Legacy (Keeper of the Lost Cities #8) - Shannon Messenger Page 0,25

anything dangerous. I’ve just been doing the mental exercises Tiergan taught me.”

“So you haven’t been taking fathomlethes?” she pressed, sighing when Keefe looked away guiltily. “Ugh. You know those things are super unreliable.”

They’d also made him cover the walls of his room at one of the Black Swan’s hideouts in tiny scribbled-on scraps of paper like a serial killer’s lair—which explained the abundance of drawings he’d managed to get done so quickly.

The rare river pearls were known for causing frenzied dreams and flashbacks.

“I was careful,” he promised.

“And it was hilarious,” Ro added. “One night he got out of bed and started doing a wiggle dance in his sleep and singing about Prattles pins. And another time he decided he was a baby alicorn and dropped to his hands and knees and galloped all over the house, whinnying. Greatest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Sandor choked back a laugh—but Sophie only felt more worried.

“It was worth it,” Keefe assured her, his face now brighter than Ro’s hair. “It helped me remember this.”

He flipped the silver notebook over and held out a photo-realistic drawing of…

A really nerdy-looking guy.

Between the tweed blazer and the bow tie and the ruddy cheeks and the wild hair, he looked like some sort of professor stereotype. All he was missing was a pair of thick spectacles and…

“He’s human,” Sophie realized, focusing on the man’s deep brown eyes.

She’d gotten so used to being surrounded by blue-eyed elves that it was almost jarring to see someone with the same eye color as her—and someone with deep smile lines and strands of gray peppered through his messy red hair.

The elves remained ageless after they became adults. Only their ears changed with time, growing points along the tops after a few thousand years.

“Look at what he’s holding,” Keefe told her, pointing to the man’s left hand, which held an envelope sealed with a symbol they’d only seen one other time: two crescents forming a loose circle around a glowing star.

“That’s the letter your mom gave you,” Sophie murmured.

“Yep. Looks like I didn’t follow Mommy’s delivery instructions as strictly as she wanted me to.”

“Which surprises no one,” Ro jumped in.

“Of course not,” Keefe agreed, a hint of his smirk returning. “But now we know for sure that I did deliver the letter. And I saw the guy she was contacting. And now that I know what he looks like? I can track him down again and find out what Mommy Dearest wanted from him.”

FOUR

BUT… YOU KNOW HOW MANY humans there are in London, right?” Sophie had to ask, even though she hated being the hope crusher. “It’s a huge city. Like, millions and millions of people.”

And the man that Keefe had drawn was a pretty generic-looking British guy—from his bright ginger hair down to the elbow patches on his blazer. There were probably ten men on every block who looked similar to him—not that wandering the zillions of London streets trying to find someone more unique would honestly be much easier.

“That’s where Dex comes in,” Keefe said, snapping the silver notebook shut with a smug grin. “I did some research—which, uh, don’t tell the Forklenator about, by the way. I’ll never hear the end of it if he finds out—and it turns out, London has lots of surveillance cameras. So Dex is going to hack into their system and set it up to search for anyone who looks like my drawing. He says the art is detailed enough that he should be able to find an exact match—and it’ll tell him which camera caught the image, so we’ll know right where the guy is. All Dex needs is a few minutes with one of their computers so he can do his thing, and then we just sit back and wait for the alerts to go off.”

Sophie wanted to point out that they were assuming the guy was still living in London, and he could’ve easily moved away in the years that had passed. But her brain was too busy getting stuck on something that was probably way less important.

“You’ve been working on this with Dex?”

She managed to leave off the “without me.” But the unspoken words still felt like they were staring them down, demanding to be acknowledged.

Keefe tapped his fingers against the spine of the silver notebook. “Well… I needed a Technopath. And Dex is the best.”

“He is,” Sophie agreed.

He was also her best friend.

And she knew it wasn’t fair to feel left out after all the times she’d chosen to hide what