When we did, they rushed at us, screaming in anger.

  Naelen held up his hands. “Stop,” he called in a loud voice.

  They all halted.

  “Why are you here?” said Naelen, pointing at a woman in the front, who was frozen in place, her face twisted in rage. “You. Speak.”

  “We want the objects,” she said. “We want to release Jacques. We will fight you until you give them to us. If you will not give them to us, we will kill you and take them.”

  Naelen sucked in breath. He addressed everyone. “Forget about the objects. Forget about Jacques. Go home, and remember none of these things. You will only know that you were in a dangerous brainwashing cult for the time you were away. Now, you are free. Go home, and be free.”

  Immediately, the crowd broke up. All of the people had confused looks on their faces. They began to amble in various directions, looking lost.

  We could hear them talking to each other. “Where are we?” “Who are you?” “What’s going on?”

  I chewed on my thumbnail. “You think that will hold?”

  “Sure, why not?” said Naelen.

  “Well, doesn’t normal compulsion wear off when you’re not in the compeller’s presence?”

  “I have two objects on me,” said Naelen. “It’s going to hold.”

  But what if we scattered the objects like I wanted us to? Would it hold then?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When I woke up the next morning, Naelen wasn’t in bed with me again. But he wasn’t in the room either. I put on my robe and wandered in the direction of the smell of coffee. But Naelen wasn’t in the kitchen either. The coffee was there, and there was a container of donuts from The Fractured Prune, which was my favorite. I poured myself some coffee and put a cinnamon-and-chocolate-chip encrusted donut on a napkin. I continued my search for Naelen.

  I found him on the back porch. He was standing at the top of the steps down to the beach, blocking the path to the house.

  Juliet was below him. She was crying.

  Naelen turned to look at me. “Hey, Clarke. Sorry. I’m trying to get her to leave.”

  I munched on my donut.

  Juliet reached out for Naelen. “How can you do this to me?” Her voice was full of tears. “Please, don’t shut me out.”

  “You have to go,” said Naelen. “I’ve been telling you that you have to go.”

  She let out a sob. “If you care about me at all—”

  “We’ve been through this,” he said. “We don’t even know each other.”

  I set down my napkin and put the half-eaten donut on top of it. Then I came up next to Naelen and put a hand on his arm. Despite myself, I felt really bad for Juliet. She was crying as if her heart was broken.

  “Maybe you should go inside, Clarke,” said Naelen.

  I shook my head. I climbed down the steps so that I was level with Juliet. “Is there someone we could call? Maybe your best friend or sister or—?”

  “You,” she said, spitting out the word. “Why does he want you?”

  I withdrew, pulling away from her.

  Naelen pounded down the steps and took her by the arm, hauling her away. “You don’t get to talk to Clarke like that.”

  “She’s a dragon slayer,” said Juliet. “She kills our kind.”

  Naelen started to drag Juliet away. “She doesn’t, and you need to go.”

  “Naelen!” I called after him. I didn’t like how rough he was being with her. I knew he was frustrated, but that wasn’t an excuse to hurt someone.

  But Juliet wriggled out of his grasp and pushed him. “Get your hands off me.” She sprinted toward the street, still crying.

  Naelen stared after her, shoulders slumped.

  I went down the steps and padded across the sand in my bare feet until I reached him. “Naelen—”

  He turned on me, and the words died in my throat. He pushed past me, heading back for the house. “She’ll get over it,” he muttered.

  * * *

  Naelen was grilling out on the back deck. He had vegetables in a grill basket that he was stirring with tongs and thick slabs of steak that he was drizzling liberally with some kind of marinade. The air smelled of a delicious, mouth-watering scent.

  Naelen’s back deck overlooked the ocean. It had two tiers, one higher and level with the house and one a step closer to the sand. The wood it was made of had been stained a dark coffee brown. The outdoor furniture—several lounging chairs, plus a table and chairs around it—looked as though they were made from wicker, but they were actually a kind of plastic that looked just like wood. They matched the deck and they had cushions on them made of geometric patterns.

  After Juliet left, Naelen had disappeared to the grocery store for hours. At least, he said he was going to the grocery store, and I believed him.

  Okay, there was a gnawing worry at the back of my head that he’d gone after Juliet, but I hadn’t given it voice. Whenever it came to the forefront of my brain, I tried to shove it back. I didn’t want to think that.

  I was sure he’d just gone to the grocery store to think. He’d probably wandered around the aisles, pushing his cart, trying to figure out his life.

  I wished he would have taken me with him, though.

  However, now that he was home, grilling lunch for us at 11:00 AM, I didn’t know how to talk to him. I didn’t know what to say. So, I just perched on one of the chairs next to the table. I divided my time between staring at Naelen’s back and looking out at the waves on the ocean.

  Naelen didn’t talk either.

  The tension between us was thick, and it was growing thicker by the moment. I had to figure out a way to defuse it.

  “Did you really go to the grocery store?” I asked. Damn it. No, not that. I wanted to put the words back in my mouth.

  He turned away from the grill, brow furrowed. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Nothing.” I pulled my feet up onto the chair, wrapping my arms around my knees and trying to make myself as small as I could.

  Naelen shut the lid on the grill and turned. He still had the tongs in his hand. “Where else would I have gone?”

  I tried to make myself even smaller. “I don’t know.”

  “Clarke, damn it, why’d you say that?”

  “It’s just that she left, and then you left,” I said. “And then you didn’t come back for hours.”

  “So, you think that I went after her and screwed her senseless or something?”

  “No,” I said. But he’d brought up sex awfully quickly, hadn’t he?

  He sighed. He set down the tongs. “Think what you want.” He stalked across the deck and went down to the lower level. He jammed his hands in his pockets and gazed out at the waves.

  I should go after him. But I didn’t know how to make this better. I didn’t want to be a crazy, jealous girlfriend. Naelen was trying as hard as he could, and I wasn’t helping by not giving him my trust. It was hard, though. Sometimes, I felt as if the crazy, jealous part just came forward, unbidden.

  As I started to get out of my chair, my cell phone buzzed. I fished it out of my pocket and peered at the screen. It was Gina. Oh, great. What now? Was she calling to scream at me about Merida Price again? I answered it. “Hey, Gina, what’s up?”

  “Clarke,” she said, her voice full of tears, “I need you.”

  I sat up straight. That didn’t sound like the angry Gina I’d left at the Order. That sounded like the old Gina, the one who always got herself into scrapes. “What happened?”

  “I… I didn’t mean to, but everything’s pointless, and I called the other people from the Magnolia Center, and none of them even remember me, and I just… I didn’t mean to, but it sounded like a good idea, and now…”

  “What are you talking about, Gina?” I was on my feet. “And where are you?”

  Naelen must have heard the alarm in my tone. He was heading back up across the deck toward me.

  “I bought some dice,” she said. “I took it.”

  “Oh, Gina.” I bit down hard on my lip.

  She dissolved in sobs. “I know.”

  Naelen was next to me. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Gina,” I said, moving the receiver away from my ear. I moved the receiver back. “Where are you?”

  “Out under the boardwalk,” she said.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said. “I’m coming.”

  “Thank you, Clarke,” she whispered.

  I hung up the phone.

  Naelen raised his eyebrows.

  “She’s strung out on dice under the boardwalk,” I said. “It’s a place she liked to go sometimes. Look at the waves and things. The police don’t like drugged-up drakes down there, though, and if they catch her, they’ll lock her up again.”

  “I’m coming with you,” said Naelen.

  I shook my head. “No, it might spook her if you’re there. It’s got to just be me.”

  “Clarke—”

  “Don’t fight me on this.”

  “Okay.” He held up his hands. “But she’s got dice in her system, and she’s a drake, so she can do magic if she wants. You better take one of the objects. You’ll need it if you want to use the monocle, or if you need to do any magic of your own.”

  I didn’t want to rely on the objects, but… well, what he was saying made sense.

  * * *

  I felt lucky to have the use of Naelen’s driver, Michael, since I didn’t have to wait for a taxi or the bus to get down here. Also, I didn’t have to drive around looking for a parking space. There was no parking down by the boardwalk at this time of the year.

  Michael dropped me off by Second Street, and I dashed up to the boardwalk. Once there, I dodged tourists on bikes and rented-specialty cycles. I crossed the boardwalk and clambered down the stairs to the sand. The boardwalk was raised up off the sand here by about three feet, and if a person wanted to crawl underneath, it was possible. It was kind of disgusting underneath there, though. There was a lot of trash that never seemed to get cleaned up.

  But I saw Gina pretty quickly. She was sitting on the sand, digging her toes down under it.

  “Gina?” I said.

  She looked up at me. She was still crying, but her eyes had the kind of manic, high look that they got when she was on the drug. “Clarke. You came.”

  “Of course I came,” I said. “I’m your sister.”

  “But I was awful to you,” she said.

  “Well… you were in shock.”

  She glared at her toes. “I thought about what you said, and you had to be right. It didn’t even make sense. If Merida wanted to help people, why did we infiltrate the Order the way we did? She made us kill people who tried to stop us, did you know that?”

  I shook my head. “It’s okay, Gina.”

  “No, it’s not.” Tears spilled out of her eyes. “She made me kill someone. I may be a crappy person, Clarke, but I never did anything like…” She was overtaken by sobs.

  I hurried over to her through the sand, and I wrapped my arms around her.

  She cried and cried, clinging to me. “And now,” she said, through her tears, “I don’t know how to stop. Dice is so good, Clarke. It makes it all better—”

  “You feel good? That’s why you’re sitting under the boardwalk crying?” I said.

  “Well, it makes it easier,” she said. “It’s only that I feel so guilty now, because I was clean for so long. But I can’t resist it. I’ll never be able to resist it. Merida was the only person who could help me resist it, and she was just using me.”

  I tightened my arms around her. “That’s not true. You had the strength within. She brought it out of you, but you are the one who got yourself clean.”

  She pushed me away, shaking her head violently. “No. The only reason I was clean was because I was inside the Magnolia Center. Look at me. My first time back out in the world, on my own, I start using again.”

  “It was just a temporary slip-up,” I said. “You’ll never do it again. Come back to my place, Gina. I’ll get some food in you and take care of you and—”

  “No!”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because that’s the way it always was between us,” she said. “And it shouldn’t be that way.” She pounded her chest. “I’m your big sister. I should have taken care of you, not the other way around. And if we go back to old habits, it’ll turn into the same thing. I’ll be stealing your TV to buy more dice and getting arrested and falling down that same dark spiral.”

  “Gina, you’ve got to stop being so negative.”

  She scrubbed at her face with the heels of her hands, and then she started crawling to the opening of the boardwalk.

  I went after her. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “Away from you,” she said. “I shouldn’t have called you. You’ve finally got your life back. If you have to start taking care of me again, you can’t go traveling with Naelen anymore. I’m not ruining everything for you. Not anymore.” She cleared the edge of the boardwalk and stood up. I could only see her legs now.

  I scrambled after her and got out of there.

  Gina had started up the steps to the top of the boardwalk.

  I caught up to her and grabbed her by the arm. “You don’t ruin things for me. We’re family. And if you think running away from me so that I don’t know what’s going on with you is going to solve anything—”

  “Forget about me, Clarke,” she said. “I’m too far gone for anyone to help me. Just let me go.”

  “No way,” I said.

  She shook out of my grasp and hurried up the steps.

  I caught up to her again, got ahead of her, and blocked her path. “You’re not running away from me.”

  “I can’t change.”

  “You can,” I said. And then I looked into my sister’s eyes, eyes that had once been the same color as mine, but were now flecked with bright pink that matched her scales, and I pumped object-boosted magic into her. “You’ll never do dice again. You’ve learned your lesson. You’ve realized that you have a well of inner strength that you’ve never tapped before. You aren’t even tempted by it anymore.”

  She furrowed her brow, looking confused.

  I poured as much magic into her as I could, compelling her, binding her to my words.

  Her expression cleared. She took a deep breath. She smiled. “It’s the craziest thing, Clarke, but I feel like that really worked. Whatever you just said, it’s like it got into my head or something. I do feel I have a well of inner strength.”

  “That’s because you are strong.” More compulsion magic.

  She nodded slowly. “Yeah. I’m strong.” She gave me a hug. “Thanks.”

  “Okay, good,” I said. “Let’s go back to my place, then. Get you cleaned up.”

  This time, she didn’t resist me.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I called Naelen to tell him I was back at my own place and that I’d compelled Gina. He said he’d come over with the rest of the objects and reinforce my compulsion to make sure it wouldn’t wear off, since he was more powerful than me. Besides, he said, he still had all that food he’d cooked on the grill.

  So, Naelen came over and we ate cold steak and veggies, which were still really good, considering they’d been charred and marinated.

  Gina dug into the meat, proclaiming it the best steak she’d ever had. Drakes had to eat meat to stay alive, and they craved it. Gina was a bit of a connoisseur.

  I told Naelen that he should give Gina and me some time alone afterward, that we needed some sister-bonding time, but Gina waved me off and said that she only wanted to get a shower and then she needed to go out and hunt for a job.

  I was pretty shocked by this. After all, she’d barely come down from her dice high, and she had held down exactly one job in her life for any considerable amount of time, and that was the one at the Magnolia Center. Anyway, it wasn’t like her to be so intent on seeking gainful employment.

  But whatever the compulsion had done to her, it seemed to have made her feel incredibly self-confident.

  If the objects could really do this—create long-lasting behavior changes in people—couldn’t we do incredible good with them? We could help people quit smoking or stop overeating or stop gambling.

  Of course, we didn’t know if they were really long-lasting, these compulsions. We knew that the people from the Magnolia Center hadn’t come back, but that didn’t mean anything, not yet. The compulsion could wear off in a few days or a week, and maybe they’d all be back at our door, trying to get at us again. Maybe Gina would start doing dice again within a few days. We’d simply have to wait and see.

  But some part of me hoped that it would last. And some part of me hoped that using the objects wasn’t all bad, even though they contained something like Jacques.

  So, anyway, Gina did exactly as she said. She took a shower and got dressed up in some of my clothes, which looked borderline professional (I had to admit I wasn’t much for owning job-interview clothes), and she went out looking for a job.

  Naelen and I went back to his place.

  But when we got there, a town car was parked outside on the street, and two people got out of it to intercept us as we went into the house. They looked older than we were, but they didn’t look aged. Still, there was something in their carriage and clothing that didn’t speak to youth. They wore clothes with an expensive cut. The woman had pearls and coiffed brown curls. The man had a suit and blue eyes.

  When Naelen saw them, he got a pinched look on his face. Hmm. I hadn’t been aware anyone could make him get that look on his face besides me.

  “Naelen, where were you?” said the woman. “We’ve been here waiting on you for nearly ten minutes.”

  He sighed. “Mother, I don’t know why you don’t call before coming over to my house like any normal person.”

  “Well, we checked with Reign last night when we all went out to dinner, and she said you were back in town, and so we thought we’d stop by. It’s afternoon, hardly the time to be out and about. We assumed you’d be home.” She let out a long sigh.

  “Yes, it’s terribly inconsiderate of you, son,” said the man.

 

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