I couldn’t be the only one to have survived a merging with the wild magic. There had to be others, especially given earth magic—as they’d called it at the very dawn of time—had been less volatile and more widely used by witches at the time.
I drew the book closer and reverently ran my fingers down the front of it. Images had been carved into the thick leather, but the book was so old and the leather so worn they were barely visible. I tracked the faint outline of a tree—the tree of life, I suspected.
“Have you read any of it?” I asked softly.
“Nope, because the damn thing is written in Latin.”
My gaze jumped to his again even as my heart sank. “Do you know anyone who can translate it for us?”
“Apparently, Eli can. He said he’d read through and convert the relevant sections for us as quickly as he could. I’ll drop it off to him as soon as I finish my coffee.”
“Good.” I finished my cup of tea, then collected the tray and pushed stiffly to my feet. “Are you and Belle heading out tonight?”
His grin was full of devilment. “I think it more likely we’ll stay in. Things to do, places to explore, and all that.”
“An image I did not need in my mind,” I said. But I certainly got them—at least until Belle abruptly shut the line down. The silence echoed with her amused embarrassment.
He laughed. “We’re all adults here.”
“Yeah, but you’re also my cousin, and I don’t want to be envisaging you all naked and sweaty with my best friend.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I never mentioned naked and sweaty.”
“You didn’t have to.”
His gaze shot past me. “Belle?”
“Didn’t shut her thoughts down fast enough.”
He laughed again. “Then I am definitely looking forward to tonight.”
I snorted softly and placed the empty plate and cups on the tray. After dropping them off in the kitchen, I headed back behind the counter to continue making the coffee orders and doling out cakes.
Aiden still hadn’t contacted me by the time we’d closed and cleaned up, and it was all I could do not to send him a text asking if everything was okay.
“And why shouldn’t you?” Belle handed me a coffee and leaned a hip against the counter. “You are in a relationship, after all.”
I scooped up some of my cheesecake. It was a triple chocolate sort of day. “Yes, but it’s one that is ending.”
“If that is what’s happening here, you need to find out.”
“Agreed, but we both also know I have a long history of sticking my head in the sand when it comes to relationships falling apart.”
A smile twitched her lips. “Hard to forget when you’ve had so few of them.”
I contemplated flicking a bit of cheesecake at her but decided it was a waste of good cheesecake and ate it instead.
“What are you going to do, then?” she asked. “Go home and wait for the man?”
“Absolutely not. I’m going to talk to Katie.”
“Can’t you contact her through the wild magic?”
“It has to be present. It’s not.” Besides, there were some discussions that were best done in person.
Belle frowned. “You won’t get any sympathy from her. Aiden is her brother.”
“I won’t even broach the subject of her brother.” At Belle’s rather disbelieving arched eyebrow, I grinned and added, “Well, maybe a little. But I also need to head across to the new storage unit and see if we’ve anything that mentions entities that can literally suck a man dry.”
“You don’t think it was a vampire?”
I shook my head. “It just didn’t have that feel.”
“I didn’t think it had hung around long enough for you to get any real sense of it.”
“It didn’t, but I have confronted vampires before, and this thing felt nothing like them.”
A car horn blasted outside before she could say anything. She glanced at her watch and then drained the remains of her coffee. “That’ll be Monty.”
“Enjoy your evening.”
“Oh, I will.” She picked up her overnight bag and then touched my shoulder lightly. “I’m here if you need me. Remember that.”
“I know.” I placed my hand over hers and squeezed lightly. “But I want you to lock down your thoughts and stop worrying about me. If I get into trouble and need your help, you know I’ll reach out.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
She studied me doubtfully for a moment. “I sense a ‘but’ in that agreement.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Because I’ll only reach out if the situation is something you can help with. I don’t want to be a spoilsport.”
“I’d rather you be a spoilsport than dead.”
“I’m not going to get dead.” I crossed mental fingers that I hadn’t just tempted fate.
She hesitated and then left. I finished my cheesecake and coffee, then locked up and jumped into the SUV. The Suzi might be cheaper to run, but all the recent rain had washed out the road up to the second wellspring. The SUV, with its bigger wheelbase and all-wheel drive, was definitely the safer option.
Once I was out of Castle Rock and on the open road, I turned up the music and happily sang along. I knew it was nothing more than a means of avoiding too much thinking, and I had no problem with that. I’d spent far too much of my life so far second-guessing not only other peoples’ motives and actions, but also my own. No matter what I feared, no matter what I thought, Aiden deserved the benefit of the doubt. The constant gnawing over what it all meant was absolutely useless.
Of course, telling myself that and actually believing it were two entirely different things.
The second wellspring lay within the St. Erth forests, which ringed the small town of Maldoon and was Marin Pack territory. Thankfully, I’d been given permission to visit the site as often as needed, but only as long as I went absolutely nowhere else.
I turned onto a gravel road a few minutes out of Maldoon and did my best to avoid the many potholes while keeping well away from the soft roadside edge and the long drop into the heavily treed valley below. But as I turned onto the track that led up through the scrub and the second wellspring, the psychic part of my soul stirred.
Something was out there.
I hit the brakes, turned down the music, and studied the shadows gathering beyond the headlight’s bright beams. Nothing moved through the trees, and there was no other sound aside from the rumble of the SUV’s engine. I glanced in the rearview mirror. The red glow of the brake lights lit tree trunks lining the road, and for no good reason, a vision of blood rose.
On the trees. On my face.
I blinked, and the vision disappeared. The trepidation didn’t. It suddenly seemed a very bad idea to be climbing this bitch of a road with night coming on and more rain on the way.
Besides, it wasn’t like I couldn’t come up here any other time. Wasn’t like I couldn’t call in a thread of wild magic and contact Katie if I absolutely had to.
The only reason I’d come up here was simply to avoid going home to emptiness. Which was dumb when I had plenty of times in the past.