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“No, she’s gone hunting for mushrooms with her father in the forest. He wanted her help to make a show of force.”

“A show of force? To what?”

“To the mushrooms, of course,” replied Cadence. “They are quite aggressive in these parts. Would you like to join them and help out?”

While the idea of aggressive mushrooms was certainly intriguing, that wasn’t why I’d come.

“Actually, I came here on another matter,” I said.

“Oh?”

“To speak to you about…” It was hard to say the words. They were so embarrassing. “About angel fertility.”

“Oh, I see.” She went into the kitchen and came back with two cups of hot chocolate. “So, what’s his name?” she asked as we sat down on the sofa.

“Who?”

“The boy.” She peered over my cup at me. “Yourboy.”

“My boy?” Oh. That. I blushed.

“There are herbs that can prevent pregnancy?—”

“You’ve got me all wrong,” I cut in, my whole face burning. “There is no boy. This isn’t about me.”

“Of course it isn’t.” She winked at me.

“It’s about my parents.”

“Oh.” She set down the cup. “I see.”

“Aunt Bella told me they want to have more children, but they’ve been unable to. Because of the Nectar.” I poked the marshmallow bobbing on top of a sea of hot chocolate. “You have all this knowledge, all these books. I was hoping you knew of a way to help them.”

“Oh, Sierra, that’s so thoughtful of you,” she said. “But I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do about that. Their power comes from Nectar—and Venom and Life. Those are all poisons. Those poisons give you something, but they also take something away. Your parents have to regularly consume it to keep their powers.”

“And if they were to stop consuming it?”

“It isn’t just about magic, Sierra. Their bodies would wither, grow weak. They are dependent on the poison, not just for magic but to survive.”

“Like Regin,” I said.

My parents had told me about the rogue god Regin. He’d been imprisoned for many years, completely cut off from everywhere, his body starved of Nectar. He’d turned into a weak, shriveled husk of a man. He’d also turned insane, though he might have been that way before his imprisonment.

“I need to find a way,” I sighed. “I just want my parents to be happy.”

“Well, Regin found a way to have ten children,” Cadence pointed out.

“By sacrificing people.” I shook my head. “No. That’s not the answer. My parents would never do that.Iwould never do that.”

Cadence slowly stirred her chocolate. “There might be another way.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think the answer lies within the book called Transformations. The djinn thief who stole the psychic ring from the Legion’s research facility had a copy of it. I borrowed another copy from Eva and Jiro’s library.”

“But what does that book have to do with this?”

“I’ve been studying the book. It describes the Immortals’ early experiments.”