Devils & Thieves (Devils & Thieves #1)(48)

“Same,” Crowe said in a hard voice. “Ronan, I propose you and I go talk to the Stalkers and the Kings. If everyone agrees, we can meet in the gathering tent after dinner—around eight. It’s neutral ground.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned to me. “Will you go get Jane for me? I want to talk to her before we all meet. She’s camped out—didn’t want to make the trip back and forth from her cabin—so she should be in the south field.”

Circles had formed under his eyes, and I was once again reminded that he hadn’t slept in nearly a day and a half. “Yeah,” I said. “On one condition.”

His eyebrows rose.

“You get a few hours of sleep before tonight,” I whispered. I held up my hand when he opened his mouth to argue. “You have to be sharp to pull this all together, Crowe, and you’re human. You nearly died less than an hour ago. You have to rest.”

For a moment, he simply looked down at me, and every nerve in my body thrummed with awareness of him. “Okay. Once I get this set up and check in with Jane, I will.” He touched my arm as I turned. “And, Jemmie? Thank you,” he murmured. “I mean it.” He trudged away and joined a knot of Devils who had gathered between the tents.

Without looking at my father, I turned and marched toward the camper grounds. People who didn’t have large family groups, or who simply preferred a little more solitude, were allowed to pitch tents or park their RVs in a wide-open area at the south end of the festival fields. Jane Vetrov sat on a ratty lawn chair outside a rusty old Airstream. Her knobby knees stuck out through tears in her jeans. A Harley T-shirt hung loose on her body and a half-empty bottle of Jack dangled from her fingers. Despite that, her gaze was sharp as she caught sight of me marching toward her. I braced myself as the silver threads of her omnias magic stretched toward me like a giant spiderweb.

“Trouble?” she asked when I got close enough.

“Yeah. Four people are missing and everybody wants to blame someone else.”

Jane looked unsurprised. “And they want me to come tell them what the hell is happening.”

I nodded. “Will you? They’re meeting in the gathering tent around eight, but Crowe said he needed to talk to you before that. We still can’t find Alex or Gunnar. The Sixes want to blame Crowe for Katrina Niklos’s disappearance, and the Stalkers seem to think he might have kidnapped one of their prospects. It’s kind of a mess.”

Jane grunted and slowly stood up. “That boy’s a magnet for trouble,” she muttered.

“He didn’t do it.”

Her pale eyes met mine. “You sound awfully sure, Jemmie Carmichael.”

Her magic smelled like steel and machine oil as it caressed the sides of my face. I shuddered and pulled back, and Jane tilted her head, peering at me with sharp curiosity. “You were always a funny child.”

“Um. Thanks?”

“Sometimes your parents and the others would come out to my property to drink and cast and talk about the future. They’d bring you along, and while the other kids were playing tag and hide-and-seek in the woods out back, I’d always see you squatting behind a chair or near the wood pile, watching.”

“I guess I was interested in what the adults were doing.”

She chuckled. “That’s what your parents said. Nosy little Jemmie. But that wasn’t what it looked like to me. You weren’t watching them. You were watching the air around them.”

I swallowed and rubbed at my arms. “If you say so.”

“You used to enjoy being around all of it, but after you hit six, maybe seven, your mom told me you started asking to stay home with a babysitter. She said you’d have a screaming fit if they tried to bring you.”

It had all gotten to be too much. The older I got, the more the magic overwhelmed me. “Well, I’m here now. Wondering why you’re telling me this. Can we go?”

Jane didn’t budge. “You’re here now, all right. Only half-in, though. Your energy is split right down the middle.”

I suddenly thought of Darek, out there somewhere, maybe with Alex, maybe in trouble, and then I thought of Crowe, trying to find his missing people and make sure this festival didn’t end in a gang war. “Can you see my future?”

She moved a step closer to me, and I inhaled her metallic essence. “Yours in particular? Not unless I touch you, and I don’t think you want me to do that.”

“It might be nice to have some answers,” I said quietly. “And if you know what’s happening, what’s going to happen, shouldn’t you tell us? People’s lives are on the line.”

“People’s lives are always on the line, little girl.” She clucked her tongue. “And they always come to me, wanting answers, and then they can’t handle what I see. Sometimes I can’t handle what I see. Sometimes this gift feels more like a curse.” After a long pull from her bottle of Jack, she capped it and tossed it into the long grass by her chair. For a moment, I thought about asking her for a swig, then realized… I didn’t really need it.

Jane started to walk slowly toward the festival grounds. “Lots of Vetrovs go crazy, you know. You dip your toes in the Undercurrent even once and you can hear it whispering, and we can’t help but go back again and again.”

From the haunted look on her face, it seemed like she might be listening to its call right now. “Is that why some omnias kindled can supposedly raise the dead?” I asked. “You know how to pull them from the Undercurrent?”