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My compelling spell whipped through the air and disintegrated just inches from my dad. I frowned and cast again, weaving the strands even tighter. The magic I threw scattered into useless fragments around my father.
He shook his head. “You’re not going to get anywhere that way. Did you think I wouldn’t come prepared? You’ve got a lot of power, Rose, but I knew that before I came down here. I made sure I was ready for it.”
He’d had other spells cast on him—repelling ones, shielding ones. I wasn’t sure I believed they were layered on densely enough that I couldn’t have found a way to break through them—but I also wasn’t sure it would be worth the energy I’d expend finding out.
Damon waved his gun. “Are you prepared to deflect bullets?”
Dad looked at him, his gaze turning hard. “You want to shoot me? Go ahead. It isn’t going to help her, if that’s what you actually care about.”
No, the gun wasn’t a good enough threat. Not for a man who’d been willing to sacrifice his own daughter—and maybe both of his wives as well—to this conspiracy. He was far more afraid of the thing on the other side of that portal.
An idea came to me with a fresh wave of queasiness. His portal families and the Assembly resources they commandeered had gone to all this trouble to keep me alive for some purpose to do with the demons. With harnessing them. But who was to say my power couldn’t be used in the opposite way.
I raised my hand toward the shifting glow on the cave wall. “Or I could try my magic on that portal. See what happens if I encourage one of your ‘demons’ through.”
Dad’s head snapped around, his face blanching. Oh, he was afraid of that, all right. “Rose,” he said with a rasp. “You have no idea— For the sake of the Spark, leave thatalone.”
“Why should I?” I said, my anger flattening my voice. “Are they really going to treat me any worse than you and your associates have?”
I wouldn’t, for even one second, really have considered releasing the fiend I’d seen poking its face through that opening. I could still remember the malicious inhuman energy that had wafted off it, all the way through my bones.
Dad should have known that. Dad should have known what kind of witch I was—what kind of woman I was.
But he didn’t. He was staring at me with his eyes panicked-wide. He’d raised me, but he’d never paid enough attention to see who I was. To know the power I’d come into wouldn’t makemea monster.
The last shreds of love I’d held for him crumbled into dust in that instant.
“They’re evil,” he said. “They’d tear you and everyone here apart. Please, Rose.”
“Explain it to me,” I said. “Properly. Why has this faction of the Assembly been covering up the fact that witches can take more than one consort, that we can consort with the unsparked? Where do these demons come into it? Where doIcome into it? Make me understand.” I twisted my fingers, and the portal’s glow brightened. An illusion, but he couldn’t tell that.
His jaw gave a nervous twitch. “I don’t know all of it,” he said. “I never wanted— If you ask Charles Frankford, he could tell you everything. The Frankfords have been at the center of this from the start. The Hallowells were only ever on the sidelines.”
A reasonable claim. It was the Frankfords who held this land, after all. It was the current head of that household to whom Dad had turned to for advice and approval while arranging my corrupted consorting. But it wasn’t as if Charles Frankford was going to sit down and have a calm, open discussion with me.
“I suppose you figure that as soon as I’ve left, you can warn him I’m coming, let him arrange some sort of trap,” I said. I glanced at the guys. “We need his phone.”
Gabriel nodded. He and Damon approached Dad, who stepped back to the wall. Dad’s hands fisted. He moved to shove Gabriel away, and Damon grasped his arm, wrenching it back as he slammed his pistol to Dad’s temple at the same time.
Whatever magic my father had on him didn’t protect him from physical force. Dad thrashed out, but Gabriel caught his other hand, pinning it to the cave wall in turn.
“So, this is what you picked,” Dad spat out as I walked up to him. “A bunch of unsparked thugs?”
Fury flared white-hot behind my eyes. I reached for the pocket where I knew Dad kept his phone and yanked it out.
“I picked love,” I said, in a sharper voice than I’d known I had in me. “Maybe you could learn something from that.”
The phone wasn’t enough. As soon as we left, he’d be running up the cliff to that old house, and no doubt there’d be some way of contacting people in there. But I could stop him from leaving without casting a single spell directly on him.
“Leave him,” I said with a gesture at the far end of the cave. Damon gave Dad a shove as he released him, sending him stumbling toward the portal.
“Rose,” Gabriel said quietly, but I already knew what I had to do. I motioned them behind me, back toward the passage we’d entered through, which was the only entrance and exit this cavern possessed.
“You’ll stay here with your demons until one of your ‘friends’ cares enough to come looking for you,” I said to Dad, my hands already weaving through the air. My feet pattered out a quick rhythm on the stone floor, my arms slicing through the air, and a burst of energy surged from my spark into a wall of magic that hummed from floor to ceiling across the whole width of the cave.
Dad threw himself forward—and my wall sent him stumbling backward. He gaped at me through it.
“It’ll hold at least a few days, I think,” I said. “Unless someone comes down and breaks it for you first. I wonder if you matter to them even half as much as you’ve let them matter to you.”
