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What the hell was I thinking, coming here and talking to this girl, getting her hopes up just so she could get her heartdestroyedagain?!

“I can and I will!” she said, but at least she wasn’t climbing down with me. She stayed on that branch and looked down at me, so angry she could be fuming.

“No, you can’t, Taylor. Just go to school. Get a degree. You can still winin life without magic.” And I hadn’t said a truer word to her since we met.

But she didn’t listen, of course. And when I made to go back to her trailer through the trees, she called, “Watch me!”

A bad feeling settled in my gut because I believed her. She was most definitely going to try to enter the next Iris Roe, and nobody would be able to stop her.

On my way back to Headquarters, I just thanked the goddess that there wouldn’t be another Iris Roe for four years, and she had plenty of time to grow up and forget.

Chapter 11

Rosabel La Rouge

I was sick. Really, really sick, and the symptoms included obsessive thinking, insomnia, vivid dreams, intense headaches, a disturbed stomach and nausea at least five times a day, among others.

And the name of my disease was fuckingcuriosity.

For two days I could hardly sit still for longer than five minutes. For two days I couldn’t stop my mind from spinning, had to perform spells on myself to get rid of my headaches, which then felt like I was pulling something out from deep inside me while my magic did its job. And it did do its job wonderfully, much better than before, and I still hadn’t gotten used to how it felt. That, too, was the cause for my nausea every time I thought about it.Reallythought about it and found no explanation whatsoever as to why my own magic would feel so foreign to my body.

Turns out, there were zero records of a Mud ever getting their magic back. I found cases of Iridians going to jail because they’d performed spells on the Mud, either to heal them or to hurtthem, but none that even mentioned a Mud performing magic in any way.

Which struck me as odd. There was just no way thatIwas the first made Mud who’d gotten her powers back. There had to have been plenty of Mud before me who probably knew how to fight and had weapons and money—like that Council member who was Mud.

WhoremainedMud, even though he was part of the Council.

Why in the world wouldn’t he have had people make a rainbow for him? He had the money and the authority—he wasthe Council.Why would he stay Mud when he could have gotten his magic back?

The questions gnawed at my insides like a fucking parasite, and the more I read, the more I foundnothingon the matter, the bigger and more powerful it became.

Then there was Taland. The case. The paperwork that didn’t fucking exist.

My goddess, Radock Tivoux had been absolutely right. There was no mention of Taland before he was caught—byme—in school. There was not a single word onmebeing hired to keep an eye on him, to spy on him, to basically deliver him to the IDD. The earliest my name came up anywhere was when they arrested Taland—his girlfriend followed the suspect and knocked him out before he could commit the crime; the student who knocked the suspect out returned home the night of his arrest.

That’s it—that’s all Taland’s file had on me, and because Taland was supposedly there to steal the veler, a highly powerful artifact, and because he’d admitted that he was a part of a dangerous rebel organization, he’d been sent to the Tomb Penitentiary right away.

I found the name of the organization, though, which I’d never heard of before. They went bySelem, and though every other information about them was classified and my name couldn’taccess it, Taland had, apparently, admitted in front of the judge that he was really part of it.

The more I read the more confused I became because I was hired by Hill to go after him. I was fucking picked by Hill—meinstead of Poppy that night in Madeline’s office—and I was sent to that school and I reported to Hill directly every single month. So why wasn’t that recorded anywhere?

Then there was the case of that story book I found in Madeline’s office two nights ago that kept popping up in my head every now and again. The story—and the drawing of those bracelets on the soldiers’ wrists.

The curiosity to go to the Vault again was like a monster breathing down my neck, but I just wanted to see if it was the same bracelet. Because my memory wasn’t the best and there was a good chance that I’d imagined it, and I just wanted to know if it was really the same.

I wanted to know a lot of things, and that was the cause of my sickness.

Not to mention the fact that I couldn’t find Taland anywhere, that even Wayne O’Bryan’s team had nothing on him or his brothers yet, and the fucking reporters had been following me around like my damn shadow every time I left the Headquarters to go to the mansion. They were relentless.

Now I was in a relatively quiet hallway, sitting in a corner and forcing myself to breathe, because it was the end of the day and I’d stayed four hours past my shift and there was simply no energy left in me to continue to search without a good night’s sleep. It had been two days, after all. Two days—and nights in which Madeline wasnotattending parties, so she was home and I couldn’t even go back to her office to take pictures of that book. To make sure it even existed, that it hadn’t just been a dream, or something I’d made up because I’d seen that bracelet thing in the Vault.

Goddess, my head was threatening to explode.

“Why do you always look like you’re about to start crying lately?”

I didn’t even have the energy to be startled when I heard Cassie’s voice. We were supposed to meet here in this very spot in another ten minutes or so, but I’d arrived early to do a spell on myself for this horrible headache.

And to get away from the other agents in the main office who were getting more ballsy by the hour and coming to me with their fake smiles and their questions about the Iris Roe.

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