The Sweetest Burn (Broken Destiny #2)

“You did what?” Costa said in disbelief.

Adrian glanced at him. “Living with demons taught me that trick, only this time, I used it against them instead of for them.” To me, he said, “Demons tie humans’ souls to theirs to create minions. It’s how regular humans suddenly get superhuman strength, and also how demons ensure that minions won’t betray them because, as you know, then the minions would suffer the same consequences. That’s how I knew that Zach could tie my soul to yours. Any power that demons have first originated from Archons.”

I gripped his hand. “See? Once more, you prove that your bloodline is just that—a bloodline. Not a template for who you are now or who you will be later.”

He touched my face, his large, strong hands managing to be feather soft against my skin. “You believe that, and I love you for it. But I don’t think most people share your opinion.”

“Most don’t,” Costa agreed, ignoring the quelling look I sent him. “But some do, and I’m one of them.”

Adrian stroked my face a final time before going over to Costa. “Thank you,” he said, grasping Costa by the shoulders.

Costa rested his hands on Adrian’s arms, leaning in until their foreheads touched. “For decades, I saw who you used to be, and I hated that man. Then you rescued me and Tomas, and I spent the next several years seeing you fight to become someone else.” Costa’s voice thickened. “You did, and I love that man like a brother, no matter who his father might be.”

Adrian pulled Costa into a hug that made tears prick my eyes, especially when Costa hugged him back just as hard. Then they separated, doing those awkward back slaps that men did when they were trying to downplay the fact that they’d experienced an emotional moment.

“Hey, I noticed something in those photos,” Costa said, changing the subject, which Adrian seemed glad to do, too.

“The tablet ones?”

Costa patted his pants pocket, where I presumed Father Louis’s phone was located. “Yep. There’s no service here, so it was either look at those or listen to Jophiel recite entire books from the Old Testament.”

Adrian grunted knowingly. “So, you chose the pics?”

“Memorized them until the battery died,” Costa replied in a fervent voice.

I stifled a snort. Good thing Zach had walked away during Jasmine’s tirade or he’d probably take issue with that comment.

“Anything would help,” I told Costa. “We went to the places the tablet implied the staff would be, and while it had been there, it’s not now, and there were no other maps or clues.”

Costa scratched his chin. “I’m not sure this means anything, but in tiny letters on the back of the tablet, it said ‘Made in Poland.’”

“What?” I said in disbelief. The stone map with ancient runic writing that was our only clue to the second-most-hallowed weapon in the world had been mass-produced in Poland?

“Did whoever took the staff leave that as a fucking joke?” Adrian growled, echoing my next thoughts.

“Maybe it was a decoy?” Costa offered, giving a helpless shrug. “You know, to throw demons off, if they found it?”

“Then why bury it in a chapel?” Adrian burst out. “No demon could enter one. If I hadn’t used dark objects to curse the ground, Blinky would’ve been fried on contact with the chapel.”

“Maybe whoever left it assumed that minions could’ve found it and brought it to their master,” I said, taking a wild stab.

Adrian’s expression reflected all of the frustration I felt at this looking like yet another dead end. “Doubtful. What would a minion be doing in a church in the first place?”

Nothing I could think of. There wasn’t anything remarkable enough about the chapel to draw that sort of attention to it. It was a small, hardly well-known one, and looked so unimpressive from the outside that no minion would feel compelled to search it for lost relics. In fact, if not for the chapel’s unusual history of being moved from place to place, there would be nothing notable about it at all. It certainly hadn’t been located in the center of a divinely parted sea or a locust storm, either.

Wait a minute. There hadn’t been anything unusual about the area around the chapel. In fact, if Adrian hadn’t trapped a demon there that he wanted me to practice my skills on, we would’ve never swung by Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and found the stone map in the first place. We certainly wouldn’t have found the staff’s prior locations, giving us a rough timeline of where it had been over the past hundred years...

All places that Adrian had also been very familiar with, and it wasn’t the first time. He’d also been the former ruler of the same realm that David’s slingshot had been hidden in. An idea slammed into my mind as if hurled by the slingshot supernaturally coiled inside my arm. What if there wasn’t just one map, but two?

“With the realm bleeding onto the campus and demons slaughtering and kidnapping at will, we didn’t have time to wonder why there was no weather or other natural phenomenon around the chapel,” I said, interrupting Adrian and Costa’s dispute over whether the stone tablet was a deliberate red herring or just what the staff’s guardians had available to write their clue on. “We know the staff had been at St. Joan’s for a few years at least, so that area should have been known for freaky weather or strange geographical incidents, right?”

“Yes,” Adrian replied, drawing the word out as he realized the implications, too. “So should its old locations in France and Long Island, but I don’t remember hearing about anomalies there, either. But we know the staff does affect its surroundings in powerful ways. That’s why the sailing stones in Death Valley were our first stop. After that, I figured we’d check out Honduras, where fish rain from the sky every year, then the Taos Hum in New Mexico, then Venezuela for the Catatumbo lighting—”

“All places with freaky anomalies,” I interrupted. “Especially the fish thing, but if we don’t think the tablet is a joke or a decoy, then it’s an authentic clue from whoever took the staff. In that case, nothing on it was accidental. So, maybe the ‘Made in Poland’ decal was left on there for a reason.”

Adrian stared at me, my meaning sinking in. “You think the staff is in a church in Poland,” he stated.

“I think it might be,” I replied, and that wasn’t even the craziest part of the theory that had taken over my mind.

Costa let out a disbelieving snort. “Talk about hiding a clue in plain sight! The decal was so small, anyone could have missed it.”

“You didn’t,” I told him, with a grateful smile. “I probably never would have noticed it in those pictures.”

He grunted. “You didn’t have those pictures as your only escape from endless sermons.”

No, but Costa had. Coincidence? I was starting to doubt it.

“So, let’s assume we’re right about the significance of ‘Made in Poland,’” I said, continuing with my theory. “Was Poland on your list of places with freaky weather occurrences?”