I didn’t have to be a conservative to know that what Crowe created and sold toed a dangerous line. It gave more people the opportunity to use their own magic for crooked purposes. And one time, I admit, I sort of did exactly that—I had tried to use one of Crowe’s amplifying cuts myself. I had stolen it from his room the day he found and chased us, actually. My dad had just announced he would be moving away, and I thought, maybe, if I could convince him I had magic as powerful as his, he would stay. He would stop looking at me with that furrowed brow that signaled a mixture of concern and disappointment.
Thanks to that reflexive barrier spell, I had gotten away with the amplifying cut. The next day, as my dad packed his things, I tried it out, thinking I could throw a containment spell around the entire house and keep Dad with us, where he belonged.
This is the way eleven-year-olds think, unfortunately. It was also the way I ruined everything. I activated the cut the same way I’d seen some of the grown-ups do at summer gatherings—cradling the wood close to my face, whispering the incantation just so—but what I thought would boost my magic only boosted my sensitivity to it. Suddenly, I was retching, writhing, the containment spell I’d tried to cast wrapping around me like sky-blue ropes, the minty, stinging scent of it closing my throat. Choking me.
I remember the horror and confusion in Dad’s eyes when he found me. I remember my mother calling 911. I remember my father having to destroy the spell I’d cast in order to allow the dreck paramedics to make it through the door.
The doctors told them it was an allergic reaction, probably to something I’d eaten. My parents thought I had misused a cut I’d stolen from my dad’s bag, and he moved out that very night. Mom told me it really had nothing to do with me, but how could I believe that? He couldn’t even look at me as he said good-bye.
That was the last time I’d intentionally used magic. But when I was in a place like the Schoolhouse, it didn’t matter. By the time Alex and I slid into our booth in the back corner of the barroom, my body was practically buzzing with it. Magic of all types crept up my spine, across my skin, into my ears and nose.
Alex gave me a look. “You okay?”
“I need a drink stat.”
She frowned, but before she could dig further, one of her cousins called her name and sidled over to our table, coaxing Alex into a conversation about the upcoming festival. I headed to the bar and furtively ordered a shot of rye from Dara, the bartender. She arched an eyebrow. “Sure you wanna go down that road again, darlin’?”
I winced, thinking about my last drunken night here. “Nope. Not at all. But this is just to take the edge off, okay?” I offered her my best puppy-dog eyes. “It’s been a rough day.”
Dara was a sucker for the puppy-dog eyes. “You know I’m not supposed to serve you.…”
“It’ll be our secret,” I whispered. “And make it two. Alex wanted one as well.”
That sealed the deal, because no one refused Alex Medici. “Sip on it, all right? Take it slow.”
“Will do,” I said as she slid two shots of the amber liquid toward me. Relief was already singing in my veins—alcohol dulled my sense of smell and dampened the killer rainbow aura of kindled power in the room. It was the best way for me to survive the night. I whirled around, smoothly downing the first shot as I did. Quickly walking back to Alex, glad as ever that she was monopolizing the gazes and focus of half the people in the room, I tossed the second shot back and set the two glasses on a table that needed to be bussed.
Alex hated rye anyway.
Smiling as the liquor burned my throat, heated my belly, and sent a wave of heavy relaxation along my limbs, I sank onto the seat next to her. She didn’t seem to notice I’d been gone and was engaged in animated conversation, so I pulled my phone from my pocket. Turns out I’d missed a text earlier—one I’d been waiting all day to receive.
I’ll meet you at your house later, it said.
Fingers trembling, I texted back: Can’t wait.
Putting my phone on vibrate, I dropped it back in my pocket and turned my attention to the library again. Just because I could sense Crowe’s magic didn’t mean he was here—the Schoolhouse always smelled like him. When I didn’t see him, I relaxed a little.
With our table now full, and Alex talking about her mother’s plans for the Medici tent at the festival, I turned to the room to people-watch. At a table in the far corner, Jackson Niklos, a Devil member in his early twenties, was showing off his animalia magic using a butterfly. The monarch flitted in between three women, the wings brushing against their cheeks like a chaste kiss, making the women blush and giggle, sending up purple puffs of magic only I could see. Behind the bar, Brooke, one of the Devils’ League prospects, a Warwick with the invictus power her family was renowned for, carted in two kegs, one balanced on each shoulder. The weight was nothing for someone with that kind of magic, which hung around her in a faint orange haze. I knew from experience it smelled of cloves, pungent and biting. Fortunately, all I could smell right now was the lingering hint of rye. It let me enjoy this place for what it was—an oasis of wonder in a not-so-wonderful world.
Within the walls of the bar, our magic wasn’t a secret, guarded and tamped down like it was in the outside world, among drecks. Even before my dad split, all my holidays and birthdays were spent here with the Devils’ League. They were my family. And even as I got older and my sensitivity to the magic grew, I never wanted to stay away too long—and so I’d figured out how to cope.
“Little banshee!” Thom Flynn called as he shuffled over and leaned in to kiss Alex’s forehead. Although he wasn’t related to Alex by blood, she considered him her uncle, and he treated her like she was his favorite niece.
“Hey, Uncle Flynn,” Alex replied quickly before snapping her fingers as Dara walked by. “Jack and Coke for me, please. Jemmie, what are you having?”
Dara gave me a hard look, and I grinned in what I hoped was a charming way. “Uh… a Tom Collins, maybe?”
“Good idea,” said Alex. “Keep it light.”
“Absolutely,” I said, turning away so she couldn’t smell the liquor on my breath. “Wouldn’t want to get crazy.”
Dara paused for a moment, and I tensed, wondering if she was going to call me on my antics. But then Alex cleared her throat and the waitress scurried off.
Flynn scooted in next to me and put his arm over the back of the booth. “So what’s new, Carmichael?”
I shrugged. “The usual.”
He grabbed a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the table and started cracking them open. “The usual good or the usual bad?”
“Just the usual-usual.”
Flynn laughed. His overgrown salt-and-pepper hair was tied back in a bun, revealing what might have once been an extremely handsome face. Freckles dusted his nose. His eyes were big and blue. Gray stubble covered his jaw and the skin wrinkled around his eyes, but a lot of the older women who orbited the club went after Flynn. I guess to them he still had something worth pursuing.
I’d known Flynn as long as Alex had, which was to say, since we were babies. My dad, Michael Medici, and Flynn used to be best friends and had founded the club together back when it was more about the riding and the freedom. I got the sense that their feud with the Deathstalkers had ruined all of that. The club Crowe inherited last year was a completely different animal, more about doing business and fending off threats. More about basic survival.
Someone called out to Flynn from across the room, poking fun at his recent loss at the poker table. Flynn cursed at the guy, whispered an inlusio incantation, and tossed a peanut his way. I held my breath to protect myself from the cigar smoke scent, but saw the telltale trail of cast magic as the peanut arced through the air and burst into a thick green haze when it hit the table—revealing a coiled viper as it cleared. The guy lurched to his feet, eyes round with terror as his body reacted instinctively to the illusion. If the snake struck, the bite would hurt him almost as much as the real thing.
Flynn laughed again. “That one deserved it,” he said to me, and grinned.