Page 17 of Anchor

That’s what Madeline said.Fix your hair,just like that.

Where I’d come from or how I felt wasn’t important as long as I just stood up and fixed my hair. As long as Ilookedput together.

Like a fool, I glanced at the guard, as if I was expecting him to save me somehow. To help me. Grab me and put me in an SUV and drive me all the way to the Blue House right now.

Except the guard worked for Madeline and all he did was look at me passively, his hands behind his back, his shoulders straight, suit impeccable.

“Grandmother, what…” I shook my head, looking around me once more because what she just said couldn’t really be true, could it?The Council,as in, the most powerful mages in the world, those who ruled over everything, those who’d created theIDD and those whom the IDD answered to. On paper, at least. I’d always thought that David Hill, just like Madeline before him, was the one who was really in charge here, and the Council was there only for show.

Then again, I’d never met them before.

“Get up. They’re going to call us in any moment now,” Grandmother said, and I realized that the wall I thought we were facing was actually a set of wide, perfectly polished doors.

She waited with her hands folded in front of her, not a hair out of a place or a wrinkle on her red suit.

My legs shook a little. Considering how the past couple weeks had been for me, I genuinely expected them to be too weak to hold me when I stood up, but they weren’t. My knees didn’t shake. My muscles were strong, my body in no pain.

And it made me want to sit there and start fucking crying becausethiswas what magic could do.Thiswas what they were supposed to do to me when I came back from that catfairie-infested woods—both at the IDD Headquarters and when I returned to the mansion. My grandmother could have sent for her healers and they could have had me inthiscondition within the day then, too.

But she’d refused because I’d beenMudthen.

Now?

“Why are we at the Council?” I asked, testing my legs, still expecting them to let go of me, expecting pain to shoot up my left leg when I stepped closer to her. There was none. I was healed—magically healed, just like always when I was wounded on missions.Properlyhealed.

“They requested your presence,” Madeline said, looking down at my body for a moment. The guard remained a few feet away, watching. “Couldn’t you have put on a dress for once?”

I looked down at my jeans and boots and jacket—no, Grandmother, because I was on my way to steal one of your cars and go to the Blue House in Darville when you caught me.

“You didn’t exactly tell me we were coming to see the Council,” I said, my voice clearer and higher the more this whole situation sank in.

She’d spelled me. She’d put me to sleep with her magic right outside my bedroom door at the mansion. I remember now—she’d spelled me without even sayinghello,and it fucking beat me that this still surprised me.

“You were already on your way to somewhere else, if I recall correctly,” she said, turning to the shiny, polished wood of the doors in front of us.

“Was that why you didn’t ask, only knocked me out cold right away?” Again, my voice was pitched higher than usual—or maybeever—when I spoke to Madeline. I blamed it on the nerves—and the fact that she stopped me from going to see Taland.

“It’s the Council, Rosabel. Nobody is allowed to know the location of their chambers.”

Yes, that did make sense. “A blindfold would have done the job.”

The look she gave me made my stomach twist uncomfortably. “I have no patience for blindfolds.”

I could have laughed.I think you just didn’t want me awake during the ride because then you’d have had totalkto me, ask me about the game, about anything at all. You would have had to admit that I’d won the Iris Roe.

Because she never saw that coming, I was sure of it. When she smuggled me into that game, she hoped I’d die, and then she’d have had the perfect sob story—I tried to help her, but she ran away from home and goddess knows how she managed to get in that game.She never expected me to actually win. Shesent me there to die so she didn’t have to get her hands dirty herself.

“I won the Iris Roe,” I said now, just to spite her. Because this was Madeline, yes, and she scared me shitless without trying, and my instincts were broken when it came to her, but I also wanted to see the look on her face just now. I wanted to see how much she despised me, just to remind myself of it.

Curiously enough, though, when Madeline looked at me again, shedidn’tdespise me.

Instead, she looked…curious.

“You did. I will admit I didn’t think you had it in you.”No, you expected me to die,I thought but didn’t say. “Well done, Rosabel. I don’t know how you managed it, but well done.”

When I tell you that I almost passed out from the surprise, I am not exaggerating.

Words were stuck in my throat. Part of me thought I should saythank you,and then another part of me thought I should burst out laughing; another insisted that I ask her if she was okay, while another said I should tell her to take her pretty words and stick ‘em where the sun don’t shine because they didn’t matter shit to me.

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