Bewitched (Betwixt & Between #2) - Darynda Jones Page 0,76

but what did I know? I was stalling, trying to come up with a plan.

When he reached over to take them off, I looked at his watch. It read 9:57. Panic closed my throat. What happened at ten?

“And before you even think about trying anything”—he waved the gun at me—“your friend won’t survive the next ten minutes unless I want her to.”

That was a lie. She barely had three.

He stood back and waited, but I didn’t have time to do the same. I said a prayer to whoever would listen, looked at the once vibrant woman in the freezer, and touched her face with my fingertips, asking for her help, for her forgiveness, because I was about to steal whatever energy she had left.

“What’s she doing?” he asked Minerva.

She winced at the bark in his tone. “I don’t know. Her magics are different from mine.”

He looked between his late wife and me. “Why isn’t anything happening?”

“Because she’s frozen,” I lied. “It’ll take time.”

He grabbed my throat, his fingers digging into my jaw, and yanked me closer, until we stood nose-to-nose. “You lie to me, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”

“I’m well aware of that, Mr. Vogel,” I ground out. “I just needed you to touch me.”

“What?” He squeezed harder.

My jaw popped, and pain shot through from the roots of my teeth to the tips of my fingers. I worried he was going to break it, but I’d needed him to touch me. I’d needed my skin to come into contact with his for the magic to seep out of me and into him.

His eyes rounded when he felt the magics begin to consume him, and his mouth slowly opened in disbelief. He pulled back, his fingers twisted and frozen in place. They turned a grayish blue as he looked on. He grabbed his wrist and watched in horror as crystals formed on his fingertips and spread through his hand and forearm. “What’s . . . happening?”

“I thought it only appropriate you freeze to death, Mr. Vogel, since your wife was still alive when you put her in here.”

“You . . . you bitch.”

“She sends her regards.”

As ice crystals slowly spread through his body, freezing him from the inside out, I drew the reveal spell on the air. I felt her instantly. Annette. But the terror coursing through her veins fought against the magics. Created a barrier. Made it difficult to pinpoint her location.

Minerva stumbled back as her uncle stiffened before her eyes, crystals sliding up his neck and over his jaw. His gaze darted around wildly, like a cornered animal looking for an escape.

“Minerva.” My own fear made me lose concentration over and over. I squeezed my eyes shut and searched. “Do you have any idea where she would be?”

I heard her whisper, “I’m sorry.”

But I saw something then. Annette buried under uniformly laid boards.

She’d managed to get her blindfold off as she struggled against the nylon ropes tying her hands behind her back, screaming through the gag, her throat raw. She wrestled the rope until her wrists bled.

But this was more than just being bound and gagged. Sheer hysteria had consumed her. Once again, something to do with ten o’clock.

I pulled back on the visual, widening the frame.

She could see through the slats in the floor. A single board missing on her right and a small opening overhead allowed a line of sunlight to cut across her face.

I pulled back even farther and scanned the building for a location, an address to give the chief. And then I saw it. Exactly where she was.

Vogel had put her in a crawlspace of the old printing factory. A factory set to be demolished at ten a.m. And her time had just run out.

An explosion thundered around her. And then another. And another. A daisy chain of perfectly timed devices designed to go off in a precise sequence to control the fall of the building.

Birds flew out broken windows overheard as the building began to crumble. Smoke and dust billowed out of them. The birds were swallowed by it but they burst out of the ash and scattered before the windows, too, fell to Earth. And, in that instant, Annette stopped.

She stopped struggling.

She stopped screaming.

She stopped crying.

A calmness washed over her, and she let her lids drift shut, knowing she was going to die.

Every cell in my body flooded with adrenaline. The magics surged through me so sharp and so fast, I didn’t have time to think. I drew