As soon as the words left his mouth, Calli raised her gun and shot him in the head. He didn’t die immediately, his powers keeping him alive. So she just kept shooting until he stopped moving.
I spun around to face her. “Why did you kill my prisoner? Again. I was getting somewhere with him.”
“He knew nothing more, and he was a threat,” she said calmly.
“A threat to whom? He was cuffed to the wall.”
She didn’t respond.
“This is about Tessa and Gin, isn’t it? About their magic? You know what they’re all talking about. You know why my sisters are being hunted.”
“Not here. Not now.”
I glanced back and watched Jace’s team enter the prison room. No one followed them in, so they must have neutralized all of Hardwicke’s forces.
“Have you seen the deserter?” Jace asked.
“He got away.”
Jace frowned at me.
“There was a whole army between him and me, and he was already escaping out of the window.”
His mouth narrowing into a hard, tight line, Jace glanced at the dead man chained to the wall. “Who is that?”
“Hardwicke, the former leader of this castle.”
The little vein in Jace’s temple bulged with irritation. It looked ready to pop. “Damn it, Leda. I needed him. The Interrogators could have gotten something out of him.”
“I’m sorry. There’s nothing I could do.”
“You could have not shot him in the head six times. He was chained up. He wasn’t going anywhere.”
“He had the strength of a vampire and the magic of an elemental. He was about to break free of his chains. And he had a fireball in his hands.”
It was a big fat lie, but I didn’t waver in my conviction. As long as I’d been the one to fire the shots and I claimed it was in self defense, the Legion couldn’t do much. Sure, Colonel Fireswift could threaten me, but he wouldn’t kill me.
But if Jace found out that it had been Calli who’d shot Hardwicke, he’d be forced to report that back to his father. Colonel Fireswift would then throw her to the Interrogators until they found out why she’d done it. Calli didn’t shoot people on a whim. She’d done it because she was scared—scared for Tessa and Gin, for what would happen to them if anyone found out about their mysterious magic. I wished she’d at least tell me what was going on.
“I interrogated him,” I told Jace. “He is part of an organization called the Pioneers.”
“The Pioneers.” He repeated the word like it was tainted.
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Yes. They’ve been around for years, hiding in the shadows. Their goal is to overthrow the gods and rule the world. So far, it’s been nothing but big talk and treacherous promises. They haven’t actually acted until now. What’s changed?”
“They’ve figured out how to bottle magic that a mortal can drink, creating a potion with all the benefits of Nectar, and with none of the risk of instant death.”
“That is not possible,” Jace stated.
“Are you so sure about that? You fought Hardwicke’s guards. You saw for yourself that it is possible.”
He clenched his jaw. “It should not be possible.”
“What is and what should be are two entirely different things. If things were as they should be, monsters wouldn’t roam the Earth, and I’d be a millionaire.”
He shook his head at me. “You’re taking this situation too lightly.”
“Right now, Jace, I’m exhausted, not to mention scared out of my mind that something’s happened to my sisters.”
His eyes panned across the room. “They’re not here?”
“They’re not here. And they’re not the only prisoners still at large.”
“I’m sorry. We’ll get them back, Leda,” he said, so low that his soldiers couldn’t hear.
“Thank you,” I whispered back.
“Load the kidnap victims and the Pioneers into the truck,” he said, louder this time.
His soldiers had already gathered the prisoners together and put the surviving guards in chains. I didn’t like them much, but I couldn’t deny that they were efficient.
As soon as Jace and his team left the room, I turned to confront Calli—but she was already gone.
It wasn’t until we were back on the train to Chicago that I got a chance to speak to my foster mother. Bella and I found Calli ordering a strong cup of coffee in the onboard restaurant.
“We need to talk,” I told her. “Follow me.”
I led her and Bella to an abandoned train car. I put up some anti-spy Magitech, then turned to face Calli.
“Time to fess up. You’re going to tell us what the hell is going on with our little sisters.”
Calli sighed. “It’s a long story.”
I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. The train rumbled and shook over the tracks, filling the heavy silence.
“Gin and Tessa were taken for their magic,” I prompted her.
Calli’s face was grim.
“You never told us that Tessa and Gin had magic.” I looked at Bella. “Did you know?”
“No.”
“Calli, what’s going on?” I demanded. “What are Tessa’s and Gin’s powers? What is making people hunt them?”
“I don’t know what their powers are,” she said. “But this isn’t the first time they’ve been hunted for their magic. Many years ago when the girls were very young, hardly older than toddlers, the warlords of the wild magic lands, beyond civilization’s borders, went to war over them.”
18
Calli's Story
“It was fourteen years ago,” Calli began her story. “I had a job that brought me to the Sea of Sin, a vast savannah where monsters roam and the world’s most vicious warlords call home. I’d been tasked to recover a magical treasure at the so-called Paragon Temple, an old gold mine abandoned centuries ago. I got the treasure out, but while leaving the ruins, I was besieged by monsters and forced to flee.”
Growing up, Calli had told us many tales of the wilderness back from her younger days. They always started a lot like this: with a job that went horribly wrong.
“The monsters drove me to the edge of the savannah,” she continued. “To escape them, I ran into a jungle. The beasts did not follow me. I knew that meant whatever lived in the trees was far worse than the monsters, but I had little choice. So I traveled through the jungle, looking for another path out, hoping to evade the monsters and find a way around them to my truck.
“While wandering through the jungle, I soon realized I was not alone. The infamous human warlord Hellfire had claimed this place as his own. I hid from his patrols, taking cover up in the trees. The soldiers were hunting someone. Two escaped prisoners, I overheard. I assumed they were prisoners taken during Hellfire’s battle with the Rogue King, another warlord in those parts. Apparently, the Rogue King took issue with Hellfire’s territorial claim to the jungle.
“I knew I had to get out of there quickly, before I was caught in the crossfire of this battle of the warlords. As soon as the patrols passed, I hurried off, and not a moment too soon. As I fled, I heard the clamor of the two war bands clashing—bullets and blades, magic and machines. I ran away from the battle as fast as my legs would carry me. And that’s when I found them, two girls no older than four years old, curled up under a gum tree.”
“Gin and Tessa,” I said.
Calli nodded. “They looked so small, so scared. They were holding to each other tightly, afraid to let go. When they saw I didn’t belong to a warlord’s band, I managed to coax them out of hiding. They told me they’d escaped Hellfire’s camp.”
“Gin and Tessa were the escaped prisoners Hellfire’s patrols had spoken of, the ones the soldiers were hunting,” Bella said quietly.
“Hellfire’s soldiers weren’t the only ones hunting them,” Calli told us. “The Rogue King had started a war with Hellfire over them. These two little girls had been out there in the jungle for months, fighting to stay free every second since their escape. They had killed beasts for food. They had killed soldiers to survive. Two young innocents, no longer innocent.”
“How awful.” Bella’s voice shook.