by Eden Butler
“If anything happens to me before I can unleash the block...” Bane almost whispered.
“What’s going to happen to you?” The idea was ridiculous and there was the smallest hint of frantic worry that made my lungs feel tight at the thought. “I know how magic works. That isn’t a higher coven secret.” Smiling helped. Him returning that smile eased some of that needless fear. “You die, your hexes and spells die, too.”
“I have no intention of dying, Jani.” The shadow of his famous smirk flitted across his face, as though the suggestion was insulting. How could the likes of Bane Iles die? Even he doubted that was possible. Still, he knew he wasn’t immortal. Yes, we supernaturals take a long time to get old. Still longer to die off, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t susceptible to disease, to decline, to decay. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t ever danger. Bane seemed to know that well enough and the longer he watched my face, that more that realization took away the smirk from his face. “But…if I’m not there...”
“You think there’s a traitor,” I realized. He glanced at me again, as though it took effort not to smile or control his shock. It wasn’t something I’d given much thought to, actually, but it did make sense. Bane was smart, calculating. He didn’t think like the others. He didn’t tackle anything without first analyzing the possible outcomes. I knew this because I knew him. No matter the time we spent apart, I still knew the wizard he was.
But I had managed to surprise him, if that slow working, impressed grin meant anything at all. Then came out his devious secret. His body language changed, limbs and fingers heating with excitement—the swell of heat from his body, the drip of truth pulsing between his subconscious and mine.
“You know there’s one.” My voice was low, hissing. “You handpicked everyone, didn’t you? To draw out the asshole who did this.”
Bane waited and that headshake, that impressed, amazed look on his face was torture. Beautiful, but still torturous. “Either I’m losing my touch or you’re a lot cleverer than I gave you credit for.”
There was no need for flattery. I wasn’t the kind of witch that thrived on any of that. And when he kept smiling, and that small wedge of pleasure swept up my stomach, I decided that only Bane could make me someone who wanted to be complimented. “You got any prime suspects?” He nodded once, but kept silent. “Who?”
Bane cocked his eyebrow, but said nothing. “Okay, fine,” I said, tilting my head to make him look at me. “Anyone I should be wary of?” He rolled his eyes as though I was simple and stupid. “Ah, I forget. Everyone, right? Trust no one?”
“Me,” he said, pulling on my arm to walk away from the guards. “You trust no one but me.”
I did trust him. It was the melding, had to be. It was our two nexuses reaching out to the other, reminding us that there had been a moment when they’d touched completely. He had my trust because everything in me demanded that it be given to him freely.
The block had worked, but had not hampered the call of the magic swimming in the wind or the low, still call of the Elam ahead of us in the ether. My eyes fell shut when a small bustle of wind brushed through the limbs of the trees around us to sweep the ground. The subtle smell of mint and honeysuckle hovered in the air, reminding me of the spicy brilliance of the life around us, pulling me closer toward it, wanting me to follow.
“Bane, it’s calling.” Reaching for him, the tension in my chest eased even as my pulse quickened to feel his fingers entwined through mine still. “If I don’t leave soon…”
“I know it.” He squeezed my fingers and the tension in his knuckles shook his entire hand. “Damn it, I know.” He looked behind us, to Hamill and the small words he exchanged with the guards, then Bane’s focus was back on me. “Hamill…”
“You’re serious? He hates me. He attacked me. I almost…”
“No, you didn’t. As to his hatred of you, I get the feeling he’d rather parade you and your family around the Cove as traitors and hacks than try to do you any real harm.”
“You willing to bet my life?”
“No fucking way.”
“Then Hamill is a no.” I nodded toward Rivers and Trevor. “And those two?”
“You’ll want to hex them inside fifteen minutes.”
“Too late. My fingers are already twitching.”
Bane’s neck was corded with muscle, and those thick veins stood out when he twisted his shoulders and his neck to work away the tension there. “I don’t like this.”
“Yeah, well, we don’t have a choice, do we? You have that mess to deal with and I have to follow the Elam.”
“Take Hamill,” he finally said, as though sensing my need to get nearer to the Elam. “Ethan and Trevor will insist on going with you. At least I know Hamill wont’ hurt you. Not really.”
“And you think your cousin and future brother-in-law will?”
“I think one of the three has your back, but still, trust no one. There’s a liar among us.”
“Easy way to sort out who they are.”
Bane stared at me long and hard. “You want to twist a spell?”
It was amazing how well we’d both adjusted to his block, to that quick back and forth of knowing what the other needed.
“I want to find out who I can trust.” Stepping away was easy, ignoring him behind me, standing close, that voice and sweet breath right at my neck, wasn’t as simple.
“Do you need me to…”
“No.” Another step ahead and that time he knew what I was thinking. Stand back. Give me a little breathing room. Stop looking at me like that. The only thing I said was, “I got it.”
He watched me step toward the clearing again, the crowd behind me, the lines and the hint of the Elam, ahead in the distance. And just one small chant, old, comfortable, easy, and a spell spun from my mouth, collected into the night and twisted outward. Those words, the magic they invoked, would carry around me, around Bane. It was a Judas spell, and it would mark a traitor, show them for the lies they told and the truths they held close to the chest.
“Any lie.” Bane didn’t ask, likely knew the answer before he asked for it. He was in my thoughts, privy to the tug of every emotion I felt. He’d have recognized the Judas spell when I spoke it.
Won’t be that easy. A glance over my shoulder and I knew Bane had heard me. They’ll have protected themselves from any detection.
“Good,” he said. “It’ll make the truth clearer, and louder when it comes.” The soft crunch of leaves signaled that he had moved closer, but I was focused as the weight of the spell continued to fall. Bane stopped near me, but not too close. Command and soldier. Client and employee. Ying and yang. I wasn’t sure what role fit me anymore, but Bane played his part well. Net cast and now we’d hunt.
“Don’t let them fill your head with pointless shit.”
“Too late.” But my joke didn’t seem to ease him. “There’s a lot of pointless shit in there already.”
“Trevor and Ethan, they’ll aim to tell you your place, make you see them as superior somehow. Don’t let them do that. You’re better than them.”
I stared at him, frowning. “They’re your coven.”
“You’re better than them to me too, Jani.”
No way I’d touch that one. Not with that frown making the muscles in his face tight. There was no use in saying goodbye. There was no longer any point for belaboring warnings or clarifications on what I needed to do. He had his job, I had mine. The Elam called me, wanted me. I didn’t need anyone to get in my way, not Hamill, not Trevor or Ethan.. They’d follow or they’d fall behind.
“Jani?” Bane said, holding me back with his fingers on my wrist. “I’ll find you as soon as I can. Keep your guard up, don’t trust them. The spell will work.” I nodded and took two steps before he called after me, bringing my gaze right to his. “There isn’t a thing about you that’s pointless. Don’t you damn well forget that.”
Chapter Ten
When I didn’t think about my surroundings, things
became clearer. There were no distractions around me in the night, only the clear sense that ahead I’d find the Elam, that it called and beckoned, like it knew I was close.
The sense of it, the way it drew me in, felt like something I was meant to do. It felt very much like a path I had no choice but to take. But there was a hurdle, three in fact, keeping me from that path. I wanted to hex all of them to clear my way.
“You know,” Ethan began, “For someone who’d been running from this place for ten years, you certainly came back in a hurry.”
“I didn’t run.”
“That’s not the way I remember it.” Ethan sounded smug, but in my brief experience with him, that was pretty typical.
“The way you remember it?” There was no need for me to stop walking, no reason to slow my pace. He’d follow. He’d have to if he wanted to annoy me. “You mean the way you heard it. You were a kid back then, barely thirteen years old. You have no idea…” I quieted when Ethan’s smile went lethal. “Bait all you want, little wizard. I won’t bite.”
“You will.” Ethan looked merely bored, not worried, not scared that he was deep into Grant territory with little protection from the elements or whoever it was that had killed Wyatt. Only an idiot like him would walk around the forest like he was on a stroll and not a mission. “All witches take the bait. It’s in your nature.”
He wanted to play, to lead me straight into a debate that would only annoy me and make my spelling fingers eager to wiggle a hex over his fat mouth. “I’m not here to entertain you. I’m here to finish this job and keep the lines from flooding the Cove.”
Ethan took a quick turn on the edge of the trail and only caught himself from a fall by jumping in front of me on the trail. “And saving your father’s business in the process?”
Curiosity is a hell of a thing. It can make you question motivations, tempt you to forget your purpose. Ethan likely knew that and anyone who’d heard even the vaguest thing about my return knew it had everything to do with my father’s business and the mess Ronan had made. Ethan was a dunderheaded jackass, meddlesome and catty, but he did likely know more about what had led my father’s business into the ground than I did. “Know something you’d like to share?”
“Ronan is pathetic.” That he admitted freely, but Ethan wasn’t coy about the sideways look he gave me or the condescending smile that held no humor. “He’s a useless piece of garbage.”
“And that makes my name dirt now, too?” The trail twisted this way and that, keeping us single file as it narrowed, but I kept ahead, not bothering to see what reaction the annoying wizard offered. “If we are judging each other by names and connections then I’d have a sharper cut to judge Bane by, wouldn’t I? With the two of you in his family.”
“Say what you want, Jani.” Ethan sped up, moved just a half a step ahead of me, but kept speaking. “We know the game you’re playing. We know your father would do anything to protect his business.”
That wasn’t true. My father was ruthless, but only when it came to protecting our secrets from the mortals. This talk of him setting up the burglary of the Elam and interjecting me into the fold to rescue it, was ridiculous. It had been when Caridee mentioned it as well. Lundi Benoit was ruthlessly loyal to the Cove, but that didn’t make him a criminal.
That was what Ethan needed to hear. It played loose to lifting off my tongue when Ethan’s jab had cut too close to the vest. But then his taunting, as well as my desire to defend my family’s honor dissipated when the brambles snapped about ten yards ahead.
“I don’t think…”
What Ethan didn’t think died immediately as my quick hex took his voice. Behind us, Trevor, who had been thumbing nosily through his cell phone, and Hamill, who’d picked up on the sounds behind us as well, met us at the bottom of the trail, mimicking me as I narrowed my eyes through the thicket of trees.
Ethan tried speaking, grunting and jabbing his finger near his throat, but I waved him off, tugging on his jacket and beckoning the rest to follow me into the dense crop of limbs around the next bend.
Two trackers, or maybe three, came down the path, sounding like a herd of cows, with little stealth at all. They were untrained, stomping in a way that was certain to leave tracks, making all sorts of noise.
“You sure they went this way? This way exactly?”
“I can smell the damn shifter, can’t I?”
Trevor, Hamill and I all kept still and silent as the pursuers neared the small outcrop of limbs that gave us cover. But Ethan, looking terrified as well as highly pissed off to have lost his voice, squatted nervously behind us, making attempts to see through the small opening in the limbs.
Pointless, all of it. The tracking, the hiding. This put me off my mission and kept the Elam’s signature distant. The time for hiding had passed, and though Ethan was useless for anything other than annoying me, Hamill and Trevor might be of some help.
Bane’s future brother-in-law gripped one of the limbs, cracking it before I could stop him and the trackers ahead stopped where they stood.
I reached out then, pushing my senses into the darkness, catching the signatures of what now proved to be two men, one shifter, and one…something else I couldn’t quite name.
We needed to find their identities and I was the finder of all lost things. Seeing their shapes—one small, wiry man with busy black hair, and a stockier, clumsy guy with too much paunch around his middle—it was easy enough for my gift to tap onto them. But their purpose was clouded behind something that had never interfered with my power before: a seclusion charm. It was a thick, heavy thing that covered the men like a cloak, tacky, and it smelled of sulphur. Simply sensing it had me covering my mouth to prevent my gag reflex from loosening.
“Enough.” My mutter wouldn’t be heard by the men outside of our hiding spot but it did catch Hamill’s attention and kept Ethan from moving too much.
I had never been happier that Papa always insisted I wear a Guise charm around my neck than I was now. The charm was smooth, a tiny stone cut from the quarry some hundred miles away, in no one’s territory. The leather band I wound it on brushed my hair from the ends as I pulled it from my neck and I twined the strap through my fingers as the stone rested in the center of my palm—bright, glowing red and pulsing with ley line energy.
My father had gifted it to me when I turned thirteen and the rite of passage dictated I venture out of our lands and make treks into the forest around the Cove that would test my meddle. This charm hadn’t left my neck since then, but it damn well would keep us undetected.
“Díegol.” The charm came in low and slight, and at least the others had respect enough to pretend they didn’t hear me as I cast it. Magic was personal, intimate. It was bad form to eavesdrop on someone else’s spelling.
A quick flush of light expanded around us, a ripple of movement, like light bending as we watched the arch of shadow and light move around us, setting the spell so that no one could hear or see us.
“Who are they?” My companions had no answers or if they did, they weren’t talking. “Fine then, you don’t know.”
Ethan protested when I stepped away from our hiding place, tapping my arm as though I’d forgotten to unbind his voice. I hadn’t and gave great thought to keeping him silent, even went so far as to bypass the trackers who sniffed the air and squinted around us as we passed them undetected. We could shout in their faces, rustle their clothing and they’d be none the wiser. No one could craft like my father, and that Guise charm was the strongest of its make I’d ever seen.
Another jab on my arm and I jerked around, knuckles popping when Ethan got a bit too aggressive with his silent insistence. “Touch me again and I’ll keep you quiet for even longer.”
“Be still, Jani and let him loose.” Trevor’s voice was clipped, sharper than I’d ever heard it, but the look he gave me—that frustrated, stern manner reminded me of the mission, of the role I was meant to play. There was little time to dole out punishment no matter how richly i
t was deserved. Ethan Rivers was an ass, but that wasn’t my concern.
A snap of my fingers and Ethan coughed, clearing his throat as though he’d swallowed down a thick swig of whiskey.
“Don’t you ever…”
“Threaten me,” I told the wizard, smiling because I guessed it would annoy him more than a glare, “and I won’t unbind it next time.”
“Leave her, Ethan.” Trevor kept his palm against Ethan’s chest, pushing him back. “Help Hamill clear the trail ahead.”
For his part, the shifter seemed as irritated with our little drama as he had my purported slacking while doing my job. He at least didn’t argue as Ethan walked with him down the trail, securing the way for a return to the Elam search.
But the faint hum of the Elam’s magic had quieted in the distraction caused by the trackers. The signature was growing faint, something I felt in my skin, in the cool dampness that collected over me as the hint of magic faded.
“Has it gone?” Trevor asked when I kept to the corners of the woods, not moving, not doing anything but trying to recapture the Elam’s power. “Jani?”
Trevor sat on the ground, fussing a bit with his pack and setting up a makeshift camp. He didn’t bother to ask if this was where I wanted to stay for the night or if I was ready to give up the search.
“You can make camp if you want. I’m not done searching. I can manage on my own.” He let me ahead by a few steps, keeping to himself as though it didn’t matter to him where I got off to before Trevor cleared his throat and any helpful twinge he’d given off earlier with Ethan, vanished.
“Not on your own. Bane wouldn’t like it.” Trevor didn’t bother to look up at me when I diverted my attention away from the woods and back to his half smile and newborn fire.
“That’s not your choice or his to make.”
“I think you’ll find it is, Miss Benoit,” Trevor said. He stopped fussing with the fire and threw a piece of kindling onto the growing flame. “He’s your client. And it’s him that gave us our instructions.”