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“That’s impossible,” he told them. “He never puts it down.”
“That’s the deal,” Darrigan told him.
“Even if I could get it without getting myself killed, it’s not enough. I can’t just wait around for you to finish playing with fate. If I get the diary, you take me back. Immediately.”
“I can’t,” Esta said. “There’s too much at stake. It’s after the Conclave or not at all.”
Logan felt like tearing out his own hair. “That’s more than a week away. Do you know what he could do to me in that time?”
“You’d have a place here,” Esta said. “We’d keep you safe.”
“No,” Logan said. “It has to be now.”
“You’re not listening, Logan.” Esta looked like she was about to lose her temper. “There is no back if we don’t stop Jack from attacking the Conclave. If he does, he could bring down the Brink. But if we stop him, we can get the Book, and then maybe—just maybe—there will be a future for you to go back to.”
“Jack has the Ars Arcana?” Logan asked. It didn’t explain why he couldn’t sense it, though.
Esta nodded. “He does, and if we don’t take it from him, then everything changes. Everything about your future depends on what happens at the Conclave, Logan. You think things were hard in the world we grew up in? They’ll be worse in a country where magic itself—and those with a connection to it—is made illegal. But Nibsy’s going to try to stop us, and as long as he has that diary, he might be able to. Get the diary, and maybe we can stop Jack. If that happens, you get to go home.”
But what if James wins?
Logan knew better than to voice the question aloud. “You’re sure I’d be safe here?”
“I swear it,” Esta told him.
He considered his options, but finally he decided. All he wanted was to go back to his normal life. He wanted to go home. If Esta was offering him a chance, he’d take it.
Esta exchanged a long, silent look with Darrigan, and when they’d finished whatever conversation they’d just had, they turned to him.
“There’s no going back once you’re with us, Logan,” Esta told him. “If James kills me, it’s game over for your dreams of getting back to your own life. And if he kills any one of my friends? I won’t be feeling generous enough to take you back.”
“I know that.” He wouldn’t let them see his nerves. I just want to go home.
“You’re sure we can trust him?” Darrigan asked.
“No,” Esta told Darrigan, never once looking away from Logan. “But if he turns on us, Viola will take care of him.”
“Happily,” Viola said, her violet eyes as sharp as her knife.
Esta did look at Darrigan then. “It’s our best shot.”
He didn’t look happy about it, but eventually, the Magician held out his hand. “I don’t like this, but I trust Esta. So welcome to the team.”
UNSETTLED
Once Logan had disappeared around the corner, Jianyu released his hold on the light. It was a dangerous gamble to send Logan back to Nibsy as a spy and even more dangerous to let him carry the knowledge that they wanted the diary.
“Do you believe you can trust him?” he asked Esta.
“No,” she said sadly. “That isn’t the Logan I knew. When I went back to the future the first time, my world had already changed. Logan and even Dakari were different from the people I’d grown up with. So I don’t know anything about this Logan, but it doesn’t matter. Harte took care of that.”
Harte nodded. “Even if he’s not for us, he won’t be able to betray us.”
“Do you think there is any truth to what he said?” Jianyu wondered. “What he told us about what Nibsy is doing with the Devil’s Own.”
“Probably,” she said. “It sounds like something he would do.”
They turned together to go back into the warmth of the building, and as they climbed the stairs to the rooms on the third floor, the problem of the Devil’s Own pressed at him.
