Chapter 15
Jaxon
“Who says we’re here to see Macy?” I challenge, and it’s my turn to ease Flint out of the way. “Maybe we came to see you, Foster.”
Though, I’ve got to say, the last few months have not exactly done wonders for my old headmaster.
Despite the fact that he’s been reunited with his wife after years of her being held prisoner by my father—because our lives really are a TV drama at this point, and not even a good one—he looks about ten years older.
His skin is dull, his brown hair looks like he hasn’t bothered to cut it since graduation, and the dark circles under his eyes are so pronounced that he doesn’t look much different from Flint, who is sporting a real shiner from last night’s adventures.
“Are you here to see me?” he asks, brows raised.
“Of course not,” comes a familiar voice behind him.
I look over his head, and there’s Macy…only not.
This Macy looks more likely to cut a guy than to hug him, especially if that guy is her dad.
Her normally brightly colored hair is pitch-black.
Her normally over-the-top clothes have been traded for black jeans, a black sweater, and black boots.
And her normally effervescent personality has given way to edge and snarl.
“Ignore Father Dearest over there,” she says in a voice filled with so much saccharin that it has chills running down my spine. “He likes to pretend he’s in charge here.”
“I am in charge here,” Foster replies in a tone I’ve never heard from him before. “And you’re not going anywhere with them.”
Foster’s tone is as aggressively hostile as his daughter’s is aggressively sweet.
And that is just…weird. Normally he’s like the nicest, milquetoast guy around.
Now, he seems more like that guy, but also mean and completely fed up—two adjectives I never would have used to describe his and Macy’s relationship ever.
What the fuck has been going on with these two since I last saw them together?
I glance at Flint, just to see if he thinks this is as strange as I do, but he’s staring straight ahead, like he can’t stand to even look at me.
It’s also obvious he has no plans to open his mouth and try to charm Foster. Which means it’s up to me. Fantastic.
I think we all know charm isn’t exactly my modus operandi.
Still, I put on my most engaging smile—the one that only shows the tips of my fangs—and tell him, “We were just hoping to talk to Macy for a few minutes, if that’s okay with you—”
“It’s not okay,” Foster interrupts. “She’s grounded, and she—”
“For fuck’s sake, they just want to talk.” Macy blows past her dad so fast that she almost knocks him off his feet, then keeps walking while Flint and I look between her and Foster, trying to decide who’s going to win this battle.
Halfway down the winding, gold-trimmed hallway, Macy glances over her shoulder. “You guys coming?” The tone in her voice says she doesn’t give a shit if we do or not. But every candle in every wall sconce she passes bursts into flame the second she walks by.
“Yeah, of course.” I shoot Foster an apologetic look, then hustle after her. I’m afraid if we don’t move fast enough, this new Macy will set Flint and me on fire even more quickly than she’s lighting those candles.
She doesn’t stop until she gets to the end of the hallway, with its gold-trimmed glass double doors.
A wave of her hand has them flying open and crashing into the walls so hard that one of the crystal doorknobs embeds itself into the wall, making a jagged hole.
Macy doesn’t seem to notice as she walks through the now-open doorway.
Her rage is palpable, filling the air around us as we follow her onto a long balcony that winds itself around half the building.
There are several sofas against the outside wall of the building and a bunch of café tables with matching chairs scattered along the length of the balcony. Macy ignores all of them.
Instead, she walks straight to the gold filagree railing and looks out at the huge stone circle that’s the focal point of the backyard below us.
What the actual fuck?
This time, even Flint forgets how angry he is at me and shoots a bewildered glance my way. Of course, he remembers as soon as our eyes meet, but I still call it progress. If we stay here with Macy long enough, maybe he’ll start talking to me again—or diving behind me for safety.
At this point, it’s hard to tell how this meeting is going to go.
I do know that Macy’s magic seems to have grown exponentially since we saw her last. I’m not sure if it’s the result of the schools she’s cycled through in the last couple of months or if it’s her anger giving it strength, but it’s obvious she’s got a lot of power in her.
And as the fairy lights spring to life all around us—glowing a bright, bloody red—it’s just as obvious that she’s not afraid to use it.
“Hey, Mace. You okay?” I ask, mostly because it doesn’t feel like she is.
“Just dandy,” she drawls right back. But when she turns to look at me, her eyes are alight with a fevered rage that has me wanting to take a step away.
While simultaneously also wanting to give her a hug and call Grace, because no matter what Macy says, she is not all right. “So what brings you here?”
“The Bloodletter says Mekhi doesn’t have much longer,” Flint tells her, before explaining what little we’ve learned so far.
“So you’re going to the Shadow Realm,” she says when he finishes.
“We don’t have a choice—” I start.
“What if you get stuck there like Grace and Hudson?” She starts to pace as she grows more agitated. “What if you all get stuck there this time? And you won’t even have a witch there to help you if something goes wrong.”
I’m still trying to decide if I should be offended by her thinking we need a witch to handle things when Flint says, “We’d have one if you came. That’s why we’re here.”
Her eyes fill with tears, and for a second she looks like the old Macy, the one we knew before all the bad shit happened. But then she blinks the tears back, and her eyes—along with the rest of her—turn ice-cold.
“There’s no way my parents will let me go.
They’ve got me on house arrest till I’m thirty—or until they find another boarding school that’s actually willing to take me.
” She throws a frustrated hand in the air, and fire dances across her fingertips.
“It’s ridiculous. Turn one little freshman purple, and suddenly you’re expelled and grounded for life. ”
“Is that what you did?” Flint asks, looking intrigued. Which is a hell of a lot more emotion than he’s shown me in the last twelve hours—not that I’m bitter or anything. “Turned some kid purple?”
“I was trying to open a portal to the Shadow Realm. I had a feeling we couldn’t count on Descent lasting forever for Mekhi, and—” Her voice breaks. “The kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Wait a minute.” Forget bitter. I have to know. “You found a way to the Shadow Realm.”
“No. I found a way to break through for just a second. But it nearly killed me and the girl—not to mention caused some kind of massive imbalance that had purple seeping over into our world even as something blocked me from entering the Shadow Realm.” She shrugs.
“Basically, it was a bad situation all around. I got the crack closed back up, but not before the purple seeped in enough to—”
“Turn the girl purple,” Flint finishes for her.
“Her hair, at least. The rest of her was fine, but the headmaster wasn’t amused. And neither were the girl’s parents.”
“I bet. Is she…” Flint trails off, casting an awkward glance my way.
“No, she’s not like Mekhi,” Macy says, giving me an apologetic look.
“Nothing bit her and injected her with the shadow poison the way it did him, so she didn’t get sick.
But they weren’t able to fix her hair, either.
Which is how I got a one-way ticket to this hell. And why I’m grounded until I’m thirty.
“My parents are acting like I tried to kill that kid. I didn’t. I just wanted—” She breaks off, shakes her head.
“You just wanted to do something,” I say, because I understand the feeling. “Anything, to make up for all the shit that happened that we couldn’t stop.”
Flint looks at me sharply, but for once, I’m not looking back. I’m too busy paying attention to Macy, who is looking anywhere but at me. “I get it,” I tell her. Because I do.
“It was too much,” she whispers. “Too many deaths, too many lies, too much betrayal. Everything was just too much. And now my prize for actually trying to fix some of the damage is being stuck here with parents who lied to me and watch me every second of the day like they think I’m going to set the whole damn Witch Court on fire in order to escape. ”
I notice she doesn’t say they’re wrong to worry. Which has me asking, “Do you want us to break you out?” Not because we need a witch—though we do—but because I can’t stand the idea of Macy breaking a little more with every day that she’s stuck here.
“They’ll come after us if you do,” she says dully. “Which will just make everything harder for everyone.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Flint tells her, and it’s the first thing we’ve agreed on since our fight last night. “If you don’t want to be here—”
“I think there are enough problems between the different courts right now without princes from the Dragon and Vampire Courts absconding with an underage witch,” she answers dryly.
But her eyes and her voice are both considerably warmer as she continues, “Though it means a lot that you’d do it for me. ”
“You’re family,” I tell her. The words feel strange in my mouth, sticky in my throat.
But just because my real family was shit pretty much from the second I was born doesn’t mean I’m not part of a better one now.
One that Grace originally brought together but that we’ve all had a part in building and cementing. One that Macy is very much a part of.