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  ALSO BY JENNIFER SOMMERSBY

  Sleight

  Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Sommers by Young

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are from the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Sky Pony Press books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Sky Pony® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on file.

  Jacket illustration © Sarah J. Coleman

  Jacket design by Kate Gartner

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5107-3209-4

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3213-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my movie-star muses:

  Mark Strong

  Jessica Chastain

  Saoirse Ronan

  Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

  Oscar Isaac

  I wanted to be a movie star

  but turns out I’m a terrible actor.

  You are not. Thank you for living

  in my head all these years

  and breathing life into my beloved characters.

  When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always.

  ~ Mahatma Gandhi

  My drops of tears I’ll turn to sparks of fire.

  ~ Henry VIII, Act 2, Scene 4

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Genevieve Flannery (Life), a seventeen-year-old, very magical girl

  Henry Dmitri (Memory; Death), an eighteen-year-old, very magical boy

  Baby (Bamidele Duncan), Genevieve’s talisman, legal guardian, surrogate dad

  Delia Flannery (Life), Genevieve’s late mother, founder of La Vérité, Baby’s life partner

  Nutesh (Memory), a.k.a., Thibault Delacroix, Original Creator of the AVRAKEDAVRA, Henry’s maternal grandfather

  Hélène Delacroix, Thibault’s wife, Henry’s maternal grandmother

  Alicia Delacroix (Memory), Henry’s late mother, daughter of Nutesh and Hélène

  Lucian Dagan Dmitri (Death), Henry’s father, owner of Triad Partners Group, son of Belshunu

  Aveline Darrow/Mara Dunn (Life; trained with Death text), related to Genevieve

  Belshunu (Death), Lucian’s/Dagan’s late father, Original Creator of the AVRAKEDAVRA

  Udish (Life), Genevieve’s late fifth-great-grandfather, Original Creator of the AVRAKEDAVRA

  Etemmu, a Mesopotamian demon

  Montague, caretaker, trusted friend, soldier for Nutesh and La Vérité

  Thierry, soldier for Nutesh and La Vérité

  Lucas, soldier for Nutesh and La Vérité

  Xavier, La Vérité Guardian, soldier, lifelong friend of Nutesh

  Sevda, soldier, acquaintance of Xavier, La Vérité member

  Violet (Vi) Jónás, trapeze artist, Genevieve’s childhood best friend

  Ash Jónás, trapeze artist, twin brother to Violet, Genevieve’s childhood best friend

  Aleks and Katia Jónás, trapeze artists, the twins’ parents

  Ted and Cecelia (Cece) Cinzio, owners of the Cinzio Traveling Players Company, Gen’s “uncle” and “aunt”

  Dr. Philips, the circus veterinarian

  Gertrude, Gen’s elephant, matriarch of the circus

  Houdini, Gertrude’s baby boy

  Othello, a very friendly lion

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Acknowledgments

  1

  CALLING ANDRONICUS A MEAN LION WOULD BE LIKE CALLING A TSUNAMI A big wave.

  He tore off our wrangler Montague’s face. He didn’t mean to. Lions are wild animals, even if they live with a circus—especially if they live with a circus—and the show Andronicus came from used bullwhips and cattle prods to train him. That cat had some stuff.

  But I saved Montague. I was young—six? Seven, maybe? I heard the screams coming from the menagerie, and if you spend any time at a circus, you get to know the good sounds from the bad ones. Montague’s hollers for help, the yowl and roar of an enraged big cat—definitely not good sounds. Naturally, all the important players went running: Ted Cinzio, my “adopted” uncle and owner of the Cinzio Traveling Players Company and the man who rescued Andronicus and his girl Hera (and Gertrude and countless other beasts) from their terrible situations; Baby, the show’s tentmaster and Ted’s right-hand man in all things, and the other half of my mother’s heart; crew leads and roustabouts and Aunt Cece, Ted’s wife; Aleks Jónás of the Jónás Family Flyers, Ash and Violet’s dad; my mother, Delia.

  And me.

  She didn’t want me to see it, but out of all of them, I was really the only one who could do anything for Montague. Baby and my mother warned me, but I loved Montague, just as I loved all of my circus family. I couldn’t just let him die there in the lion’s pen, hay and dirt matting to his hair and neck from the incredible blood loss.

  I saved a bird once. It flew into the side of our Airstream trailer. I picked it up and my head exploded in a firework of pain and light. I squeezed that little bird gently and mended its wing and it went from almost dead to alive and flying away in less than a minute. Then I threw up and my mom told me that we have secrets. It was the first time I really listened to the story—the one she told over and over again—about the little girl whose mother told her of a secret family treasure. I knew from then on that we were different.

  Which is how I knew I was the only one who could save Montague.

  While Ted and the wranglers tranquilized the lion, I sneaked in under their legs and laid my hands on Montague’s face. I pushed the skin back where it should be. I stopped the bleeding and saved his eye.

  I was just a kid, so I wasn’t strong enough to restore him completely. I might have been able to if Baby hadn’t scooped me up and run out of the menagerie tent. Too
many people were watching. But this was before everyone recorded everything on their phones. No one thought to record the little girl with the magic hands.

  No matter. It has all caught up to me now.

  And as I watch Montague in his predawn jog across the massive lawns of the Delacroixs’ French estate, his heavily scarred face a reminder of that day at the circus, I think about how I’d give anything to go back to that life, to those people, to that day, when I saved someone I loved.

  When I believed I still could.

  2

  THE DOOR OPENS BEHIND ME, QUIET EXCEPT FOR THAT TINY SQUEAK WHEN it catches on the plush carpet.

  “I come bearing gifts. Hélène made us hot chocolate.” Henry enters, holding a tray with two mugs.

  “With whipped cream?” I ask.

  “So much whipped cream,” he says, setting down the tray. “Did you sleep in the chair?”

  “I wanted to watch the sunrise.”

  Henry hands me a cup, pulls the ottoman closer, and then sits next to me in front of the window that overlooks the rolling green hills of the massive estate belonging to Thibault and Hélène Delacroix—his grandparents. This place is a fortress, hospital, and five-star hotel all in one, in the middle of the French countryside. Henry leans in and pushes the springy curls back from my forehead.

  “I hate how short it is. And how dark,” I say. The weirdest part—when I look in the mirror, I don’t see my mother’s face staring back at me anymore. Our shared red hair, mine wilder and frizzier than hers, but still—it’s all gone. Not even long enough to make a ponytail anymore. It’s like being naked.

  But it’s necessary, to keep us hidden, and alive.

  “It makes your green eyes pop.” His smile fades when he runs a hand over his own head. It’s been cut so close I can see his scalp, his messy curls shorn and dyed from his usual blond to dark like mine. His cheeks are pink again, his eyes less purple this morning. He lost so much blood—it wasn’t just the car accident near Boeing Field when Lucian Dmitri and his witchy minion, Mara Dunn, ran us off the road and flipped us like a diner pancake. Mara Dunn, the talented aerialist brought to our circus after my mother, Delia, died, now known by her true identity of Aveline Darrow, my half sister, stabbed him. They wanted the magical AVRAKEDAVRA texts so much—my mother’s and the one Henry stole from his father’s study—they were willing to kill for them.

  During the circus’s New Year’s Eve fundraising gala, my mother was pushed from her lyra to the circus floor thirty feet below, murdered by an Etemmu, a vicious Mesopotamian demon made of swirling arms laced with hate and pain, controlled by Lucian Dmitri and his Death text. I tried to save her, but as her life drained into the fine soil, she took with her too many secrets. About the daughter she had long before I was born, about the world’s most powerful magical books, about how, in the wrong hands, they could rewrite everything.

  About how all this secrecy and torture by the Etemmu would land firmly upon my shoulders in her absence.

  I miss her, fiercely. I see her in every flower stretching out of its vase, in every tree that whispers in the breeze, in every tiny sprout pushing out of the dirt. Mirrors trick me when I pass by, thinking I’m seeing her face when it’s only my own.

  But I’m so angry. I’m so angry, I could burn a hole through a granite wall with my bare hands.

  I run my hand through what’s left of my hair. “We’re still ourselves,” I say. “Right?”

  Henry leans in and kisses the whipped cream off my lip. “Still ourselves.”

  “For now.”

  “For always.”

  “How do you feel? Since . . .” Since last night, when Thibault Delacroix—aka Nutesh, Henry’s grandfather, one of the three Original Creators of the AVRAKEDAVRA, and our host and chief strategist—sealed his grandson to his book. For something so important, it is such a brief, quiet undertaking. Like he did with me on the plane hurtling away from the carnage left at Boeing Field with Lucian and Mara Dunn, Nutesh pulled on his leather gloves, placed a hand flat on the Memory text, and voilà! Henry was a sealed heir, all ready to be assailed by whatever new magical endowments the text might decide to share.

  Henry is in line for two books, though—Memory, through his mother’s family, and Death, the text he stole from his father’s study back in Oregon. Why Henry has only been sealed to one family’s book remains a mystery, but it’s probably better that way, for now. I love Henry—I know this in my heart—but my head tells me that one person sealed to two books? Unwise. It’s only a short walk across the house for him to take the third, and this whole mess starts over again.

  “I’m fine. Nothing new or weird yet.”

  “The day is young,” I say, wishing I felt as light as my words suggest.

  Henry moves to the coffee table, retrieving the TV remote. “So, you might want to see this. New developments . . .” He clicks on the flat screen hugged on either side by whitewashed bookshelves stacked to their limits.

  Lucian Dagan Dmitri—Henry’s father and the man now hunting us—fills my room, microphones at his chin. He’s talking to the press.

  The red-and-white news banner at the bottom of the screen reads: “Teens kidnapped, on the run after art heist.” Lucian’s at the fairgrounds, the Cinzio Traveling Players Company big top billowing in the background. He’s standing with police, and my heart jumps into my throat when the camera pans left to show a very worried Ted and Cecelia Cinzio.

  “It took him thirty-six hours to come up with this?” I ask. We’ve been in Croix-Mare, France, just long enough to have our significant injuries healed, put restorative food in our bellies, and change our appearances for the mission yet to come.

  “He’s smart,” Baby says, standing in the doorway, eyes on the TV, ceramic mug dwarfed in his hand. He’s healed—we’re all mostly physically healed from the car accident and subsequent attack by the Etemmu in Washington just a few days ago—but Baby’s color still isn’t right. His black skin lacks its normal vigor and warmth.

  “Lucian’s pacing himself. Timing it for maximum impact. He knows we won’t linger here long,” Baby says. He walks into the room and sits on the long, cushioned bench that abuts the end of my bed.

  A picture of Bamidele “Baby” Duncan flashes on the screen and includes his full name, height, weight, ethnicity, eye color, and tattoo descriptions. The man who has been my father and guardian my whole life, who kept my mother and me safe from harm, is being danced about on international news like some hardened criminal.

  “How . . . how could he say this? How could he lie to everyone?” I ask.

  Henry’s face is sad. His father stands as buttoned-up and in control as ever, not a shred of physical damage after our electrical dance the other day, his bald head protected from the elements by an umbrella held aloft by an unfamiliar individual wearing one of the standard-issue black Triad Partners jackets. “We have reason to suspect that my son Henry and his new female friend have gone to Europe in the company of Mr. Duncan. It is our belief that these two young people were coerced into committing the theft, as certainly Henry would have access to my collection. Mr. Duncan was very recently a guest in my home, at which time he would’ve had the opportunity to survey the target of his plot. Given his relationship with young Genevieve Flannery’s late mother, it is presumed that he manipulated his surrogate fatherhood over the girl to convince her to play a part in his scheme. Genevieve, in turn, recognized a soft target in my son and engaged him in a romantic ruse to win his trust and thus gain access to our home’s private collection.”

  Henry looks at me for a long moment before turning back to the TV. I don’t have a read on his emotions—his jaw flexes and he’s blinking a little faster than usual.

  That’s his dad on the television, lying to the entire world about his own child.

  Lucian is still talking. “We will be working with international law enforcement and private agents who specialize in these sorts of cases so we can bring Henry and Genevieve home safely. That
is our number one priority.”

  “God, the smug, lying bastard. International law enforcement? What, like, Interpol? Scotland Yard?” I ask, moving to the bench to sit nearer to Baby. I take his coffee cup, sipping, shuddering.

  “French coffee is strong, a leannan,” he says, his smile tired.

  “Baby, Ted and Cece couldn’t possibly think you kidnapped us. Come on. You can’t kidnap someone you’re legally responsible for. And Henry is eighteen. He’s an adult.”

  “I’ll find a way to get in touch with the Cinzios. This is all bluster. Dagan wants the world to think he’s the hero, that he’s the wronged party, so now everyone will have eyes out for you two. It’s his way of maximizing visibility.”

  “Nothing he’s said is the truth.”

  “Welcome to the post-truth age,” Baby says. “The people who count—the people who know how Dagan works and what he’s really talking about—this is like the Bat Signal to them. He’s going to make sure this gets maximum airplay. He’s got eyes everywhere.”

  This does not feel good at all. Eyes everywhere?

  I scrutinize the screen—Aveline is nowhere in sight.

  My stomach drops. Where is she?

  And what about Violet and Ash? I can’t even imagine what the twins—my siblings, for all intents and purposes—must think of what’s happening. Violet and Ash Jónás and I have grown up together, done everything together. Baby and I just gone—vanished into thin air—the police involved. A stolen car, a robbery from the esteemed Dmitri estate, a rich philanthropist’s son missing too. It sounds bad. And it is bad—it’s just a different kind of bad than what they’re probably thinking. They don’t know anything about ancient books or heirs or the threat of our lives being erased if Lucian gets his hands on the AVRAKEDAVRA.

  And my poor elephants . . . thinking of Gert and Houdini and sweet Othello the lion—actual physical pain forces me to clench the fabric over my chest. God, I hope they’re safe.

  I send a quiet plea to Alicia, Henry’s mother—she’s a ghost, one of my mother’s long-time companions only she could see. Delia’s gift of communing with the dead was hers alone—until Alicia showed up in that post office in Cannon Beach, floating and weightless above the sandy floor. It was the first time I’d ever seen a ghost, and since that day, I’ve needed her help more than I ever thought possible.