I was better off without him.
Kissing him that night at his house, over a year ago now, had been the biggest mistake of my life. We had both been drunk, too caught up in each other. I wouldn’t make that mistake ever again.
FOUR
I FINALLY BREATHED A SIGH OF RELIEF ONCE I HEARD Crowe’s car start up and tear off down the street. I made my way down the hallway to my bedroom, wanting desperately to peel off my jeans and get into a pair of comfy pajama pants. But as soon as I stepped inside my bedroom, I knew I wasn’t alone.
I flicked on the lamp on my dresser. Darek lay in my bed, half propped up on an elbow, his phone in his hand. “When did you get here?” I asked.
“About fifteen minutes before you did. Parked my bike up the road.” He nodded toward my open window, which I’d left unlocked just for him. “And for a second there, I thought I was going to have to come to your rescue.”
“You heard all that?” I dropped on the bed beside him and lay flat on my back.
He slid his arm over my middle slowly, like he was waiting for me to push him away. I didn’t. Instead, I sighed and sank into the mattress as my muscles unknotted from the tension of the last hour or so.
“How could I not hear it, Jem?” A backward baseball cap covered most of his sun-bleached blond hair, but a few loose strands had managed to escape.
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t intervene.” I scrubbed at my face, suddenly sleepy. “You and Crowe in the same room would be a very, very bad idea.”
After all, Darek was a Deathstalker prospect, due to be voted up to a full-patch member of the club in a month or two. To Crowe, he was the enemy, straight up. Even if the two gangs supposedly had a truce.
Darek offered me his easy, sweet smile, one I’d seen through video chat at least every week since last summer. We’d met at the festival—right after I’d seen Crowe with Katrina for the first time. I’d needed a distraction, but he had become more than that. “I think I could take Crowe Medici, don’t you?”
I laughed. “When did the Deathstalkers get into town?”
“Few hours ago.”
“Seen any of the Devils yet?”
“Oh, yeah. I ran into one at that ice cream place by the library.”
I sat upright. “Are you serious?”
He hung his head back. “You think I’d be sitting here if I crossed paths with a Devil all by myself? I can’t hurl a hex to save my own skin—you know that.”
“God. Don’t do that to me.” I collapsed again on the bed. “Tensions are high right now. I don’t want you to get hurt.” I debated telling him about Old Lady Jane meeting with Crowe but decided maybe it could wait. Even though I was pissed at Crowe, blabbing about it felt a little disloyal. Besides, I didn’t want to think about it now. I was just happy Darek was here.
The night we’d met, I’d tried to escape the festival after drinking too much. I’d been trying to cope with both my heartbreak over Crowe and Katrina, and the extreme amount of magic in the air. I’d accidentally wandered off the path and into a swamp, where Darek found me buried up to my knees in muck, still clutching an empty bottle of Jack.
To say I had been messed up was an understatement. By all accounts, I was a pathetic disaster. But Darek, all blond, blue-eyed, sunbaked, and lean, merely asked me which I’d like first—a piggyback ride out of alligator territory or another drink.
I chose the piggyback ride. When we got back to the festival, he got me a huge cup of lemonade (nonalcoholic) and we talked for hours, just wandering the edges of the grounds. We had more in common than I ever expected. Our fathers gone, our powers a disappointment, our lives spent in others’ shadows. He handled it more gracefully than I ever could.
And now he was lying next to me, the line of his body pressed against mine, and I knew the time had come to make a decision. Anything less was unfair to Darek. We’d never progressed beyond the friend zone, but our e-mails and phone conversations had circled ever more tightly around the possibility that we would. Both of us knew this year’s festival would bring us together again. Neither of us knew exactly what to expect, though.
Sometimes I liked to daydream about how Crowe would react if he found out I was seeing a Deathstalker, and one who looked like Darek at that.
He’d die.
I’d die with delight.
But starting a romantic relationship with Darek needed to be about a lot more than making Crowe jealous. It shouldn’t be about Crowe at all, really. So why was I still thinking about him?
“Are you hungry?” Darek asked.
I blinked up at him, shaking off the image of Crowe stuck in my mind. “I have a sandwich,” I answered.
Darek jumped out of the bed. “How pedestrian. I’ll make omelets.”
“Are you serious?”
“That seems like a stupid thing to be unserious about. Do you want one or not?”
“Umm… yes?”
“Is that a question?”
“Yes, I would like an omelet. Please.”
I followed him into the kitchen. He tore off his black-and-white flannel shirt and tossed it over a kitchen chair, revealing his fitted black T-shirt underneath. “Whoa,” he said, peering at the burned hunk of meat and plastic in the sink. He poked at it gingerly. “What happened?”
“Crowe happened.” I sighed as I stared at the new scorch mark on the counter.
Darek dug the carton of eggs out of the fridge, along with the butter, cheese, a green pepper, and an unopened package of ham. “What did you mean when you said tensions were high?”
“Oh, no big deal,” I said airily. “Crowe just thinks your club killed his dad.”
He cursed. “Why would he think we would do something like that? It would be suicide. The Devils already wiped us out once. Killian wants us on the straight and narrow, especially as we rebuild.” His hands shook a little as he buttered a pan and set it on the stove a bit harder than necessary. “When is this going to stop, Jem? It’s the twenty-first century, for God’s sake. We’re not fucking barbarians anymore. Why do all our problems need to be solved with violence?”
“I don’t know. You do sort of look like a Viking.”
“I’m French. Not Scandinavian.”
“Could have fooled me.” I smiled and slid his cap off his blond locks. Darek was a Delacroix. He was a distant relative of Killian Delacroix, who became the president of the Deathstalkers at the age of twenty—right after his older brother Henry and, I now knew, the entire leadership of the Deathstalkers had been killed by our very own local club. I knew it was because Henry had been trying to do something majorly evil, but killing all their officers seemed over the top.
The Delacroixs were known for the animus magic that ran strong in their veins—the ability to sense and manipulate emotions, and sometimes thoughts. I might have been nervous about hanging around with Darek as a result, except that I already knew he didn’t have that kind of magic at all. Not all people with kindled parents manifested the same power that was dominant in their family tree. Sometimes there were surprises, like a kid might take after his mother’s side of the family instead of his father’s if both had magic, or he might even inherit a type of magic from even further back, like Gunnar did when he got his great-grandmother Kitsamura’s arma power. And sometimes, unfortunately, a kid didn’t inherit any magical ability at all, or just a trace of it, not enough to actually call upon and cast at will.
My mom was like that. So was Darek.
As we maneuvered around my mom’s tiny kitchen, I couldn’t pick up anything in the room but the slight sting of my own magic and the ashy, acrid stench of burned meat. I didn’t know how Darek coped, not being able to cast like nearly everyone else around him, but he seemed to take it in stride and had still chosen to be a part of the kindled world.
I was a little envious at how easy he made it look.