I wish Val were here.
I sucked in a breath as a sharp pang lit up my chest. The truth was, if Val were still alive and she hadn’t betrayed us, I would’ve called her. She’d been the type of friend, or at least I’d believed so, that would hide a body with you and go down in a ball of flames by your side.
But Val wasn’t here anymore, and it wasn’t like I could call up Jo Ann. That poor girl would have a heart attack. I had to deal with this by myself.
I pushed away from the wall, starting to walk again as I packed away what Ren had just done. If he was right about the other Elite members knowing what I was and using me as bait to lure out the prince, it was no longer safe for me to be here. The ticking clock over my head had sped up.
My phone ringing cut off my thoughts. Digging it out of my purse, I saw that it was Brighton. A flash of guilt caused me to wince. I’d totally forgotten about Merle and everything.
“Hey,” I answered, scanning left and right as I stopped at the corner. A police officer was across the street, and a small group of people were huddled in a half-circle. I could see two straight legs on the ground.
“I’ve found something,” Brighton said, her voice pitched with excitement. “Finally, I’ve found something.”
It took me a moment to catch up. Her mom was missing. Community of fun loving faes. Right. “What?”
“One of the old hand-drawn maps of the city shows a totally different city,” she said.
I frowned as I crossed the street. “What does that mean?”
“It means exactly that,” she said, sounding out breath. “At first I thought I was just looking at a normal map. It has a lot of the landmarks and businesses, but holy crap, you’re not going to believe this. They are everywhere, and they were right under our noses the entire time.”
A horn blew, and I placed my hand over my other ear. “Brighton, you’re going to have to give me more detail, because I have no idea where you’re going with all of this.”
She took an audible breath. “Okay. Sorry. It’s just . . . This is big, Ivy. So big.”
Laughter spilled out from a restaurant as a door opened, and I sidestepped a slow-moving couple. “Details, Bri.”
“It wasn’t really the map that caught my attention at first. There are dozens of these hand-drawn things, but one of them had these strange markings in front of certain homes and businesses. They looked like crudely drawn wings, and I remembered seeing the same thing in one of Mom’s journals,” she explained. “It took me forever to find the journal it was in, but those wings on those buildings symbolize a safe haven for the fae.”
I almost stopped in the middle of the street. “Are you sure?”
“That’s what it says. Now, we know that the fae obviously have some kind of network in the human world. It’s the Order’s responsibility to ferret out locations where they’re clustered together, but I don’t think these locations are the kind my mom wrote about—the good fae.”
“Wait,” I said. “I don’t get it. If your mom knew about these places, then the rest of the Order had to, right?”
“I can’t answer that, but that’s not all,” she added in a rush. “I think I know where my mom is. There’s this house—a mansion really—that keeps popping up on all the maps. It has that symbol drawn on it. Mom had circled it on another map, too. I know that’s not the best evidence, but I . . . I just have a feeling.”
“A feeling?” I repeated.
“Yes. I know it sounds stupid, but I just know that’s where she is,” Brighton insisted.
I bit down on my lip. The conversation with Brighton was all over the place, much like my life right now, and a “feeling” really didn’t mean anything, but she was desperate to find her mom. That meant she would probably go knocking on the door of this house. “Where is this place you’re talking about?”
“Okay, so that’s the weird part,” she said, and I waited. A moment passed. “It can’t be where it says it is on the map.”
My brows lifted. “Explain.”
“I’ve double-checked and triple-checked the location,” she said. “And I keep coming up with the same place. This mansion is located over on South Peters Street.”
“Really?” I was trying to think of what was down there, but all I could muster up were images of old warehouses. Definitely no mansions.
Brighton drew in another deep breath. “It’s where the Market Street Power Plant is.”
My lips parted wordlessly and I paused to think. “That huge, abandoned and creepy-ass building on Peters Street?”
“Yes,” she said. “I told you. I’ve compared the different maps. Some of them show a different city—places that, as far as we know, don’t exist. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
That didn’t entirely make sense. “Are you going to be home all day?”
“Yes. Where else would I be?”
I stopped beside a delivery truck. “I’m going to swing by. Just promise me you will not go to that plant. Okay? I’ll check it out first.”
She didn’t answer.
My hand tightened around the phone. “Promise me, Bri. There are a lot of crazy things going on right now, and the last thing I need is you getting kidnapped or falling through a rotten floor. I’ll be over shortly. Just hang tight, okay?”
Brighton hesitated and then sighed. “Okay.”
“Thank you.” I started to hang up and then stopped. “I talked to Jerome. He knows something, but he warned me to not poke around about these fae.” I kept my voice low as people passed me. “You haven’t mentioned this to anyone else, right?”