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M uzzy-headed and exhausted, I blinked the sky into focus next to still another bonfire. The demon must have discovered a lot more logs because this blaze engulfed him from the claws on his toes to the tips of his horns poking above his wild mop of hair. Groaning, I rolled to the side to put some distance between me and the inferno he’d built. Mild surprise crept through me when I realized, despite that perhaps unwise maneuver, I didn’t hurt much. My shoulder twanged in protest, but the frigid cold was gone. Now clammy against my skin, my ruined work polo wasn’t flash-frozen to me anymore. My brow furrowed because my leg didn’t ache all that bad, either.

What I felt, with dawning horror, was the almost complete absence of the power I’d wrestled into submission my whole life. Funny considering how often and fervently I’d wished the magic away and the massive energy I spent every day concentrating just to contain the gifts I’d been born with. I closed my eyes to better focus—to search out that faint buzz within me, the vibration that had always been there as both plague and companion. When I concentrated, I could sense a dim kernel of my magic. It hadn’t been stripped from me entirely. But close. Damn close.

When the crackling of the fire drew my attention, I turned my head.

The demon grinned at me from inside the flames.

If appearances could be trusted, he was much stronger. The reddish cast to his skin had grown pronounced, the marks from the wounds he’d received before portaling now only thin silvery lines on his torso and limbs. I shivered at the bright red restored to the demon’s eyes, no mystery where my power had bled to. Squinting his forearms into focus, the sigils I’d glimpsed a scant hint of inside the dryads’ circle showed more prominently, the arches and whirls blurry but clear enough to activate if the demon called for each spell.

Although the demon’s own magic had been revived, signs of the physical damage he’d suffered lingered. His wings had begun to mend while I’d been unconscious. Some rents still marred the membrane in places, but the edges, no longer tattered, had smoothed. His spilled blood had burned off in the flames. A deep groove, raw and angry, carved a stark path into his hair above his pointed ears, though, the curls matted together. Similarly, the circle of the bullet wound he’d taken to his biceps seeped. The freezing spell active in those bullets had dispersed, at least.

I wondered that he hadn’t killed me. Despite draining my power, I felt his hunger as a gnawing ache in my gut. Working magic, especially stolen magic, required a lot of energy. He’d also been mortally injured when I’d discovered him in the Grove. Repairing enough of his devastated body to survive would’ve sapped his strength and mine. He wasn’t simply hungry. He was ravenous.

And there I was, a tasty human morsel too weak to put up a fight. Drained nigh dry of my power, I wouldn’t taste as sweet to him, but demons loved to snack on magicals. They consumed us less than mundanes, true, but only because they deemed the risks we posed to their autonomy as too great. Demons targeted us less, but they did hunt us.

I groaned again, lifting my leaden arms so I could rub the exhaustion from my face. When I shifted my hands from my gritty eyes, I let out an undignified yelp at the demon crouching over me. “I require meat,” he said.

For a moment, I believed he would bend low and take a chunk out of my sore shoulder, but he only blinked those blood-red eyes at me instead. Realizing I wasn’t on the menu, I gulped. “Where are we?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

“Safe.” He tapped his temple unmindful of the furrow that bullet had cut into him. “You saw this.” His wave encompassed our surroundings.

Glancing from the demon, I turned my chin…

Across the rectangle of a garden plot already harvested this late in the season, the glass of a greenhouse shimmered against the rays of the late afternoon sun and my stomach did a slow roll. “Aw, fuck.” I moaned, spying the back porch as cluttered today with pots, garden tools, and burlap sacks as the last time I’d seen it at age ten. “Fuckety, fuck, fuck.” I marshaled the strength to rip my horror-struck stare away. “Fuck.”

“I do not know this word.” His mouth thinned. “Meat,” he reminded me.

Swallowing down bile, I let my head fall back to the dirt. I would’ve hit it several times if I thought the blows would knock sense into me or give me any idea what to do now, but it was just dirt. All I did was crackle dry leaves. “If anything’s in the fridge, it rotted a decade ago. You’ll have to hunt.”

The demon’s eyes lit with glee. He smacked his lips. “I go.”

He hopped off me with lightning rapidity and crashed through the brambles on the other side of the firepit we’d frequently enjoyed in my childhood. “Stay inside the wards.” I called to him, but did it matter? Like he had any reason to heed me. Blowing out a despairing breath, I pushed myself off the ground with gluey arms. I just had to hope the demon’s desire to avoid being tracked by the cops might dissuade him from a murderous rampage. Not like I was in any condition to stop him. Others might, but humiliating weakness and lethargy made me a threat to nobody.

As soon as I’d crossed the border to my dad’s land, John Griffith would’ve gotten the alert. The warning wouldn’t have been as fierce and jangling as one indicating an intruder. I wouldn’t have been able to ignore that stab to my other senses, either, magic depleted or not, but Griffith would know I was here, just as I’d known when he’d crossed the wards once every month since I was a kid. Dad’s wards would’ve also informed Griffith I wasn’t alone.

The question was, would Griffith understand what that meant?

The news of the demon must have broken in the magical community. In all of Allegany County. A wounded demon on the loose? The mayor would’ve called the governor begging for National Guard support before we’d landed…or crashed…from our awkward, spiraling flight to evade the police. Local media must have broadcast our last known location, with shelter-in-place orders for the immediate area.

Did I have time?

I avoided John Griffith, the Towpath Guild, and its associated businesses like the plague. The last time Griffith and I had spoken, we’d argued about my place and legacy within the magical community. I’d crossed my dad’s wards last spring to work on the novelty grafts I’d wanted to experiment with on my own after playing it safe in Megan’s class. I rented a house with four other guys across the blue bridge in West Virginia. Fewer restrictions and paperwork, cheaper rent, more space than the jam-packed neighborhoods in town. We had a yard, but nowhere I would risk the trees’ maturity cycle on. I didn’t know if I’d still be in the rental next year, forget five years from now. I had to start the grafts somewhere permanent, isolated, a spot I could monitor and nurture the trees until they began bearing fruit. My boyhood home was the logical answer.

Since Ma had moved me out of the place when Dad had died, I hadn’t returned. Even when I’d couch-surfed at seventeen after Ma’s drinking got too dangerous, I hadn’t stayed here. I…couldn’t. So, when I showed up last spring, Griffith had streaked out of town to meet me as though his ass was on fire.

Hell, yes, we’d argued, but until then, I hadn’t seen or spoken to the guild boss in years.

Did he know where I worked? That the demon had portaled into my freaking job?

Had the cops mentioned me by name as an abductee of the demon to the press? I wasn’t a pretty, blonde white girl, so maybe not. Probably not. The police liked me. I was a success story to them. Magical father murdered. Mundane mother drowning her grief in a bottle, which got so bad I was effectively homeless my last year of high school.

The cops never forgot how grisly my dad’s death had been or the trauma that violent loss had inflicted on me when I was a kid. They’d helped me. Mentored me. Showed up for my high school graduation when Ma was too drunk to bother. CPD had taken a collective interest in steering a kid from a shitty home clear of growing up to become another punk.

How much of that support would hold now that they knew I wasn’t mundane? Enough to buy me time free of John Griffith’s interference by not specifying me by name in their alerts? I wouldn’t bet my life on it.

Then I laughed because, ha, I was doing exactly that.

I had to assume Griffith would arrive any moment and that meant getting my ass up from the barren earth surrounding the firepit. Bracing my arms, I moaned as I pushed my weight up, impressed when I didn’t collapse back to the ground. I was weak. Very. But if I gritted my teeth, I could function.

I stumbled to my feet. Shoulders squaring, I faced the cluttered porch across the dying garden. With more determination than courage, I lifted a foot to begin a lurching march to the back door. Did I have a plan? No. But unless the aquifer beneath the house had run dry in the years since I’d been inside the place, the taps at the kitchen sink would spill cool, sweet water to quench the dehydrated desert that was my body.

When I took the stairs, holding onto the banister to steady my wobbling stagger to the house, I noted the fresh plank of the first step with a weary sigh. Griffith. Had to be.

Dad had set his wards on his land so only three people other than himself could breach them: me, Ma, and his best friend. While I’d known Griffith had maintained and repaired the house during the long years it had remained empty, my belly knotted at the evidence of the other man’s diligence at preserving my father’s legacy.

Much to Ma’s chagrin, Dad had used the back porch as an overflow area for his greenhouse. Pots, urns, and gardening tools had crowded out whatever grand designs she’d had for the space. That hadn’t changed. I’d avoided the house when I tended my grafted trees. I’d planted them on the other side of the greenhouse so I’d see as little of my childhood home as possible. Griffith must have sourced the compost from the community drop-off Megan had organized because the WMBG logo had been stenciled on several sacks and a pair of collection bins. Goosebumps pebbled my forearms at how closely the guild boss had hovered in the periphery of my life.

I should’ve monitored him. Obviously, he had kept his eyes on me.

Nothing I could do about that now except shorten the time I hoped to have to settle on a plan before he showed up.

Crossing the worn floorboard of the porch, I reached for the screen door. My eyes widened, my breath locking in my chest at the open back door, and then I startled when one of my roomies popped into the doorway. He beamed a lopsided grin. “Oh, hi! Figured I’d find you here. C’mon in. I brought groceries.”

“Skip?” I gawked at him. “How did you get inside?”

“I didn’t break in.” Affronted, he wrinkled his nose. “It wasn’t locked.”

Skip Stone was twenty-four going on fourteen. Although he’d enrolled as a student at FSU too, if he’d ever attended the classes the Cult of the Way paid for, I’d never seen evidence of it. I’d also met no person—human or magical being—who enjoyed his recreational pharmaceuticals as much as Skip, at least not without suffering through advanced addiction. He only messed with cannabis, though, primarily edibles from the dispensary he worked at part-time. Skip stood as tall as me, though the manual labor I regularly put in at the botanical garden hadn’t filled out his frame with muscle. His shoulders under his routine T-shirt were wide enough, though, and his scrawny legs poking out of his baggy denim shorts were fit. He had brown eyes prone to twinkling with mischief and spiky blond hair he’d only recently grown out. The guy also had, as near as I could tell, no discernible goals or ambitions beyond worshipping Anand, Goddess of the Earth, and otherwise having a fun time.

Despite being a religious nut and a stoner, Skip was still my best friend. I confided in no one, ever, but he was the closest I had to an actual friend, anyway. “The wards,” I said as a dazed mumble, my dizzy head spinning.

He waved a dismissive hand. “The great and mysterious Goddess made me impervious to your wards.” He nudged the screen door wider and tugged me inside. “She said you need water and food immediately.”

On jellied legs, I let him guide me into the kitchen. My heart panged at the familiar sunny yellow cabinets, central work island, and happy sunflower accessories Ma had decorated the space with. My mother had been young once, happy. A legit mom who had led my scout den, volunteered as a parent reading partner for my second-grade class, and had made cookies for bake sales to raise money for my T-ball league. She’d fallen apart when dad was killed, but before? She’d been the kind of mom who’d hung merry sunflower wind chimes at her kitchen window. I could still picture her at the sink, arms deep in suds to hand-wash the stuff she hadn’t been able to jam into our dishwasher.

“Sit.” Skip guided me to a stool nested beneath the long edge of the work island, a breakfast bar I’d consumed many, many snacks at while Ma had drilled me on my spelling words. I plopped onto the cushion and watched my friend unerringly choose the correct cabinet from which to pluck a jelly glass. He turned the faucet at the sink, let the water run over his fingers for a few seconds, then filled the glass. He carried it to me. “Drink.”

Since my brain seemed to have locked up, I tipped my head back and drank.

I’d forgotten how cool and crisp the water at the house was. Our rental had a well too, but required a water softener that never quite removed the mineral taste. The weird flavor didn’t bother two of the guys I shared the rental property with, but Skip, Finnegan, and I hauled cases of water from the market instead. After years of Dad’s careful attention to the land, the aquifer here produced a purity that no bottling company could ever hope to match. I gulped the contents of my glass down and when Skip refilled it, drank half of that too.

While I’d replenished the desiccated husk of my body, Skip had resumed unpacking canvas grocery bags that crowded the kitchen counters. He shoved a box of my favorite granola bars at me. “Dipped in chocolate. I know you don’t like the added sugar, but the goddess insisted you would need a quick burst of energy.”

“Skip,” I said again, marginally impressed my voice wasn’t as raspy as before. “The wards guard against humans.” I placed the granola bars next to my glass on the countertop. “ Especially magicals.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “Well, I’m not strictly human,” he said, as though that didn’t change everything. Since I wasn’t eating the snack he’d offered me, he reached into the bag and plucked a plum from it. He pitched it to me, grin broadening when I reflexively caught the fruit before it beaned me in the nose. “If not chocolate or candy, fruit’s best.”

“Dad crafted his wards to allow freedom of movement for magical creatures endemic within the ecosystem.” Dryads and other nymphs, pixies, and gnomes, even centaurs were given unimpeded passage through our land, although no centaur had been seen in western Maryland in a generation.

My father had been a druid, a powerful and dedicated one. To him, caring for nature included taking steps to ensure the thorough protections he’d set for his family had not in any way disturbed the balance of the forest he’d invested so much of his magic preserving. “None of those endemic magical beings can shift into human form or could ever be mistaken as human.” I set the plum aside. “ What are you? ”

“Your friend for the past three years.” Skip rolled his eyes. “One who brought you food.” He lifted a red bag from his grocery haul and shook it beseechingly. “I brought you those corn chips with the disgusting powder you love so much. Very bad for you, but just this once. You need to eat.”

Because what I needed was answers, I glared at him, then ripped my hands up to grasp the counter. I caught my breath as my world subtly shifted.

Skip dropped the nacho chips and rushed toward me. “David?”

Stomach rolling, I tried for a smile despite the clamoring of my father’s wards on my nerves. “Griffith’s here.”

Blue eyes narrowing, Skip scowled. “Him,” he said, voice scathing.

Incapable of dealing with my friend’s bullshit on top of Griffith’s, I pushed off my stool and headed across the kitchen, through the living room, and to the front door with my eyes straight ahead. The less I noticed details, like one of my action figures still on the coffee table or my framed school artwork proudly displayed on the wall, the less my battered heart would break. I ripped the door open as Griffith’s green F150 pulled up the driveway. My nausea increased tenfold at the shadow of a passenger in the truck with the guild boss.

Great. Just great.

Crossing my arms, spine stiff, I waited at the top of the front porch stairs.

Griffith killed the engine and climbed from the truck. He marched to the porch, the rugged grooves on his face reflecting equal measures of anger and concern. “A demon, David. Really? It had to be a demon.”

“He stabbed me with his claws and I got shot twice, but I feel okay now, Griffith. Thanks for asking.”

“Of course, you’re fine. Your demon would’ve healed your injuries first.” He snorted. “If you’re binding a demon, a couple of bullet holes are the least of your problems.”

Behind him, another one of my roommates hopped from the truck, fastidiously brushing nonexistent lint from his Dockers and a light blue Oxford button-down. “John,” Finnegan Bailey called to the guild boss.

Who cursed.

Pivoted.

He stomped back to the truck and grabbed Finnegan by the arm to drag him across the innermost circle of my dad’s wards.

Unperturbed, Finnegan pushed his glasses up his nose. “We’ll need my jeep.”

“Does no one care that I’m soaked in blood?” I glared at them both. “Some of it is mine.”

Finnegan cocked his head to one side and swept his stare over me from head to toe. Then he returned his attention to Griffith. “The wards are as impenetrable as you described, but one should always have an escape plan for when shit hits the fan.” He glanced at me. “Again.”

“I agree. But thanks to this guy,” the guild boss said, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder at me, “and his known association with the Towpath, we’ll be watched.”

Finnegan’s jaw hardened. “We need transportation.”

“I know. I’ll figure something out.”

“He has transportation. The demon can fly.” Startled, I jumped when Skip emerged from the house behind me. He sniffed his disdain at the two men arguing in the driveway. “John Griffith, I understand. Magicals must register with a guild, but what is he doing here?”

When I looked over my shoulder, I finally realized that Skip’s glare had focused on Finnegan.

What the hell?

We’d shared the same house for three years, and now Skip suddenly loathed Finnegan? News to me. Mind, my two roomies hadn’t been close. They’d been friends to me more than friendly to each other, but they hadn’t acted like mortal enemies before today, either. “I need a drink.” I shoved my fingers through my hair and spectacularly failed to make sense of any of this. “Shower first. But then a drink.”

“Where is he?” Griffith climbed the porch steps, Finnegan shadowing behind him. “Your demon.”

“Doing shots of tequila at a bar in Budapest. Who knows.” Disgusted with all of them, I turned and walked back into the house. Glaring at my younger self’s action figure on my way to the kitchen, I sighed. I reached into the canvas bags of groceries and randomly pulled out cookies. Perching on a stool at the island dominating the room, I ripped the packaging open and prayed the sugar rush would ease the headache building behind my eyes.

The house wasn’t warded as thoroughly as the greenhouse and the outer perimeter of the land, so Griffith, Skip, and Finnegan followed me into the kitchen.

“You didn’t bind him?” Griffith rested a warm hand on my uninjured shoulder and squeezed. “At least start the process?”

I shook my head. “I was unconscious,” I said through a mouthful of chocolate chip.

“When he snatched me from work, I was shot and he legit stabbed me.” I rolled my right shoulder to test that injury, then shrugged. “Truthfully, had I wanted to bind him, I wouldn’t know how. Not like any of my professors are covering daemonica in Plant Pathology or Biotech.”

Skip scurried to my side. “Shirt off.”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “I beg your pardon?” Then I slapped his hands away when he reached for the hem of my ruined polo. “Stop.” Shoving another cookie in my mouth, I lifted my foot and propped it on the other kitchen stool. I nodded to my calf. “Cops shot me there.” I peered down at the unblemished skin. Dried blood caked my leg, but I couldn’t see a mark, not so much as a bruise. “The shoulder hurts a little, but my leg is mostly fine. Twinges a little, but that’s all.”

Bending over my calf to inspect it, Griffith’s mouth thinned. “You don’t need your shoulder to run from a threat. He wasn’t strong enough to fully heal you.” The guild boss flashed a glance up at me. “He prioritized.”

“Demons don’t heal humans they aren’t binding with,” Finnegan said, leaning against the jamb of the doorway. “That requires a massive amount of energy. He would’ve been weak and severely injured after portaling. That the demon bothered with you at all is a strong indicator how intense the link he feels already is.”

Griffith glanced up from my leg to meet my gaze. “Did he exact a promise?”

Flummoxed, I blinked. “Did he do what now?”

Griffith blew out a sharp, frustrated breath. “Did he ask you to make some sort of oath? Big or small doesn’t matter for binding magic. What’s vital is the giving and receiving of a promise.”

“None of your business.” When Griffith’s brow furrowed, my temper exploded. “I was a little preoccupied with not bleeding to death. I don’t remember, okay?”

“He gave his vow.”

The others flinched. Finnegan yelped in the doorway to the living room. Skip scrambled around the other side of the cooking island. Even Griffith retreated a few steps from the demon standing at the open screen door to the back porch.

Griffith’s eyes narrowed on the demon, though. “Did you give him yours? Cement the binding magic?”

The demon glared at him. “Ne.”

The guild boss arched an eyebrow at him. “Interesting.”

“Not really.” Drying blood that was starting to itch covered me, and Skip’s goddess had been right—my empty stomach was trying to gnaw its way out of my abdomen. Exhaustion muddied my senses, and the almost complete absence of my power grated on my nerves. I couldn’t muster the alarm the others showed in the demon’s presence. Couldn’t make myself care. “Don’t hurt them,” I told the demon, tipping my jaw at Skip, Finnegan, and Griffith.

Claws unsheathed, the demon scowled at me. “Why?”

Good question. “Griffith will tell us how much trouble we’re in.” I considered my roommates. “And until you leave, we need friends.”

“They stink of lies,” the demon complained.

“Allies then.” I pushed to my feet. “No bloodshed in the kitchen. I mean it.” I grimaced at the witch’s blade Griffith must have pulled from wherever on his body he kept it hidden. “You know what? I don’t care. I need a shower, clean clothes, and food.” I grabbed the bag of cookies from the countertop. “Do what you want.”

I maneuvered around both Griffith and Finnegan as I strode from the kitchen into the living room. I veered left to the stairs. At the top, I didn’t go to my old bedroom. I wasn’t ready to add that to today’s laundry list of traumas and besides, I was ten when my dad was murdered. I was an adult now. None of those clothes would fit.

I headed instead to my parents’ room, my heartbeat racing at the unmade bed as I crossed to the dresser. I pulled open drawers until I found sweatpants with a drawstring waist and a T-shirt.

In my memory, my dad had been huge. Enormously tall and so strong.

Judging by the sizes on the clothing labels, I had grown bigger than my dad, but the clothes would do.

Balling them in my fist, I strode from the bedroom to the bathroom, relieved when no cacophony of battle met my ears from downstairs. I sat on the toilet to loosen the laces of the hiking boots I wore to work so I could kick them off. I peeled off socks that had stiffened with dry blood, then my wrecked work polo, jockeys, and cargo shorts.

The trust my dad had set up before his death paid the property taxes on the land, but also covered basic utility bills. The landline wouldn’t work and cell service out here was spotty, but the electric was still connected. The pump drawing water from the aquifer deep underground had juice to feed the tap when I turned on the faucet. I tested the stream, unsurprised when I had to adjust the temperature to make it cooler—the hot water heater still worked.

A glance in the stall warned me Griffith must have cleared away the shampoo and soap at some point, but I found extras in the linen closet, where they’d been stored alongside the towels when I was a kid.

Ten minutes later, scrubbed clean, I used the edge of a damp towel to wipe off the mirror, shocked that the person in the reflection looked familiar. Same dark eyes, same shadow of stubble darkening my jaw and a stubborn chin that tended to jut. I was taller, a little stockier. I kept my hair trimmed shorter too, but I didn’t need the framed pictures all over this house and snapshots stuck with magnets to the refrigerator to know I could otherwise be my dead father’s twin. After her nightly fifth of vodka, the pain in my mother’s eyes whenever she could bear to look at me had told me the resemblance was uncanny.

Sometime when the similarities with my dad caught me off guard, sad affection and pride filled me, but mostly, it felt like a curse.

When I yanked on the pilfered sweats, I frowned at my bare ankles showing from the elastic at the bottom of each leg and the cotton stretching over my thighs like sausage casings. I wrestled into the too-small shirt as well.

I looked ridiculous, but at least I was clean.

Snagging the bag of cookies from the top of the dresser on my way downstairs, I listened to the silence. Shouldn’t they be arguing? The house was quiet, no blaring TV, no music streaming from anybody’s phone. The ticking of Ma’s grandfather clock in the living room creeped me out. I wondered if they’d gone or maybe I’d dreamed the past hour or two, but when I crept into the kitchen, Griffith hovered over a skillet on the stove. My stomach grumbled at the rich scent of cooking meat.

Griffith pointed at the kitchen stool with a spatula. “Sit down before you fall down,” he said before plating a thick slab of beef. The guild boss opened a cabinet to fetch a glass. He filled it with ice from the freezer before pouring water from the tap. I watched him while he carried the drink and a steak to the cooking island where I’d sat. He produced a knife and fork from a drawer and placed both next to me. “If you’re still vegetarian, I don’t care. Your body’s been through a lot and needs protein. If you aren’t strong, your demon won’t heal.”

He’d known I’d been a vegetarian at one point? I picked up the knife and fork and set to work cutting the beef. “It was a phase.” The arched eyebrow the guild boss shot me suggested Griffith knew that phase had lasted two years, but the thing about lying? Deceit can become every bit a part of you as your hand and your eyes. I’d been lying to John Griffith since before Dad died. We both had.

“Where is…” I trailed off because did I want to know where the others were? Not really. Instead, I shoved the first bite of the steak into my mouth and groaned in ravenous satisfaction at the burst of flavor.

“They’re outside. Your demon took down a deer, but I convinced him you’d need food—cooked food—faster than he could butcher it.” He flashed a whimsical smile. “He’ll expect you to eat some of his venison anyway, even if we ruin the meat by grilling it.”

My belly rumbled again at the memory of my mother’s roast swimming in gravy with potatoes, carrots, and onions grown in our garden. “I liked venison.”

“I remember.” Griffith settled on a stool next to mine, as comfortably as he might’ve when he shared a meal with my parents in this kitchen when I was a kid. “With me, Finnegan, and Skip so close, he’s feeling territorial. His instincts are screaming at him to feed and protect you, but that won’t last. He’ll be steadier once he heals.”

I chewed and swallowed, staring at my steak as I sliced off another bite rather than at the guild boss. “How long will that take?”

“I don’t know.” Griffith shrugged a stiff shoulder. “Until today, Cumberland’s nexus has been dormant. No bound demons have located in this part of the tri-state, either. I tasked Bea with tactfully approaching outsiders for research when I left town to see if you’d brought your demon here. We’ve just had no reason to learn or know much about daemonica .” He spread his hands. “A few days for him to recover? Any longer than that and he risks the link between you growing too strong for him to break it to portal back home. But that’s a guess.”

Chasing the neat pieces of steak with more water, I ate and pondered the disaster of a demon sticking around for a few days. Incapable of comprehending the intensity of that looming catastrophe, I considered instead from my menu of lesser what-the-fuckery. “Finnegan,” I finally said.

Griffith flinched. “Yes.”

“Is he genuinely enrolled at ACC?” I asked, curious.

The guild boss shook his head. “He’s training as a fire mage under Keith Wright.”

My eyebrow winged up. Fire mage? They were usually more temperamental. “He doesn’t seem the type.”

“Finn’s insecure about it because he tested very low, a one or a weak two at best, but Keith’s taken him along to shadow him with the forest service for controlled burns to prep for fire season since Finn was fourteen.”

That explained Finnegan’s weird hunting trips every summer and fall. Weird because, to my knowledge, Finnegan didn’t own a gun, and he was squeamish around local wildlife. The lies about hunting had been obvious, at least to me, but I’d had secrets too. I respected them in others, so I hadn’t pushed.

“He’s committed to his apprenticeship and training,” Griffith said, pride lacing his voice. “My guess is he’s a solid level three fire mage now.”

I stood to refill my glass from the kitchen sink. Turning, I leaned against the counter to assess Griffith. “You sent him to spy on me.”

Griffith flinched. “Spy is a strong word.”

“But an accurate one.”

“Not entirely.” The guild boss frowned. “When you tested as mundane…” His shoulders slumped. “You probably don’t know this, but your dad initially tested as mundane, too. You never met your dad’s family, thank God, but they’re big muckety mucks in Chicago, an extensive line of powerful druids, all level tens. Scary fucking people, to tell the truth, and not just because every single of them are psychopaths. Teddy, as their heir apparent, testing as non-magical was quite the scandal back then. He wasn’t genuinely mundane, though. Just a late bloomer.” He shot me a pointed stare.

I kept the bland look on my face. Barely. “I’m not a late bloomer.”

“No, you hid what you are and you’re powerful enough to throw the test, a ten like your dad and every other Mace.” Griffith shook his head. “Like knows like. Your dad and I were best friends. I knew you were no mundane from the moment you were born. I felt it.” He rubbed his chest, just over his heart. “Here. Before Teddy died, years before you were old enough to test, I recognized how powerful you are. Your dad never wanted to see it, said you were too little, but I knew .”

My mouth curved. “So, you sent Finnegan to catch me drawing magic?”

“I couldn’t blame you for turning your back on your power.” He sighed. “Magicals killed your father and destroyed your life. If you could walk away from the trauma of being magical in this fucked-up world, who was I to stop you? That was your choice. In your place, given your opportunities, I don’t know that I would’ve chosen differently.”

His dark eyes glittered, beseeching. “But I lost him, too. I loved your dad like a brother, and he made me executor of your trust, of all of this. For you.” He waved at the sunny kitchen. “He trusted me with your future. No one else. Not even your mother. Me.” He blew out a sharp breath. “I didn’t send Finnegan to spy. I assigned him to shadow you because I had to be sure you were okay.”