He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked down at the screen. “Not even at the gate and the little bastard’s already bugging me,” he murmured before answering the phone with an impatient “What?”

I chuckled to myself, then felt him stiffen next to me.

“Slow down. Where are you exactly?”

My heart began racing in alarm.

“You’re not going to run out of air. Calm down.” He stopped to listen to whatever Jupe was saying. “We won’t call the police, I promise. I’m getting off the plane now. We’ll be there in half an hour. Don’t open the door, you hear me? Jupe? Jupe?”

He pulled the phone away and looked at the screen in shock, then shoved it in his pocket and stood up.

“Sir, please sit down. It will be a couple of minutes before the Jetway is in place.”

Yanking me up out of my seat, he pushed forward and got in the flight attendant’s face. “My son has been kidnapped. Let me off this damn plane right now.”

Her eyes widened as a low rumble rippled through the passengers around us, then she turned and ran to the phone on the wall next to the pilot’s door.

“Lon?” I yelled, shaking his arm.

His eyes were blank as he turned to face me. “It’s Riley Cooper,” he said. “She’s got Jupe cornered in a closet at school.”

22

It was after 10 p.m. when we finally made it to La Sirena Junior High. Riley Cooper knew we were coming, so Lon didn’t bother to be stealthy. He skidded into the parking lot with the same abandon that he had just used while speeding from the city to the coast in well under a half hour.

“Goddammit, I wish I had a gun,” he complained as he flung open his car door in unchecked anger. “I’m never leaving home without one again.”

I wished that he did too, though at that point I was a little worried that he was contemplating shooting me along with Riley Cooper; he was furious with me, and I was sick to my stomach.

He hiked up the front steps, but I raced to stop him.

“Hold on! My invisibility spell,” I said as I pushed up my sleeve to reveal my white tattoo. His expression changed from angry to hostile. “I just need blood to make it strong enough to cover you …” I trailed off into silence.

“You’ve got to be joking,” he snarled. “Haven’t you done enough magick? Because unless I’m missing something, the only reason my son is being held hostage in there is because you didn’t have the sense to stop for a second and think that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to upload your fucking servitor in front of him.”

I suppose I deserved that. He’d been stewing the entire trip here, after I’d suggested the only obvious reason behind all this: the strange ending to my servitor’s transmitted images, when I could see her looking at me. I thought she’d somehow sensed my servitor in the room with her, or it set off a ward. But the green dot I saw must’ve been some sort of tracking spell. Maybe she couldn’t trace my energy because of my deflector charm, but Jupe was there with me, unprotected.

Lon was right. This was my fault. I tried to hold my head up, but I couldn’t maintain eye contact. He shook his head and stormed off, acting like he was going to break down the doors to the school, then changed his mind at the last second. The door was open when he tested it, so he entered and I followed.

The school was dark, silent, and eerily empty; each footstep we made was conspicuous. Rows of turquoise metal lockers lined either side of the hallway, broken up by the occasional classroom door. We crept along, frantically eying each door as we went, until I couldn’t take it anymore. While Lon was looking the other way, I bit down on a sore hangnail, wriggling it in my teeth until it bled. It hurt like hell, and it didn’t produce much blood, but it was enough. I smeared it on my invisibility ward and mouthed the incantation for the spell, momentarily losing my balance after it took hold. His neck stiffened. I was certain he felt the spell—he had to. At the very least, he could surely sense that I was being sneaky? Perhaps his immediate concern for Jupe overrode his instincts, because he continued on without comment.

After we passed under a faded paper football banner strung overhead—go blue devils!—he stopped and looked back and forth down two branching hallways. Jupe had tried to tell him what classroom he was in, but Lon didn’t know where he was going. His hand twitched as he debated, then he made the decision to go left.

As we approached the first pair of doors, one on each side of the hall, he slowed and crouched low. I peered into the room on the right while he looked to the left. Nothing. We both turned to each other and shook our heads, then continued.

I’d never tried to maintain a substantial temporary ward for two people. It made me dizzy, and it was taking everything I had to walk a straight line. Lon gave me a suspicious side-long glance, but kept going.

When we came to the second set of doors, we crouched again and followed the same routine … until a dull cracking noise startled us. We peered farther down the hall, then took off.

Running is difficult when all of your energy is being drained by a ward you’re attempting to keep up on the fly; when we got within a few feet of the cracking sound, my ankle gave out and I tripped. Right as my fingertips stubbed against the cool tile floor, Lon jerked me back up. I swayed. The gold from his halo seemed to move in horizontal trails as my vision doubled.

We moved to the side of the door, and Lon peered inside. I waited for several seconds, but he showed no reaction. I pushed him aside to get a look. The light in the room was on, but that had been the case in several other rooms we’d passed. Then I noticed the desks. Three near the far windowed wall were crooked and out of place; all the other desks conformed to tight, neat rows. The askew desks sat in front of a closet door at the back of the room … a door marked by the slightest tinge of blue light.