something about it. The thing was, she missed him, too.
Freya wiped her tears. "All right. I'll be right over."
She was tired of feeling guilty. Bran was far away. She knew he had work to do but she couldn't help holding it against him. Maybe things happened for a reason. Maybe they were already broken, even before Killian came onto the scene.
Because like everything that took place this summer with Bran and Killian, she felt as if she were part of a larger story, and the curious, reckless part of Freya - the one who drank too much and played with matches and broke a million hearts before breakfast - wanted to see how it would all play out in the end.
Chapter twenty-eight
The Hidden Door
Ingrid looked around the empty ballroom at Fair Haven and shook out her legs. Flying always gave her cramps, especially when she took Oscar's form. Like Freya with Siegfried, and Joanna with Gilly, Oscar was part of her, and she could turn into his shape at will. She did not do it often, only on occasions that demanded it. During Freya's engagement party she had noticed that the top windows to the ballroom were always left open. Now Ingrid had flown in through one of them before dawn, when everyone in the household was sure to be asleep. She could have taken a broom, but since Joanna had been spotted the other day Ingrid thought it would be more prudent if she assumed an animal-like shape. There were many ways for witches to travel, and like her brethren Ingrid preferred the more natural one: lifting into the air and rising to the heavens as her magic lessened gravity's hold on her core. They used the brooms to ground and center themselves, an anchor to the earth that no longer held them when they were flying.
She texted to her source.
"i'm inside"
"good. you have the blueprints with you?"
"yes."
"excellent, go to the ballroom. center tag. something's different about it."
He was right. There was something a little off about the center tag in the ballroom floor plan; the little diamond that pointed toward the walls in the room she was standing in was surrounded by that strange calligraphy of symbols. And one of the points on the diamond was just a little askew. It may have been the careless hand of the draftsman, but the whole tag seemed to cant slightly toward the right-hand corner of the room. The tip of the diamond on that corner was just a bit longer than the others', as if it were reaching toward that far corner, pulling the eye toward that part of the room. She scanned the room and found that corner. It was an exhilarating feeling, understanding an abstract drawing of a space and its relationship to the real world.
"ok i've found the wall," she texted.
"knock on it, what does it sound like?"
As directed, she knocked on the wall, making a dull heavy thud.
"heavy, like there's something behind it" Ingrid knew that a standard wall would have a hollow sound, sharp and round.
"what do you want me to do?"
"see what's underneath."
Ingrid left the room and returned a few minutes later with a crowbar that she had found in the garage. She took the sharp end and dug it into the corner of the wall. The blade slid forward, splitting the paint as it bit into the wall. Ingrid decided she would just have to try one of Joanna's restoration spells to fix it after she found out what was behind it. No time to think of the damage she was doing now. She was on to something here.
She pushed the blade deeper into the wall, but it stopped after half an inch. She wedged the end of the crowbar sideways and a chunk of the wall the size of a baseball fell off and landed on the floor. She picked up the piece of plaster and examined it. A renovated house like Fair Haven should have walls made from cement plaster spread in layers on a wire mesh. The cement would be coarse and sandlike, but Ingrid was holding a chunk of Sheetrock that was much older. She tossed it back to the floor and knelt below the hole she had made. Along the break she saw the paint chipped by the blade of the crowbar. The outer paint layer was a thick, glossy emulsion. It had the dark, rich sheen of lead-based paints. But underneath the paint, where the crowbar had