What do you do when the person you’re supposed to save is your own brother?
In Jack Mac Paidin and The Missing Sister, Book Five of the Jack Mac Paidin fantasy series, fourteen-year-old Jack faces his most dangerous challenge yet: his older brother Ethan is one ritual away from becoming a demon prince—and Jack has to stop the transformation without losing his brother in the process.
Before you read the full chapter excerpt below, Jack would like to explain the situation himself.
Fair warning: he’s had a rough few weeks.
—
A Word From Jack Mac Paidin
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.
READ AN EXCERPT FROM JACK MAC PAIDIN AND THE MISSING SISTER
Chapter Two
THE FALLEN ANGEL
THE CATACOMBS BENEATH ROME, ITALY — PRESENT DAY
The air was thick with moisture and the smell of ancient stone, and Jack’s arms were shaking by the time he pushed himself up from the hard limestone floor for what felt like the thousandth time that morning.
“Again,” Samael’s voice echoed through the chamber, calm and patient as it always was.
Jack groaned but dropped back into position, palms flat against the cold floor.
Up. Down.
Up. Down.
His muscles had been lodging complaints since the second set, and he’d learned quickly enough that voicing those complaints didn’t change anything. Samael simply waited, those ancient eyes watching without judgment or impatience, until Jack either finished the exercise or his body made the decision for him.
This time he made it to fifty before his arms gave out and he face-planted onto the stone.
“Better,” Samael said, with the faint suggestion of approval in his tone. “You lasted twelve seconds longer than yesterday.”
Jack rolled onto his back, chest heaving, and stared up at the vaulted ceiling of the underground chamber.
Candlelight moved across the ancient stone walls, sliding over frescoes and carved markings he’d spent enough hours studying that they’d started to feel like wallpaper in a room you stop really seeing. He’d been down here long enough that the candles on the altar had begun to feel like the only natural light in the world.
Somewhere above him, Rome was going about its ordinary business—traffic, tourists, afternoon sun beating down on cobblestones.
The thought of it felt almost fictional.
Samael moved into his line of sight, those huge gray and white wings trailing softly across the floor as he crouched beside Jack. If the candlelight hit him at the right angle, Jack could see the faint outline of the stone wall through his shoulder.
Jack had stopped finding that unsettling sometime around day three.
There were enough other things to be unsettled about.
“Rest for a moment,” Samael said, handing him a ceramic cup filled with cool water. “Then we move to the next phase.”
Jack drank gratefully, the water cutting through the dryness in his throat.
“Let me guess,” he panted. “More impossible exercises that might actually kill me?”
“Physical conditioning is only one aspect of what you need.”
Samael settled onto the stone floor beside him with an ease Jack still found slightly ridiculous considering the size of those wings.
“Your body must become stronger. Faster. More difficult to overwhelm.”
Jack lowered the cup. “That’s comforting.”
“It wasn’t intended to be.”
Jack snorted.
He sat up slowly, every muscle registering its objection, and looked down at his hands. They were scraped and bruised now, dirt under the fingernails, the knuckles roughened in a way they’d never been when the most physically demanding thing in his life was lugging boxes around Flanagan’s Hobby Shop.
Just days ago, those same hands had been gripping a flashlight in the dark, pushing through overgrowth toward the shimmering portal in the woods at Mac Paidin Manor, absolutely convinced that he and Bart were going to walk into Blarjord, find Ethan, and bring him home.
It had seemed like a plan at the time.
A stupid plan, apparently.
But still a plan.
A Battle Is Coming
“You keep saying there’s a battle coming,” Jack said.
Samael looked at him.
“Like that’s supposed to make everything simple.” Jack turned the cup slowly between his hands.
“It’s not. You’re training me to fight my own brother.”
“I am.”
“And Bart is still stuck in that picture from the past. And Sadie—”
He stopped.
Sadie led immediately to the pink light on the locator globe. Somewhere in San Diego, his little sister’s powers had finally awakened, and she probably had absolutely no idea what was happening to the rest of them.
“She doesn’t know any of this is coming,” he finished.
“No,” Samael said. “She doesn’t.”
Jack stared down into the empty cup.
“I don’t want to fight Ethan.”
“I know.”
“He’s my brother.”
“I know that, too.”
Jack looked up sharply. “Then why do you keep talking like this is just something I’m supposed to accept?”
Samael’s expression didn’t change.
“Because whether you accept it has no bearing on whether it comes.”
Jack pressed his mouth into a hard line.
Typical Samael.
“You saw your brother in Blarjord,” the fallen angel continued. “You saw what he has chosen so far. You saw the power gathering around him.”
“I also saw everything Inez and Valdis have been feeding him.”
“Yes.”
“And I know what Inez has been telling him about Grandpa. About me. About our family. She’s been doing it for years.”
“Yes.”
Jack frowned. “You keep agreeing with me like that’s helping.”
“It isn’t meant to help.”
“Of course it isn’t.”
For the briefest moment, something almost amused moved across Samael’s face.
Then it was gone.
“Ethan has been manipulated,” he said. “He has also made choices. Both things can be true.”
Jack went still.
Samael let the words sit there.
“That distinction matters,” he continued. “If you decide every action your brother takes belongs to someone else, you underestimate him. If you decide everything he has become is entirely his own doing, you misunderstand what has been done to him.”
Jack looked away.
That was the part he hated.
It would have been easier if Ethan were just evil now.
Easier if Jack could look at him and see some completely different person wearing his brother’s face.
But that wasn’t what he’d seen in Blarjord.
He’d seen Ethan.
Older – yes. Definitely angrier, and harder even. His beautiful sapphire-blue eyes going so flat and dark they didn’t catch the light anymore. They just swallowed it.
That was the most disturbing part of all
But still underneath all of it, he was still Ethan.
Still his big brother.
“He looked at me like I was the enemy,” Jack said quietly.
“You are standing between him and something he wants.”
Jack looked back at Samael.
“Right now,” Samael continued, “that may be enough for him to treat you like one.”
“You’re really bad at pep talks.”
“I am not attempting a pep talk.”
“No kidding.”
Samael rose smoothly to his feet.
Jack watched those enormous wings settle behind him.
“When I first told you that Ethan was completing the rituals,” Samael said, “you immediately asked how to stop him.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t ask whether you could defeat him.”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t want to defeat him.”
“Good.”
That surprised him.
Jack frowned. “Good?”
“Wanting to destroy your brother would make this training considerably easier.”
“Okay…”
“It would also make you considerably more dangerous.”
Jack stared at him.
Samael stepped closer.
Strong Enough to Save Him
“You are learning how to fight because you may have no choice but to stand against Ethan. That does not require you to hate him. It does not require you to stop loving him.”
He paused.
“It requires you to be strong enough that your love for him does not make you helpless.”
Something in Jack’s chest tightened.
That was different.
He looked down at his battered hands again.
Helpless.
That word he understood.
He’d spent enough of his life being helpless.
Helpless when Earl and Lizzie controlled where he went and what he knew.
Helpless when Inez took him.
Helpless when Ethan dragged him through that portal.
Helpless when people twice his size and hundreds of years older kept deciding things about his life before he even knew there was a decision to make.
He was getting pretty tired of it.
“So what happens if I can’t do it?” Jack asked.
Samael’s brows drew together slightly.
“Can’t fight him.”
“You can.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No,” Samael agreed. “It isn’t.”
Jack waited.
Samael was silent long enough that water dripping somewhere in the tunnels became the loudest sound in the chamber.
Finally, he said, “I don’t know what will happen.”
Jack blinked.
Samael almost never said that.
“The future is not written,” the angel continued. “Neither yours nor Ethan’s. I can prepare you for what is likely. I can teach you how demonic energy behaves, how to resist it, how to defend yourself and others when it is directed against you. I can teach you how to survive long enough to make your own choices.”
He looked directly at Jack.
“But I cannot tell you what your brother will choose when you next stand before him.”
Jack swallowed.
That sounded considerably more honest than reassurance would have.
Samael turned toward the center of the chamber.
“Come.”
Jack groaned. “I knew the resting part was too good to last.”
“Physical strength is only the beginning.”
Jack pushed himself upright, his legs immediately protesting.
“So what’s next?”
Samael faced him.
For a moment the candlelight caught his features in a way that made him look both beautiful and terrible at once—ancient in a way that had nothing to do with wrinkles or years and everything to do with what those eyes had witnessed.
Learning to Fight Demons
“I am going to teach you how to fight demons.”
A chill moved down Jack’s spine.
“Actual demons?”
Samael stared at him.
“Just checking.”
“Your brother is one ritual away from completing his transformation,” Samael said. “If that ritual is completed, the power available to him will exceed anything you have faced so far.”
Jack’s stomach tightened.
“You need to understand dark energy before it reaches that point. Not as an idea. You need to know what it feels like when it is directed at you. How it moves. How it searches for weakness. How to hold your ground when every part of your body is telling you to run.”
He began pacing slowly across the chamber.
“And you must learn to defend yourself against something that may be wearing a familiar face.”
Jack looked at him.
Samael stopped.
“That will be the hardest part.”
Jack didn’t argue.
Because that much, at least, he already knew.
“There is something else,” Samael said.
Jack waited.
“When I carried you here from Blarjord, you were unconscious.”
Jack nodded.
“You spoke several times during the journey.”
His eyebrows pulled together. “What did I say?”
“You called for Ethan.”
Jack went still.
“More than once,” Samael continued. “You were trying to warn him.”
Jack fixed his eyes on the altar candles.
The flames blurred slightly before he blinked them clear.
Samael didn’t say anything for a moment.
Then:
“Remember that.”
Jack looked up.
“Why?”
“Because Valdis will teach you that strength means domination. That mercy is weakness. That affection makes you vulnerable.”
His expression hardened.
“She’s wrong.”
There was no grand pronouncement behind it. No ancient riddle.
Just fact.
“Your concern for Ethan is part of who you are. Keep it. But do not confuse loving someone with allowing them to destroy you.”
Jack breathed in slowly.
That landed somewhere deep.
He thought about Ethan, with that guarded look his brother’s face always wore now. And Bart, still stuck in the past in the smoke and the screaming of that Orc village, with no idea if anyone was even looking for him. And Sadie, a sister he’d never actually met, waking up in San Diego with absolutely no clue what her life was about to become. And Grandpa Edward, who kept apologizing for things that weren’t entirely his fault. Grandma Lydia, who’d looked at him in Bunko’s ship cabin like she was memorizing his face in case she didn’t get another chance. Bill, probably wearing a groove into Ninian’s cottage floor right now, worried sick about a son he couldn’t help.
All the people somehow scattered across worlds and centuries and impossible situations because this family apparently couldn’t do anything the easy way.
“So,” Jack said, flexing his sore fingers. “How exactly do you teach someone to fight demons?”
Samael stepped back and gestured toward the center of the chamber.
“Show me what you’ve learned.”
Jack looked at the open stretch of stone.
Then at Samael.
Then back at the stone.
He was exhausted.
He was scared.
And he still had no idea what would happen the next time he saw Ethan.
But for the first time since waking beneath Rome, that uncertainty didn’t make him feel quite so small.
Jack crossed the chamber.
He let everything come with him—the fear for Bart, the questions about Sadie, the anger at Inez and Valdis, and the awful weight of knowing that his big brother was becoming something Jack might actually have to stand against.
He didn’t push any of it away.
He planted his feet.
Raised his hands.
And fell into the fighting stance Samael had been drilling into him for days.
“Again?” Jack asked.
Samael inclined his head.
“Again.”
This time, Jack was ready.
Ready to Keep Reading?
Jack’s fight to save Ethan is only one piece of the story.
In Jack Mac Paidin and The Missing Sister, Jack is racing against the darkness consuming his older brother while another piece of the Mac Paidin family mystery is finally coming into focus: their missing sister, Sadie.
Continue the adventure in Jack Mac Paidin and The Missing Sister, Book Five of the Jack Mac Paidin series.
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Thank you for reading—and for following Jack, Ethan, Sadie, and the rest of the Mac Paidin family on this increasingly strange adventure.
— Tracy