by Eva Chase
“We end this fast, and then she won’t be under all that pressure,” Damon said. “Simple as that.”
“Simple enough to say…” Ky said. He checked his phone again. “Still nothing from Seth. Maybe we should head out and look for him like you suggested, Gabriel. He’s more than half an hour late now. Not even a message—that’s not like Seth at all.”
I nodded, setting the other more ephemeral worries aside. “Do you know where he was working with your dad before he was supposed to come here?”
“Yeah, the Nelsons’ place, over on Haven St. I can swing by there.”
“I can go around by his house,” Jin said. “Check things out there.”
“Maybe we should pair up,” I said. “It’ll take a little longer to cover as much ground, but when we don’t know if he might be in some kind of trouble, extra manpower seems like a good precaution.”
My hand lifted to brush over the token Jin had painted and Rose had imbued with magic, which hung from its leather string around my neck. We all still wore them under our shirts as another precaution—a little extra magical protection. They couldn’t protect us from everything, though. We’d gotten hurt in the skirmishes on the road last month.
No wonder Rose felt as if she had to take on the Frankfords and their allies all by herself. How much could the rest of us even do?
Damon looked like he was about to argue—I wasn’t sure he knew how to take suggestions without automatic resistance—but Ky was already nodding. He started toward the door. “That makes sense. We don’t want to get careless. Rose needs us.”
Those last few words shut Damon up. He loped to catch up. Kyler was just reaching for the door when it swung open from the outside.
Seth stepped into the hall. His T-shirt and jeans were so dirt-streaked it was obvious he hadn’t changed since work. He had a smudge on his cheek, and his expression was weary. There was something so defeated in the big guy’s stance that my heart skipped a beat before I’d had the chance to be relieved he was okay.
Rose darted out of the room she’d ducked into with Imogen, a smile springing to her face. It fell as she took in Seth’s expression.
“What happened?” Ky said. He had to be able to read his twin’s demeanor even better than the rest of us could. “Where’ve you been?”
Seth swiped a hand over his short hair, only managing to rumple it more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was going to call when I realized I’d be late, but the battery died on my phone, and I was already on my way… I was at the hospital in Burns. They had to take Dad there.”
We all stiffened. Ky’s hand twitched as if he’d almost dropped the phone he was still clutching. “Dad? Is he—”
“He’s okay. At least he’s going to be. They think.” Seth cleared his throat. “The addition we were working on—the frame collapsed on him. He took a pretty bad blow to the head, and his shoulder is messed up… They had him sedated for most of the time, but when he came to he was talking okay. If I’d thought there was any chance he wouldn’t make it I’d have called you to come.”
“You should have called me anyway,” Ky said. “Jesus. What the hell— How did that even happen?”
Seth’s gaze slid to Rose. Her mouth tensed into a flat line.
“Magical interference,” she said. “Like the fire.”
“I looked at the boards,” Seth said. “I know how my dad works. I was there with him for most of the construction. There’s no way it should have collapsed like that under any normal circumstances.”
“Those bastards,” she spat out. “They could have killed him. They could have killed you. They were probably hoping they would. They’re just not going to be satisfied, are they? Not until they destroy everything— No. If they dare set foot anywhere near here again—”
She halted, her hands clenching at her sides and a light so fierce it unnerved me coming into her eyes. “There is someone here we can get answers from, isn’t there?” she said. “Let’s take everything he can give us.”
She swiveled toward the door.
“What are you talking about, Rose?” I said. “What are you going to do?”
“My father thinks it’s worthwhile consulting with Master Courtland,” she said. Fury radiated from her taut voice. “I think it’s time I had a talk with him too.”
I wasn’t letting her go there alone, not in that state. “Let me drive,” I said quickly. “You can concentrate on what you’re going to ask him, the best approach to take.”
“Oh, I know what approach I’m taking,” she muttered, but she nodded before she stalked out.
“If he knows something about what happened to my dad, I want to be there,” Seth said.
“Same,” Kyler put in, even though his eyes were nervously wide.
Damon cracked his knuckles. “I’m not missing this.”
Jin gave the rest of us a tightly bemused smile. “Rather than squeeze myself into the party, maybe I’d better stay here. Hold down the house. So I can let you know if they launch some kind of direct attack.”
Rose was already halfway to the garage. I squeezed Jin’s shoulder. “Good thinking. Tell Rose’s guests to stay in the house too, all right?”
He gave me a quick salute.
I hurried across the front yard to get the Buick that was Rose’s favorite ride. She dropped into the passenger seat next to me, and the other guys piled into the back. “Are you sure he’s even home right now?” I said. If she had time to cool off a little before this confrontation, maybe it’d go better.
“If he’s not, we’ll just come back later,” she said, leaning back in the seat with her arms crossed tight in front of her. “But he’ll probably be there.”
I wished the drive to Courtland’s house took more than a few minutes. Far too soon, I had to pull up outside the little country house that was much less imposing than Rose’s manor.
Rose was pushing open the car door in an instant, striding past the wooden gate and up to the front door. By the time the rest of us had clambered out, she was already knocking on it a second time.
Courtland’s thick voice carried from the other side. “All right, all right, I’m com—” He froze the second he opened the door wide enough to see Rose.
Rose didn’t even try to talk. With a jerk of her elbow and a twist of her hand, she shoved him backward into his house with a burst of magical energy. My throat closed up. I dashed after her.
When we reached the front hall, she had Courtland on the floor in the kitchen. “You can talk to my dad, you can talk to me,” she said, looming over him, her hand braced at her side ready to cast another spell. Power crackled through the air, so potent it raised the hairs on my arms. “I think you owe me plenty. What are the Frankfords and the rest of them planning? Who are they going to come after next?”
“I don’t know,” Courtland said, his voice wavering. He’d flung his arm across his face protectively. What did he think she was going to do? “They don’t discuss those plans with me. I’m not officially aligned with anyone.”
“You were aligned enough with my father to help him figure out how to turn me into a slave,” Rose snapped.
“I’m telling you, I don’t—”
She wrenched her hand to the side, and his voice cut off with a flinch and a choked sound. My stomach lurched. She’d hurt him.
Rose’s hair lifted from her shoulders as if stirred by a private wind. “I’m done hearing excuses,” she said. “Their people come after mine, I come after theirs. And you’re theirs enough to count. What do you know about the security on the Frankford properties? Who else has evidence of what you all have been doing?”
“Nothing,” Courtland said around a gasp. “And I don’t know.”
She flicked her fingers again, and he groaned, but that didn’t change his answer.
“Rose,” I said, and her other hand shot up in a gesture that clearly said to back off. Next to me, Damon was grinning sharply, but the twins were staring. Seth looked almost as sick as I felt.
“I should drag you into the Assembly,” Rose said, leaning closer to Courtland. “Force you to tell them everything you’d seen, everything you’ve heard.”
He lowered his hand enough to glare defiantly back at her. “They’d arrest you for illegal mind magic before you got one word out of me that would count as testimony.”
Rose’s jaw set. She obviously knew that was true. She spoke as if through gritted teeth. “You will tell me something I can use against the Frankfords. And you’ll want to tell me quick. Because no one will be able to tell that I did this to you. Now you know what it’s been like, knowing someone hurt you and not being able to prove it. I can think of all sorts of ‘accidents’ I could make happen in an instant.”
Her arm whirled, and her hand balled into a fist. Courtland knifed over, his arm dropping to hug his belly. Rose’s hand squeezed tighter. Her knuckles whitened, and Courtland gasped.
“Rose,” I murmured again. An ache ran through me from throat to gut. I wanted to grab her, to pull her into my arms and away from here—but I was afraid to find out what she might do if I tried. Maybe she’d end up hurting him even more badly if I distracted her.
“I don’t know anything,” Courtland sputtered.
“I don’t believe you,” Rose said flatly.
I took a step forward, my heart thudding. Before I could figure out how to intervene without making this worse, Courtland shuddered, and his mouth flew open again.
“There’s one thing. Charles has gotten more paranoid. He doesn’t want to discuss anything confidential in the Assembly building since one of your boys breached it. He’s got a code, when he sets up an important meeting somewhere private. He always mentions the place where he met you last, so you know for sure it’s him. Doesn’t trust his phone and computer not to get broken into either. I only know that because your father was complaining about it.”
Rose dropped her hand. Courtland sagged against the floor with a grateful sigh. His arm was still clamped around his abdomen. A smile stretched across my consort’s face, so bright and satisfied it brought acid up my throat.
“Thank you,” she said. “That’s something.”
Oh, Lord, that was not the woman I loved. That was not the Rose I’d lived and breathed for so long as kids and so much of the last two months.
As she turned toward us, still smiling, a horrible understanding crept up through my body. I’d done this. I’d drawn her into our group way back when, even though I’d known the lonely-looking girl sitting on the manor’s front steps was a Hallowell, even though I’d been aware even at seven that the owners of the estate didn’t get friendly with anyone not their kind.
If Rose had stayed the obedient girl her father had wanted, one who’d never mixed with unsparked guys like us, would he even have sacrificed her the way he had? Or had that first transgression made all the difference?
I couldn’t answer that. There was no way to know. The only thing I could say for sure was that I couldn’t let it go on.
Whatever it took, wherever it took me—I couldn’t let her fall any further into that darkness she’d once been so afraid of.
Chapter Fifteen
Rose
For the first few minutes after Master Courtland had talked, a victorious energy hummed through my veins. By the time the Buick’s engine rumbled to life as we set off for the estate, that exhilaration had dulled. What had we learned, really? How much could we even use it?
I snatched after that sense of accomplishment, holding onto it as tightly as I could to ward off the helpless feeling that had been gripping me for far too long.
“We can do something with that information, right, Ky?” I said. “You could figure out how to hack into Frankford’s phone, and then we can send a message pretending to be him.”
“I should be able to manage it, if I had his number for whatever phone he uses to set up the meetings,” Ky said. “But we’d have to get that first. And who would we be messaging? What would we be telling them?”
I bit my lip. “I’m not sure. We might be able to trick someone into admitting more than they should over the phone. Or… we could have people from his faction bring something incriminating to the same place as legitimate people from the Assembly and expose them like that.” Of course, we’d have to figure out what that incriminating “something” would be and which people in the Assembly were definitely legitimate.
“If we do use it, we’ll want to make sure we’ve got the best possible plan,” Seth said. “We’re probably not going to get away with that ploy more than once before Frankford realizes. It’ll be hard enough making sure he doesn’t find out about the fake meeting in the first place.”
“Yeah. And we’d need to know where he’s seen whoever we’re inviting to that meet-up most recently beforehand.” It didn’t seem likely Frankford would leave that information around where someone could find it.
“Once I’m in his phone, I’d be able to see the old messages,” Ky said. “But anything he wants to keep secret, he’ll be deleting after he sends it.”
“Oh, come on,” Damon said. “We’ve got something we can use. We’ll figure out the rest. And that Courtland guy is shitting his pants right now at the thought of getting on Rose’s bad side even more. I doubt he’ll be cozying up with her old man again any time soon.”
Gabriel hadn’t said anything. When I glanced over at him, he was watching the road, his hands tight around the wheel, his expression difficult to read. Normally he would have pitched in an idea or two of his own. Did he figure our trip out there had been a total failure?
“The witch who joined us a couple days ago,” I said, thinking out loud. “Thalia. When she’s feeling up to it, I’ll talk about the Assembly families with her. She might not be able to talk openly about what she’s been through, but she can tell me if there’s anyone not in Frankford’s files who was involved in any way. Who she’s sure wasn’t involved. If we cross-check that with what my Aunt Ginny and Naomi have found out and what I know from my dad, we’ll have a decent idea of who we could bring this to.”
“You could do that trick you did on Courtland with one of the people closer to Frankford,” Damon suggested. “Hell, even on your dad. They’d have more sensitive info they could cough up.”
I paused. I hadn’t really thought through what I’d done to Courtland. My anger and my fear for the people I needed to protect had propelled me onward. It was hard to imagine planning to go up to someone and torment them into revealing what we needed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess if we found the right person, the right time—”
The car jolted to a halt with a screech of the tires. I jerked against my seatbelt and turned to stare at Gabriel. He was already unbuckling his seatbelt and shoving the car door open. By the Spark, what was he doing?
“Gabriel,” I said. When he kept moving, I scrambled out on my side, my pulse rattling in my chest. We were just a few feet down the road from the gate to the estate, the big stone wall looming over me from the other side of the ditch. I spun to face him. “Gabriel, what’s going on? Where are you going?”
“I can’t do this,” he said, his voice raw. His bright blue eyes caught mine, stark with pain. “I can’t just sit there and listen to you talk that way. I can’t watch you torture people like you’re having fun doing it. I can’t.”
With a wave of dizziness, the ground seemed to tip beneath my feet. I grasped the still-open door to keep my balance. “I was trying to make sure the Frankfords don’t hurt anyone else. They came after Seth and his dad, they burned Jin’s house—they didn’t know he wouldn’t be in it—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gabriel said. “The Rose I used to know would have found another way. She wouldn’t have given in and sunk to their level. They were attacking us the whole way to New York and back, and you never did more than you had to.”
The other guys had pushed out of the car too. “You can’t talk to Rose like that,” Damon said. “Who the fuck do you th
ink you are? She’s kicking their asses, and they deserve it.”
“Damon,” I said, motioning him quiet. Having him butt in wasn’t going to resolve anything. I kept my gaze on Gabriel.
“They might have deserved it,” he said. “But it used to bother you anyway.”
“It still does,” I protested. But I couldn’t help remembering that moment when Master Courtland had cried out, when I’d been able to sense that if I pushed him just a little farther his control would break… and a rush had shot through me with that surge of power that had been almost gleeful.
“Maybe,” Gabriel said. “Not enough.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I…” He raked his hand through his dark red hair, the thick strands scattering around his ears. “I’ve tried talking you down. I’ve tried reminding you of how you used to think, but it hasn’t worked. And I can’t keep helping you if this is how you’re going to fight this war.”
My stomach dropped. Beside me, Seth stiffened. All three of the guys still standing with me were gaping at Gabriel.
“What are you going to do, then?” I said, the question wrenching through me.
“I’m going,” he said. “Maybe sometime later, when all this is over… I don’t know. But I can’t stay with you like this.”
For a second, I couldn’t speak. Then my legs were moving, running, around the car. Gabriel backed up, holding up his hands to stop me. The bond between us, the one we’d only committed to weeks ago, throbbed inside me.
“Don’t do this,” I said. Tears were welling up in my eyes. No amount of blinking could hold them back. “You can’t really mean this. You promised—you swore yourself to me, Gabriel.”
“I swore myself to the Rose I knew,” he said. “You’re not her. I’m starting to think they were right to try to cage your magic, if you’re going to enjoy hurting people with it.”
He turned on his heel and started to stalk down the road. My arm flew up on instinct with a tearing sensation in my chest. No. He couldn’t. There had to be some way we could work through this, some way I could convince him.
