Dad accepted the stuffed animal from Crowe and closed his eyes. My nostrils flared as the stinging scent invaded. Blue tendrils sprouted from my father’s body like vines, slithering along the forest floor, winding up tree trunks and into the canopy above. I watched in awe as his magic expanded so easily, so controlled. But then it shrank back just as quickly, and Dad frowned. “There’s nothing,” he said quietly.
“What do you mean?” asked Crowe. “Jemmie sensed her. She led us to this spot.”
“I’m sorry, Crowe,” Dad said. “I’m just not picking anything up, and if she’s anywhere within a hundred miles from here, I should be able to.”
“I probably got it wrong,” I said miserably. “Crowe, I’m so—”
“No,” he snapped. “You sensed her, and you know it. Don’t get scared now. Own it.”
I stepped back, stung. “I warned you I might not be able to do it.” I couldn’t escape his gaze, hard and full of challenge.
“Crowe,” my dad said quietly, “Alex isn’t a locant, so she couldn’t hide herself from me.”
Crowe’s eyes narrowed. “Then maybe someone with locant took her.”
“Okay,” Dad said cautiously, “but the number of people with enough locant to completely conceal a life spark from someone like me is so small that—”
“My sister is not dead!” shouted Crowe.
Dad took a step back. “That’s not what I’m saying. We’ll all help you search. But maybe we should talk to Ronan and the Sixes first. If Katrina is looking to punish you, that might be the best place to start.”
“Fine, let’s go talk to them,” Crowe said. His lip curled as he gazed at the Stalkers’ tent. “I need to get out of here anyway, before I change my mind and curse all of them with explosive diarrhea.”
“Never thought I’d say this, but thank God Owen put up that shield around them,” said Brooke. “Because we don’t have nearly enough toilets for that.”
The Devils fell into step just behind Crowe as he stalked off down the path toward a tent flying the emblem of the Rolling Sixes, some type of crouching demon with ragged wings clutching a human leg bone with its clawed fingers. Wind ruffled my hair and dried my sweaty face as I followed. Dad made his way to my side and caught me by the elbow when I tripped over a clump of grass. “You might be healed, but you lost a fair amount of blood before he got that wound closed,” he said.
“I’m fine. I just want to figure out what’s going on, and I want to get Alex back.”
“I didn’t mean to make you look bad back there, Mo. I think it’s great that you tried to do a locator spell.”
I stared stonily at the path ahead. “I’m not a child, Dad. You don’t have to talk to me like one.” It wasn’t his fault I was freaking incompetent. I could have sworn, though, that I did it right. My own magic had flared out just like his—but unlike his, I had connected with Alex, however briefly. “I know I found her. I just… didn’t get a good sense of the location quickly enough.”
“Crowe was right—she could have been cloaked,” he said. “But it would take someone with locant magic even more powerful than mine.”
“One of the Stalkers has that kind of magic.”
“Ford? He can barely cloak himself, let alone someone else. He’s always been resentful because he doesn’t have much power and can’t do much with what he has.”
“So you don’t think the Deathstalkers could have been responsible for kidnapping Alex?”
“Do we know she was kidnapped? She’s been gone less than twenty-four hours, and from what I hear, she’s grown up to be quite the wild child.”
“Alex can be wild, yeah, and she can be tough when she’s mad,” I said. “But I don’t think she would deliberately make the people who love her worry like this. I mean, Crowe, maybe. He’s the one who bound her magic, but—”
“Wait, Crowe did that?”
“No, I did, but—”
“So you are using your magic,” he said, looking pleased.
“Yeah.” I offered him a bitter smile. “Now that you know I’m not a reject, are you gonna come home?”
Dad’s face went from tan to ashen in the space of a few seconds. “You think I left… because of you?”
I scowled and kept walking.
He grabbed my arm and pulled me to a stop. “Jemmie, it killed me to leave you.”
“Uh-huh.”
His eyes shone with emotion. “You have no idea what we did. I had to go, to try to make it right.” His voice was husky. On the verge of breaking.
“What who did?”
“Me and Michael. At the time it seemed like we had no choice, and I went along with it. But it was wrong, Jemmie, and I couldn’t live with it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Dad looked past me, back at the Deathstalkers’ tent. “When we took down Henry Delacroix and every single one of his officers.” He winced, as if he was seeing something horrific in his mind’s eye. “I helped Michael kill six men that night, Jemmie.”
Crowe and the Devils were way ahead of us now, and though I wanted to know why Katrina had attacked us, I needed to know this. “It was just you and Michael? Why did you two have to kill all of them?”
“The officers were following the orders of their president,” Dad said, his tone soaked with regret. “But Henry—he was about to do something that would have changed our world forever. Have you ever heard of the cruori spell?” When I shook my head, he went on. “It’s blood magic. The worst of the worst.”
My cheeks bloomed with heat as I thought about the blood magic between Crowe and me. A thrill of his power still ran through my veins, my heart beating with it. “I didn’t know there were levels of badness when it came to that type of magic.”
Dad shrugged. “It’s never good. Blood incantations involve taking someone else’s essence into your body, or losing it to another person, and you can never know how it’s going to affect either the taker or the giver.”
“What if it’s sort of… mutual?” Crowe had used my magic, but I was the one who offered it.
“You still can’t predict how it might change you,” he said sternly. “But the cruori spell is on a different level. It involves stealing kindled life forces so you can permanently possess every type of magic.”
“Stealing life forces?”
“It is what it sounds like—you have to kill the person, or come close enough to absorb all their magic.”
“But… you’d have to kill a lot of kindled! There are eleven known types.”
“Well, now there are ten. The Crofts and their tollat magic…”
“The family line ended, but didn’t Henry have that tollat power to siphon that the Crofts were known for?”
He nodded. “He must have had Croft blood way back in his family tree, because that power hadn’t been seen in years before he came on the scene, and he was the last person to have it. But to complete the cruori spell, you have to completely drain kindled of their various abilities. That’s what Henry was trying to do, Jemmie. That’s why we had to stop him. If he’d succeeded, he would have been all-powerful. He could have ruled our world. Or ended it.”
I shuddered. “But you stopped him.”
“We got wind of what he was doing after Paul Medici turned up dead, blood drained.”
Paul had been Michael’s cousin. I’d met him once at a summer barbecue when I was eight or nine. He’d let me sit on his bike and wear his helmet, and I cried when Mom told me he had died. “Did Henry get his power?”
Dad shook his head. “Not permanently. There’s something about all the magics combining that binds them to the spell caster and amplifies each one. We think Henry was just experimenting with Paul. But after his murder, it was personal for Michael. I rode with him down to Nola. We didn’t let anyone know we were going.”
“The guys would have backed you up.”
“We wanted to keep it quiet, and the whole club on the road would have let them know we were coming. No, we needed to sneak up on the bastard. And we did. We watched him snatch a Cabrera—one of your mother’s relatives, actually—from a bar. The boy was one of the few remaining merata kindled. He was a friend of Killian’s. Visiting from Brazil.”
“Did Killian have anything to do with Henry’s plans?”
“He was eighteen at the time, Jemmie. I don’t think he had a clue.”