“A book of magic. Like, spells and instructions and stuff. Sometimes, they’re kind of like journals too, and mythics will write down their experiences.”

“And something in this grimoire will save your friend’s life? Is a spell going to kill him?”

“More or less.” I gave him a hard stare. “So, will you go home now?”

“No. I’m sticking with you, Tori.”

I gritted my teeth. “I already reset my phone.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I’ll do it right now.”

“I can follow you anyway.”

I gripped my paintball gun, half lifting it from its holster. “No, you can’t. One pop of sleeping potion and I’ll be long gone before you wake up.”

He returned my threatening stare, unflinching. He was calling my bluff and we both knew it.

Ugh. Brothers.

“Don’t you have a job?” I muttered angrily, slumping against the vehicle. “You can’t follow me for days on end.”

“I took some time off.” He sighed. “Tori, I’m not doing this to be annoying. This is important to you, isn’t it? I want to help.”

I tried to think of a comeback and ended up grumbling wordlessly under my breath.

“You’re awfully distrustful of Blake,” he remarked. “Why?”

“He’s a member of the Keys of Solomon—a demon-hunting guild.” I tipped my head back, squinting at the cloud-dotted sky. “Remember back around Halloween, when parts of downtown Vancouver were put in lockdown?”

He nodded.

“That happened because there was a demon on the loose. A Keys of Solomon team showed up to hunt it, and they were so bent on killing it themselves that they deliberately hampered the search efforts and threatened other teams. According to pretty much everyone, that’s standard behavior for the Keys.”

“Does the MPD allow that?”

“It’s complicated.”

He shifted his weight. “Were you involved in the … demon hunt … too?”

“Briefly.”

“Is that normal?” He cleared his throat. “My impression from the law-enforcement side was that venturing into those neighborhoods was extremely dangerous, so it seems … unusual … for civilians to participate.”

I was guessing “unusual” hadn’t been his first word choice, but he was trying to sound neutral.

Pressing my lips together, I considered how to answer. I didn’t want to get into my near-death experience at the unbound demon’s claws, our failed attempt to hunt it, or Ezra’s confrontation with the Keys team. Technically speaking, I shouldn’t have been out there at all. I had only recently been classified as a mythic and hadn’t had any combat training yet.

“Do sleeping potions work on demons?” Justin asked after a moment.

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you have other magic weapons that do work on demons?”

Not really … but though I didn’t say it, my silence answered for me.

“Then …” His brow scrunched. “Then why were you out there hunting a demon?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. I’d gone to support the guys, but … had they actually needed me?

“Tori!”

I whirled around at Aaron’s call. He was striding toward me, Blake limping in his wake.

“We have a problem,” the pyromage snapped. “Blake here is refusing to undig the hole he put my SUV in until I tell him what we found in the underground room.”

“We found cult junk,” I told the terramage flatly. “Chalices, candelabras, scepters, some fabric—probably cloaks or something creepy and over the top like that.”

“Yeah, sure,” he rumbled, leaning on his staff. “But you also found something that has you rushing off instead of digging through the burnt ‘cult junk.’”

Sometimes I hated smart people. Why couldn’t Blake be dumb as a rock like I’d initially hoped?

I glanced at the SUV’s tires, sitting in the two-foot-deep hole. “Screw it.”

Blake’s eyebrows rose expectantly, then lowered again as I stomped past him. Opening the SUV’s hatch, I yanked out a shovel.

“Do you have any idea how much I didn’t want to dig?” I growled, tossing the shovel to Justin. I grabbed the second one. “Digging sucks.”

Justin followed me to the front bumper, and when I set the point of the shovel against the frozen earth, he copied me. As much as there was to complain about when it came to my brother, he’d never been afraid of hard work.

Now I was thinking nice things about him, and that made me angrier.

Snarling like a dog, I stomped on the shovel’s step. The blade dug an inch into the hard earth.

Aaron hurried over. “Tori, I can—”

“I’ll do it! I can dig a damn hole!”

Blake’s staff thunked toward us. He stopped beside the passenger door, glancing over his handiwork. It was a very nice grave with lovely straight sides. The bastard.

I jumped on the shovel’s step with both feet, wobbled, and almost fell. When Aaron tugged the handle away, I let him take it with a bitter sigh. He set the shovel against the earth—and the ground heaved.

Staggering, I flailed my arms for balance. As quickly as it had begun, the mini-quake ended. My glower flashed toward the asshole terramage.

He stood beside the passenger door—which was now open. And in his hand was the eight-year-old envelope I’d left on my seat in plain sight, like a complete dumbass.

“This address,” he growled. “Is it—”

Aaron snapped his fingers.

The envelope burst into flame. Yelping, Blake dropped the flaming paper. The scepter inside fell to the ground and bounced on its stubby handle, shreds of flaming envelope clinging to it.

I folded my arms. “Get lost before Aaron lights you on fire too.”

Blake smirked. Turning, he walked away from our vehicle. Aaron, Justin, and I didn’t move, watching until he’d disappeared down the road that led away from the property. A minute later, the echo of a car door slamming reached us. An engine rumbled to life, and the sound receded into the woods.

“Finally,” I growled, stooping to pick up the scepter. “Now let’s—”

I broke off. The front edge of the hole our SUV was trapped in had, moments ago, been a straight vertical edge. Now it was a smooth ramp.

Snatching the scepter, I puffed out an angry breath. “He’s still an asshole.”

“Yeah,” Aaron agreed, collecting the shovels. “Now let’s get the hell out of here before he decides to come back.”

Chapter Ten

The drive from Enright to Portland was two hours, most of it winding mountain roads. Aaron and I didn’t even try to talk until we were back on paved highway. I never wanted to see another dirt road again in my life.

“Tori …” he began in his “bad news” voice. “You know this address is even more of a longshot than Enright was, right?”

“I know.” I tugged the strap of my seatbelt away from my neck. “We can always go back to Enright to search the ruins again if we have to.”

“I doubt we’ll find anything, even if we turn the whole place upside down.”

Trees flashed past, sunlight sparkling through their branches, and I wished I could enjoy the nice weather. My stomach grumbled, complaining about the insufficient amount of food I’d eaten in the last twenty-four hours.

“You can do what you want, Aaron,” I said, staring out the windshield, “but I don’t care how bad the odds are. I’ll turn over every rock on that property until I find something. I’ll knock on every mythic’s door in Portland until I find someone who knows about the cult. As long as Ezra is alive, I’ll keep searching.”

“I know, Tori. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up that we’ll find something.”

“I want to get my hopes up. You and Kai and Ezra lost hope, and that’s why you stopped trying.”

Aaron’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Kai and I stopped searching because Ezra asked us to. He didn’t want us wasting our lives trying to save his. After three years of searching, we’d run out of ideas …”

“I’m not blaming you,” I said softly.

He was quiet for a long moment, then his gaze flicked to the rearview mirror. “So … do you want to explain what your brother is doing?”

I scowled at the mirror too. An unfamiliar black pickup truck followed a dozen car lengths behind us. Justin, the sneaky jerk, had rented a vehicle so I wouldn’t spot his recognizable Challenger.

“Justin wants to mend bridges,” I muttered. “And according to Justin logic, putting a tracking app on my phone and following me when I leave town in the middle of the night is a good way to accomplish that.”

“Hmm. Well, it’s nice that he’s finally trying to understand what you have going on, right?”

“Sure, yeah,” I replied sarcastically, resting my head against the passenger window. “And he’s getting a fantastic crash course in mythics as a result. Demon cults and mass-murders and a terramage-pyromage battle. Great intro.”

“He’s stayed pretty levelheaded, though,” Aaron pointed out. “He even saved our butts against Blake.”

I pressed my hands into my seat. Justin had been more useful than I had, and that grated in a big way.

“He got lucky,” I growled. “And we only needed him because you didn’t use lethal force on Blake first.”

“Suppose. He would’ve been difficult to beat either way.”

Kicking my boots off, I pulled my socked feet onto the seat and hugged my knees. “I wish Kai was here.”

“Me too.” Aaron’s blue eyes dimmed. “I’ve been texting him updates. He said he almost has Makiko convinced, but he’s probably deluding himself.”