“Some of that’s true,” I said with a sad smile. “There was a terrible fight. The Magister and the rest of the council members didn’t survive.”
They both sucked in sharp gasps.
“But.” I held up a hand. “The coven isn’t gone. Remember, the coven is a sum of its parts, and the council was only here to make sure those parts were taken care of. The coven is you, and me, and Dorian here. It’s the family you saw at the attack. It’s all of the bone mages who want to be a part of it. Not a few council members hiding away in their ivory tower.”
The witch nodded, her eyes shining with tears. “I hope you’re right, but everyone out there is scared. We just want to go about our daily lives, spend time with our families, and maybe use magic every now and again for fun. We’re not trained to fight demons or vampires. We thought all that was behind us. The demons were banished back to their realm. There was a truce with the vampires. Now, we’re trying to fight creatures we can’t handle. Those of us who joined the war back then are rusty now, and our younger mages haven’t been trained. We don’t want to be doing this.”
“And you don’t have to,” Dorian said, resting a soothing hand on my shoulder. “I admire your bravery in stepping forward in a time of need, but no bone mage has to fight if he, or she, doesn’t want to.”
“But you’d take on more Enforcers now, if someone wanted to train?” the man asked, looking to me for the answer.
Standing, I gave him a nod. “It’s becoming pretty clear that this is only the start of the fighting. We’re trying our best to stop this before it gets bad, but just in case? We could use some more mages on the team.”
“Then, consider us in.”
Chapter 11
After leaving the two new recruits in the conference room, I found the Magister’s office. It had been trashed just like everything else, but it didn’t look like the thief had actually stolen much of anything. Papers were strewn everywhere, but it didn’t take me long to find the directory of bone mages. Every single one who had pledged their loyalty to the coven had their name, address, and phone number logged in this book. After the discussion with Michelle and Chris, it was time to get in contact with each and every one of our coven members and fill them in on the events that had transpired these past few weeks.
Dorian filled the doorway while I sat behind the Magister’s desk, flipping through the list of names. “Well, this is certainly a strange sight.”
“What?” I glanced around, realizing exactly where I’d ended up. “Me in the Magister’s chair? Yeah, he’d fucking hate that.”
“You look good there, though. And those mages out there clearly took comfort from your words. I think your powers impressed them.”
“Not everyone will see it that way,” I said, snapping the book shut. “In fact, I’m guessing most of them will freak out when they find out the truth about my powers. I’m done keeping it hidden though. No more secrets. Now isn’t the time to be pretending I’m someone I’m not. If I’m going to get the coven through this thing, they need to know who I am.”
“Get the coven through this thing, huh?” He asked, raising his eyebrows as he perched on the edge of the desk. Crossing his arms, he twisted his lips into a smile, a look I’d seen on him before. A look he wore when he was both amused and impressed by something I’d said or done. “I’m surprised to hear you of all people say something like that. I thought you hated the politics.”
I frowned and leaned back in the leather swivel chair. “I do hate the politics. They suck ass, and all this alliance shit has caused serious problems. When I say I want to help the coven get through this, I want to leave all the politics out of it. I just want to get them through the war.”
Dorian nodded and grabbed a pen from the desk, absently spinning it in his hands as he regarded me. The smile vanished from his face, a sign that he was finally taking me serious. “I agree we should try to leave the politics out of it, Zoe, but we might not be able to avoid it completely. What if we end up needing something—like the help of the werewolves, for example—but the only way they’ll fight is if we give them something in return? And what if that something belongs to the Daywalkers? We’ll have to play the game of politics to make everyone happy.”
Blowing out a breath of hot air, I slumped back in my chair and closed my eyes. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Agreed.” Dorian stood and rounded the chair, resting his hands on my knotted shoulders. He pressed his fingers into the tension that had slowly built over the past few months, kneading my skin with a kind of expertise that made my body begin to hum. His scent enveloped me as his fingers did master work with my shoulders, and I sighed so loud and long that all the breath expelled from my lungs.
But even though a part of me felt intoxicatingly relaxed, another part of me was clenching in anticipation.
“You haven’t said anything, but I know you’re worried about what Oberon told you,” he murmured softly. “Don’t forget, I can feel things you think you’re hiding from the rest of the world.”
Closing my eyes, I leaned back against his chest, trying to block out the memory of Oberon’s words. Because of course Dorian was right. As much as I wanted to roll my shoulders and forget what he’d said, I couldn’t. “You’re not implying that Grams is the shadow mage who stole the blade, are you?’
“I know Grams would never want to bring demons into this realm,” Dorian began slowly, “but I think it’s a good idea to consider the possibility that she may have been involved for whatever reason. Think about it, Zoe. She’s gone, right after the weapon was taken. And it would explain why Anastasia wasn’t able to sniff out the difference between you two. You’re of the same blood. You smell similar.”
All the tension that Dorian had rubbed out of my shoulders and neck returned in a brutal tightening of every muscle in my body. “Grams would never do something like that.”
“She’d never cut holes in the veil, I agree,” Dorian continued. “But she could have thought she was helping, thought she was saving you from having to take the blade yourself.”
“Then, why wouldn’t she have told me?” I shook my head, swiveling to face him. “Why sneak around and take it out from under our noses?”
“Would you have let her take it if she’d told you her plan?” Dorian asked.
“Well, no. Of course not. She’s better now, but she’s still weak.”
“Exactly,” Dorian said. “So, she stole the blade and took it somewhere that no one can find it. Hell, maybe she knows about the spell that closes the veil for good. Maybe she’ll be the one who ends up saving us all.”
Sighing, I clenched my teeth so tight that my skull began to ache. As much as I hated to admit it, Dorian’s argument made sense. If Grams had wanted to save me from the burden of the blade, she would have taken it herself. And it certainly did explain her strange and random disappearance, as well as the letter she’d left behind. I just couldn’t understand why she would have hidden it from me.
“She’s a shadow mage deep down, remember?” Dorian added. “Just like you. And sometimes you have a tendency to keep things to yourself.”
“You’re right,” I said with a sigh. “I just feel like this is something she should have told me about. It’s not like Grams to sneak around.”
“Well, I’m sure she’ll be back soon enough, and she can explain exactly what happened.”
“Dorian,” I said as I dropped back my head. Looking up, I searched his dark eyes for the truth. “You really don’t think that Grams is trying to help Wagner, do you? I could tell that Anastasia was suggesting that. And Oberon. It’s just…it’s not possible. Grams would never do anything that would be such a threat to this world.”
Dorian knelt before me and took my hands into his cold fingers. “Ignore Anastasia. She might be on our side, but she sees the world much differently than we do. To her, everyone is capable of the worst things she can imagine. But we know Grams. And you are so much like her that it’s
almost eerie. You’d never take the side of evil, so I know she wouldn’t either. You’re too good for that. She is, too.”
Heat flooded my cheeks as I squeezed his hand and pulled him closer, my body yearning for him, my soul begging for his. He’d said everything I wanted to hear, and I could feel through our bond that he meant every word. Grams might have pulled a Zoe and snuck around without telling anyone what she was up to, but that didn’t mean that she was on Wagner’s side.
“Okay,” I said, letting out a soft sigh at the look of yearning in Dorian’s eyes that was reflected in my heart. “Thank you. I just needed to hear someone else say what I felt deep in my gut. Logic says one thing, but my heart says another.”
“I trust in your heart,” he said. “You should, too.”
A knock sounded on the Magister’s door, and my entire body groaned. Every inch of me wanted—and needed—to pull Dorian closer and to show him exactly everything I was feeling inside. Need, desire, fear, and something else. Something I was still too afraid to say aloud. But we’d been interrupted—again. When all of this was over, I wanted to run away with him to his castle in the middle of nowhere and spend weeks holed up with nothing else in the world but him.
Maybe one day. If we all made it through this.
Hopefully, Dorian was right and Grams was closing the veil for us right now as we spoke.
“Hi, we’ve got a problem,” Laura said, popping her head around the door. Her eyes flicked between me and Dorian, and her cheeks went pink. “Oh god, I’m sorry. Am I interrupting something?”
Yes, I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. “It’s okay, Laura. What’s going on?”
“A bunch of witches have shown up downstairs, and they’re demanding an audience with the Magister,” she said, nibbling on her bottom lip. “They’re in the lobby, and they’ve been seen by a ton of humans who work on the bottom floors of this building. I have no idea if we should let them in or not? I mean, it’s not exactly common knowledge that the Magister is dead, and I was scared they’d make some kind of scene. Not that it would make much of a difference now, I guess. The demon attack downtown is plastered all over the news right now.”
“Seriously?” Frowning, I flicked my gaze toward a large flat-screen television mounted on the wall across from the desk. I found the remote and pressed the ‘on’ button, clicking to the first news channel I could find. A wide-eyed reporter stood before a scene of total chaos. Cars were sideways, smoke billowed, and several terror-faced humans stood just behind her, whispering amongst themselves. The caption that scrawled underneath it read, Has the apocalypse arrived? Magic-wielding witches wanted for murder.
“Well, that’s not good,” I muttered underneath my breath. I’d expected some kind of blowback from fighting those demons out in the open like we had, but I hadn’t expected this and certainly not this soon. We’d left the scene only an hour before. For the first time, I truly understood why the covens had wanted to keep magic hidden from the wider human population. Because this was going to be a pain in the ass to explain and even harder to handle if the police wanted to arrest us. If Grams didn’t know about closing the veil, then we’d still have a demon problem on our hands. And we couldn’t fix that if we all landed in human jail.
“When you said those witches have gotten the attention of humans downstairs,” I said slowly, “what exactly did you mean?”
“They’re standing there with their blades strapped to their sides,” Laura said. “Visible. Not hidden under anything. I think the news about the demon attacks is making everyone say fuck it, to be honest. Why hide if the world already knows?”
Closing my eyes, I let out a heavy sigh. I had no idea how I was going to fix this or if I even could. “Okay, tell them to come on up. I’ll figure out something.”
With a nod, Laura disappeared from the doorway, and I stood from the desk, feeling the weight of the entire coven resting on my newly-tense shoulders. Was this how the Magister had felt all this time? Constantly on edge about the fate of all the mages who were technically his responsibility? Not that these mages were my responsibility now. I was just an Enforcer-in-training. Hell, I wasn’t even a true bone mage. Still, somehow, I felt as if I had to do whatever it took to keep them at ease, at peace, and out from behind bars.
The back of my neck prickled, and a flood of images churned through my mind, hard and fast and full of pain. With a sharp gasp, I bent over and grasped my stomach, squeezing my eyes as the images tore through me. Flashes of the Witch’s Blade, followed by a pool of dark blood. Over and over again until I could see no other color but red. And, as the blood faded to black, a storm of demons tore into the sky.
With a gasp, I opened my eyes and whirled to Dorian, my heart pounding so fast that my ribcage shook.
Dorian hovered before me, eyebrows furrowed and lips turned into a frown. “Zoe, what’s going on? Are you okay?”
“I’m not sure what just happened,” I said as I panted hard, still shaking from the force of the vision—or whatever it was. “But I saw something. Something terrible. I can’t really explain how I know, but I swear someone just used the Witch’s Blade to tear a hole in the veil. And I think they killed someone in order to do it.”
Chapter 12
Pacing back and forth, I shoved my shaking hands into my hair to try and make sense of what I’d seen. “There was a big puddle of blood on cobblestone.” My voice cracked, and a tear leaked out of my eye. “Dorian, what if someone just attacked Grams? What if she’s—”
“We can’t think that way,” he cut in as he wrapped his arms around me tight. “We don’t know what you saw. It might have been some kind of vision of something that just happened, but it could have been something else entirely. A warning of what’s to come. Maybe your own fears playing inside your mind.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I can’t explain it, but I know whatever I saw was real. I could feel it, taste it, smell it. Maybe it hasn’t happened yet, but it was definitely real.”
“Just because you saw some blood doesn’t mean that Grams is hurt,” Dorian said. “Did you see her?”
“No.” I shook my head and clutched the shirt near my heart. “But I could feel pain and fear. Someone was hurt. And they were hurt for the blade. If she has it, like we think she does, then it has to mean that—”
My voice choked on the last word, as if my body were trying to stop me from speaking my worst nightmare out loud. If someone had gone after my grandmother while I was sitting here in a stupid corporate office staring lustily into my hybrid boyfriend’s eyes, I didn’t think I would be able to forgive myself. I should have been out there, looking for her, doing whatever it took to track her down. Hell, she’d probably taken the Witch’s Blade to save me, so this entire thing would be my fault.
I’d shoved myself into the middle of everything—again. And the wrong person had paid.
“I have to try tracking Wagner again.” I flipped off the lights, and the room was plunged into darkness. “If he’s in the middle of using the blade, then he might not be able to keep up his defenses for the tracking spell.”
“Zoe, I—”
“I have to try,” I said through gritted teeth and settled onto the floor. With my eyes closed tight, I took in a few deep breaths to steady my nerves. As easy as I found this spell, I couldn’t go into it with my emotions ripping through me like this. That would only be an express ticket to losing control of my powers. The only way I was able to keep a lid on the darkness that threatened me every minute of every day was making sure that I stayed calm and steady when using my magic. If I went in hot and wild, then I’d only end up losing the reins. And if my darkness took ahold of me, I’d be of no help to anyone, least of all Grams.
“Okay,” Dorian said, moving behind me to squeeze my shoulder. “Listen to my voice if you need an anchor to this world.”
He felt my raging emotions, and he knew what they meant. And his voice sent a wave of calm through my body. As my heartbeat settled into a con
trolled rhythm, I spoke Ivan Wagner’s name and tugged the cord that appeared before me. It pulled me through Boston, across the ocean, and straight to a small cottage in the middle of nowhere. The enemy stood inside a dark kitchen, his back tense and straight. In his hand, I saw the blade.
In the blink of an eye, I returned to my body in the coven’s headquarters before he could realize I was watching him. “He has it.”
Dorian was by my side in an instant. “You saw him with the Witch’s Blade? Where is he?”
“In a cottage in the middle of England.” I closed my eyes to remember the sight of him. “He was standing there, holding the blade and looking like he was waiting for something to happen. Maybe he just cut a hole in the veil. Luckily, Grams wasn’t there, at least that I could see.”
“Good job.” Dorian squeezed my shoulder and yanked open the door. “We need to go now before he realizes he’s been tracked. Get ready to do the travel spell. I’ll let the others know what we’re doing.”
“Oh shit.” My face fell. “Laura went to get the mages from downstairs. We’re supposed to calm them down before they do something stupid. If we leave now, there’s no telling what they’ll get up to while we’re in a different country.”
“This is far more important,” Dorian said. “I’ll tell Laura to keep them occupied until we get back, and hopefully we’ll have some good news to share with the rest of the coven. If we catch Wagner and get that blade, we might not have to go to war with the demons after all.”
A mere ten minutes later, Dorian and I stood on a hill overlooking a small English village. A cobalt sky was a backdrop to a cluster of small cottages, their chimneys shooting wispy smoke into the chilly air. The cobblestone streets were empty, save for an older gentleman walking his dog toward what looked to be the village pub. Nothing at all about this place suggested demons or dangerous mages. It was calm, peaceful. The back of my neck prickled as my intuition picked up something I couldn’t see, hear, or smell.
Witch's Fury (The Bone Coven Chronicles Book 4) Page 5