Authors: Amanda Hocking
He lowered his eyes, staring down at his lap. The corners of his mouth twisted into
a bitter smile, and it was several long moments before he finally answered. “You know
why.”
“No, I don’t.” I turned in my seat, folding my leg underneath me so I could face him
fully. I could let it go, and part of me thought I should, but I didn’t really understand
why. So I pressed on.
“Because my dad was on the Högdragen, and he got killed for it,” he replied wearily,
still staring down at his lap.
“But…” I exhaled and shook my head. “I mean, I’m sorry for your loss.”
Ridley waved it off. “It was fifteen years ago.”
“Your dad died a hero,” I said, as if that would offer some comfort. “He saved the
kingdom. He died an honorable death.”
“He did.” Ridley lifted his head and nodded. “But he’s still dead. My mom’s still
a widow. I still had to grow up without him. Gone is still gone.”
“So what?” I asked. “You’re afraid of dying?”
“No. Come on, Bryn.” He turned to me, smiling in a way that made my skin flush for
a moment. “You know me better than that. I’m no coward.”
“No, I never said you were,” I said, hurrying to take it back. “I didn’t mean it like
that.”
“I know.” He held up his hand, stopping my apologies. Then he let out a deep breath
and looked away from me, staring out the window at the trees and lakes that the train
raced past. “You know why my dad died?”
“Viktor Dålig killed him trying to overthrow the King,” I said.
He laughed darkly. “No, my dad died because Elliot Strinne was a slut.”
I shook my head, not understanding. “What are you talking about?”
“Elliot Strinne became King at a young age, and he thought he had all the time in
the world to get married and have babies,” Ridley explained. “So he decided to sleep
with as many eligible young ladies as he could, and that meant when he suddenly fell
ill and died of a rare fungal infection at the age of twenty-six, he had no direct
heirs. The crown was up for grabs.”
Ridley was telling me things I already knew, giving me a refresher of history lessons
I’d learned in school. But he was doing it with a decidedly different twist, a bit
of snark mixed with sorrow, so I let him.
“Viktor Dålig thought his young daughter should’ve been Queen, even though she couldn’t
have been more than ten at the time,” he went on. “His wife was Elliot’s sister, and
she would’ve been Queen, if she hadn’t died years before.
“All these freak accidents fell into place.” He stopped for a second, staring off
and letting his own words sink in with him. “There should’ve been a reasonable heir.
But there wasn’t.
“It was between the child Karmin Dålig, and Elliot’s twenty-three-year-old cousin
Evert, and the Chancellor had to make a call.”
“It made sense,” I said when Ridley fell silent for a minute. “It was a logical decision
for an adult to be the monarch rather than a child.”
“I’m not arguing about whether it was fair or just, because honestly, I don’t care.”
Ridley shrugged. “All that mattered was that Viktor Dålig threw a fit because he felt
like his daughter was being passed over.”
“Then your dad, and other members of the Högdragen, stood up to him and his friends
when they tried to throw a coup,” I reminded Ridley.
“Viktor and his friends tried to assassinate a King arbitrarily placed there.” Ridley
gestured as he spoke, getting more animated the louder his voice got. “The Chancellor
could’ve chosen Karmin Dålig just as easily as he had chosen Evert Strinne. But he
didn’t. And if Elliot had just gotten married and had a child, the way a King is supposed
to, my father wouldn’t be dead.”
He shook his head, and when he spoke again, his voice was much lower and calmer. “You
called his death honorable. He died in the hallway of the palace—a hall I have walked
down a hundred times since that day. He died in a pool of his own blood, trying to
protect a random stranger in a crown, because another man wanted that crown for his
own daughter.” He turned to me, his eyes hard and his words heavy. “He died for nothing.”
“If you really believe that, how can you do any of the things you do?” I asked. “How
can you stay in Doldastam, working for a King and for royals you despise?”
“I don’t despise them, and I don’t mind working for them. I
like
my job,” he insisted. “I just refuse to lay down my life for something that doesn’t
matter.”
“The crown may seem arbitrary to you, and to a point, it is. But for better or worse,
our society works because it’s a monarchy. Because of the King,” I told him emphatically.
“And you may think your father died for some jewels wrapped in metal, but he died
protecting the kingdom, protecting you and me and everyone in it. And I’m sorry you
don’t see it that way.”
“Yeah. I am too,” he admitted.
“Maybe you shouldn’t go on this mission,” I said softly.
Ridley looked at me sharply. “Why?”
“There’s a very good chance that Konstantin Black is going to try to kill Emma, or
me, or you, or all of us.” I tried to speak without accusation, because I wasn’t mad
at him and didn’t think less of him. I’d just begun to fear that his heart wasn’t
in this, and that could result in somebody getting hurt. “I wouldn’t want you to risk
your life for something that you don’t care about.”
“Emma is an innocent girl. I won’t let him hurt her, and there is no way I’d stand
by and let you face Konstantin alone.” Ridley reached over, taking my hand in his,
and the intensity in his eyes made it hard for me to breathe. “I already told you
that I’m in this with you.”
The house looked like it came straight from a fairy tale. It was a majestic Victorian
mansion surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. Trees surrounded the property, all fresh
and green thanks to the early warmth of spring, and a few of them had white and pink
blossoms. Amid the bustle of a downtown metropolis, this was a slice of another world.
Since we planned on sneaking in, we wouldn’t be going in through the front gate, which
left us scoping it out near the back. Through the fence and the trees, I could barely
see the end of the long, curved driveway, which seemed oddly crowded, with several
cars parked in it. I leaned against the fence, trying to get a better look, but Ridley
spoke, so I turned back to face him.
“She’s not home,” Ridley said matter-of-factly.
He stood a few feet behind me, the collar of his thin jacket popped to ward off the
icy chill in the air. The wind came up, ruffling his hair. It was so rare to see his
thick, wavy hair unstyled, and I realized that it was getting long.
After traveling all night to get here and sleeping on the train, neither of us had
had a chance to shower yet, and Ridley hadn’t shaved. We’d rented a car, parked it
two blocks away from Emma Costar’s house, then walked down to stake it out.
“Can you sense her?” I asked.
Ridley stared up at her house with one hand in his pocket, where he kept her lock
of hair. His lips were parted just slightly, and his eyes darkened in concentration,
then he shook his head once.
“No,” he said finally, his voice nearly lost in the wind. “But it’s ten in the morning.
She should be at school.”
“So you’re still not getting anything on her?”
“Not yet.” He glanced away from me, watching a car that sped by. “I’m probably not
close enough. Or maybe it’s just harder because I’m out of practice.” He turned back
to me, trying to give me a reassuring grin, but it faltered. “I haven’t really done
this in four years.”
“Well, we should figure out which school she’s in,” I suggested.
“The file had listed two or three private schools in the area they thought she might
be in,” Ridley said. “Why don’t we check into the hotel, then grab something to eat
and start making a plan to get to her?”
“I need to get to a school, so I can get to know her.”
“No offense, Bryn, but I don’t think enrollment is gonna be an option this time.”
Ridley smirked at me. “You can pass for seventeen, sure, but I sincerely doubt that
anyone would take you for grade nine, and that’s what grade Emma’s in. We’re gonna
have to approach this a different way.”
“Do you wanna break into her house?” I suggested. “Check out her room, see if we can
find anything on her?”
He seemed to consider this, staring at her house with a furrow in his brow. “No. It
just doesn’t … feel right.”
“What do you mean? Is this her house?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “Maybe. Let’s just get out of here and regroup.”
Ridley started to walk backward, away from me and away from the house. I stayed behind
a few beats, glancing back at the house. He paused, waiting, so reluctantly I went
after him. As we walked the few blocks down to our car, a police car sped by with
its lights off, and Ridley regarded it warily.
We reached our hotel and checked in quickly, and Ridley spoke little. When I tried
to press him about what was going on, he just said that he needed to get something
to eat, and then hopefully he could think more clearly.
The diner we stopped at had an expansive organic vegan menu, which was nice and gave
Ridley plenty of options to pig out if that would help him. I’d grabbed Emma’s file,
and I spread it open on the table beside me, leafing through it as I picked absently
at a salad. When I glanced over at him, Ridley had his head bowed over his sandwich,
his fingers in his thick hair.
“I still think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to check out her school,” I said.
He sighed. “We just need to find her and get out of here.”
“What is going on with you?” I closed the file and rested my elbows on the table,
so I could lean in closer to him. “You’ve been acting strange ever since we got here.
Are you just freaking out ’cause you can’t sense her? It’s not a big deal, and we
can still find—”
“It’s not that I
can’t
sense her,” Ridley quietly interrupted me, staring emptily at his plate. “It’s that
it feels like there’s nothing to sense.” He looked at me then, the fear in his eyes
conveying the gravity of the situation. “She just feels … cold.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve never felt anything like this before. But it can’t
be good.”
“So…” I tried to take in what he was saying. “What do you want to do?”
“I think we should do an Internet search to make sure that’s her house. I know her
file says that’s her last known address, but I’m not completely sure when that was
updated,” Ridley said. “And then we go to her house, and we wait there until she comes
home—
if
she comes home—and as soon as she does, we basically grab her and get out of here.”
I glanced around, making sure nobody was nearby, and when I whispered, my words were
nearly drowned out by the Laura DiStasi song playing on the diner’s stereo. “You want
to kidnap her?”
“If we have to, yeah,” he said without remorse. “Something bad’s going on.”
I leaned back in my chair, considering his idea, and then I nodded. “Okay. If it’s
what you think we should do, then let’s do it.”
He pulled out his smartphone and took the file from me, double-checking the spelling
of the host family’s name and the address. I dug into my pocket to pull out my wallet
so we could pay for our lunch and then get out of here.
“Shit,” Ridley said, and his whole body sagged. Under the dark stubble on his cheeks,
his face had gone ashen.
“What?”
Instead of answering, he turned and held his phone out toward me, so I could see the
ominous headline that had shown up during his search for Emma’s address.
Emma Jones, Teenage Daughter of Software Mogul Benjamin Jones, Was Found Missing from
Her Bedroom
I scanned the article below, and it went on to say that based on the ransacked state
of her room, the authorities suspected foul play, and they were reaching out to the
public to see if anyone knew anything about where Emma might be. Worse still, her
family said Emma had only been gone since the early morning.
My heart dropped to my stomach. “We missed her by a few hours.”
“Then maybe we haven’t missed her.” Ridley shoved his phone back in his pocket and
stood up in a flash.
I threw a couple bills on the table, then pulled on my jacket as I hurried after Ridley.
An icy drizzle had begun outside, but Ridley hardly seemed to notice.
“We should split up,” I suggested. “We can cover more ground that way.”
“Good. That’s smart. I’ll go back to her house, see if I can get a better sense of
where she might be. You should go back to the hotel.”
“The hotel? Why?”
“You should get on your laptop, check out her Facebook, Tumblr, et cetera, see if
her friends know anything and what people are saying online. You can also figure out
what school she’s at, and then you can go down and talk to them.”
“All right,” I agreed reluctantly.
“If I can’t find anything at her house, I’ll head down to the police station. I might
get them to tell me something.”
That wouldn’t have sounded likely except that Ridley had mild persuasion. He only
used it for tracking, and usually on people like host families or school officials.
Or in this case he could get a police officer to tell us everything they knew about
a missing girl.
I didn’t like being stuck on desk duty, but it might give us a clue to what happened
to her. If Konstantin Black was trailing her, her friends might have noticed, or Emma
might have said something to someone.
She might have even left with Konstantin willingly—before he’d been on the Högdragen,
he’d been a tracker just like Ridley and me, and he was just as capable of talking
a changeling into leaving with him as we were. And if he had done that, maybe Emma
had told someone about it or where she was going.
That didn’t seem likely, especially given how aggressive Konstantin and Bent had gotten
with Ember and Charlotte, and given the alleged state of Emma’s room. But at this
point we couldn’t rule anything out, and we had to work as quickly as possible to
find Emma.