Bell’s cabal got its hooks in him, when he was a chemistry major looking forward to a career as a researcher. Before he’d been tortured to death by a blood mage and ended up as a ghost because Bell had wanted him bound to a powerful mage, and before angels had decided I needed a companion and protector. He hadn’t had much control over any aspect of his life—or death—for a very long time. I knew from personal experience exactly how much that sucked. And he hadn’t been able to touch anyone for comfort.
Before I knew what I was doing, I hugged him. He was cold, but I didn’t care.
He hugged me back. When we let go, his smile was a little crooked. “I warned you last night not to get sappy on me,” he reminded me. “All this lovey-dovey huggy stuff…I kinda miss the angry, rude Alice I used to know.”
I surreptitiously wiped my eyes and sat cross-legged in the center of the tracking spell with the obsidian rock in front of me. “Really?”
“You’re all soft and squishy now. Hard to believe you’re the same person who threatened to have me exorcised.”
“Yeah, well, call me squishy again and see what happens.” I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths, inhaling through my nose and exhaling through my mouth.
When my mind was clear, I picked up the stone and drew on the trace of the scroll’s magic it contained. The tracking spell on the cloth shimmered on the edge of my senses, waiting to be unleashed.
I inhaled, exhaled, and grabbed the tracking spell with my mind. “Adinvenire.”
Magic flared. The spell should have shown me a vision of where the scroll was. Instead, a blast of power sent me flying as the tracking spell splintered. One moment I was sitting in the middle of the cloth I’d brought, and the next I was crumpled against the wall on the far side of the room, with my ears ringing and nose filled with the smell of smoke and dark magic. My chest hurt like I’d been kicked by a mule.
For a moment, I thought Valas had somehow booby-trapped the magic in the stone, though that didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense if she needed that scroll found. What did make sense was my magic, or even the spellwork I knew, wasn’t going to work here in the Broken World—at least, not like it did back home. The tracking spell had failed and released its energy the only way it could. I was lucky I hadn’t been knocked out—or worse.
“Alice!” Malcolm shook my shoulder. I’d already forgotten he could do that now. “Wake up! Your wolf’s out!”
My eyes snapped open.
My wolf stood about ten feet away, in what I was starting to think of as her furry, real-wolf form. She must have jumped out of me when the spellwork fractured. Like Malcolm, she looked pretty damn solid. No wonder my chest hurt.
She sniffed the ground and air, then bared her teeth and growled.
“I know it smells weird.” I sat up with a groan. Everything that didn’t already hurt from the journey now ached from hitting the wall. “You can’t be running around on your own here. We’re strangers in a strange land. You need to go back where you were.”
She growled again and resumed sniffing her way around the room. Blast it—the last thing I needed right now was a stubborn wolf refusing to return to my body.
Malcolm watched both of us nervously as I staggered to my feet and leaned against the wall. Nothing was broken, I decided after checking my arms and legs, but I would be completely black-and-blue by morning. I missed Sean’s soaker tub so much in that moment I almost cried.
The cloth with the tracking spell was gone, blown to smithereens by the blast, which had also scoured the stone floor clean of all dirt and debris. The obsidian stone had probably met the same fate, or was permanently lost in the ruins around us.
I rubbed my face. “Son of a bitch. Without the stone, and without a tracking spell, how are we supposed to find the scroll? Mariela’s got a massive head start on us. She could be anywhere.”
“We’ll have to study the magic here and develop a new tracking spell, or find one we can use. You’ve still got the bag the stone was in. It’ll have some trace—for a while, at least.” Malcolm frowned. “Hey, what’s she doing?”
My wolf disappeared into