"Well, that wasn't expected," I said, trying to make light of the situation. "Hey, as long as we get what we need, who cares how it happens, right?" I said.

  "Right. Now we just wait for James and Tavas. Who needs a drink?" McKenzie asked.

  Grateful for the change of topic, I followed McKenzie away from the basement door toward the kitchen. It was a large, open kitchen with dozens of cabinets, sprawling quartz countertops, and four ovens. It was a kitchen designed for cooking massive dinners for events and parties.

  One of the things I loved about the kitchen when I was a kid was that it was closed off from the rest of the house and always had something sweet in the pantry. Once, I'd eaten most of a bag of miniature marshmallows while waiting for my mom. To this day, I still can't even smell marshmallows without feeling sick.

  A small group of mages gathered in the kitchen. They were speaking in rapid, hushed tones, concern written across all their faces.

  McKenzie pushed past me to get to the group. "What is going on here?"

  The young red-headed mage that I recognized from before looked even more pale than usual. He stuttered a few times before one of the other mages took over.

  "We have an unusual visitor request," a squat, red-faced mage man said.

  My heart pounded and my mind raced. Were we under attack? Had Dr. Byers returned with his spiders or was the dragon queen waiting for me in the sitting room?

  "I should be informed of anything unusual immediately," McKenzie said. "Just spill."

  The mages exchanged a glance before looking back at McKenzie. Finally, the red-head gathered enough courage to speak. "It's a Fae."

  Relief spread through me and my shoulders relaxed.

  McKenzie covered a laugh, but regained composure quickly. "Where is this Fae?"

  "He's awaiting instructions outside the gate."

  "Let me get this straight," McKenzie said. "You have a cooperative Fae waiting outside our gate. A Fae who is being polite and waiting for you while you do what, exactly? You didn't come get me. You stood here arguing."

  "He's a Fae, he could be here to kill us all," the redhead said.

  "So keeping him waiting outside the gate is going to prevent that?" McKenzie asked.

  I bit down on the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing at the sorry state of the remains of the Mage Order. After Jasmine and her followers were arrested, they didn't appear to have anyone left with any sense of how security should work or what they should do when met with a foe. Though we all knew that most likely, the waiting Fae was Tavas.

  "What should we do?" the squat mage asked.

  "Go let him in," McKenzie said.

  "Really?" he asked.

  McKenzie closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath before opening them again. "Go.Let.Him.In."

  The two mages took off through the kitchen and vanished around a bend in the hallway.

  "We have got to get better security when this is all over," McKenzie said.

  "You know, you might want to spend the next few days at my place," I said. "At least until this whole thing blows over."

  McKenzie's brow furrowed. "Why would I do that?"

  "It's not safe here," I said, confused by her comment. Then her expression registered. She looked hurt. Afraid I'd insulted her when we were just starting to trust each other, I tried to cover my mistake. "Not that it's your fault, I mean, I'm sure you'll get it all fixed up soon."

  "Morgan, you don't think I'm going to let you run off on some damn fool quest to steal a weapon from the Mage Order's biggest mistake alone, do you?" she asked. "You need me."

  "Having another mage would be helpful," Dima said. "I mean, there's only so much Alec and I can do."

  "Right," Alec said. "I've seen Ocean's Eleven about a hundred times, but that's about all I've got going for me in terms of planning a heist."

  I smiled. "You're right, having another mage around would be helpful."

  McKenzie nodded and though she didn't say a word, her smile let me know she was happy I was including her.

  "We should go meet our Fae friend," Alec said.

  We arrived just as the door opened. Standing in the last remains of the sunlight, a wide grin on his face, stood Tavas.

  The Fae took a step forward and the mages who accompanied him moved in front of him.

  "Stay where you are," the red-head said.

  I was impressed with his ability to give a command after he'd seemed so afraid of having a Fae at the Order in the first place.

  "Let him go," McKenzie said. "This is Tavas, he's a friend."

  "It seems I wasn't on the guest list," Tavas said.

  I smiled. "You know you wouldn't want it any other way. I'm sure you enjoyed scaring some mages and making an entrance."

  "Oh, you know me, I do enjoy being the center of attention." Tavas walked into the foyer. "So what was so important that you yanked me away from Faerie during my homecoming?"

  I lifted an eyebrow. "The homecoming where your parents were trying to decide if they wanted to let you live?"

  "What other kind of homecoming could I possibly have?" He shrugged. "Now, if we're going after the dragon queen, I'm going to need some whisky."

  "It's..." I glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that it was nearly six in the evening. We'd been trying to find out where Dr. Byers was all day. "Fine, but food first."

  "I can order a pizza," Dima suggested.

  "Might want to make it a few," Tavas said. "And brew a pot of coffee for the mortals. Something tells me we're just getting started."

  19

  Tavas sipped on a glass of straight whisky while we all stood in a circle around the kitchen island. Notes, clippings from newspapers, legal briefings inside of folders, and a variety of other documents were spread out on the counter.

  Aside from Alec and Lyla, who'd volunteered to check on the girls at my place, the rest of us were flipping through the documents. I had a stack of papers that were nothing but dead ends near me. When I looked around at the others, it seemed they were doing the same thing. Skimming pages, then setting them aside.

  The doorbell rang and I let out a slow breath, grateful for the distraction. It must be the pizza. "I got it."

  "I'll help," James said.

  I could feel eyes on me as the two of us walked out of the kitchen.

  "You doing okay with all of this?" James asked.

  "Which part?" I asked. It wasn't his fault, but I was getting tired of everyone checking on me.

  "Any of it, all of it, me?" he said, a playful tone in his last word.

  I glanced over at him to see a smile on his handsome face. He stopped at the front door, and opened it, taking the pizzas before I could offer to carry any of them.

  After closing the door, he stood there, six pizzas in his hands and stared at me. He was waiting for me to answer his question.

  "Honestly," I said. "I don't know how I feel right now about any of this. But that doesn't matter. I don't have a choice. I never had a choice. It was all thrown on me and that's just how it is."

  "If it makes you feel any better, I'm glad you broke into my house," James said.

  "Even though it brought in a chance at the apocalypse?" I asked.

  "That, I could live without, but if that's what it takes, yeah, it was worth it," he said.

  "I don't think anyone else shares your perspective," I said.

  "You will," he said. "When it's all said and done."

  "You're mighty sure of yourself, aren't you?" I asked.

  "I just know what I want," he said, leaning over the pizza boxes to be closer to me.

  My heart fluttered and my breath caught. "And what's that?"

  "You two get lost?" McKenzie called from the kitchen.

  "Later." James winked at me, then walked toward the kitchen.

  I cursed silently. We'd been about to have our first conversation about what the hell was going on between the two of us and stupid McKenzie interrupted it. I knew I shouldn't care. There were far more important things to deal with right now than my personal relationships and I didn't even know if my feelings for James were real. But I wanted them to be. And I wanted to know what it all meant.

  With a sigh, I walked toward the kitchen to join the others. I had a feeling the only way I'd get my answers was if we succeeded in taking down the dragon queen. It was another reason on the long list of why we had to succeed at this.

  "Anyone find anything yet?" I asked as I entered the kitchen.

  "Nothing yet," Dima said through a mouth full of pizza.

  I walked back over to the island and stared at all the documents we still had to sort through. The archivist had done a great job of saving everything she could find on Dr. Byers. I picked up a folder and flipped through it. The whole thing was full of his high school report cards. While it was interesting to note that he didn't pass French in the tenth grade, it wasn't helpful. I just wished we could just look through a personnel file like they had in the human realm.

  Tossing the folder on the island, I thought about what I had just wished for. When I worked in the human realm, they didn't keep files on employees in a library, they kept them in an office. Usually locked up, away from the rest of the employees. Wherever the boss worked.

  "McKenzie," I said. "Where is Jasmine's office?"

  She swallowed a bite of food, then wiped her mouth with a napkin. "You mean my office?"

  "Right," I said. "Take me there."

  "You think she'll have something on Dr. Byers in there?" Dima asked.

  "Why not? If I were a super villain or a boss looking for employees, I'd keep their info where I could go through it at my leisure," I said.

  "Good idea," McKenzie said. "Let's go."

  I followed her away from the kitchen, up the stairs to a locked door. McKenzie whispered the spell to unseal the door, then paused with her hand on the doorknob. "Just so you know, I haven't been in here yet. It's all set up the way Jasmine wanted it."

  Brow furrowed, I wondered why she'd given that disclaimer. Was she trying to set me up for disappointment or worse, was she hiding something from me?

  As soon as McKenzie opened the door, my jaw dropped open and I understood the warning.

  The walls were covered with bubblegum pink patterned wallpaper and a shelf ran along the top of all four walls. Every space of the shelf was full of dolls.

  Porcelain faces and glass eyes stared down at me from those shelves. I stood in the doorway, hesitant to enter with all those little faces watching us. Frilly dresses, little overalls, sailor dresses, and even little fuzzy animal costumes dressed the dolls. Every single one of them was different and even one of them in the room would have given me pause, this many was like walking into a horror movie waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  "I know," McKenzie said. "But I swear they’re normal dolls. You can check them for magic if it makes you feel better. I know I have. Many times. They freak me the fuck out."

  "Why?" I asked, unable to articulate anything beyond the single word.

  "I have no idea."

  Keeping the dolls in view out of the corner of my eye, I stepped into the room. Aside from that, the rest of the room was a typical looking office.

  A black metal desk with a glass top was pushed against a wall. A laptop and a desk calendar were the only things on the smudge free surface. Next to it was a file cabinet, and in a corner was a decorative lemon yellow chair.

  Looking around the room, I let my senses relax, feeling for magic. There was definitely magic here, and not trace amounts. My eyes darted up to the porcelain nightmares near the ceiling, but I knew McKenzie was right. There were no magical signatures coming from that high up in the room.

  The only place to store anything in the room was the file cabinet, which would be the most logical place to find anything Jasmine had been storing. I walked over to the cabinet, expecting to feel a locking spell or even a curse, but it came up clean. Hesitantly, I pulled open the top drawer.

  The drawer opened without incident. Inside, there was a box of pens, a box of paperclips and a bag of dark chocolate. Nothing unusual.

  The bottom drawer didn't have any magic, either. This time, I felt a bit optimistic when I opened it. The entire thing was full of hanging file folders and inside those were manila folders filled with papers.

  I flipped through them and read the titles of the tabs out loud to McKenzie, "Contractors, food and beverage, maintenance, gardeners, take out food, charities, scholarships." Then I stopped on a folder that sounded promising. "Secret."

  I pulled it out and set it on the desk, anticipation tingling in my fingers as I opened the folder. Inside were print outs that looked like they'd come from an online dating site. My shoulders sunk. Her secret folder was her sad dating life. It seemed even the head of the Mage Order struggled to find that special someone.

  "Unless this is code for something, I don't think it's going to help us." I said, sliding the contents over to McKenzie.

  She covered her mouth to stifle a laugh. "I'm sorry, I just didn't realize she was cataloging her dates in a folder."

  I pulled out a folder at random and read the label: take out food. Inside were menus with sticky notes on them. The notes rated how much she liked the food, how long the delivery times were, and how consistent the quality was. "Well, I got to give it to her, she is crazy organized."

  McKenzie was pulling out folders now and opening them up. "These all look legit so far, but we should check them just in case."

  "You check those," I said. "I'm going to see if we're missing anything."

  The feeling of magic was still hanging in the room. For all I knew, it was the lingering remnants of a powerful spell that had been cast in here. But for that kind of magical signature to remain, it would have had to be a stronger spell than anything I was familiar with. Considering this woman was the one who brought back a dead dragon queen, I supposed that was possible but I wasn't ready to give up.

  I stood in the center of the room and ignored the shuffling of papers coming from McKenzie digging through the file cabinet behind me. Taking a deep breath, I called to my magic. A seeking spell should be all I needed to determine if anything was hiding. It was just like being at an estate sale. If Jasmine stashed something away, I would find it.

  The spell came quickly, without even having to speak the words thanks to my dragon blood, and almost right away, I felt the pull. Opening my eyes, I reached out in front of me. My spell was guiding me straight ahead, to where there was nothing but a pink wall. Was one of the dolls hiding something after all?

  Moving forward, I stretched my hand out toward the wall, brushing my fingertips over the patterned wallpaper.

  Narrowing my eyes, I stared closer. Then I saw it. The shimmer that told me something was being hidden with magic.

  Dropping my hand I looked around the room again. The room had a single window, and it was on the second floor of a house. This wasn't built to be an office. Now that I was looking more clearly at the space, I realized, this had to be a bedroom. Which meant, there was a closet.

  20

  I pressed my ear against the wall, then knocked. A smile spread across my lips. As I hoped, it was hollow.

  "McKenzie," I said. "I've got something."

  The other mage joined me in front of the wall and stared at it, her brow furrowed. She was trying to see what I could see and failing.

  I could tell it was driving her crazy that she couldn't figure it out so I walked over to the wall and knocked again.

  The creases left her forehead and a look of recognition lit up her expression. "There's something back there."

  "I think there's a whole closet here. How do you feel about breaking a security charm?" I asked.

  McKenzie smirked. "Now you're speaking my language."

  The two of us set both hands, fingers spread wide, on the space of the wall where we were guessing there was a door hidden.

  "Count of three?" McKenzie asked.

  "I don't have to say the words out loud," I said. "So you start, I'll join in."

  "Show off," she said, then she began the spell.

  I joined in silently in my head and as soon as I said the words to myself, magic rushed through me, stretching out to my extended fingers and lingering there with a warm glow.

  McKenzie's fingertips were outlined with white halos, just like mine. Ten seconds later, the glow expanded, sending hairline cracks in the invisible surface of the shield in front of us.

  Dropping our hands, both of us stepped back to watch the magic crackle and spread across the wall until it reached completion. The shield shattered into millions of sparkling fragments, hovering in the air for a moment like stardust, then dissolving the wall completely.

  "Well, would you look at that." I stood with my hands on my hips, admiring the opening that had been revealed by breaking the charm. It wasn't a closet, it was a whole room.

  Jasmine must have split a larger room into two parts with a false wall. Her once small office now became the size of a large master suite. It was just small enough to keep people from wondering what the extra wall space in the hallway was, but large enough that anyone who wanted to redecorate would have noticed.

  "Now we know why her doll collection wasn't on this wall," McKenzie said. "It never existed in the first place."

  "Good thing for us. Can you imagine if it had been a real wall and they all came tumbling down on top of us?" I shivered at the thought of a dozen dolls landing on me and shattering on the ground.

  "As soon as she's officially convicted, I'm getting rid of all of those things," McKenzie said.

  "We should have a bonfire," I said.

  "Agreed," McKenzie said.

  I took a step toward the missing wall and did a quick spell to check for any magic in the new section of room. Nothing.

  "Seems clean in there," I said. "I don't think she expected anyone to find this. Shall we?" I swept my arm toward the darkened empty room.

  McKenzie pulled her phone out of her pocket and clicked on the flashlight. "Let's check it out."

  I searched the walls for a light switch as McKenzie moved her light around the room. "Odd. There's not even a light fixture in here, let alone a switch."

 

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