Devils & Thieves Series, Book 1

by Jennifer Rush

  Dad accepted the stuffed animal from Crowe and closed his eyes. My nostrils flared as the stinging scent invaded. Blue tendrils sprouted from my father’s body like vines, slithering along the forest floor, winding up tree trunks and into the canopy above. I watched in awe as his magic expanded so easily, so controlled. But then it shrank back just as quickly, and Dad frowned. “There’s nothing,” he said quietly.

  “What do you mean?” asked Crowe. “Jemmie sensed her. She led us to this spot.”

  “I’m sorry, Crowe,” Dad said. “I’m just not picking anything up, and if she’s anywhere within a hundred miles from here, I should be able to.”

  “I probably got it wrong,” I said miserably. “Crowe, I’m so—”

  “No,” he snapped. “You sensed her, and you know it. Don’t get scared now. Own it.”

  I stepped back, stung. “I warned you I might not be able to do it.” I couldn’t escape his gaze, hard and full of challenge.

  “Crowe,” my dad said quietly, “Alex isn’t a locant, so she couldn’t hide herself from me.”

  Crowe’s eyes narrowed. “Then maybe someone with locant took her.”

  “Okay,” Dad said cautiously, “but the number of people with enough locant to completely conceal a life spark from someone like me is so small that—”

  “My sister is not dead!” shouted Crowe.

  Dad took a step back. “That’s not what I’m saying. We’ll all help you search. But maybe we should talk to Ronan and the Sixes first. If Katrina is looking to punish you, that might be the best place to start.”

  “Fine, let’s go talk to them,” Crowe said. His lip curled as he gazed at the Stalkers’ tent. “I need to get out of here anyway, before I change my mind and curse all of them with explosive diarrhea.”

  “Never thought I’d say this, but thank God Owen put up that shield around them,” said Brooke. “Because we don’t have nearly enough toilets for that.”

  The Devils fell into step just behind Crowe as he stalked off down the path toward a tent flying the emblem of the Rolling Sixes, some type of crouching demon with ragged wings clutching a human leg bone with its clawed fingers. Wind ruffled my hair and dried my sweaty face as I followed. Dad made his way to my side and caught me by the elbow when I tripped over a clump of grass. “You might be healed, but you lost a fair amount of blood before he got that wound closed,” he said.

  “I’m fine. I just want to figure out what’s going on, and I want to get Alex back.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you look bad back there, Mo. I think it’s great that you tried to do a locator spell.”

  I stared stonily at the path ahead. “I’m not a child, Dad. You don’t have to talk to me like one.” It wasn’t his fault I was freaking incompetent. I could have sworn, though, that I did it right. My own magic had flared out just like his—but unlike his, I had connected with Alex, however briefly. “I know I found her. I just… didn’t get a good sense of the location quickly enough.”

  “Crowe was right—she could have been cloaked,” he said. “But it would take someone with locant magic even more powerful than mine.”

  “One of the Stalkers has that kind of magic.”

  “Ford? He can barely cloak himself, let alone someone else. He’s always been resentful because he doesn’t have much power and can’t do much with what he has.”

  “So you don’t think the Deathstalkers could have been responsible for kidnapping Alex?”

  “Do we know she was kidnapped? She’s been gone less than twenty-four hours, and from what I hear, she’s grown up to be quite the wild child.”

  “Alex can be wild, yeah, and she can be tough when she’s mad,” I said. “But I don’t think she would deliberately make the people who love her worry like this. I mean, Crowe, maybe. He’s the one who bound her magic, but—”

  “Wait, Crowe did that?”

  “No, I did, but—”

  “So you are using your magic,” he said, looking pleased.

  “Yeah.” I offered him a bitter smile. “Now that you know I’m not a reject, are you gonna come home?”

  Dad’s face went from tan to ashen in the space of a few seconds. “You think I left… because of you?”

  I scowled and kept walking.

  He grabbed my arm and pulled me to a stop. “Jemmie, it killed me to leave you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  His eyes shone with emotion. “You have no idea what we did. I had to go, to try to make it right.” His voice was husky. On the verge of breaking.

  “What who did?”

  “Me and Michael. At the time it seemed like we had no choice, and I went along with it. But it was wrong, Jemmie, and I couldn’t live with it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Dad looked past me, back at the Deathstalkers’ tent. “When we took down Henry Delacroix and every single one of his officers.” He winced, as if he was seeing something horrific in his mind’s eye. “I helped Michael kill six men that night, Jemmie.”

  Crowe and the Devils were way ahead of us now, and though I wanted to know why Katrina had attacked us, I needed to know this. “It was just you and Michael? Why did you two have to kill all of them?”

  “The officers were following the orders of their president,” Dad said, his tone soaked with regret. “But Henry—he was about to do something that would have changed our world forever. Have you ever heard of the cruori spell?” When I shook my head, he went on. “It’s blood magic. The worst of the worst.”

  My cheeks bloomed with heat as I thought about the blood magic between Crowe and me. A thrill of his power still ran through my veins, my heart beating with it. “I didn’t know there were levels of badness when it came to that type of magic.”

  Dad shrugged. “It’s never good. Blood incantations involve taking someone else’s essence into your body, or losing it to another person, and you can never know how it’s going to affect either the taker or the giver.”

  “What if it’s sort of… mutual?” Crowe had used my magic, but I was the one who offered it.

  “You still can’t predict how it might change you,” he said sternly. “But the cruori spell is on a different level. It involves stealing kindled life forces so you can permanently possess every type of magic.”

  “Stealing life forces?”

  “It is what it sounds like—you have to kill the person, or come close enough to absorb all their magic.”

  “But… you’d have to kill a lot of kindled! There are eleven known types.”

  “Well, now there are ten. The Crofts and their tollat magic…”

  “The family line ended, but didn’t Henry have that tollat power to siphon that the Crofts were known for?”

  He nodded. “He must have had Croft blood way back in his family tree, because that power hadn’t been seen in years before he came on the scene, and he was the last person to have it. But to complete the cruori spell, you have to completely drain kindled of their various abilities. That’s what Henry was trying to do, Jemmie. That’s why we had to stop him. If he’d succeeded, he would have been all-powerful. He could have ruled our world. Or ended it.”

  I shuddered. “But you stopped him.”

  “We got wind of what he was doing after Paul Medici turned up dead, blood drained.”

  Paul had been Michael’s cousin. I’d met him once at a summer barbecue when I was eight or nine. He’d let me sit on his bike and wear his helmet, and I cried when Mom told me he had died. “Did Henry get his power?”

  Dad shook his head. “Not permanently. There’s something about all the magics combining that binds them to the spell caster and amplifies each one. We think Henry was just experimenting with Paul. But after his murder, it was personal for Michael. I rode with him down to Nola. We didn’t let anyone know we were going.”

  “The guys would have backed you up.”

  “We wanted to keep it quiet, and the whole club on the road would have let them know we were coming. No,
we needed to sneak up on the bastard. And we did. We watched him snatch a Cabrera—one of your mother’s relatives, actually—from a bar. The boy was one of the few remaining merata kindled. He was a friend of Killian’s. Visiting from Brazil.”

  “Did Killian have anything to do with Henry’s plans?”

  “He was eighteen at the time, Jemmie. I don’t think he had a clue.”

  I thought about that. Crowe had been nineteen when his father died, and he seemed the opposite of clueless. “You stopped Henry from hurting the Cabrera, right?”

  Dad grimaced. “Normally, the kid should have been invincible—that’s the essence of merata magic. But he would have had to summon it, and they slipped something in his drink, just to knock him out. Then Henry and his sergeant at arms took the kid to a warehouse out in Algiers. We followed him and snuck in. He already had four others with their magic bound, all chained up and waiting for the slaughter.” Dad’s expression had gone dark and dangerous. “We didn’t plan to kill him. I didn’t want to kill anyone.”

  “What happened?” I whispered. We were standing in the middle of the field in broad daylight, beneath the midsummer sun, and I still felt a chill run up my back.

  “I trapped them all inside the building with a barrier,” he said. “Henry realized we were there—and he had his officers each run to one of the chosen victims. He ordered them to kill, just to keep them from being rescued.”

  “You had to stop them.”

  “Yeah,” Dad said quietly. “I got a bubble around all but one. I wasn’t fast enough to protect Carlos Cabrera. Kyle Horst—the Deathstalker vice president who was the meanest invictus kindled I ever met, cut his throat. And the kid—he never regained consciousness, so he had no chance to protect himself. Michael couldn’t stand for it. He snapped Kyle’s spine with a mere thought, and then he just kept going. Before I could stop him, the officers were dead and only Henry was left. He tried to run.” Dad bowed his head. “But Michael shouted for my help, and I couldn’t let him down. I bound Henry’s siphoning magic, rendering him powerless, and then I basically delivered him to Michael on a silver platter—I immobilized him with a vault hex. And Michael…” He sighed. “He turned Henry inside out, Jemmie. Literally. He pulled him apart and left ten pieces of him scattered across that warehouse floor, a message to anyone who would ever even think about trying the cruori spell.”

  “Pieces?” I said weakly.

  “It got out of control, and I couldn’t stop it.” He ran a hand through his hair. “We should have called in the Syndicate, and instead we took the law into our own hands.”

  “But Henry was in the process of doing something terrible.”

  “That doesn’t mean we had to become like him to take him down.” He raised his head. “That’s why I left, Jemmie. It had nothing to do with you, except that I was too ashamed to look at you afterward, too afraid of what I had turned into. I couldn’t stand to think that I had that much blood on my hands. I had to atone.”

  “So you left us,” I said in a dead voice.

  He sighed. “I’m not saying I did the right thing. I just did what I had to do to be able to look at myself in the mirror again. It took a long time to feel like I wasn’t staring at a killer. Truth is, I haven’t felt worthy of being your father for years. Haven’t felt worthy of being a husband or a real friend, either.”

  In that moment, standing with my father in the middle of that field, I finally realized how alone he had been. “Did you ever talk to Michael after that night?”

  “He tried to talk to me. He kept saying he’d done what he had to do.” Dad stared at Crowe’s distant form. “But if you become a monster to kill a monster…” He shifted his attention to me. “Doesn’t change the fact that you’re a monster. And I get the feeling that Crowe is a lot like his father, Jemmie. He’s got more power than he knows what to do with, and more rage than Michael ever did.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “You’re here for him, aren’t you?”

  “I’m here to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself.”

  “And you think Crowe’s going to kill more Deathstalkers?”

  “I think he’s just looking for an excuse. Part of me wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got Alex hiding somewhere.”

  “Just to pin the blame on the Stalkers?” I gaped at him in disgust. “Do you have any idea how worried Crowe is about her? He’s sick with it. And you—” I turned and started walking after Crowe. “If you want to make up for whatever you did, and if you want to make sure Crowe doesn’t take matters into his own hands, help him find his sister!”

  “I asked for this assignment, Jemmie. I asked because if it hadn’t been me, the Syndicate would have sent others, and they don’t care about this club the way I do. They think the Devils are outlaws and would love to take the entire club down. But I know these people. I grew up with them. I watched some of them, like Hardy and Jackson and Brooke, take their first rides. I don’t want innocents to get hurt, and I don’t want anyone caught in the crossfire, including you.”

  “But you don’t give a shit about Michael Medici’s son!” I yelled, my voice cracking. “You’re here, looking for any excuse to bind him and take him in, just to make yourself feel better for what you did!”

  “In the last year, Crowe Medici has shown that he’s more than willing to hurt other people to make a point.”

  “He was protecting his club.”

  “He’s going to take it too far someday, Jemmie. He reminds me so much of Michael.”

  “So you’ve already tried him and found him guilty. Sounds fair.” I headed off, needing to put distance between us.

  “Wait, Mo, I need you to understand—”

  “I think I understand perfectly well,” I shouted back. “If a person can be judged on the basis of who their father is, then I need to get the hell away from you.”

  I cut between the Warwick and Flynn family tents, past the kiddie tent, past the beer tent, all the way to the tent of the Rolling Sixes, where I found Crowe and Hardy and a few other Devils facing off with Ronan Niklos and what looked to be half his full-patch members. My throat was instantly coated with a funky mixture of venemon and animalia magic, and my vision clouded with amber-purple haze. A fierce growl drew my eyes to the enormous Doberman hulking at Ronan’s side, teeth bared and eyes fixed on Crowe, as if he’d already been given a target.

  “You know I didn’t,” Crowe was saying. “I had no reason to hurt her.”

  “You’ve got a history of breaking people who so much as look at you funny,” Ronan said through gritted teeth. He towered over most of his fellow Sixes—he had to be six eight, and most of him was covered in tattoos of hellhounds dragging lost souls into the flames of damnation. His clenched fists were huge, and it looked like he was ready to use them.

  Hardy glanced over his shoulder and spotted me, then poked Crowe and whispered something to him. Crowe turned, and his eyes locked with mine. “Jemmie. Tell Ronan what you saw when we were attacked.”

  Suddenly aware that I’d become the center of attention, I sucked in a deep breath, then coughed as the heavy scent of magic burned in my nose and mouth. “I—I saw Katrina. In the trees just past the Deathstalker tent. She hurled a curse that hit Crowe. It could have killed him.”

  Ronan’s eyes narrowed. “I know who you are. My niece said you were out to get her. That you and that little Medici bitch cursed her in the middle of a mall.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest as the Doberman turned its head and snarled at me. Ronan was controlling it—I could see the purple loops of his power around the animal’s body and head. “I stand by what I saw. I’m telling the truth.”

  Ronan snorted and spit on the ground. “That’s what I think of your truth, little girl. You have as much reason to lie as Crowe does.”

  “Then ask Katrina,” I said. “Maybe we can have Old Lady Jane question her. Doesn’t she know when someone’s lying to her?”

  “He can’t,” said Crowe, very quietl
y.

  “Why not?” my father asked, moving to stand next to me.

  “’Cause Katrina’s missing,” Ronan barked. “No one’s seen her since early this morning—but Fang here did sniff this out.” He held up a torn scrap of fabric that looked a whole lot like the lacy top I’d seen Katrina in the night before. “Found it at the edge of the grounds. There’s blood on it.”

  I stared at a red-brown stain on the dangling scrap. “Oh.” My mind spun with questions, like whether she might have done this on purpose to frame Crowe. But with the Sixes, half of whom were her cousins or brothers or uncles, all glaring murder at us, I didn’t think now was the time to question it. “Have you tried a locator spell?”

  “You think we’re idiots?” This came from a Six who looked to be in her twenties and was wreathed in locant magic. “There’s no sign of her anywhere.”

  Ronan nodded. “So I’m actually glad you stopped by, Crowe. Now we’ve got a problem.”

  “Why? I’m not trying to start anything, Ronan. I just want to find my sister.”

  “And I want to find my niece!” roared Ronan.

  “Maybe the same person took—”

  Ronan shook his head. “Don’t give me that bullshit, Crowe Medici. I’ve been asking around all day. And you know what people told me?”

  The skeins of purple animalia tightened, and the Doberman refocused on Crowe. Its hackles rose, and a low, deep growl rolled from its throat. Ronan leaned forward and dropped the scrap of Katrina’s shirt at Crowe’s feet. “You were the last person to be seen with her.”

  THIRTEEN

  MY STOMACH DROPPED AS AMBER SKEINS OF MAGIC unfurled around Crowe—he was preparing to defend himself in the only way he knew, and it would make things worse.

  “There are three people missing right now,” I said loudly, shoving forward to stand next to Crowe, ready to do my best to throw out a barrier around us if it came to that. It might not work, but I had to do something. “Alex Medici, Katrina Niklos, and Darek Delacroix. The Devils, the Sixes, and the Deathstalkers are each looking for someone.”