CHAPTER 1
At the end of Oak Leaf Lane, dawn arrived fifteen minutes early. Most folks didn’t notice, as they rarely did about such things, but eagerness circled the air like a hungry buzzard, watching and waiting. Wild grass shivered; droplets of dew danced to the ground. The earth trembled as low whispers tumbled over hummocks, making geese startle into the sky. Something was about to happen.
But Bristol Keats slept soundly, oblivious to the long-fingered light prying its way through her drapes at such an early hour. Nothing could wrestle her from her bed but a good night’s rest. Drool dampened her pillow, and her arm hung limply over the side of the bed. She had worked late. Her tips lay in a satisfied heap on her nightstand, a ruffled monument to her determination.
Finally, midmorning, she stirred, groaning, then rose from her rumpled bed and shook herself into her jeans. As busy as Friday nights were, festival days were busier, which was a good thing for Bristol. The late notices were stacking up. At the top of the pile lay the electric bill—forty days past due, and shutoff was imminent. Bristol’s tips that day, combined with those from the past week, would take care of that one and leave a little extra for groceries.
With sleep still in her eyes, she sniffed her hair for the oily scent of the parlor, then swiped it into a quick messy ponytail, unaware that the day would be anything but ordinary. It wasn’t something you could see, but as she splashed her face with water, then brushed her teeth, her head turned slightly to the side, a strange velvety warmth filling the air, though it was only a vague sense that she couldn’t name. She didn’t even realize she leaned into it, like a cat arching its back against a doorway.
A doorway. Yes. That is what she leaned into.
But she didn’t know it yet.
* * *
Bristol whisked back her drapes and shielded her eyes from a sun that already glared over the trees, too eager to remind her of the day. It had been one year since she returned home. For her, it seemed far longer. A lifetime was packed into the past weeks and months. The year bulged like an overstuffed suitcase that couldn’t be shut.
Home. Even now, it was a hesitant word on her lips, foreign and new, a word she toyed with in fits and starts. A word she was afraid to love. Run. Move on. Those were the words ingrained in her like dirt beneath her nails.
She turned from the window and riffled through a basket of clean laundry on the floor, pulling out a black tank top, then slipped it on. Her figure smoothed out the wrinkles.
“Bri!”
Harper’s voice bellowed up the narrow stairway like she was a six-foot bouncer instead of a skinny fourteen-year-old still waiting for a growth spurt. What Bristol’s little sister lacked in stature, she made up for in volume.
“I’m up,” Bristol called back, getting down on her belly to search for a missing shoe under her bed. She was certain she’d kicked them both off beside the bedpost last night, but it was late, and she had been exhausted.
“Bri!”
She paused from her shoe search. That wasn’t her sister’s usual wake-up call. Maybe a spider in the kitchen sink? Besides paying the bills and mowing the front yard weeds when she had time, Bristol was the designated spider retriever. Or maybe, worse than a rogue spider, another pipe had busted? Damned old house. Bristol rested her forehead on her fist for a moment, willing it not to be that. The balance in her head tipped and swayed, waiting for disaster to fall. They couldn’t afford another plumbing bill.
Rushed footsteps pounded up the stairs and Bristol stood, bracing herself as her bedroom door flew open. Harper’s cheeks glowed with a deep rosy hue, and her glasses hung crooked on her nose. Bristol’s stomach squeezed at how young she seemed, how urgent everything was to her. There were seven years between them, but they may as well have been a century.
Harper held a letter in her hand. “We got another one!”
Bristol pulled Harper into her room and closed the door. “Is Cat gone?”
Harper nodded and Bristol eased out a sigh. At least something was going right. She didn’t want Cat going into another tailspin over a simple letter. Technically, Cat was older than Bristol by ten months, but strangers usually guessed Bristol was the older of the two. Something about her reserved demeanor. Bristol was admittedly more calculating, weighing options before revealing her moves, while Cat was reactive. She felt everything passionately and didn’t hold back. Bristol loved that about her sister, her passion, except it also made her rants long and passionate, and she had no time for a high-pitched tirade today. Cat’s last rant came with tears when Bristol said she planned to drop her classes and search for a full-time job. Cat went on for a full hour. Are you crazy? Daddy paid good hard cash for those classes. He’d want you to see it through. Cat always knew the buttons to push, and their father was one of those buttons.
Bristol took the envelope from Harper, shrugging to prove her disinterest, and casually flipped it back and forth like it was junk mail. She did a lot of things for Harper’s sake these days. When it was too obvious, Harper’s jaw would jut out and she’d say, You’re not my mother. And then Bristol would snort, and they’d both laugh at the absurdity of it all, laughter its own strange release from their reality.
At least Harper had brought the letter to Bristol instead of Cat, who thought the letters were worse than junk mail and had squeaked like an injured mouse at the previous two. She proclaimed them a scam and ordered them burned. Bristol suggested the garbage would suffice.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Harper asked.
Bristol rubbed her thumb over the smooth vellum envelope. It was the same expensive stationery as before and, again, no return address, but the handwriting was different from the previous two letters. This time it was heavy and bold, as if to say, Pay attention! It had the same red wax seal as the others—another pay-attention gimmick. In her years traveling the fair circuit, witnessing spinning wheels and last-chance deals, Bristol had seen them all. Still, she opened it, the wax cracking and falling to the floor. She rolled her eyes as she pulled the letter free, additional proof for Harper that it was only a transparent scheme that wasn’t fooling her at all, but inside, her heart sped up. A third letter. They aren’t giving up.
Her parents’ instinct to run that had governed her entire life kicked against her ribs like a last warning from them. Harper pressed close, reading the letter too.
Dearest Bristol Keats,
Your great-aunt Jasmine is sorry you were unable to accept her previous offer to meet for tea. She offers another invitation, but this time at a location closer to you, the Willoughby Inn on Skycrest Lane just outside of Bowskeep. Please come and meet with her at 4 o’clock today in the tearoom. She has many warm memories of your father she wishes to share with you, as well as a gift—a rare piece of art that might help you and your sisters, similar to the art your father acquired not long ago. Please come alone. Your aunt’s health is fragile, and she shuns crowds.
Sincerely,
Eris Dukinnon, Counselor DN
Whoever wrote the letter was certainly trying harder. Dearest? They knew nothing about her father either. He didn’t have an aunt. He didn’t have so much as a scrap of a relative anywhere on the planet. He was abandoned as a toddler and grew up in foster care, bouncing from one home to another. A social worker gave him his name. Logan. There were no “warm” memories for any fictitious aunt to share.
But the offer of rare art was a new angle, one that hit closer to home. A chill tickled Bristol’s spine. They were digging, finding things out about the Keats family.
Harper nudged closer. “Do you think it’s possible—”
“No,” Bristol said, too harshly, and hoped Harper didn’t notice. A single sharp word from her could instill all kinds of worry in Harper. “No,” she said again, this time with practiced boredom, reluctant to meet her sister’s gaze. A disappointed breath hissed through Harper’s teeth. She was the brainiest of the sisters, her nose always in a book, but she was also the most softhearted and hopeful of the three. She still believed in happy endings, and, some days, that terrified Bristol. It wasn’t something Bristol could deliver. Harper took after their father in almost every way, from his warm brown skin to his straight black hair. She also had his big dark eyes rimmed with thick lashes that could disarm anyone. Their mother had been fond of saying that his eyes cast a spell over her from the day they met. Harper’s eyes had a different kind of power over Bristol—they made her wish she could set everything right for her, that she could undo all the wounds of the last year.
Secretly she shared Harper’s curiosity. Didn’t everyone wonder about who and where they came from? It was a question that never went away. Their father’s origins were a mystery. Ever since Bristol could remember, she and her sisters had ventured every possible guess. But his answer had always been the same: I don’t know. Her mother’s past was just as enigmatic, but unlike Bristol’s father, she simply refused to talk about her family other than to say they were rotten. If pressed about what rotten meant, she left the room. Something about it was too painful for her to discuss, and their father would shake his head, silently signaling the sisters to drop it.
But dropping the subject didn’t make the questions vanish. Even now, when she passed someone with warm brown skin and beautiful dark eyes like her father’s, she wondered, could they be a cousin or uncle? Likewise, when she passed someone with pale skin and shimmering copper hair like her mother’s, she wondered, could they be one of those rotten relatives?
Cat took after their mother, with the same green eyes and hair the color of a summer poppy—and then there was Bristol. With medium brown hair and height, she didn’t look like either of her parents.
Maybe that was why the ancestry question still poked at her. Even her eyes were a color somewhere between the two of them—hazel—a catchall name for a color that couldn’t decide what it was. Greenish? Brownish? Goldish? It was as annoyingly noncommittal as her parents were about their pasts.
Instead of fading away as memories should, her parents’ origins pricked her thoughts more often these days. Maybe it was the psych course she was taking at Bowskeep Community. Something her professor said burrowed into her head, and she couldn’t shake it out again: Our past is a shadow that follows us. For better or worse, it shapes us, and sometimes it controls us.
That was what it was like. A shadow tracing her footsteps. Just when she pushed the past out of her mind, a shitty letter like the one in her hands would arrive, stirring up old questions again. Who were the faceless monsters that had made her parents run? Did she look like any of them?
“Bri?” Harper waited for her decision.
Bristol crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it onto her already overflowing trash can. It tumbled to the floor, and Angus, their ferret, scurried over to sniff and investigate. He loved to shred paper, and snuck out the door with it.
“It’s only a scam, just like the others,” she said, but Harper’s eyes still drilled into her, dark clouds heavy with questions. Bristol grabbed her hoodie from her bedpost. “Gotta run, Harp. Today’s going to be crazy. Sal will kill me if I’m late.” She rushed out the bedroom door.
“But they’re not asking for something,” Harper argued from the landing as Bristol hurried down the stairs. “They only want to give us something.”
“Something that comes with a catch,” Bristol called back.
A catch they couldn’t afford.
People who lied about who they really were always had an angle, something they were working that, in the end, would cost you more than you could afford. And the Keats sisters had already lost too much.
CHAPTER 2
A gust of air blistered across the floor, a thousand stinging nettles warming Eris’s skin. The counselor’s long silver hair billowed behind him, caught in the tempest. Seconds later, heavy boots echoed off mirror-smooth black floors.
Tyghan was back. He rounded the corner and met the counselor’s gaze.
The young man’s face was laced with a fine spray of blood and his black wind-tangled hair was caked with mud.
“It didn’t go well,” Eris ventured.
“Glad your observational skills remain sharp.” Tyghan continued down the hallway. “My suite.”
“After you’re cleaned up, we can—”
“Now.”
Eris followed without comment. He understood the stress the young man was under. He hadn’t seen him rest in months.
Once in his suite, Tyghan stripped, flinging his clothes to the floor, then walked into the shower basin. He cupped his hands, catching water streaming from the golden spout, and splashed his face but flinched when the water hit his back.
Eris eyed the swollen slashes across Tyghan’s shoulder. Blood trickled in rivulets down his muscled back and thighs. “Shall I summon a physician?”
Tyghan didn’t respond, only focused on removing the blood that spattered his face. “Two of ours are dead,” he finally said. “Or worse. We couldn’t retrieve the bodies.” He was methodical as he described the encounter that turned into an ambush. “Three months. That’s all we have left—”
“Three months is still—”
“Not enough.” Tyghan’s reply cut the air like a cleaver. “I’ve spent fourteen years in training. So have my officers. The rest of our ranks, at least five. Three months is laughable.”
Eris answered quietly. “It’s all we have. We’ll make it enough.”
Tyghan went back to scrubbing. “Any more responses to your inquiries?”
“A few. I’ve expanded my search. I have someone coming in from Paris, and another from Lon—”
“Paris? Dammit, Eris! There must be someone closer!”
“The meager skills we need have become distant and rare, through every fault of our own.” Eris knew it was not what Tyghan wanted to hear, but it was true.
Tyghan shoved his face back into the stream of steaming water. The marble basin swirled with dirt and blood. “Not rare enough, unfortunately.”
Unfortunately. It was an understatement of epic proportions. Eris understood his frustration, but it was more than today’s loss that seethed through him. Betrayal was a bitter wound that still held Tyghan captive, a wound Eris feared he would never recover from. He weighed his next words, unsure if it would be welcome news or not. “I’m meeting with another potential candidate today—if she shows up. She ignored my previous two letters, although I provided ample incentive.”
“If she’s too stupid to take advantage of a valuable gift, she’s useless to us. Search elsewhere.”
“Or it could be she is too clever.”
Tyghan turned. He wrapped a towel around his waist and dried his face with another, his hair still dripping onto his shoulders. “How so? You haven’t even met her.”
