been so deep and so long that she was restored. With her eyes still closed, she reached out for Shinobu. She found only the rumpled covers, cool and unoccupied.
She opened her eyes. She was alone in bed, still dressed in her dirty clothing from the day before, with splatters of mud on her trousers.
“Shinobu?” she called.
She heard footsteps downstairs, but after a moment of listening, she knew they belonged to her mother, not Shinobu.
When she got to her feet, she saw the note on her bedroom floor.
Quin—
I have to go. Something isn’t right in my head. Don’t worry. I’m going to make it right again.
—S
She knew at once the focal had harmed him. Had he ever followed Mariko’s instructions for using it?
She ran downstairs and looked through all the rooms on the main floor. She found Fiona cataloging herbs in the treatment room, but no Shinobu.
Back upstairs, she pulled open the closet door in her bedroom. She’d thrown the focal in there last night, before they’d collapsed. It had seemed safe enough, just for one night, until she could hide it better.
The focal wasn’t in the closet. She searched the entire house for it, just to make sure, but the metal helmet was gone.
So was the athame of the Dreads.
19 Years Earlier
The train shook as it went around a corner, and the lights flickered off and on. Catherine was in London, gray and rainy London, which seemed so much more severe than Hong Kong had been. Her body swayed as the train straightened out, the dark tunnel flashing by outside the windows. She was riding the Underground to meet her parents.
They’d forbidden her to move around the city on her own, unprotected, but she was ignoring that order. Her parents were probably right. Anna was dead, and she herself could have been killed in the club in Hong Kong. Catherine still bore the bruises of that encounter across the back of her head and on one side of her jaw. But she wasn’t unprotected. As the train took another turn, she felt the comforting weight of her whipsword at her back. And she was standing, even though the car was only half full, because standing kept her alert. If another mystery Seeker was planning to attack her, she would not be caught unawares. It felt good to be back, to be ready to fight, to be a Seeker again.
On the same day Catherine had been attacked in Hong Kong, Anna had been attacked—by another person looking for their athame, possibly a brother of the one who’d attacked Catherine. Anna had lived long enough to explain that much. Judging from the amount of blood at the scene, her parents believed Anna had severely wounded her attacker, but she’d died before she reached the hospital. The athame had survived, well hidden in her parents’ bank safe.
It was still difficult to believe her sister was gone. Catherine had loved Anna, who’d been only a year older, but they had never been close. They’d fought with each other more often than not, and when Catherine looked back over her childhood, it seemed filled with petty competition and cruelty. Anna had been prettier than Catherine, better at math and science than Catherine, better at languages than Catherine, and she’d made a point of reminding Catherine of this every day since they were small.
But even with all of Anna’s talents, she’d been jealous when Catherine grew to be the better fighter. Anna didn’t like her little sister beating her at anything. When Catherine, who had beauty in her own right (if slightly less than Anna’s), had started to attract interest from boys, Anna had made it clear Catherine would never be anything but a second choice. When Catherine had shown great love for Seeker lore, Anna had mocked her mercilessly for her endless questions. When she’d daydreamed about the good deeds she would do as a Seeker, Anna had ridiculed her for being naive. And when Catherine had returned home from France with their family’s athame, recovered after missing for a century, Anna had stopped speaking to her altogether.
Their last conversation had been forced upon them by their mother. Anna had called Catherine in Hong Kong a month before, at their mother’s insistence, to brag about how much she loved the boy her parents were forcing her to marry. Archibald Hart. A ridiculous name for what must be a ridiculous boy—he’d have to be if he’d agreed to an arranged marriage in this day. He wasn’t