Devils & Thieves (Devils & Thieves #1)(15)

Sometimes I liked to daydream about how Crowe would react if he found out I was seeing a Deathstalker, and one who looked like Darek at that.

He’d die.

I’d die with delight.

But starting a romantic relationship with Darek needed to be about a lot more than making Crowe jealous. It shouldn’t be about Crowe at all, really. So why was I still thinking about him?

“Are you hungry?” Darek asked.

I blinked up at him, shaking off the image of Crowe stuck in my mind. “I have a sandwich,” I answered.

Darek jumped out of the bed. “How pedestrian. I’ll make omelets.”

“Are you serious?”

“That seems like a stupid thing to be unserious about. Do you want one or not?”

“Umm… yes?”

“Is that a question?”

“Yes, I would like an omelet. Please.”

I followed him into the kitchen. He tore off his black-and-white flannel shirt and tossed it over a kitchen chair, revealing his fitted black T-shirt underneath. “Whoa,” he said, peering at the burned hunk of meat and plastic in the sink. He poked at it gingerly. “What happened?”

“Crowe happened.” I sighed as I stared at the new scorch mark on the counter.

Darek dug the carton of eggs out of the fridge, along with the butter, cheese, a green pepper, and an unopened package of ham. “What did you mean when you said tensions were high?”

“Oh, no big deal,” I said airily. “Crowe just thinks your club killed his dad.”

He cursed. “Why would he think we would do something like that? It would be suicide. The Devils already wiped us out once. Killian wants us on the straight and narrow, especially as we rebuild.” His hands shook a little as he buttered a pan and set it on the stove a bit harder than necessary. “When is this going to stop, Jem? It’s the twenty-first century, for God’s sake. We’re not fucking barbarians anymore. Why do all our problems need to be solved with violence?”

“I don’t know. You do sort of look like a Viking.”

“I’m French. Not Scandinavian.”

“Could have fooled me.” I smiled and slid his cap off his blond locks. Darek was a Delacroix. He was a distant relative of Killian Delacroix, who became the president of the Deathstalkers at the age of twenty—right after his older brother Henry and, I now knew, the entire leadership of the Deathstalkers had been killed by our very own local club. I knew it was because Henry had been trying to do something majorly evil, but killing all their officers seemed over the top.

The Delacroixs were known for the animus magic that ran strong in their veins—the ability to sense and manipulate emotions, and sometimes thoughts. I might have been nervous about hanging around with Darek as a result, except that I already knew he didn’t have that kind of magic at all. Not all people with kindled parents manifested the same power that was dominant in their family tree. Sometimes there were surprises, like a kid might take after his mother’s side of the family instead of his father’s if both had magic, or he might even inherit a type of magic from even further back, like Gunnar did when he got his great-grandmother Kitsamura’s arma power. And sometimes, unfortunately, a kid didn’t inherit any magical ability at all, or just a trace of it, not enough to actually call upon and cast at will.

My mom was like that. So was Darek.

As we maneuvered around my mom’s tiny kitchen, I couldn’t pick up anything in the room but the slight sting of my own magic and the ashy, acrid stench of burned meat. I didn’t know how Darek coped, not being able to cast like nearly everyone else around him, but he seemed to take it in stride and had still chosen to be a part of the kindled world.

I was a little envious at how easy he made it look.

The eggs sizzled when he poured them into the hot pan. “Don’t repeat this,” he said, “but I think Killian plans to reach out to Crowe directly during the festival. See if they can’t improve ties between the clubs.”

“He’s got some work to do, then.”

Again, I considered mentioning Jane. The fact that she’d seen bad things in our future likely meant the Devils’ League and the Deathstalkers would not be besties anytime soon. But why? If Killian extended the offer, why would Crowe turn it down?

“And you?” I asked Darek. “What do you think about a truce?”

He diced up the ham and green pepper with quick efficiency, and threw it, along with the cheese, over the bubbling eggs. “You know how I feel. I want fences mended. I want peace. Families have died out before, you know. Magic lines have been crushed out like cigarettes, or have just dwindled to nothing.…” He trailed off. The eggs started to brown.

“Hey. You okay?”

“What? Yeah.” He scraped the eggs, folding them into an omelet. “I was just making the point that we should all get along. The kindled have this amazing heritage, you know? I don’t understand why they can’t work together to preserve it.”

“Darek, it’s our heritage, too.”

He looked over at me and smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Good point. But how about this—I also don’t like the fact that I have to hide our relationship just because we’re from two different clubs with a bad history of killing each other.”

I grinned and threw a scrap of diced pepper at him. He heroically caught it in his mouth. “Relationship, huh?” I asked.