Devils & Thieves Series, Book 1

by Jennifer Rush

  And found nothing.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Crowe whipped around, releasing my hand. I staggered a little and turned. Six Deathstalkers were coming toward us, the long grass parting to form a path for them. The smell of terra magic reached me a second later, and I could see the telltale pink haze of it coming from a guy with broad shoulders and a scorpion tattoo on his chest, visible as his leather vest gaped open. “He’s probably a Stoneking,” I whispered, nodding toward the guy.

  Crowe gave me a sidelong glance and nodded, his hair blowing in the breeze the Deathstalker had conjured. “We’re looking for my sister,” he said to the group as they came to a stop at the edge of the woods, about twenty feet from where we stood.

  They fanned out quickly, hemming us in. Crowe put up his hands—which were completely steady. “If you’ve got her,” he continued in a low voice, “the best thing to do is to let her go.”

  “Yeah?” said a Deathstalker with full-sleeve tattoos and a scar across her forehead. “How about you give up our prospect first?” This one was emanating faint wisps of crimson—animus magic, like Killian’s.

  “She might be trying to influence you,” I murmured to Crowe, whose eyes narrowed.

  “We don’t have your prospect,” Crowe said to the woman. “But I’d like to know where he is, too. He was the last one seen with my sister.”

  “Uh-huh,” said a third. He had buzzed black hair and a long beard. Glimmers of sapphire hung in the air around him. He had the same magic I had, but either he was holding it close or he didn’t have nearly as much as my dad.

  “Locant,” I whispered.

  Crowe gave me another look, this time with an arched eyebrow, before returning his focus to our current predicament. “Where’s Killian, Ren?”

  “None of your fucking business,” said a fourth Deathstalker, the one apparently named Ren. She had dreads pulled back in a red bandanna and intense pale green eyes that contrasted with her dark skin. “And we’re gonna have to ask you to clear out now. We’re having a meeting.”

  “Without your president?” Crowe asked. His fingers, still held up to show he meant no harm, twitched. A faint amber glow, one I knew only I could see, flared off his fingertips.

  “Get back to your clubhouse, Crowe,” said the bearded guy, cracking his knuckles.

  “I want my sister. If Killian has her somewhere on these grounds, I’m going to find her. And if she’s hurt, I’m going to have to find some way to work out my extreme disappointment.” His fingers curled, and shimmering, undulating threads of venemon began to stretch from their source.

  “And if you’ve hurt Darek—” Ren began.

  “I don’t give a fuck about Darek,” Crowe snapped. He took a step forward, and all six Deathstalkers had their hands out in front of them, fingers spread, power fogging and slithering in the air as the scent of all of it rolled toward me. It was coming from all sides, closing us in.

  And then I smelled something new, something terrible, like stale cigarettes and burning meat. It was a magic scent I’d never come up against. My head swam with it, and I swayed as my stomach threatened to revolt.

  “Crowe…” I licked my lips and peered through the cloud to try to find the source of the unfamiliar odor. To our far right, several yards into the woods, someone tall ran between trees, too fast for me to recognize. The person was emitting strands of pale yellow and crimson streaked with black. “Someone is…”

  Crowe took a step in front of me, his arms spreading, his magic billowing from him.

  “Watch out,” Ren shouted. “He’s going to cast!”

  “Crowe!” shouted a familiar male voice. Hardy, who must have seen us and come on the run. Thank God. But whatever he shouted next was lost as a fierce wind whipped my hair. Crowe stumbled into me, and we both went down. Branches cracked over our heads as curses flew from all sides. My ears were ringing and I could barely breathe—I was choking on magic, on the bitter, burning stench of it.

  Crowe’s hands were on my waist and his voice was in my ear. “Can you run?”

  My breath came out of me in a strangled wheeze. “Crowe,” I tried to say as amber venemon burst from his palm and rocketed wildly into the murky fog around us. He could probably see clearly, but I was almost blind from all the magic swimming around and overwhelming my senses.

  A sharp wind slammed into us again, sending twigs and leaves scraping against my cheeks and forehead. My mouth filled with grit as I struggled to my feet. Crowe shouted something I couldn’t make out in the storm of air and people and magic around me.

  “I can’t—” My next words were stolen from me as I staggered back from a sudden impact. Heartbeat pounding at my temples, I looked down at my shoulder to see the hilt of a knife protruding from my shirt. The pain hit me a beat later, a racing, pounding lance of agony arching out across my shoulder like a net of needles. My knees gave out.

  “Jemmie!” Crowe shouted. Two people ran by in the shadows. We were in the middle of a full-on kindled brawl, shouts and grunts and gasps punctuating the fight. More of the Devils’ League must have found us because we’d initially been surrounded by Deathstalkers, but now people had spread out, seeking safe places from which to hurl their curses. Their voices were coming from all sides.

  Another knife whistled through the air, a glint of steel in a ray of sun, piercing the blanket of thick fog around me. Crowe ducked out of the way as he landed at my side, and the blade skimmed past his face, leaving a long, bloody gash across his jaw.

  I tried pulling myself into a sitting position, but every inch of my body throbbed with pain, as if the knife had pierced not just my flesh but every nerve in my body, sending electric shocks down to my toes. Was this real or an illusion? I put my tingling fingers up to the wound and felt blood streaming across my palm. As I became dizzy with shock, I squinted at another person moving between tree trunks nearby, palms open toward us, giving off puffs of purple magic mixed with red and black. Confusion filled me. Was that who it looked like?

  Crowe wrenched me toward him before I could get my eyes to focus, and I inhaled the smoke-and-honey scent of his power as he muttered a healing incantation. But then he groaned and clutched at his middle. Only a few dozen feet away, the person I had spotted smiled a beautiful, evil smile as the animalia curse took hold. Crowe doubled over at my side, vomiting centipedes and beetles and spiders and black moths, and this was no illusion. A great, writhing mass of insects grew into a puddle around him, and no matter how much he retched, more just kept coming. This curse was going to kill him.

  And I knew exactly who had hurled it. I just couldn’t understand why she would do such a thing.

  My vision pulsed with blackness. Blood loss threatened to pull me into unconsciousness. And even if I could put up a barrier around us, it wouldn’t help Crowe now. Whatever was wrong was already inside him.

  So I did the only thing left to me, something my father had once told me I should never do.

  “Crowe,” I said in a choked voice, and stretched out my bloodied hand, hoping he’d understand what I was offering.

  Blood.

  He didn’t hesitate—he frantically swiped the blood dripping from the gash on his face and clamped his hand in mine.

  Medici blood met Carmichael blood. Venemon and locant.

  Tingling spread through me, hot where our hands met, warm everywhere else. I wondered if Crowe was feeling the same. My heart thumped in my head and in my toes, pumping magic through every inch of me. Crowe’s grip on my hand was iron—he had taken control of our combined power, and I would have given him anything in that moment. Ribbons of blue and gold surrounded us, braiding together, taking on a color I’d never seen before, indescribable and vibrant and entirely new. It was neither venemon nor locant. It was…more. A sigh escaped me. Everything inside of me felt like it’d been touched by the sun. It was the first time in my entire life that magic had felt like this.

  Still holding on to me to keep our blood
mixed, Crowe pressed his fingers against his throat with his other hand, squeezing till his veins bulged. Bugs squirmed behind his black-stained teeth, gnashed together. He was beyond speaking, but I swear I could hear his thoughts whisper an incantation. Somehow, he was casting using this new magic we’d created through our connection, and the effect was instantaneous. The tendons in his neck stood out in stark relief as a growl vibrated in the back of his throat, and the growl swelled to a roar as he finally opened his mouth. The insects scuttled past his teeth and over his lips, vaporizing when they hit the air, burning off into curling ribbons of black smoke.

  When the lethal curse was extinguished beneath Crowe’s healing hands and the alchemy of our mixed blood, he looked down at me, and I sucked in a startled breath.

  The whites of his eyes were gone, bled completely to black. “This is amazing,” he said, giving me an eerie grin. Even though the pain from my wound was gnawing at my ecstasy, I grinned back, knowing my eyes probably looked the same but unable to worry about it.

  Heavy footsteps thudded toward us. Every single one was like a nail pounding into my skull. Crowe dropped my hand and scooted away from me, blinking fast and shaking his head as if to clear it. The warmth I’d felt seconds ago faded instantly, leaving me trembling and raw.

  “Jemmie!”

  “Dad?” I wheezed as he crouched over me. His gaze didn’t focus on my eyes, so I could only assume they looked normal again. The fog of blood magic had certainly dissipated, but so had my vision in general. My heart stumbled and skipped. My breath was wet and unsteady.

  I was pretty sure I was dying.

  “This is the Syndicate,” my dad shouted to the woods around us. He spread his arms and threw out a massive, glittering barrier. “Anyone caught showing further aggression will be sentenced to binding!”

  “They’re running,” said Hardy, who had appeared next to Crowe and was helping him to his feet.

  My mouth opened and closed as I tried and failed to gather the strength and volume to tell them who I’d seen in the woods, who had used such evil magic against Crowe.

  My dad pressed a hand to my shoulder and I made a guttural, inhuman sound. My vision flashed to pure white. “Hang in there, Mo.”

  Don’t call me that.… Words were out of my reach.

  “Crowe, she needs you right now!”

  I’ve needed him for a lot longer than that, I thought, my brain a tangle of dream and memory and now, fraying and unraveling before dissolving to pinpoint flashes of light, then fading to nothing.

  There was no more magic, not now. All I had was darkness.

  TWELVE

  MY SENSE OF SMELL RETURNED FIRST, BRINGING ME THE scent of venemon magic, of Crowe, smoke and honey. Then sound. His voice, commanding and fierce.

  “Dammit, Jemmie, open your eyes.”

  I obeyed, squinting at slivers of sunlight shining through the canopy of leaves above me. Crowe blocked the view a moment later. “You’re fine,” he said tersely, pulling his hand away from my shoulder. My shirt was torn and covered in drying blood, but my wound was gone.

  “Your eyes,” I whispered.

  They were dark green once again. “Shhh,” he said. Voices from behind him told me my dad, Hardy, Jackson, and Boone were talking about what had just happened.

  “—better that we just let people cool down before we jump to any conclusions,” Dad was saying.

  “Are you shitting me?” Hardy snapped. “Those bastards nearly killed them both without any provocation!”

  “It wasn’t Deathstalkers,” I muttered, “not all of it, at least.” I’d seen two people with that black-streaked magic in the woods—the tall, fast-moving shadow I’d spotted just before the knife had hit me, and the other… I still couldn’t believe it, but she definitely wasn’t a Stalker.

  Crowe gave me a look that said he was holding back a lot of questions, but then stood up and helped me do the same. I swayed as I tried to get my legs to hold me up. The feel of his arm around me was scary and comforting at the same time, and for a moment I leaned into him, not wanting to let go.

  Then I remembered he wasn’t mine—and that I didn’t want him to be. I wriggled away from him and ended up facing the others, who were gathered around us several paces into the woods. Over their shoulders, I could see the scorpion flag whipping in the wind above the Deathstalker tent, all of it within a faint blue bubble of locant magic.

  “Where did they go?” I asked.

  “I closed ’em up in there for the time being,” Dad said. “For their protection and ours.”

  “What the hell happened, Crowe?” Hardy asked.

  Crowe glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “We were looking for Alex.” He leaned over and scooped her teddy bear from the ground. His jaw clenched as he took in the splotches of blood that now marked its fuzzy head and limbs. “Jemmie did a locator spell.”

  Dad’s eyebrows rose. “You did?” A hint of a smile played at his lips.

  “I tried.” Was that all he cared about? Whether I could do magic? “I lost the connection, though.”

  “Right here?” asked Brooke, her face flushed from the fight, her curly hair, usually tamed by a black bandanna, loose and wild. She scowled at the Deathstalker tent.

  “I don’t think they have her,” I said. “They seemed focused on finding Darek.” I stumbled a little over his name. “He’s their prospect. And they thought we had him.”

  “If that’s true, why did they attack you?” asked Boone. “Or did you attack them?”

  Crowe’s gaze scanned the woods around us. “I didn’t have a chance to hurl much of anything—Jemmie got hit and I was trying to help her. Then I got slammed with…” He shook his head. “It could have killed me.” His eyes flicked to mine as he left everything else unsaid. We’d done blood magic together—we’d mixed our essences to enable him to break a killing curse. It had been desperate and necessary but was technically illegal.

  “Which of them hurled the lethal hexes?” Dad asked. “It’s one thing to brawl, but what happened to both Jemmie and Crowe was attempted murder.”

  “Jemmie’s had to have been someone with arma,” said Boone. “That knife in her shoulder turned to dried leaves when Crowe tried to pull it out.”

  I rolled my formerly wounded shoulder, wincing. “Glad I wasn’t awake for that.”

  “Yeah, you were too busy scaring the shit out of me,” Crowe muttered. “But if the person who sent hex knives in our direction was arma, it couldn’t have been the same person who hurled the insect curse—that had to be animalia. Jemmie’s right—I don’t know all the Deathstalkers, but the ones I’m familiar with don’t have those powers. And both curses were too strong to have been produced by cuts.”

  “We can dig deeper into which Deathstalkers might have arma or animalia, but I thought we had all the Stalkers on the run right before you got hit,” said Hardy, rubbing the back of his head, leaving his dark hair mussed.

  I thought back to what I’d seen, that red-and-black-streaked magic that smelled of ash and cinders, like stale cigarettes. “Like I said, it wasn’t all Stalkers. I saw two people deep in the trees. I only got a good look at one of them. It was Katrina Niklos. I saw her hurl the curse at Crowe.”

  Hardy looked as if I’d hit him over the head with a two-by-four. “Katrina?” He turned to Crowe, who was frowning at the ground. “Um. I guess she didn’t take it well?”

  Take what well? It almost came out of my mouth.

  Now we were all looking at Crowe, and my heart was pounding with hope and suspense. He shook his head. “But I wouldn’t have expected her to do anything like this, and why would she step into the middle of a brawl between Stalkers and Devils? We’ve got no problem with the Sixes.”

  Boone chuckled. “Yeah, but Ronan ain’t exactly a fan after you put his boys in the hospital last fall.”

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Dad said.

  Crowe rolled his eyes. “Ronan understands our kind of law. He s
ent his crew to my town because he thought we were weak. He thought I was weak.”

  “Oozing boils and uncontrollable puking, though,” said Hardy. He whistled. “It was pretty gross.”

  “It was a deterrent,” Crowe replied firmly.

  “Let’s get back to Katrina,” Dad interjected. “That was a pretty serious curse—and accusation. Besides, although she might be able to conjure insects, she couldn’t hurl an arma hex, and as far as I know, none of the Sixes have arma.” He tilted his head. “Are you absolutely sure she cursed Crowe, Jemmie? Or maybe…”

  Anger rose up in me. “Yeah, Dad. I know what I saw. I’m not lying.”

  He put up his hands. “I can certainly ask her a few questions,” he said. “In fact, what if we all head over to the Sixes tent now?”

  “Yeah, because it’s going to go real well when we show up with a Syndicate agent in tow,” grumbled Brooke.

  Dad shrugged. “I didn’t ask you to be happy about it. But it might be good to put space between you guys and the Stalkers, especially if Killian shows up.”

  “Yeah, where is that guy?” asked Hardy.

  “If he has Alex, I’m going to kill him, Owen,” Crowe said. “You won’t be able to stop me. He’s not going to take another member of my family away from me.”

  “We have no evidence that Killian Delacroix has done anything wrong,” my dad replied. “Then or now.”

  Crowe muttered something hostile under his breath before turning away. The clench of his long fingers around that little teddy bear made my heart ache.

  “Crowe, wait,” I said. “Before we go, maybe my dad could try a locator spell…?” We’d come here to find Alex, and I didn’t want to leave if she was close. “He’s a lot better at them than I am.”

  Dad smiled, looking relieved. “I’d be happy to, Crowe. It’s the least I can do considering you just saved Jemmie’s life. I owe you.”

  I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, I wanted to stay mad at my dad—it hurt less than opening myself up to disappointment yet again. On the other, I remembered the desperate look in his eyes as he hunched over my bleeding body, and the wrenching sound of his voice as he begged Crowe to save me.