Devils & Thieves (Devils & Thieves #1)(45)

“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.”