“Or twice as many of you could end up dead.” Dad pursed his lips and finally looked at me. “The King and Queen made the call, and the decision is final.”
“I’m just saying—” I began.
“Bryn Aven, why don’t you come up here and get your placement?” Dad asked. “That would probably make the rest of this meeting go much faster.”
I groaned inwardly, but I went up to the front of the room, carefully maneuvering around trackers and guards. People had begun whispering and talking among themselves again, but they kept their voices low so they’d be able to hear my dad call their names.
“Where’s my file?” I asked when I reached my dad.
“I already gave it to your partner.” Dad motioned to Ridley, standing beside him, holding a manila file.
“You’re retired,” I protested.
“I came out of retirement for one last job,” Ridley told me. “This is an important mission, and they needed the best.”
“And that’s me and you?” I asked.
Smiling down at me, he said, “I don’t see anybody better here. Do you?”
TWENTY
enemies
The train ride to Calgary was long, and that should’ve been a good thing, since it gave me more time to go over the changeling’s file. As soon as we’d been assigned, Ridley and I had gone to our respective homes, packed up our things, and within twenty minutes we were on the road out of town. I’d glanced over the file long enough to see where we were headed, noting that there would be a lot of downtime as we passed through the Canadian landscape.
That also meant there was plenty of time to have awkward conversations with Ridley. I hadn’t spent this much time alone with him in … well, in ever, actually, since we’d be together for at least a few days on this mission.
This was coming right after we’d spent the night together—platonically, sort of. And right after I’d realized my feelings for him, feelings I was trying to will away or at the very least pretend didn’t exist. Which was much harder to do when he was sitting right next to me, his arm brushing up against mine as I leafed through the file.
The cover page had all her basic information on it.
NAME: Emma Lisa Costar (Jones)
PARENTS: Markis Guy Costar and Marksinna Elsa Costar, née Berling
HOST FAMILY: Benjamin and Margaret Jones
BIRTH DATE: February 26, 1999
HAIR COLOR: Brown
EYE COLOR: Brown
LAST KNOWN ADDRESS: 1117 Royal Lane SW, Calgary, AB T2T 0L7
Paper-clipped to the top were two photos—a baby picture taken right after Emma was born, before she was switched at birth, and a composite photo of what Emma might look like now, based on her baby picture and her parents. I always thought the composite photos looked more than a bit creepy, but they had helped me find changelings in the past.
According to her birthday, Emma was just barely fifteen, but in the composite picture of her, she appeared younger. Her cheeks were still chubby, her eyes wide, her dark hair falling in ringlets around her face.
The packet of pages behind that had all kinds of information about her biological family, in hopes that it would shed some light on what she might be like, as well as information about her host family, to make it easier to find her.
I barely glanced through the packet, though, because I already knew a great deal about her family. Her mother—Elsa Costar—was Dylan Berling’s sister, making her Linus’s aunt and a cousin to the King. If something were to happen to Linus, when Emma returned from Calgary in a few years according to the original schedule, she would be next in line for the throne. Charlotte Salin—the changeling Ember had just rescued—was only next because she had come of age, and Emma Costar hadn’t yet returned to Doldastam.
We kept very rough tabs on changelings while they were gone, since in general the Kanin liked to interact with humans as little as possible. That meant that, rarely, changelings would move or go missing, and we couldn’t find them. On other tragic occasions, the changelings died while in the care of their host families, usually due to accident or illness.
The horrible truth was that we had no real way of knowing what was happening to changelings when they were with their host families. Most of the time it was nothing notable—their host parents generally loved and raised them like their own. But right now, when Konstantin Black was on the loose and going after changelings, it was a little scary not knowing where exactly Emma Costar was or if she was safe.
“Anything good there?” Ridley asked.
He sat low in the chair next to me, one of his legs crossed over the other, making his knee bump into mine every time he shifted. His head rested back against the seat, and his eyes were barely open, hooded in dark lashes so I wasn’t sure if he even saw anything at all. In his hand he had a small lock of Emma’s hair, taken from her when she was a baby and tied with a thin pink ribbon.
“Just the usual stuff,” I said with a sigh and tried not to stare at Emma’s hair as he twirled it between his fingers.
The Costars hadn’t taken Emma’s hair in a gesture of affection. It was a tool, an aid in helping trackers find her later. By touching something personal, most trackers had the ability to imprint on a changeling. Ridley couldn’t read her mind, but he’d be able to feel if she was terrified or in pain—extreme emotions that meant that she was in trouble and needed our help.
This also turned the changeling into kind of a tracking beacon. If Ridley focused on her, we’d be able to find her. I wasn’t sure exactly how it worked, but Ember had explained it as feeling a pull inside of you, like a tug from an invisible electrical current warming you from within and telling you which way to go, and the closer you got to the changeling, the stronger the feeling would get.