by Cassi Carver
“I think you’re right about that.”
“The book may have been a dead end, but this place is teeming with magic. I can feel it. I know Claudius is hiding something.”
Jaxon leaned a hip against the bookshelf. “That very well may be, but I’m hoping you’ll see the logic in our walking back if you can’t find the spell book by tonight.”
“Walk? Are you serious? Do you remember how long it took to get here?”
“I can carry you, or you can ride on my back. If we’d started last night, we’d have been home by now.”
“It’s not just about getting back now. I want to understand what’s going on here. I need to know why every trace of my family is gone, and why the cabin where I had so many good memories is wiped out.”
“It seems simple enough to me—your uncle is a selfish, scheming bastard. Staying here longer won’t help you make sense of that.”
“Don’t you see? This was it, Jaxon. With my house destroyed in the fire, this was last place I could go to remember my parents. I needed to come to my crappy little cabin and smell the musty scent of old carpet and see faded pictures hanging on the walls. I wanted to stand at the same oven and remember my mother pulling out burnt cookies—crispy around the edges with soggy little centers. Claudius took that from me—damn him. And to the extent that I can, I’m going to take it back.”
With her jaw set, Abbey turned her attention back to the desk. She’d gone through the desk drawers before, but now she took her time, envisioning her uncle sitting here, plotting and planning how he was going to keep his precious spell books safe.
“Anything?” Jaxon asked after a while.
“No. Claude is a neat freak. Not a scrap of trash or even a gum wrapper. All this drawer has is an old grocery list.” She scanned the lines. It listed many of the things they’d already seen in the cupboards. “Groceries: Thirteen waters. Two shakers of salt. Twenty-eight pounds of sugar.”
“That’s his list?”
“Yeah. What a flippin’ weirdo. Who needs twenty-eight pounds of sugar? Why twenty-eight? Don’t they come in five-pound bags?”
“Do you use it for spells?”
“No spells I know of would use that much sugar. Hold on.” Her eyes bulged before she blinked them back into their sockets. “No. That can’t be it.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not telling you. It’s a stupid idea.”
“And?”
She jumped up from the chair and padded barefoot toward the kitchen, stopping by the dryer along the way to yank on jeans that still smelled way too much like fruity-floral body spray. When she got to the door of the pantry, she pushed her palm out to stop him. “No. You wait here. It’s probably nothing.”
“It is a spell! Do you think that’s the recipe for locating the book?”
“Uh…just a sec,” she answered as she closed the door behind her and twisted the timer for the pantry light.
She studied the dial, a one-hour timer from zero to sixty. She rotated the timer all the way on then clicked the lights off again, casting the room into darkness, then she carefully twisted it on again, stopping at the number thirteen.
“Abbey?” Jaxon’s voice boomed.
“Just checking on something.”
Next, she turned the dial off again and then on, just to the second tic mark. When she tried a third time, she held her breath, casting the room into darkness and then creeping ever so slowly to the twenty-eighth minute. She waited. Nothing happened. “Crap!”
Jaxon pushed open the door, his eyebrows raised. “Now will you tell me what’s going on?”
Her cheeks burned all over again. “No. I warned you it was stupid. You may have had Agatha Christie, but I obviously read too much Nancy Drew.”
He regarded the light switch and smiled. “The timer. It may not have worked, but it was a clever idea.”
She rolled her eyes. “Thanks. I guess Claude just likes sugar. Maybe he’ll need lots of it when the witch-pocalypse strikes.”
Jaxon’s gaze moved over the shelves. “Water. Sugar. Salt. What did that list say?”
“Thirteen jugs of water. Two shakers of salt. Twenty-eight pounds of sugar.”
“What if you put the numbers in the order of how the items are placed along the walls instead?” Without another word, Jaxon switched the lights off and on again. “Thirteen.” Another flicker. “Twenty-eight.” His outline disappeared, then once again, the light blazed on—“Two.”
The shelves shook, jostling the sugar bags to the floor as the entire back pantry wall slid to the side.
“You did it,” she breathed. “A real secret passageway.”
Jaxon pick her up and spun her around. “No, you did it! Once you put your mind to something, the outcome is decided.”
He kissed the corner of her mouth, and white-hot flares shot to every nerve in her body. She felt breathless with excitement, and she wasn’t sure if it was from the dark corridor before her or the man wrapping his hands around her waist. “Let’s go. If I was right about this, I’m right about the book. Passive magic this strong has to have a focal point somewhere near.”
After descending the steps and entering the corridor, small torches along the walls burst to life before her, lighting her path then dimming as she passed. “This proves once and for all that my grandma couldn’t have been part of building the new house.”
“Why?”
“If Grammy D had constructed a secret passageway, she would have dressed up in something mysterious and taken me here for slumber party, complete with spooky stories and hot chocolate.”
“You have an interesting family.”
She whistled low and long. “You have no idea.”
Jaxon bumped into her from behind when she slowed to look at the markings on the walls, but then he reached out to steady her. His fingertips felt like they could have burned a path through her jeans if she allowed them to linger too long.
“I’m assuming there’s no chance of booby traps?” he asked more quietly, his mouth only inches from her ear.
“You’re asking me? I’m no expert on this.”
The tunnel was unfinished on the sides, not like a typical hallway, more like someone had carved a path through dirt and stone. When the passageway branched in two different directions, she stopped. “How many tunnels do you think are down here?”
“I wouldn’t know, but I can tell you one thing, we’ll be heading in the same direction. Splitting up is not an option.”
Abbey snorted. “You must be confusing me with our kick-ass Kare-bear. I think there’s a correlation between being immortal and liking to head down dark passageways alone. I wasn’t even going to suggest it.”
“That’s not because you aren’t brave—it’s because you’re a prudent woman.”
“That’s me. Abbey ‘Prudence’ Sellers.”
She followed the tunnel through the earth, and as uneasy as she was with her uncle’s remodeling of her mountainside, she had to admit there was a curious peace down here, too. Witches were connected with the natural energy around them, and although she’d never visited many sacred places, she knew earthbound coven grounds could be powerful places. “I’m sensing something…I don’t know how to describe it.”
Jaxon brushed his hand down her bare arm and linked his fingers through hers. “Are you sure this is worth it, Abbey? There’s no telling what we might find down here, and you need to be prepared.”
“Seriously, Jaxy, how could I prepare for this? It’s been nothing but strange and screwed-up since we got to the mountain.”
They tried the path to the right first, but when they found an empty room, they backtracked and took the path to the left. When it split again, Abbey groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Still holding his hand, she closed her eyes and reached out with her consciousness to feel the wisps and cords of spiraling energy around her.
Magic. Witch magic. Someone had been mixing some nasty spells in these caves, but
there was a familiar purity twining among the darker threads. “I’m not sure Claude was the one who built these tunnels, after all. It’s almost as though I feel my dad here—at least, what I remember of him.”
“Really?”
“Well…yeah. Not physically here, but it’s like an echo of his power is still resonating through the earth.”
She wasn’t sure it was smart, but she followed the strongest trail that led them to another small, carved-out dirt room. It was circular with an opening small enough that Abbey would have to duck.
When she went to step over the threshold, her foot stuck like she’d stepped in congealing tar. “Shoot. What is this stuff? This room is different from the other rooms.”
“Then we must be in the right place.”
She carefully pulled her foot back. “Yeah, but if I can’t get in, that isn’t going to do us much good.”
“Are you not the future high priestess? Do they award that position to a witch of such little power?”
She glared at Jaxon. She knew what he was doing. “I don’t think it’s so much my potential power as my family tree that got me in line for that great honor.”
“How can you belittle your own destiny? I believe you have what it takes, Abbey. But what I believe isn’t going to get us through that ward.”
“Nice one, Jaxy. Just the right amount of guilt mixed in with the motivation. Who wouldn’t cave to that? Okay. You want to see me try? I’ll try.”
“You see—the bravest witch on the mountain,” he said.
She might have given him the stink-eye, but Jaxon’s encouragement felt like spring rain on a parched field, and something desiccated inside her soaked it up. Her ex, Tray, had always tried to keep her as far removed from magic as possible, and at the deepest level, she’d never really felt accepted by him or loved for who she was.
She tuned out Jaxon’s sexy smile as she stepped back and reached her hand toward the threshold, trying to get a feel for what spell had been cast there. Thrusting her consciousness into the magic, she fumbled for something recognizable and caught on the familiar thread. Her family’s blood.
She didn’t know the spell to use, but here in the mountain, she felt so connected to her father that the words seemed to come to her of their own volition. She took a deep breath and said slowly, with expectation that it would work, “This ward of my blood, this barrier fine, open for me and reveal what is mine.”
Jaxon’s brows rose when the soil around the threshold trembled and shook free, raining down on them a steady spray of dirt and gravel. “It worked?”
She didn’t need to reach her hand through to know she could enter. The magic in the small room had changed, now welcoming her in. “It worked. But you need to wait here. I think only someone with Sellers blood can get through.”
“I’m always amazed to see witches work. You have great power at your disposal—if you can just find the words.”
“I wish it were that easy, but it’s not just about the words.” She inched into the room, scanning the stone pedestals that lined the curved wall. Five pedestals, and each had a single, leather-bound book displayed at its center. She almost picked up the nearest book, but she felt a restrained presence in the air. The ward to the room wasn’t exactly turned off. It seemed to be…waiting.
She stepped back, and Jaxon sidled closer to the barrier. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Everything’s great.” Her gaze fixed on the red symbols painted on the wall. If the lines and squiggles were words, she was in trouble. “Hey…you’re good at languages and deciphering stuff, right? Does that look like something to you?”
The top of the doorway only came to his collar, so he bent down to get a better view. “I’m not fluent in every language—I’m not even two hundred years old.”
“I know—” she started to say, but before she could finish, he interjected.
“One.”
“One?”
“Yes, the first word of the top two lines is one. One…book. One…thought. No—choice. One choice.”
She swallowed. “And the last line?”
“Choose wisely.”
“Oh. Super.” Somehow she couldn’t imagine her father making these tunnels and writing these strange words. Maybe this place was older than she’d imagined.
Looked like she couldn’t stack the books this time and peruse at her convenience. No, she had to choose, and she only got one. “Do you think if I choose the wrong one I can come back later and exchange it?”
Jaxon laughed under his breath. “I’m not a witch, dove, but even I can tell that whoever set up this ward and this warning took it fairly seriously.”
She couldn’t bring herself to agree out loud. With any luck, he was wrong. She stood back, inspecting each book from a distance, but she couldn’t decipher the symbols on the front. “Can you help with the words on the covers?”
“I can’t see them from here.”
“Maybe I could tilt them up without actually taking them from their spot.”
“Maybe, but be careful,” Jaxon answered. “What are we looking for?”
She circled around the pedestals like she was stalking the books. “I have no clue.”
When she reached for the first book on the left, her fingers prickled right before she touched it, like its energy was reaching up to her, ready to glom on—but the energy felt all wrong. She snatched her hand away. “Shoot. I’m not going to be able to lift them. It’s like their energy is sticky. But I can tell you it’s not this one.”
Energy fields were tricky, and manipulating them with magic was even trickier. Sometimes she had to mix ingredients for a spell. Sometimes it was saying the right words. But successful spells depended on the power of the witch, too.
Abbey wasn’t a weakling, but she wasn’t exactly high-priestess material. On the scale of witchy awesomeness, there were sorceresses on one end, people who had the bloodline—but not the magic spark—on the other, and then there was Abbey somewhere in the middle. “I don’t know if you realize how cool it is that you guys have a sorceress on Mercury Island. Most people say they were wiped out with death magic.”
“She doesn’t wield nex veneficus, of course. There is no way in hell the Mercury Lords would allow death magic on an island of Demiáre. That would be as smart as feeding your wings through a wood chipper.” Jaxon paused when Abbey brought her fingers above another book. “Any luck? As much as I appreciate these beautiful burrows, I much prefer a wide-open sky above me.”
“Not this one. Just one more minute.”
She eyed the third book. It was bound in black with red slashes on the cover, intricate enough that she couldn’t tell if it was a design or another foreign word. But it didn’t matter what it said on the outside. Not when she was getting such a strong feeling of what was on the inside. Its energy was dark and seething, but it purred to her—a silent, contented vibration—as her hand drew near.
“I can only take one, and unfortunately—” she carefully lifted the black tome from the rough surface of the stone pedestal and held it up for Jaxon to see, “—I think it’s this one.”
He met her eyes, his gaze cautious in response to her somber tone. “Why ‘unfortunately’?”
“Because to take down the mountain’s protection, I’ll need the focal point. And I‘m pretty sure it’s this—The Book of Death.”
Chapter Four
Jaxon didn’t look happy. “At least now we know what your uncle was hiding—the bastard. Your entire coven could be held responsible for this. Even being in possession of a book of death magic is enough to get you killed.”
“Calm down. All I did was pick up a dusty, old manual. It’s no big deal.”
“There’s a reason nex veneficus is called death magic, Abbey. It’s one of the few ways witches can kill my people. Demiáre like to believe they are invincible, and they don’t take kindly to spells powerful enough to end an immortal’s life. The discovery of another handbook of nex veneficus is a ‘big
deal’ to every clan on this side of the Shadowland.”
As she walked across the small room, the floor began to suck at her feet, and the soil around them quivered. “It’s getting sticky again.” She lifted her knees higher in an attempt to break the bonds of the magic pulling at her.
“Hurry,” Jaxon commanded.
“I am hurrying.”
But there was only so fast she could move when every step felt like dragging foot-long magnets over raw iron. And at the same time, the roof started to shake and large chunks of rock began to cascade down all around her.
“Oh, crap.” She was almost there. Almost…
As soon as her elbow cleared the doorway, Jaxon grabbed her and yanked her hard, just as the roof gave way. She spun, and with wide eyes witnessed the soil and rocks pour in behind her, building until the doorway was completely blocked. She expected the dust to billow out around them, but it seemed the same spell that kept Jaxon out kept the debris in.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No. I’m okay. But I guess I really don’t get a second book now, do I?”
He narrowed his eyes and shook his head. She took a few steps into the corridor and scratched her scalp with one hand while the other arm cradled her prize. Thanks to the shaking ceiling, she had enough grit in the part of her hair to plant a row of corn. She blinked her eyes, trying to clear the dust from them. “What? I know that cranky look you get, like the time the DVR got full and erased your favorite series.”
“I cannot let you use that book.”
They headed toward what she hoped was the exit to the caves. “We need to disable the ward. Using the focal point to undo the spell is the only way I’m going to be able to get your wings working again.”
“Then we’ll walk.”
“That would take forever.”
“No, forever is how long I’ll be without you if you’re targeted by an angry clan of Demiáre.”
She sighed in relief when the small torches illuminated the stairs leading up to the pantry. “They don’t need to know. It’s not like I’m going to start a Demiáre death club or teach classes on nex veneficus at the local community college. This will be between you and me. Nobody else. Just one little spell to break the ward, and that’s it.”