he’d done. The stones are much more easy to obtain on the outer planes. It’s where he got them. When Devinshea disappeared, he knew he couldn’t keep Daniel. That was when he allowed the two of you to go through. He knew Daniel would never stop searching for Devinshea. The trap was for Marcus and Kelsey. Devinshea was what he hadn’t counted on. The wizard came in and quickly assessed the threats to his absolute control over Daniel.”
“Marcus and Kelsey. I’m insulted I wasn’t on that list.”
“Ahh, but he never gave you enough credit, my darling girl. He thinks you’re nothing more than a wife and mum. He doesn’t understand the most dangerous of all creatures is a mum whose kids are threatened.”
“Why go after the kids?” I asked. “They couldn’t challenge him. Why not allow Declan to come for them? Miria would have taken them and they wouldn’t have been any trouble at all.”
“When he came for the children that day, I think that’s what he might have done. The hours after you went missing were quiet. No one had a clue you were gone because Danny was supposed to help with the locator ceremony.”
Myrddin had planned to hold a ceremony in the dark temple at midnight that night. Danny and I were going to attend, and it could have gone on for hours. “He told everyone we were in the temple?”
“That was what I believed,” my father agreed. “I stayed over because I wanted to talk to you when you got back from the business with Daniel. When you didn’t come back, I went to look for you. I overheard them talking, and Myrddin decided the best way to deal with the situation was to lock down the crown very quickly. Honestly, I think he panicked a bit. He’s not used to his plans being upended. I know he came into the penthouse that morning and fed me a line of bullshit about how you and Danny had been attacked and he needed to get the children someplace safe. Albert was already on the move, getting the children ready. Trent had spent the night with Fenrir, so he was back there, too. I held him off as long as I could.”
“How did he kill you?” I wanted to know everything, every single reason to punish the wizard when the bill came due.
“When he realized I was giving Albert and Eddie cover, he stormed back into the kids’ rooms. He quickly discovered that Eddie had transported them, and he took it out on me. The great Merlin packs quite a punch when he wants to. I’m not sure if he was trying to kill me or trying to hurt me and send me a message, but when that bolt of lightning from his hands hit me, my heart gave out. The world went dark and when I came back to consciousness, it was several weeks later and Myrddin had done his worst by then.”
“His worst?”
Evan took that one. “He’d consolidated his power by killing everyone he could. He put out the story that the royals had been killed by a rogue group that had embedded members close to the royal family.”
“Let me guess. Trent and Sasha,” I concluded.
“And Marcus,” Evan added. “He used Marcus’s disappearance to make the vampires look particularly bad. Not that there aren’t a subset that work with Myrddin now, but it was a good way to sway the supernaturals who don’t like the vamps.”
“It was a good way to get rid of all of our allies.” The political situation had been tenuous at best. It always was in our world. Daniel’s coalition had held, but there were always factions fighting, millennia of bad will and betrayal among the different tribes. The wolves didn’t trust the vampires, and the witches are wary of the Fae. There was often some sort of rebellion to put down. “I take it he invited the demons in.”
“Yes. By that point he’d brought in the demons, and the witches had taken over the Council,” my father explained. “I had no idea where the children had gone then. I stuck close to Myrddin and learned a lot about his plans. In those first months, he simply struggled to secure the throne. He didn’t bother to go after the children. He tried to figure out why the painting hadn’t worked the way he thought it should. It went blank after it took you and Daniel.”
I had so many questions about that. “Did he