mind. Jessie had chosen a side yesterday, and she didn’t seem to feel any regret about not picking her current team leader. That spoke volumes.
It also spoke volumes that Austin Steele, on the brink of passing out, had sat beside Jessie until everyone else had returned from taking care of the intruder. He was in this, whether he wanted to admit it or not.
“Even if I did agree to join Jess’s council, the house gave the gargoyle the ability to grow her magic. He will not follow me until I make him, and he will not be at his best if I subdue him. He and I won’t work. It’s too late.”
“This is the problem with talking to men. The lot of you are so dense, I wonder how you get through without someone holdin’ yer hand.” She ran her hand down her face. “Ye already have a place in that house. He doesn’t. Ye already have the magic. He doesn’t. If you give in and sit in a council chair, there is no doubt in my mind that Ivy House will give you what you seek—what you should have been given in the first place.”
“Which is?”
“Have you not been present for this conversation? The ability to help her magic grow. Janey Mack, but I’m losing my patience.”
He shook his head slowly, the stubborn ox, and went back to looking at the water. Niamh checked her phone again. No new messages, but a strange feeling was bleeding through the magical link. Wariness and anticipation. Jessie was on the move, and Earl was with her. No telling who else. She was probably heading to the bar even though Niamh hadn’t responded. Time to go. She didn’t want Jessie to leave before she got there.
She stood, about to tell Austin Steele to think on things, when she noticed his head tilted to the side and a crease between his eyebrows, as though he were listening for a soft sound.
The truth dawned on her. She smiled.
“Ye know…Jessie thinks that if she cuts out her ability to feel her team through the magic,” Niamh said, “the link is severed. When she plugs her ears to us, so to speak, she doesn’t realize we can still feel her unless we also block the link.”
Austin Steele glanced up at Niamh, guilt in his eyes, before looking out over the lake again.
That was all the proof she needed.
“I’ve never corrected Jessie’s thinking on this,” she continued, “because I didn’t want her learning to block the magical connection entirely. Eventually she’ll figure it out, but now, when things are so precarious, we need to be able to keep tabs on her in case she gets in trouble. Don’t you agree?”
He didn’t comment, or look over again.
“She hasn’t been keeping tabs on any of us, out of respect for our privacy. Your privacy, over everyone else.” Niamh stepped a little closer, facing the lake to keep things light. “How strange, then, that you would be monitoring her.”
“I’m not monitoring anything. It’s just since the trouble started. I’m…”
“Worried about her. What’s going to happen when you move away? You won’t be able to block her because of that worry, but what if something happens? How do you think you’ll react if you feel that connection severed and know she died because you walked away?”
Muscles popped out along his frame, the air alive with power. Niamh’s warning sensors turned up a notch. Her feeling of Jessie clicked off.
She frowned and looked back toward the direction Jessie had been, searching for that feeling. Was it because she’d been talking about it that—
Austin Steele pushed to standing, suddenly on alert.
“Do you feel that?” he asked, his deep voice rough with menace and terror. “Did you do something?”
“I feel a lack of something, yes. But it wasn’t me. My giving ye a what if was not supposed to turn into a premonition.” Her phone chimed.
A text from Earl. Are you alive? You and Austin Steele aren’t on bar premises. If you’re alive, they took her. Four mages. Five tried, but I killed one and used her as a shield. The rest took Jessie and got out before Ulric could turn from stone to gargoyle and before Cedric could get his thumb out of his keister. They were incredibly effluence.
“Effluence?” she said out loud. “Autocorrect for efficient, maybe?”
A phone chimed in the cabin, Austin Steele already running for it.
Niamh pushed her sweats down and then tapped Earl’s name to call him.