When we arrived at Dora’s house that afternoon, she ushered us in and offered tea, but she didn’t have any detailed information on how sealing was done. She found a few relevant journals to look through, however, and we spent the day skimming through them for anything that might help.
“What should we be looking for?” Tink asked.
“Anything about the Circles. How they were created, or anything about their power…being tapped into, I guess. And anything about the blood of the Old Race. It was used to make the Circles.”
Tink wrinkled her nose. “Just how I wanted to spend my summer. Searching through old journals to read about blood.”
“This was your idea,” I reminded her, flipping through one of the books Dora had brought me.
Most of the information I knew already. The Circles were thought to have been made, in some way, from the blood of the Old Race after they crossed over from Beneath. The Old Race hadn’t been able to close the Beneath behind them, so with the last of their power, they’d formed the Circles—barriers that protected our world from the Beneath. The energy that created them was the same power that gave Guardians their strength and abilities; it was the blood that made someone Kin, and had been sealed away within my father. There was no evidence that the Circles had ever been bound to anyone before, at least not before me. And there was no information, anywhere, on if sealing had ever been tried directly on a Harrower.
Tink was having less success than I was. “My eyes are beginning to glaze over. I can’t make sense of any of this.”
“There has to be something here,” I argued. “Something we’ve overlooked.”
“If Iris wants you to use the Circle to kill Gideon…can’t you use it to just, like, disconnect him?”
“How? If there’s a plug to pull, I can’t find it.”
In the end, we thanked Dora for her help and headed home with a few more of the journals to look back over that evening. Tink dropped me off back in St. Paul, telling me she’d call if she found anything in her stack of books.
When I wasn’t looking through documents, I spent my time texting Mom for updates, or training with Elspeth whenever she was home. Which wasn’t often. She was spending as much time with Iris as she could—probably, I thought, because she wasn’t certain how much time they would have. The Guardians were too preoccupied to search for Iris, but she couldn’t remain in the Cities indefinitely. Eventually, she would have to leave, or go back Beneath.
If Esther was aware of Iris’s whereabouts, she didn’t mention it to me. I wondered if she knew that Elspeth was hiding her, or if she was being willfully ignorant. She’d told me before that she believed it had been Iris’s own choice to betray the Kin—but I’d never been certain she meant it. Iris was still her granddaughter. And if there was one thing Esther believed in, it was family.
So I didn’t ask her about Iris. I asked about my father, instead.
“Have you heard from him again?”
“Briefly,” she said. She was in her sitting room again, in her plush chair, closing her eyes as she spoke. “It’s going to take him some time. Elliot is with him.”
“Does he remember everything?” I asked, biting my lip.
“He hasn’t told me what he remembers.”
“You and Charles aren’t going to go see him?”
“There are matters to deal with here.”
“He’s your son,” I said.
She sighed. “To be honest, I never expected to see him again. Not as he was. For now, I am granting him a little time to rediscover who he is.”
When I asked if the Kin leaders had come up with any solutions for how to deal with the Beneath, she shook her head—but she informed me they had sent reinforcements. Though they were wary of weakening their own defenses, each Circle had sent three Guardians to Minneapolis. They’d started arriving that evening, and were going to coordinate their efforts with the Cities’ Guardians.
But when I called Tink later that night to see if she’d found anything in her journals and asked who was currently leading said Guardians, the answer was apparently no one.
“Mr. Alvarez is still on a break from the Kin?”
“No one has even seen him. Camille says he hasn’t been on patrol.”
“I wonder what he’s doing,” I said.
“Sitting in his apartment and eating french fry pizza would be my guess.”
Since we’d had a pizza party in Precalc at the end of the school year, I knew she wasn’t making that french fry thing up. Mr. Alvarez was lucky that Guardians had such high metabolisms.
The following day, Esther looked worried at dinner, and the shadowy circles beneath her gold eyes seemed to have deepened. I cornered her in Charles’s study later that evening. The study smelled of paper and leather and the lingering scent of cigar smoke; it was the only room where he indulged in the habit, even though it clung to the books and yellowed the walls. The tall windows behind the desk showed the falling dusk outside, the darkened lawn. I trailed my fingers along the top of Charles’s armchair and asked Esther what she’d learned.
She glanced up at me, then walked around the side of the desk after closing the drawers she’d been snooping in. “Learned—nothing. It is simply a disturbing report.”
“About what?”
“Seers,” she said, in that familiar clipped tone. “Which I would normally ignore. You recall the trouble a few months back. The Seer who was killed.”
“Valerie,” I said.
“It would appear we haven’t heard the last of this vision she had.”
I wondered if Elspeth had spoken to her, or somehow managed to convey Iris’s warning. “The future isn’t fixed,” I replied. “That’s what you told me. You said not to worry about Val’s vision. That it wouldn’t come true.”
“Correct. One Seer having one vision is not something I would normally put much stock in. However. Every Seer throughout the Kin having the same vision—that is potential cause for concern.”
Goose bumps rose on my flesh. “Every Seer?”
“Yes, well. That isn’t a fantastic number,” she said. She folded her hands in front of her, tightening her lips. Despite her calm bearing and the brisk tone of her voice, I caught the hint of something I’d never felt from her before: a slender thread of fear. “There are maybe a dozen true Seers throughout the entirety of the Kin. Beginning last week, they all began to have the same recurring vision.”
“What exactly are they seeing?”
“A Harrowing at our Circle. The Beneath breaking through. Permanently.”
She didn’t have to say the next part. The end of the Kin.
“I hope that means the other Circles are sending more reinforcements,” I said.
But before she could answer, a sudden sense came to me. A deep chill that started in my bones and sent icy tendrils through my veins, climbing up toward my heart. That high, keening sound—a sob or a scream—at the very edge of my hearing. Knowing that squeezed at my lungs.
I turned to Esther, reaching for her arm.
“We have to go. We have to run.”
Her eyes met mine. Her lips parted.
And then the Beneath stood before us, dressed up in Shane’s human skin.
Shane appeared near the window, the fading dusk outside making him into a dark silhouette. But I knew it was him immediately. His hostility filled the room, and there was that faint scent of decay again, turning my stomach. He took a step forward, then another, until the lamps in the study illuminated him, sending sharp yellow light across the angles of his face. His blond hair was matted and sticky with blood. His shirt hung in tatters, and his jeans had collected more stains.