“I picked it up before the fight in Ozias’ bunker.” He shifted his weight and stared over her shoulder at the dashboard. “I shoved it in my pocket before I shifted and decided I’d save it for an emergency. You know, like this one.”
She bit her lip and eyed the heron coin. “And you weren’t gonna say anything about it unless we really needed it. Like right now.”
The werewolf shook his head. “I’m sorry. If you’re angry, I totally get that and I can deal with it. You thought it was gone, and it was easier to play it off like that. I know you didn’t mean for anything to happen like it did in Oitylo. Ozias and his people knew that too. But it was… I mean, you summoned this out of the Winnie and all the way underground, right into your lap, Lil. I assume it was super-easy for you, and I didn’t want you to worry about that part—”
“Okay.” Lily held his shoulder gently and gave it a little squeeze. “Okay.”
Romeo’s gaze darted from the coin in his hand to her arm reaching toward him and finally to her eyes. “Okay?”
“I’m not mad. I probably would’ve done the same thing if things were switched the other way around.” She nodded. “I’m glad you picked it up and that you thought about what we might need down the road instead of ignoring everything else before that fight in the bunker. Honestly, I’m really glad you didn’t tell me you had it until right now.”
He blew out a breath of relief and gave her a sheepish smile. “I guess I was worried about a whole lotta nothin’, huh?”
“Maybe.” She slid her hand down his arm and stopped at his wrist, not quite ready yet to touch the heron coin once again. “Maybe not. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He nodded at the couch. “If you’re gonna do this, we should probably sit, right?”
“Definitely.” She went to the couch first, stopped, and turned to point at him. “Whatever happens, though, no hospitals, okay?”
“You were bleeding out of your ears, Lil—”
“No hospitals. If I’m caught up in a place like that with a new, giant target on my back again, the Black Heron’s not gonna care how many innocent people they have to mow down to get to me. There are too many innocent people in a hospital.”
His nostrils flared, but he finally sighed, nodded, and came to sit beside her. “Okay. No hospitals. If anything happens to you, do you think Bentley could talk a werewolf through how to bring you back?”
Lily smirked, knowing he was mostly joking but that there was still a trace of truth in there. He was scared. “Unless you tapped into the Black Heron’s free-magic experiments, you won’t have any luck with spells. But yeah, Bentley could definitely talk you through how to get some potions, at the very least.”
“Does he know anyone in Libya?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, I guess we covered as much of a contingency as possible. Are you ready, then?”
She pulled her legs up onto the couch and crossed them beneath her, then stared at the silver heron coin resting in his open palm. “Yep. You know we gotta be on our toes when I’m done, right? I don’t know how much time we’ll have before they storm down the road.”
“I’m ready for that, Lil. No problem.”
“Good answer.” With a deep breath, she pulled up the last memory of her mom’s face—dirt-streaked, gaunt, but still determined—and stretched her hand out to touch the coin.
Twenty-Five
The air sucking out of her lungs wasn’t nearly as intense this time, only a little pinch. In the next moment, Lily registered the darkness of the Black Heron network, and it responded instantly to what she wanted. The red lines streaked from her location in every direction, but they were little more than a blur before the tunnel of images narrowed in front of her vision and showed her exactly where she needed to go.
The vision took her directly across the desert, heading southeast along the Mediterranean before cutting almost directly south. She soared over towns, over brown, dry land, and over paved roads and packed, sunbaked dirt roads. Finally, she saw the same nondescript patch of earth beside an empty road. The only reason she knew it was the same place was because the air across the road shimmered with the orange-brown light exactly like it had the last time she’d seen it. Other than that, there was nothing else there.
Wait… What’s that?
A tiny flicker of yellow light rose from the barren, dusty earth. Lily wanted to move closer to see what could have been a bottlecap reflecting the sunlight or something that was actually important for her to see—to remember. She couldn’t move, though, as the network’s tunnel only took her so far and would only show her so much. As she strained to make out the source of the yellow flicker in the dirt, she didn’t notice that the orange-brown shimmer in the air solidified, grew, and became a face that hovered in the air.
It was giant, the size of an actor’s face projected on an IMAX screen. The man had a short, pointed goatee and one completely opaque eye and he stared directly at her.
The vision lurched forward, and she was shoved up against the shimmering wall of light that had become the man’s face. It was all she could see, and if she’d been there in body, she would have leaned away from the sneer he brought to bear on her. “You are so resilient, little witch.” The man’s voice growled all around her and drove all other thoughts from her mind. “And foolish.” His face receded into the shimmering orange light to reveal the man’s entire figure. He wore an old-fashioned smoking jacket, the high collar turned down neatly along his shoulders. When he stepped back and stretched an arm behind him, she saw a huge study, full bookshelves lining both walls, and a fire crackling in the hearth on the left. There was so much to take in—too much—but it had to be a reliquary with all the glass-doored cabinets filled with jars, glowing metal tools, and an orb that spun continually in midair.
In the center of it all, kneeling in front of the low coffee table between two massive, wing-backed armchairs, was Greta Antony.
“Come and join your mother, Lily. Complete our circle. She is waiting for you, and now, so are we. Most of us, at any rate.” The man chuckled, lunged forward and shoved both hands out toward her with a snarl.
She was thrown back across the bare earth, over the dirt road, and back through the tunnel. All the images she’d been shown blurred past her at even greater speeds and the red lines of the network crossed over each other again and again and glowed brighter until the only thing she could see was one massive flash of red.
The next thing she knew, she was sprawled on her back on top of the kitchen table in the Winnie, her head throbbing and her legs caught at an awkward angle over the back of the booth.
“Lily?” Romeo was at her side in an instant, the silver heron coin forgotten on the couch. He eased an arm beneath her upper back and helped her to sit on the table. Carefully, he turned her toward him and held her face in both hands while he examined her for more blood or signs of another seizure or anything that might mean she wasn’t actually okay. “Hey, you gotta say something. Please.”
Lily closed her eyes and shook her head quickly and when she opened them again, her blurry vision finally focused. She brought her hands up to his wrists and gave them a reassuring squeeze. “She’s alive.” When she looked at him, his eyes were glistening.
“Sure, that’s something.” He puffed out another deep breath. “Does everything feel okay?”
“She’s okay. I mean, they have her, but she’s okay.”
“I meant with you.” He leaned closer until his face was directly in front of hers and studied her gaze. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.” It was hard to nod like she wanted to with his hands on either side of her face. “All I got was south. Southeast, kind of.”
He merely nodded but didn’t release his hold on her yet. “Was there anything different? Anything we can work with?”
“Only a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and some kind of spell in the air—almost like a ward. Like how the Romani hid their villa
ge, remember? But someone talked to me through it. A man with a fake eye, I think.”
“Huh.” He lowered his hands slowly from her face and settled them on her shoulders for a moment before he finally let her go. “Did you actually see your mom?”
“He showed her to me. I don’t know exactly where. She was in this library, or a reliquary…” Her head pounded again, which made it hard to concentrate on what she wanted to tell him. “There was something else there. In the ground. It was like a—” She narrowed her eyes and turned slowly where she sat on the table to look over her shoulder. There was the bright chord of glowing yellow light, exactly like it always was. “Oh, my God. The light.”
“Okay, if you have a sensitivity to light now, Lil, that’s not a good sign.”
“No, not that. I mean—” She pointed in the direction of the yellow beam. “What direction is that?”
“Um…” He chuckled. “I never actually thought I’d wish I had a compass. Hold on.” He hurried to the front of the Winnie, retrieved his phone, and pulled up the GPS. The tip of the little blue triangle that showed him where they were moved as he spun toward Lily. He stood in front of the table again and moved his phone until it was lined up with her pointing finger. “Southwest, basically. A little more south, maybe.”
“Oh, jeez.” Lily ran her hands through her hair, slid off the table, and turned. The yellow beam streamed directly ahead of her now, directly from her chest to disappear through the side of the Winnie. She knew it would keep going once she stepped outside. That it would always point in that direction. “That’s what this is. This whole time, I thought it was…well, I didn’t have any idea.” She looked up at Romeo with wide eyes and chose to ignore his gaping mouth and the fact that he was still completely clueless. “I saw something in the network. Only the smallest trace of yellow light on the ground. I didn’t get a chance to see what it was before the man started talking to me, and then he literally tossed me out again—”
“Lily?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretend I don’t know anything at all. I can’t follow your train of thought right now.”
“Right.” She nodded. “We simply have to follow the light. This thing”—she pointed at the beam he couldn’t see—“that’s kept me awake and never goes away. I can see it but you can’t but I’m almost positive it’s leading me precisely to that stretch of open road in the middle of nowhere. Right to her. That’s what we have to follow. That point of light in the dirt is like a…like a pinned location. I don’t know how, but that’s how we find her.”
Romeo nodded slowly and put everything together in his own way. “What are the chances that pinned location is simply one more clue your mom left for you to find?”
“I’d say they’re reasonably high. I didn’t think she could do it because they still have her but obviously, she did.” She stared at the yellow beam where it vanished through the wall and uttered a surprised laugh. “She’s still leaving me clues.”
“And she’s still alive.”
She whirled to look at him and remembered the rest of it. The frown settled on her brow felt tight and made her head pound even more. “The man who spoke to me…he basically gave me an open invitation to come to get her.”
“That doesn’t sound like a trap in any way whatsoever.” He scowled and scratched the back of his head.
“But all the Black Heron members who targeted us have wanted me for something, right? It’s obviously not to kill me anymore.” She rubbed the back of her aching head and found the tender place where she’d thumped it against the table. “He literally threw me out of the network and across the Winnie,” she muttered.
“It was intense.”
She looked at him and gave him a small smile. “I’ll be fine. He said they were waiting for me—my mom and the Black Heron Society. But not all of them.”
He frowned. “Like the Frankenstein magicals who wanted to take you in for experiments. Is that what you’re thinking?”
“Yeah. The ones who haven’t managed to blow themselves up yet are looking for me too. Maybe it started with all of them wanting to bring me in and hand me over. I don’t know. But it would be almost impossible for anyone to control that many magicals all over the world. Not completely.”
“So the Black Heron Society has split into factions.” Romeo folded his arms and stared at the floor. “The ones who have your mom and want you to show up to complete whatever this stupid circle is. And then the ones who already had a taste of that messed-up stolen magic on a much smaller scale. They want you because the higherups want you, but not to bring you to your mom.”
Lily huffed out a sigh and threw her arms up. “This is getting ridiculous.”
“It’s always been ridiculous. Remember that werewolf in Canada? The one who chased us out of that club for magicals?”
“The one who cast spells like a witch before he sucker-punched you?”
Romeo frowned quickly and released a surprised laugh. “It wasn’t a sucker punch.”
“Well you didn’t go down, so it doesn’t really matter.”
“It does matter, but—” He closed his eyes and chuckled again. “Not as much as this. That werewolf had someone else’s magic, Lily, because of the Black Heron’s experiments leading up to this giant, magical free-for-all spell they’re trying to whip up. So yeah. If they gave the wrong kind of people access to even a little taste of magic that didn’t belong to them—”
“They’re all the wrong kind of people.” A wave of dizziness rushed over her, and she braced herself for a few seconds against the table.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m only a little dizzy.”
“Gotcha.” He turned quickly to get her a bottle of water from the fridge and snapped the cap open on his way back before he handed it over.
“Thanks.” She drank as much as she could and managed to find her feet again. “If we’re right, things actually got weirdly more complicated.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think that was possible until now.”
She lowered her head and decided to drink a little more water, just in case. “The head of the Black Heron hierarchy…they’re the ones who want me to keep going. To find my mom and deliver myself up to their giant dark spell, I guess.”
“And the crazy underlings want to steal you first, experiment with your magic, and then take you in and collect their prize.”
Lily snorted. “No one’s getting a prize for that. But we’re gonna go get my mom. And after that, we’ll do whatever we have to do to make sure their circle, whatever it is, doesn’t get anywhere near completed.”
“Man, I really wish I knew what the heck that stupid thing’s supposed to be. Or do.”
She smiled and gave his chest a gentle pat, feeling like herself again despite a night without sleep and having been thrown across her own RV. “Careful what you wish for, buddy.”
Twenty-Six
“Can you map us a good route to get us…I guess simply southwest through the country, right?” Lily screwed the lid back onto the bottle of water and headed toward the front of the Winnie again.
“Definitely.” Romeo joined her and slid into the driver’s seat, already working it up on his phone. “You have no idea how far southwest, huh?”
“Nope. But when this super-annoying beam of light stops pointing at anything, I guess we’ll know we’re there.”
“Got it.” He placed his phone into the cupholder and started the engine. “Uh-oh.”
“Okay, new rule. Any uh-ohs are followed up by a number on a scale of one to ten.”
He looked at her and pointed at the gas gauge behind the steering wheel. “On the ‘this is bad’ scale, it’s a two. I’d give an almost empty tank a nine-point-five on the priority scale, though.”
She sighed and rubbed her cheeks. “We won’t get very far without gas.”
“Not unless you have a flying carpet stashed away in here somewhere.” He smirked and shifted into drive.
“Those
are much harder to come by than you think.”
“Wait, flying carpets are real?”
“Romeo, we were ferried across the Mediterranean in half an hour, the last moments of which we spent riding on the top of this RV, and you actually watched me catapult onto the table because I touched a coin.” She pressed her lips together and studied his profile as they moved onto the road and headed toward Sirte, the town now faintly visible a few miles ahead of them. “How are you still surprised by things like flying carpets?”
“I only…” He laughed and ran a hand through his hair. “The only magic I’d really seen before you showed up at my house in the middle of the summer came from you and your mom. Not much of it applies to werewolves. I dunno. Maybe I wouldn’t question it at all if we actually were riding a flying carpet.”
“Fair enough.” She leaned against the passenger seat and watched the city grow larger and closer ahead of them. “To be clear, though, I’m fairly sure genies aren’t a real thing.”
“No genies. No magic lamps. Got it.”
“No…no there are still magic lamps.”
He thumped his hand against the steering wheel. “Now you tell me.” With a broad grin, he shook his head and cast her a few quick glances before he returned his full attention to the road. “How come genies aren’t a real thing? The rest of the magical world couldn’t find a place for them, or what?”
“Seriously?” Lily burst into laughter and winced at the throbbing pain it brought to the back of her head again. “Try not to make me laugh so hard for a while.”
“But I’m really good at it.” He smirked and lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug.
“Where did you think all the stories about magic came from in the first place? Like the kids’ movies and books and everything.”
Return Of The Witch (The Witch Next Door Book 6) Page 16