Winging It

  ‘We have to figure out how we can get dry before we get sick,’ Isabelle said and I could hear her teeth chattering. ‘It looks like we’re off the edge of the world.’

  ‘No, we’re not. Maybe there’s a coffee shop or something once we get to the street.’

  ‘Coffee. Don’t give me fantasies that might not have a chance of being fulfilled.’ Isabelle sighed. ‘One of those is enough.’

  Before she could get too depressed, I left the purse and appeared beside them in human form.

  ‘Zoë!’ Meagan shouted and caught me in a tight hug. The soot-colored cat, caught between us and just as wet as Meagan, was a bit less glad to see me. It meowed with outrage, then leapt out of Meagan’s arms.

  It shook itself, then glowered at us both.

  ‘Zoë!’ Isabelle echoed and hugged me from the other side. The big cat she’d picked up also jumped to freedom. The two cats sat elegantly on their haunches in the gravel. They looked disdainful for a moment, then began to groom their paws.

  As if nothing had happened at all.

  I wished they could tell us the deal with all those cats, but no luck.

  It did look as if we’d fallen off the edge of the world. We were on the shore of a reservoir that must have been made from a quarry. A gravel ‘beach’ stretched around its perimeter and the water was gray in the winter light. I could see the dark circle of a pipe on the other side of the lake, one that would spew into the pond.

  ‘Is that where we were?’ I asked and Meagan nodded. She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. Both Isabelle and Meagan were soaking wet and it was snowing slightly.

  There was no sign of the guys or Derek.

  The rest of the herd of cats was gone, too.

  ‘How’d you get away?’ Meagan asked and I showed them the ebony feathers I’d torn out of Kohana’s hide.

  ‘He wanted to make a deal to get them back.’

  ‘I hope you said no.’ Isabelle scoffed. ‘He’d just lie to you again, take what he wanted, and betray you all over again.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I’m here, with the feathers. I’ll wait to make him an offer he can’t refuse.’

  ‘Which is?’ Isabelle asked.

  ‘I’m not sure yet.’

  ‘Can’t hurt to have something to negotiate with,’ Meagan said, ‘but I don’t really understand why they’re important.’

  ‘Any chance of a little dragonfire?’ Isabelle asked me, shivering. ‘I’ll tell Meagan about the feathers while we get dry.’

  ‘I’ll trade you for the rest of that chocolate bar in your purse.’

  She blinked with surprise, then opened her bag, staring at the chocolate bar that had one end gnawed off.

  I grinned. ‘I thought you’d brought it for me.’

  Isabelle laughed and handed me the rest of it. As usual, the sugar hit helped enormously. I flung out my arms, shifted, then treated them both to the full furnace while Isabelle talked. Even the cats came closer, evidently getting over their distrust of me for the sake of the heat. Once everyone was dry and we headed toward civilization, the cats trailed behind us.

  But then, there wasn’t a Mage spell to draw them in any specific direction anymore. The sky was devoid of orange spell light. We could have just happened to be walking beside a quarry reservoir as a blizzard began.

  Did that mean the Mages were satisfied with what they had?

  Or that they were just busy, doing to Liam and Garrett and Nick and Derek whatever they had done to Jessica? The idea made me sick.

  What did they do to shifters? I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know, but I guessed that was the key to saving the guys.

  How could we find out?

  ‘Does your having his feathers mean Kohana can’t shift at all?’ Meagan asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I only have some of them. If I had the full coat, that would be the case. Maybe his power is just compromised.’

  ‘Well, there’s got to be something going in our favor,’ Isabelle said. ‘Let’s get out of here. I need that coffee now.’

  We found one coffee shop that was open and huddled in a corner as we sipped hot beverages of choice. It was warm enough in there for the windows to steam up. I put Kohana’s black feathers in the middle of the table, between us. There were three of them, each more than a foot long, and they gleamed with dark highlights.

  I thought I’d had more than that, maybe because they were each so wide. The quills on each feather were as wide as the whole length of my hand, at least six inches across. It was hard to hold even three.

  I was amused to see the two cats take up position immediately outside the window, as if they were standing sentinel over Meagan and Isabelle. They sat with their backs pressed against the glass, surveying the street and flicking their tails in the air.

  Then they cleaned their paws some more.

  We talked the situation through, backward and forward. I had a slew of notes on my messenger, so many that it was hard to make sense of them.

  ‘Do you think the guys are okay?’ Meagan asked for the hundredth time.

  ‘What do you think they’ll do to them?’ Isabelle asked, clutching her second extra-large cup of coffee.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, tapping away on my messenger. Sophie wasn’t answering me. The guys were captured. I could tell my dad and the older Pyr, using old-speak or more mundane methods, but I wasn’t at all sure they’d believe me.

  Or that they could solve the problem. They might just get trapped, like they had the last time. Or they might get all agitated about exile over the breach of the Covenant and my breaking my dad’s new rule. I felt that it was up to me to fix this first.

  I wished I had the stupid book on the Pyr that Jared had, even though it hadn’t been enormously helpful any of the other times I’d had a peek in it. I also wished that I could have asked Jared for more insider Mage information.

  No luck.

  I wished we had cracked the code of that Mage book.

  This was one big puzzle, one that I had to solve myself.

  The truth was there was no such guarantee, but I refused to take the easy path and believe that everyone was out to get me, much less that we were all doomed.

  Saving Derek would have to get me some points with the wolves. And I had to think that the jaguars would be similarly relieved to have Jessica safe.

  A rescue mission, then.

  Based on zero data. Where were the Mages holed up? In what state were their captives? How could they be freed? We needed information and I had no idea where to get it.

  Meagan finished her cocoa. ‘What do we do, Zoë?’

  I surveyed my checklists of Wyvern abilities assumed and yet to be conquered – okay, out of a certain level of desperation – and that was when I knew something I’d left off the list.

  The previous spring, I’d navigated my way through my father’s memories to find his location. I’d followed the conduit that led to him and walked in his memories.

  I wondered whether I could do the same to Trevor and learn what that apprentice Mage knew. There wasn’t a conduit to him like the coppery lines I saw to each of the Pyr, but maybe I could follow the spell light to Trevor and slip into his mind. If I found the right memory, I could discover where the NightBlade was and what they had planned for the captive shape shifters.

  It would be risky, but it had to be quicker than breaking the Mage book’s code.

  And we didn’t have a whole lot of time.

  ‘What can go wrong?’ Meagan asked. We were holed up in Isabelle’s room that Sunday afternoon, partly because it was snowing like crazy outside. By the time we’d come out of the coffee shop, the blizzard had gotten serious and the dorm was the closest haven. The storm had provided the perfect excuse to not go back to Meagan’s place, although Meagan’s mom had pinged her about six times since she’d told her where we would be.

  Neither Isabelle nor Meagan liked my plan, but neither of them could think of a better one, either. The cats had
come with us – I’m not sure we could have left them behind at this point – and sat on opposite ends of Isabelle’s windowsill, staring into the flying snow.

  Meagan studied me with concern. ‘How will we know if something does go wrong?’

  ‘And what can we do to help if it does?’ Isabelle asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I smiled at them, trying to soften my words. ‘I’m guessing you won’t be able to tell, and you won’t be able to do much, but I really don’t know.’

  Isabelle grimaced. ‘Could you get stuck there?’

  ‘I haven’t gotten stuck yet.’

  ‘You haven’t poked around in someone else’s memories yet,’ Meagan noted.

  ‘Actually, I have. I did it with my dad. Last spring, when they were in trouble. I visited his memories to find out where he and the other Pyr were.’

  ‘So you could save him,’ Meagan said. ‘I think he’d be more likely to cut you some slack than Trevor if he caught you in his mind. After all, you want to steal his memories.’

  She was right. Deciding to poke around in someone else’s memories without authorization was a lot like breaking into their house.

  Still, I couldn’t see another way to find out more.

  ‘Would you actually be stealing them?’ Isabelle asked, suddenly thoughtful. ‘Or would you just share them? Kind of like breaking into an office and reading the files but leaving them there?’

  It was an interesting idea. ‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted, feeling as if the whole thing was very elusive. ‘This Wyvern thing isn’t very well documented.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be all bad if you made him forget something. If you could.’ Meagan considered me and shrugged. ‘Just throwing that out there.’

  ‘Maybe you could mess with his memory so he messed up whatever they plan to do to the guys,’ Isabelle suggested.

  It sounded unlikely to me, but I was determined to remain positive. I was terrified enough as it was. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘What about us?’ Isabelle asked.

  I remembered Jared helping me before with this kind of deliberate dreaming, but he knew his powers as a spellsinger. Meagan was uninitiated and might inadvertently make trouble for me.

  I smiled at them. ‘Just watch the door. Hum something in a major key.’

  ‘Something easier,’ Isabelle said.

  Meagan frowned. ‘The Hallelujah chorus of Handel’s Messiah is in D Major.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Isabelle said. ‘We sang that in choir at Christmas.’

  I left them to it. How did anyone pass undetected in another person’s mind? I didn’t know. I slid my ring onto my finger so I could see any spells coming. I held Kohana’s feathers in one hand, just in case I had to negotiate anything. He’d turned up when I did dream stuff in the spring. Maybe this would be similar.

  Meagan and Isabelle watched me but didn’t say anything. I could almost taste their worry.

  But there was nothing I could say to reassure them.

  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to lull myself to sleep. My heart was thumping, though, a sure sign of my trepidation.

  How would I find Trevor’s memories?

  How would I know when I got there?

  What was I really looking for?

  How would I know when I found it?

  I pushed these questions around and around in my thoughts, heard my breathing slow and my pulse calm. I relaxed and entered the same meditative state we use for breathing dragonsmoke. I recalled how I had found my dad’s memories by feeling for the other Pyr. I’d seen a network of sparkling copper lines then, and followed the right one to him. I’m not sure what told me which one, but I knew it when I saw it.

  You have to believe I was hoping for a similar conviction this time. I did not want to end up in the wrong Mage’s memories.

  So, I thought about Mages and their spells. I thought about Trevor’s MG and his parents’ house and all that musical gear. I thought about how they must live and looked in my mind for the orange spell light.

  I saw it flickering and pulsing almost immediately. I followed it cautiously, drifting behind it but not coming too close. It swirled out of the sky toward a neighborhood and I saw that it was leading me to Riverside Drive. The spell light spiraled toward Trevor’s parents’ house, where we had been the night before. Snow fell thickly all around, piling on the roof and the walkway. The house didn’t look very damaged, much to my surprise, and I couldn’t smell any sign of fire.

  It was surrounded by golden light, though.

  I guessed that the Mages could cast a kind of enchantment on humans, too. Maybe it was an illusion. Maybe what had happened to us had seemed like an illusion to everyone else. I’d have to find out later.

  One spell thread was thicker and brighter, so on impulse, I chose to follow that one. As I got closer to the house, I heard a saxophone playing. The spell thread I was following resonated with the music of the sax, undulating through the air.

  Like a summons.

  I steeled myself for trouble, turning the ring on my finger. Then I latched on to the spell line, swung myself onto its rippling width, and slid down the line into the house.

  It led into a bedroom. I had a glimpse of Trevor with his antique sax, his eyes closed as he played, and his hair mussed. Then I slid into the mouth of the sax, and through the instrument. I braced myself for biological information I didn’t need, expecting to be dumped into his mouth.

  Instead, I found myself in a forest.

  One filled with the silence of falling snow.

  I was surrounded by dead and blackened trees, a forest with no perimeter. It just went on and on and on, essentially the same in all directions.

  Was this Trevor’s memory? Or some other dimension?

  How could I move through it without leaving any tracks?

  I stood there, knee-deep in snow, and considered my options.

  There didn’t seem to be many.

  Memories are strange places to visit. I guess everyone organizes his or her mind differently. I’m not even sure that people see their memories the same way that intruders like me do.

  My dad’s memories had been ruthlessly organized. Maybe he’d had time to get all that together, seeing as he’s centuries old. It had appeared to me like a long corridor with a black stone floor and a white ceiling. There’d been no discernible light source – the ceiling just appeared luminescent.

  Each wall had been lined with stainless-steel filing cabinets, one after the other after the other. I’d been pretty intimidated by this, until I’d noticed that each drawer was dated.

  And they were in order.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  After that it had been easy. Find the right drawer, open it, be deluged by my dad’s memory. Piece of cake.

  To tell the truth, I’d expected something similar from Trevor’s memory. The dead forest threw me off my game, making me wonder if I’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in Granny’s snowy sphere instead. I had a good look at the tree closest to me, the one I could check out without making any more tracks.

  Something glimmered at the base of it, halfway obscured by the snow. I brushed the snowflakes away carefully and saw that it was a gold plaque, screwed to the tree.

  And engraved on the plaque were the words december 2010.

  A month’s worth of memories? In this tree? How? I tipped my head back to look up at its bare branches, so dark against the gray sky.

  My heart stopped cold. There was a large black bird sitting in the boughs overhead.

  Watching me.

  It had yellow eyes, that bird, which told me who it was.

  ‘More to you than meets the eye,’ Kohana said, and it sounded like admiration in his voice.

  ‘I said, no deal.’

  ‘And I’m making a gesture of goodwill.’

  ‘Right.’ I didn’t believe it for one minute. If Kohana was here, then I was history.

  Or soon would be.

 
I pivoted and would have run, but I didn’t manage to take one step. Kohana swooped down and grasped me by the shoulders of my jacket. I squirmed, biting back my yell of protest, but he took flight.

  ‘At least you can shut up when someone does you a favor,’ he muttered. ‘Scream and we’ll both be finished.’

  ‘Why would you be helping me? To trick me into trusting you again?’

  ‘Messing with Mages, especially if it doesn’t look as if I’m the one responsible, is always a good thing as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘You’re just trying to get me killed.’

  ‘If you’d taken one step, you would have managed it yourself. They don’t take kindly to intruders.’ He made a sound that could have been a laugh. ‘Maybe they know we’re here even now.’

  They?

  Kohana flew over the forest, which truly did look as if it extended to the horizon in every direction.

  Did he really imagine I was going to trust him?

  Before I could think of asking, he hovered over a tree.

  ‘Do your salamander thing,’ he ordered.

  Then he dropped me.

  We weren’t very high above the trees. There was a hole in the trunk of a tree, one that could be seen only from the top. As I fell straight toward it, I realized his intent. I shifted shape, even as the branches of the tree touched my feet.

  I barely managed the change in time. I lost some skin sliding into the hole, had time to wince, and then Trevor’s memory engulfed me.

  Kohana had dumped me into the memory of the night Trevor had joined the Mages.

  Chapter Thirteen

  We were somewhere out in the country. It was hard to tell exactly, because the air was so thick with Mage spells. The scene was almost lost in blindingly bright gold, a swirling network of spell light on every side. I could see individual spells of every shade of yellow and gold, tangling together to create an impenetrable mesh.

  If I peered through the spell light, though, I could see a gathering of people, singing in a field. Well, a field with statues in it. Where were we? It was night, although the sky was clear and the moon was full. That moon cast its silvery light over the chorus of singers.