Page 28 of Magic for Nothing

Chloe stared at me for a moment before the corner of her mouth began to twitch. “You’re fucking with me. Either I agree that I’m super important and stop questioning you, or I deny being super important and you don’t have to listen to me. You have siblings, don’t you?”

“I’m the youngest,” I agreed, before remembering my cover story. I forced my face to fall, looking down at the open drawer in front of me. “Or I guess I was the youngest. I’m an only child now. Not the way I wanted it to happen.”

“And since we don’t know yet whether you’re lying or not, I don’t know whether to feel bad for reminding you, or annoyed that you’re such a bald-faced liar.” Chloe shook her head and sat on the edge of her bed. “You’re good. I’ll give you that much, no questions asked. You’re very, very good.”

“If you think I’m lying, why am I even here?” I finished shoving my stuff into the dresser—sans Mindy, who was off investigating the house—before sitting on my own bed and frowning at her, hoping I looked more perplexed than annoyed. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to dispose of me in London?”

“It’s harder than you’d think to hide a body in London, especially if you’re planning to stay there,” she said. “We have a private graveyard here at Penton Hall. Your body would never be found, not by the best investigators in the world. London is a city with a remarkable number of cameras.”

“So?”

“So those cameras will show you leaving the bookshop shortly after you entered, in your rubbish hoodie, with that odious suitcase of yours, and catching the Tube all the way to Wimbledon. You walked into a residential neighborhood after that. No cameras there. No sign of what happened to you either.”

She sounded almost unspeakably smug, and was roughly my height and build. I raised an eyebrow. “You did that?”

“While you were having a nap in the guest room, right after you’d arrived. Having you reappear won’t raise alarm bells unless someone reports you missing—and if you’re really an orphan, as you say, no one’s going to do that.”

“And they loaded me into the van through a back door. No cameras there either, huh?”

Chloe’s smug silence was answer enough. I shook my head.

“Moments like this make me glad I’m telling you the truth,” I said. “You’d just make me disappear.”

“I think Leo would be sad about it. He’s a little sweet on you, you know. He’s also my brother, and your superior, so I’ll thank you to keep a safe distance.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Romance is the last thing on my mind. I’m here to avenge my family, not to start a new one.” Leo wasn’t hard on the eyes. But Leo wasn’t my type, and more, he wasn’t Dominic, ripe and ready to be swayed from the creed he’d lived by for his entire life. Leo was a believer. This was where he belonged; this was what he wanted to be doing. Nothing he’d shown me gave me any cause to think differently. And dating Darth Prepboy really wasn’t why I was here.

Chloe looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. Then she smiled. “You know, I believe you,” she said. “Not about everything, mind—that’s still being looked into—but about my brother. You’re not here to try picking up a husband.”

“No, still not doing that,” I said.

“Sorry. Leo’s quite well-regarded among the Covenant girls, and he’s not betrothed yet. Some of them are thinking he might be engaged one day instead, and they’re keen for the job.”

I frowned. “The difference being . . . ?”

“Betrothed is when they do it for you, according to the bloodlines and what’s hoped for. I’m to marry a Bullard, for example—Anthony, thank God, not Robert, who’s too old and a dreadful bore—because our families haven’t been combined in generations. Engaged is when you do it for yourself. Mum and Dad were engaged. He was meant to marry a Post girl, and she a Carew boy, when they fell in love and simply couldn’t be talked out of it. It’s part of why Grandfather’s still in charge. Normally, he’d have stepped aside by now, but there are some members of his cabinet who don’t feel my father has what it takes to lead the Covenant, because he broke tradition marrying as he did.”

I stared at her like she was speaking a foreign language—which, to be fair, she sort of was. “Um, okay. See, back in America, everybody just sort of falls in love, gets married, maybe gets divorced, whatever. The normal way. No bloodlines involved.”

“That’s because you’re heathens,” said Chloe, and laughed, presumably at my expression. Then she shook her head, and said, “It’s not like we can exactly go to the club and meet people. The Covenant is a secret society. We protect mankind. We have a sacred duty to keep doing that until all threats are eliminated, until humanity is able to walk in the night without fear. It’s easier if our marriages are arranged for us. Avoids inbreeding, guarantees healthy children. Everything we do is for the sake of the next generation, which might be fortunate enough to be the first born without this fight.”

She spoke like a rational person, like the things she was saying made perfect sense. Of course they’d have arranged marriages, because who else would understand? And of course they’d go along with it willingly, for the sake of the children as yet unborn, the ones who would inherit a better world built on bones. It was a perfectly reasonable way to look at things.

It was disturbingly close to the way we’d always looked at things. It bore a striking resemblance to my family’s expectation that one day, you’d go on a job and come back with a fiancé, someone who’d seen how bad things could get, someone who would understand. And of course we’d raise our children with smiles on their faces and knives behind their backs, because the Covenant was out there, lurking, a faceless, amorphous monster in the night. We had to be prepared to defend what was ours. We had to be ready to die for a better world.

Whether we’d intended to or not, we’d created ourselves to mirror them, and it had never been more obvious than it was right now, with Chloe making cheerful, measured statements that sounded utterly insane to my unfamiliar ears.

“So what happens now?” I asked, just to break the silence.

Chloe sobered. “We get changed. We go to dinner. Leo and my father continue looking into your story. You train with us, while they do. And when they decide one way or another, whether you’re a traitor or an ally, they come for you. They offer you a choice.”

“What’s the choice?” I asked.

Her smile was almost sympathetic. “I think you know, don’t you? Now get something decent on, I won’t let you make me late for food—and I meant what I said about touching my things. Don’t do it. You’ll be sorry.”

I already was. “Got it,” I said, and turned back to the dresser. It was time to keep playing make-believe, only this time, I wasn’t playing for the hand of Prince Thrushbeard from the Butterfly Kingdom.

I was playing for my life.