Page 119 of Tracking Snow

It's my fault.

Because only one other person knows Ariel's secret other than me. Only one person could be the one plucking people from my life in such a perfectly timed sequence.

The Seven.

The last time I saw Ariel was the same night as my fight with The Seven. I haven’t seen either of them since.

My stomach twists so violently I almost gag.

I brought him backstage at the Pumpkin Coach Club. I put him three feet from Kiki while she healed me with her level four mage powers, asked her if maybe she could help him too. And then she was gone.

Goldie disappeared after I let him close enough. Then Cinder.

Every name stacks in my skull until it feels like fingers pressing behind my eyes.

Carolee dead on our doorstep.

Then I remember his expression when he saw her. The shock there, raw and unguarded, before he could tuck it away behind one of his masks.

If he did this, why would he be so upset? And if he was behind it, why did he keep letting me get close, letting me follow him, letting me see pieces of him he could have hidden?

Or maybe I’m just a stupid girl clutching a dead girl’s pencil case, trying to carve mercy into a pattern that keeps ending with my friends gone.

The guy in the underground train station flashes through my mind. The mage we cornered. The one I thought we were saving.

We’re here to help, I told him.

I said it with my whole chest, standing beside The Seven like we were the same kind of monster in the dark. Like we were hunting the same villains. Like I had found someone who understood the shape of my rage.

We were both tracking magic-kind.

My breath catches.

We were both tracking magic-kind.

Only I was trying to keep them from disappearing, and he was the shadow at the edge of every disappearance.

That’s the part that makes me want to scream until my throat tears open.

Because I stood beside him and thought we were facing the same direction.

I press Rosie’s pencil case into my forehead until the bent corner bites into skin and the metal gives a tiny, wounded pop beneath my grip. I wrench my eyes shut so hard I see stars as I push it even harder into me.

Poison Apple is the heart of it. The safest place in Boston for mages, fae, shifters, Lost Girls, glitter freaks, weirdos, and anyone too much for the outside world. I led him right into it. I gave him names, faces, routines, weaknesses, secrets.

I gave him Ariel.

The pencil case slips from my grip and clatters against the floor. A brutal sob claws up my throat, but it gets stuck there, lodged behind my teeth.

The Seven took her.

Or he helped someone take her.

Or one of The Seven did, while another one would have stopped it if he’d been strong enough to get control.

I don’t know why. I don’t know where. I don’t know how much of him knew what was happening.

But Ariel is gone, and he is gone, and the shape of his absence fits too perfectly over hers.