“I don’t know,” I said. “But why not work together? Mallory wants the book, they both want the evil to be released, and there are more of us than there are of them. They both have magic, but so does Paige, and they couldn’t have known what kind of security would be waiting for them.”
I walked back to the front door and glanced outside, but there was no other sign anything was amiss. The farm looked like a farm at the edge of winter, waiting for snow to fall, and snow to clear, and seed to be planted again.
“The silo?” he asked.
I nodded. “Let’s go.”
We walked quietly to the field that held the missile silo, eyes peeled for any sign of them. As we neared it, the scents grew stronger, like a cookie factory had opened up shop down the road.
The concrete box looked the same as it had when we’d left it. The door was closed, and there weren’t any supernatural lights or sounds that suggested Tate and Mallory were throwing evil around.
Hope blossomed; maybe we weren’t too late.
“They’re here.”
We turned and found Todd behind us, a new patch of crimson on his shoulder.
“Are you all right?”
“I’ll heal,” he said. “They went in. I took an orb to the shoulder.”
“Paige?” I asked.
“Paige, the other witch, and the dark one.”
Tate, with his head of dark hair, must have been the dark one.
“While we were fighting Mallory,” Ethan said, “Tate was nabbing Paige and waiting for Mallory to finish us off.”
Maybe Paige had been right. With every action she took, Mallory was sliding closer to friendship in the past tense.
“Thank you for your diligence,” I told Todd. “And thank you for your help earlier.”
He nodded. “We are done with this fight for now. We’ll go to ground. We’ll regroup. It’s the way of our people.”
When he looked up again, he looked pissed. “End this tonight.”
“That’s our every intention,” Ethan promised, holding out a hand. “My apologies again for my behavior earlier. My comments were shortsighted and naive. We are better for having met you, and we are honored that we shared a field of battle.”
Todd hesitated for a moment, then took Ethan’s hand. “Good luck,” he said, then disappeared across the field. The night was quiet again, stars speeding by overhead.
“I’d feel a lot better if they were going down there with us,” I said.
It took Ethan long enough to answer that I looked over at him. His eyes were squeezed closed, his forehead pinched.
I put a hand on his arm. “Where is she?”
“Nearby,” he said, rubbing his temples. “I can feel her fretting. But this is different from earlier.”
“She’s probably preparing to use dark magic again—the real deal. Are you going to be okay?”
“I’ll be fine. Let’s get this over with.”
The snap in his voice convinced me not to push the issue. He was a big boy. If he wanted help from me, he could ask for it.
Carefully, swords drawn, we opened the door to the silo. It was dark even in comparison to the black night outside, and my eyes hadn’t yet adjusted. I walked carefully forward.
But not carefully enough.
“Stop!” Ethan called out, wrapping an arm around me before I vaulted into the darkness below.
The elevator was gone.
Ethan wrenched me back just as the momentum would have taken me over the edge. An uncontrolled fall into the depths wouldn’t have ended comfortably.
“Jesus,” Ethan said, settling me back from the edge, his hands shaking with nerves.
“I guess they took the lift,” I said, glancing down over the edge. “How are we going to get down there?”
“It’s thirty feet,” Ethan said. “I can jump it, but you don’t have the experience.”
“That’s not entirely true.”
Ethan slowly looked at me.
“While you were gone, I learned how to jump. Well, how to fall, anyway. Jonah taught me.”
“Ah” was all Ethan said. But he looked at me for a moment, an expression of mild curiosity on his face.
“He helped me while you were…gone,” I explained, not that he’d asked for an explanation.
“I’m not jealous, Sentinel.”
“Okay.”
“I have no need of jealousy.”
I was equally amused and aroused by the bravado. This was Ethan in the fast lane, hugging the curves instead of constantly riding the political brakes.
“Back to the point,” I recommended. “Whoever goes first could send the platform back up?”
“Too noisy. We’ll need to be quiet once we’re down there. Between them, they probably already know we’re on our way, but there’s no sense in announcing it.” He looked at me. “You’re sure you can