“I don’t think so, but I was pissed, and he was panicked.”

“Wait, wait, wait—does that mean your persuasive emotional thing was working on him or not, Lon?”

“I think so.” Doubt clouded his eyes. Embarrassment, too.

Dear God, my head! Blood pulsed in my temples. What had I forgotten? My mind fastened on a single detail: the tattoo on Merrin’s chest, the one peeking out of the top of his shirt. It was awfully dark for an old military tattoo. And that was no army eagle, it was the top of an Egyptian symbol for strength, and it wasn’t lined in blue ink, it was charged with Heka.

Shit! He’d constructed some sort of magical seal to ward himself, either from Lon’s ability in particular, or from Earthbound knacks in general. Anxiety cleared a path through my fuzzy head.

“What?” Lon asked, suddenly panicking right along with me.

“My weird headache . . . Jesus, Lon. We just let Merrin go. He’s not going to help us. He tricked us! He—”

“He was using my knack.”

I glanced around. Thousands of paradegoers were swarming the streets. How would we find him now?

“You took his invisibility talisman,” Lon said.

I patted my pocket, then thrust my hand inside. Empty. “Oh, no . . . He bumped into me on the way out. He . . .” I didn’t bother finishing. Lon made a miserable sound. “How much of what he’d told us was true? Was he under your influence at all? Did he tell us enough to shut us up? Or—” I fished out my cell and ducked into an alcove to get away from the crowds.

“What are you doing?” Lon asked.

“Looking up Hotel Guinevere. Have you ever heard of it?”

His blank expression told me that he hadn’t. I hadn’t either. Not that I knew every hotel in the city. A million people lived here. “Hotel Guinevere,” I said, reading from my phone’s web browser, “closed in 1990. It was one of the oldest hotels in the city.”

Lon’s eyelids fluttered in disbelief. “How did I not know?”

“How did I not know? This must be what it feels like to be on the receiving end of Jupe’s knack.” My head still throbbed. “I wonder if he was lying about the possession details? He wasn’t possessed himself—we’d know, right?”

“I wasn’t touching him the entire time,” Lon said despondently.

“Yeah, that’s when I started trusting him—when he touched me.”

“I think he was telling the truth at the beginning. Before his thoughts became muddled to me. But I don’t know . . . I just don’t know.”

My mind flipped through everything he told us, then I suddenly remembered what had caught my attention before the magical explosion stole it. “Mark Dare.”

Lon grunted.

“He jumped off the float less than a minute before Merrin’s explosion.”

Another grunt.

“He was at the carnival the night that the third kid was taken.”

That got his attention.

“Mark and his father don’t get along. Dare said they’d recently reconciled, but he’d also called his own son a prick—maybe Mark feels the same way about Dare.”

“There’s bad blood between them,” Lon confirmed. “But enough for Mark to team up with Merrin?”

“They must know each other—if Merrin remembered you, then surely he remembered Mark, too. And teaming up certainly would allow Mark to get revenge on Daddy, by making it appear that Dare couldn’t protect his own cubs from predators. If members were scared and pissed off, it might even get Dare impeached from the Hellfire Club and put Mark at the helm.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Cady.”

“You were right to begin with—Merrin set that fire as a distraction. And it wasn’t for the Halloween protesters. That was a load of crap.”

Lon didn’t answer. He just pulled me back into the moving crowd, and we plowed our way through to the float.

Police lights flashed red and blue on the parade route where the fire truck had been parked. But not all of the police were investigating the Little Red Riding Hood crime scene—several surrounded the Dare Energy float. A fresh rush of panic swept over me as I quickly inspected the area. The kids were all huddled at the front of the float with two police officers. Adults were being questions by other cops. I was searching for Mark Dare when his father stepped into our path.

“Where the hell have you two been?” Dare snapped. His face was red. His halo was bright and big, practically crackling. He wasn’t happy.

Lon was unfazed. “Chasing after Merrin.”

Dare was momentarily confused.

“I told one of your guards when we left,” Lon added. “The fire on the float was magical—not real. Merrin’s spellwork. We saw him and chased him down.”

“Well, where is he then?”

Lon didn’t answer.

“You fucking let him get away—again?”

“He used magick,” I said. “He turned Lon’s knack around on us.”

Lon quickly explained what happened with Merrin, but his eyes were on the float the entire time, watching the cops. He finally stopped midsentence. “What’s going on here?”

“Juanita and Ben’s kid got taken right off the fucking float.”

“No,” I said weakly.

“That’s right,” Dare said, barely containing his anger. “Fifteen minutes ago, while you two imbeciles were being bamboozled by Merrin.”