her shoe.
But this one swallowed him clear up to his neck.
“Bacchus!” she cried, finding her feet and rushing toward him. He might as well have been trapped in a mountain! She ran her hands over its uneven bumps, searching for the rune.
Bacchus grunted, trying to move, but he was pinned completely, his limbs immobile within his close-fitting prison. “Bloody . . . ,” he began, but didn’t finish whatever foul thing sat on his tongue. “He’s getting away!”
Elsie spied the slimmest glimmer in a crack. Her skeleton seemed to puddle inside her. “I found it, but it’s on the other side of the rock. Your side.” She tried to push her fingers through, cutting them as she did, but she couldn’t chip the cement. Stepping back, she wedged the crowbar in. It chipped away at the cement a little more, but it wasn’t hard enough to break the stone. Elsie put her weight on it, but it seemed the crowbar would break before the concrete mound did. Panicked breaths tore up and down her throat. “Maybe I-I can find something else. A hammer—”
“Elsie, leave me. Go.”
She shook her head. “I’ll get you out—”
“You’ll lose him!” he barked. “Go!”
“Can’t you melt it?” Desperation squeezed her voice out an octave higher than usual.
Bacchus shook his head, though he was barely able to do so. “This is stone. Do you know what the liquid version of stone is? And it’s too large to shift to gas. I’ll kill myself and you.”
Her breaths became rapid. “Can you try to change just a little of it? If I can get through—”
“Go, Elsie, before it’s too late!”
“I don’t leave people!” she snapped, hands fisted against the bespelled mound. She panted, seeing red, feeling as cold as Bacchus’s aspected ice.
Bacchus hesitated only a moment. “No, you don’t.”
Swallowing, she glanced up at him.
“Elsie.” His voice was firm yet somehow melodious, his Bajan accent slipping through. In the moonlight streaming from the open door, his eyes glowed. “You’re the one who can stop him. Who can get past his spells. He might listen to you. You need to go now, or you’ll lose his trail, and this will all be for nothing. I believe in you.”
“But—”
“I’ll know you’ll come back.” His eyes were intent, bright as emeralds. “Elsie, please. Go.”
She held his gaze for a heartbeat, cradling her injured fingers against her breast. He was right. She needed to go. But she could only undo spells, not create them. She was armed, somewhat, and after what had happened with Nash . . . she might be able to get past Ogden’s spells if she focused. But what if she couldn’t? She’d die, and Bacchus would be trapped here until a worker found him . . .
Her own possible demise flashed across her mind. Was she ready to die to stop Ogden?
It was what Robin Hood would do.
She started for the door. Paused. Glanced back to Bacchus.
She rushed toward him and, stepping onto one of the crags of his cement cage, lifted her face to his and kissed him on the cheek. His half beard was rough and startling against her jaw. Her nerves sparked, but it was done.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and without a second glance, she bolted out the door and across the dock.
Her employer might be able to slow her down, but in doing so, he left a clear path.
Follow the runes, find Ogden.
CHAPTER 24
There was something oddly familiar about the spells she chased, but Elsie couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
She disarmed an enormous weed that shot up through cracks in the concrete, grown with a temporal spell. Removed, albeit with shaking hands, a rational spell on a warehouse wall that created the illusion of a giant spider. Leapt over a gap a physical spell had created in the boards of the bridge. Disenchanted another that had fused several boards together to create a wall.
There were no dockworkers or security seeking out the cause of the noise, which worried her. Was St. Katharine’s so empty at night, or had Ogden already . . . eliminated them?
Before she followed the trail into the next warehouse, an owl swooped down at her at a strange angle from the direction of the river, and Elsie shrieked despite her need to be undetected. She wouldn’t be able to remove the spiritual spell driving the animal to attack her, so she bolted for the door and slammed it shut behind her, crowbar squeezed in her clammy right hand. The bird’s