23

My basement looked like a mobile field hospital. I didn’t want Riley Cooper to be able to use spells to escape, so I painted four old sheets with sigils that blocked magick and hung them around a small area of my basement that the previous owners had intended to convert into a bathroom. An old toilet and a drain for a shower were as far as they’d gotten.

Adding grand theft auto to my list of crimes that night, I’d managed to get Riley back to my house blindfolded in a hot-wired Ford from the school’s back parking lot; I had to plaster the backseat in old newspapers so she wouldn’t bleed all over it. Once we got home, it took me fifteen minutes and several tries to remember the counterspell that would allow her to breach Lon’s house ward. Then I had to contend with all my other minor wards; every time I tried to get her through the door, a series of irritating warnings ballooned in my head and she started moaning and shaking, but I finally managed a successful cloaking spell.

I found the key to the handcuffs on a small key chain in her pocket. After digging out a length of rusted chain from the shed in my backyard, I shifted her hands to the front of her body and cuffed her wrists to one of four metal support posts that were bolted into the cement floor. Nothing within her reach but the toilet and a musty couch I’d dragged to the metal post. I brought down a satellite radio and switched it on, then left her there and locked the basement door.

It was nearly six in the morning by the time I crawled into bed.

I slept a few hours, woke around noon, then fired up the courage to call Lon. He didn’t answer. I sent him a text and told him that I hoped Jupe was okay, and waited for a response, but it never came. If he was serious about my not seeing Jupe again, then he was serious about my not seeing him either. All the work we’d done was for nothing, and I was back at square one.

Not only was the possibility of helping my parents look like the biggest long shot in the world at this point, but I couldn’t even focus on the futility of it, because Lon’s words were competing for attention: This is your fault. The accusation repeated in my head ad nauseam, along with the blank look he’d given me. My heart felt like it’d been buried under a pile of rocks.

Dazed and drained, I plated some fruit and crackers and carried it down to my kidnapping victim. She was asleep on the couch behind the makeshift antimagick curtains. I woke her.

“Do you want to eat?” I asked.

She stuck out her handcuffed hands and raised both middle fingers.

“Look, I don’t have any problem leaving this food on the floor, but you’re going to drink the water before I leave.”

She initially resisted but gave in without too much prodding. It took her two tries to empty it.

“How old are you?” I asked after she’d finished.

Water ran down her chin. “None of your business.” She threw the empty plastic bottle in my direction.

“Eighteen?” I guessed. “Seventeen?”

“Twenty-one. Where are we? Are we still in La Sirena?”

She didn’t know where I lived. That was good.

“We’re in Fresno,” I lied.

“Fresno? What are we doing here?”

I ignored her. “What were your instructions from Luxe?” She shifted her legs to curl up on the couch, facing away from me. She looked uncomfortable. “Bring you back to San Diego … alive, unfortunately.”

“Why me and not my parents?”

She laughed. “My brother’s hunting your parents in Mexico, don’t worry.”

“I doubt he’s having better luck than you are, then. I’m sure they’re already farther away than that.”

“But you don’t know? Interesting.”

“Whatever. The less we know about each other’s whereabouts, the easier it is to stay hidden. So it’s kinda useless, you see, trying to bring me in to get info on them. Because I don’t have it.”

“Hmph.”

“Why did your order kidnap our caliph?”

She wrinkled her nose. “What are you talking about?”

“The head of Ekklesia Eleusia. Why did you kidnap him?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Nobody’s kidnapped anyone except you, and you’re going to regret that when my order finds out.”

Perhaps they hadn’t told her about the caliph, or she wasn’t high up enough in the hierarchy to know—just a bounty hunter instructed to do a job.

I’d removed her leather pants and boots so that she couldn’t use them as projectiles to knock down the sheets, and now she had on only underwear and a sheer black spiderweb print shirt. The dirty soles of her feet faced me as her toes curled; the black polish on her toenails was chipping. “Are you cold?” I asked. “There’s a space heater I can turn on.”

“Are you mad that they left you?” she asked, ignoring my question.

“My parents? No. They were protecting me.”

“By deserting you? If you were so fucking special, why wouldn’t they guard you with their own lives?”

“The three of us being seen together would draw suspicion. It was safer to separate.”

“Or maybe they just told you that. Maybe they realized that you weren’t the savior to Ekklesia Eleusia that they’d thought you’d be. Maybe they thought you weren’t worth the troub—”

“Look, this isn’t going to work. My parents love me. They just did what they had to.”

She shook her head. “Still protecting them after all these years, huh? One of our mages has a theory that you helped them with the killings.”

“They didn’t kill anyone,” I snapped.

“I know for a fact that they did.” When she tried to smile, all I could see was the gaping hole in her teeth. The incisor that once held that spot was now in my pocket.

“Let’s see, you were fourteen or fifteen during the Black Lodge slayings? I seriously doubt you knew much more than your math homework back then.”

She relaxed her shoulders and stared at me for a moment. “Huh,” she said thoughtfully.

“What?”

“You really don’t think they killed all those people, do you?”

I gave her a weak smile. “They were framed by the head of your order.”

“Wow, you’re dense.”

“Alrighty, then. This is going nowhere.” I moved the fruit and crackers toward her with the tip of my shoe. “Have fun eating like a dog off the floor.” I left her a small length of toilet paper on the arm of the couch and parted the hanging sheets to exit.

“I know your parents killed the other heads of the orders,” she said behind me, “because they tried to kill my dad.”

Her dad? I froze in place.

“That’s right, Moonchild. I’m Phil Zorn’s daughter.”

An uneasy chill ran down my back. Magus Zorn? Holy shit. I had just kidnapped the Luxe leader’s daughter. This was either the worst mistake I’d ever made, or a once-in-a-lifetime piece of leverage; I wasn’t sure which.