Page 116 of Anchor

“I really have to go now,” I cut her off and walked outside.

“Of course, of course” she said, holding the door open. “It was such a pleasure to meet you, Rosabel. I will be holding mysecret for a week, but then I’m tellingeveryonehow delightful you are!”

I almost started running.

But when I was on the sidewalk, she remained there with her arms crossed, watching me still, and I could see my reflection in the glass perfectly fine. I looked just likeme, which made me curious—too curious not to ask.

“What do I look like to you now?” I asked, knowing that I might regret it later, but I’d regret it more if I didn’t ask.

“Oh, very…plain,” she said with a shrug. “Brown eyes, short brown hair, chubby cheeks and a smaller mouth. Different from your real self.”

I nodded.

“But pretty still, of course!”

She must have really thought I cared. “Thanks a lot,” I said and turned around to walk away, go find Graveyard Junk and get the hell out of this place already.

“You’re very welcome. Come back again—any time,” she called. “Thank you for your purchase!”

Don’t look back, don’t look back, don’t look back,I whispered to myself, because it wasn’t okay to attack someone just for being annoying.Not okay, Rora. Keep walking.

I did. By some miracle, even after she called after me to tell me thatwe would make just the greatest friends in the world if I came back,I walked away without a word.

Chapter 23

Rosabel La Rouge

I found Graveyard Junk fairly easily. Nobody was in the cabin in front of the gates. There was a trailer inside, and the lights were on, but nobody was coming out of it, either.

Not that I waited long before I went to look around, barely a few minutes, but still.

A black Range Rover was parked behind a pile of metal scraps far to the right of the gates. It was covered in a thick layer of dust, and I didn’t need to wonder if it was the car Taland had left here because the door clicked open when I was still two feet away from it. The ignition turned on and the wipers did a great job in clearing out the windshield and the rear window.

I drove it away without really thinking, without checking the trunk or under the seats or anything at all—I just drove it away slowly.

The gates of the junkyard were still closed, and whoever was inside that trailer remained there. Nobody stopped me, nobody asked me questions. I went right through the town and tothe other side where I’d come from. Where I’d left Madeline’s Mercedes right there by the welcome sign.

I stopped the SUV next to it, and I waited for a car to disappear in the distance before I raised my hand and called for a fire spell, one that continued to intensify in the first ten minutes when it caught onto something. It hurt to unleash it through the open passenger window and onto the windshield of the Mercedes, but it was worth it. A scream slipped from me, but the ball of flames that shot out of my hand and broke the glass was incredibly satisfying. I drove in reverse until I was far enough away so that the explosion didn’t reach Taland’s SUV and waited.

Sure enough, the Mercedes exploded a minute later with a deafening sound. The magical fire was going to consume most of its pieces by the time they put it out, and it was going to take these people a while to find out who the car belonged to, if they ever did. By then, I’d be long gone.

The tank was full and the road clear, and I apparently didn’t look like me at all. There was an old 44 Magnum in the glove compartment, fully loaded. Different than my M17 but it would do just fine in case I needed bullets, which I doubted. The radio worked and I left the volume on low, just to have some background noise so that my thoughts didn’t get the best of me.

Like that, I drove all the way back to Baltimore.

The Mergenbach siblings.

Taland had mentioned them a few times—the ones who basically ran Selem together with his brothers. And it had seemed familiar at first when Taland said it, that name, but I had no idea why until I was all alone in a foreign SUV with a vulcera made out of wood on the dashboard, and my heart in pieces.Until I was so desperate to find out what the hell I was going to do next, how I was going to try to find Taland.

You really haven’t heard of the Mergenbachs before?—that’s what Cassie had told me back at Headquarters. She’d kept on mentioning that name, mentioning her cousins, and she always looked at me a certain way when she did, like she expected me to react. Like she excepted me toknow.

Now I did. Now I knew exactly who she was talking about, and whether that meant she knew Taland or knew about Selem didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was going to talk to her, and I was going to find out.

The problem was that I had no phone, and even if I bought one, I didn’t know her number. I had no idea where Cassie lived, either—we’d never really talked about it, but I knew where to find someone else who could help me. I’d been there once for a birthday party, and I’d been itching to go back since the Iris Roe, but I’d stopped myself.

Now, I wasn’t going to stop myself anymore.

The McMurray twins lived in this one-story house that their mother had bought them, with a large, half withered oak tree in the front—because they’d been playing and had accidentally hit it with magic when they were drunk one day, they said, and now half the tree had died, but the other half somehow remained alive. It was a small place and they even shared a bedroom, something Erid had found out by snooping around their place that night of the party. It had been a good night. I’d laughed a lot, had drank a couple glasses of wine. We’d played pool and Monopoly and I hadn’t gone home until two in the morning, so I’d had to sneak in through the back, afraid Madeline or her guards would hear me.

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