Page 123 of Anchor

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Rora. I simply can’t contact them any sooner,” she whispered, putting her hand over my knee.

“It’s okay,” I said, though it wasn’t. “It’s fine. I’ll figure it out.” Iwouldn’tbecause I had no clue where the hell to even go next. I had a car and some cash, that’s all.

“I’m glad to see you’re alive and well,” Cassie said, and her smile had turned sad now. Sorry. “And between you and me, I’m glad you finally decided to switch sides.” And she winked.

I pressed my lips. “Not sure if that’s what I did. I just…followed my gut. I followed Taland.”

That made Cassie laugh, and she didn’t bother to be silent about it, either. “Don’t worry, nobody will hear us,” she said, like she knew it for a fact. Like she’d made sure of it herself, probably with a spell. “Goddess, I love love. Really—Iloveit. It makes people so much more interesting. You were pretty boring before.”

This time I laughed a little. “I was?”

“Oh, yeah. And I also hated your guts for what you did when you first came to the IDD. Seriously, I was thinking about killing you on the job and calling it an accident. I tried to work as a clairvoyant with Michael a lot of times before we actually met.”

“Well,fuck,” I repeated, and she laughed.

“C’mon, don’t judge me. I didn’t know you. I had no idea who you really were!”

“Butyoujudgedme!”

“True, true,” she said, nodding. “But I changed my mind after we met and talked a couple times. Ididn’tkill you, and I think that’s all that matters.”

I was still laughing a bit. “Sure, Cassie. That’s all that matters.”

“You put Taland in prison—what did you expect?”

“I put Taland in prison to save his life, actually,” I dared to say, something I hadn’t even thought about often until I talked to him. Until he saw the memory in my head while he was carrying me out of the Iris Roe, and he said it himself—Ihadn’tbetrayed him. “They were going to shoot him on sight as soon as he stepped through the doors of the Strongroom, so I knocked him out before he did.”

That was a shock to Cassie. “You’re fucking with me.”

“I am not fucking with you, no.”

I told Cassie the story, only the important parts of it.

I told her about Hill, too, and that surprised her the most.

“You know, he’s the cousin of my cousins, but Ineverliked that guy. He gives me the creeps,” she said, flinching. “Fucking Whitefire. They’re all the same, I swear.”

“And you should stop judging people based on their color, Cassie,” I said. “But yep—you’re right. They are.” This was only half a joke. As much as I believed that all colors of magic were the same, most Whitefires were just mean. Evil.

“I’ll be talking to my cousins about him,” she said. “Hill actually grew up away from Selem, you know that? His Whitefire father raised him. He refused to live near Selem or his wife’s family when she died—very young—until Hill grew up and decided to come back after his father’s death.” She shook her head. “We never really hung out—he’s much older than me, but he always looked like a red flag on two legs.”

“I had no idea,” I muttered. “Just make sure to tell them, okay? Whenever you talk to your cousins, tell them.”

“I will. I will.”

Cassie told me about Headquarters, about the teams that were sent after me and Taland—classified information, all of it, butof courseshe knew about it. Everybody owed Cassie favors.

“The agents who know are making up all kinds of stories—that he went to prison for a reason, that it was all planned from the beginning, thatyoubroke him out and brought him into Headquarters to steal—stuff like that.”

“Let them think whatever they want,” I mumbled.

“The public doesn’t know, though. They have no clue what happened,” Cassie said. “They’re keeping it a secret to most of the staff as well.”

I sighed deeply. “Good.Fine.I don’t really care, Cass.” What I cared about was finding Taland.

“You really have no idea where he could have gone?” Cassie said after a moment, as if she could read my mind. I shook my head. “You said there was no sign of struggle, right?”

“There wasn’t.” I’d checked that house so many times, I was sure of it.

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