“I’m so sorry I doubted you.”
“I’ve given you more than enough reason to doubt me.” His thumb slid over the back of my hand. “We’ll stop him, Jem, and we’ll get our people back and then we’ll figure this out.”
I shivered, feeling the heaviness of his words, the promise that came with it. I didn’t know what the outcome of figuring it out would be, but I understood that we weren’t done. We hadn’t ever been done.
He let me go and said, “How long do you think it’ll take you to get your magic back?”
“No idea,” I said. My eyes skimmed the barrier Darek had created. “That thing is huge. I can’t believe it came from me. There’s a lot of magic there.”
Hardy squinted. “Wait. You can actually see it?”
I blinked, realizing I’d just revealed a secret I’d been trying to keep for years. But somehow, it just felt right. It was time to stop hiding. “Yeah.” Resolve filled the empty cavern inside me, the one that had been filled with my magic. “And I’m going to try to take it down.”
Hardy looked back and forth between me and Crowe. “She can see her own magic?”
Crowe’s eyes flicked to meet mine, and in them was something that I hadn’t felt in a long time—respect. “She can see everybody’s magic.”
“Whoa,” Hardy said. “And that wasn’t drained when Darek stole your locant?”
I frowned, realizing that was true. “I don’t think he knew it was there, so he didn’t know to take it. I’ve never really told anyone about it. It’s not a kind of magic anyway, or a power.”
“The hell it isn’t,” said Crowe.
I smiled at the awe in his voice, realizing he was right. I’d been so focused on avoiding magic for so long that I hadn’t really understood what I could do, or how useful it could be. I could see the magic people had. I could see when they were preparing to attack, or when a spell was wrapped around another person or thing. I could see all of it.
“Oh my God,” I whispered as another realization struck. “We have to get back to the festival. We were looking for the wrong thing.”
Crowe frowned. “What do you mean?”
“We were trying to locate the people who were missing, but Darek must have cloaked them using the magic he’s been siphoning from me. That’s why Alex disappeared from my radar, and why we couldn’t find Katrina or anyone else. He’s shielded them.”
Hardy dusted himself off. “So, what do we do?”
“What do I do, you mean,” I said, walking up to the barrier and placing my hands against it. “I’m going to take this down, and then we go back to the grounds.” I looked over at Crowe. “And then I’m going to look for my own magic.”
SIXTEEN
I APPROACHED THE BARRIER WALL, SHIMMERING SAPPHIRE under the starlight. My nose and throat stung with the sharp mint prickle of it, but I knew now that it couldn’t hurt me if I didn’t panic. For so many years, I’d done exactly that, running or drinking or doing whatever I could to avoid letting the sensations get too intense, all out of fear that I couldn’t take it.
I wasn’t afraid anymore.
My magical battery might be low in the aftermath of what Darek had done to me, but I could see the locant magic hanging in the air so easily, the threads of it braided together to form a kind of mesh across the road and far into the distance in the fields on either side, stretching high up into the air. It actually made me smile to know that my power had produced it, even if it had been controlled by Darek at the time. It meant I could do it if I tried.
I laid my palms on the barrier’s firm surface, and light pulsed through it, reacting to my touch. To Crowe and Hardy, I was pressing my hands against empty air, but they were silent as I worked, and their faith added to my confidence.
I felt the warm throb of power against my skin, and I whispered an incantation to call it back to me, to let me through. I was glad that even though I hadn’t ever practiced these things, I had studied them. Now I realized they came naturally once I stopped hiding from them. And being able to see the magic only made it better.
Feeling a bit of magic trickle from me, I pushed against the threads of the spell, feeling them start to fray. The net of locant magic began to wrap itself around me, and for a moment the burn of it in my lungs made my heart pound with anxiety. But I reminded myself that this power belonged to me. My fingers curled and dug in, boring holes through the barrier. With one last command, I tore through the thing, leaving a gaping hole, and then I ran my hand along the edges, widening it.
Smiling, I turned back to see Crowe and Hardy watching me warily.
“Is it done?” Hardy asked.
I looked back at the barrier wall, which now contained an archway the width of the road. “Yep.”
Crowe walked over to me, and Hardy laughed. “You might want to put out your hands to keep from busting that pretty face of yours against the barrier if she’s wrong,” Hardy suggested.
Crowe gave me an assessing once-over. “Nah,” he said, then strode confidently through the hole that only I could see. “She’s got this.”
The way he was looking at me made me feel like my bones were melting.
A few minutes later, I stood shivering in my driveway as Crowe primed his bike. I held his helmet in my arms, waiting. I had sworn I’d never ride with him again, but a little thrill ran through me when he kick-started the bike with a quick, downward thrust of his foot. The engine caught right away, the sound of it like rumbling thunder. When he gave it a little throttle and looked at me over his shoulder, the ram’s skull patch on his vest almost glowing on his back, I knew I was a goner.
I’d spent so many months trying to forget him, trying to hate him. I’d thrown myself into my thing with Darek, pretending I could feel the same way for him that I’d once felt for Crowe. Pretending it was enough, pretending that it felt right. But there was no avoiding this now, just like there was no avoiding what I could do. I needed to face it.
Whether I was a distraction to him, only a friend, or anything else, it didn’t matter. My heart knew the truth.
I wrapped my arms around his waist and held on tight as we raced back to the festival. The closer we got, the more real the challenge became. Jane had been right—I was a part of this, not just someone watching from the fringes. If I couldn’t figure out where Darek had hidden Alex, my mom, and the others, they would all be dead. I could tell by the tension in Crowe’s body that he was thinking about it, too. And when he rolled into the parking area at the festival and pulled off his helmet, the look on his face said he felt the same weight on his shoulders. “He gave himself a big head start,” he said, frowning as he looked up the path toward the festival. “You really think he’s here?”
“I think we should head for the spot near the Deathstalkers tent,” I said. “That’s where we were when I lost Alex’s signal.”
He nodded. “Hardy, go find Owen, Jane, and the rest of the Devils. See if Boone has turned up.”
Hardy swung his long leg over his bike and left his helmet on the seat. “Should I alert Terrence and the Kings? What about the Sixes?”
“No. Not yet. We’re missing the most people—their lives mean more to us than they do to any of the other clubs, and it’s my responsibility to get them out. Besides, the more people we have chasing after Darek, the greater the chance is that we’ll be found. We have to go in fast and quiet. Let’s keep our numbers small.”
“Copy that,” Hardy said, and jogged up the path to the RVs.
Crowe and I headed for the woods. “Who is Darek missing for his spell? He has Alex, so that’s venemon. Katrina is animalia.”
“If he took Gunnar the night he got into town, that’s arma,” Crowe said. “Flynn is inlusio. And your mom would be merata. That’s half of what he needs, and if he grabbed Boone tonight, he’s got terra, too.” He frowned. “But he left you at your house tonight after draining you. He didn’t even try to take you, even though your locant magic is strong as hell.”