I started to speak. He cut me off.

“Listen to me, Arcadia Bell,” Dare said firmly. “I’m asking you this as the leader of this community, and as a family man. I’m also asking honestly, without using my ability to influence you. But if I wanted to . . .”

His eyes narrowed and he trailed off. The veins in his hands stood rigid on the surface of his papery skin. The air rippled, and just as I realized what was happening, a small groan flew from Dare’s pursed lips as he transmutated right in front of us. His ears elongated to points, his brow shifted forward. Two small ridges plumped up the sides of his head, right above his ears. They didn’t quite make horns—just bumpy bands of thickened flesh with deepened furrows above them. But the most impressive change was the halo, which morphed from a luminous green cloud to a fiery oval that flickered high above the center of his head.

Like an echo, Lon shot up out of his seat and put himself between us. If Dare’s transmutation was a ripple, Lon’s was a storm. It thundered in my ears and threw my balance off. His halo flamed up into a golden pyre, brighter and bigger than Dare’s, dancing high around the majestic pair of spiraling auburn horns that nearly took my breath away every time I saw them.

The men glared at each other like snarling dogs. Hello, testosterone. I slipped my hand inside my jacket and touched my caduceus, just in case. Not the best weapon, but at least it wouldn’t explode in my hand like the pencil in the parking garage when Jupe and I were getting almost-mugged. And even though I didn’t have time to draw a proper binding triangle, I could still shock the hell out of Dare, if need be. I was wary but not excessively worried, which was probably foolish. You know you’ve been spending way too much time with demons when two of them standing before you transmutated and ready to fight were preferable to a weak human mugger afraid of his own damn shadow.

“Now, Lon—” Dare started, his voice slightly altered by his transformation.

“Out of respect, I’m giving you a warning,” Lon rumbled, his own voice noticeably deeper, dangerous enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. “If you even think about charming her into doing your bidding, I’ll stop you—family or not.”

A spark of affection lit me up from the inside. Was it wrong that I found his show of loyalty toward me incredibly romantic? Probably. I chastised myself and pushed away those thoughts—he could pick them right out of my head when he was transmutated.

“All right, son,” Dare said. The tension between them calmed. I peeked around Lon’s legs, watching as Dare let go of the transmutation and shifted back to human. He closed his eyes and held the side of his head as if in pain, then exhaled dramatically. “Give an old man a break,” he said between breaths. “I was just trying to prove a point.”

Lon stood still for several seconds as flames leapt around his head. He was listening to Dare’s thoughts. Whatever he heard must have satisfied him, because a few seconds later, he shifted down. The spiraling horns and pyrotechnic halo faded and disappeared, as if they were never there. Clash of the Earthbounds avoided.

I released my caduceus and removed my hand from my jacket as Lon ran a hand through his hair where his horns had just been. He often complained that they left a strange itchy sensation behind, like a phantom limb.

“Okay,” I said after a few moments. “Now that we’re all best friends and trusting each other again, what exactly is it that you want me to do?”

Dare grimaced and shook his head, probably fighting off a post-shift headache. Then he looked at me very seriously. “I want you to find Jesse Bishop and stop him from taking our kids. I want you to trap him and bind him with magick, and then I want you to banish him to the Æthyr.”

Executioner.

That’s what Dare wanted from me. The same role I’d been forced to play with my parents. Icy shock froze my tongue as this realization dredged up guilty feelings that I logically shouldn’t have, but did. Damn them for forcing me into that role, and damn Dare for asking me to repeat it.

I didn’t say yes, but I couldn’t very well say no, either. Dare thanked me, nonetheless, assuming my silence was agreement. I guess it was. Who was selfish enough to refuse to help innocent kids? I might have been a few months ago . . . before my parents’ betrayal. Before Lon. Before Jupe.

But things had changed, and so had I, I supposed.

Lon and I exited Dare’s house with a shoe box of paperwork in tow, filled with information he’d amassed over the years regarding Jesse Bishop. Unfortunately, Dare had burned most of the incriminating papers that he’d found in Bishop’s home thirty years ago—the stuff that matched up the children’s names with spell elements—so all we had now was a fairly useless stack of Hellfire Club photos, a few yellowed newspaper clippings about the Sandpiper Park Snatcher case, and a list of the original missing children with addresses.

At the very bottom, below the paperwork, was a blue velvet ring box. Inside lay a small metal key about two inches long on a tarnished silver chain with a broken clasp. Dare said he’d found it at Bishop’s house beneath the kitchen table after they’d discovered Bishop missing. Dare and Lon’s father had searched the place for anything it could’ve possible fit, but came up empty.

None of this seemed useful in helping us locate Bishop, and to add to our frustration, Dare suspected the man had done some sort of cloaking magick in the ’80s, so he might be hard to find using normal methods today. Normal methods for me meant constructing a magical servitor—a roving ball of energy that fetched information. However, the last time I used a servitor to find another magician, it came back and bit me on the ass, and that’s when Jupe got hurt and kidnapped. I didn’t want to take that chance again until I was able to teach myself more advanced servitor techniques. Better to exhaust other methods first.