Dark Heart of Magic (13 page)

Just like at the Sinclair mansion, heavy metal grates covered the shelves, locking away the healing liquid, but there was more of it here than I'd ever seen in one place before. Hundreds upon hundreds of bottles lined the shelves from top to bottom. It made sense, though. If Victor was thinking about attacking the other Families, he'd need a lot of stitch-sting to patch up the Draconi guards.

I put my phone away, moved through the lab area, and stepped into the greenhouse section. Herbs and vegetables stretched out in all directions, along with row after row of stitch-sting bushes. The dark, evergreen bushes weren't quite monsters, not like tree trolls and copper crushers, but they would still poke out their sharp needles and try to scratch you if you got too close to them without paying their toll. But I hadn't felt like carrying around ajar of honey tonight to drizzle on their roots, so I made sure to stay clear of the bushes.

And just like in the rest of the castle, everywhere I looked, I spotted something else emblazoned with that snarling dragon crest, including each and every one of the white flagstones that curled across the floor. The crest looked so fierce, so lifelike, that I thought the dragons might rise up and bite me on the ankles for stepping on their snouts.

Finally, I reached the center of the greenlab, a round, open space with paths snaking off in all directions. One enormous dragon made out of red and gold stained glass was set into the middle of the floor here, with matching flames streaming out of its mouth and wrapping around the dragon's body, as though the creature were continuously breathing fire and about to incinerate everything around it, including itself.

Just like Victor killed anyone who displeased him in the slightest way.

Maybe it was stupid, but I skirted around the stained glass crest, not wanting to step on any part of it, especially since the dragon's red eyes seemed to follow every move I made. I crossed to the far side of the open space and ducked behind another stitch-sting bush, ready to cut through the rest of the greenlab and find Victor's office—

“What do you think you're doing?” a voice hissed.

I
froze, my breath caught in my throat, my heart hammering in my chest, my fingers curling around the hilt of my sword. I thought I'd been so careful, so quiet, sneaking around and keeping to the shadows like the perfect thief, but someone had spotted me. Now, all I could do was hope that I could fight my way out of the greenlab, make a mad dash for the woods, and disappear into the trees and the mist—

“I wanted to see you,” another, deeper voice murmured.

Wait a second.

I knew that voice and the first one too. I sighed. Seriously? They were meeting
here
? Did they not know how stupid and dangerous this was?

I hunkered down, crept forward, and peered around a white marble dragon planter full of sprigs of stitch-sting. Sure enough, Deah and Felix were standing in the middle of the open space, right in the center of the stained glass dragon. The glimmering bits of red and gold glass made it look like fire was licking at their feet and that the snarling creature was about to erupt out of the ground and gobble them up. Well, that's certainly what Victor and Blake would do if they ever found out what was going on. Felix and Deah were taking their whole Romeo-and-Juliet romance to new extremes.

Felix grinned and held out a single red rose. Deah slid her phone into her pocket, then crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. So Felix was the one who'd been blowing up her phone at dinner. I should have known. I wondered how she'd managed to get herself excused from the meal to come here.

“And why would you want to see me now that Katia's back in town?” she snarked.

He winced. “Um, I don't know what you mean?”

“I just bet you don't,” she snapped back. “Funny thing, though. I remember you and Katia being
all over
each other during the tournament last summer, especially at the after-party at the lake. Don't you remember? Oh, wait. You probably don't, since the two of you were sucking face the
whole time
.”

Felix opened his mouth, but Deah cut him off and kept right on going.

“And from the looks of things today, Katia is ready for round two.” A note of bitterness crept into Deah's voice. “She kissed you. Yesterday, when we all met on the Midway—she kissed you right in front of Blake, Devon, and Lila, and I had to keep my mouth shut, stand there like an idiot, and watch her flirt with you. Just like I had to do at the tournament again today.”

Felix winced again, but his face turned serious. “Listen, Katia is cool, but you're the one I want to be with, Deah. Not her. You know how I feel about you. How I've felt about you for
months
now.”

He held out the rose to her again. Deah stared at the flower, and I shifted to one side so that I could look into her dark blue eyes. Her emotions slammed into me a second later.

Lingering, numbing boredom from dinner. Pinching hurt from her father's harsh words and high expectations. Rock-hard confidence that she was going to beat Katia and win the Tournament of Blades again. Sharp worry that someone was going to catch Felix in the greenlab. But most of all, I felt how much she cared about Felix. The hot spark of her feelings for him was like a firecracker exploding in my heart over and over again.

Despite her longing, Deah didn't take the rose. Instead, she shook her head and stepped back. Her eyes dulled and dimmed, and that hot spark was snuffed out.

“You should leave,” she said in a sad, tired voice. “This is never going to work. Not with you being a Sinclair and me a Draconi. You should go before one of the pixies sees you—or worse, Blake or my dad. Maybe it's a good thing that Katia's back in town. So we can make a clean break now, before things get any worse than they already are.”

Felix's smile wilted, and he dropped the rose to his side. “You don't mean that. Not really.”

Deah shrugged, her face blank. “It doesn't matter. Nothing does except the fact that my father and brother hate your Family. There's no getting past that, Felix. No matter what you think.”

“But—”

“No,” she said in a firm voice, shaking her head and making her blond hair fly around her shoulders. “Don't tell me again that nothing matters but us. That's not true and you know it. Too many other things matter. And how we feel about each other isn't one of them.”

Felix kept staring at her, his eyes dark with hurt, pain, love, and longing.

Deah sighed again. “Just leave, okay? And don't come back. That's what's best—for both of us.”

She turned to go, which spurred Felix into action. He dropped the rose, stepped forward, pulled her into his arms, and planted his lips on hers.

Deah stiffened, her hands coming up to his chest as though she was going to push him away. But then, her fingers curled into his shirt, and she swayed forward and melted into the kiss. Her arms snaked up and around Felix's neck so that she could pull him closer. They broke apart and stared into each other's eyes, both of them breathing heavily.

Then they kissed again, as close together as two people could possibly be, their lips crashing together again and again as though their lives depended on it.

Guilt flickered in my chest at spying on such a private moment—along with more than a little jealousy. I wished I could kiss Devon like that. Hold him like that. Or that I just had the courage to tell him how I really felt about him, to take a chance and see what might happen between us.

But I pushed aside my feelings and turned away from Felix and Deah. I still had a job to do, one that was far more important than hiding in the shadows mooning about Devon.

Because if I didn't figure out what Victor was planning, he would destroy us all.

 

I slipped deeper into the greenlab, careful not to make any noises that would alert Felix and Deah to my presence. But they were too wrapped up in each other to notice the whisper of my sneakers on the flagstones, and I left them behind and reached the far side of the greenlab.

I peered through this set of glass doors, but the hallway beyond was deserted, so I stepped outside and hurried on my way. I rounded the corner and finally reached my destination—the double doors that led into Victor's office.

The gold knobs were shaped like snarling dragons, and I gingerly tried one, half expecting it to come to life and bite off my fingers. Of course, that didn't happen, but the door was locked, so I pulled out my chopstick lock picks and went to work. Less than a minute later, the door
snicked
open. I waited, listening for noise and movement on the other side of the wood, but I didn't hear anything, so I felt safe enough to slip inside, shut, and relock the door behind me.

Lights burned in the office, which was easily twice the size of the Sinclair library. And just like with the rest of the castle, gold glimmered everywhere I looked, from the pillows on the couches to the trim on the furniture to the chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Shelves took up two of the walls, filled with books, photos, and trophies. I spotted two gold cups with Deah's name engraved on them, proclaiming her as the winner of the Tournament of Blades. I wondered why they were in here, instead of her bedroom, since she was the one who'd earned them, not Victor. I snorted. Then again, he probably considered them
his
trophies, since she was
his
daughter and a member of
his
Family. Sometimes, I didn't know which I hated more—Victor's cruelty or his ego.

I scanned the rest of the shelves, my greedy little heart wondering how many precious things I could stuff into my pockets and how much cold, hard cash Mo would give me for them. I particularly admired a set of diamond-crusted dragon bookends. But I forced myself to keep my sticky fingers in my coat pockets where they belonged. I didn't dare steal so much as the smallest knickknack. Not from Victor and especially not from his office. Swiping those bookends would tip him off that someone had been in here, and that was the last thing I wanted.

So I hurried over to Victor's desk, which was close to another wall. It was three separate sections joined together in a U shape and featured your usual office setup—laptop, mouse, keyboard, phone, a couple of reading lamps. I'd just reached for the laptop to wake it up when a spark of red caught my eye.

I looked up into the face of a dragon.

I staggered back against a corner of the desk, making a cup full of pens
rattle-rattle
, and I had to clamp my lips together to keep from shrieking. After a few sweaty, heart-pounding seconds, I realized that it wasn't an actual dragon staring at me, just one that had been carved into the white stone wall behind Victor's desk.

It was the same snarling dragon crest that was on everything else, the biggest I'd seen in the entire castle, but this dragon's head was turned to the side, with a fist-size ruby for an eye embedded in the stone. Flames curled all around the dragon, and its head and the ruby eye were particularly prominent, as if the creature continuously peered over the shoulder of whoever sat at the desk. I shivered and dropped my gaze from it.

I focused on the desk again, starting with the left section since that's where Victor's laptop was. I jiggled the mouse and made the screen flare to life, but the laptop was password protected. I tried a few combinations, like Blake's and Deah's names, but nothing worked, so I moved on, scanning through all the papers on top of the middle section of the desk: invoices, contracts, shipping orders. The same sort of stuff that Claudia had on her desk—all the things that dealt with the Families' business interests. Stuff that would tell me nothing about what Victor was planning.

Still concentrating on the left and middle sections, I opened and closed all the drawers, scanning through the items inside. There were more papers, along with pens, staplers, and rolls of tape. Nothing interesting, but I still made sure to put everything back
exactly
where I had found it. I didn't want Victor to even
think
that someone had been in his office, much less rifled through his desk.

When I finished with the drawers, I turned to the right and final section of the desk, the one that was the closest to the dragon carving's eerie ruby eye. And I finally found something interesting.

Files—on everyone in the Tournament of Blades.

There were five stacks of files, one for each major Family—the Draconis, Sinclairs, Volkovs, Itos, and Salazars. I flipped through the top file in each stack. Name, age, height, weight, hair and eye color. It was all detailed, from first-time competitors to folks who had been in the tournament for years. A photo of the person was also clipped to every file. But what was really interesting—and totally creepy—was that the information was so specific and so detailed, especially when it came to a person's magic.

Victor had chronicled every person's Talents, cataloging them as minor, moderate, and major, and listing all the things that person could do with his or her magic. The more powerful a person was, the thicker the file and the more notes crowded into the margins, ones that I was betting Victor himself had written in blood-red ink.

Devon's file was on top of the Sinclair stack, and I held my breath as I opened it and read through the notes.

I exhaled. Victor didn't know about Devon's compulsion magic. Good. That was good. Compulsion was the sort of rare, special Talent Victor would do anything to have for himself, including kidnapping and killing Devon—just as he'd tried to do when Devon was younger. Victor would have succeeded back then, too, if my mom hadn't intervened.

I put Devon's file back and scanned through some others. The longer I looked, the more I realized that Victor's notes were different when it came to the various competitors. For the folks in other Families, he'd just jotted down observations about their magic. But for the Draconis, he had gone a step further, almost as if he were planning how to best use their magic for something.

The notes on the Draconi competitors went on and on, and I had no idea what any of them meant. I didn't dare steal any of the files, so I pulled out my phone and snapped several photos to show Claudia and Mo. Maybe they'd be able to decipher Victor's code.

I spotted a file with Deah's name on it. Curious about what Victor had written on his own daughter, I pulled it out of the stack and opened it up.

The notes chilled me more than any others I'd seen so far. Victor wanted to experiment on his own daughter? With what, exactly? And why?

I snapped photos of her entire file, concentrating on Victor's notes, then put it back in the stack where I'd found it. Below Deah's file was one with Blake's name. I took pictures of it as well, although Victor had only written a few notes in it. Apparently, he wasn't nearly as interested in Blake's magic as he was Deah's. Then again, her mimic power was a much rarer Talent than his strength magic.

I worked as fast as I could. Dinner had to be winding down by now, and Victor could come back here any second. I put Blake's file back where I'd found it and was about to move away from the desk when I spotted a final folder sitting off to the side all by itself. The name on the tab caught my eye.