Chapter 11. Grayson
Grayson
Our wheels touch down in Shannon, Ireland, and I haven’t managed more than an hour of sleep.
I kept bracing for Eloise to march up to me again and demand to talk about everything in front of my uncle’s favorite spy—Damien.
Or worse, reveal she knows I lied about us calling the Key.
How can anyone be so naive? If I hadn’t shut her down so completely, who knows what she might have said.
Since there was no chance of sleep, I went over everything I know about the Archive Key, which adds up to a whole lot of nothing useful.
I know what everyone knows—that it has some sort of sentience that causes it to show up when it wants.
No one can force it. No one can guarantee it—which is exactly what I did.
I also know what everyone doesn’t—that my uncle has been searching for that Key forever. Killing for it.
But Eloise? I’ve never been so thrown by someone in my life.
She’s smashed everything I’ve worked for since I was thirteen.
I made that deal to spare her sister because it was the right thing to do.
But no way am I letting her hand that Key over to my uncle.
Which also means I now can’t take my eyes off her for a goddamn second, on the off chance a miracle happens and she does call it.
There’s a black SUV and my red Porsche waiting on the tarmac—one of the many perks of being the Chancellor’s nephew. Jack, who has a crooked nose from too many brawls, tosses me the keys as I step down onto the asphalt at Shannon Airport.
The air smells green and wet. It’s raining, which is no surprise.
Eloise stands on the tarmac looking lost, her arms crossed over her middle. She’s wearing jeans and a plain, cropped white T-shirt that hugs her petite frame, her wavy brown hair in a messy braid. The moment our eyes meet, she scowls.
The feeling is entirely mutual.
But as much as I despise the idea, our fates are now linked.
I throw open the passenger door of my Porsche and give her an impatient look before moving to the driver’s side.
When she hesitates, I honk the horn and she jumps.
Her already large golden-brown eyes widen, reminding me once again of a startled lioness—one who is considering attacking me.
Two seconds later she slides into the passenger seat and slams the door, filling my car with the scent of her annoyance—spicy cinnamon.
“You’re an asshole, you know that,” she says with gusto.
“And you’re the reckless girl who almost got us killed,” I reply smoothly.
The Guardians’ SUV revs as it heads out of the airport, and I step on the gas fast enough to make Eloise curse again and grab her seat belt.
She glares at me. “I did nothing to that discernment spell,” she says with so much feeling that if I didn’t witness it with my own eyes, I might believe her.
“And who did? Me? The Council? My uncle, maybe?” I reply with one hand guiding the steering wheel and my other elbow resting on the center console.
“Damn it, I don’t know,” she says and runs her hands over her hair, doing exactly nothing to tame it.
“You touched the spell,” I continue. “It paused. And then your face showed up above my head.”
“I did touch it. But I didn’t cast,” she says with a frown. “I don’t know why it did that any more than you do.”
But I can smell her doubt, enough for me to surmise she’s withholding information. “You’re not doing either of us any favors by lying,” I say. My uncle knew it in his office. And so did I. “At least if you tell me what you did then maybe I can help sort out how you called that Key.”
“And if you’d believe the truth then maybe we can start looking for the real reason the Key showed up,” she replies, and I honestly don’t know how we’re going to survive this car ride, much less anything else.
“Do you know how you summoned it?” I ask.
“No,” she says and nothing more.
“Did your spell feel different? Did you change the components of it?”
Her mouth pinches with annoyance and she glares at me.
My hand tightens on the wheel. “Silence. Good idea. That’ll definitely help.”
But instead of replying, she shifts her body toward the window and stares out it like her life depends on it. For the next half hour or so we say nothing, Eloise maintaining her scowl until she loses steam and her eyes flutter closed from exhaustion. The next time I look over, she’s asleep.
By the time Eloise wakes up, we’re most of the way there, having left the main road behind for the smaller ones that wind past the lakes and villages.
“Wow,” she says, rubbing at her eyes and staring at County Mayo’s rolling hills and moss-covered trees. “This place is so … pretty.”
She presses her hand to the glass, decides that’s not good enough and rolls down her window despite the drizzle, practically sticking her head into the wind. “This feels like … magic. Real magic. Wild and green.”
The statement skewers me in a way I don’t expect. Because it’s similar to something my brother Liam used to say when we were kids. No matter how many times we came here, he never got over this place. He thought there was more magic in the land of Ireland than in any Mage.
“There’s a pull-off,” she says with a twinge of awe, the loose strands of hair whipping around her face. “Right there by the lake—” But she gets one look at my expression and stops, like she suddenly remembered where she is and why.
“I’m not supposed to stop,” I tell her, which is mostly true. It’s the Guardians’ job to get us to Uni with no delays to minimize any threat by the Lawless.
“Right,” she says, falling back in her seat, her eyes still following the lake with longing.
And I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the unexpected memory of my brother or the fact that we might be dead in two weeks. But I swing into the lookout at the last possible moment.
The Guardians’ SUV screeches its tires to stop and I smirk at the curses I know Jack and Damien are spewing.
Eloise wastes no time; she jumps out of the car the moment I park.
As I climb out to stretch, Jack graces me with a death glare from his rolled-down window.
I hold up my hand to tell him to give me five minutes, and even though he looks less than pleased, he doesn’t say anything. He’s known me since I was seven.
I don’t join Eloise on the bank of the lake, framed by jagged rocks and mountains.
But I do watch her lips stretch into a grin as she lifts her hands up into the rainy wind.
She’s most likely never spent time outside the wards, probably hasn’t traveled past Portland, Maine. A lot of Laboring families haven’t.
I get back in the car, feeling ten kinds of conflicted. I’m annoyed at myself for being so soft. At Eloise for a whole litany of reasons, and at this crap situation in general. My eyes pinch shut and I push my palms against the steering wheel.
It doesn’t take long before she slides into the passenger seat, her cheeks flushed from the fresh air and her eyelashes dewy from rain. I pull back onto the left side of the road, something I’m used to, considering I’ve spent half my life here.
“Thanks for that,” she says as she closes her door.
“I needed to stretch my legs. It was nothing.” I take a sip from my water bottle as she fastens her seat belt.
“I think we’re gonna die,” she says, and I choke.
“Excuse me?” I say, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
“I’m not trying to be pessimistic,” she says in a quiet tone, her hands folded in her lap like she left her wild energy out in the wind.
“But I’ve done some reading about the Archive Key.
I used to fantasize about calling it when I was little.
People have spent lifetimes trying to summon it. We have two weeks.”
I don’t know what to say. Because she’s not wrong.
“That’s why I said thanks. For stopping, I mean. For letting me see something beautiful before it all turns ugly,” she continues in that quiet tone that nips at my defenses. It’s much easier to hate her when she’s calling me an asshole.
“You could tell me what you did to the spell,” I say, only this time I leave out the accusatory tone. “And how you think you called the Key?”
She nods without looking at me, lifting her chin ever so slightly, and the scent of her embarrassment billows between us—floral and vulnerable like a petal that’s easily crushed.
“Here’s the absolute truth,” she says. “I told the discernment spell I was good enough.” She cringes, tucking her hair behind her ear.
“I demanded it admit me and I promised to be worthy of the chance. But no one was more shocked than I was when it paused. I didn’t cast. I swear. I just … talked to it.”
“You talked to it,” I repeat like I must have heard her wrong.
She nods.
I groan, rubbing my hand down my face. Her big omission—the guilt my uncle and I both read as a lie—turns out to be nothing more than politely bargaining with the discernment spell? You’ve got to be kidding me. Ninety percent of our class definitely did the same.
She looks out the window. “The second time I cast, I lost control and the Key suddenly appeared. I didn’t ask it to come; I wasn’t even thinking about it.” She sighs. “I’d tell you more if there was more. Your life is on the line here, too.”
I stare at her for a long moment before returning my gaze to the road. I can scent that she’s not lying. And that’s a problem. Because if she knew how she summoned the Key, we might be able to find our way out of this mess.