Heart of Vengeance (Alice Worth #6) - Lisa Edmonds Page 0,49
Keep an eye out, will you?”
“It’s pretty quiet. What am I watching for?”
“I don’t know. Anything weird, I guess.”
I unrolled the cloth and spread it out on the stone floor. To save time, I’d drawn the spellwork for the tracking spell on the cloth before I left. The cloth smelled like my home—and like Sean, who’d helped me cut the fabric and rolled it up for me when the spellwork was complete.
He’d hung out with me in the basement all afternoon, sitting on my work table while I decided what to bring, what to leave behind, and what I needed to prep ahead of the journey. We’d talked about a lot of things, most of them inconsequential, like movies we wanted to watch when I got back and painting a few rooms in the new house before moving in. Making plans for the future helped us both avoid thinking about the possibility I wouldn’t make it back.
I reached inside my jacket and wrapped my fist around my wolf amulet. I breathed in the parchment scent of Carly’s magic and smiled at the warm golden magic of Sean’s shifter trace. The sensations were bittersweet.
Sean would have sensed the moment I went through the mirror. I pictured him at home, sitting in the living room with a glass of whisky, or maybe lying in bed, when our connection vanished and he knew I was gone. It must have felt like a punch right in the gut, even though he’d known it was coming. My own stomach contracted thinking about the pain it would have caused him.
I should have told him where we were going, Valas and the entire Vampire Court be damned.
I tucked the amulet back under my shirt so it nestled reassuringly between my breasts and got back to work. From the velvet bag, I took a piece of obsidian and placed it in the center of the spellwork on the cloth.
“That’s the darkest magic I’ve ever sensed that wasn’t straight-up black magic,” Malcolm said, eyeing the stone. “The trace is strong. The stone must have been soaking up the scroll’s magic for a long time. Good thinking on Valas’s part to keep a stone with the scroll so if it ever went missing, we had some of its magic for a tracking spell.”
“Yeah, yay for Valas.” My voice was bitter. “She thinks of everything, all right.”
Malcolm crouched beside me. His new almost-human physical presence was going to take some getting used to. “Is there anything you need to tell me?”
Best to just say it and get it over with. “As I was stepping through the mirror, Valas told me if we don’t bring the scroll back, we aren’t coming back at all. The mirror will be locked to us without it.”
He stared at me, aghast. “That wasn’t the deal you made!”
“No, it wasn’t, which was why she waited until I couldn’t turn back to tell me.” I took off my jacket, wincing at the sizzle of pain in my injured shoulder. “We’re stuck here until we get that scroll from Mariela.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He whistled low. “When Sean finds out, he’ll kill her.”
“He might not get a chance.” I removed my shirt and used a couple of wet wipes to clean off the travel spellwork. I started to burn the wipes, then remembered the accidental flamethrower and thought better of it. Instead, I put them in a plastic bag and stuffed it into the backpack. “First things first: we have to find Mariela and the scroll.”
“How are you so calm?” Malcolm demanded. “Valas tricked us. If we don’t find the scroll, we’re trapped here forever.”
“I have to be calm, Malcolm.” My vision went red around the edges. Dark magic swirled between us. “If I let my anger get the better of me, I think the results would be very bad.”
He put his hand on my arm. I’d never felt his touch before, not like this. We’d been friends—siblings, almost—for months, and this was the first time we’d made real physical contact.
I was angry at Valas. So very, very angry. Burn-down-the-world angry. But when Malcolm touched my arm, my anger morphed into something that might be useful—something I could control.
Malcolm appeared shaken. “Wow, I didn’t realize how much I’d missed human contact until this moment.” He squeezed my arm. “Hi. You feel really warm.” He gave me an almost-boyish grin that made my heart ache.