My Brother Is Becoming a Demon. And I'm the One Who Has to Stop Him.

I know what you're thinking.

Cool premise. Great hook. Very dramatic.

Except I'm not the hero of an action movie, and none of this feels cool from where I'm standing — which is on a cold limestone floor, somewhere in the tunnels beneath Rome, face-down after a training session that left me unable to lift my arms.

My name is Jack Mac Paidin. I'm almost fourteen. And my older brother Ethan is one ritual away from completing his transformation into a demon prince.

Let me back up.

I grew up in Portland, Oregon, in a house where nobody loved me and nobody explained why. Earl and Lizzie O'Brien were the people I called my aunt and uncle, and the charitable version of that story is that they did the bare minimum to keep me alive. I had asthma. I had a bed in a cold basement, and no idea that I had a grandfather in Dublin, or that the siblings I remembered — an older brother who felt like the sun in every room he entered, a baby sister with sandy curls I could still picture if I tried hard enough — were out there somewhere, just as hidden as I was.

I also had no idea that the same people who decided where I'd live had arranged for my parents to die.

I was five when it happened. I don't have many memories of my dad — auburn hair, hazel eyes, the feeling of being held by someone who made you feel like nothing in the world could touch you. My mother is mostly warmth and the smell of citrus, and the sound of a voice I can almost hear if I'm not trying too hard. Ethan, I remember more clearly — he was seven, already the kind of person who filled a doorframe just by standing in it. Sadie was three, which meant she was mostly fists and curls and the volume of a toddler who had decided life was unfair.

Their names were Ross and Faith Mac Paidin, and I was told they died in a car accident. For a long time, I accepted that story because I had no reason not to and nobody to tell me otherwise.

The truth is worse and also better, in that the truth can be both of those things at the same time. It's worse because the accident wasn't an accident at all. It's better because my parents loved us enough that people went to extraordinary lengths to destroy that love, which tells you something about how real and how big it was.

My aunt Inez ordered it. She arranged it. She decided that my father was an inconvenience to her plans, and that my mother was collateral damage, and that three small children were assets to be distributed among her allies, kept dormant until their powers surfaced, and then used.

That's the family I come from. Literally half of it wants to use me. The other half is scrambling to find me.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it is Ethan.

My brother has brilliant sapphire blue eyes. I noticed them in the observation room at the top of Mac Paidin Manor, our ancestral home outside Dublin, Ireland, the first time I'd seen him in person since we were small children. I noticed them because they were the same color as the light his powers leave on the locator globe in the center of that room — that globe my grandfather has been watching for years, waiting for his grandchildren's magic to switch on one by one like beacons coming on in the dark of night.

What I couldn't see then, what I understand now, is that his eyes were already starting to change.

Every ritual he completes — apparently there are three — pulls him a little further from what he was born as and a little closer to what Valdis, our immortal vampire demon queen ancestor, has been building him toward his whole life. Not his whole life on the surface — his life in Salt Lake City with Thaddeus and Astrid looked nothing like mine. He was the golden child. The quarterback. The boy every adult in every room drifted toward without knowing why. He was told he was exceptional from the time he was old enough to understand the word, and he was told that by people who meant it in the worst possible way, which is to say: they told him because they needed him to believe it.

And he did believe it. Of course he did. He's smart and capable and powerful, and they handed him a story that fit perfectly around all of that, a story in which he was the hero and our grandfather was the villain and his destiny was waiting for him in a demon realm he'd been groomed since childhood to embrace.

And then — this is the part that lives in my chest like something unbearable, something I can't even believe — they told him that I had stolen his inheritance. That the role of Magic Hat Maker had passed to me because he'd forfeited it by refusing Arthur's rescue. They handed him a name for his rage and painted my face onto it.

I don't want the title. I never asked for any of this. But that's not the point, and it wouldn't matter if it were, because Ethan doesn't know that, and he's not in a position right now where knowing it would change anything.

He chose to stay with Valdis. He looked at me across a throne room, and he chose the other side.

I think about that a lot, down here in the dark beneath the bustling city of Rome.

Samael — the fallen angel who pulled me out of Blarjord on the back of a white flying serpent while I was unconscious and brought me here — told me something I keep turning over in my mind. He said that when he was carrying me here, when I was completely knocked out, I was calling for Ethan. Not asking for Samael's help. Not even calling for Arthur, or Bill, or Bart. I was calling for my brother.

Trying to warn him.

I don't remember that. But I believe it, because that impulse — that stubborn, irrational, infuriating impulse to reach for Ethan even when Ethan has made it abundantly clear that he doesn't want to be reached — hasn't gone away. It's still in there. When I'm face-down on a limestone floor too tired to move, and it's there when I'm fighting against summoned demons in the dark until my magic starts to come as naturally as breathing, and it's there when Samael tells me in that careful, monotone way of his that my brother will be faster than anything I've fought so far.

I don't want to fight Ethan. I've told Samael this. He doesn't argue with me. He just says: the future is not written. Ethan still has choices to make. The angelic blood in his veins is the same blood that runs in mine, and it doesn't simply disappear because something darker is trying to overwrite it.

He said: the question is whether that blood can still be reached. Whether there is anything left of the person Ethan was that might hear you, if you could get close enough.

Whether there is anything left.

I am training in these tunnels every day — push-ups until I can't lift my arms, demon-combat until the magic stops feeling like a foreign language and starts feeling like my own, willpower exercises that Samael says matter more than any of the physical work — because the answer to that question has to be yes. I have decided that. I have decided it the way you decide something when you have no proof and no guarantee and only the stubborn, stupid refusal to stop believing in it.

There is something left of my brother in there. There has to be.

And I am going to be ready when the moment comes to reach him.

Book 5 of the Jack Mac Paidin series — The Missing Sister — coming soon. Start the series with the Books 1–3 box set, now available on Kindle Unlimited.