Or, knowing what I now knew about Jace’s fighting skills, maybe they’d saved Cal’s life.

“So, you still know the area?” Marc asked, ever focused on the goal at hand.

“As well as anyone who still lives there. Better than most.” Jace wasn’t bragging; he was simply stating a fact.

I sent a silent thank-you to my father for sending him. Marc and I would probably have bumbled our way into some serious trouble without him.

“What about Brett?” I leaned forward with an elbow on each of the front seats. “Did you think of anywhere he might have stuck those feathers? Other than beneath his mattress?”

Jace hesitated, but I recognized an idea in the artful dart of his gaze from mine in the mirror. He wasn’t sure. In fact, he was so unsure he didn’t even want to mention it. But however small it was in his mind, his idea was the only one we had.

“Jace?” I prodded, and he looked at me reluctantly as our speed dropped back toward eighty.

“It’s not going to be there. We’ll waste hours hiking through the woods in the dark, uphill the whole way, freezing our asses off, and it won’t be there.”

“Where?” Marc asked, half a second before I would have said the same thing.

Jace sighed, still staring at the road. “There’s this old deer stand. It’s really just a platform and three wobbly rails for walls. If it’s even still standing. We weren’t supposed to go past the property line—the other side is public hunting ground—but that old deer stand was too much to pass up. Brett and I would raid the castle tower and storm the fort all weekend, by the time he was five or so.”

“Your mom let a five-year-old and a nine-year-old wander the woods alone?”

Jace shrugged. “She didn’t know. She was busy with the younger ones, and so long as we showed up again for dinner, she’d assume we were playing near the tree line. It seems stupid and dangerous now, but then…”

“Sounds like fun,” Marc said, and I smiled, pleased that the two of them could be civil when it really mattered.

“Yeah. It was.” Jace smiled distantly, as if he’d just then realized the truth in his statement. “There was an old wooden chest up there. We used it as an armory. Brett had a couple of toy pistols—you remember those pop guns?—and I had this plastic retractable knife.…” Jace’s voice faded again, and I spoke up to prompt him.

“And you think he might have hidden the feathers in there?”

“No.” Jace shook his head firmly. “I doubt the old stand is there anymore, and even if it is, Brett probably hasn’t thought about it in a decade.” The present tense did not escape my notice, and judging by the look Marc shot me, it hadn’t escaped his, either. “I know I haven’t. But it’s the only place I can think of.” He shook his head again. “It’s a total waste of time. It won’t be there.”