The other passengers mostly ignored her, when they weren’t jostling past to find a spot to sit or stand. A boy about her age, handsome in his own way, stared openly at her for two stops, before he disembarked. He made a point to brush his hand across her hip as he passed, and the touch made her skin crawl. Something deep inside of her wanted to snap that she was not his to touch as he pleased.
She was Rook’s.
Warmth settled in her belly, calming some of her jumping nerves. She wanted Rook by her side, giving her strength to be brave and do this. He wouldn’t be afraid of a city with millions of people. He’d played his guitar and sang for large, rowdy crowds of drunks; Philadelphia would be a piece of cake. She drew on that for her own confidence, drew on him, even though he was a hundred miles away.
Archimedes exited at the next stop—Market East Station—and she followed him out.
She had come here once with a tutor, for an event at the convention center. She couldn’t recall now what or why, only that she recognized the station name and the street they came out on. Archimedes strode to the end of the block and turned left onto Filbert Street. She kept her distance, allowing half a dozen people to remain in between herself and her father as they passed into the shaded area beneath Reading Terminal. Halfway down, he wove between cars stalled in traffic and walked into Reading Terminal Market.
Brynn didn’t hesitate in following him now. If she lost him inside the hustle and bustle of the market, she would never find him.
He walked straight up the main aisle, past a seafood stall, deliciously fragrant Thai food, and a produce vendor. The noise and combating smells of noodles and fish and baked goods served to both make Brynn queasy, and to remind her that she hadn’t eaten since supper last night.
Archimedes went into a large seating area and sat down at an empty table. Brynn scurried around to the other side, out of his direct line of sight and tried to tuck herself out of the flow of traffic.
She didn’t have to wait long for his companion to show. A young woman about Brynn’s age, with short black hair, a thin nose, and a fierce expression plopped down into the chair across from Archimedes. A shudder of revulsion tore through Brynn, accompanied by a pang of recognition. She hadn’t met this woman in person yet, but she’d seen a very accurate drawing the night before. Her insides turned to ice.
Why is my father meeting with Fiona?
She desperately wanted to call Rook, to tell him what she was seeing. She wished for her cell phone to take a photo of this as proof, even though her mind would never forget the scene of betrayal playing out in front of her.
Their conversation was lost to her, but neither of them looked happy. Fiona gesticulated with her hands almost as quickly as she spoke. Archimedes went red-faced very soon into the argument, his body rigid, hands perfectly still. No one around them seemed to notice. No one had any reason to notice. They could have been any father and daughter arguing in a public place.
The thought stopped Brynn cold. A dull roar filled her ears, made worse by the thundering of her heart. She couldn’t move. She wasn’t entirely certain that she was breathing. Her father was one of the fire elementals. Fiona’s Magus power was fire-based.
Please, Avesta, no.
Archimedes reached into his coat and retrieved a folded manila envelope. He dropped it on the table between them. Fiona plucked it up, smoothed out the crease, then fanned herself with it. She seemed less angry now, more smug. She said something else that made Archimedes scowl, then she pushed back from the table.
Brynn tracked Fiona with her eyes as the murderous hybrid disappeared into the crowded market, torn between following Fiona and confronting her father. As much as she loathed allowing Fiona to escape, Brynn had no resources with which to hold the woman. Fiona could kill her with a touch.
Propelled by anger and confusion, Brynn strode over to her father’s table and sat down across from him. He jerked backward when he realized she was not a returned Fiona. His eyes widened to comical proportions, even as the earlier flush of his skin bled away, leaving a striking pallor in its place.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. He even had the audacity to sound offended by her presence.
“Neither should you,” Brynn snapped back. Her blood hummed with barely contained fury. “This explains quite a lot about our phone call last night.”
“It explains nothing.”
“What did you give her?”
He stared at her, his earlier shock settling into confusion. She had never stood up to him before, never openly questioned anything he had said or done. Learning the truth about her mixed blood had changed her, gave her confidence to defend herself and the things she cared about—like the McQueens.
“What are you doing here, Brynn?”
“My questions first. What did you give her?”
“Information. She agreed to a trade. Information for your life.”
She blinked hard. “My life?”
“Your involvement with the animals in Cornerstone has made you a target. I’m trying to save your life. You need to come home with me.”
“No.” She leaned forward and placed her hands palm-down on the table. “Why didn’t you tell me that I have loup garou blood?”
He froze as perfectly as a television image on pause.
“I’ve spent the last three days among the loup. Do you really think they wouldn’t have sniffed me out?”
“But you took the medallion.”
She lifted the necklace out of the collar of her t-shirt. “This one? Its shielding power isn’t as effective as you’d like to think. Who is the loup blood from? You?”
“Absolutely not!” He was so perfectly offended that she almost laughed.
“My mother, then.”
“We shouldn’t be talking about this here, daughter.”
“I think this is the perfect place to discuss it.” Someone passing by jostled her chair, and Brynn gave brief review to their location. No. Public was best. She would not risk being whisked off to his home and imprisoned there.
His home. When did you stop thinking of it as yours?
Her home was with Rook. With people who accepted her despite her Magi blood. The Magi would never accept her if they discovered her loup blood. “You knew about the hybrids all along, didn’t you?” she asked. “The Congress is involved, right? They condone the slaughter of hundreds of innocent people?”
“They’re loup, daughter, not people.”
A week ago she would have readily agreed with him. Everything she’d ever been taught about the loup boiled down to a single, simple concept: the loup garou are animals. And perhaps they did have an animal deep inside of them, an animal they unleashed when they shifted, but the man was always present. When Rook shifted for her, she’d seen him clearly in the beast’s eyes.
No one could unlearn decades of rhetoric in only a handful of days, but she was determined to try—for Rook, and for herself, no matter what her father believed.
The heat of Brynn’s anger settled into a cold rage. “I suppose that means I’m not a person, either,” she said. “Do you see me as an animal, as well?”
“Of course not. Despite your unfortunate blood line, you are still my child.”
“A child who is a disappointment as a Magus, and whose abilities you never believed in.”
“Brynn, this is more complicated than you know. Magic is about control, and Magi must have control over their ability in order to be effective. Your visions are haphazard, at best, lacking any sort of ability to control their timing or content. My support would have made me a joke to the Congress.”
“So instead your daughter is the joke.”
He actually looked miserable for a brief moment. “It was a callous choice, but I did it to protect you. Positive attention from the Congress, any sort of meaningful interaction with its members, meant a greater risk of someone discovering your dual nature. I wouldn’t risk it.”
“Because finding out you had a half-breed daughter would get you kicked out of the Congress?”
“Because they would have killed you.” Something like grief pinched his face. “From your perspective, my actions were cruel and uncaring, but I do love you, child. All I ever meant to do was protect us both.”
“By pushing me down and raising yourself up?”
“It was a cruel thing to do to you, as was calling your vision of my death a fabrication.”
“I saw it.”
“I know you did.”
His answer hit her in the chest like a fist. “What do you mean?”
“I believed your vision about me and that loup, especially when you brought me his name, but I needed you to leave it alone. I couldn’t risk you getting involved with them, even to try to save my life. I worried that they might discover what you are.”
A fear that was not unfounded. “They knew right away, and they never hurt me.”
“They told you that you have loup blood. It was not their secret to tell.”
“Would you have ever told me the truth?” His silence was her answer. “You made a mockery of my visions and hid me away in order to protect me, and yet here I am, squarely in the middle of everything.”
“And I need you out of it before the violence that started in Stonehill destroys the rest of those animals.”
She finally understood something with startling, heart-wrenching clarity. “You knew the attack on Stonehill was coming. You knew the hybrids would be going after the East Coast runs, and you didn’t want me in the middle.”
“Yes. I want you far away from this as it plays out.”
“It’s too late for that. I’m involved.” Involved and furious that her father had been complicit in so many deaths.
“So I’ve heard. Fiona told me you interfered in her plans the other night.”
“I saved the lives of two men who’d been tortured and manipulated by Fiona and her sisters. How could expect me to do anything less?”
“I did not raise you to sympathize with animals—”
“You didn’t raise me at all, Father, tutors did.” She lowered her voice, aware of the shrillness of her tone. “Sixty years ago, the Magi tricked the loup into nearly destroying the vampires. You’re using the hybrids to do it again, aren’t you? Only this time, you want to see the loup garou destroyed.”
“We want to see them contained.” His temper was peeking through, and behind his anger she swore she saw fear. “The vampires were getting too numerous and too strong, and they had to be dealt with. The loup are the same now. Their numbers grow too rapidly, and their half-breed human offspring are getting too much negative attention. Our lives depend on secrecy, Daughter. The loup are distasteful creatures who are easier to control in small numbers.”
“What gives you the right to declare genocide on a species?”
His expression adopted the haughty, superior stare she’d grown so accustomed to over the years. Every Magus had perfected it. “The Magi have been in power for thousands of years, centuries before the loup garou found their skins and adopted to life on two feet. We rid Europe and Asia of vampires before our people came here to do the same in the Americas. We’ve done these things to protect the human race.”
“Bullshit.” The profanity slipped out, shocking both of them. Brynn found unexpected power in the word, and in her flat denial of her father’s statements. “The Magi have committed mass murder for centuries to protect themselves, not humans.”
He did not reply.
She needed to steer the conversation back to useful territory. “If you’re the one pulling Fiona’s strings, then why did you have to bargain with her for my life? Doesn’t she do what you tell her to do?”
He squirmed. He actually squirmed in his seat. “Fiona is learning more than she needs to know, and she’s beginning to question my authority.”
“You’re losing control of your pets.”
“In some ways, yes. They were supposed to attack Stonehill and leave injuries and witnesses implicating the Potomac run. They were not supposed to slaughter everyone in town.”
Horror wrapped around Brynn’s heart and squeezed, and any shred of the man she’d once called Father fell away. Left behind was the cold-blooded general of an imaginary war—a man responsible for over four hundred deaths in only a few days.
“It doesn’t matter what they were supposed to do or not do,” Brynn said. “You set them loose. You’re responsible for everything they’ve done.” She remembered the ring she had long admired, and his long-ago boasting of drugging a loup with it. She swallowed hard, wishing she had a glass of water. “Are you also responsible for taking Chelsea Butler from the Stonehill run twenty-five years ago?”
Archimedes stared, his mouth flapping open like a gasping fish.
“The loup are smarter than you think,” she said. “And so am I. I know only White Wolves can breed with other species, and I know Chelsea Butler disappeared from her run without a trace. Is she their mother? The hybrids?”
“Yes.”
Brynn closed her eyes as disgust assaulted her. She couldn’t imagine the life Chelsea must have had, or the things that had been forced upon her. She also had one more question before she needed to find a place to vomit. She met his gaze, repelled by all of the emotions she saw there. “Are you Fiona’s father?”
His silence was her answer.
My father is a rapist and a killer. Please, Avesta, give your daughter strength.
“How could you?” she whispered.
“My wife was infertile.”
The seeming non sequitur threw her for a moment. “My wife” had to be Brynn’s mother, but—“What do you mean?”
“You know the importance of offspring to a Magus. The woman you called your mother was infertile. We realized this too late, though, and we were already married. Because of my own father, I was due a seat as Prime Magus and the scandal of a divorce would have ruined me. Her parents were too well placed to risk it.”
She shook her head, not understanding—no, she did understand. “She was infertile because she was half loup garou?”
Archimedes sighed. “No, not that. She was fully Magus, but her eggs were not viable. I could have taken a mistress and risked an inappropriate power match, but the idea did not suit me or your mother. When the Hybrid Project was presented to me, I saw an opportunity to serve myself, as well as our people. We borrowed a scientist who was doing what was, at the time, groundbreaking research in in vitro fertility treatments. He created embryos from my sperm and Chelsea Butler’s eggs, and he implanted them in my wife. Ten months later . . .”