WhenwereachedDr.Lewis’s office, the state in which he’d left it told me he’d all but abandoned it mid-workday. It wasn’t disorganized, or overly refined, like he might have expected someone to snoop. It just looked used, like a mad scientist at work.
While Silas stood guard at the door, I sat at Dr. Lewis’s desk and sifted through the papers on top. There were sheafs of them, along with several new, glass-blown orbs sitting out next to them.
On instinct, I reached for one of the orbs and pulled it close to me. I studied it closely, noting the exquisitely blown glass, Lily’s potion inside dancing to its own beat with sparkles of magic simmering there.
As I ran my hand over it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had been off with these orbs. I continued to study his notes, and study the orbs, and study Lily’s potion inside. Insofar as I could tell, Dr. Lewis hadn’t made any significant, or even notable, improvements since the last time we’d worked togethersix days ago. Pairing his notes with the physical view of the orbs, I suddenly understood.
Hehadn’tmade significant changes. Thesewerejust like the last ones.
On purpose.
A man like Dr. Lewis—smart, capable, curious—would’ve been wracking his brain for new methods to get these wards up and running. If he’d truly been trying to make improvements, he would’ve shifted something drastic. He would’ve been trying to create something powerful enough to contain a Fae Queen’s magic. He would’ve incorporated an element of salt, an important part of the original crystals. He would’ve conferred again with Lily.
But he hadn’t been doing any of that. He’d been merely wasting my time, and Lily’s time, and the time of the Rangers who had dedicated resources to help him in his work.
I felt a rush of anger so sudden and vicious I wanted to smash the orb against the ground. But that wouldn’t help anything, and it would simply create a mess that someone else would need to clean up, so I refrained.
Instead, I stared at the orbs, wishing I’d put the pieces together sooner. This orb had never been meant to work. He’d simply been using up my time so that it couldn’t be spent creating wards that would actually be effective against the Darkest Lord. The whole thing had been a ruse, and I’d been duped.
I tore through his things then, his desk, drawers, anything I could find. A scrap of paper or a jotted line that referenced therealwork he’d been doing here. Because Dr. Lewis had been at work, but if he hadn’t been trying to improve the wards, what had he been trying to do?
I found it at the bottom of a drawer. A tiny shred of paper that looked like an old napkin, something just about anyone elsewould’ve tossed out without a second thought. But something about it caught my eye, the messiness of it, as if the idea had come to him in a flurry, and he’d simply reached for something to jot it down. It wasn’t neat and contained, like the rest of the notes in his notebook.
The napkin held sketches: spirits, monstrous horses, floating figures. But it was the back of the napkin that made my breath catch. Dr. Lewis hadn’t been working on how to close the wards. He’d been looking at how to open them. How to destroy them, or reverse them, or infiltrate them. Instead of closing The Isle with the wards, he’d found a way to open it up to attack.
I focused on a rough-hewn drawing of The Isle near the bottom. It was inaccurate, but unmistakable all the same. What struck me as curious, however, was the blankness of it. Aside from the river running through the center, there were no landmarks, no roads, no villages annotated. Not even a marked target.
Only outlines. Wavy lines traced different territories, but I couldn’t figure out what they were in reference to. Most of the lines were around the outskirts of The Isle, some in The Forest. The river had been shaded in too, as part of the territories he’d designated.
Ley lines?I wondered. Was he trying to map the ley lines?
Everyone now knew the river was a central ley line on the island—it glowed when I’d used my magic, and it was no longer a secret. But the rest of it didn’t make sense. There were thousands, maybe millions of tiny ley lines all throughout the island. They certainly weren’t concentrated around the edges. Not to mention, even I didn’t know where all the ley lines were, and as the Fae Queen, I was probably the one who used them the most. It seemed impossible that Dr. Lewis could have ever hoped to find them all. So what had he been mapping?
I puzzled over the drawing, flipping through the rest of his notes. I found what I was looking for tucked in between drawings of the orbs that were meant to waste my time. Some sort of equation, a spell or curse he’d been modifying, that didn’t belong.
On my first pass through, I’d assumed the formula was something he’d been toying with as a way to replicate my Fae magic once I’d disappeared. I had been gone, and theoretically, he would’ve needed something to power the wards that wasn’tme.
But now that I knew he wasn’t trying to actually fix the wards, this formula no longer made sense to me. As I scrutinized it even closer, I realized that it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to me. It wasn’t a scientific formula, but a spell—a curse. And all of my instincts told me that Dr. Lewis hadn’t come up with this curse from scratch. I was willing to bet he’d adopted it straight from the Furies.
Dr. Lewis had been trying to continue the work of the Furies that I’d banished. He’d utilized the bones of the curse that had held this island captive for years and was trying to revive whatever was left of it.
The areas he’d mapped? I reviewed the napkin once more, and sure enough, they were a map of the lands that had been killed off by the curse. The deadened parts of the island. Something about the dead lands was interesting to Dr. Lewis—but what?
I considered the spirits still hovering above the river. On a hunch, I stood and went in search of Ranger X. I didn’t have far to go. He’d been waiting in the hallway for me, speaking in low tones to Lily and Silas and a slew of Rangers dressed in black. As soon as I found the group, I thrust the map and the spell forward with both hands.
“Where are the spirits arriving on the island?” I asked. “Can you take a look at this map and give me a general idea?”
“What do you mean?” Ranger X said. “We’ve had reports from all over the island, different places.”
“Like these places?” I thrust the map at him a second time. “Just take a look.”
Ranger X looked down, and a flicker of surprise crossed his face. “Ranger Z. Take a look at this.”
I recognized Ranger Z, Lily’s cousin Zin. As Ranger X handed off the map to Zin, we all waited patiently to hear her conclusion. She scanned the paper quickly, a similar look of surprise appearing on her expression.
“The darkened areas here…” Ranger Z pointed to the areas that Dr. Lewis had mapped. “They’re pretty spot-on as to where we’ve received reports. These are the most heavily targeted areas bar none. I’ve been responsible for tracking all spirit sightings, and I honestly don’t think we’ve had a spirit appearoutsideof these zones. Where did you get this?”
“Dr. Lewis’s work,” I said. “He mapped out the dead lands. The areas killed off by the curse. I think the spirits are only able to appear—to exist, really—in the areas that were consumed by the curse.”
