I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed a smile into his shoulder. Maybe this could work. Maybe all of it would work. The Devils and the Deathstalkers would shake hands and become allies. I could love Darek. I could practice my magic. Alex and I would smooth things over, and we’d go right back to having fun. The next few days were full of promise and possibility.
Of course, this was how I’d felt last year, just before the festival, when my hope for a relationship with Crowe fell apart—and just before Crowe’s father crashed on that lonely road in rural Louisiana. But in Darek’s arms, sliding into a river of dreams, I couldn’t help but hope that Old Lady Jane’s dire predictions were dead wrong.
FIVE
I WOKE TO THE SOUND OF MY MOTHER CURSING AT THE coffee machine in the kitchen. I rolled over and found the other side of the bed empty. With bleary eyes, I checked my phone. One text from Darek and none from Alex.
Had to go join the guys for a breakfast gathering, his text said. I’ll catch up with you later.
At eight in the morning? I threw the blankets back, unreasonably sad and irritated that he’d disappeared without waking me. I hadn’t slept so well in weeks.
“What’s wrong?” I croaked when I shuffled into the kitchen.
Mom sighed. “I’m exhausted, and I can’t get this stupid coffee pot to work.” She stood there in a raggedy old band T-shirt and men’s boxer shorts, glaring at the coffee maker as if considering all the terrible things she wanted to do to it.
“Move,” I said, and she stepped aside, pulling herself up on the counter, well out of my way.
Our coffee maker was possibly older than I was and just as stubborn. There was a trick to getting it to work. I unplugged it, flipped the On/Off switch a few times, then plugged it back in. It gurgled to life and a huff of steam escaped the crooked reservoir lid as hot coffee finally dripped into the pot.
I grabbed us each a mug.
As I spooned sugar into the cups, Mom gestured at the scorch mark on the counter. “That has Crowe Medici written all over it. You introduce him to Darek?”
“Not a chance in hell.”
I avoided looking at the evidence of Crowe’s being here, the reality of it in stark daylight somehow more troubling than it had been in the semi-darkness of night. “Crowe gave me a ride home.”
“And he was so overcome with joy at seeing you home safely, he left a permanent scorch mark on my glorious counter?”
“It’s orange laminate, Mom.”
“You are avoiding the question.”
“That was a question?”
She frowned. The morning light filtering in through the window at her back rimmed her in a pearlescent haze. She’d scrubbed the makeup from her smooth, light brown skin and tied her ebony hair into a messy topknot. There were faint shadows beneath her brown eyes, but they only served to make her look delicate instead of haggard.
Sometimes it hit me out of the blue how gorgeous she was when she wasn’t trying to be.
Both of my parents were beautiful beyond reason, but the older my mother got, the more slowly she seemed to age. My mom might not have had a lot of her family’s Cabrera merata magic, which made the people who possessed it invincible, but she must have inherited a few scraps. She’d never been sick in my entire life, and she looked better at thirty-five than I usually did at eighteen.
“What’s going on with you two?” Mom asked, and it took me a second to realize we were still talking about Crowe.
“Nothing.”
Mom hopped off the counter and poured her coffee, stirring in a truckload of powdered creamer. “What’s Darek think about it?”
I side-eyed her. “Why?”
She shrugged innocently. “Just wondering. I mean, from the look of it, the two of you have a thing, and I have to wonder how he felt when Crowe drove you home and then things got heated enough to barbecue without a grill.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
I’d never told her what had happened between Crowe and me, that we’d kissed, that it’d seemed like there was more to our relationship, only to have him ignore me afterward and act like a total jerk at last year’s festival and ever since, but she could sense that something had gone wrong, and she had obviously taken my side.
She looked thoughtful as she sipped her coffee. “Well, Darek seems nice. And safe.” For a moment, she stared out the window, toward the shed where Dad used to work on his bike. “Not a bad thing, especially for you.”
I poured myself some coffee while my throat tightened. “You mean because I can’t cast. Because you think I can’t keep up with Crowe or anyone like him.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“What did you mean?”
“You think it was easy for me to be with your dad? I loved the guy.” Her chuckle was laced with sadness. “So damn much. But he had power oozing from his pores, and I’ve always been…” She raised her arms, as if to say just look at me. “He never tried to make me feel bad about it.”
“But you did anyway,” I said quietly.
She gave me a sorrowful smile, and her thoughts were so obvious that I had to turn away from her. She didn’t want me to end up the same way she had—with a powerful guy, whom she had to watch from the sidelines. The idea stirred something rebellious and ragey inside me. I didn’t want that, either.
Was a guy like Darek, who was from a kindled family but had no power of his own to speak of, the answer? It didn’t feel right to make a choice because of that.
Or maybe I just had to admit to myself that I wasn’t ready to let go of Crowe quite yet. That I never had let go of the hope that he’d realize what an idiot he’d been, that he’d come back to me. “God, I’m so stupid,” I whispered, then buried my nose in my cup, breathing in the bitter fumes.
“No such thing. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Just make sure you use it.” She gave me that motherly look of hers that I rarely saw but always took seriously when I did.
“I will,” I said, and she smiled and nodded. The one thing I could count on my mother for was her ability to let secrets lie. Most people poked at them, prodding them from the shadows so they could see them standing naked in the light.
“Oh, by the way,” she said as she disappeared into the hallway, “your father will be here within the hour.”
“What?” I shouted, but she was already gone, her bedroom door clicking shut behind her.
I couldn’t believe my mom hadn’t given me more advance warning. Then again, the last time he’d visited, I’d hidden out at Alex’s, and when he’d done a locator spell to find me, I’d refused to speak to or look at him. Yeah, I’d been a typical pissed-off fifteen-year-old girl, but I guess Mom didn’t trust me. “He’s trying,” she’d told me.
He hadn’t tried much after that, but now he was coming to Hawthorne. It must be for the festival—the big party tonight was the kickoff and day one of the three-day event that would bring thousands of kindled to our town, and I guessed it made sense that the Syndicate would send someone to check it out. Just my luck, my dad was the law now. As if being basically powerless wasn’t enough, this would cement my status as the most popular girl at the festival.
Ugh.
He arrived an hour later in his ridiculous and totally not inconspicuous black Audi. I peered at him through a crack in the curtains, torn between locking myself inside my bedroom or climbing out the window and trying to sneak into the woods behind the house. He paused halfway to the door and looked at my curtained window like he could see me spying. His mouth twitched into a little smile, and I lurched back, my eyes stinging, my fists clenching.
“Mo?” he called as he let himself inside.
“Don’t call me that,” I blurted out, loud enough for him to hear me through my closed door.
Mo was the nickname Dad had given me when I was a kid. It was short for mo ghrá, which was Irish Gaelic for “my love.” I used to like the name. Now I hated it. If he loved me so much, he would’ve stuck around.
> “Come out here and say that to my face,” he said, humor infusing his voice. “Or else I’ll never call you anything else!”
“Big threat, considering I hardly ever see you.”
I listened to the sound of his footsteps coming up the hall. He knocked softly on my door. “Come on, Jemmie. I’m here now.”
I could barely speak past the lump in my throat. “Yeah, for the festival, right? Did you draw the short straw to get this assignment?”
He was quiet for a moment. “Not exactly. Will you come out, please? I don’t care if it’s just to punch me in the face. I want to see my little girl.”
“A funny thing happens when you barely stay in touch. Little girls grow up.”
“If you come out, I’ll take you for ice cream. If you don’t, I’m just going to wait until you open the door. You’re going to have to come out at some point.”
Especially because I’d had all that coffee. “Ugh. Fine.” I whipped open the door.
Dad looked startled. “Whoa. You’re a lot taller than you used to be.”
“Screw you,” I said, stalking past him and heading into the bathroom, where I slammed the door.
“Trying to sleep,” Mom shouted from her bedroom. That was probably a lie, considering she’d gone in there with a cup of coffee, but she hadn’t come out to see Dad, and he wasn’t trying to make her.
“Sorry, Gina,” Dad called.
When I came out of the bathroom, he was rummaging in the fridge. “Does your mother not feed you?”
“I’m eighteen, Dad. I can feed myself.”
“Mostly prepackaged garbage, from the looks of it.”
“Is that why you came over here? To lecture us on proper nutrition?”
The fridge door squeaked shut. “How about we go grocery shopping?”
“Right now?” I asked.
“Is there a magic hour for grocery shopping?”
“No. There is no such thing as a good time to go grocery shopping with your father. Especially when that father is you.”
He nodded. “Good. Expressing your feelings is healthy. Now get dressed.”
I huffed. We were getting low on coffee and ice cream, the basic necessities. “Are you buying?”
“If I say yes, will you come?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
Less than twenty minutes later, we were heading inside Delmore Grocery, Dad a few paces ahead of me. Like my mother, my dad had naturally dark hair, but he spent hours in the sun, so it was blonder on top and dark brown closer to the roots. He was wearing it longer than when I’d seen him last, and he seemed to be styling it now so that it stood up from the top of his head in a disheveled pompadour.
As we entered the store, at least four sets of eyes tracked him, like they couldn’t decide if he was someone famous, or just someone unfairly handsome.
Or maybe just a jerk who’d abandoned his family seven years ago, simply because his daughter couldn’t follow in his footsteps. I knew that wasn’t the whole reason, but as I trailed him through the store, the resentment bubbled up inside.
A dreck lady gave him an appreciative look, her gaze sliding down the length of his full-sleeve tattoos, watching his muscles flex as he bagged a few apples and set them in his cart.
I rolled my eyes and grabbed a bunch of bananas. “How long are you here for?”
“A few more days. I actually got here yesterday. You know how these festivals are. People start to gather before the formal stuff starts to happen. I’m just here to observe.”
“Oh, yeah. Because the Syndicate is so neutral.” Flynn had told me they’d been gunning for the Devils for years, just looking for an excuse to take them down a peg. He’d always stopped short of insulting Dad to my face, but I could tell what he really thought.
“We are neutral, Mo.” He took in my sour look. “We’ve got the Sixes, the Kings, the Devils, and the Stalkers, all of which have feuded with each other in the past decade, as well as a handful of smaller clubs. Not to mention all the other kindled folks who just come for a good time. The Syndicate’s just here to keep the peace.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Yeah? And you’re the best person for the job?”
His nostrils flared. “I am, actually.”
I made a grumbly, skeptical sound in my throat as I poked at the tomatoes.
“So, have you been hanging out with the Medicis much?” He picked through the onions, like the question was insignificant.
“Around Alex, yeah. I don’t see much of Crowe anymore.”
Dad tossed an onion in the air and caught it again. “Crowe is a great kid, but he’s a great kid who does bad things, and I worry about him without the guidance of his father. I think it’s smart to keep your distance.”
Sometimes I forgot that the death of Michael Medici affected more than just Alex and Crowe and their mom. My dad and Michael had been best friends since they were kids—until my dad took off, that is. I hadn’t talked about Michael’s accident or death—or murder, if Crowe was right—with my dad, but that was mainly because he hadn’t even come back to town for the funeral. And though I was pissed at him for leaving, I couldn’t believe Dad didn’t care. I could see the loss etched on his face now, the pain that flashed through his eyes before he turned away. It sort of took the wind out of my anger.
We made our way through the store, and Dad grabbed the necessary items to make chicken fajitas, my favorite, which told me he was either a) sorry for being such an absent dad and hoping cheesy Tex-Mex would heal all wounds or b) planning to use spicy deliciousness to lull me into opening up.
Dad grabbed a six-pack of beer off the shelf. “You been practicing at all?”
Well, there it was. His fake-casual tone dragged me back eight years, to when he would try to coax me into showing him what I could do and then pretend not to be disappointed when anything I tried fizzled out halfway through because I was too overwhelmed to hold it together.
Instead of answering, I turned the corner to enter the aisle for frozen food. I needed ice cream. Like, the most salted-caramel-chocolate-dipped-pretzel-terrible-for-me kind.
“The perimeter on the house is practically nonexistent,” he said. “That should be easy for you by now.”
A mom, prodding along two young kids, stalled for a second as my dad passed. She smiled at him. He ignored it.
I tossed a carton of my chosen vice into the cart. “Is that really any of your business, since you don’t live there anymore?”
“Maybe it should be, if Crowe Medici is showing up and trying to burn down the house that I still own. His dad used to get worked up like that from time to time. Like father, like son.”
“It was a few pounds of meat, for God’s sake.”
“Not really the point.”
The point was that he’d caught me in a lie. Or at least, a half lie. I’d said I hadn’t seen Crowe much, and I hadn’t. But I had seen him the night before in the kitchen of my own damn house, and both Mom and Dad had noticed.
“He drove me home,” I explained.
“Uh-huh.”
“Dad,” I said, part warning, part whine.
He glanced at me, leveled his stare. “Just don’t lie to me, Jem. It’s as simple as that. I’m your father, you know.”
“Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed, what with you moving hours away!”
He turned into the next aisle. “I keep a roof over your head, don’t I?”
I grabbed an extra carton of frozen comfort, grinding my teeth. “That’s it? That’s what you have to say?”
He was waiting when I entered the aisle where he was loading up on pasta. “Jemmie, someday, when you can talk to me like an adult instead of like a toddler throwing a tantrum, I’ll tell you why I left.”
“Fuck you,” I snapped, tears starting in my eyes. “I have a right to be mad.”
He bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry. Look—let’s go home. We’ll cool down and talk later.”
>
“Whatever,” I mumbled, but followed him to the checkout line. I didn’t want my ice cream to melt before I could get it to a freezer. I also didn’t want to break down in the middle of Delmore’s.
The girl behind the register greeted us in a too-high-pitched voice. I tossed a few things on the conveyor belt. She rang up a total of three items before saying, “Wow. Your tattoos are incredible.”
“Thanks,” Dad said. He fished his wallet out.
“How long did it take you to get all that done?”
She was stalling now. The conveyor belt had stopped moving and our milk sat, waiting to be scanned, the plastic sweating in the heat.
“A few years,” Dad answered vaguely, probably used to having these conversations.
It was so weird to stand there next to him. He was only in his mid-thirties; he and my mom had had me so young. Didn’t mean I was cool with a girl my age stumbling over herself to flirt with him.
“They’re incredible,” she said again. Her cheeks flushed when she noticed me staring at her, my lip curled in disdain. She scanned the milk. The sun beat through the windows, momentarily blinding me. If only it’d deafen me, too.
The girl finished scanning the groceries. “I’ll be in the car,” I said, and grabbed a few bags.
“Wait, Mo,” Dad said, but I was already gone, the automatic doors rushing open in front of me.
Outside, in the parking lot, I slid my sunglasses on and sighed against the sudden warmth of the sun. As I made my way to the car, I smelled something heavy in the air. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Magic.
Dad ran up behind me. “I said to wait. You never listen to me.”
Three motorcycles sat parked in the back of the lot, with three members of the Devils’ League perched atop. Hardy, Flynn, and Boone.
Dad had his sunglasses on—great big aviators with mirrored lenses. But I could tell he was staring at them, and they were staring at him, and something tense and hostile thrummed between them.
“Dad?” I said, my voice sounding young and unsteady as the scent of his magic hit me, mint so strong it burned the inside of my nose.
“Get in the car,” he said, so I hurried to it and climbed inside, locking the door behind me. I didn’t think the Devils’ League would hurt Dad, not now, and especially not out in the open, not in broad daylight. At least, not if they were sober. But the power was so thick and pungent that my head throbbed with it. I pressed my face into my hands and breathed through my mouth.