Persie Merlin and the Witch Hunters - Bella Forrest Page 0,64

them for help in a more mature way, and perhaps that showed them that I understood my own limitations. That I was an adult.

“Then… I think you might’ve just given us a lead.” Mom smiled, the tension in her face slackening. “We’ll be careful what we say and who we say it to, but this might be gold, Persie.”

Dad gave her a squeeze. “If you’re right about this link, I’ll slap a medal on you.”

I laughed. “Just don’t tell Victoria I told you about the witch hunters, and that’ll be enough for me.” I propped my chin on my hands and grinned at my parents. “Right, I have to go now. I won’t promise I’ll call more often, because I’m hopeless at remembering, but I’ll try my best to text more.”

“We’ll take that,” Mom replied. “And don’t worry, your secret is safe with us.”

“I love you so much.” I felt a weight slough away. My parents had some new information for their case, Victoria had listened to me, the kidnapping would stay on a need-to-know basis, and Victoria wouldn’t find out who’d told my parents about the witch hunters. As far as victories went, I was going to chalk this conversation up as one. My parents were the masters of stealth; if they’d promised to keep things on the down-low, I believed them.

Mom touched her fingers to her lips and pressed them to the camera. “We love you too, sweetheart.”

“And we miss you, so you’d better text.” Dad blew a kiss of his own, which I pretended to catch.

“Talk soon.” With that, I ended the call. Mom hated being the one to end it, and I didn’t want to get caught in an endless cycle of “goodbye, bye, bye, I love you, bye, yep, goodbye, I’m really going now… yep, bye, bye, bye.” Especially considering that my eyelids had gotten heavy all of a sudden, and my weary bones craved the snuggly embrace of my bed.

Leaving the phone where it was, I peeled myself off my desk chair and padded over to the bed. I collapsed in a heap, dragging the covers over me and pulling Thread Bear in for a hug—the one I wished I could give my parents. When I closed my eyes, sleep hit me like an 18-wheeler, melting away the real world and leaving behind a universe of dreams.

And there, still, in the center of that ensuing darkness… a pair of burning red eyes.

Eighteen

Nathan

I walked along the cliff path, keeping a weather eye to the rainclouds gathering on the horizon. It had been several days since the kidnapping, and my near-kiss with Genie, but both the culprit and the opportunity to get close to Genie again had proven decisively elusive. Summer had presented its glorious swansong, bringing with it a relentless heat and clear skies for the last three days. Now, a storm was threatening to break, attempting to relieve the tension in the air. If only the tension between Genie and me could be resolved with a downpour.

With the investigation into the kidnapper running dry, I had decided to take matters into my own hands. In a small footnote of a tome I’d paged through dozens of times, I read that a Fear Dearg left traces of dread in the atmosphere, which could linger for days after the creature had moved on. In essence, we were dealing with a Fear Dearg, even if it had an unprecedented ability to turn into a man, and vice versa.

“Please work,” I murmured as I plucked two items out of my pocket: my trusty specterglass and a second circular piece of bluish-tinted glass. Naomi had referred to this blue-tinted glass as a Pelios Lens. With Pelios being the God of Emotions, I supposed that made a great deal of sense, considering that was what the lens detected—the visible auras of emotion. I’d had to beg the lens off her, under strict instructions to bring it back in one piece, as she was using it in one of her experimental contraptions. She’d explained it to me at her usual breakneck pace, and I’d gotten the gist of it—she hoped to build a device that could concentrate human emotions and reflect them back at Purge beasts. Essentially, this would subdue them prior to capture. It appeared she’d forgotten that, during captures, hunters were often scared or panicked or running on pure adrenaline. But I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her it wouldn’t work. I’d been proven wrong many