Hey. The body remembers, people. The body remembers.
But in this case, it’s nothing more than a pointless fantasy thatneedsto be forgotten, pronto. Draegan doesn’t look at me that way—not like Jude and Auggie. Even Rook. As shy as he comes off, it’s clear he’s open to something more between us. Maybe not tonight, but one night.
Daddy Drae, on the other hand…
I bring the collar of his T-shirt to my nose, breathing in the scent. It’s freshly laundered, but I can still smell him. He’s in the very fabric, the sheets, the air.
He must’ve put me in his bed last night. In his shirt. I don’t remember that part.
I lower the shirt again, and my eyes land on the nightstand beside the bed. There’s a small ceramic dish—plain white, with a scalloped edge. The kind of thing you might use to hold your wedding ring while you do dishes or roll cookie dough.
This dish doesn’t hold jewelry, though. Just a pale gray stone naturally shaped like a heart. It’s about the size of a golf ball. I pick it up and turn it toward the window, the fading light illuminating a set of initials carved into the back.
A.C., it looks like, but it’s hard to tell. The stone has been worn smooth on this side, almost as if it was polished in a tumbler.
Or by the worrying of a thumb, I realize, suddenly picturing Draegan holding this stone, rubbing his thumb back and forth over the grooved letters, thinking about whoever gave it to him. The C could be for Caldwell.
Did he…Goddess. Did he have a wife?
A strange mix of emotion washes through me—heartache and jealousy. Grief. Even fear that a man like him could still have a soft, breakable heart inside.
I’ve only ever known him as Draegan, the stern, commanding, often pig-headed gargoyle who loves to tell me no and only occasionally shows a human side.
Like last night.
But hewashuman once, I remind myself. A man, probably in his forties. A man who may have loved…
And very probably lost.
I rub my thumb over the smooth stone, a chill skittering down my spine.
I set it back in the dish.
It’s not for me to touch. It’s not for me to even mention.
Blinking away fresh tears, I rise from the bed and head to my room to shower and dress, eager to scrub the remnants of the mage blood from under my fingernails.
Even more eager to head out to the library.
Rook. I need to find Rook. I need to see him with my own eyes and feel his warm embrace and know, without a doubt, that he’s okay.
Chapter Twenty-Six
ROOK
The moment the sun sets behind Blackmoor Manor tonight, Jude and Draegan are in flight.
After everything that went down at the meat packing plant last night, I knew they would be. Jude was anxious to follow up on Conrad Nesterman—aka Full Metal Jacket. The name checked out—I was able to pull up his address, along with his family contacts and police record. His rap sheet was even longer than the other two mages’. Real fucking prince, this one.
Tonight’s particular mission is a fact-finding fly-byonly, and Draegan insisted on accompanying him to make sure our resident psycho sticks to the plan. After what they did to Florentine and Pomeroy, we need to lie low before the next round of interrogations, which will likely include Pomeroy’s mother and this Nesterman asshole. Two mage buddies going off-grid aren’t likely to raise any alarms—not for a few days, at least. But if half the shadow magic society starts vanishing without explanation? We’ve already got our hands full running Forsythe and Detective Reedsy in circles over West’s “disappearance” and the fire, not to mention the stolen Codex.
With Jude and Drae down in Bayside scoping out Metal’s residence, Auggie and I decided to stay at the manor with West tonight. I haven’t seen her since the whole thing went down with the mages, but apparently she was in pretty rough shape. She was still asleep in Drae’s bed when I woke up, so that’s where I left her.
In the hour or so since then, Auggie and I—under the close supervision of Huxley and Lucinda—have been keeping busy snooping through the texts, photos, and voicemails on the cell phones they took from Pomeroy and Florentine.
Between that evidence and the details Auggie shared with me about last night, a picture is starting to emerge.
But that’sallit’s doing—starting. It’s way too soon to throw out those old favorite words of mine, certainty and determination. So far, all we’ve been able todeterminewithcertaintyis this:
