She squeals around her fruit and wiggles against me. But her tail rises off my knee and the tassel comes up to brush my cheek, and I turn my head and steal a kiss from it before it can pull away.
“The problem isn’t just that Henry exists,” Tiana goes on, still pacing. “It’s what he’s holding. The first Blackwood spell book. The original. Every founding spell our coven ever set down is in that book. The transfer rite they used to lend him his magic in the first place. The bindings. The seals.” She stops and looks around the room at us. “Our family has been working from copies and memory. He has the source.”
Kiara sits forward slowly.
“Think about what that means,” Tiana says. “The rite that made him is in his hands. He can lend magic the same way it was lent to him. Stand up loyal warlocks out of nothing, owing everything to him.” Her mouth goes flat. “And the seals. Every seal in that book is written in our family’s hand. He doesn’t have to break Blackwood work. He can sit down with the source and unwrite it, page by page, like correcting a letter.”
The room is quiet. Mara has gone very still in my lap, and her ears are turned toward my sister even though her eyes are on her bowl.
“I had a run-in with him today,” I say.
Every head in the room turns to me. Tiana stops dead mid-stride and pivots on me. “What?”
I clear my throat. Mara shifts in my lap and becomes very interested in her watermelon. “Yes. With the help of Josiah. He seems to know how to draw him out of places.”
Tiana turns her head to our mother. My mother just sighs and throws her hands up.
“That damn Josiah sure knows when to be useful.” She shakes her head. “I haven’t seen him in a while. He left to go back to the Master Coven and didn’t say why.”
“Don’t look at me.” I shrug. “I don’t know either.”
“Henry’s mastered eluding us because he has to,” Tiana says, picking her path back up. “He’s always known that if there were any Blackwoods still alive, they’d eventually come asking for the book to be returned. Something he never intended on doing.”
“So if we’re bound by the same laws as the Baileys,” Kiara asks, “how do we get it back? We can’t just take it without consequence.”
Tiana perks up, and her attention comes straight to me. “So what exactly made Henry come out of hiding?”
Mara’s tail goes alert against my arm. Her ears stand. She says nothing, just keeps munching on her bowl of fruit like the answer doesn’t involve her at all.
“Jo and Layla murdered all of his help in broad daylight,” I tell them. “In one of the studies of the Detroit Main Library.”
Jacob snorts. My mother’s head turns with a frown already loaded, and he starts choking it back immediately, coughing into his fist like something went down wrong.
Tiana smiles at me. It’s a fake smile. Underneath it she’s cringing so hard it nearly breaks through.
“Apparently,” I say, “Jo figured out how to get under his skin.”
She crosses her arms. “Apparently.”
“I have a few ideas of my own,” I murmur.
That gets the whole room. My sisters turn toward me, and even my mother stops mid-eye-roll to hear it.
“I think to defeat Eric, we have to know who and what we’re dealing with.”
“Oh, I know exactly who and what we’re dealing with,” my mother chimes in. “A bottom-feeding, soul-selling, dirt-licking coward of a?—“
Jacob gives her a gentle squeeze. She stops mid-tirade and presses her lips together.
“What I’m saying is,” I continue, “I think I need to go into the Witching Glen.”
The room gasps. All of them at once, but Samara’s is the loudest, sharp enough to make Mara’s ears flatten.
“But you can’t, brother.” Samara’s on the edge of her seat. “There’s no telling what’s going on in there.”
“Samara is right, Aaron,” Kiara says. “The Witching Glen was closed off after Aya Bailey’s demise. They’ve been imprisoned in that realm a long time.”
“Yes,” Tiana says. “There’s no telling what kind of mind those witches and warlocks have after sixteen years of imprisonment.”
