“He won’t be back tonight. We’ll track him down soon, I promise.”

“He needs to be taken care of. He’s too dangerous to leave alive,” Danaus said as he resumed his walk through the woods, the darkness immediately swallowing him up so that he was little more than a disembodied voice.

“I know,” I whispered. Rowe was too dangerous to leave alive. I might have once hoped to use him, but that wasn’t going to work. His only goal was to buy his way back into Aurora’s good graces, and his only way of achieving that was through me. I couldn’t take the chance.

Unfortunately. I had bigger concerns waiting for me in the darkness. I was on a deadline to learn to control Danaus’s powers, and I was getting better at it. I could still feel the hunter fighting me, but in each situation he decided not to pull away. We had been desperate, surrounded. There had been no choice if we had any hope of surviving to see the next night.

Bending my right knee in front of me, I rested my right elbow on it and threaded my fingers through my disheveled hair. “What the hell do you want now? I did as you asked. I used his powers instead of my own.”

“And I am so proud of you,” Nick crooned, suddenly appearing before me in the form of my father. The snow crunched beneath his feet as he approached me with a slow, steady gait. It was like he had all the time in the world. We were in a dark, snowy forest surrounded by nightwalkers and lycanthropes. Now wasn’t the time for a little family reunion, but then my life didn’t matter to him.

“What do you want?”

“Just to tell you that you’re close. You just need to try a little harder,” Nick said.

“Try harder?” With my right hand, I tried to push to my feet, but with a slight wave of his hand Nick knocked me back down on my butt. I sat, balling my fists in the snow, barely suppressing the urge to hurl a fireball at him. I was getting over the fact that he looked exactly like my father. There were small differences now that my brain was beginning to pick out. He didn’t walk the same. His gait was too confident and relaxed, as if he were lord and master of all that he saw. There was a twist to his thin lips that made him look like he was just about to flash a smug smile in my direction. And his eyes. They weren’t the soft, loving brown that I remembered. Nick’s eyes were the same shade of purple as mine. Maybe we were father and daughter, but that wasn’t going to stop me from trying to fry his ass the first chance I got.

“You’re struggling to maintain your hold over the would-be bori,” he said. “If he were to really fight you, you’d lose your grip on his powers. That’s not going to do you any good. And what if he comes at you with an attempt to control you? Do you even know how to fight him off?”

“He hasn’t tried to control me. We’ve come to an understanding, which I am continuously breaking just to keep you happy,” I snapped.

“My dear, you aren’t trying to keep me happy. You’re trying to save your own skin.”

“Whatever. At this point it’s the same thing.”

“True.” Nick shrugged, shoving his hands into the pockets of his dark pants. “But I’m not happy yet. Get a firm control on the hunter and then you need to go after the nightwalker.”

“Jabari?” I asked, my voice cracking.

“He’s the only one left that can directly control you. That nonsense needs to be stopped now before one of them discovers what you are truly capable of,” Nick commanded, his expression growing grim for the first time. “I will not have you running rampant through the streets when you should be at my beck and call.”

“Like an obedient dog,” I growled as I struggled back to my feet. Reaching out with my mind, I tapped into all the blood magic that I could sense swirling in the air from the nearby nightwalkers and lycanthropes. I reached farther for the souls of the humans that lay slumbering in the nearby villages. I stretched for any creature with a soul and tapped that energy.

Holding my hands out to my sides, I summoned up two balls of fire that snapped and crackled with all the raw energy I could handle. I hurled them at Nick, willing them to not only hit his body but stick like tree sap to a leaf. I encased the creature in flames that grew to the point where it licked at the tops of trees and sent down a rain of melted snow. Clenching my eyes closed, I focused the energy on burning through flesh and eating through bone. I aimed for what I could sense of the creature’s soul, trying to use the soul energy of others to destroy his.

I held the energy focused on him until my body trembled from exhaustion and I grew light-headed. With great reluctance, I released him, hoping to find that I had reduced him to mere ash. I didn’t want to sense him in the area. I wanted to wipe him from existence. But he was a god and I wasn’t strong enough.

A white skeleton stood before me with its morbidly grim smile mocking me. It seemed to shiver once, and in a matter of seconds, muscles, organs, tissue, and skin all grew back over him. Clothes came next, so that in less than a minute he stood before me again exactly as he had been before my fit of temper. Behind him the earth was scorched with trees reduced to thin black timbers.

“Now it’s my turn,” Nick said, and my stomach jolted in fear. Like an orchestra conductor, my father raised both of his hands. At the same time, it felt as if my soul had been lifted out of my body. I tried to open my mouth to scream in terror, but I no longer had a mouth to scream out of as my body went limp and dead to the ground. The world swirled around me, becoming pure energy. If Nick released his hold on my soul, I knew I would float away, never finding my way back to my body. Would this be death? Or something worse? Trapped forever between this world and the next, a part of nothing.

“I am not the bori or the naturi that can so easily be destroyed with your meager skills,” Nick snarled. “I am a god and you cannot harm me. You have been given the great gift of my limited patience. Do not waste it.”

I felt more than saw Nick lower his hands again, placing my soul back into my body. I curled up on the ground in the fetal position as if I could tighten my hold on my soul. “Lucky me,” I muttered, looking down at the snow.

Nick was on me in a flash. Kneeling before me, he tightly gripped my face in one hand so that his fingernails dug into my cheeks. I could feel the blood streaking down my face and dripping down on my stomach and legs. He lifted my face so I was staring him directly in the eyes. They were two massive voids swirling around, nearly enveloping all of my thoughts and emotions. I gasped and tried to pull away from him. His power surrounded me and consumed me until I felt I was losing my grip on my very soul. He was everything, everywhere.

“You have no idea how lucky you have been,” he snarled. “My patience wears thin. Control Danaus and Jabari: this is your last warning.”

I blinked once, trying to nod, but he was already gone. I slowly let my eyes travel over the dark forest. There were no sounds beyond the clack of dead branches stirred to life by the wind. Around me were the dead bodies of the lycanthropes I had killed using Danaus. Their blood had cooled and there was the faint scent of burned flesh hanging fetid in the crisp night air. I still had to dispose of the bodies and burn around the blood-soaked snow. But for now, I didn’t feel like moving. Nick was watching my every move, and Danaus’s life hung in the balance. If I was going to keep him alive, I would have to make him my puppet.