The Shakeup
I stopped a foot from the bed. The feather hadn’t exploded or dissolved into smoke, but it might as well have. It landed just as hard. Just as deliberately.
Raven peered over my shoulder without a word. He didn’t ask. Just looked at me, then at the bed, then back again. “Where did that come from?”
I dropped to the bed and picked the feather up carefully, the way you’d lift a broken heirloom.
“It’s not the one I gave Charlie,” I said quietly. “But it’s close. Too close.”
He didn’t push, didn’t offer false comfort. Instead, he crouched beside the bed, eye-level with the quilt, studying the feather between my fingers like a clue in one of Dru’s puzzles.
“It’s her,” I said. “Rune. This is her idea of revenge.”
Not the pettiness I’d enacted to make myself feel better at the house she shared with Charlie, the same house where I had once spent most of my off-hours with the man I had loved. My idea of revenge had been insignificant and for no other reason than to soothe my battered pride.
So what if I’d taken the turntable from the microwave or unscrewed the bulb in the refrigerator?
“Hmmm, revenge for what? Stealing her toilet paper? Lilah, you were being a little silly, yes, but I doubt she knows about your prank. Dru said there’s no evidence from the surveillance we planted that Rune and Charlie are aware we were ever there.”
I shrugged off his theory. “I know what the facts are, but I’m telling you, it’s from Rune. She knows I gave Charlie that feather in a bottle and what it meant to me. The important thing is that she knows what it meant to Charlie.”
Raven’s gaze flicked to me again. “You think she sabotaged this assignment to get even?”
“No, I think that was opportunity. I think planting the feather in our room is her way of letting me know she ‘won.’ She was able to get the jump on us by having all the details of this mission. From our passwords to our room code. She wants me to know it’s her. That’s the fun of it. For her, anyway.”
“You’re sure this isn’t the same feather?”
I shook my head. “It can’t be. I threw the original out your car window. After we found it at Charlie’s. The odds are a gazillion to one that she could have found it or known where to look. Maybe a billion to one if she had some kind of magical help, but she doesn’t.”
I turned the feather in my fingers. Glossy black. Slightly iridescent but white at the base, just like the one I’d preserved, once.
“She doesn’t have to use the original to get to me,” I added. “She could have grabbed the book and never bothered to leave this behind.”
I recognized it for what it was: quiet sabotage. Emotional warfare. She could grind a person into the ground and look sweet doing it. Rune didn’t need spells when she could weaponize emotion itself. That’s how she turned Charlie into her puppet. She knew exactly how to weaponize his self-esteem.
“Lilah.” Raven studied my face. “I know you don’t want to admit it, but I know Rune stealing that book while posing as you really rattled you.”
“I’m fine.” Reflex.
“Let’s just say that if Rune left this feather to get to you—”
“She did.”
“—Then Charlie has probably said way too much about your secrets, and he’s enabled her to shake you up in ways probably no one else can. She’s got inside knowledge of who you are and how to hurt you.” He let his gaze drop again to the feather. “We need to know better what hurts her.”
“Charlie’s affection for me. Raven, if you’d heard what she said to Charlie when I was hiding practically under her feet…”
He waited a moment, then said, “Read it.”
I didn’t move.
“I mean empathically. Read the energy on the feather. Let’s figure out what she was thinking.”
I still didn’t move.
Because here’s what he didn’t understand—what no one really did unless they’d carried someone else’s grief in their own body through this so-called gift of empathy that was equal parts curse. I didn’t want to feel what she left behind. I didn’t want Rune’s smugness, or cruelty, or worse, her perfect calm. Her glee. I didn’t want another reminder of how easily I’d been replaced in Charlie’s life just as she’d replaced me at the bookstore, and how precisely she still knew how to rattle me.
But I was a professional. And professionals did the uncomfortable things when necessary.
Raven was with me. Kneeling. Present. If anything happened, he’d be there. Like always.
I closed my eyes and opened the part of myself I usually kept sealed. My empathic antenna unfurled, reached outward, lightly brushing over the feather. I waited. For malice. For anything.
Nothing came.
No hatred. No intent.
Just silence.
Almost as if a surrogate had left it.
This feather wasn’t steeped in rage or righteousness. It was…hollow. Devoid of intent. Whoever had handled it last had held it like a package, not a message.
I opened my eyes, shaken. “If Rune or Charlie had left it here, I’d recognize the energy. There’s no trace.”
Raven stood. “So it’s not hers?”
I hesitated. For half a second, I almost let the doubt in. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe this was all coincidence, a setup without intention. Maybe something charming the B&B did, or maybe something left behind in our room.
But that second passed.
No, Rune didn’t need to leave fingerprints to leave damage. The absence of her energy was a tactic in itself. She knew me well enough to haunt me with echoes.
“No. It’s from Rune. Just…not directly. Never mind the energy on the feather. I just know it’s from her. But someone else handled it last. Someone I’ve never met. A woman. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was just following orders. For money, I think. That’s all it was to her.”
“So maybe someone in housekeeping got tipped really well to leave it?”
“Raven!” I’d been so thrown off-kilter by the feather that I hadn’t realized the bigger danger. “If Rune left this here, or had someone leave it, then she has access to this room. We can’t stay here tonight.” I clawed my hands through my hair, freeing it from its clips. “How the hell did Rune get that code? Dru didn’t hand out passwords and codes like candy.”
Raven was on his feet immediately, stalking around the room, checking for surveillance with an app on his phone. He stepped to the window, his posture alert. He nodded toward the bookstore across the street. “All quiet over there. If I were our competition, I wouldn’t be hanging around or coming back to mess with you. I’d take the book and get out of here. But don’t worry: I know a few spells that will keep this room under my protection while we sleep.”
“Thank you,” I murmured, pushing to my feet and peeking out the window at the bookstore. “Looks like Jerome is back with his lunch. He’s parking his bike around back.”
I couldn’t stop pacing the length of the room. I still pinched the feather between my fingers. Each step made the floorboards creak in protest beneath the antique rug.
“I don’t know, Raven. It feels wrong to stay. This entire mission is tainted. I think we should go home.”
“Maybe.”
Was that disappointment I heard in his voice? Part of me wanted to stay, too. Just not under Rune’s shadow.
I bent to sniff a small vase of fresh flowers on the dresser. The sweet, powdery scent hit me like a lie. Pretty. Harmless. Completely at odds with the way the feather made my stomach twist.
“Okay, Raven, we don’t have to deliver bad news in person. Even if we didn’t stop once, it’d still take us over four hours to get back to the library. We should deliver the news by phone. Now.”
He watched me from his position silhouetted against the window. The midday light cast half his face in harsh gold, the other in shadow. Outside, the muffled clop of hooves drifted in again.
Neither of us jumped to make the phone call. Neither of us wanted to tell Dru we’d failed.
Adjusting the hairpins in his topknot, Raven turned back to the sunny window. He tilted his head to peer down at the bookshop across the street and frowned.
“The ‘Closed’ sign is back up,” he reported, “but there’s movement inside.”
“Weird. It was open when I looked. Maybe Jerome wants to eat his sandwich in solitude.”
I blew on the feather and watched it ripple. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Take it home for Dru? Flush it? Let Raven perform some kind of freeze-her-in-place spell on it? I decided to leave it on the end table near the door on my southernmost pacing.
Stretching my arms over my head and bending backward to unkink my spine from hours in the car, I kicked off my shoes and scrunched the antique rug under my toes. Maybe I could relax my body if not my mind. The feather had me keyed up, my skin one size too small. I was always at my best when my feet were bare.
“We should call Dru.” Try as I might, I couldn’t will my voice to steadiness. “Now. Update her on the situation.”
As if on cue, my smartwatch tapped against my wrist. I’d finally figured out how to activate the haptic alerts Dru’s tech team had designed. Better late than never.
“It’s like she heard us.” I touched the bezel to accept the incoming call. Given her state-of-the-art technology, it was entirely possible she was eavesdropping not only on Charlie and Rune’s home life but on my adventures, too.
I held the back of my left forearm at eye level. Dru’s face appeared on the small screen, her silver-streaked hair pulled back in a stylish side sweep. She was in her office at the Special Collections Library, the one that connected the library to her lecture hall in the English Department. A stack of leather-bound volumes rose behind her. Obviously, she’d just received another shipment of artifacts to authenticate and hadn’t started yet.
“Lilah, Raven,” she greeted us, smiling. Neon red reading glasses hid her eyes. “How’s Savannah? I’d love it if the two of you brought me back some fudge or peanut brittle. Matrease usually brings me back a goody basket to celebrate a new addition to the library.”
Without thinking, I made a face. Raven coughed.
“What? You don’t like sweets?”
Raven cleared his throat. “I’m not opposed to them, and sure, we’ll be happy to pick up some of both for you.”
Dru nodded slowly, confused at our blank faces. “It’s after one o’clock. I expected to hear from you by now. Did you secure the package?”
A beat of silence. I shot a glance at Raven, moving nothing but my eyes.
“Someone beat us to it,” Raven said at last. He moved in closer beside me so Dru could see both of us on her screen. “They had our names and the password.”
Dru pulled off the red reading glasses. “Explain.”
We took turns laying out what had happened—the locked bookstore, Jerome’s confession, the red-haired woman and sandy-haired man who had claimed to be us. I held back about the feather, not ready to share that particular violation.
“It was Charlie and Rune,” I blurted out. Then I remembered that the man had multiple tattoos, and Charlie didn’t. “Or at least, Rune.”
“Impossible,” Dru said without hesitation. “Charlie’s been at the library all day. He even skipped lunch to catalog a set of medieval maps I’ve been after him about for weeks.”
“And Rune?” I asked.
Dru winced. “She showed up about an hour ago, actually. Trying to get in because you weren’t here.” Dru’s mouth thinned in disapproval. “She managed to sneak in for a few hours yesterday while I was away, but when I returned, I made it clear to Charlie that he’d be fired if I ever caught her inside the Special Collections Library again.”
“But she was already banned after The Book of Heroes incident,” I pointed out.
“Which is why she waited until I was gone. I’d already revoked her student ID access, but you know Charlie’s brain is in his pants. Idiot let her in thinking I wouldn’t know.”
Raven grabbed my hand to quiet me. I hadn’t even noticed I was fidgeting again.
“So not Charlie, but it could be Rune. And someone else.”
Dru sighed. “I know where you’re going with this, but no, not Rune either. I can ban her from the Special Collections vault but not from the university library. Not as long as she’s a student here. She spends her spare time sitting in the lobby outside our door. Usually either on her laptop or making googly eyes through the glass at Charlie.”
Dru rolled her eyes enough that I could see them above the rims of her reading glasses.
“Anyway, Lilah, she’s definitely not in Savannah. Neither of them. Charlie didn’t know any details about this pickup. I only finalized the arrangements yesterday afternoon before I was called away and I didn’t share that information with Charlie. I had Sierra handle the arrangements.”
I lifted my eyes from my smartwatch to the feather on the end table. Why was I still struggling with a sense of betrayal even though Charlie clearly wasn’t involved? Somehow, it felt like Rune was winning a fight I hadn’t even realized we were in.
I didn’t need physical proof. Just the echo was enough.
This was usually where the man in the room said, “You’re being dramatic.”
But Raven simply said, “Okay.”
And then: “If you say it’s her, it’s her.”
I blinked, suddenly off-balance. It was easier when men didn’t believe me. At least then, I didn’t have to worry about what it meant when they did.
But Dru was nodding, too. Dru, who always believed me. “Hang on, Lilah. Just in case. I don’t know how, but…hang on.”
We watched her moving through a library corridor, through a door with a keypad, back into a backroom in the library, then opening the door into the main room of the Special Collections Library, known to the staff as Gate 1. She held up her watch so that I could see Charlie bent over a work table. In the distance, on the other side of the glass wall that separated Dru’s domain from the rest of the university library, I could see Rune in an overstuffed chair, feet on the ottoman, head buried in her phone. Dru reversed course and waited until she was back in her office to speak.
“Did you see them, Lilah? Whoever beat you to the pickup, it wasn’t Charlie and Rune. Unless Rune has a twin.”
“What should we do, Professor?” Raven asked, leaning into the watch.
“Find that book,” she replied grimly. “I didn’t tell Jerome everything, but that book is a Gate 6 level acquisition. It’s dangerous in the wrong hands. It contains rituals for opening doorways between worlds, not just metaphorically. If Rune already had it, I’d say maybe that’s how she did it, but at this point, it’s the only copy still in existence. I need you two to recover it, quickly and quietly.”
“We’re on it,” I promised, just as Raven’s head snapped up, his attention drawn to the window.
“Keep me updated,” Dru said and ended the call.
“What is it?” I joined Raven at the window.
Through the wavering glass panes, I caught a flicker of movement at the bookstore. A flash of bright red hair as someone—a woman—passed by the sunny front window, drawing the blinds closed.
“The light near the back door,” Raven murmured, pointing. “Did you see it pulse? Like someone opened it and quickly shut it again.”
He was right. Even from this distance, I could see the pattern had been disturbed. Not in any way a normal person would notice, but Raven wasn’t normal. His priestly gifts and magical intuition operated on a different level, tracking the currents and flows of energy that most people—even empaths like me—missed entirely.
“They came back,” he said softly. “They’re not done. Which means they probably still have the book with them.”
I slipped my shoes back on. For the first time since the feather, I had somewhere to put all that static. This was something I could do. A problem I could solve, rather than an emotion I had to untangle.
“Lilah, I’m worried about Jerome. They’re in there with him, and he knows now that they’re imposters.”
“Then that’s where we should be,” I said, already heading for the door. “Taking back that book. And our identity.”
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