A Darker Past (Entangled Teen) (The Darker Agency) (17 page)

My heart pounded so hard I thought it might leap from my chest, and I called out. There was no answer. I darted for the stairs, taking them two at a time. Mom called out for me to stop, but nothing short of the apocalypse was going to get in my way now. There was a stillness in the air that made it hard to breathe. If we were too late…

No.

When I reached the top, a lump formed in my throat. The second floor of the Belfair house was in ruin, worse than the first. The curtains at the other end of the hall were singed and still smoking, and the antique table that I’d tripped over a thousand times since first grade was nothing more than splinters scattered all over the hallway.

I was rooted. Too afraid to face what the silence might mean. Terrified that somewhere in the ruin and rubble, I’d find my best friend just like Jana. Lifeless and cold.

I had to force my feet to move. Ten steps. Twelve, maybe. I was at the door to Kendra’s room. Sucking in a breath, I turned the corner and stepped inside. It was no better than the hallway. In fact, it was worse if that were possible. Unrecognizable objects lay in hundreds of pieces across the floor. But the destruction wasn’t the focal point. The only thing I could focus on was Cassidy, pale and kneeling on the floor in the middle of the room.

“What happened?” I demanded, dropping down in front of her. She didn’t answer, and I pretty much lost it. I grabbed her shoulders and shook as hard as I could. “What the hell happened?”

A minute later, someone was pulling me to my feet and dragging me across the room, away from the witch. I clawed at the air, desperate for a piece of her as Mom’s soft, controlled voice filled the air. “Cassidy, where’s Kendra?”

No answer. Cassidy blinked, but that was about it.

That’s when I lost it. I tore free of Dad’s grip and lunged for Cassidy. If Kendra wasn’t here, then there was really only one possibility. There was no body… “He took her, didn’t he?
Didn’t he
?”

That seemed to snap her out of the haze. “Yes,” she said, finally looking up. “The monster took my daughter.”

Her admission made the anger boiling up inside me ten times worse. If this was just a fraction of what Lukas felt when Wrath was with him, of what he
still
felt, I could understand his lack of control. My mind spun with dark possibilities. Painful, agonizing things I could do to get back at the coven leader. “This is your damn fault,” I raged, slapping her hard across the face. “If you’d just worked with us. If you’d just put aside your petty bullshit, this wouldn’t have happened.”

She might have been in some kind of shock, but she was still Cassidy Belfair. She climbed to her feet and shoved me hard. I didn’t take the hint. I rounded again, and it was only because Dad grabbed me around the waist and swung my body away that I didn’t rip her to shreds.

Or, at least try to.

“Jessie, be calm. This isn’t going—”

Lukas came up beside him and reached for me, but I pulled away.

I let out a scream. It launched from my throat like a missile and echoed in my ears. Inhuman. It sounded inhuman. Demonic. There was no reason to listen to the rest of whatever platitudes he was going to offer. It wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t keep Kendra safe. I dived for the shadows.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I knew it was against Lucifer’s rules for anyone in the Shadow Realm to help us with Gressil, yet still it was the first place I went after shadowing out of the Belfair house. I found myself outside the door to Valefar’s office, itching to knock, while at the same time, desperate to run. Of all the places I could have gone, why did I bring myself here? To the one place I didn’t want to be a part of.

“Don’t just stand there warming the tile, Cookie Puss. Come in.” The demon’s disembodied voice floated through the hall, followed by the slow creak of the opening of the door.

I rolled my eyes and stepped inside. He was lounging on that damn chaise with a bowl of grapes and a light blue drink with a tiny umbrella poking out.

“You’re here, and I haven’t even summoned you. Careful, little demon. I might start to think you like me.”

“Like a pile of demon shit,” I mumbled. “Look, I know you were ordered not to help me, but—” The grapes and drink disappeared. Actually, the entire room did. I blinked. Just once. When I opened my eyes, we were sitting at the table in an elegant-looking café with cloth napkins and a wine rack that would have made Paulson crap himself.

Valefar stabbed a potato from his plate and popped it into his mouth. “For the sake of getting Gressil tucked away nice and neat, I’d love to help, but you heard the big boss.”

“Fine,” I said, annoyed. I didn’t want to call him on the fact that, in my opinion, he’d already tried to help by giving us Samuel’s name. “Then what can you tell me about Samuel Darker?”

“Hmm. Darker. Darker… Sorry. Name doesn’t ring a bell.”

“He took my best friend,” I said, trying against every ounce of sanity in me to use a different tack. “That bastard took her. You don’t have to help me trap him, but give me something useful to help her. Tell me where he would take her.”

“He wouldn’t. She’s probably dead already. He needs magic-infested souls to recharge. She’s a witch, is she not?”

“No.” I shook my head so hard that my neck hurt. “She’s not dead. He wants that prison even more than he wants to recharge. She’s leverage. If he was going to kill her, he would have done it on the spot. There’d be no reason to cart her away.”

Valefar sighed. “A demon like Gressil doesn’t need leverage. How many witches has he killed so far? He might not be able to break into the Shadow Realm yet, but he’s more than powerful enough to see to his task without leverage. Though, I’m inclined to agree with you. If she was nothing more than a means to refuel, he wouldn’t have taken her. If I had to guess, there’s more to this than you know.”

“What does that mean? More, like what?”

He poked a finger at me and popped another potato into his mouth. “No can do.” Tilting his head, he sighed. A waiter appeared out of nowhere and poured a bright red liquid into each of our cups. Valefar immediately took a long swig, while I held my breath. There was only one thing I knew of with that color and thickness. It wasn’t about to breech these lips.

He saw me glaring at it and laughed. “It’s not what you think. Yes, its blood, but it’s hardly human. Human blood tastes like iron. Not suitable for steak and potatoes. Fish on the other hand…”

“You know if I can’t figure this thing out, Gressil is going to kill me, right?” The only thing left was to appeal to his greed. “You’re going to lose a Regent.”

He shrugged and downed the rest of the not-human-blood. “There are other Regents out there. You’re hardly irreplaceable, Cookie.”

I was so frustrated that I screamed.

He set down his fork and leaned forward. “If I were you, I would reexamine the facts you already know. You have all the answers you need to retrap him.” He pushed away from the table and dabbed the corner of his mouth with the napkin. “I must say, I’m fairly disappointed that you don’t have this all wrapped up yet.”

His words smacked like brick to the face. “How can you say that? Recheck your info. I have no magic, no method, and add that to the fact that Lucifer is going to be looking to boil both my ass and Lukas’s, and that equals a big fat zero. I’ve got nothing.”

His expression grew serious, and he leaned farther over the table, stopping a few feet from my face. Having him so close sent chills—not the good kind—skittering across my skin, but I didn’t move. “Listen to me carefully,
Jessie
, as I’m not going to say this again. You have everything you need. Go. Over. It. Again.”

A second later he was gone and I was up in my room, sitting cross-legged in the middle of my bed with Smokey in my lap, wriggling his butt against the edge of my sneaker.

…

“What are you doing in here?” Mom poked her head in from the hall. “You missed dinner. Either you’re dying or you’ve done something you shouldn’t have.”

I pulled my head from the book and slammed it closed. I’d been going over everything again and again, just like Val suggested. There were old Darker journals and notebook paper with a list of things I knew—and things I didn’t—strewn around me on the bed. The list of things I knew was short. “Probably closer to the first one.”

She came in and sat on the edge. “Why are you looking at these again?”

“I went to talk to Valefar one more time. I thought—” I shrugged. “I dunno what I thought. He said I had everything I needed to fix this.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “You have everything?”

“Right? So I figured I’d give it another look and see if maybe we missed something.”

Mom picked up my notebook. She was one of the few people that could actually read my handwriting. Even I had trouble with it sometimes, and that was just sad. “
Charles and Lorna work together. Trap You Know Who. Belfair magic gets lost somehow. Samuel Darker and Lorna Belfair have a thing
.” She looked up. “A thing?”

“You know,” I said, rolling my eyes. “A thing. They were a thing.”

“Um, I think that’s extremely unlikely.”

I blinked. “Why?”

She sighed. “This is a perfect example of how your lack of interest in knowledge fails you.”

“I have interest in knowledge,” I insisted. “I thrive to know all there is to know about pointy things. And Otherworlders.”

“Well, you should have brushed up on your genealogy as well.” She dug through the books on my bed and finding the one she wanted, opened it and flipped to the middle. “There’s only one Samuel Darker in our family tree, and if my memory is correct—and it always is—he was far too young for Lorna Belfair to have started an affair with. He was Charles’s nephew.”

I took the book from her. It was the one with our family tree. Lukas would have undoubtedly seen what she was talking about right away, but I was more of a fieldwork person than a book person. “What am I looking at?”

“I imagine since she helped Simon and Charles with their Otherworlder problems, she was roughly the same age as them. We could find out for sure. But if you look in that book, the only Samuel Darker in our line was born in 1881, a year before Lukas was trapped in the box. That’s thirty-one years after Charles. If Lorna was even roughly the same age as Charles, she was old enough to be his…”

“Mother. Oh my God. She and Samuel weren’t the ones with the thing. It was her and Charles!”

Mom shrugged. She wasn’t the least bit surprised. If anything, she’d put it together before me. Damn. I needed to up my game. “They worked together closely. It happens.”

“Kendra couldn’t find much about Lorna, but at the Town Hall exhibit, it said she left Penance in 1880. Maybe she left Penance to hide the pregnancy and have the baby in secret.” I closed the book. “But I don’t understand why they would hide it? I mean I get the whole unmarried stigma, but why keep it a secret? It said she never came back, but Samuel is in our records, so obviously the baby came back to Penance.”

“I imagine the choice was not on Charles’s end. If I had to guess, she wanted to keep it a secret from the coven. I would guess she left to have the baby, then gave him to Charles to raise after he was born.”

“Lorna told me herself that the coven refused to support the Darkers and the work they did. If she told them she’d just had a kid with one…”

Mom set down the journal and nodded. “Witches are very strict about pure blood. It was probably bring the secret to her grave, or die at the hands of her sisters. Polluting the gene pool is a serious offense. The baby would have been in danger.”

Then I had a thought. I snatched the book from the bed and tore it open, finding the page with our tree. Finger to the page, I went down until I found Mom’s name, and mine, then followed it up to the top. “Charles. Ma, we’re descended from Charles’s line.
From Samuel
.”

It took a minute, and I allowed myself a rare moment of
hah-I-found-it-first
, but Mom caught on quick and her eyes widened. “Belfair blood.”

“That had to be what Valefar meant. He said I had everything I needed to take care of this. If only a Belfair could do this, then we’re set. You and me, we’re Belfairs.”

“But the Belfair magic has faded, remember? And we’re
Darkers
, Jessie,” she said, taking the book away and closing it slowly. “Maybe this is all true and there’s a little bit of Belfair blood running through our veins. That small amount won’t be enough to do real magic. That’s why the witches are sticklers about preserving the lines. Magic fades when diluted. It would never be enough for you to trap the demon on your own.”

I threw my hands up. “Then I give up. I have no clue where to go from here.”

Mom picked up the paper I’d scribbled my notes on. “We
can
do this. Darkers don’t give up. Your Dad’s out following a lead for me, and—”

“He can’t. Lucifer said he couldn’t help.”

“Don’t worry,” she said with a wicked grin. “We’re covered. You said Valefar told you we had everything we needed to take the bad guy down. We just need to put all the pieces together.”

How many times had we done this? Brainstormed cases until the early-morning sun broke the Penance hills? It’s what we did, and normally I loved every second of it, but with Lucifer’s threat hanging over our heads, the fun was kind of sucked out.

“We know that the demon wants his Master’s prison—assuming in exchange for Kendra.”

“Agreed,” she said. “He wouldn’t have taken her otherwise. I think he’s sure Cassidy knows where it is and this will force her hand.”

“But what if she
does
know?” The thought crept up, and as much as it terrified me to think about it, it wouldn’t be pushed aside. “Say she has it and hands it over. That’s bad in a super volcano way. But, say she doesn’t have it. Say none of us know where this thing is and we can’t find it in time? Then what happens to Kendra?” I took a deep breath to control the tremor in my voice. “I know you’ve always taught me the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but how the hell am I supposed to choose between my best friend and the world?”

She set the list down and grabbed my hands. “You won’t have to. We’re going to fix this, Jessie. I promise.” She nodded toward the notebook. “What else do we know? Come on, focus.”

“According to Lorna, we know the Belfair magic is weakened. We know she has
some
connection to Samuel Darker, possibly maternal. And we know Cassidy is hiding something.”

“Okay. So where do we start?”

“I feel like this is a trick question…”

“It’s not,” she said. She brushed a stray hair from my face and tilted my chin up. “I want to know what you think. We’re partners and this is your case. Where do you want to go from here?”

There was only one reasonable path to take.