The SUV lurched upright, settling onto its wheels with a heavy thud.

  For a second we all just stood there, breathing hard. I peered at the windows while Gabriel started inspecting the tires. The glass all along the left side of the car was shattered, but the rest were fine.

  “I don’t think I can meld the glass back together.” I toed the shards on the ground. “But I can put up a simple illusion that’ll stop anyone from realizing they’re broken. It’s warm enough that it shouldn’t matter having some air come in, right?”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” Ky said.

  “The tires look okay,” Gabriel said. “The real question is whether that engine is going to start.”

  He lifted the hood and looked it over. “This isn’t the happiest looking system I’ve ever seen. But maybe…” He reached inside, twisted something, fiddled with something else. Then he pulled back, shut the hood, and held out his hand for Damon to pass him the key.

  My throat tightened as he hopped into the driver’s seat. If this didn’t work…

  Gabriel turned the key. The engine sputtered—and then thrummed to life. My shoulders sagged in relief.

  Knocking the last few slivers of glass away from the side window, Gabriel leaned out his elbow and turned to grin at us. “Everybody back in! Let’s see what New York has in store.”

  Chapter Ten

  Kyler

  The moon was full overhead, the night air cool on my skin, when Damon and I swapped off spots at the front of the SUV with Seth and Gabriel in the wee hours of the morning. I peered up at the gleaming circle against the near-black sky. “Well, that’s not ominous or anything.”

  “I don’t think we need any omens to know we’re in a tight situation,” my twin said, but he managed to sound a little wry.

  “True. Very true.” I looked him over. “You’re feeling totally okay? No headache, fogginess, or dizziness? Ringing in your ears?”

  Seth shook his head at me as he got into the driver’s seat. “Why do I have the feeling you’ve been scouring the internet for symptoms of a concussion? I’m fine, Ky.” He glanced back at me to catch my eyes. “I promise.”

  I held up my hands. “Hey, I had to ask. The last thing we need is you out of commission.”

  Rose was still dozing in the middle row of seats, her jacket bunched under her head. When I slid in next to her, she roused enough to reach over and squeeze my hand. I squeezed her fingers in return. The sight of her, tired and probably a little frayed but able to relax for now, made my chest fill with so much affection that I almost thought it would burst.

  I’d have liked to snuggle up with her and fall into my own doze, but instead I pulled out the stolen phone. Rose had worn herself ragged protecting us. I’d better do my bit to protect her.

  Damon sank into the seat next to me. “What’re you doing with that thing now?” he asked, keeping his voice low. Jin was sleeping in the back. The car rumbled as Seth hit the gas.

  “I’m still working on finding a back door into the Assembly’s server,” I said. My thumb skimmed over the touch screen. “I’ve tried a few things that didn’t work out, but I’ve got another strategy that I’ve made some progress with.”

  He snorted. “I thought you could hack your way into anything in two seconds flat.”

  “Not quite,” I said with a laugh. “Getting into the phone wasn’t hard. And it’s been used to access at least one level of the Assembly’s database before. But they cancelled her user account as soon as they realized the phone was stolen, it looks like. So I’ve got to carve my own way in.”

  “Hmm. Yeah. I wouldn’t know where to start. Haven’t really had time to play around with computers a whole lot.”

  Because he’d been busy getting in trouble in class and then working sketchy jobs to keep afloat after he’d dropped out of high school. Yeah, I guessed my honor roll, college graduate self must look pretty privileged to him.

  We’d all suffered some when Rose’s dad had fired our parents from the Hallowell estate staff as punishment for the friendship we’d formed with her all those years ago, but my and Seth’s parents had found their feet pretty quickly. Whenever I’d seen Damon’s mom around town, she’d always looked run down and sad. And his dad had run off years before that.

  He hadn’t sounded pissed about it just now, but a prickle of guilt ran through my gut anyway. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Damon raised his eyebrows at me. “For what? My lack of computer skills?”

  Oh, hell, I was probably going to put my foot in it. But I’d already committed.

  “I just mean—back then. All the stuff you were going through. I wish I’d reached out more. I mean, we used to be best friends, all five of us… We didn’t have to drift apart. I should have tried harder.”

  Damon blinked at me. He ducked his head, his spiky coffee-brown hair drifting to shadow his eyes. “I guess I can’t say I was doing a whole lot of reaching out myself.”

  “You were having a hard time,” I said. “I knew that. I wish I’d done more. That’s all.” I paused. “Although maybe it was for the best in the end, because if you hadn’t gone off and made those new friends of yours, you wouldn’t have picked up all the nifty breaking-and-entering skills we’ve found so useful.”

  I wanted to take the words back the second they’d spilled from my mouth. Yeah, that didn’t sound at all insensitive or anything. Damon’s head jerked up so he could stare at me, and I gulped. His mouth twisted.

  Then he started to laugh.

  The sound was catching. In a second, I was laughing too. The comment hadn’t even been that funny, but it was a relief just to feel like we could laugh about something in the middle of all this.

  “You do have an interesting way of looking at things, Mr. Brainiac,” Damon said when he’d caught his breath. “I guess that’s for the best too. Get on with your fancy-pants hacking.”

  He leaned back in his seat, letting his eyes drift shut. As I tapped into the interface I’d been using, Rose stirred at my other side. “What’s so funny?” she murmured.

  “Nothing really,” I said, still smiling. “Nothing worth waking up for, anyway.”

  She made a dismissive noise. After a swivel of her hand, her body went unnaturally still for a moment. When I glanced over at her, wondering what spell she’d cast, she nodded.

  “I can’t sense any magic at all anywhere nearby. I don’t know how much range I have, but I think the way I’m checking now, I’d know if they were close enough to really hurt us.” She sighed. “I guess tonight’s attack was their big effort.”

  “They’re regrouping,” I suggested.

  “We’ve got to assume so. I don’t think they’re going to back down yet.”

  It’d be easier to know if I could get into this damn server. My fingers flicked over the screen. A little code here. Massage a password there. Chip away at the walls around the network until I had a hole just big enough to weasel my way in.

  I’d broken into a whole lot of secure databases in my time: banks, government, you name it. Just for kicks, though. None of them had really mattered.

  Breaking through these layers of security, on the other hand, could be a matter of life and death.

  I squinted at the screen, tapping out another sequence on the touchscreen keyboard. This wasn’t exactly the greatest phone I’d ever worked with either. But—hey! Was that an opening?

  My spirits shot up. My fingers dashed over the screen as if the crack I’d discovered might close at any second. I shoved it wider with another line of code, and—bingo! The lowest level of the Assembly’s private database spilled down the screen. My mouth stretched into a grin.

  Ha. They might have magic, but they didn’t rule the internet, that was for sure.

  My excitement must have radiated off me a little more strongly than I’d intended, because Rose shifted again, tipping her head against my shoulder and looking down at the screen. “Is that good?” she asked, looking hazily at the interface.

  “I just got into the low security level of the Assembly’s network,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll be able to access the super secure areas from the phone, but we’ll have access to their basic records now.”

  She scooted a little closer, her expression becoming more alert. “That’s great! I don’t even know what we should look up at this point, though. The faction that’s hunting us will have kept all their records separate.”

  I nodded. “I’d probably have to be physically in their building to have much chance at those.” Even sitting in the coffee shop across the street a few weeks ago, they’d shut me down before I’d grabbed more than a couple of files. But we could use this entry point in other ways. “I know the names I saw on the form I dug up—the one where they approved the murder of that witch and her lover. And we know your father and that Frankford guy are involved too.”

  “And my stepmother,” Rose said. She winced. “Or at least she was.”

  Because Celestine Hallowell had recently become the victim of another highly suspicious accident. This faction of the Assembly had used a supposed car crash to cover up things they didn’t want getting out before. What were the chances she’d just happened to get hit, right after Rose had sent her running from the estate? Right before she’d been supposed to carry out Mr. Hallowell’s dirty work, binding Rose in that corrupted consorting?

  But that didn’t mean her name wouldn’t be useful. “Right,” I said. “I can cross-reference those names with any of the witches you think we could turn to for help. See if I come across any connections between them, good or bad. So we can be a little more sure that they’re not under the influence of this group in any way.”

  “That’s a good idea.” She looped her arm around mine in a gesture so comfortably familiar another pang of affection shot through me. “The first person I figured we should talk to is Margo Elands. I texted her from the burner phone you got me back when I was trying to figure out whether I even could kindle my spark properly with consorts who weren’t witching men.”

  “She’d heard about other witches doing that?” I said, my eyebrows rising.

  Rose shook her head. “Not any time recently. Just, like, a legend sort of thing. From what I read, she dabbles in the more obscure or questionable areas of witching history. And she’d seen a few of those etchings like the ones in the tower on my property—pictures of witches with multiple consorts. Apparently she’d mentioned those tidbits of history in the wrong company, and it got her fired from a job with the Assembly. She owns a New Age shop on Staten Island now.”

  “She definitely sounds like someone who might be on our side, then. Let me see what I can find on her.”

  I started a search of the database looking for any documents in the vast array that contained both Margo Eland’s name and any of the witching people we knew were part of the conspiracy.

  “I’m not seeing anything about her in the database,” I said. “Let me try regular old Google too.” They might be witches, but they had real lives in the real world that could intersect in different ways.

  Nothing came up there either. “Ms. Eland seems clean,” I said. “I mean, we’ll still want to be cautious, but I don’t see any reason to worry about her somehow being involved with that shady faction.”

  “Yeah, that seemed pretty unlikely anyway,” Rose said.

  I looked at her. “You were thinking maybe we could contact your mom’s family too, right?”

  “Yeah.” She hesitated. “I’ve never even talked to them before… My dad always made it seem like they disowned us because they weren’t happy about the marriage. I figured they were all snobby jerks. But now I’ve got to wonder if he pushed them away because they knew something wasn’t totally right with him. I’m not even sure… What if he did something to my mom like he meant to have happen between Derek and me? What if he was controlling her magic?”

  What if he’d been responsible for her death too? She didn’t have to ask that question—it hung in the air regardless.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said to the questions she had asked. “I can see if there’s anything to dig up here. What’s their family name?”

  “Levesque,” she said. “That was her maiden name. Alora Levesque. I found an old photo once of her with her sisters—the older one was Irene and the younger one was Virginia. I don’t know about her parents, or any kids my aunts might have now…”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “That’s enough.”

  I started by searching for Irene and Virginia Levesque in the New York City area. It didn’t take long to find a large property on the outskirts of one of the particularly posh suburbs. Irene held that one. And Virginia’s name was on the deed of a slightly smaller estate just a mile away.

  “It looks like they’re still in New York State,” I said. “And close to each other. Let’s see what else I can find…”

  My digging turned up almost as much nothing as when I’d looked for Margo Elands.

  “There are a couple of records in the Assembly’s database,” I told Rose. “A while back Virginia filed a minor dispute with Frankford about the tutor she hired on the Education division’s recommendation. It looks like she has a daughter who’s just a couple years younger than you. And Irene and your father served on a board together for a year, about thirty years ago. I’m going to guess that was how he ended up meeting your mother. I don’t see any sign that the two of them had any connection other than that.”

  “Hard to tell without being able to access the deeper records, though, right?” Rose said.

  “Yeah. I can’t be sure. Even with those we couldn’t be perfectly sure.” I ran my hand over my hair, the curls scattering under my fingers. “But if anyone from your mother’s family was on your father’s side, you’d think he’d have brought them back into your life. Another point of influence.”

  “That’s true.” Rose rubbed her mouth. “At least we know where to find them now.”

  That didn’t feel like enough. I frowned at the phone. Then something Gabriel had mentioned earlier came back to me. The enforcers who’d been holding us—one of them had said something to him about a “Cliff.”

  A search of the Assembly’s database turned up nothing. I switched to the regular internet. First I checked for “Maxim Hallowell” and then “Charles Frankford.” My thumbs stilled over the screen.

  “Did you find something?” Rose asked, leaning closer.

  “I don’t know.” I cocked my head as I considered the article I’d found. “It’s just a little piece from some small-town paper… So small I guess this qualified as news. It’s reporting that Charles Frankford the First purchased a large property near the coast there, ‘just east of the cliff area.’ The First? It’s from fifty years ago.”

  “Maybe the dad of the Frankford I’ve met? Or his grandfather? What’s the name of the town?”

  “Heronville.”

  “Nope, definitely never heard anything significant about that.” Rose’s brow knit. “Maybe that’s something to look into if we can’t dig up anything else to help us, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But not right now,” Seth’s voice carried from the front. “You two are supposed to be getting some sleep, remember? We want to be fresh for whatever the Assembly throws at us tomorrow.”

  Rose made a face. “He’s right,” she said. “Come here.”

  She nestled against me, inviting me to lean my head against hers. I let myself relax into her the way I’d longed to earlier, because Seth was right. I needed my mind sharp. And I’d already found out a lot.

  But under the warm flush of victory, my nerves weren’t exactly calm. We might have allies in Rose’s mother’s family, but what had happened between them and her dad in the first place? And what did this Cliff have to do with anything?

  Nothing good—that was all I knew for sure.

  Chapter Eleven

  Rose

  “So you said Margo Elands’s shop is on Staten Island?” Gabriel said. He was at the wheel of the SUV now. It was late afternoon, and we’d just come into the built-up area around New York City proper.

  I rubbed my eyes. I’d gotten some sleep here and there overnight and through the day’s long drive, but I couldn’t say I really felt rested. Especially since I’d been reaching out with my magic over and over, testing for the presence of other spells in opposition.

  Just in the last few hours, I’d started to feel a faint tingling. Distant still and not an overt attack, but enough to put me on my guard. The Assembly was still searching for us. I couldn’t be sure how closely they were tracking us.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’ve got the address. I can give you directions once we get over there.”

  “Looks like we’ll reach the bridge in about ten minutes,” Kyler said from where he was navigating from the phone.

  Behind me, Damon leaned his arm out the open window. “I want to head over to Brooklyn for a bit. There are a few guys there I know. They might be able to help out in non-magical ways.”

  “Like what?” I asked, tensing a little, both at the idea of one of my consorts leaving the group even for a little while—and at the idea of what Damon might have planned. He’d calmed down some since I’d first gotten back in town, but he still had some… overly aggressive ideas of how to deal with problems. He’d sent a bunch of small-time gangsters to beat up Derek when my former fiancé had been getting overly pushy with me, even though I’d had the situation under control.

  “Nothing you need to worry about,” he said in his favorite cocky tone. “I’ll just be getting some supplies. I promise I won’t get anyone else involved.”

  Well, I guessed that was something. “I don’t think you should go alone,” I said.

  “These kind of guys don’t really want a whole party of people they don’t know showing up on their doorstep.”

  “Can you at least take someone, just in case trouble shows up?” I wasn’t sure what any of the guys could do against the enforcers on their own, but at least if two of them were together, they had more of a chance of creating a distraction or getting a message to me so I could help.

 

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