Dark Heart of Magic (29 page)

And he kissed me right back.

We melted together, spinning around and around on the terrace, our lips, hands, and breaths mixing and mingling together. More and more of those feelings roared up inside me, until I felt as though every press of my lips against Devon's sent hot, electric sparks shooting out into the night air, the same way they were erupting in my heart over and over again. He pulled me closer, tighter, and I melted into him even more, breathing in his crisp pine scent. All I could see, hear, taste, touch, smell,
feel
was Devon.

And I loved it—I loved
him
.

The kiss was as perfect as perfect could be, everything I'd ever imagined and then some, and I never,
ever
wanted it to end.

But it slowly did, the way all good things eventually do.

Devon pulled back, his eyes slightly glazed and a goofy grin stretching across his face. “What was that for?”

“For just being you,” I said. “For being there, for looking out for me the way you always do.”

He smiled. “We save each other, remember?”

“Got it.”

Devon stared at me, his eyes dimming just a bit. “So . . . what does this mean?”

I looped my arms around his neck again. “It means that you were right and I was wrong. I care about you just as much as you care about me. But I've been a stupid fool, worried about getting hurt again, about getting my heart broken again.”

He frowned. “That could still happen. Not because I want it to, but because we both have a lot of enemies. And then there's Victor and whatever he's planning.”

I let out a breath. “I know, but I don't care anymore. I almost died tonight, and we both almost died a few weeks ago at the lochness bridge when Grant came after us. If there's one thing any of that has taught me, it's that we should seize the moment, take a chance, because no one knows what's going to happen next. I was alone, on my own, for a long time. It's been hard for me to let go of that, to let you in, to trust you with my heart. I'm not a hundred percent there yet, and I don't know if I can ever get there.”

His frown deepened. “Okay . . .”

“But I do know this. We could be—we
will
be—fantastic together. I've known it ever since our battle during the tournament, and I've been wanting to tell you for hours now. So if you'll still have me, I want to give us a shot, Sinclair.”

Devon blinked and blinked, as if I'd surprised him so much that his brain just couldn't process my words right now. So I decided to put it in simple terms for him.

“You and I are totally going to make out now,” I said. “And then, maybe tomorrow night or sometime later this week, we'll go out on an actual date and see how things go from there.”

Devon gave me a teasing, wicked grin, his green, green eyes shining even brighter and hotter than all the lights down on the Midway. “The first date of many, I hope.”

“The first of many,” I promised as I drew his lips back down to mine again.

T
he next night, Devon and I did go out on our first date.

Sort of.

If you counted me breaking into the Draconi mansion again an actual date.

But Devon was hiding in the woods, keeping an eye on the guards and texting me updates about their movements. Since I'd already been inside the mansion once, it was easy for me to slip inside again.

According to some chatter Mo had heard, Victor and Blake were having dinner at the Volkov compound tonight, which meant the mansion was mostly empty. So I didn't have any trouble going through the greenlab and picking open the doors to Victor's office.

Everything looked the same as I remembered, right down to the creepy files on his desk. They were still sitting in the same positions as before, one file for each person in the tournament, and five stacks, one for each of the major Families.

The only thing different was that my file was on top of the Sinclair stack now.

I opened it up, curious to see whether Victor had written any more notes about me, whether he'd realized that I had much more magic than I let on. But the file was the same as before. I guessed that Victor hadn't gotten around to updating it yet. But he would. I shivered and closed the file again.

Then I went over to what I was really here for tonight—finding a way into Victor's secret room.

The snarling dragon still glared from the wall, the same as before, with that ruby serving as the creature's eye. And once again, a cold chill of magic emanated from behind the stone. Something was back there, and I thought I knew exactly what it was, but I wanted to make sure before I told Claudia and the others.

So I ran my hands up and down and back and forth across the carving, searching for a loose bit of stone or some other mechanism that would open the wall so I could get to the room on the other side. But I didn't find anything. All the while, the ruby in the dragon's eye kept staring at me, smug that its secret was still safe.

I let out a soft laugh. Of course. How stupid of me. Always try the obvious first.

I reached up and pressed on the ruby. It sank into the stone with a whisper, and part of the wall slid back, revealing a large room.

I stepped inside, and a light clicked on above my head. Shelves lined all three of the walls from floor to ceiling. All of the shelves were filled with black blades, and all those blades pulsed with magic.

This was it—this was Victor's plan.

His dark heart of magic.

I walked along the first shelf, staring at the weapons—swords and daggers mostly, with an occasional mace or a hammer. Each weapon was on a peg by itself and carefully, neatly numbered with a tag. I recognized the letters and symbols as being written in Victor's hand, in the same code that had been on the files in his office:
TT29
,
CC2
,
RM55
, and the like. Now, thanks to Katia, I knew exactly what the initials meant.

At the boathouse, she had said that Victor and Blake had been catching trolls, which explained the trap I'd found on the Draconi property the first night I'd come over here. I wondered how Katia had found out what Victor and Blake were doing—if she'd discovered their cage in the woods last summer while she was planting her own traps out there. I didn't know the answer, and it didn't matter. But I had no doubt that Victor and Blake had trapped and killed the tree trolls for the same reason that Katia had.

They had stolen the monsters' magic.

“Tree troll number 29,” I muttered, staring at a dagger that was the same size and shape as the ones that Katia had tried to kill Deah and me with. “Copper crusher number 2. Rockmunk number 55.”

And the weapons and codes went on and on, all the way around the room. Even though it made me sick to my stomach, I pulled out my phone and snapped photos of everything to show Claudia and Mo later. It took me a while, since there were more than a hundred weapons inside the room, enough to outfit most of the Draconi guards.

Enough to win a war against the other Families.

Mo had been right when he'd said that Victor was building an army—and he planned to outfit each and every one of his soldiers with a black blade. All those extra boosts of magic would make the Draconis almost invincible; it could only be a matter of time before Victor decided to strike out at the other Families.

But we'd be ready for him when he did.

I'd made sure of that.

 

I stepped out of the secret room to find two people waiting for me in Victor's office—Deah and Seleste.

They both looked fine, and no cuts or bruises marred their faces. It didn't look as though Victor had punished them, despite Deah's confession that I had let her win the tournament. Making sure they were okay was another reason I'd come here tonight.

Deah had her sword out, but Seleste smiled when she saw me.

I smiled back at her. “Hello, Seleste. How are you?”

“Oh, fine, darling,” she said, waving her hand at me. “Just fine.”

“No more bones and blades?”

She shook her head. “No more bones and blades.”

“Good.”

Seleste smiled at me again, then started humming to herself and wandering around the room. Earlier today, I'd confronted Claudia and Mo about Seleste being my aunt and why they'd never told me about her and Deah. They'd said that my mom had wanted it that way, that she and Seleste had had a falling out when Seleste had announced her plans to marry Victor after he'd had my father killed. But I wanted to hear it from her.

Seleste went over to the bookshelf where Deah's trophies were sitting, picked them up, and started polishing them with the sleeve of her dress, still humming all the while.

Deah wasn't so accommodating, though. “What are you doing here?” she hissed, dropping her sword to her side. “Are you crazy?”

“No, just checking out a hunch. And I wanted to talk to your mom. I was hoping that she would come in here. You too.”

I went over to Seleste. Now that I was looking for it, I could see how much she resembled my mom—same dark blue eyes, same straight nose, same mischievous curve to her lips. Seeing so much of my mom in her made my heart ache, but I kept my face and voice soft and gentle.

“Aunt Seleste,” I asked. “What happened between you and my mom?”

Her hand curled around the trophy she was polishing, the gold cup from this year's Tournament of Blades. Someone—Felix, most likely—must have found it in the boathouse and returned it to Deah. Seleste stared at the trophy a moment, then carefully pushed it back into place on the shelf.

“I loved Victor. I thought he was different from what he really was. That he was a good man.” She gave me a sad, crooked smile. “Mine is the only future I can't see, and I didn't realize what Victor was really like until it was too late. But Serena knew. She
always
knew. She tried to warn me, but I wouldn't listen.”

Seleste drew in a ragged breath, then slowly let it out. “I didn't realize that Victor set Luke up to be killed by that nest of copper crushers. I thought it was just an accident. But Serena knew the truth. So did everyone else. But it was already too late for all of us. Claudia didn't want Serena seeing Luke, so they fought. Mo took Serena's side, so he and Claudia fought. Serena didn't want me seeing Victor, so we fought. Everybody fought, all the time, until there was nothing left of us.”

Seleste stared at me, then Deah, who'd come up to stand beside me. “I don't want that for the two of you. You can't fight each other the way Serena and I did. You have to work together. Otherwise, Victor will win, and he'll destroy all the other Families.”

Deah's eyes widened. “Mom, you don't mean that. Sure, Dad has his problems with the other Families, but he would never try to destroy everyone else.”

Seleste stepped forward, reached up, and cradled Deah's face in her hands. “My darling girl, always wanting to believe the best of people, even when they don't deserve it. You are the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. Always remember that.”

Seleste leaned forward and kissed Deah's forehead. Then her blue eyes glazed over, and she skipped away, humming and lost in her own world again. Deah watched her, a stricken expression on her pretty face.

I shook my head. “Open your eyes, Deah. Your dad has been plotting something against the other Families for a long time now. And I finally figured out what it is.”

I pointed to the secret room, which was still open behind me. “Remember what Katia wanted to do to us? Well, your dad has already done the exact same thing to a whole bunch of monsters. He and Blake set out traps in the woods to catch monsters so they can rip their magic out of the creatures with black blades.”

I stalked over to the desk and picked up one of the files there. “And he has files on all the Draconis, notes about how he can use those black blades to augment their magic, make them faster, stronger, better fighters. He even has a file on you, if you care to look.”

Deah's face paled, and her mouth twisted as though she was going to be sick. “He wouldn't do that. Not to everyone in the Family, not to
me
. . . .” Her voice trailed off, and I could tell that she didn't even believe her own words.

“Go in there and look for yourself. Just be sure to close the door behind you when you leave.”

I'd seen and heard everything I needed to, but instead of leaving the office like I should have, I stood still and kept staring at Deah.

“There's a war coming,” I said. “Between the Sinclairs and the Draconis. And you're going to have to choose a side. I hope you choose ours, cousin.”

Deah stared back at me, her blue eyes full of worry. All the while, Seleste kept humming and skipping around and around us.

I nodded at Deah, then left Victor's office.

 

I met up with Devon in the woods, and we hiked back to the Sinclair mansion. We went straight to the library, where Claudia and Mo were waiting. I e-mailed the photos I'd taken to their phones and told them everything I'd seen in Victor's secret room, including all the black blades hidden there and what I thought he wanted to do with them.

Claudia put her phone down, took off her glasses, and rubbed her head as though it was aching again. “So Victor has enough black blades to give the majority of his guards more magic.”

“Just a boost,” I said. “Katia said that monster magic burns out of your veins quickly, that it's not permanent, like human magic is.”

“How quickly?” Mo asked.

I shrugged. “She didn't say. But she'd set traps along the lake, and it sounded like she'd had to kill a lot of monsters just to advance through the tournament.”

“It doesn't matter how long monster magic lasts,” Devon said. “All Victor needs is an hour, maybe two, and he could wipe out an entire Family, including ours.”

Silence descended over the library as we all took in that not-so-cheery thought. Claudia and Mo picked up their phones again, staring at the photos, but I wandered over to the bookshelf where that picture of my mom was. Now that I knew the blond woman with her was Seleste, I picked up the picture and looked at it again.

They both seemed so young in the photo, although they must have been about the same age as I was now. And they seemed so happy, smiling at each other, their arms slung around each other's shoulders. Whatever happened from here on out, I was going to take Seleste's advice—I wasn't going to fight with my friends, and I especially wasn't going to fight with Deah. She was my cousin, my family, my blood, and we would need all the help we could get to defeat Victor.

“So what do we do now that we know Victor's plan?” Devon asked, breaking the silence. “Do we tell the other Families and try to form some sort of alliance?”

“No,” Claudia said. “That would just cause a panic. The fewer people who know about Victor's secret room and what's in it, the better.”

“But we have to do
something
,” Devon protested. “We just can't sit around and wait for Victor to decide to use those weapons against us.”

I set the picture of my mom and Seleste back down on the shelf, making sure it was straight, then turned to face the others. “Don't worry about the black blades. I know exactly what to do about them.”

Claudia arched her eyebrows. “And what is this brilliant plan of yours?”

“It's not a plan. It's what I do best.”

I looked at Mo, and he grinned, picking up on my train of thought.

“Just like the Parker job?” he asked.

“Exactly.”

Claudia frowned. “What's the Parker job? Or do I even want to know?”

“It's an assignment I sent Lila out on last year,” Mo said. “This guy named Parker had bought a very nice diamond necklace for his wife, one that I had a buyer for. But Parker was mobbed up with the Draconis, so we couldn't steal the necklace without some serious consequences.”

“So what did you do?” Devon asked.

Mo pointed at me, still grinning. “Lila had the bright idea to, shall we say, replace Parker's necklace with one that I ordered from a jeweler in Cypress Mountain.”

Claudia tilted her head to the side. “Lila stole the real necklace and replaced it with a fake.”

Mo nodded. “And Parker and his wife still don't know the difference. She wears that necklace all the time to Family events. And I laugh to myself every single time I see all those fake diamonds flashing around her neck.”

Claudia and Devon looked at me, questions in their eyes.