A Darker Past (The Darker Agency #2)(56)
“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…”