“I’ve never had a scar,” Audrey replied. “If I so much as skinned my knee, I’d have Guardian blood to heal the wound. My skin is perfect.”
“I’m sure the forces of darkness will doubly appreciate your sacrifice, then,” Logan said drily. “Now can we get on with this?”
“But—” Audrey held her hands up, gazing at her smooth, pale skin.
“Keep in mind that if we don’t cast this spell, those hands of yours will be full of bulging blue veins and wrinkles in a matter of years,” Chase added, throwing Logan a wink.
“Fine.”
Each of the three would-be supplicants stepped into the circle to stand before a stone. Logan took Chase’s hand, turned it over, and carved a triangle into his palm with the dagger. He handed the blade to Chase, who in turn cut the same shape into his sister’s palm. Audrey winced but remained silent as she’d been bidden. And she didn’t try to make her own slices into Logan’s palm overly slow or deep. Her hand shook as she drew the sharp point of the dagger along his flesh, and Logan realized how frightened she was.
Taking the dagger from Audrey’s trembling grasp, Logan gave a quick nod and all three of them held their hands, palms facing down, over the wet stones. Their blood mingled with the water from the jug, and Logan began to speak.
“We three supplicants offer our blood on this blind night. Hear our call and let us see beyond this plane. Open beyond and below that we may gain passage to the other, to the Nether.”
Logan could barely hear his words due to the roar of blood in his ears. On either side of him, Audrey and Chase were breathing hard, and Logan knew they must be feeling what he was. Power, thick and heavy, like a python curling its way up his calves, constricting as it moved. The force of it made Logan want to fall to his knees, but he did not dare lose control.
Silence covered the forest around them. No birds stirred in the branches. No breath of wind turned leaves over to rustle against the ground.
Then, a sound. Low and steady. Menacing.
A snarl.
“Holy shit.” Chase stumbled back, and for a moment, Logan was terrified Chase would step beyond the circle and break the spell. But Chase recovered his balance even as he stared in horror at the shape that had formed from the forest’s shadows and now stalked toward them.
“Logan,” Audrey breathed in horror. “What did you do?”
“It’s all right, Audrey,” Logan said, though he was far from sure that was true. He clasped his hands behind his back, afraid that if he didn’t they’d begin to shake uncontrollably.
The wolf drew near. It was still snarling but didn’t move to attack. The beast’s dark fur shimmered with silver, and as it came closer, Logan saw that its body, though clearly outlined, was partly transparent. The wolf was both there and not there. Then Logan’s chest clenched.
No. It couldn’t be.
Even as his mind rejected the possibility, the wolf shifted forms. A tall, lean figure gazed at Logan with dark, accusing eyes.
Logan cleared his throat and said the only words that came to mind. “Hello, Renier. I wasn’t expecting you.”
Ren’s smile made Logan shiver. “That makes two of us.”
THOUGH NOT A HARD and fast rule, Adne knew that weaving for her own purposes, and doing so in secret, ran counter to Searcher protocol. She’d never been that reluctant about rule-bending, and sometimes rule-breaking, as she deemed it necessary, but tonight guilt gnawed at her when she began to weave.
Threads of light spooled out from Adne’s skeins as she moved, and in a matter of minutes a pattern emerged, then an image. A room full of shelves and boxes.
The Tordis Scribes had declared it foolhardy to relocate Rowan Estate’s collection of books, scrolls, and assorted strange occult objects to the Roving Academy. Someone had suggested that it might be possible that one or more of said items could emit magic akin to a beacon, magic that could be traced. While the Searchers widely believed that the remaining Keepers had been cut off from their magical ties, no one wanted to risk revealing the location of the Searcher stronghold.
Thus one of Rowan Estate’s drawing rooms had been repurposed as a storage and research area. Scribes came and went from the room, cataloging works and marking them according to subject and relative urgency: what needed to be studied without delay and what could be put aside until more immediate concerns had been addressed.
But even the most obsessive scholars from Tordis didn’t crave nights spent in the former lair of Bosque Mar. As a Weaver, Adne knew the schedule of portal openings to and from Rowan Estate, and none of them took place after ten P.M. or before six A.M. And that was why Adne had slipped out of Connor’s bed just after midnight and returned to her own room to weave a door that no one else would use or see.
Wiping the fine veil of sweat from her brow, Adne stepped through the portal and immediately closed the door behind her. A rash move, as it turned out, because she was instantly plunged into darkness. The room’s lights had been turned out for the night and Adne hadn’t given thought to the fact that its temporary state of illumination had been courtesy of her portal.
Fumbling through the darkness, Adne groped along the floor and then the wall until she found a light switch. She flipped the switch without hesitation. The Scribes insisted on keeping the old books and papers stored there in a protective environment, meaning that sunlight was blocked out by heavy drapes drawn over all the windows. The night patrols roaming Rowan Estate’s grounds would be none the wiser that a room which was supposed to be empty now had a sole occupant.
The sometime parlor smelled of leather and must. Bookshelves that had been hastily erected were filled with ancient tomes and yellowing scrolls. Adne passed by the scrolls and headed for the shelves that held tall leather-bound volumes.
Logan had stolen several books about the Keepers’ history and lineage, but according to the Scribes Adne had struck up casual conversations with, he hadn’t taken all of the pertinent volumes.
The books’ spines were no help. Their leather bindings might have been exquisite, but they didn’t reveal a book’s content, so Adne was forced to take one volume off the shelf at a time and scan its pages until she discerned what it was about. The process would have been much less tedious had she been able to get a copy of the Scribes’ cataloging system, but asking for those records seemed too likely to invite questions Adne didn’t want to answer. As a Weaver, she wasn’t supposed to be digging through potentially dangerous books as they were readied for archiving. She also wasn’t supposed to be in possession of a box of relics that Logan Bane, for reasons unknown, had deemed valuable.