Page 7

7

T he next two days did not go well. Finnegan was indeed determined to teach me remedial magic. While I’d admit my dad’s furtive mentoring prior to his murder had been riddled with gaps, Teddy Mace hadn’t left his orphaned son defenseless. While I hadn’t been able to practice my druid magic during the long years I’d masqueraded as a mundane, my range of expertise exceeded that of most low- to mid-level druids. I also had mastered minor spell work in other areas of specialty my father had considered vital to my magical education, especially charms and potions. I recognized basic alchemy when I saw it and could duplicate it. Though I lacked practical experience, because magic that manipulated water was closely related to my druid gifts, I was a minor water mage, but I was a complete disaster at focusing fire, air, and earth. Short of bringing forth water for my plants, even that element was otherwise inaccessible to me. Fire and air responded to my magic not at all, which Finnegan seemed to accept as a personal affront.

“C’mon, man. Focus on the wick.”

Ignoring him and the candle he’d placed dead center of the cooking island he’d cleared of other items, I leaned with the countertop at the sink digging into the small of my back and concentrated on my dad’s grimoire as much as I could through the haze of pain throbbing from my mangled thumb. I had sunk an entire day in pouring over the pages, refreshing my blood on the barb in brief intervals to keep working, but had yet to find whatever magic my father had left that would allow me to access the grimoire without inflicting permanent damage. The thick gauze bandaging all fingers and thumb on my left hand hindered turning the pages. The digits on my right hand hadn’t fared significantly better, and I could hardly concentrate because of the throbbing sting. I’d nestled the awl I’d used to prick the center of both palms above my ear. I’d even tried scratching shallow grooves in my forearms to feed the blood magic.

Everything hurt.

But no dice.

Teddy Mace’s voracious barb drank my blood in greedy gulps and I was no closer to identifying the solution to the protective magic locking away his grimoire than I’d been at the start. I could read it, but only for a few minutes, ten at most. Then, I had to refresh my offering of blood or the book shifted into gibberish again.

Obviously, Dad had magicked the barb to drink in blood faster than normal, to dry the sacrifice unlocking his grimoire at a speedy clip. My blood, alone, wasn’t the key. Or rather, it was only part of the key. He’d designed the magic guarding his grimoire to achieve a certain purpose, to teach me a lesson. But what?

I glared at the opening page as my blood poured from my tortured thumb and the squiggles drifted into the words that had dogged me for the past forty-eight hours: love and welcome .

Frustration clawed at my gut.

Sheened in sweat after the sharp return of unusually high temps in the mountains, Jae trudged through the back door. One side of his mouth curling, he swept the candle Finnegan concentrated on with a mischievous glance.

The wick burst into flame, and Finnegan startled, a pleased grin lighting his face. “Hey!” he said, his tone as bright as the candle until he noticed my demon, who smirked at him. Finnegan glowered. “You are such a dick.”

Despite the exhausted lines grooving his features, Jae smiled. He waved at the burning candle. “Fire magic will come to him. Until then, he has me. He must prepare to run the gauntlet to your council testing. Yet, you waste his time,” he said, arching an eyebrow, “which makes you a bag of dicks.”

Finnegan scowled at him. “I liked you better when you hardly talked.”

At least the new translation sigil I’d drawn on his stomach in my blood—because, of course, that magic would require my blood since I wasn’t giving enough of it to Dad’s grimoire—had worked. For good or ill, Jae understood slang now. Once he understood what Skip and Finnegan were saying, he picked arguments with them constantly.

Sighing at the extra tension and distraction, I returned my attention to the grimoire and swore when I realized the text had scrambled already.

Finnegan stared at me, his forehead furrowing. “What?”

“I think it’s getting faster.” I glared at the grimoire.

“What’s getting faster?” Finnegan rose from the kitchen stool and crossed to the sink.

“My dad sealed the grimoire with blood magic.” Showing him the open book, I nodded at the barb and my wrecked thumb. “Only my blood unlocks the text, but it’s drying faster and faster.”

With a pained harrumph, Jae marched from the door and elbowed Finnegan aside. His eyes flashed a faint red as he studied the barb. His mouth thinned when he regarded the injured mess I’d made of myself to read the book thus far. “This is what you do while I spy on our enemies.” He snorted in disgust and glowered at Finnegan. “And you let him.”

“He doesn’t let me do anything,” I said, temper flaring.

“Yes,” Finnegan said. “We need what’s in that grimoire.”

Jae snatched the book from me and set it on the counter, splayed open to the first page. He grabbed my injured hand and turned it. He lifted his own, claws extended, and pricked the center of my palm. I sucked in a pained hiss at this further abuse of my poor hands and then watched, eyes wide, as he released me to stab his palm as well. He mashed his wound to mine, his claw-tipped fingers grasping me tight, and power zapped through my body like an electric current. I jolted at the surge, but the demon held on. He tipped his jaw at my aching thumb. “Now it will work.”

This time, when I painted the barb with my blood, the steel glowed crimson and the words didn’t crawl to unscramble—the text instantly deciphered into my father’s inelegant scrawl. I gasped, feeling the thrum of the demon’s magic channel through me and into the grimoire. I jerked away, trying to break the connection as the tiny hairs at my nape stood on end, but Jae refused to release me. “Your magic is too low,” I said in protest. “You’ll drain to nothing again.”

“Ne.” Jae shook his head. “I do not feed the book my blood or my power. Only you can.” He jerked a shoulder, nodding to our joined palms. “As long as we touch and our blood mingles, my demon magic disrupts the hastening spell.”

I winged up an eyebrow at him. “I can read the book without continuously spilling my blood.”

That day was better, but also worse. Jae didn’t drain his power to allow me access to the grimoire, but the new red glints in his eyes faded to black when he focused his magic to heal the damage I’d done to my hands. A weakened demon was a cranky demon, and a bored demon could be lethal. While I poured over the culmination of my dad’s life’s work, my left hand grasped by his, Jae grumbled and taunted Finnegan and Skip. Especially Skip, who seemed to have devoted himself to my care and comfort. He ensured I slept, brought me meals, and fetched one of my mother’s crocheted blankets when that night grew crisp with cold.

“He has me,” my demon said with a sneer from his position next to me on the couch. Unlike me, cocooned in the warmth of Ma’s afghan, he sprawled in front of the fireplace where Skip had kindled a crackling fire to drive off the chill. “He does not need you.”

“Smell that? Snow’s coming.” Rising from his crouch at the hearth, Skip cocked his head at a provocative angle. “What use will you be to him then?”

“Stop it.” I studied Dad’s grimoire in my lap, flicking a glance at them both. My finger paused at a brief assessment of the magical properties of water in the pond at the north end of his territory in my father’s sloppy handwriting. I kept searching, for what I was no longer sure of, but cool little tidbits like this frequently distracted me. “I can’t concentrate.”

“He started it.” Skip frowned.

My demon grunted.

Bent over another one of my dad’s books in a side chair, Finnegan glanced up. “He’s right, though. Demons avoid our nexus with reason. While it’s too early for winter weather, western Maryland is notorious for our mountain snows. He won’t be at his full power several months of the year, best case, and worst? Ice could kill him.”

My heart thudded because I was aware the region I called home boasted an entire season hostile to demons. If Jae stayed, lingering high in the Appalachians would be a danger to him, but despite my demon sticking close to my side while I studied Dad’s grimoire, I still couldn’t convince myself that Jae wouldn’t leave me once he strengthened. He’d already abandoned me once. He’d failed, drawn back by the scent of my spilled blood when I’d first unlocked my father’s grimoire, but Jae was no quitter. When he recovered more, he’d try again.

Maybe he wouldn’t return to the daemonica realm. We hadn’t discussed that or much of anything else, but his reticence persuaded me that perhaps the world from which he’d come was at least as perilous to him as storms dumping snow measured in feet rather than inches. Still, he could reject the link binding us together, choose another magical to partner with. We’d only met a couple of days ago. As fiercely as I felt the tug connecting me to Jae and him to me, that compulsion could yet be broken. He hadn’t given me his promise to complete our binding. He wasn’t stuck with me and my messed-up life.

“First Bloods are powerful apex predators among the tribes. He’ll be weaker during winter, but that ignores the fact that the magic of rival demons would also fade in the cold. The harsh winter environment is an even playing field in that respect and Jae would still be the faster, more agile warrior against most.” Walking to a rocking chair, Skip plunked into it and shook his head. “Dragons would be a worry, but when aren’t they?”

Skip pulled another one of my mother’s blankets around him for extra warmth. “Not only do I believe the demon will do fine here, I think settling in the mountains is his best bet because the problematic location will reassure other beings that he doesn’t intend to become a threat to them.” He shrugged. “Shivering his balls off in the snow may, weirdly, improve his odds of survival. And yours.”

Jae squeezed my hand in his, smiling when I shuddered at the scrape of his claws. “I am difficult to kill.”

I was confident of that much. “I need to work. Everybody shut up.”

And I read.

I studied.

I rifled through pages and, after Finnegan slipped me both paper and pen, I took notes. Or tried to. Given the awkwardness of managing the book, my grasp with my demon to disrupt Dad’s blood magic, and writing with a pen, reading whatever I wanted to remember aloud while Finnegan played stenographer ended up our most effective option.

After an ungodly number of hours, the most solid conclusion I could draw was that Teddy Mace had coped—badly—with the most vicious case of ADHD known to the magical community.

His grimoire sprinted from one subject to another with zero transition or explanation. The book was compilation, a summary of his lifetime of experimentation and earned wisdom. Although I still hadn’t touched the extra bedroom filled with books, Finnegan had made a brief stab at it. While I puzzled through Dad’s grimoire, he had heaved one crate into the living room. Skip had pried it open with a crowbar fetched from the back porch. Both the mage and imp had sunk hours into examining the crate’s treasure of contents. Jae had even stirred from his drowse to page through a book or three. They had discovered one of my father’s earliest grimoires, all ten volumes of the Complete History of Medieval Necromancy, four picture books I’d enjoyed as a child, an herbology encyclopedia so rare the book was worth more than my truck, and an assortment of Michael Crichton novels.

Jae liked Jurassic Park so much, Skip searched for and found a VHS of the movie.

Yeah, the place still had a functioning VCR.

What the fuck.

Dad’s grimoire was packed full of a whole lot of tidbits I’d started referring to as wait-wuts, too. He’d written out an elaborate recipe for a long-lasting, non-fogging glass cleaner for his greenhouse alongside a sigil to waterproof anything, and what looked like an old grocery shopping list. He’d crowded the margins with a snippet of lyrics from Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters.

My dad had been a head-banging metal head. How I’d forgotten that, I couldn’t fathom, but he’d been a diehard fan judging by the doodles sprinkled throughout the pages like Iron Maiden Eddie confetti. If I hadn’t grown up with it, I’d have developed a complex because sketched variations of that dude littered the grimoire, along with the weird symbol a guy from that band had used as signature and album cover Easter egg.

I found Ma’s recipe for pot roast.

And a multi-page deep dive on the magical properties of various salts.

The lot of it jumbled together in a chaotic mess with no inherent logic or apparent effort at organization. Dad’s lone stab at prioritizing was including that array with a personal note at the front, but even that, I had to dig through the anarchy of the grimoire to locate the directions for all the tinctures used in that snarl of complex magic.

The grimoire was utter chaos and, despite my growing frustration, beautiful in a way I couldn’t give voice to, primarily because the clutter and disorganization dragged up so many long-buried memories of my dad. Things I’d forgotten, that I’d done my level best to pack away. Teddy Mace had been as much a tangled knot of contradictions as his grimoire. His greenhouse? Rigidly organized. Every plant, herb, and stone inside those glass walls had been placed in each’s exact spot for a purpose, and woe be to anyone who dared to interfere with my dad’s schema for his work space. Outside his work, though, my father had been an impulsive dervish lighting from one passionate interest to the next and the next.

Teddy Mace had been a poor carpenter—Griffith had built the greenhouse according to Teddy’s precise specifications—and a middling alchemist. His drawings had shown genuine talent, from each gory Eddie to the intricate lines of flora he’d documented. He could’ve skipped magic altogether to make a splash in the art world. That’s how lifelike his sketches were, but once his power had spilled over to force him to claim his magical identity, he’d embraced that destiny instead. He’d played guitar poorly and his cooking had been food of the gods. He’d taught me my love for baseball. And read more than any person I’d ever known before or since.

But he hadn’t been able to stay on task.

For that much, Rosie Mace deserved credit. My mother had been his touchstone, a stabilizing influence in every facet of his life, from his magic to fatherhood to keeping the lights on. She’d seemed to know, organically, what he needed to focus his considerable energies to achieve his most productive best. She’d made him laugh when he’d been down, asked the right questions to redirect his concentration when his attention wandered, and loved him as he was, as no one else could. Theirs had been a grand affair of the heart, the true melding of a perfect match, each partner inspiring the other to be better, stronger, more giving…just more.

I’d never faulted my mom in that respect. She’d been a fantastic wife to my father. Shitty mother. But she’d been the ideal lover for my frequently scattered and spiraling dad.

The night before I was due in town for testing, I finally stumbled over a brief note about creating a blood bond with Jae to suspend the voracious greed of the grimoire’s blood magic. But by then, I’d figured Teddy out. The why. My dead father had intended to require the support of my demon to access the book, which would—at least to his mind---solidify the binding magic. Whatever glimpses he’d seen ahead for me, the better option included Jae. My dad wouldn’t have forced our proximity otherwise.

That we barely got along was just my sad luck.

Jae sniped at me and the others constantly. Not that I could blame him, or tried not to. The demon hadn’t opened up to me about what disaster in the daemonica r ealm had driven him into the human world, but my carefully organized life wasn’t the only one upended. He was in a foreign place where no one spoke his language, the foods were different, our customs wildly disparate. We didn’t think like he did, and the only other beings who shared his nature and perspective sought to kill him. So yeah, that Jae was a little cranky was maybe understandable.

Didn’t make his digs and insults any less irritating, though. I was too slow. Any time I failed to grasp his frame of reference or point of view, I was dumb. He regarded any food that wasn’t fresh meat as suspect and worthy of his snide distrust. As infuriating as his jabs at me were, his treatment of Finnegan and Skip was worse. By a lot.

His antagonism toward Skip seemed especially cruel and biting. Honestly, I tried to get that, too. I hadn’t wanted a familiar. Druids didn’t need one to exercise our magic, and we tended to be loners, anyway. If the Goddess Anand hadn’t interfered, I never would’ve lured a familiar to me, but she did interfere. I couldn’t reject her gift without facing brutal consequences, either. I was stuck with Skip.

Part of me grasped Jae would consider him a rival. As a familiar, Skip took care of me. Not just my magic. Me. He made sure I rested, that I ate. He took my comfort as his personal responsibility. He was also as much a teacher to me as my dad’s chaotic grimoire, at least so far as tutoring me on the nature of demons. The binding compulsion Jae felt toward me, despite his failure to complete it by giving me a promise, could only see Skip as a threat to the position the demon sought to establish in my life.

That Jae fought those urges, had not offered me his oath, complicated everything further.

When I slept, Jae still left me. In fact, any time he didn’t hold our wounded palms together in his viselike grasp while I puzzled through Dad’s grimoire, Jae couldn’t get away from me fast enough. Though I sensed the bonds intensifying between us as the subtle thrum of him in my chest built to a fierce strand tying us together, that connection also began leaking snippets of his emotions to me. I felt his anger and his horror alongside the insatiable craving to be near me. With me.

How much of those feelings reflected my own, I couldn’t know. I doubted my demon could tell, either. At some point, it wouldn’t matter. If he didn’t abandon me to my fate, he would truly and forever bind with me and I with him. We’d be partners in every sense, the threads that made each of us distinct twined into one, but for now, we fought it. He did. I did.

As long as we pushed the binding compulsion away, we had a chance to separate and continue building our own lives. No matter how strong we could be together, how powerful…The danger. Oh, the danger.

Everything cost something. Everything came at a price.

I tried not to mind that he regularly left me when I slept and was therefore most vulnerable. I wasn’t a child, if I ever truly had been one. I acknowledged he tested the limits of the binding compulsion to weaken it. Only he could break it. No promise? Meant no binding. Part of me rejoiced my demon hadn’t buckled and resisted, that he struggled against our fate, but another side of me ached.

Even if the binding—or the shattering of it—wasn’t crucial to both our immediate futures, we still needed reconnaissance for what occurred outside my father’s wards so when Jae returned in the morning mumbling about the activity of the helicopter birds, where other demons hunted and how many more had streamed into Allegany County, I pretended his absence hadn’t hurt me.

What had he told Finnegan? That I would run the gauntlet to be tested?

My demon hadn’t lied.

I ate in the kitchen, dry toast to settle my queasy stomach, and watched him through the window over the sink. Jae had rebuilt the fire upon his return and stood inside it, absorbing as much of the snapping flames as he could. He had strengthened over the past days. With heat and rest, the mortal injuries he’d suffered had faded to thin silvery lines crosshatching his torso and limbs. His muscles bulged, more defined. When he snapped out his wings, the tatters had mended, and I entertained zero doubts he could fly us into town if doing that seemed our best play.

Sadly, it wasn’t.

Demons swirling around Cumberland like a swarm of angry hornets had etched into my mind. I didn’t have to go to the living room’s picture window to recall that image. It had seared into my brain the moment I laid eyes on the wretched dervish at dawn. With the house sitting high on a ridgeline around the city, I couldn’t miss it. What had started as four hunter teams had escalated. It seemed like every demon in North America had joined the frenzy and I couldn’t rule out the possibility teams from South America and Europe had streamed into the chaos, too.

Killing a First Blood demon was a top priority for these fuckers.

No flying. Taking to the air would provoke a bloodbath.

We couldn’t portal, either. Jae’s eyes shone a dull red. Stealing my magic and resting the past days had partially restored him, but not enough. I wouldn’t risk draining him, not when every moment bristled with danger.

Griffith might be able to draft a guildie to portal us instead, but I trusted no one. I would not risk our safety to anyone outside our group knowing where our sanctuary was. Even if a Towpath sorcerer met us on the edge of town to portal us the rest of the way, that magic was far too traceable. With enough resources, any magic could be tracked, but portaling especially was prone to not only detection, but interference. Everyone knew where I needed to go. Intercepting portaling magic to that location would be ridiculously easy. If we tried, the response would be quick and brutal. So. No portaling.

We’d have to run for it. Fight our way to Cumberland’s magical community center.

I carried my coffee from the kitchen to the front porch, where I settled on the steps to sip while I watched the demons fly in the lightening sky over Cumberland. Surprise arrowed through me when Skip joined me, settling on the top step next to me with his own mug. He watched the looping whirls and dives of the distant demon flight, too. “Big day,” he said on a murmur.

Propping my elbows on my knees, I lifted my coffee cup to drink. I sighed at the warmth. “Yup.”

Skip blew out a long breath, eyes on the horizon. “You’re going to let them see you as a level ten druid.” He turned to stare at me, one eyebrow arching. “Your father’s family will be in touch.”

Annoyance tightened my gut. “They didn’t care about me before. Resented me before.” My early childhood had a golden haze in my memory, an idyllic time unspoiled by the grief, anxieties, and genuine fear that had come for me too soon. The Chicago Maces distinguished themselves as the lone blight on those innocent days, though.

“Level ten or not, I’m still half mundane.” My parents had struggled to shield me from my dad’s people, but I’d been a precocious, nosy little shit, so their poison had still reached me. “They’ll contact me, but only as a political performance.”

More importantly, they’d leave me alone after.

Maybe.

“Binding a demon changes the playing field for them.” Skip blew on his coffee cup and a cloud of steam billowed from the hot surface. “They could safely ignore you when you were mundane. The Mace empire likely would have turned a blind eye to you emerging as a powerful druid, too. They would’ve claimed some of your shine, vague responsibility for your accomplishments. Good magical blood will prove itself, despite the obstacles of half mundane parentage and the inferiority of your raising.”

A corner of his mouth kicked up. “But you’re right. You’re too much of an embarrassment to them. The mighty Maces would’ve stayed away.” He shifted to face me. “Except…your demon.”

I grunted. “He has a name.”

“They won’t be able to maintain their fiction of superiority if the get of their estranged black sheep achieves the ultimate status and power of binding a demon.”

“I haven’t bound him yet.” I frowned, although freeing Jae and I both of the compulsion was our shared goal and ideal. I shrugged a stiff shoulder. “Even if I do, I’m gay. Nothing my grandparents offer me could entice me into the political marriage they’d require of me.” I froze, the hamster wheel inside my head spinning. “Actually, my being gay may be a perk to them.” I flashed Skip a deprecating grin. “If I forged an alliance with another powerful family’s son, any children of the union could come from my husband via IVF and a surrogate, instead of unloosing my mundane mother’s half of subpar genetics into the world.” I chuckled. “The Maces could give an appearance of progressiveness while adding to their power base and still tamp down the embarrassment of my existence.”

“I don’t think the Maces will welcome you into the fold with a political marriage.” Skip’s mouth pressed into a thin, hard line. “They’ll try to kill you. To them, the sooner you are dead, the better.”

The rumble of an approaching engine dragged my attention to the goat path that passed for a road to my childhood home. Without regular traffic, brush and overhanging tree branches had grown over the winding path down the mountain and through the valley spilling into the outskirts of Cumberland. Dad had set camouflaging magic to hide our route to safety and security when I was a boy. I was sure Griffith had refreshed those old spells to conceal us, else demons would have pinpointed our location long before now. I couldn’t see through the thick press of green briars and brambles as the engine’s roar drew closer.

I didn’t want to deal with Griffith, but Skip was right. If the Chicago Maces had made overtures toward me, they would’ve begun by contacting the Towpath. I needed to know. To brace for whatever flack was coming from the north.

But a couple of days without Griffith had been…necessary. Finnegan was never far from my side and he’d adopted the role of surrogate for his biological father. Updates from town and Griffith’s suggestions for most effectively using the brief window of time his conniving had bought me had streamed through Finnegan. To his irritation, I’d embraced only some of those commands. Because Griffith, best friend of my father’s or not, was also a guild boss. His strategies reflected what was best for the Towpath and any shared benefit to me was by wild coincidence. Godfather though he may be to me, Griffith was a political animal no different than any other magical.

Facing him at dawn before the ordeal of reaching the community center, forget the trial of testing, did not appeal.

Still, I stood as the vehicle approached.

A white delivery van shoved through the blackberry thicket disguising the route to my childhood home and my eyes widened when the boxy vehicle inched beyond my dad’s wards—now mine and Jae’s—to park well within our secure boundaries. I lifted a hand to shield my eyes from the rising sun cresting the hill tops.

And my stomach plummeted to the ground after the driver’s side door swung open and my mother climbed out.

Perversely, Rosie Mace looked better than she had since she’d been my class’s homeroom mom and scout den leader, healthier than anyone who’d sunk years into drowning in a liquor bottle had any right to. The black pants and white smock of her catering uniform slimmed her slight pixie-like build, having shed the puffiness and bloat alcoholism had given her through my high school years. I’d always taken after my dad and the other Maces, brown hair and dark eyes. I looked nothing like her. At some point, Ma had cut her waist-length wild mop of strawberry blonde curls and she’d scraped what remained into a bun at her nape. The glasses were new too, owlish black frames that highlighted hazel eyes no longer dulled by booze. Those eyes stared at me, wide and unblinking, just soaking me in as she fidgeted near the open van door and waited for my verdict.

“No.” I stood and pivoted, set on marching back into the house, but Skip’s grasp on my elbow halted me.

When I glared at him, he released his grip, but shifted to block my path to the door. “The human partners of those soaring demons must be tailing Griffith. They’d have followed him to you. Meanwhile, the entirety of Allegany County knows you are estranged from your mother. Hunter teams would’ve picked the brains of local gossips the moment they reached Cumberland, so the heat on her would’ve been less.”

I curved my lips to a contemptuous smile. “I’m not important enough to rate attention from any rumor mills.”

“You weren’t. Past tense.” Skip frowned. “You are all anyone’s been talking about for the past three days, guaranteed.” He jerked his chin toward Rosie. “Plus, she’s the only one besides Griffith outside these wards who knew where this place is. That none of the hunter teams captured and tortured her to reveal your location is a miracle.”

“Griff stashed me in a safe house in Belair on Friday evening.”

My stomach clenched at the melodic notes of my mother’s voice too close behind me. When I glanced over my shoulder, she wrung her hands at the bottom of the front steps, her gaze up to me desperate and beseeching. “I wouldn’t have said. I asked Teddy to magic me so I couldn’t tell where our house was before you were born and Griff told me that spell’s so strong, still, that no one can break it. But I wouldn’t have led demons to you, magic or no magic.” Her sigh stuttered at her whole-body shudder. “I wouldn’t hurt you again, David. Not for whole worlds.”

The tragedy was I wanted to believe her. Despite all evidence to the contrary and the shit I’d been through—because of her—I wanted to think my mom was like every other mom, that she wouldn’t in a million years seek to cause me pain. She’d been a genuine mother, whatever that was, to me once. In this house, no less. She’d read bedtime stories, baked cookies, and kissed my ouchies. We’d played in the backyard. She hadn’t flinched at my magic. Then.

She hadn’t ratted me out when I’d tested as a mundane, either. Rosie Mace had known. Of course she had. A mother knows her child and if she couldn’t sense the power thrumming inside me, she’d watched Teddy guide me through my first attempts at channeling magic in our kitchen garden behind the house. Before our lives went to shit, Ma had even goosed me to ripen vegetables for our dinner when Dad had been on business in town. Until Teddy’s murder, my mom hadn’t been afraid of me or what I could do.

After? Well, she hadn’t revealed my secrets. No matter how scared she’d been, regardless of the dark threats I’d issued towards the end, Rosie Mace hadn’t outed me as magical. She hadn’t even kicked me out of her home. I’d left on my own at seventeen, when I’d become afraid of me, too. She’d been a shitty mother, yeah, but she hadn’t betrayed me. When telling the council and the magical community I was no mundane had been in her best interests, she’d kept her yap shut.

That alone froze me in place. I didn’t so much as blink, including when Finnegan stormed out the front door and stumbled to a halt. “Oh, you’re here,” he said to Rosie, then pinned me with a beady stare. “Thanks to your bad blood, no one paid much attention to her at first and removing traces on her was easiest, which the Towpath had to do anyway to hide her. Plus, she had access to the catering van to sneak us into the city and she already knew where you were.” He waved to my mother. “Griffith said to tell you to be smart.”

The burgeoning druid in me respected the guild boss’s strategy, but brutal experience had also taught the hurting and abused little boy I’d been to trust no one, especially Rosie Mace.

Skip, however, could always be relied upon. “Is there food in that van?”

“Council hired me to cater a brunch celebrating his retest.” Ma snorted a laugh. “Van’s full.”

Stiffening, I turned to face her. “That’s an event?”

“ You are an event.” Finnegan stepped forward, and settling a hand on my shoulder, he squeezed. “You’re the biggest news western Maryland has seen in decades.”

The humor glinting in Ma’s eyes dimmed. “Since Teddy and I moved to Cumberland from up north.”

Predatory menace pouring off him, Jae stalked around the corner of the house. He halted, red eyes studying my mother. Apparently deciding she was no threat, he unclenched his muscles and strolled to the base of the porch stairs to join us. “I smell meat,” he said to my mother.

“I brought an entire leg of lamb.” Ma chuckled, shooting me an eye roll. “Griff’s footing the bill, so I tasked one of my servers with stopping at Martins for prime rib before leaving the van at the park and ride, too.”

“You wouldn’t climb into that van without your demon and he would’ve balked after sensing your hostility toward Rosie. So. Prime rib and lamb. John is a big believer in bribery.” Finnegan shoved his glasses up his nose. “Just be careful. You don’t want to owe a guild boss, that one especially.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You admired and respected Griffith enough to join the Towpath.”

“I did.” Finnegan nodded.

“Safest option available,” Skip said. “The Goddess agrees.”

“Doesn’t mean I trust him,” Finnegan said with a tight smile. “Nor should you.”

Rosie twisted her mouth into a bitter smile. “Your godfather or not, Griff is a guild boss first. Scheming is bred into his bones.”

“Go. Eat.” I waved Jae to the catering van. “You’ll need your strength for the drive into Cumberland.” We all would.

Hell waited.