of me they were supposed to. My emotions needed some sorting, too. As much as I hated being manhandled, Carson had kept me from doing something really stupid.
Maguire scared the crap out of me. When I blinked, I could See the glow of his remnant debt stamped on the dark of my eyelids. A man with a conscience would buckle under that weight. Maguire had none, and that gave a concrete reality to his threats.
So what did I do? Threaten him back. It was insanely stupid, but it was the only defense I had left.
Laughter made me jump. The guard from the door and the two gorillas who’d escorted Carson and me were clustered around a smartphone, paying no attention to us at all.
“Play it again!” said the guard, and the goon with the phone tapped the screen. “Look at her go! Like a red-haired gazelle, that one.” I couldn’t see the video, but I could guess they were watching the farce of my escape attempt. Their cackles when I hit Carson and the groans of sympathy when I kneed him were a giveaway.
“Something funny, Murphy?” asked Carson. A rhetorical question, because clearly, it was hilarious.
The goon squad sobered, but Murphy, the guard from the door, didn’t bother to hide his grin, even when he said, “No, sir.” Then he gestured to a cloth-covered tray on a console table tucked against the wall. “Bertram brought this up for your guest.”
Lauren went over and lifted the napkin to reveal a toasted sandwich, an avalanche of potato chips, and a pickle spear. “Do gazelles eat turkey sandwiches?”
Not voluntarily, but I was running on four Cokes and a long-gone snack pack of pretzels from the plane. I snatched up the sandwich before she had a chance to do anything witchy to it. “You,” I said with as much dark venom as I could muster over my growling stomach, “are going to be so sorry.”
She took a handful of potato chips. “You know that thing about magic coming back on you three times is a myth, right?”
“Not where my family is concerned. If anything bad happens to me because of this, the Goodnights will bring the rain. So pack an umbrella.”
Carson grabbed the napkin and handed it to me. “Walk and eat. I want you to get a read on Alexis’s room, see if there are any clues.”
The thought of Alexis made the gourmet turkey and bread about as appetizing as a boot-leather-and-cardboard sandwich, but I wolfed it down anyway. It wasn’t bravado, it was biology. I needed food if I was going to be good for anything.
I followed the platinum cockscomb of Lauren’s spiked hair down another of the house’s hallways into another wing of the building. That made three. I’d lost track of the number of corridors.
Carson had fallen into step beside me. Not crowding, but within arm’s length. He wasn’t taking any chances.
“I don’t know where you think I’m going to go,” I said around a mouthful of sandwich. My aunts would be appalled. “I don’t think I could find my way out of here with a GPS and a team of Army Rangers.”
He shot me a sideways look, and I noticed the darkening bruise on his cheekbone, corresponding to the lump on my head. “I’m not going to underestimate you twice. You just threatened to shove Devlin Maguire into the afterlife.”
I shrugged to hide a shudder. “I was very angry.” I was still angry, which was unusual. Mostly it’s all explosion, no simmer with me, which I hate because I’ve known too many dead people not to have learned where hotheadedness gets you.
But as hunger receded, I still had a knot in my gut—the slow burn of outrage turning into a coiled spring of tension, telling me to move, act, swing for the bleachers.
Unless it wasn’t anger, but something else.
I slowed my steps, wondering what would happen. If I was just pissed, then nothing. But as soon as I started dragging my feet, my muscles tensed and my heart pounded and my chest tightened with term-paper-due-tomorrow tension.
I wasn’t just pissed. I was bound.
Son of a witch.
Whatever I knew, so did the geas. Turning away from Alexis’s room with no other plan would not find the missing girl. The spell gave my subconscious power over me, like OCD dialed up to eleven.
“What’s wrong?” asked Carson, with a sharpness I didn’t understand.
“Seriously?” Stopping to look at him wasn’t difficult. Clearly my subconscious knew the value of venting. “I am ensorcelled. Bound by