THE WEATHER HEATED UP. IT WAS AS HOT A CANADIAN SUMMER AS I'd ever felt. We ran around outside with shirts off like we were normal people. Sadie even bared her arms when she was on the property. I assumed Ginny had been instrumental in this. She had shown up in my room with two wardrobe boxes with giant bows on them and left them for Sadie. Not a thing inside had long sleeves. She had felt for Sadie in her particularly persecuted shirtless moment in the Survivors' City. This was her quiet way of saying: It was time to be free.
I idly wondered when my embattled baby sister would start to feel free.
Sadie eventually got used to the sound of me and stopped leaving rooms when I came into them and texting me to apologize for it. And I eventually got used to the feeling of electricity in my bones. I also got used to her sleeping in my bed again, in the home I'd known best in my life. She hadn't admitted it, but being away from the Survivors had given her peace in a way, even if she felt like she was failing them.
It seemed stupid we hadn't thought of it before that acquiring from a Survivor meant more than acquiring a power. Why else would Raven have acquired Achilles' weakness? Didn't it make sense that consuming the essence of warrior vieczy Survivors who had consumed that of other Survivors would only continue to fuel Raven into a bigger and hungrier monster? Sadie was excited and terrified to learn how it worked. The rest of us were just grateful to know something, to have made any progress at all. She was also particularly grateful that something useful had come from Lizzie's still unexplained tragedy.
This was crucial because we were at a standstill. We kept one eye on the Survivors and one on the murmurs of the supernatural world at large to see if Raven was moving. But like so much of this journey, we'd run full speed into brick walls. All we could really do was prepare for the inevitable, which, as it turns out, is not as focused of an activity as one would think.
The first week I had the power, we kept it from Anthony. But by the second week, he had figured it out. I had learned to use it, and it had already become second nature to Ginny. Anthony lingered, watching us practice more closely than he usually did, and he was there to see the moment Ginny unintentionally merged two squirrels into one rather normal, if not a little large, creature. If it weren't already, the jig was then up.
By the third week, I had the power mastered, and I began working with Sarah to pick up where she and Lizzie had left off: merging the power from one of us with the power from another. Sarah was capable of bestowing power on others, if it had been taken from another source. Our theory was that if I could create a merged power — a blend of my own and whomever's — then she bestowed it upon me, it would stick because it was mixed with a power already belonging to me. In this same way, if I could pull the power from two supernaturals —one enemy and one ally, for example — and merge them, then she could put the power in ally.
We were getting closer, but so far it hadn't totally worked. I was trying to do it on myself before I did it with others, but I couldn't manage it. Mark and Patrick thought that was because I didn't have any individual powers for someone else's powers to merge to. So one afternoon, they showed up at our makeshift training space in the yard dragging a ghastly looking creature behind him, bound by invisible chains. Patrick killed the creature — a disgusting shape-shifting, flesh-eating beast called a ghoul whose roots could be found in the mythology of a few Islamic countries — on the spot, and unceremoniously called, "Everett, get over here!" He had me inhale the milky white smoke that rose from the creature's dead lips. Patrick clapped me on the back and said, "Congratulations, kiddo. I'm pretty sure you just earned either the ability to be invisible or to walk through walls. Now back to work." I'd been working on merging someone's power to my new one ever since.
Meanwhile, my mother had created a full-scale apothecary in what was once a catering kitchen (though we had never and would never have company there), where she, Sarah, and Hannah created every elixir from Lizzie's book and any others they could think of. This, too, fell under the aimless task of preparing-for-the-inevitable. But at least it kept them busy.
By the fourth week, Mark had brought me another creature to acquire from — a shape-shifter with a fire-conjuring power — and while I mastered the use of fire, my father complained to me, having given up on Sadie's ability to master the half of a reading power she acquired from Valentin (the other half floating somewhere in Alexander Raven) on her own. Whether she was incapable of learning how to use what was highly regarded as one of the three most valuable supernatural powers on this earth — along with Mirroring like Ginny's, and mind-reading like her own — was unclear. But if you asked me, I think Sadie was tired of knowing so much about people, and I don't know that she was in a hurry to learn anything new, for once. It goes without saying: I didn't actually say this out loud. But whether it was inability or avoidance, my father had taken the situation into his own hands and had arranged a meeting for her with an ally of his who knew a great deal about reading powers in hopes that said ally could help Sadie learn to use the gift.
Today, she ventured to the meeting by herself. And I walked down the dirt road that stretched on the other side of the forest behind our house, down among the houses in Red Blood territory.
My family had bought our land from the Kainai people, the Blood Nation, when the Canadian government was selling pieces of their reserve out from under them a century earlier. Situated on the far corner of our chunk of the Blood 148 reserve, we had given most of it back to my father's Blood allies, an outcast group nicknamed the Red Bloods for their loyalty to my father and our family. In the clearing, I walked past modest, aging houses I had built hand in hand with my father and the allies.
My father's relationship with the Bloods extended further back than my life did. When I was a child, he had made a prophecy to a family member of the chief's about a powerful magical medicine that would come to the Blood Nation. As the story went, the prophecy, coming from an outsider, incited a feud in the clan, and the chief's relative and his supporters who believed the prophecy broke off from the rest of the tribe for some time. Because the Bloods had always called Anthony Red-Eye, the leader of the breakaway sect that supported him called himself the Red Chief. For most of my life, we'd lived on this land in the reserve with our allies, an open secret from the rest of the Blood Nation. When the prophecy of magic coming to the tribe came true, we gave this piece of our land to all the magical Bloods so that they might still be able to live inside their reserve, if not technically on the land the tribe itself owned.
As years had passed, the open secret stayed just that. The Red Chief may have come and gone since then, but the group remained. Now the term Red Blood referred to the group of Kainai men and women who were connected by one magical bloodline.
But now they were led — I use the term loosely — by another. I knocked on the door of a house I had helped build over a hundred years ago. A sixteen-year-old boy with black onyx hair that reached his shoulders answered with only a nod, then saw himself back into the modest living room, where he sat on an aging wooden rocking chair. His skin was lighter than was normal for the Bloods. It was as if diluted by a yellowy hue instead of the deep tan of the rest of his tribe. And though I'd thought it before, seeing him now, he reminded me of someone in a way that was simply uncanny.
I felt a pang of guilt hit my stomach.
I hadn't seen Kutoyis in a while, but otherwise he looked the same as he always did. He was wearing fitted jeans I was pretty sure Ginny had brought him, Chucks she'd given him when they were cool the first time, and a Bon Iver T-shirt she'd picked up a few months before, which told me she'd beat me here. Kutoyis and Ginny had always understood each other on a level the rest of us couldn't. They were both different even in our circles. They were outcasts among outcasts. I could think of someone else I knew and loved who fit that description.
He was rolling a cigarette on the coffee table. The TV droned on in the corner.
"Where the hell you been?" I asked. "We've been here for over a month."
"Why do you care, Goldilocks?" he asked me as he lit up. The name his elders had given me was actually Gold Heart. For the first hundred years of our relationship, Kutoyis and I were closer than I'd been with anyone. But he'd grown distant over time. The last members of his clan who had raised him died, his twin sister abandoned the Blood 148 reserve, and he started hanging out with Ginny during a punk-rock phase she went through. At some point, he'd started calling me Goldilocks.
"If you're not going to call me Gold Heart, couldn't you at least just call me Everett?"
"All right, Everett." He blew smoke rings in my direction. "What can I do for you?"
"Do you remember you used to be a warrior? The most fearless of your entire tribe?" I asked.
"Whoa, big talk today. This is unexpected," he said. I narrowed my eyes at him. "Okay, okay," he confessed. "Not unexpected. Ginny's given me the whole spiel. I'll tell you what I told her: Birthright or not, I'm done fighting. We're all lame and exist in these happy little poor, exploited, and useless reserve worlds, and there's no longer anything to fight over."
I laughed. "Big talk indeed. For one, you've lived on a reserve your whole life, so don't give me that crap. Two, maybe the human part of your tribe, sure. But the part that you supposedly lead? You think there's nothing to fight for there?" I asked. He laughed, ignoring my question. "Just a month ago you painted your face in the old ways, put feathers in your hair, got on a horse, rode all the way to the Piegan territory in Montana, and fixed a gaping hole in magical protection so big that none of the other supernaturals there could. You can pretend you don't care, but I know you do."
"That was a favor to Red-Eye. You know how much I owe him," he said.
"Please. We all have a million things we could do to make my father happy, but we don't necessarily do them," I argued.
He shrugged.
"Why did you really go?" I asked.
He said nothing.
"Let me guess," I said, nodding toward the flat screen on the wall. ""The Hidden City' was on the news, and you realized that it might be the same hidden city you'd been searching for all these years."
Kutoyis put the papery cigarette to his lips, inhaled deeply, and held the smoke in his lungs. Maybe it wasn't a cigarette he was smoking after all. Finally exhaling, he said, ""Searching for' is an overstatement."
"Like hell it is. Was it all you hoped it would be?" I asked.
"Who said I had any expectations?" he asked, flipping channels. The "Search for the Hidden City' had first been relegated to the news ticker at the bottom of the screen on CNN, before it disappeared entirely. A blip on the world's memory.
I was losing patience with him. "Can you stop this angsty teenager crap with me? I was closer to you than my own brother once, and I don't know when you got like this, when you stopped talking to nearly everyone and holed up here in this tiny house smoking whatever it is you're smoking, and hating everything about yourself, but it's time to snap out of it. Ginny's told you about the war. My dad has asked you to be a part of it. And you and I both know that you'll take any excuse you can to use all that magic of yours, especially if it's to kill something."
"It's not angsty teenager crap. I'm 143 years old, jackass," he spat. "If you don't like it, leave."
"No. I need your help, and for that to happen, I have to figure out what the hell is going on with you," I said.
"What's going on, Goldilocks, is that I'm mad at you. Legitimately, rationally angry with you. You and I stood on that cliff for a hundred years and worried about the prophecy of the Sorcerers somewhere down in some hidden city in Montana. Red-Eye foresaw its existence. Ginny saw its danger. We looked for it. We kept looking for it when everyone else forgot, after Mark was born and everything changed. You thought there was a cure to your goddamned Winter Condition in there, and I thought maybe there were people like me in there so I wouldn't feel like such a freak, and now I find out that not only have you found it, you've been living there? That you're in love with a girl from there?"
"Kutoyis . . ."
"No, no. It gets better. Because then I find out that the city wasn't what you thought it was, that it doesn't have a damn thing to do with curing your bloodsucking disease. But it is full of people like me, isn't it? People who have these powers and not your stupid Condition. People who are more human than they aren't. People who can have families and pass their powers down. People like me. All those years, I was right. All I've ever wanted was to be was among people like me, and you found that place, and you didn't tell me about it? For a year?" He was screaming now. I could only imagine who was hearing this.
"You're right," I said. "I should have told you. But you have to understand . . ."
"What's there to understand? You don't care about me. You aren't the same person you were. But that's your story isn't it? Always changing. 'Cause, see, the first Everett I knew hated himself so much for his murderous instinct that he couldn't kill his own prey and his big brother had to do it for him. Oh wait, but then the Everett I knew was so bloodthirsty that his family relegated him to staying up here in total isolation so that he couldn't hurt people like he did in New Orleans. You know, Google tells me people still think of those brutal murders as the work of an unidentified serial killer? Except, of course, for one guy who apparently wrote the newspapers down there at the time, telling them the murders were the work of a supernatural demon. I wonder where he got that idea from? Then there was the spoiled brat Everett who complained that he had to stay here in little old Blood 148, so his family built a frickin' mansion for him to bide his time in. Oh but now the Everett I know sometimes lives in sunny California on a beach with nearly naked people running around in front of him, just asking for trouble. Or does he live in Montana among a bunch of sorcerers like me, keeping them from me? Or is he here, sharing a bed with a half-human he's supposedly in love with, who he's more likely to kill than he is to fuck? Gee, I don't know. These all sound like com pletely different people to me."
I emitted a low growl I wish I hadn't. I guessed my eyes were turning red because my throat started to burn. It was an obnoxious little history lesson.
But I found a way to keep my focus. I came for a reason. Bigger than the war, bigger than my pride. I came for Sadie. "You got one part wrong," I said. "They aren't all like you in the hidden city. Only one of them is."
"But Ginny said . . ."
"Yeah, I know what it seems like, but trust me," I said, clenching and unclenching my fists to stay calm. "I know you and Sadie, my half-human as you call her, as well as I know anyone in the world. And I can tell you that you two are cut from the same cloth. The rest of them? Yeah, their powers are similar. And they do pass powers down like you do, but it's different. It's always been clear part of you is human. Now it's clear part of her is too."
This information seemed to cut through the anger boiling in Kutoyis. He actually paused to think and then said, "So what do you want from me?"
I tried to figure out how to put it. "She's seeking a lot of answers about herself, and even though you pretend you've given up on that, I know you haven't. If we figure out more about her, we'll figure out more about you too. Maybe even about Sky, and where she could have gone. It could help all of us."
My voice must have given me away because he said, "There's something else you aren't saying."
Of course there was something I wasn't saying. It was the part that would get me in trouble. "An elder in their family, Hannah, has visions like Red-Eye does. Except she only has them about her family . . . and the Bloods."
This rattled him. "You're telling me that we're—"
I cut him off. "I'm not telling you anything. I know what it looks like, but I can't say you're related to them. I don't know. They've never heard of the Blood Nation, let alone figured out that your reserve is only a few hundred miles from them. Sadie . . . apparently had a vision of the Bloods too. Or so Hannah said. We haven't told them the whole truth about our history with your tribe. As far as Sadie is concerned, we've been allies with some people in Canada all my life, but that's it."
Kutoyis laughed sadly. "Keeping secrets from the ones you love, Gold Heart? Who are you? Your father?"
"I know. Look, I'm not an idiot. I know it's not exactly going to go well when Sadie finds all of this out. So I hoped you and I could work things out before we talk to her so that your issues with me — and the issues she'll have with me when we tell her all this — won't keep you two from connecting. Somehow you two are pieces of the same puzzle. I'm sure of it."
A long silence fell between us. He finished his cigarette and stamped it out against the blackened table. "Just how much alike are we?"
I considered how much to tell him and how much to let Sadie tell him. I settled on asking him one question. "I don't think there's been a day in her life where she felt like she was born to be immortal. Has there ever been one in yours?"
He looked at the floor. "Not a one."