Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(76)

We followed Merrin out the front door, then immediately lost him in the crowd. Loud whoops and laughter echoed off the glass windows of the restaurant as drunken revelers galloped down the sidewalk.

“Damn, my head is killing me,” I complained as we made our way back to the float. “I feel like I’ve forgotten something. Do think it was safe to let him go like that? He was telling the truth, right?”

“I guess.”

“What do you mean, ‘I guess?’ You don’t know?”

“I couldn’t hear his emotions sometimes. I could at first, but later it was off and on. And his thoughts were muffled. I could catch glimpses of things, but I—”

This alarmed me. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Sometimes I can’t hear certain people very well.”

“But you didn’t have problems hearing him in the Silent Temple.”

“I don’t think so, but I was pissed, and he was panicked.”

“Wait, wait, wait—does that mean your persuasive emotional thing was working on him or not, Lon?”

“I think so.” Doubt clouded his eyes. Embarrassment, too.

Dear God, my head! Blood pulsed in my temples. What had I forgotten? My mind fastened on a single detail: the tattoo on Merrin’s chest, the one peeking out of the top of his shirt. It was awfully dark for an old military tattoo. And that was no army eagle, it was the top of an Egyptian symbol for strength, and it wasn’t lined in blue ink, it was charged with Heka.

Shit! He’d constructed some sort of magical seal to ward himself, either from Lon’s ability in particular, or from Earthbound knacks in general. Anxiety cleared a path through my fuzzy head.

“What?” Lon asked, suddenly panicking right along with me.

“My weird headache . . . Jesus, Lon. We just let Merrin go. He’s not going to help us. He tricked us! He—”

“He was using my knack.”

I glanced around. Thousands of paradegoers were swarming the streets. How would we find him now?

“You took his invisibility talisman,” Lon said.

I patted my pocket, then thrust my hand inside. Empty. “Oh, no . . . He bumped into me on the way out. He . . .” I didn’t bother finishing. Lon made a miserable sound. “How much of what he’d told us was true? Was he under your influence at all? Did he tell us enough to shut us up? Or—” I fished out my cell and ducked into an alcove to get away from the crowds.

“What are you doing?” Lon asked.

“Looking up Hotel Guinevere. Have you ever heard of it?”

His blank expression told me that he hadn’t. I hadn’t either. Not that I knew every hotel in the city. A million people lived here. “Hotel Guinevere,” I said, reading from my phone’s web browser, “closed in 1990. It was one of the oldest hotels in the city.”

Lon’s eyelids fluttered in disbelief. “How did I not know?”

“How did I not know? This must be what it feels like to be on the receiving end of Jupe’s knack.” My head still throbbed. “I wonder if he was lying about the possession details? He wasn’t possessed himself—we’d know, right?”

“I wasn’t touching him the entire time,” Lon said despondently.

“Yeah, that’s when I started trusting him—when he touched me.”

“I think he was telling the truth at the beginning. Before his thoughts became muddled to me. But I don’t know . . . I just don’t know.”

My mind flipped through everything he told us, then I suddenly remembered what had caught my attention before the magical explosion stole it. “Mark Dare.”

Lon grunted.

“He jumped off the float less than a minute before Merrin’s explosion.”

Another grunt.

“He was at the carnival the night that the third kid was taken.”

That got his attention.

“Mark and his father don’t get along. Dare said they’d recently reconciled, but he’d also called his own son a prick—maybe Mark feels the same way about Dare.”

“There’s bad blood between them,” Lon confirmed. “But enough for Mark to team up with Merrin?”

“They must know each other—if Merrin remembered you, then surely he remembered Mark, too. And teaming up certainly would allow Mark to get revenge on Daddy, by making it appear that Dare couldn’t protect his own cubs from predators. If members were scared and pissed off, it might even get Dare impeached from the Hellfire Club and put Mark at the helm.”

“Jesus f*cking Christ, Cady.”

“You were right to begin with—Merrin set that fire as a distraction. And it wasn’t for the Halloween protesters. That was a load of crap.”

Lon didn’t answer. He just pulled me back into the moving crowd, and we plowed our way through to the float.

Police lights flashed red and blue on the parade route where the fire truck had been parked. But not all of the police were investigating the Little Red Riding Hood crime scene—several surrounded the Dare Energy float. A fresh rush of panic swept over me as I quickly inspected the area. The kids were all huddled at the front of the float with two police officers. Adults were being questions by other cops. I was searching for Mark Dare when his father stepped into our path.