Binding the Shadows (Arcadia Bell #3)(65)

“Dad is going to be Hulk angry.”

“Yeah, he is,” I agreed.

“I wanted her to be okay.”

I thought of my own mother, and how badly I wanted her to be okay, even after I knew she’d killed people. Even after I knew she was irretrievably lost.

“She said she was sober, but that Evan guy was selling her drugs. I saw him. I went to find them, and he was giving her a tiny bottle of something. Like that.” He pointed to my medicinal.

I stilled.

“What color was the bottle, Jupe? Do you remember?”

“Red. Like a little bottle of red wine.”

Oh my God. Could it be? The bionic elixir? “Did she drink any of it? This is important, Jupe.”

“No, I don’t think so. We started fighting, and she told him she’d come by his place later after she got me home.”

Jesus. My pulse jackhammered against my temples as I tried to sort it all out in my head.

“Dad’s going to . . .” He didn’t finish.

“I’ll deal with your dad. Go on and sleep. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to leave the light on, in case you need to go to the bathroom. Don’t want you to trip over Mr. Piggy’s crate and smush him.”

He mumbled something and shut his eyes. After I’d made it halfway to the door, he said, “Cady?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not giving her any more chances.”

I blew out a long breath, not knowing what to say. He probably wouldn’t remember it anyway. “Go to sleep. I’ll check back in on you later.”

When I closed the door behind me, Rose was striding down the hallway. Pissed off as hell, from the looks of it. “He’ll be okay,” I assured her. “I gave him something that will help him detox. He threw up, so that’s good. Got some of it out of his system.”

“Did he tell you what happened?”

“A little—”

“Yvonne said they left Jupe at the table while they went to talk to someone else in the restaurant, and that’s when he sneaked the wine.”

“Look, I’m not saying she’s a liar, but Jupe said that Evan guy encouraged Yvonne to let him drink. They left him at the table with the wine bottle, and they were gone long enough for him to empty it. And—” I stopped and decided against telling her about the elixir. It just complicated things, and I needed to see it for my own eyes first. Jupe was drunk, after all.

She swore under her breath. Her anger was contagious, because now that I was satisfied Jupe would be okay, I was furious. “I don’t know who this Evan guy is, or what they were thinking, but Jupe says Lon hates him. And given the fact that he’s Hellfire, and nobody I’ve met from that bloody club has a decent bone in their body—”

And if he had a whole bottle of elixir on him, did that make him the distributor? Was this the guy Telly originally robbed to get his supply? If he was Hellfire, it would explain how Merrimoth got it, back when this all started. Could also explain its presence at Peter Little’s Richie Rich party.

“I knew she was lying,” Rose said. “She just tried to use her knack on us.”

“Out there?”

“Just now. Anytime she does anything wrong, that’s what she falls back on—the knack. Only it didn’t work on me because of my charmed ring. When she didn’t get what she wanted, she pressed on and shifted herself.”

“Transmutated?”

Rose nodded. “Almost too much for the ring to fight. It was tough, but I did.”

“Where is she now?”

“Sitting in the backseat of her rental. Adella’s got the ring. She’s guarding her. I’ve got her car keys.” She opened her palm to show me. We stared at each other for a long moment. Long enough to hear Jupe snoring through the closed door. Rose eventually said, “You remember what we talked about?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said you could strip away that magick from her. So she can’t shift like that.”

“Whoa,” I said, throwing up both hands. “I said I possibly could.”

“Lon tells me you’re special. Different. He says you can do incredible things that other magicians can’t even dream about doing.”

“But—”

“Do you want me to beg you? Because I will. She could’ve hurt him,” she said, pointing at Jupe’s door. “What if he’d ended up in the hospital getting his stomach pumped? What if she got drunk too and crashed her car?”

That thought made me sick.

“She’s a danger to everyone around her, and she’s going to end up killing someone or herself before it’s all over.”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, trying to move things around in my head. To make sense of everything. I was overwhelmed. Could I do what she was asking? I knew I couldn’t with a traditional spell. It would have to be the Moonchild power. As much as I didn’t want to admit it after what happened in Hajo’s parking garage, I’d had success using it. In fact, I’d instinctually been able to get the results I’d wanted every time. They weren’t always results I knew were possible: freezing time to help Lon, trapping Noel with smoke at the car rally, squeezing the trust funder to the brink of death, teleporting myself home.