Copper Veins(73)

“Well, why did you come here with the shapeshifter?” I demanded, trying to shift focus away from my apparent thick-headedness.

Juliana’s gaze flickered across my face, then dropped to stare at her hands. “It returned to headquarters and was going to tell Mike and Langston that it was unable to sway you.”

“Sway me?” I repeated.

“Sway you to leave Micah and go back to the Mundane realm,” she explained. Micah’s fingers clenched around my elbow, but he remained silent. Before I could point out what a stupid plan that was, even for Peacekeepers, Max spoke up.

“That’s crap,” Max said. “Mike wouldn’t have sent you here to talk to anyone. If anything, he would have wired you and asked you to dig for information.”

Juliana stared at Max for a moment before replying. “Mike didn’t send me here—the shifter never filed his report. I faked orders, intercepted the shapeshifter, and told him to bring me here.”

When we all stared at her, open-mouthed, she continued. “I mean, after you wrecked Langston’s rally, he was furious. I really thought he was going to kill me that time, but you know how he doesn’t like to get his hands dirty. He figured that, if you guys weren’t on to the shapeshifter yet, you would be soon. So, when the shifter checked in talking about how no one was buying his act, I knew I had to do something.”

Max’s expression, which had been furious, softened a bit. “Did he hurt you?” he asked.

Juliana shrugged. “No more than usual.”

“Easy words coming from the one working with Peacekeepers,” I said.

“Cut her some slack, Sara,” Max said. “Jules has been through a lot.”

Great, now my own brother was siding with the enemy, and one that he should be hating at least as much as I did. Here he was, telling me to give the one who’d experimented on him for years some—

Wait. What had he called her?

“Jules?” I asked. Juliana’s head shot up, her eyes wide and panicked. You see, Juliana has a thing about her name—it’s Juliana. Joo-LEE-Ah-Na. Not Julie, not J, not anything but Juliana. If you referred to her by anything other than her full name, she’d either flat-out ignore you or give you a verbal tongue-lashing.

Max had just called her Jules, and she hadn’t even flinched. More significantly, she hadn’t corrected him. Which meant that he’d called her that before.

Which meant that she had let him call her that.

Mom couldn’t care less what Max called Juliana, and she’d had enough of our debates. She grabbed Juliana’s shoulders and demanded, “When did you last see my Beau?”

“A few weeks ago,” Juliana replied. “He was transferring facilities. He was an even worse prisoner than you,” she added with a nod toward Max.

“My Beau,” Mom murmured. “Scrappy as ever.”

“Transferring facilities?” Micah repeated. “In which world?”

“This world,” Juliana replied. “He’s been here since his capture. They couldn’t risk Mr. Corbeau contacting his allies in the Mundane world.”

Micah rubbed his chin and smiled. “Then I know where your father is.”





31


As it turned out, there was only one human-run establishment within walking distance of the Whispering Dell—the Museum of Human Triumph. Everyone, both human and not, knew about it since it was the only edifice built by human hands that existed in both the Mundane and the Otherworld.

“No,” Max said when I mentioned it. “There are two. The Peacekeepers just want you to think it transcends the veil.”

Just another lie told to us by our government, then.

We traveled across the metal pathways to the museum—for some hard-to-accept reason, we had taken Juliana along for the ride. Max had insisted that she come, and Micah agreed that having someone who knew their way around a Peacekeeper facility might be useful. I’d ended up relenting, but not because I particularly wanted her to come along. I just wanted to hurry up and find Dad.

We also made one small stop to depositing what was left of the shifter outside the village gates. Mom had insisted that the creature be blinded.

“Strike its eyes out,” Mom had said. “I do not want it to ever torment a grieving widow again.”

Max had taken care of that.

After we had gone as far as the metal path could take us, we trudged along a packed dirt road. It hadn’t rained in some time, and our footfalls were stirring up miniature dust devils. Micah led our little procession. Mom strode beside him, asking him all sorts of questions about Mundane museums and shapeshifters. I lagged behind, partly because I was still pretty beat after my adventures with the Queen’s Lace and partly to eavesdrop on Max and Juliana.