Sister Seeker Read online

  I didn’t have to say anything out loud; Tony could see all my nerves just by holding my gaze. He wasn’t even skilled in mental magic—he was an elemental witch—but Tony had a sense about people that no one else could match. So he simply reached over and pulled me into a solid hug before he even thought about answering my question.

  Tony always knew what to do to make his friends feel better.

  Once he got the hug out of his system, he dipped his head down to catch my gaze so that I could look him in the eyes and see the truth there. “I trust Theresa with my life,” he told me. “I trusted her so much that I asked her to marry me.”

  Okay, I absolutely hadn’t been expecting that.

  Sure, I knew that Tony had a daughter named Bianca—I’d met her on my first mission with the Rendezvous. She had been one of the witches I rescued from a temporal spell in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. But for some reason, I’d never thought much about who her mother was.

  The truth was that I’d always assumed Bianca’s mother had been killed or captured—or maybe she was working for the Royalists. I’d heard about families with split loyalties, and since Tony rarely talked about his wife, I guess I assumed that was the case for him too.

  But now? Now, I had so many more questions. The first and most obvious one being: “What happened? Why isn’t she with you?”

  Tony smiled sadly, his lips tight at the very corners of his mouth. “She left,” he said simply, and his tone was so heavy, so different from the usual light and joy that I had always heard from Tony, that I couldn’t justify asking him anything more.

  Instead, I pulled him into the same tight hug that he had given me before and didn’t let him go until he returned it. “I’m sorry,” I muttered.

  “It’s alright,” he promised. “I just don’t talk about it very often.”

  I nodded. “But Tony . . . you still trust her?”

  “Always,” he said, so fervently that I almost couldn’t help trusting her based on that tone alone. “I never stopped trusting her or loving her—and we didn’t split because she stopped loving me, either.”

  I bit my lip, barely resisting the urge to ask him again what happened. But before I could even form the thought to ask Lila what she knew—since, after all, she was a Future Seeker and often knew more than I did about the important actors in this ongoing war—she shot me down.

  It isn’t my place to tell you other people’s secrets.

  I hated that she made so much sense.

  She was right, and I knew it, so I simply let my shoulders drop and tried to let go of my curiosity. For Tony’s sake. Even if I had been historically very bad at not asking the first questions that popped into my head. It was practically a running joke in the Rendezvous: Michelle and her insatiable desire to know the history of every little detail of the magical world.

  Could anyone really blame me, though? Everything was still so new to me.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “That’s a very good reason for you to trust her. But I’ll reserve judgement, if that’s okay with you.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less, all things considered,” Tony said. “But I promise you: Theresa is nothing like the rest of the people that have traipsed through your head.”

  “That much we can agree on,” I said before I leaned over to rest my head on the side of the plane, trying to get comfortable for the very, very long flight ahead. If I tried to go to sleep—or at least looked like I was trying—maybe I could beat back my desire to ask Tony any more personal, pressing questions.

  At least until we met Theresa.

  Chapter 2: Road Trip!

  When our plane landed, I was grateful to see that the person Theresa sent to pick us up looked totally normal. He was wearing jeans and a tee shirt and was holding a sign along with several other people who had been hired to pick up travelers, though his had the simple name “Tony” on it, with no last name. Beyond that, though, he completely blended into the crowd—and I’m sure my human friends were glad to see it after having to put up with Elaine and Andrew for the long flight out.

  “You must be Santo,” Tony said with a smile as he strode up to the young man. “Theresa said she’d be sending you.”

  “And she didn’t say there would be so many,” Santo said, one eyebrow raised as he took in the group of us. “You’re lucky we won’t be traveling by car for very long. We will only fit with a little magic, and I thought the point was to stay undercover as much as possible.”

  “I told her I would be bringing my friends along,” Tony said, shaking his head with a barely-suppressed laugh. “Has it really been so long that she thinks I would bring only one or two people with me with that kind of promise?”

  Santo shrugged as he directed us to follow him. “I don’t know. Mama doesn’t talk much about life before she went into hiding.”

  Santo had his focus on leading us through the airport, so he didn’t see Tony freeze—but I was right beside him and reached out a hand to steady him. “Tony . . . .”

  Tony glanced my way and then cleared his throat and shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said in a hoarse whisper that told me he clearly was not at all fine before he straightened up and nodded to himself. “I’m fine,” he repeated.

  He wasn’t, but I also knew this wasn’t the time to try to address that, so I simply hung close to my obviously hurting friend as Santo helped us load up our bags in the trunk by shrinking them down. And the second row of seats above the others, like a double decker bus but smaller, in what should have been a sedan definitely meant he’d done some magical finagling. But since that meant no one had to sit in anyone’s lap in the sticky heat, we all appreciated it.

  “I have to warn you,” Santo said as he nosed the car into traffic, “it’s a long drive.”

  “That’s alright,” Tony assured him, but by that time, my mind wasn’t on the drive or Tony’s relationship to Santo or anything like that.

  For the moment, all I could think about was the fact that I remembered the sticky heat of summer and the feeling of my clothes plastered to the small of my back with sweat as a few kids and I piled into the back of a car to drive down to the beach with my family.

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture it, but as quickly as the memory had come up, it faded from my reach again.

  I’ll look for it, Lila promised.

  Thanks, I replied, leaning back, hoping that the feeling of the leather seat against my back would bring the memory back. It was so frustrating to get bits and pieces of my old life back this way. I just wanted to be the girl I had seen back then, the one who had a family, who had a witty reply to everything, who seemed to know what she was doing. Why couldn’t I get back to the way I had been before my father put his nose in my business?

  I closed my eyes to concentrate on looking inside my own mind, where Lila, in her daisy-yellow glory, was flitting around the gray monolith that represented the block my father installed to keep me off my game. She was getting used to being a construct of my mind rather than a person on her own merits—that much was easy to see as she floated around in the sort of sandstorm form that my memories took. She hovered around the edges of the monolith, studying it, frowning at it, before she looked up and waved me over.

  “I think I found it,” she said, running her hand over a fissure in the monolith.

  I bit my lip before I stepped in, mentally putting my own hand where hers had been and closing my eyes. Sometimes, if we both worked at it, we could pull some of the loose memories off, and I hoped this was one of those times.

  “Roll the window back up,” a teenage girl sitting next to me grumbled, grabbing her hair as it whipped around in the wind.

  “No.” The girl’s little brother was sitting on my other side, completely wrapped up in the book he was reading—which prompted his big sister to stick her tongue out at him and start to complain.

  “Mom!”

  The woman in the front seat of the car shook her head with a look of longsuffering
so much like her father’s. I had seen a few generations of this family, and they all seemed to have the same tics, even if I knew this particular mother hadn’t known her father when he had died in Korea. “Erica, you know your brother gets carsick—”

  “So the rest of us have to suffer?”

  The corner of Erica’s mother’s mouth tightened, and I tipped my head back and let out a long breath before I waved a hand at the headrest in front of Erica’s brother. The material of the headrest parted in a circle, and the excess material hardened into blades for a fan. I reached past him to roll up the window with the hand crank and then turned to give Erica a dry look. “You can always ask. You know that.”

  Erica frowned for a moment before she let out a huff. “Well, why couldn’t you do that in the first place?”

  “Because you didn’t ask,” I said again, trying not to shake my head at her. She was thirteen, that age when the world was out to get her and everything provoked the most dramatic reaction possible. I’d seen plenty of “cousins” through that age, and at this point, the drama hardly fazed me.

  Erica crossed her arms and slid further into her seat. “I hate that rule. I’ve said that, right? Because I do.”

  At that, I couldn’t stop my smirk. My family and I had imposed that rule way back when Jacob and Charlotte were married, but it had been carried down through the generations: I shouldn’t step in with magic unless the situation was an emergency—or unless someone asked me to.

  No bias against magic had prompted the rule, either. Instead, it came from an independent kind of spirit that I could appreciate. My family wanted to be able to get by on their own as much as they could without “cheating” and using magic. I could understand that.

  We also shared a legitimate concern that my magic could draw unnecessary attention. I appreciated that they wanted to keep me safe, even if I often wanted to use my magic to do the same and keep them happy and safe from the too-dangerous world. But then again, everyone knew the stories of the soldiers in black that followed me around. No one else in the family had that problem.

  “You only hate the rule because it requires you to use your words,” Erica’s brother sang out, earning him another furious glare from his big sister—not that he seemed to mind at all.

  I had to hide my smile. I knew better than to play favorites when it came to family, but this little boy reminded me so much of Jacob at that age. They had the same mannerisms, the same wit, the same fearlessness—and the same expression of pretended innocence when they would get in trouble.

  “Jake, leave your sister alone,” their mother said in a sigh.

  And then, of course, there was Jake’s name. I had to work very hard not to play favorites when faced with that kind of connection.

  Jake turned to me with a crooked smile and mouthed out “I’m right, though,” and I simply couldn’t hide my smile. He grinned wider before he returned to his book, leaving me with the task of trying to pretend not to be entertained and not to be picking favorites—even if I knew no one in the car would believe it if I insisted otherwise.

  The memory flooded my mind all at once, as it always did when I earned back another piece of myself from the monolith. Those organic moments came so much faster than the memories my father and brother forced me to watch play out in real time in order to keep me locked up in my mind and docile. This time, when the memory finished flooding me, Lila hadn’t even had time to back up a few steps from the monolith to give me privacy in my own mind.

  I straightened up and smiled her way. “Thanks,” I said quietly.

  “I wish I could break off bigger pieces for you,” Lila admitted.

  “You and me both.”

  “It helps when you remember things organically,” Lila said. “Sights, smells, feelings—those prompt memories more than any work I’ve done.”

  “Yeah.” I let my shoulders drop to show my frustration. “Now if only I knew what to do to trigger memories like that.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Lila said with a gentle smile that made it hard to argue—because she meant every word. I had learned that everyone had their own color to their souls, and it made perfect sense that Lila’s was yellow. She was bright and joyful, a ray of sunshine everywhere she went.

  I paused and then reached out to pull Lila into a hug. Even though she lived in my mind, she still existed, and I was trying to do what I could to make sure she understood how much I loved and appreciated her as a friend, not just as a means to help me overcome my memory issues.

  The nice part was that I didn’t have to figure out how to put that into words, because she lived in my mind and could hear my thoughts—she knew how much I loved her.

  When the hug finished, I stepped back with a smile before I opened my eyes again in the car and looked around myself. While it felt like I had been in my mind and memories for a while, I could actually still see the airport not that far behind us. And Aaron and Izzy were both still trying to find a way to get comfortable in the heat of the car.

  I reached out a hand to pull off the same spell that I had used to help Jake, turning the headrest into a fan that blew on Izzy and Aaron. “Better?”

  Aaron turned my way and flashed me a thumbs up. “That’s the kind of magic I can get behind.”

  “The kind that helps you,” Izzy teased, poking Aaron in the side.

  “The kind that’s helpful and not super evil? Yep. That kind,” Aaron said, nodding with a crooked sort of smile in place—though I could tell he wasn’t entirely teasing. Considering the recent revelation that my father had literally brainwashed Aaron into having a crush on me to keep me distracted, I couldn’t blame him. The fact that he still wanted to be anywhere near anything to do with me or magic was nothing short of a miracle, in my opinion.

  “I bet witches don’t have to worry about being carsick or airsick,” Izzy grumbled playfully, looking toward Tony as if he’d betrayed her simply by not having to worry about things like that.

  Tony shrugged. “Not really,” he confirmed. “The healing works too quickly for that kind of thing.” He turned to shoot me a smirk. “Michelle can, though. She got vertigo when we went flying together.”

  “Because you fly like a maniac,” I pointed out, shaking my head. “I’m perfectly fine flying with anyone but your speed demon self!”

  “Not my fault you can’t handle it,” Tony replied easily, some of his usual brightness returning. Of course he got his groove back talking about flying; he was like a human who raced cars for a living or flew fighter jets. But considering he had been so taken off-guard by the fact that his ex had a son, I decided not to tease him too badly. He needed a happier distraction.

  “I’m still convinced Andrew sent me to learn flying from you as some kind of intimidation tactic,” I laughed.

  “It was not,” Andrew said, shaking his head at the insinuation.

  “You never know,” I shot back without missing a beat. “It sounds like something you’d do!”

  Andrew rolled his eyes. “If I wanted to intimidate you, I wouldn’t use Tony to do it.”

  Izzy chuckled. “He’s got you there, Michelle. Tony’s definitely not intimidating.”

  “Hey,” Tony protested, one hand over his heart, though he was smiling too much to convincingly pull off the “insulted” act.

  “Face it, Tony; the secret’s out,” I laughed. “You’re too sweet to be in this business.”

  “I didn’t know being nice was a mark against me!” he said, laughing right along with me. “I guess that means we’re all kicked out of the Rendezvous.”

  “Yeah, but you take it to a whole new level.” Izzy chuckled. “You? You’re the guy that goes in after the battle is over and cheers everyone up.”

  “Yeah, but that’s literally my job!”

  Izzy gestured to Tony as if that explained everything. “Well there you go.”

  Tony laughed and leaned back against his seat. “I guess I’ll leave all the fights to the five of you from here on out, th
en.”

  “Oh, totally,” Aaron said with a smirk. “You sit back and relax, and we’ll have this whole war cleaned up inside of five minutes.”

  “Good to know,” Tony said.

  I couldn’t help but smile. We had been together this whole time, but we’d had to act like strangers. Now, squished together, the teasing had to come out or awkwardness would have reigned. And I was glad to hear it—not only because the camaraderie was so obviously improving Tony’s mood but because I loved when anyone in the Rendezvous would go back and forth with Aaron and Izzy. Aaron in particular had a wicked sense of humor—he used to refer to himself as my plucky sidekick back when we were surviving just the two of us on the streets together—and he made friends everywhere he went. The first Rendezvous hideout that we’d lived in was full of witches that Aaron knew by name, even if he only knew them by their voices. He’d spent hours telling stories about the human world, reciting movies and books and comic stories as his own kind of mythology—and they all ate it up.

  Aaron needed to be surrounded by people. He thrived when he was with friends. And even if I was starting to consider him more as a friend than a romantic interest, even if the crush I had on him was starting to dim by virtue of my father’s brainwashing and the simple fact that I’d helped raise several generations of kids . . . even with all of that being said, I still loved Aaron.

  So I was always glad to see Tony and Aaron hanging out together. Tony was one of those rare witches in the Rendezvous who didn’t have preconceptions about humans, who seemed to make friends as easily as Aaron did, no matter the species. I was a Halfsie, Izzy was a goblin, Aaron was a human, Andrew was a mercenary, and Elaine was a princess—but none of that seemed to matter to Tony. And I appreciated that more than I think he knew.

  Aaron was still smiling and laughing with Tony when he looked up and caught my gaze, and that somehow turned his smile that much brighter. “What’re you thinking, ‘Chell?”