He would try. If things did go sour, he would sprout fangs and claws and march his team of hard cases brandishing savage weapons into Lawrenceville to try to pry me loose from my father’s grasp. I had to make sure it didn’t come to that, because it wouldn’t end well for everyone involved.
I leaned over to Curran and kissed him. His arms closed around me and he squeezed me to him for one bone-crunching second.
“I’m off.”
“I’ll be right here,” he said.
“Have fun with your A-team. Sharpen some knives. Clean some guns. Don’t kill anybody while I’m gone.”
“I can’t make any promises.”
I climbed into Cuddles’s saddle. The black and white mammoth donkey twitched her ears.
“I’ll tell dear old Dad you’re sorry you missed him.”
Behind Curran, Eduardo snorted.
Curran bared his teeth. “Not as sorry as he’ll be if I have to come and see him.”
“Hey, Daniels,” Ella called out. “Bring us back some cookies.”
“What makes you think there will be cookies?”
“When I go home to see my parents, there are always cookies.”
If Roland did have cookies, they’d probably make me spit fire. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I started down the road. In its glory days I-85 was a giant of an interstate road, six regular lanes and two express lanes on each side. The magic had fed the tree growth. The pavement crumbled at the edges under the relentless onslaught of magic waves, making it easier for the roots to raise the asphalt, and the once mighty highway turned into a forest road. The huge hickories, maples, and white ashes flanked it, warring for space with colossal live oaks tinseled with Spanish moss. The heat was brutal, the sun pounding the road like a hammer. It would take me about twenty minutes to get to Lawrenceville, and by the time I made it, I’d arrive well-done with a crispy crust. I stuck to the tree shadows.
What the hell could Roland possibly want with Saiman?
Thinking about it made me clench my teeth. He came into my territory. He took one of my people out. No matter how I felt about him, Saiman was an inhabitant of Atlanta. If I had hackles, they would be standing up.
You’d think he would stop screwing with me fourteen days before my wedding. As a common courtesy.
I still hadn’t bought the dress. I’d gone shopping for it three times and come back empty-handed because I didn’t see anything I wanted.
Ahead Derek stepped out from behind a thick ash, moving with the easy gliding grace of a shapeshifter. In his early twenties, with broad shoulders, and a face hardened by life’s grinder, he looked at me with dark eyes. With some shapeshifters the nature of their beast was more obvious. Even in his human body, Derek looked like a wolf. A predatory, solitary, smart wolf.
“I was beginning to wonder where you were.”
The former boy wonder shrugged his shoulders. “I scouted ahead.” His voice matched his looks: low, threatening, and rough.
“Anything?”
“No patrols between us and Lawrenceville.”
I wasn’t sure if that was good—because I wouldn’t have to intimidate and possibly kill anyone—or bad, because my father apparently worried so little about me presenting a threat that he neglected to defend his base.
“You look like you want to murder somebody,” Derek said.
“Don’t I normally look that way?”
“Not like this.”
“It’s probably because I have one nerve left and my father keeps jumping up and down on it.”
I kept riding. Derek trotted next to me.
“Curran told me about the Conclave,” he said.
“Mm-hm.”
“Why does Nick hate you?” he asked.
“You know the story about Voron and me? How after Roland killed my mother, Voron raised me?”
Derek nodded.
“Whenever we came through the Atlanta area, Greg Feldman would visit us. When I was older, I thought it was odd, because Greg was a knight-diviner and Voron steered clear of the Order whenever he could. I asked him about it once, and he told me that he, my mother, Greg, and Greg’s ex-wife, Anna, used to be friends. Then after Voron died, Greg became my guardian. Occasionally he would take me to Anna’s house. She didn’t like me at first, but eventually she helped me. She is a precog. I used to wonder why I haven’t heard from her for a while, but it makes sense now.”
“Okay,” Derek said. “How does Nick fit into it?”
“You remember when Hugh killed the knights in the Atlanta chapter of the Order, and Nick dropped his cover? Maxine called him Nick Feldman. When we got back to the Keep, I asked Jim to look into it. He did. Nick Feldman is Greg Feldman’s son.”
Derek frowned. “You didn’t know he had a son?”
“No. Greg took care of me for about ten years. Neither he nor Anna ever mentioned a child. There were no pictures and nobody ever said his name. So after Jim told me, I called Anna.”
It had taken four phone calls and a promise to come find her in her country home in North Carolina before she finally called back.
“I had always thought that Greg and Voron had been friends. I have a picture of the four of them, Greg and Anna and Voron and my mother, standing together. Apparently, all of that is bullshit. They knew each other, but they weren’t friends. My mother had worked for the Order for a short time before marrying Roland. She met Greg, and Greg fell in love with her. He told Anna, but Nick was two years old and they decided to stay together for his sake. My mother and Greg reconnected again when she and Voron were running from Roland. At the time, I was a baby. Greg left Anna the day he found out my mother died. Nick was six.”
“I don’t get it,” Derek said. “Why leave when the other woman is dead?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea what went on in Greg’s head. Maybe he thought he was betraying my mother’s memory somehow by staying with Anna.”
Thinking about it put all those meetings between Voron and Greg in a new light. They weren’t two friends catching up. They were two men mourning the death of the same woman.
“He and Anna shared custody, but when Nick was twelve, he applied to Squire’s Rest. It’s the Order’s preparatory boarding school, the place you go before the Academy makes you into a knight. Nick got in and they never saw him again. According to Anna, Nick hated both her and Greg. When he became part of the Crusader program, Greg was told to remove all traces of Nick, photos, documents, everything, for Nick’s safety and the safety of his family. Eventually Nick went undercover with Hugh for over two years. So my mother broke up his parents’ marriage and my father was the reason he had to do despicable shit for two years. I’m not his favorite person.”
“I get being mad at his parents and at your mother, but you were a baby.”
I sighed. “Maybe if I were the daughter of the other woman his father loved, or the child his dad took in instead of him, or Roland’s daughter, he could deal with it. But I’m all of those things. He will get over it or he won’t, Derek. I don’t really care.”