“I know who he is,” I realize. “I’ve seen him before. He’s Mora’s work friend.”
“Work friend?” Ella asks.
“Or something. I don’t know—he was at Grandma Dalia’s funeral with Mora. I remember. It was him and another guy. When this one,” I tap the boy’s face with my fingernail, “saw the photo of Grandma Dalia on her wedding day, he looked at Mora, and then she held his hand.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing,” I say, shaking my head. “I was glad to see it, actually. I thought maybe it meant she was with him and that she wasn’t interested in Kai.”
“She took him—clearly—and then brought him back to go to Dalia’s funeral,” Ella says.
“She feels bad?” Lucas suggests.
“No,” Ella says, shaking her head. “It’s not guilt.” She presses the paper back against the book cover absently, then speaks again. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she’s not faking confidence. Taking the boy she kidnapped back where he might be recognized? It’s like a show of power. Like she’s proving something to someone.”
“No, wait,” I say, shaking my head. “The boy at the funeral was maybe a few years older than me at the most. If it’s the same boy, he should be Grandma Dalia’s age. Right?”
Ella and I look to Lucas, who sighs and sits back. He rubs his mouth with his hand, and I can tell there’s something he doesn’t want to say. “She’s done something,” he says, finally. “The wolves—they don’t age once they transform. Maybe whatever she’s done to this boy—and Larson Davies, and maybe Kai—works the same way.”
Something in my chest plummets.
I was afraid she’d kill him, afraid she’d hurt him, afraid she’d abandon him.
It never occurred to me she’d keep him.
CHAPTER TEN
Lucas is going to find Mora and Kai—if they’re still in town. The snow has melted a little, making the roads somewhat passable, but there’s still a snowdrift blocking the Reynolds’ garage; Lucas has to take the pink Hummer that he abandoned at the bottom of the hill a few days before. I watch him drive away, grimacing at the icicles dripping off the front porch—does the weather change mean the Snow Queen has moved on?
“You have to trust him. This is what he does, remember? Besides, if there are Fenris out there, you and I are just going to attract their attention,” Ella says as we walk back to the living room and plop down on the leather sofas—Lucas insisted on going alone.
“They never attack men?” I ask. I remember Grandma Dalia’s warnings about the beasts—was Kai only ever in danger from the Snow Queen herself?
“The Fenris don’t, but it looks like Mora has that covered anyhow,” Ella says as she flips another page of a thick book that appears to be written in Italian. I fidget for a few moments, looking at the clock. Ella lifts her eyebrows at me and smiles.
“He’s just finding them. Then he’ll come back and get us and you can go to work on convincing Kai to stay away from the Snow Queen, while I pummel her to find out where she took our opera singer. You have no idea how much money we poured into that kid,” she says.
“That’s probably why she wanted him,” I say. “I was thinking last night… Mora told me and Kai once that she used to be wealthy, but that she was trapped. And something about how she wasn’t allowed to dance.”
“Huh,” Ella says. “So she wasn’t always the Snow Queen, then.”
“No,” I say, and shake my head. “And I’m thinking that’s why she takes certain boys. Because now that she has this power, now that she’s a queen—”
“She’s using it to own the things she’s always wanted. Artists. Bohemians. Rebels. The anti-tie crowd,” Ella says, nodding. “Like Larson.”
“Like Kai.”
“I wonder what the other boy did—the redheaded one,” Ella says.
“I wonder how many boys there are,” I answer. I open the cookbook and flip through a few of the pages I haven’t studied closely yet. The pages grow more confusing as the book goes on—the recipes toward the back are written in shorthand so punctuated I can’t fathom what they mean, and one page contains a weird shape outlined in pencil, something resembling a curled-up dog. There’s text near it, but it’s too smudged to read.
Read. I’m sitting here reading, while Kai is with her. While she’s doing whatever it is she does to him, however she does it. Making him a collectible, all to prove something to the world, all because of some terrible past. Did she become the Snow Queen because of her past, or in spite of it? I look at Ella again. I trust her—I trust her and Lucas more than anyone other than Kai, even though I hardly know them, yet just sitting here while Lucas is out is making my head spin.
“What about you?” Ella interrupts my thoughts.
“Hm?”
“Kai plays violin. Larson sings. Lucas tracks things. The redheaded boy did something. What do you do?”
“I…” I trail off. I try to stop it, but my stock response, the same one I gave Mora, falls from my mouth, clunky and awkward. “I don’t really do anything.”
“Don’t do anything,” Ella asks, drumming her fingers on the sofa, “or don’t do anything yet?”
I smile. “Is there a difference?”
“Huge difference,” she says. “People who don’t do anything annoy me. People who don’t do anything yet excite me, because they can potentially do everything.”
“Kai always said I need to find something,” I admit, letting the idea that I can do everything sink in and rattle me pleasantly. “I think it bothered him that he knew he was a violinist, and I didn’t know what I was. He said I should be something.”
“You will,” she says. “When you’re ready. Don’t let anyone rush you. Unless you’re living in your parents’ basement at thirty. Because then I’ll personally show up and rush you. Don’t think you can hide down there. Lucas can track anyone anywhere.”
I laugh. “Don’t you ever go with him, when he’s tracking? Don’t you want to?”
She shakes her head. “He’s good at what he does. I’m good at what I do. But that doesn’t mean that I’m good to have along when tracking. Or that he’s good to have along when meeting the governor, because my god, he’s not. Nor does he like wearing a tux, so it works out.”