I take the stairs two at a time and sprint out of the lobby and into the parking lot. I know Felix will be after me as soon as he gets the leg-locking hex lifted—fortunately I had the wherewithal to grab his wand off the coffee table and stuff it under the couch cushions, which should hopefully slow him down at little.

I throw myself into my car and reverse out of my spot, peeling out of the parking lot and into the street.

My hands are shaking and my heart is pounding. I clench my teeth, and squeeze the steering wheel hard enough that my knuckles turn white.

“You're just going to check it out,” I tell myself, trying to get a handle on my emotions. “You're just going to see who it is.”

Maybe I'd go invisible. I wouldn't even show myself until I figured out who the letter-sender was. Felix has no reason to be worried. I can handle myself. I'll be fine.

My father. I'd never really thought about my father before. In my head he was always just some deadbeat who didn't stick around when my mom got pregnant. But now, for the second time in as many days, the mystery of who he was has been brought up again. Maybe there really is something to discover here. Maybe this is the real deal.

It only takes fifteen minutes to get to the cafe on 5th street. I park two blocks away and walk the rest of the way. I check my watch; only nine fifty. The letter said to come by eleven, would they even be here yet? Am I too early? Felix will definitely catch up with me before eleven, or send someone else to get me, so I can't afford to wait.

But the letter said by eleven, so maybe that means the person will be waiting for me from the time they slipped the letter under my door until then. I keep my fingers crossed.

Once the outdoor tables of the cafe are within view, I duck behind a bush in a giant concrete planter and wait until no one is looking my way. With an inhaled breath, I feel the invisibility spell wash over me, and all my senses grow just a little dulled as I fade from view.

The sidewalk is crowded even on a weekday morning, and it's not easy to wind my way through the flowing tide of people without bumping into anyone and starting a panic.

I finally get up to the iron gate that encloses the cafe's patio and I press myself up against it, as out of the way as I can get. I scan the outdoor tables, searching for a familiar face; or for a suspicious one.

No one stands out to me, but then, several of the patrons have their backs to me, or their faces are hidden by the newspapers and books they're reading.

I discount all the couples and groups. That leaves maybe five people who could potentially be the person I'm meeting out here. Two women, three men. There's also the seating inside as well. I glance up at the window that looks into the cafe. There's more people in there, and any one of them could be the person I’m looking for. I edge along the fence until I get to the gate. I only have to wait a minute or two before someone comes out, and I slip in after them while the gate is hanging open. I don't go inside the cafe just yet. I figure it's better to scope it out from outside first, where I have more avenues of escape in case something goes wrong. I press my face up against the window to reduce the glare, and stare inside at all the patrons.

“Adam? I can see your breath fogging up the glass,” a voice suddenly says behind me, and I whirl around, the invisibility spell breaking the moment my attention is yanked away.

I find myself looking into the face of Samuel Cartwright.

My magic immediately starts to bubble up to the surface, and my mind races as I try to think of what to do. Should I throw him through the window? Hit him with a stunning spell and run for it?

Before I can make a decision, Samuel raises his hand—I see he has his wand tucked into the sleeve of his shirt so he can hold it inconspicuously—and he says, “Calm down.”

There's magic in the words, and I feel my spiking emotions level off against my will. I still take a step back from him, my heels hitting the wall of the cafe behind me.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn't blow your head off here and now,” I snarl at him, trying to sound a lot more sure of myself than I feel.

“Because we're in public, surrounded by mundanes, and I doubt you want to get arrested again—and tried as an adult this time—or bring the attention from the Council on you,” he replies in a low voice.

I'm sorely tempted to do it anyway, consequences be damned; but he's right. I'm seriously limited with what I can do in a public place like this. But then, so is he, and I take a little comfort in that.

“I'm leaving,” I say, shoulder checking him as I shove my way past. “And I'm calling the Council to let them know you're here.”

Samuel reaches out to grab me by the arm before I can get far. I almost push him off with a wave of magic, but then I notice that several people have turned to look curiously at us, and I let the half-formed spell burn away into nothing.

“I thought you wanted to know about your father,” he says to me in an undertone. “That's why you're here, isn't it?”

I freeze. I glare at him, wishing that looks really could kill. “...I'm not going to be a part of some MRF trick,” I snarl, yanking my arm out of his grasp.

“This isn't a trick, and I'm not with the MRF anymore,” he replies. Then he gestures to the table he had been sitting at with his back to me. “Why don't we have a seat?”

“You've already lied to me,” I say sharply. “Of course you're back with the MRF, everyone knows it. That's how you've been able to keep breaking every tracking spell that’s been put on you.”

Samuel's eyebrows raise. “News certainly travels fast. It's true I've had help in breaking the tracking spells; but not from the MRF. I failed, Adam. I failed in my assignment to bring you over to our side. The MRF doesn't take kindly to failure. They want nothing more to do with me. No, I've sought out one or two sympathetic friends I still have to help me, but the MRF have washed their hands clean of me. I'm not working with them or for them. I'm a man alone, and the only interests I'm working for now are my own. My own, and yours.”

“That sounds a hell of a lot like the bullshit you tried to feed me in France,” I sneer.

“The only way I can convince you of my sincerity is if you listen to what I have to say.” He spreads his arms out wide in a gesture of peace. “Will you at least give me that courtesy, Adam? I swear on my life, I'm not going to do anything to you. I just want to tell you what I know about your father.”

“Why?” I demand. “Why do you care? What does anything about me and my father have to do with you?”

“You'll understand if you let me tell you everything,” he insists.

I stand there motionless for a long moment, chewing on my bottom lip. Samuel's expression is friendly, open, honest, apologetic. Exactly the same as it had been on the cliff top three years ago. He's thinner now, and there are dark circles under his eyes.

I could take him, if I had to. If it comes down to fight, I know I could win.

“Okay,” I finally concede. “I'll let you talk. But you only have a few minutes. There's almost certainly someone coming to find me right now.”

“It'll only take a few minutes,” Samuel replies with obvious relief. He goes over the the table and sits down, gesturing for me to take the seat opposite him.

It feels wrong to sit down at a little cafe table with the man who tried to kidnap me, and did kidnap Felix, but what else can I do? I sit, but I lean back in the chair to put as much distance as possible between him and me, and I cross my arms over my chest.

“All right then. Out with it. What do you know about my father? How do you know about my father? How do you know I even give a fuck who my father is? Why do you care if I know anything about my father?”

Samuel leans forward, putting his elbows on the table, so he can drop his voice low enough that only I can hear him. When he speaks, his words come quick, and his tone is serious. “Twenty-two years ago, a magician named Sarah Connolly, only seventeen years old, ran away from home with her boyfriend. Her parents didn’t like the boy, they thought he was trouble, and they didn’t want her associating herself with him. Well, you know how teenagers are, especially when they're in love. Sarah and her boyfriend dropped out of school and left the state, coming here to California. They weren't stupid, and they made sure to either bring or throw out everything they owned, to make it impossible for them to be tracked. They didn't want to be found, they just wanted to be together.

“Well, it turns out her parents were right, and the boy was trouble. He got rough with her, pushed her around. She had no friends nearby, and was too humiliated to go back to her family, but she found the strength to leave, even though she was barely able to scrape by on her own, and spent most nights living out of her car.

“There may not be many of us, but magicians have a tendency to find each other, even in the days before smart phones and the internet. She met a boy, young and full of himself and completely enamored by the pretty girl with the big, dark eyes. He just wanted to take her away from it all, to save her from overbearing parents and cruel ex-boyfriends and sleeping in the back of cramped cars in empty parking lots. They fell madly in love with the speed and intensity that only teenagers can, and they became each other’s whole worlds. He would have done anything for her, and she, him. Then, they discovered that she was pregnant.

“They were thrilled by the news. It wouldn’t be easy. She was a drop out, and he was working a minimum wage job as a mechanic. They had no money to their names, and their apartment was too small and in a rough part of town, but they were going to be a real family.

“They didn’t dare get married officially. She was afraid of her parents being able to find her if there was a record of her real name anywhere, and he had his own reasons for wanting to his paper trail as small as possible. But they held a symbolic ceremony in the park, inviting only a few of their closest friends.

“They decided on a name for the baby: Adam. Adam was the first man, the beginning, the father of all the potential the human race possessed. And that was what they hoped for their son, that he would be a new beginning for them, and be a symbol of all the potential greatness their lives could be.”

Samuel's face suddenly twists into a grimace. “But the boy had a secret. When Sarah met him, he had gotten himself involved with a crowd that was making waves in the world of magicians. They didn’t like the way they were forced to live, in constant fear of being discovered by mundanes and turned into laboratory animals or unwilling weapons of war. They didn’t like that the Council had to answer to no one; that their word was law for all magicians; that they had no limits to their terms of office; that they were made up of a few rich, inbred bastards who had no idea what it was like to be a real human being struggling to live between two worlds.

“The boy was young and idealistic, and he threw himself into this movement heart and soul. Sarah had an idea of what he was doing and what he believed in, but she didn’t really understand. It was just a few, incoherent groups of dissenters back then, no real structure or organization. She was too busy being worried about the family she was starting to bother worrying about the condition of all magickind as well.

“And then, when Sarah was only a few weeks away from her due date, the boy did something very stupid. He had more passion then sense, and when told that actions speak louder than words, he mistook ‘violence’ for ‘action’. He and several of his close friends, all members of this group of would-be-revolutionaries, planted an explosive device at a prison where several magicians were incarcerated for mundane crimes. It was an act of protest, one directed at the Council to express the inhumanity of stripping these magicians of their wands after their arrest and allowing them to be treated like chattel by the mundanes.

“But they were young and foolish and the bomb was easily traced back to them. The Council got involved, they all had their wands taken from them, and then they were turned over to the mundane authorities.

“Sarah couldn’t believe what he had done. She had had no idea the lengths to which he had been prepared to go; and discovering that he was willing to risk throwing away his freedom, without regards for her or their unborn child, made her see him in a whole new light—and not a flattering one. She was appalled, and heart broken, and now she was utterly alone.

“He was sentenced to ten years in prison, and ten years is a lifetime when you’re only eighteen. Ten years. That's all he could think about, that he would be in prison when his son was born, and that he wouldn't get to see the boy until he was ten years old.

“Sarah didn't come to visit him in prison. She didn't even come to hearing, or the sentencing. She was humiliated and ashamed by him. He broke her heart, and he never saw her again.

“He still had hope that he would be able to make it up to her, however. Desperate to see her again and make up for his mistakes, he was a model prisoner, and got out on parole in four years. He searched for Sarah and his boy, but he never found them. He never found them.

“Until... until many, many years later, when the entire magical world started talking about a teenage boy who had turned up out of the blue with wild magic; a boy that was the right age, and had the right name. When the boyfriend heard about the boy, he suspected the truth. And then, when he saw him for the first time, and saw how much he looked like his mother, like Sarah... he knew without a shadow of a doubt. But unfortunately, by then, the boyfriend, Adam's father, wasn't in a position to step up and claim his son. He had turned his back on violence, but was more committed than ever to seeing the corrupt government of the magical world overthrown and rebuilt in a form that benefited all magicians. He helped bring cohesion to that disjointed group of rebels, and he emerged as one of the founders of the Magician’s Revolution Front. He had devoted his life to fighting for what he believed in, but he was left unable to show his face to his own son.

“But then, when Adam's future was in jeopardy and the MRF needed to send someone to convince him to support their cause before it was too late, his father jumped at the chance. The chance to finally meet Adam face to face, to see his son, and to maybe even work with him in an attempt to better the magical world.”

Samuel leans back in his chair, watching me closely. “It didn't quite work out how I had been hoping it would. Still, I don't regret finally getting to meet you, Adam. You were very brave, and I still feel very proud of how you handled yourself in a very difficult situation.”