooden platforms. There were even stairs leading up into each one.
"Wow," I said as we came to a stop. "These aren't really tents. They're more like cabins. Or like a tent and a cabin had a baby. A 'tenbin.'" It was a bad joke. A stupid one, and my heart wasn't even a little bit in it. Archer would've laughed at it anyway, I thought, and once again, pain slammed into my chest, nearly leaving me breathless.
Call didn't say anything, so I just swung my arm out, gesturing to the tents. "Pick any of them. They're all empty." still not looking at me, Call moved toward the tent directly in front of us, and pushed back the flap. It occurred to me that I probably should have just given him the lantern instead of following him inside, but by the time I'd had that thought, he was already in the tent.
I climbed the steps and ducked through the canvas doorway. "Wow," I said to his back. "Not exactly the digs we had at Thorne, huh?" There were two pieces of furniture on the scuffed wooden platform: a folding table and a low cot like the ones in the basement. Of course, that's about all there was room for. The tent was tiny, and I suddenly felt a little claustrophobic.
I put the lantern on the table, wishing the pool of light it cast were bigger. As it was, I could barely see Cal's face in the gloom. Then I shoved my hands in my back pockets and blew out a long breath. Call sat down on the cot, and it squeaked slightly under his weight. He rested his elbows on his spread knees, hands clasped in front of him, but he still didn't say anything.