Chase and Audrey exchanged a glance.
“Yes, I know about it.” Logan looked at each of them steadily. “I assume you know where the key is.”
“What’s the second thing?” Chase asked.
Logan smiled at him, noting that he hadn’t answered the question.
“Some spells require three supplicants to succeed,” Logan said, pointing at Chase, Audrey, and himself. “One. Two. Three.”
The twins stared at him for several minutes. Logan found himself enjoying how disconcerted they seemed.
Chase leaned forward. “This is a joke.”
“Not at all.” Logan stabbed out the cigarette and stood up. “I need to cast a few spells. Learn magics from the books your father has secreted away in his library. Then I’ll want to cast more spells.”
“Why on earth would you go meddling with magics?” Audrey asked, exasperated. “Didn’t you tell us when you arrived that you feel like you have a target on your back?”
Logan pursed his lips but didn’t answer.
“Casting spells is like planting a homing beacon on yourself,” Audrey continued. “Do you want the Searchers to find you?”
He didn’t. “I don’t have any choice.”
“Of course you do,” Chase replied. He waved at their surroundings. “What more do you need than this? Can spells bring you happiness?”
“I’m not after happiness,” Logan told him. He couldn’t pinpoint what it was that had driven him to an obsession with the Keepers’ history. Why he hired thieves to ransack Rowan Estate and bring him as much of Bosque Mar’s collection as they could manage. One of the fools had been caught. Damn him. But what Logan had managed to get his hands on proved useful enough. It at least pointed him in the right direction.
Logan couldn’t expect the twins to understand something he didn’t fully comprehend himself, but he needed their help.
Giving Audrey a direct look, he said, “How do you expect you’ll look in ten years?”
She lifted her chin in pride.
But when Logan said, “Twenty?” her face fell.
If there was anything Keepers had in common, it was vanity.
“Bosque Mar kept us from aging,” Chase interjected. “And he’s gone.”
Logan’s fists clenched at Bosque’s name. “I know.”
“So what are you after?”
Logan sighed. He’d talked himself into trusting Chase and Audrey, but that didn’t make confiding in them easy. “I just want to know—I need to know—if there’s a way to bring him back.”
“Bring him back?” Audrey snorted. “Have you forgotten your history, Logan? The Rift was opened by a great knight. You may be Efron Bane’s son, but a knight you are not.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Logan said with a shrug, “but I think I could be a warlock if I tried.”
“A warlock?” Chase tilted his head, regarding Logan with curiosity. That was a good sign.
“Yes.” Logan leaned back against the couch cushions, trying to appear at ease, though his pulse was frantic.
“Interesting.” Chase kept his eyes on Logan while Audrey clucked her tongue in disapproval.
“It’s a waste of time,” she said.
“Then you don’t have to help,” Logan told her. His gaze moved slowly over her face. “If you find humanity so satisfying, of course you wouldn’t want to bother with this.”
Audrey blanched, clutching at the edge of the divan. Chase looked at his sister and then returned his attention to Logan.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll help you.”
THOUGH SABINE KNEW the wolf no longer lived within her, she still felt the sway of its feral instincts. She wondered if the lingering sense of the wolf would fade with time, or if it would remain a part of her—like a phantom limb, reminding her of a past now gone forever.
But there were moments when Sabine could feel her hackles rise, warning her of imminent danger. And that bristling along her spine had become a frequent occurrence, taking hold of her at least once a day. Sometimes more.
Shrugging it off as habit, or something as simple as muscle memory, would have been easier if not for the timing of her heightened tension. The gnawing sense of something amiss, something lurking in a shadowed corner, a waiting horror that couldn’t be seen but was nonetheless there: all of it began with the ransacking of Rowan Estate’s library.
Sabine couldn’t bring herself to call it a coincidence. Something was wrong. Very wrong. But what that was, she hadn’t a clue. All Sabine could do was watch and wait until the problem revealed itself.
And that was why Sabine, warrior wolf of the Bane pack and sometime sexy beast—as Ethan liked to call her when he wanted to rile her up—had perfected the skill of pasting on a bright smile and simultaneously walking backward and describing the architecture and history of Rowan Estate. All while wearing a name tag.
In Sabine’s days as a Guardian, if someone had suggested she would spend her future days wearing a name tag and performing a job with the title “docent,” she would have bitten his fingers off. When Sabine had informed Ethan of her intention to take up the post as director of tours at Rowan Estate, he’d laughed. When he realized she was dead serious, he’d first balked, then protested.
“You’re a fighter,” Ethan had argued. “One of the best I’ve seen. You belong in the field.”
“I belong here,” Sabine had countered. And after those words, and a pointed look, there had been no further discussion.
Having just concluded that afternoon’s tour, Sabine returned to her watchpost at the top of the stairs, bidding the visitors to return to the foyer and make their way to the exit. The final minutes of the tour were those that most closely touched Sabine’s own life, as she discussed people the tourists assumed were long dead but whom Sabine had known, served, and despised. Speaking their names in a matter-of-fact tone always proved a challenge: Efron Bane, Lumine Nightshade. That Sabine was no longer a wolf didn’t seem to change the way the memory of the pack masters made her want to snarl.
As the director of Rowan Estate’s burgeoning new tourism business, Sabine wasn’t expected to guide the tours herself. But she found winding her way through the mansion’s halls, recounting its past, and rendering its rooms legible to strangers to be rather cathartic. As the doorways and passages of the estate became familiar, its specters faded along with Sabine’s lingering fear. She’d done literal battle in this place, had soaked its priceless carpets with the blood of her former master, given up a part of herself to become someone new. Though she couldn’t deny it had been the site of countless horrors, to Sabine, Rowan Estate had come to represent a powerful shift in her life: a moment of choice, of liberation.