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Don’t be silly,he’d written back.I want to be there. That hasn’t changed.
Right now, it felt as if an awful lot had changed. The awkwardness after our first kiss had expanded at least tenfold. But I wasn’t going to confront him in front of the other guys. Especially not when we had so much else to worry about.
“The group has assembled,” he said now in his usual easy voice. “What do you need from us, Sprout?”
My lips twitched at that old nickname, wanting to smile but not quite making it. “I’m… not completely sure. There might not be anything else we can do now. But I was hoping if we talked it through together, we’d figure out any possibilities we do have.”
“What’s the picture right now?” Jin asked. “What are the pieces we do have?”
I sucked in a breath. “Well, there are clearly people in the ruling body of witches who support the kind of scheme my dad was orchestrating. It sounds like there are other witches who’ve been trapped in similar ways. So if I report him to them, there’s as much chance they’ll help him finish the job as bring him to justice.”
“Let’s get down to the foundations, then,” Seth said. “What needs to happen so you can be safe?”
“It sounds simple,” I said. “It’s the same thing I needed before. I need my dad off the estate, stripped of any authority over the property or me… and I need it before he tries to see this new consorting through. I just don’t know how I could justify it if I can’t point to his crime.”
Damon cocked his head, his dark eyes flashing. “You can’t point tothatas his crime. If you want someone out of the way, you just have to findsomethingto pin on them. It doesn’t even have to be something they actually did, right?”
Gabriel straightened up. “That’s a good point. If they won’t care about his real crime, frame him for something they will care about.” His gaze came back to me, settling somewhere in the vicinity of my cheeks rather than directly looking me in the eyes. “What do you think your Assembly would get worked up about?”
I blinked. I hadn’t thought about that. “I’d still need proof of whatever it was. But I guess there’d be all the same sorts of things regular law enforcement cares about.”
Kyler nodded, his hand tightening around mine. “So, theft, assault, murder…”
“I can’t set him up to havekilledsomeone,” I said. My stomach turned.
“They’re very concerned about how you all use your magic, aren’t they?” Gabriel said. “Keeping it a secret. Not mingling with the ‘unsparked.’ If he exposed that part of your society somehow…”
“Hedoesn’t have any magic himself,” I said. “I can’t pin anything magical on him.”
Seth frowned. “Is there any way he could do something with magic without it being magic he cast himself?”
Jin tipped his head toward me. “You cast that spell on the necklace I made for you. I take it it’s possible for magic to stay in objects. Are you the only one who can use something you worked on?”
I hesitated, my hand rising to the lump of the pendant under my shirt. I’d kept wearing it even though Derek was gone. It still made me feel safer, as false a feeling as that might be.
“No,” I said. “Anyone could use the power that’s been put into an object.” That was what my stepsister had accused me of doing, wasn’t it? Hurting Celestine with some sort of enchanted tool. I hadn’t. But Dad could hurt someone that way. Or at least, could look like he had…
“We’d need an object. And witnesses, so it wasn’t just my word. Enough witnesses that the Assembly couldn’t ignore it.” My pulse skipped a beat. “His Cairo deal. It’s the most important thing he’s worked on all year. They only just finalized it—some of his colleagues have been encouraging him to host a celebratory party.”
Gabriel snapped his fingers. “Yes. I’ve heard him talking about that on the phone out by the garage. More than once. He was putting them off because of your wedding coming so soon…”
“But my wedding isn’t happening anymore. At least not that soon, as far as he knows.” The tendrils of an idea started to twine together in my head. I slipped back through my memories to that first day when Dad had returned, when everything was different. The fancy case he’d shown me, the artifact he hadn’t dared let the unsparked staff handle. All the power it had once contained. “I think that’s it. At least, it’s the start of a plan.”
Gabriel grinned. “All right. Then all we need to do is work out the details.”
* * *
Dad had said he’d call around noon to update me on progress with my potential consort. It was half past twelve, and I was so wound up at the thought of the conversation ahead that I startled whenever a door squeaked in the house.
“I think you’d better send one of the cleaning staff around with some oil for those hinges,” Philomena said, with an arch look.
“It’s an old house,” I said. “Things squeak.” I paced from one end of my room to the other and then sat on the bed. “Come here?”
She sat down next to me. It used to be that Phil was so real to me, so solid in my imagination, that I could all but feel the layers of her dress as they fell against my leg, smell the powdery floral perfume she wore. Now, she was so far from the life I was living and all the dangers that had come with it, she’d gone almost filmy.
But it still was a comfort having her here next to me.
My phone trilled. I jumped again, and then I pawed for it. Dad’s number showed on the screen.
