important, right?”
“No one expected this to escalate. Another case of allowing preconceived notions to color expectation.”
The bulk of the vehicle made parking fun, assuming we wanted to get out again without requiring a tow.
The SUV Clay had arrived in was nowhere in sight, which puzzled me, but there were other roads.
“Are you armed?” Asa reached into the console to retrieve his service weapon. “Or do you need to be?”
The modified Glock used ensorcelled rounds that blasted magical shrapnel throughout a target’s body.
“I’m good.” I patted the leather pouch. “I brought my own firepower.”
Interest sparked in his eyes before he slid out his door onto the grass. Interest in my magic. Not in me.
After giving his drink the stink eye, I joined him in the field and did a thing I rarely did these days.
I drew my wand.
The length of twisted wood resembled a crooked finger and had come from the magnolia tree that grew above my mother’s grave. Most wands required an emotional link to infuse the carved base with power.
For white witches, it was a familial element. For black witches, it was a link to an important death.
For me, it was both those things. I hadn’t traded wands when I changed disciplines. Mine covered both.
A steady thumping noise drew us deeper into the woods, where all suspicion Asa had ulterior motives in bringing me along vanished as we discovered the spot where the agent in charge of this retrieval lost her life.
Death didn’t bother me. I had caused too much of it to be squeamish. But this was a bad way to go.
The killing blow crushed the woman’s skull. The dryad had decided to smash her brain to jelly for funsies.
I squatted next to the body, as if there could be any doubt the woman was dead, and there it was…
A tingle along my senses that alerted me to the presence of power ripe for harvesting.
Her heart was intact, and like an addict jonesing for a hit, I salivated as I stared at her chest.
“Clay must be over there.”
On a breath that was part mercy and part desperation, I murmured a spell and touched the wand to her.
The body incinerated in a fever-bright rush of magic pulled straight from my core, leaving fine white dust that would scatter on the winds, lifting her soul to whatever afterlife she believed in.
And, most importantly, destroying her heart before I cheated on my diet.
A warm hand rested on my shoulder, and that touch made it easier to shake off my mood and rise.
“Thank you for that.” Asa made a gesture at his navel that reminded me of a Catholic signing the cross.
“We all deserve last rites.” Pitiful as they might be. “Let’s find Clay.”
Golem or not, Clay had his breaking point. We had to reach him before a rabbi was required for repairs.
A steady thump, thump, thump guided us straight to him, and the dryad.
The nature spirit had inhabited a rotting pecan tree, but that didn’t limit her reach. The roots had ripped from the earth, leaving them to slither across the dirt in search of anchors for when it swatted at a foe it was having trouble pulping.
Clay might not be fast, but he moved well, and he was tough.
“Need help?” I kept a safe distance from the tree. “Or is this a con job to get us to do the work for you?”
A turn of his head revealed the far side of his face. “Shish look like a con shob to you?”
Had he been anything other than golem, he would have been dead. The first blow might not have done it, but it would have put him on the ground, and that was the last place you wanted to be during a fight.
An inch to the left, and she would have destroyed his shem, leaving her with a clay statue to pummel.
From the corner of my eye, I spotted a black SUV up a tree and wondered if she smacked him with it.
“I can take her down,” Asa said from beside me, “but it won’t be pretty.”
“I haven’t done the white witch thing in the field,” I confessed with a twinge of embarrassment, because honesty with your partner, even a temporary one, kept you both alive that much longer. “I might need a helping hand once I expel the dryad from the tree.”
“I’m right here.” Hearing Asa say so shouldn’t have made a difference, but it did.
I didn’t trust Asa. To be fair, I didn’t know him. But I trusted