Silence hung heavy in the van. Only my dad and Zoe kept their faces uncovered, and I turned my gaze on her. “You sold me out.”
She hadn’t been prepared for the hardness in my voice and eyes. She swallowed. “Y-you sold yourself out. You’ve done horrible things. You’ve let them corrupt your mind.”
“Is that what this is really about?” I asked. “Or is it because I was going to testify for Mom?”
My dad flinched. “This is about us showing you what family really means. I take responsibility, of course. I should’ve known when you ran off with that dhampir girl that this would happen. I should’ve intervened then, but I was blinded by sentiment.”
I gave a harsh laugh. “Really? Sentiment? I can’t believe you said that with a straight face.” I turned back to Zoe. “Did you steal the phone?”
She shook her head. “I found it in the car when I was practicing those turns.”
Any other laughter, mirthless or otherwise, withered inside of me. Of course. Adrian had noticed the phone was missing the day after my birthday. It must have fallen out of his pants when we’d strewn our clothes all over the backseat.
No, I realized with a start. It hadn’t fallen out. It had been taken out. By me. When I read Adrian the William Morris quote, I grabbed the first phone I could find, which wasn’t hard since we had four of them between us. I hadn’t paid much attention to whose it was, and I certainly hadn’t been careful when I tossed it back into the pile of clothes so that I could go back to being nak*d with Adrian.
“But there were other things too,” Zoe was saying, her eyes glittering with tears. “Just the way you talked and laughed around them. The way you always disappeared. The cupcakes.”
My defiance faltered, mostly due to confusion. “The cupcakes?”
“You said you bought them. But in the cafeteria that one day, when Angeline was complaining about the cake, she started going off about the chocolate-peppermint cupcakes Adrian had made. Something about waiting until they’re cool to frost them.”
It was another horrible yet almost laughable moment. Cupcakes and birthday car sex had been my undoing.
No, Sydney, I thought. Don’t think too highly of yourself. You slipped up long before this.
Her voice was tremulous. “We’re going to save you.”
“I don’t need saving,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. You should’ve come to me first before unleashing all of this.” I tried to wave my hand for effect, but it was stuck. “We could’ve talked. I’m your sister.”
“No, Sydney.” The hard, flat look on her face was frighteningly close to our dad’s. “You’re just another Alchemist, and I’m treating you like one—just like you told me to.”
Her words struck me deeply, and my dad was quick to jump on my moment of weakness.
“You’ve been brainwashed, and we’re going to undo it,” he said. “This’ll be a lot easier if you cooperate.”
“I told you, there’s nothing wrong with me!” Anger I hadn’t known I held burst out, shoving aside my fear and sadness. “You’re the ones deluded by centuries of bigotry and superstition. The Moroi and dhampirs are just like us—well, except they’ve got more honor and decency.”
I didn’t see the slap coming. For all his faults, my dad had never struck us, but the blow he delivered then made me painfully aware that he had no moral qualms about that kind of discipline. My head snapped back, and I bit my tongue.
“You don’t know the sacrifices I’m making here for you,” he hissed, his eyes cold. Keith’s glass one had more feeling. “You have no idea how lucky you are that we’re doing this for you. The darkness has corrupted you so much that I don’t know how long it’ll take to fix. But we will. No matter how long or how difficult, we will undo whatever that Moroi boy has done to you.”
I managed a wavering smile, tasting blood in my mouth. “You sure about that, Dad? Because he’s done everything to me.”
My dad’s eyes flicked to someone in the seat behind me. I flinched as I felt the sting of a needle in my neck. The world spun, and I felt light and tingly all over. His and Zoe’s faces swam in my vision for a few moments, and then I fell into darkness.
CHAPTER 23
ADRIAN
IF EDDIE WAS THE DRINKING TYPE, I’m pretty sure he would’ve joined me at a bar. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was as upset as me about the disaster we’d fallen into, but he probably took the next spot on the list.
After he’d burst into Jackie’s with his story that night, we’d immediately tried the obvious things. We’d called Sydney’s phone, multiple times. We’d driven out to the closed-down restaurant. There wasn’t a trace of her there—or even at Amberwood. In barely two hours, her room had been completely cleaned out, and the administration had been notified that Sydney Melrose and Zoe Ardmore were withdrawing, effective immediately. No forwarding address. Our confusion was understandably perplexing to the staff, seeing as we were all supposed to be related.
Marcus had waited for us back at Jackie’s, uneasy about showing his face at the dorm, just in case the Alchemists were still in the area. He stood up as we entered the living room, agitation all over him. Jackie had already been up, pacing around.
“Anything?” she asked. Eddie shook his head, and I strode over to Marcus.
“Where is she?” I demanded. “Where would they have taken her?”
“I don’t know,” he said, face drawn.
“Yes, you do! It’s what you’re all about.” I had to resist the urge to shake him. “You know these things, damn it! You’re supposed to be some great big mastermind! Where is she?”
Eddie came up and caught hold of my arm. I think he was afraid I really would attack Marcus. “Easy,” Eddie warned.
Marcus looked pale. “I’m sorry. I really don’t know where she’s at. I can make guesses, I can make calls . . . but without anything to go on, it’s the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
Real people didn’t use the word “proverbial.” Only smart people like Alchemists did. Sydney would have. Groaning, I flounced back into an armchair.
“They said they were going to save her from damnation,” said Eddie. He still looked like hell and hadn’t made any attempts to clean himself up.
“Yeah,” said Marcus darkly. “I’m sure that’s what they think they’re doing. And there’s any number of places they could hide her—many, no, most of which not even my contacts know about. The places they take people like her to . . . well, they’re not really on the public Alchemist grid.”
People like her.
I felt ill and buried my face in my hands as I thought back to the frantic story Eddie had told us. “That phone. That goddamned phone.” It was my fault. My fault she’d been caught. If I hadn’t been so careless, I wouldn’t have lost it wherever I had. When I glanced up, I saw everyone looking at me, puzzled. Even Eddie, who’d related the story, didn’t entirely understand the phone’s role. Marcus suddenly sat straight up.
“Wait. We can find her. I know how.”
I stopped breathing. “How?”
“You,” said Marcus eagerly. “Your spirit dreams. She has to sleep sometime. Find her, and have her tell us where she is.”
I sank back into the chair. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. I wanted to punch something. “I can’t. My spirit’s kind of out of commission right now.”
And there it was. The fear of being unable to heal Sydney if she got injured had haunted me from the first day I took the mood stabilizer. Never, ever, had I imagined that it was a dream I’d need. Even though I knew it was hopeless, I tried to reach out and touch spirit the way I used to. Nothing happened. It wasn’t even like I could sense it and not reach it. It just wasn’t there at all.
I had failed her. I’d been weak, too weak to handle spirit’s dark side. I’d given in to the pills, and now I was useless. Would spirit come back if I stopped taking them? How long would it take? In this moment, the questions were pointless. Sydney was gone, and none of us could do anything when we most needed to.
Jackie cleared her throat. “I might be able to help. I can scry for her—the same kind of spell she did for your Moroi friend. I’d need a lock of her hair.”
Wan hope surged in me. “I’m sure there’s plenty at my place.” Marcus’s eyebrows rose at that.
“I might have some too . . .” Jackie turned and hurried toward her workroom. I followed and watched as she knelt down to the shelf where she’d let Sydney store things that couldn’t go to her dorm room.
Most of it was magical paraphernalia, things Sydney couldn’t risk Zoe finding. There were a few changes of clothes too, in case Sydney spilled anything on her while working, Jackie explained. It was the kind of precaution Sydney would take. There was also a velvet cloak and some spell books. We carefully unfolded the clothes, desperately searching for any stray hairs that might have fallen. I found one at last, as fine and brilliant as real gold, lying near the collar of a purple T-shirt. I handed the hair to Jackie and opened up the shirt fully. I had to stop myself from breaking down then and there.
It was the shirt I’d made her, dark purple with a flaming heart painted in silver. For the space of one breath, I saw us back in a crowded, smoky sorority house. We’d sat on the floor side by side, and when I’d looked into her eyes, I’d seen my own longing mirrored in them. Her kiss had unbalanced my world, and I’d known from that moment that no matter how hard she denied it, we were bound together.
I clenched the shirt and pulled it to me. It still held the fleeting scent of her perfume. “I’m taking this.”
Jackie nodded. “Go join your friends. It’s going to take me a while to set this up.”
“You have to find her,” I said, grabbing her arm. I knew I sounded crazed and desperate . . . but, well, that’s kind of what I was in that moment. “You have to. If something happens to her . . . I can’t . . . that is . . .”
Tears glittered in Jackie’s eyes, and to my astonishment, she hugged me. “I’ll do what I can. For now, you need to get a hold of yourself.”
I didn’t know if I’d achieved that by the time I came back to Eddie, Marcus, and the others, but they were all so lost in their own worries that no one really noticed mine. Eddie glanced up at my approach. His face was still lined with grief.
“I tried,” he whispered. “Adrian, I tried. I never would have ever left her if I’d known. I would have stayed with her to the end. I would have laid down my life and—”
I had to forcibly hit the pause button on my own feelings as I dealt with his. Eddie had lost another person. It was bad luck, that was all. He was one of the most badass, capable guardians out there, but he couldn’t believe that about himself, not when he kept seeing these failures laid at his feet. Looking into his eyes, I recognized the intense self-loathing consuming him. I knew the feeling well because I was carrying around a fair amount of it myself.
“I know you would have,” I said. “There was nothing you could do.”
He shook his head and stared off with a haunted look. “I was an idiot. I never should’ve bought into that spell stuff. After what I’d seen her do with fire, it just seemed so . . . well, real. I believed her. It made sense.”
I smiled without humor. “Because that’s what she does. She’s trained to make people believe things. And outsmart them. You didn’t have a chance.” She also was willing to trade her own life to save her friend’s, but no one had trained her to do that. It was just something within her.
Eddie wasn’t going to be swayed so easily, and I left him to his grief as I huddled with mine. Einstein had said even with the mood stabilizer, sad things would make me sad and happy things would make me happy. He’d been right because as I sat there, with my world completely falling apart around me, I felt as though I’d never taken any of those pills. The dark, smothering despair that I thought I’d banished crashed down around me, seeping into every part of my being. I hated myself. I hated my life because Sydney wasn’t in it.
My misery swirled around me, and it was just like the old days of spirit—except that I didn’t have spirit. If I’d had it, I wouldn’t have been so goddamned worthless. I had nothing to offer Sydney. I never had.
But Jackie does. If I couldn’t pull myself out of that choking despair, I would at least look for light in someone else. Jackie would pull this off. She would find Sydney, and somehow, maybe with Marcus’s voodoo and Eddie’s fists, we would get Sydney back. I clung to that spark of hope, nurturing it into a small flame that chased some of the shadows in my heart away. The blame and self-hatred eased up, and I told myself to be strong. I had to for Sydney. She had believed in me.
But when Jackie returned, I could tell by her face that the spell hadn’t worked.
“I tried,” she said, her eyes red. “I thought I connected to her, but I couldn’t grasp at anything substantial. No images. Just darkness.”
“Is she alive?” I asked, barely recognizing my own voice.
“Yes,” said Jackie and Marcus together. I glanced between them questioningly.
“If she were dead, I’d be able to tell in the spell.” Jackie didn’t elaborate.
“They won’t kill her. It’s not their style,” said Marcus. “They prize their people too much. They’ll just try to change her, make her think differently.”
“Re-educate her,” I said dully.
He spread his hands out in a helpless gesture. “Well, that is where the name comes from.”