A Matter of Heart (42 page)

He looks up at her,
adoration stretching his lips wide.

“Before you offer up your
first born, know it hails from the coffee cart outside,” the Elemental warns,
choosing the chair next to him.

His smile doesn’t falter one
bit. “
Grazie
.”

Dusky red spreads across
Giules’ cheeks before she looks away. “Is everyone here?”

Iolani sits down across from
me. “We’re still waiting on—”

“We’re here!” Karl steps
into the room, Kellan right behind him.

Raul whistles. “You look
like hell,
hermano
.”

As a matter of fact, both
men do. Hair disheveled, clothes muddy and torn in a few places, smudges of
dirt and plaster caked on their faces and brows. I must be the only one
alarmed, because nearly everyone else in the room bursts into laughter.

Karl practically collapses
in the chair next to me. “Shut it. All of you.”

Kellan sits next to Iolani.
I try not to stare at him, but I fail miserably. He’s better than I, though. He
hasn’t looked at me once since he entered the room. Hasn’t spoken to me once
since the day we all left Costa Rica.

“You could say we got into a
scrape,” he drawls, amusement dripping from every word as he taps a pen against
the agenda in front of him.

More laughter. “Do tell,”
Kiah Redrock says from further on down the table.

“Well,” Kellan says, “it all
has to do with a spider.”

“SHUT IT,” Karl growls. He’s
turned beet red.

“Kellan, expect to be
benched for the foreseeable future if you do not finish this story,” Zthane
says. Karl sighs deeply and crosses his arms.

Kellan is happy to oblige.
“Apparently, this little spider dropped on Karl’s neck just as he was about to
trigger the earthquake—”

“It was huge!” Karl barks.
“Easily three inches across! Plus! It was a black widow, I’m sure of it.”

There are tears, people are
laughing so hard. “As I was saying, it dropped on his neck, and in his panic to
not . . .” Kellan grins across the table at Karl. “How’d you put it?”

“Screw you, Whitecomb.”

Kellan quirks one of his
half-grins. “I think it was die. He was afraid of dying, or so he kept
squealing, like his toddler would. Anyway, he started freaking the hell out.
The spider finally hit the ground—”

“Goddamn thing bit me!” Karl
sounds like he’s being strangled. “Here! On my neck!”

I peer at the back of his
neck. The skin is smooth but dirty.

“So, of course, Karl figured
it had to die an ugly death itself,” Kellan continues. “Which meant, he—”

“You didn’t.” Iolani
cackles. “You smashed it, didn’t you?”

“Oh, he did,” Kellan grins.
“Quite forcefully.”

Nearly every cell phone in
the room is whipped out, so stats on the earthquake he caused just hours before
on the Human plane can be disseminated. “Six-point-seven?” Raul’s eyes look
like they’re about to pop out of his head. “But . . . Karl! It was supposed to
be a three-point-one!”

I didn’t think it possible,
but Karl slinks even further down in his chair.

“We were in an abandoned
building that was situated right on top of the fault line,” Kellan says. “It
was already falling apart. Karl simply helped demolish it. It just sucked that
we were in it at the time.”

The guffaws in the room are
deafening. It takes threats of bodily harm from Karl before petering out.
“Well, Karl,” Zthane says, struggling to maintain a straight face, “I’m glad
that in the battle of Magical versus Spider, the Magical won.”

“Oh, bite me,” Karl mutters.

“I would, only the spider
beat me to it.” Zthane ducks Karl’s flying pencil. “Okay, okay. We can tease
Karl for at least another hundred years about this if we’re lucky. Right now, I
want to go over the latest Elder information we’ve acquired.” The room sobers
instantly. “As many of you already know, two Magicals were killed this last
week on the Elvin plane.” A red laser pointer circles the eastern edge of
Gelandreigh, a city whose population hovers around three million. “Most of the
attacks in the past have occurred in less densely populated areas. Therefore,
it’s most likely safe to assume that with these latest attacks, the Elders are
becoming more aggressive in their hunting.”

Kiah looks up from the
agenda below her, where she’s been scribbling notes. “Who were the victims?”

“Micah Oleander, an
Elemental, and Penny Yarrow, a Shaman.” Zthane hits a few keystrokes on his
keyboard; the map disappears and images of the two Elves appear. “Oleander was
on assignment at the time; the responding team who found his remains deduced
that he’d been caught unaware just as he’d begun brewing his lightning storm.”

Micah Oleander looked nice.
Like he was gentle. He was skinny, a bit hipster-ish, but his face radiated
kindness.

Flashes of two backpacking
Gnomes fill my mind.

“Yarrow was to merge in
three months. She’d turned eighteen only weeks before.” A series of sighs fill
the room. He rubs at his eyes. “She was Council-bound. Her parents are
devastated.”

“Monsters,” is whispered
from somewhere down the table.

Penny Yarrow’s delicate face
smiles down at us. She looks extraordinarily young. Only a year younger than
me, she could probably pass for fourteen.

Grief for her early death
rocks me. Thanks to these . . .
things
. . . Penny will never get to
discover the joys and challenges of her craft. If she hasn’t already, she’ll
never fall in love with someone. She’ll never have a child, if that’s what she
wanted. She’ll never know what it’s like to grow old.

“They need to be stopped,”
Kiah says. Her voice is ragged.

“I doubt there is a Magical
alive who doesn’t agree with that,” Zthane says. His fingers scrape against his
day-old stubble. “Which brings me to my point. Battletracker sent out ten
separate Trackers over the last month to try to discover the Elders’
whereabouts. Despite all our combined Magics, finding them has been
frustratingly elusive. Seems like we’re always a few steps behind. But a couple
of our guys think they might be able to track them after an orchestrated
attack.”

Papers shifting against each
other are the only sounds for a good five seconds. Then Giuliana says, “You’re
talking live bait.”

Zthane nods slowly.

“It makes sense,” Karl says
as we all digest this. “What better way to draw them out in the open than to
offer up what they want most.”

Zthane slowly nods again.

And then Kellan growls
between clenched teeth, “NO.”

My eyes fly to his face.
He’s clearly pissed.

“Kellan—” Zthane tries, but
Kellan cuts him off right away.

“You think Jonah is going to
go for this?”

My heart trips.
Jonah
?
They think they’re going to offer up Jonah as bait? Oh, hell no. I open my
mouth to voice my dissent, too, but Zthane beats me to the punch.

“Of course we need Council
blessing. I already planned on talking to Jonah after our meeting today. He
knows what’s at stake. He’ll go for it if we make sure we—”

“Are you
insane
?” The
papers in front of Kellan go flying as he shoves himself out of his seat. “He
deposed Belladonna for simply saying something. Banished him for plotting that
may or may not have been based in fact. And yet, you think he’ll just go along
with you purposely sending Chloe out like a lamb to slaughter?”

Hold the phones. They’re
talking about
me
?

“The Elders have only ever
repeatedly targeted one Magical,” Zthane says calmly. “It serves to reason that
Chloe would be our best option for attracting their attention.”

“You’re wrong.” Kellan leans
down, palms flat against the table. “They’ve targeted me and my brother
multiple times, too.”

“By association,” Zthane
argues.

“Can you be absolutely
certain of that?” Kellan asks. “Because it didn’t really feel that way any of
the three times they’ve tried to kill me.”

Karl clears his throat.
“They’ve gone after her five times.” Kellan glares at him when he holds up five
fingers and begins to tick them off. “There was that first car chase, then the
San Francisco fiasco.” He still holds this grudge, because I wince at his stern
frown. “The battle here in Annar. The failed portal attempt. And then in India
a few months back.”

“I was locked in a building
that second time,” Kellan hisses. “For all you know, they could have been
coming after me and Jonah then, too. It’s not like we endeared ourselves after
we tortured them that first meet and greet.”

I’m blown away—not so much
by the fact that the Guard wants me to be a goat tied on a rope, waiting to be
a dino’s snack, but because Kellan is publically going after someone for daring
to put me in harm’s way. Which is exactly what I chewed Jonah out for. And I’m
still not down with him—or anyone—fighting my battles for me.

“What would I have to do?” I
ask before Zthane can counter Kellan. “If I agree to this?”

Kellan finally looks at me,
astonished. Beyond furious.

“Well,” Zthane says, clearly
relieved to switch his focus to me, “we’d take you to a location and make your
presence known. A team would accompany you and be watching at all times.”

Kellan is nearly apoplectic,
he’s so livid.

“The goal of the mission
would be to either imprison the group, like we did here in Annar, or follow
them and discover their home base. Either way, it would be a win-win situation
for us. Any intelligence we can gather on these things can only help us.”

“Plus, it would give us a
chance to try out multiple crafts on them that maybe haven’t had a shot
before,” Karl adds. “As of right now, there aren’t a whole lot of us that are
truly effective. Non weapons are pointless. We need to do some test runs on
what mixture of crafts will serve us best in battle.”

“I was thinking of asking
Jonah to come along, anyway,” Zthane says to Kellan. “The two of you have
always been some of our most effective weapons against these monsters.”

Kellan snaps, “If you think
he—”

“I’ll do it.”

All eyes turn to me.

But mine look up at Micah
and Penny. “Too many people have died because of these things. I’ll do it. It’s
my choice, after all. My decision,” I stress. “No one else’s.”

Zthane’s
exhale is pure relief. Kellan gives me one last look filled with disapproval,
before going back to ignoring me for the rest of the meeting.

He tracks me down
afterwards, though. I’m not even five feet from the Guard HQ entrance when he
grabs my arm. “What was that in there, C?”

“That was exactly what I was
going to ask you.” I yank my arm away, even though it feels so good to have
contact once more. “Why is it that you and Jonah think I’m so helpless?”

He has the nerve to pretend
to be confused, which only pisses me off. “I’ve never once thought you
helpless.”

“You argued that I was too .
. . I don’t know, fragile to do this small job!”

“Small? That’s what you
think this is?” He herds me to a nearby café and motions for me to sit down. I
cross my arms as he drags a chair over so we’re sitting next to one another.
“I’m sorry if you misconstrued my meaning in there. I most certainly do not
think you’re incapable of any assignment.”

“Really.”

“Stop being a brat about
this. Yes,
really
. But what Zthane is asking of you is dangerous. That’s
what I object to.”

It’s the opening I’ve been
waiting for. “Well then. Since we’re voicing our objections over dangerous
activities, I vehemently object to your belt.”

He’s exasperated. “I’m
serious, Chloe.”

“As am I. It makes me . . .”
I can’t even think of a good enough word to describe my feelings over this, so
the word I pick is inferior to how I truly feel. “
Sick
to know that you
keep track of how many times you break yourself into pieces.”

“These are two different
sets of circumstances. Can we—”

“Is it? Because I’m pretty
sure that me, on a mission to help Magical kind, surrounded by an entire team
of gifted Guard, is a far safer bet than you jumping out of planes or bridges just
for the sole purpose of smashing bones.” I motion to his belt, which is
obscured by his plaid button down. I hate that damn belt. “And you mark them.
Like they’re somehow badges of honor.”

He takes a deep breath. Runs
his hands through his hair. Drums his fingers against the table. “We’re not
talking about that right now. We’re talking about the mission you just agreed
to.”

I refuse to let him switch
subjects. I’ve been silent on this for too long, afraid to piss him off, but
I’m done with that. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Kellan. It’s not
healthy.”

He closes his eyes for a
long moment. They’re starkly honest when he opens them. “If I stop, will you
promise not to go on this mission?”