Chapter II #2
That phone call—Sweetheart, is there someone I should call?—hung in Vic’s mind. She had felt very small that day. Small and wrong and out of her depth in a thousand ways. The nervous feeling in her hands redoubled, and Vic fought the urge to rub them together, to hit something.
Henry raked a hand through his too-long blond hair, the same shade as their mother’s.
A combination of trust and entreaty made his face childlike when he looked up at Vic, though now he stood half a head above her and rarely ever needed to look up.
To Vic, a part of Henry would always be ten years old, turning to the older sister who could fix anything.
Men are coming for me, he’d told her all those years ago, in an apartment hundreds of miles away now. Mom told me. In case anything happened to her, she told me to run.
“Vic,” Henry repeated, and she snapped back to the present. Henry’s eyes were wide with concern, and Vic forced her body to still. He spoke slowly, carefully. “I think the jig might be up.”
“Wait a second—”
“I think I should go.”
“No,” Vic said, shaking her head. “No way, not when we’ve been hiding from these guys for eight years.” She pointed an angry finger at the door. “Not when they’re threatening to kill you if you don’t go.”
“What if he’s right?” Henry asked. “What if it’s the safest place for me to be?”
“Did you forget what Mom told you?” Vic asked, exasperated. “She told you to run.”
Henry paused to think, his forehead pinched. “I’m not sure that’s what she meant,” he said, and it was Vic’s turn to frown. “I’ve been trying to remember. I was so young when she died, the conversation isn’t clear anymore.”
“ ‘Run’ is pretty clear, Henry.”
“She said that men were coming, yes. But she also said that I would be safe at the castle. The castle,” he repeated.
“I thought you made that part up,” Vic said. He’d been a child. Of course he would conflate something terrifying with what he knew—fairy tales, fantasy. There were no castles in the United States.
“I did, too,” Henry admitted. “But Nathaniel said he would take me to Avalon Castle. And then I remembered. That was real, she really said the part about the castle.”
Not for the first time, Vic raged internally at her mother.
Why did she confide only in the youngest child?
Why couldn’t she have given Vic the tools to understand the threat?
Instead, Vic was forced to rely on a warning passed through the ears of a fourth grader, and she’d been out on a limb ever since.
“And if I can learn,” Henry went on, “then I can protect us. We won’t need to look over our shoulders every day. You can be normal, and I can be like Mom.”
Like Mom, Vic wanted to scoff. She remembered all the strange things that trailed her mother.
The faucet starting a second before she touched it, electricity bounding out of outlets and into Meredith’s fingers without hurting her.
Muddled looks in strangers’ eyes when they gave up arguing and let Meredith do what she wanted.
She’d even heard hints of the organization her mother worked for, whispered conversations when Vic was supposed to be sleeping.
Vic had written it off—first because Meredith was her mother and the strangeness surrounding her was normal to a child who knew nothing else, and later when maturity cast doubt on Vic’s early memories.
But then Henry told her his story, and Vic realized she’d been right all along.
Vic put her head in her hands and rubbed her temples. “You haven’t even finished high school.”
“You dropped out of high school,” he pointed out.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” she said.
“Look at our choices here,” Henry said, his voice low. “If it’s death or training, I’m going with the second one. At least then I might be able to fight back.”
How were those their choices? Just that morning, Vic had driven Henry to school, complaining about his oversleeping and missing the bus and an eighty-degree January in Austin and shouting at the traffic on the highway.
Her biggest concern had been the asshole in front of her, and Henry had shaken his head at his irascible sister and her inability to control her temper.
Now, like a bomb dropped in her lap, it was death or training. Be hunted or learn how to hunt.
Vic couldn’t imagine her life without Henry. Even worse was the idea of him wandering into a dangerous situation, into a world where men cut strange marks into their skin and disappeared without a trace.
“Where is this place, anyway?”
Henry tore open the envelope and thumbed through the materials Nathaniel had left. “Somewhere in New York,” he said. “Look.”
He pushed the paper toward Vic, but she stared at it with confusion.
“What?” Henry asked. He flipped the page back to look at it again. “What do you see?”
Vic didn’t see anything. The paper was as blank as the wall behind her.
“Fucking magic,” she groaned under her breath, and Vic felt her world spinning away from her. There was really no choice, at the end of the day.
Vic sat up straight, set her shoulders, and came to a decision.
“We’ll leave on Monday.”
Henry nodded, solemn, then frowned. “Wait, did you say ‘we’?”
“Yes. I’m coming with you.”
“What?”