Cade

Cade is Ava’s guardian, the man who raised and trained her, and the closest thing she has to a father. Though they are not related by blood, he and Ava understand themselves as family; his love for her mother, Lilia, and his lasting friendship with Duncan are part of the same chosen-family bond. Cade’s care is rarely abstract: it takes the form of lessons, meals, fireproof walls, and a home made safer for a girl whose power can set it alight.

Identity and Background

Cade was Lilia’s childhood sweetheart and, in Ava’s view, the great love of her life. Their relationship had endured beyond youthful romance into a deep attachment that Ava regards as defining: her mother’s look at Cade made clear to her that he was Lilia’s true heart. When Lilia died, Cade became Ava’s guardian. The state might have classified their relationship differently, but to Ava he was family in every way that mattered.

He is tall, blond, bespectacled, and generally cheerful, his blue eyes framed by thin gold wires. Ava sees them as opposites: she is average in height, brown-eyed, dark-haired, and often surly, while Cade’s appearance and good humor make a contrasting pair to hers. Their difference does not distance them. Ava loves him deeply, and an everyday greeting can become an affectionate one-armed hug.

Cade takes the parental role seriously, turning ordinary activities into opportunities to teach. Maple-sugaring season is one example: the work is a family routine, but it is also part of his effort to train Ava’s Firebug abilities. He does not treat her supernatural nature as a reason to leave her unprepared; he includes it in the practical education of daily life.

A Home Built Around Ava

When Ava moved in, Cade offered her the bedroom downstairs because he believed a teenage girl should have private space. Ava refused and chose the small loft above the den instead. It had room for a mattress and box spring, a nightstand, and a modest dresser. The loft was not much, but it was hers; having a space of her own was new enough that she sometimes touched the wall to reassure herself it was real.

Making the cabin safe for Ava required considerable work. The walls were treated with fire-retardant sealer and paint, a sprinkler system was installed, and the household kept fifteen fire extinguishers. Cade checked them regularly and kept flammable supplies locked in a separate shed, from which Ava was forbidden to come within ten yards. The couches and mattresses received fire-resistant treatment as well, and the household bought the chemical in bulk. His precautions extended beyond the building: he had once required monthly fire drills.

Cade also paid for a Coterie-sanctioned witch to place wards on the cabin against fire. He would have preferred an independent practitioner, but no witch within three hundred miles would approach Ava without Venus’s approval. Because wards were expensive, the magic protected the house itself rather than all its contents; furniture and linens relied on chemical treatment, while Ava’s sheets had warded embroidery. These layers of mundane and magical protection show how Cade adapts a home around a danger he cannot simply ask Ava to stop being.

Duncan and the Family Cade Chose

Cade’s own childhood had not given him an easy model of family. He was distant from his parents, who disapproved of Lilia because they considered her parents disreputable. Their objection did not sever Cade’s bond with her: he ignored their prohibition on the friendship, and the two remained close. At sixteen, he packed a bag and left to live in his own car. After a week, Duncan found him camping in the woods and took him in; Cade stayed with Duncan until he could establish a home of his own.

His parents moved to Vermont shortly after he left. They still send him a card on his birthday and another at Christmas, but sign only their names. Cade’s response has become a family ritual of its own: he reads the card aloud, folds it into a paper airplane with ceremonial flourish, and Ava incinerates it mid-flight. The ritual gives a small, repeated shape to the distance between Cade and his parents—and turns that distance into something shared between him and Ava.

Duncan remains part of that chosen family. He visits after the cards arrive, bringing stout for Cade’s birthday or mulled cider and whiskey during the winter holidays, then sitting by the fire to whittle and tell Ava stories about Cade as a teenager. Ava considers Duncan the nearest thing she will have to a grandfather and holds tightly to him, partly because she has already lost her mother and never knew her father, and partly because Cade loves him. Their history also surfaces in ordinary exchanges: at maple sugaring, Cade trades some syrup for Duncan’s smelt and other catch from the water.

Work, Care, and Everyday Affection

Cade owns Broken Spines, the used bookshop where Ava and Sylvie work. He does not make much money from it, so he supplements the household’s resources by gardening, preserving food, and trading what they produce. Maple syrup is both practical income and a means of maintaining ties with Duncan. The cabin’s open-sided sugaring shack, with its roof, concrete floor, and central brick-lined fire pit, reflects the same unshowy approach: the work produces steam, so the structure is built for the task rather than for comfort or display.

Hospitality is another of Cade’s habits. When Lock, Ezra, and Duncan gather at the cabin, Cade serves coffee while Duncan brings Allen’s Coffee Brandy and Moxie. Cade declines the brandy in favor of coffee, and Ava’s teasing affection for him sits easily alongside the ordinary rituals of food, cards, and company. Such scenes establish that his guardianship is not only a response to danger. He and Ava share a domestic life whose repeated gestures—coffee, work, trading, teasing, and touch—make their bond tangible.

Warning, Absence, and Narrative Significance

When Ava later hears Cade’s voice on the phone, she is so relieved that she nearly cries. His concern quickly turns to the danger surrounding her encounter with Ryan at Heaven. Cade warns that Ava cannot know Ryan’s nature or motives simply from what Ryan has told her. He points out that drugs may have been readily available at the club and raises possibilities without claiming certainty: Ryan might have acted out of anger over Lock and Ezra, or under Venus’s orders. What matters most to him is the risk Ava faced while unconscious in a public bathroom, and the possibility that Lock’s intervention prevented her from being taken to Venus.

Cade’s warning is protective, not a definitive account of Ryan’s intentions; he explicitly recognizes that the group does not know what was planned. That caution makes his advice part of a wider pattern. He takes Ava’s vulnerability seriously even when she may not want to confront what could have happened, and he presses her to check on her friends as well as herself.

Later, at Duncan’s home, Ava realizes Cade is missing. She says he would have left a note if he had changed his plans, and Lock concludes that Cade probably never made it back to pack. The evidence establishes the unexplained absence but does not resolve what happened to him. Its force comes from what that absence threatens: Cade has been the guardian who made a home, trained Ava, and helped hold her chosen family together. The ordinary assurances he built around her now become the measure of how much is at stake when he is no longer there.