Forbidden Alchemy (Elemental Book 7)

by Rain Oxford

“Maybe we should reconsider flying,” Rita said.

  “Veronica wouldn’t let us get on a plane.”

  “It took her seven hours to find us. We managed to escape the school, get to him, and get this far. We need to figure out how she found us so that we can lose her.”

  “Obviously, it’s from her Tower of Babel,” Darwin said.

  “Her what?”

  “The kids that are trying to talk to you. She has some power over them, like Krechea did. If your theory that they’re trying to call on their siblings for help is correct, then she has enough power to stop you all from communicating, but not enough to stop you from sharing a vision altogether. In other words, she’s not powerful enough to stop you from seeing each other, but she is powerful enough to make you unintelligible to each other.”

  “And you think she’s using that to track us?”

  “It makes more sense than that she’s watching you through a crystal ball.”

  “Can she do that?”

  “If she has the skill to do it. All she’d need is a bit of your hair, nails, or blood. It’s not as easy a spell as it looks, though.”

  I was pretty good at not leaving my genetic hostage material around after Gale’s curse, but there was no certainty.

  “Hell, she could outright track you if she has anything of yours, and since some of your siblings were working for her, they could have gotten something and gave it to her.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that there’s no way to hide from her?”

  “There are plenty of ways, yeah, but you’re not that skilled a wizard.”

  “He’s a better wizard than you,” Henry said.

  Darwin didn’t mean it to be insulting, though. “Don’t get me wrong; your psychic magic is amazing and I think you’re right to focus on developing that. Just don’t expect to be like Hunt. You could become that powerful and diverse in magic, sure, but you won’t. You can’t beat him at being him, so be the best you that you can be. Very few people have the powers you have; use that to your advantage.”

  “You’re underestimating his wizard skills,” Henry said.

  “I don’t underestimate anything. Did you know that Marcus is a great carpenter?”

  I hesitated. “Actually, no. He built shelves and security rooms, but it never really mattered.”

  “Because he’s so good with technology.”

  “Yeah.”

  Darwin shrugged. “There are plenty of carpenters who are better than him, but not many people who are better at literally anything to do with technology. Should he have focused on becoming a better carpenter? Why? Should everyone who happens to make decent food dedicate their lives to becoming professional chefs?”

  “It’s not the same thing. If I’m not a good enough wizard to do the magic I need to do, I shouldn’t be calling myself a wizard.”

  “You’re a wizard whether you know what you’re doing or not. I’m just saying that there are a lot of wizards who practice and study to become the best wizard. Sure, there is magic you can’t do. There is magic Remington and Hunt can’t do, too. You have a talent they don’t, though. Use it.”

  “So you’re suggesting that I hide us from Veronica with my psychic magic?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not like I can put thoughts into her head that we’re in Canada.”

  “Why not?” he repeated.

  “Because I don’t know who the hell she is. I can’t find her mind. I don’t even know what she is. There’s no telling if my magic would even work on her.”

  “Think, Devon. Her curse couldn’t stop your mind control.”

  I looked at Rita for a moment. “You know, demons have the shadow pass. Casters have portals. It could be that Veronica is from another world, where appearing and disappearing is no problem. Where controlling elementals is no problem. She could be disguising herself as a wizard to take over this world.”

  “No,” Ahz said, chewing on a carrot. We all looked at him, but he continued coloring as if he hadn’t spoken.

  “What do you know?” Henry asked him. Not surprisingly, he ignored us.

  I considered it for a few minutes. “Veronica didn’t stumble upon some powerful kids and decide to take over. She knew about us and our abilities.” I thought back to that vision at Maseré’s pack. More specifically, the woman who was at Canada’s pack meeting. “Maybe I do know her. I might have met her, but I’ve never been in her head.”

  “Now that really narrows it down. How many paranormal women have you met personally, and haven’t been in her mind?”

  “Women I knew were paranormals? Hundreds, but only a few dozen who know about my ability, and none that I can think of who know about John’s other kids. Maybe she knew John. I definitely don’t know anyone named Veronica.”

  “People can go by multiple names,” Rita said.

  “It could be Becky,” Henry said.

  “No, not her.”

  “She was all over you at Quintessence,” Darwin said. “Plus, you can’t get into a more powerful position.”

  “It’s not her.”

  “Have you ever been in her mind?”

  “I never needed to. Becky is a shy, soft-spoken, tree-hugging, liberal, feminist, bisexual with a new baby at home.”

  “That’s a lot of hats for one person. Without having been in her head, how do you know that isn’t all an act? She could be deranged.”

  “She’s not.”

  “What if irrefutable evidence came to light that she was responsible?”

  “Then I would say Veronica somehow placed the blame on her.”

  “Isn’t being stubborn bad for the P.I. business?”

  “Yes. Look, Veronica is devious. She’s more like Krechea. I tried to take over the woman’s mind, but I couldn’t; Veronica’s hold over her was too strong. Veronica didn’t give her a command; she possessed her. She is more powerful than John was, and definitely more powerful than my mind control.”

  “And if all you had was your mind control, I would be shaking in my cheap sneakers,” Darwin said. “You aren’t a one-trick-unicorn, though. You stopped her by using your visions.”

  “I don’t know that I did. Her sights were set on the Xterra, and now we’re trapped here until we can get other transportation. She didn’t acknowledge me at all; it was like she couldn’t see me. That tells me something pretty important; she can’t change her target once she takes over someone.”

  “What do you mean?” Rita asked.

  “Ahz and I were both in the car, so she made the Xterra the target because she couldn’t have predicted that I would get out. When I did, she could have easily run me down, but she didn’t.”

  “Unless Ahz was the target,” Darwin pointed out.

  “She could have swerved to hit you. She could have hit me first and then gone for the Xterra.”

  “Why didn’t she possess you and have you kill Ahz if she’s more powerful than you?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she can’t. It’s like the school’s ward. It’s easier to protect my mind than it is to invade another mind.”

  “Then she could possess us to kill you and Ahz,” Rita said.

  The room fell silent.

  Chapter 14

  I woke to my intuition warning me of something wrong. We weren’t in danger, but something was definitely wrong. I sat up quietly and looked around. Fortunately, my eyes were adapted to the dark. Ahz and Rita were in one bed, still asleep. Darwin and Henry had insisted on me sleeping in the other bed since I was the “old man” of the group. I wasn’t even thirty-five yet, but I was older than them. Loki was on Ahz’s chest, alert and staring at me.

  Henry was in his jaguar form in front of the door. Darwin had fallen asleep in his wolf form by the window, but he wasn’t there. After a moment, I heard a sound from the bathroom and got up. I paused outside to make sure I was right about the sound. Darwin was throwing up.

  I knocked softly. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m peach
y.”

  He didn’t sound well at all. The door wasn’t locked because Darwin never locked anything, so I opened the door and entered.

  Darwin’s face was pale and clammy. “What’s wrong?”

  “Amy must have knocked me up.”

  “Is this Veronica’s doing?”

  “No, Amy is just really good at sex.”

  “Would you be serious for a fucking minute?”

  He looked at the toilet and shook his head. “I threw up my serious organ. It’s gone forever. And maybe my tonsils, too.”

  He had on a t-shirt and shorts, but I saw a strange mark on his arm. I raised his sleeve and groaned. The bite mark was black and the skin around it was turning black. There were also darkened veins visible through his skin.

  “Fuck. We need to get you to a hospital.”

  “What’s a bloody quack gonna do? I don’t think they carry monster antivenom.”

  “You’re right. We need to get you to Dr. Martin.”

  “At this rate, I won’t make it. They said it could take them a week to fix the truck, and I bet they were underestimating the damage.”

  “Then we’ll rent another truck. This has something to do with demons, so we need a demon cure.”

  “There’s another demon we know,” Henry said from right behind me.

  I didn’t jump, but my heart did. “Damned shifters. I told you not to sneak up on me.” He wasn’t apologetic in the slightest. “There are the shadow walkers, but I don’t know where any of them are.”

  “I was referring to Logan Wayne, the half-demon in White Hills.”

  Logan Wayne was born on Earth. His father was a demon who was good friends with Logan Hunt, so Logan Wayne was named after Hunt. “He’s only half and he was born here, so he might not know how to help. On the other hand, he’s a few hours away rather than days.”

  “From what you two told me about White Hills, I think that would be a bad place to lead Veronica to,” Darwin said.

  He had a good point. White Hills was basically a paranormal sanctuary. There were vampires, shifters, wizards, fae, and everything in between living there in peace. It was the type of community that Hunt wanted to create with his schools.

  “I don’t care. We need to get you some help.”

  “I just need to shift again.”

  “You already shifted a bunch of times.”

  “Oh, right.” He threw up again.

  I used Rita’s laptop to rent us a truck. Unfortunately, we were in such a small town that they didn’t have a rental service nearby. We had to hitch a ride to a larger city. I figured on asking the mechanic.

  It took Darwin two hours to get back to sleep, and it wasn’t restful. He muttered in other languages and thrashed in his sleep. I was pretty sure he was having nightmares of the creatures he couldn’t remember.

  * * *

  With extreme care, I Googled anything I could about creatures that look human that could vanish. It was a waste of time; humans knew very little about the paranormal world and paranormals didn’t post their truths.

  “If you want to know about me, you could just ask,” came a too-familiar voice behind me. I jumped up and saw Remington standing a few feet away. Although I knew it was Veronica, my intuition didn’t react. My friends didn’t wake, either. She smirked, as if she knew what I was thinking. “Were you hoping they could save you? Power in numbers?” She scoffed. “More like easy pickings.”

  “What are you doing here?” I needed to distract her long enough to control her mind, but when I unleashed my power, I met the strongest mental block I had ever encountered. I could break Hunt’s and Vincent’s. I had even invaded John’s head in the end.

  But Veronica was too strong.

  She laughed. “Relax. I’m here to talk… this time. When it’s time to threaten you, I’ll bring the severed head of the person you love most.” She walked over to Ahz and knelt beside him. I took a step towards her, unthinking, but the look she shot me stopped me cold. Although she was disguised as Remy, her eyes held hatred that Remy could never achieve. “Look at your little brother. Your savior is so strong, and yet I could snap his neck right here, right now. Imagine how his mother will scream when I let her wake. She’ll know that you failed to protect her child. All of your friends will.” She sneered at Darwin. “Not that you’re doing a good job at protecting them as it is. You’re going to have to replace this one soon.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You know what I want.”

  “Is this about John? Is that why you’re after John’s kids?”

  She stood, her humor gone. “You can’t stop me, Devon. I’d hoped we could work together, but you’ve disappointed me. If you keep getting in my way, I’m going to stop playing around and squish you like the annoying insect you are. I could take everything important from you in a heartbeat. In fact, I could take that from you as well.”

  She didn’t gesture or make any indication that she was doing magic, but pain suddenly swelled in my chest. I knew the sensation; it was Gale’s curse. She could kill me in under a minute and I couldn’t even break through her mental block.

  “Do you understand who you’re dealing with now?”

  I opened my mouth to say something that would further piss her off, but she clenched her fist and I felt like she was squeezing my heart. I fell out of the chair and called to my familiar.

  She didn’t answer me. Maybe she couldn’t.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the pain was gone. I sat up, panting. She was gone. A strange thought occurred to me. We’d been looking into elementals and magical creatures that could appear and disappear. What we hadn’t considered was that most familiars could do it.

  * * *

  Tuesday, November 29

  I woke Rita ten minutes before the mechanic was supposed to open and told her that we had a change in plans. When she saw Darwin, she didn’t question me. “Your wounds got infected. I’m so stupid. I should have gotten you some antibiotics.”

  “No, it wasn’t the surgery; it was the monster bites that led me to wolf-out and get hit by a car in the first place,” he said, lifting up his shirt weakly. The bite on his abdomen was even worse, and the black veins were stretching mostly towards his heart. Rita looked sick. Considering she didn’t bat an eye at her wolf patient turning into a man or giant rocks flying towards us, that was saying something.

  We walked to the mechanic, but Darwin was sweating when we got there.

  The mechanic, Joe, was ten minutes late, and when we asked him if there was any way he could drive us to a larger city, he said he couldn’t. “You might want to get your friend to a hospital, though,” he said, looking at Darwin like he had the plague. He probably didn’t want to take us to a city because he was afraid Darwin was contagious.

  We got some breakfast at the diner and returned to the motel. Darwin got a hamburger because eating meat would help him to heal, and it did put some color back on him. Halfway through eating, there was a knock at the door. I answered it apprehensively.

  Two men stood there, and I knew immediately that they were shifters. They were both in their early thirties, built like runners, and had dark amber eyes. The taller man was six-five with dark auburn hair, while the other was six-two with medium auburn hair. They were close enough in appearance that I figured they were brothers, and their eyes and my intuition told me they were wolves. I had gotten good at telling different shifters apart over the years.

  My intuition also warned me that while they were dangerous, they were not threatening. “Hello. I’m Reese, and this is my brother, Riley,” the larger man said. “We’re looking for Darwin Mason.”

  “He’s here, but what is this about?”

  “Wizard, right?” Riley asked. I nodded. “He’s alpha-son of the Mason pack. We’re not here to cause trouble; we just want to meet him. We have to report back to our alpha that he’s not a threat.”

  “Is it Morris’s pack?”

  “No, Alpha Morris only
controls New Mexico. Alpha Mason controls most of the northern states. Our alpha, Nola Ace, controls the southern states east of New Mexico, including Texas and Oklahoma.”

  “Come in.” I stepped out of the way. “It’s surprising to see wolf shifters in this part of the country. I imagine the desert isn’t the place for wolves.”

  “We survive where we can. Alpha Ace is peaceful and easygoing. We live here because there’s too much competition and drama in the north. We sacrifice our natural environment for peace. Don’t get me wrong; we will annihilate anyone who crosses us.”

  “Well, we’re not here to cross anyone; we just want to get home. I’m Devon. This is Henry, Rita, Rita’s son, and Darwin.”

  “You don’t look so good,” Reese said to the smaller wolf.

  Darwin didn’t feel like explaining that he wasn’t plague-ridden, so he lifted up his sleeve. “We need to get to White Hills.”

  “White Hills is excluded from pack territory, but we can take you there. I assume there’s a healer there?”

  “We hope, because we can’t make it back to our healer in time,” I said.

  “Our aunt’s husband is a wizard healer, but I’ve never seen anything like that, so White Hills is a better bet. You won’t all fit in my car, though,” Riley said.

  “Ours was damaged. Can you take Henry to a nearby city so that he can rent a car?” Henry didn’t argue with me. He was our best driver and the least likely to be Veronica’s target.

  “Yeah. We can, but we’ll have to drop you off. If we don’t report back to our alpha by nightfall, she’ll send backup.”

  “Can’t you call her?”

  “That’s a red flag. We don’t trust anything said on the phone.”

  Henry left with them and I immediately doubted my decision. My intuition wasn’t warning me of danger; I just didn’t like sending him off alone. However, we had to get Darwin help.

  * * *

  An hour later, Henry returned with a dark green Ford Explorer. Darwin passed out the minute he got in the passenger seat. Henry drove faster than normal and a little reckless, but I wouldn’t tell him to slow down. We spent most of the drive on the highway.