We’d climbed about halfway up the stairs — which, despite a series of landings, did appear to dead-end at another lookout point — when the gold sphere tried to yank me over the railing and through the rock wall to my right.
“Wait!” I shouted. My voice reverberated back to me off the cave walls. Everyone froze around me. Kandy in mid-step.
The owner/operators of the Sea Lion Caves had strategically placed red mood lighting in various hollowed-out spots all along the passage that had been carved out for the stairwell. I stared at one of these concave hollows and attempted to see beyond the human-generated light. “Magic,” I breathed. “More magic. Right there.”
I stepped by Desmond, who was directly in front of me, to stand beside Kandy. The magic emanating off a witch, a vampire, and two shapeshifters had overwhelmed my senses. I hadn’t felt this other magic until Kandy was almost past it.
If I angled my head just right, I could see a narrow path veering off ninety degrees from the stairwell, straight back into and through the cave wall. At the mouth of this passage, another small box sat on a rock that jutted out like a shelf. If she’d seen the passage before I did, Kandy could have easily brushed it with her shoulder.
“You can’t see that?” I asked Kandy, pointing at the box.
“See what?” she growled.
A ripple like a heat mirage fluttered in the air around the box. “Spelled invisible,” I said. I climbed over the stair railing onto the bare rock beyond. Kett was instantly at my side.
“Here?” the vampire asked.
“Can you see it?”
“Not quite.”
“Do you see the tunnel beyond?”
“Yes, now. Standing here. Is that where the sphere prompts —”
“Can we pass or not?” Desmond interrupted Kett’s interrogation, which was fine with me. The vampire could probably spend weeks analyzing the placement of the box alone, never setting one foot into the hidden passageway. Desmond’s growl, a mixture of impatience and stress, completely reflected my own feelings. I’d just been taught to be more polite about it.
“Give me a second,” I said. I looked around for a loose rock. There weren’t any. “How is there not a single rock in a cave?”
“It’s a tourist attraction,” Kandy answered. “If the humans could take one of the sea lions home, they would. Did you hear about the guy getting killed by a beaver —”
“Kandy.” Desmond’s growl was now even more pronounced. “We don’t need the dowser more distracted than she already is.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, knowing that even in the low light, he’d see my glare. I mean, it wasn’t like he was wrong or anything. It was just plain rude to point it out.
“Jade,” Scarlett said. Her soft tone was instantly soothing. “How wide does the magical field extend around the object? That should give you a sense of its range without hitting it with a rock.”
The rock idea was obviously too simple for the powerful quartet sulking through the cave by my side. Silly me.
I swallowed my pride and answered. “About two inches.”
“Meant to be accidentally brushed against,” Kett said.
“Or as a warning,” Desmond said. “Placed obviously like that. He’s met the dowser. So no one brush up against that rock shelf.” He stepped by the box and through into the passageway. I wondered how many humans had accidentally wandered in here and were never heard from again … since the passageway didn’t appear in the brochure.
Kett was still staring at the box intently, but nothing happened as Desmond passed it by. Kandy helped Scarlett climb over the handrail, then stepped by Desmond to take up point again.
I followed, with Scarlett right behind me. She snapped her fingers and a blue glow the size of a tennis ball floated up from her hand to settle above her shoulder. The light was bright enough for us to see a couple of feet, but not so bright as to ruin the shapeshifters’ night vision up ahead. The comforting taste of Scarlett’s magic washed over me before ebbing to its normal levels. I’d always loved that light spell as a child, and coveted it as an adult. I couldn’t cast without a power circle, and even then, my spells were more miss than hit.
Kett stayed behind long enough that I began to wonder if he’d tried to touch the box. Then I felt his magic as he closed in behind us. The noise of the crashing waves dimmed as we pushed further through the cliff side.
“Stop,” I called two more times for two more magical boxes placed in our path. “He likes to contain spells in things. Boxes. This sphere. Is that a sorcerer thing?”
“Blackwell is a particularly powerful sorcerer,” Scarlett answered.
The compulsion spell in the gold sphere ramped up in intensity. It really wanted me to walk through the rock wall to my left.
“Wait,” I whispered, as I slowly pivoted in the cramped tunnel.
We were walking single file. Thankfully, none of us was over six feet, or headspace would have been a problem. I couldn’t see him well in the low blue light, but shoulder space might already be a problem for McGrowly.
“It … it wants me to go through this wall.” I stretched my arm out toward the wall to my left. The magic in the sphere pulsed in response. Scarlett flicked her fingers, and her light ball darted forward as if searching for an entrance up and down the craggy rock wall.
“Magic?” Kett asked.
I shook my head. No magic emanated from the wall. The gold sphere in the palm of my outstretched arm tugged me forward … and … to the side? My arm slid around the wall.
“A blind entrance,” Desmond murmured from my other side.
Indeed, the cave wall cleverly disguised a perpendicular passage.
“No breeze,” Kandy said as she squeezed by Desmond and me to take point once more. “But we must be traveling parallel to the coast again.”
We continued forward. I followed Kandy, with Desmond right on my heels. The passage was too narrow for him to push past without manhandling me. Scarlett’s light returned to float above her shoulder. Now that Kandy had mentioned the no-breeze thing, I tried to not think about the hundreds of feet of solid rock over my head, and the limited air supply.
The fourth trap sprung before I could even react to the glimmer of magic. Maybe Kandy had gotten too far ahead, or maybe Blackwell had gotten better at masking his spells. As she passed it, something shot out and grabbed the green-haired werewolf by the ankle, apparently yanking her through the wall.
“Kandy!” I shrieked, only to be face-planted against the opposite wall by a rough shove between my shoulder blades as Desmond pushed by me.
“Kandy!” he roared at the wall that had just absorbed the green-haired werewolf.
“I’m here.” Kandy’s voice was muffled but coming through the rock wall somehow. “Fuck, fuck. Sorry.”
“Back away, Desmond,” I said.
McGrowly begrudgingly stepped to the side. I peered at the wall. It was difficult to distinguish different magical signatures when surrounded by this many powerful Adepts. “Some sort of residual spell on the wall,” I said. I could clearly see the outline of an opening, but not Kandy.
“Yeah,” Kandy said. “It’s another passage. I can smell sea air now though.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” Kandy sounded pretty pissed, as if she should be hurt in order to justify being grabbed by Blackwell’s trap.
“I could maybe cut through the … ward or whatever is blocking us from Kandy’s passage.”
“Does the sphere urge you in that direction, Jade?” Scarlett asked.
“No.”
“Blackwell knows the dowser wouldn’t come alone,” Kett said.
“And that we wouldn’t put her on point,” Desmond added.
“Perhaps a miscalculation on our part.”
“Kandy,” Desmond called through the wall. “Back track if you can, and come through the tunnels again. Follow our scents and avoid the traps behind us.”
“Yes, alpha.”
“What?” I cried. “We aren’t going to leave her!”
“She’s leaving us, dowser,” Desmond said. “Step ahead.”
“You didn’t even let me try to cut —”
“Kandy is a warrior. One who would gladly sacrifice herself to save a packmate who was less able. We find the fledglings, first and foremost.”
“Yes,” Scarlett agreed behind me. “If we had been more careful leaving Vancouver, the necromancer wouldn’t be in danger.”
Kett — of course and always –- remained silent when others were expressing the opinion he would have expressed himself.
“Kandy?” I called, but there was no answer from behind the wall.
“She’s already moving, dowser. She knows how to execute orders.”
I shoved by Desmond, making sure to hit him in the gut with my elbow — twice — but he probably didn’t even feel it. The magic of the gold sphere had begun to buzz underneath the skin of my palm, as if it was attempting to burrow into me. Its intensity lessened as I moved. I wondered whether if I held on long enough, the magic would manage to grab hold of me completely.
“Blackwell would have assumed the compulsion spell would work on me,” I said.
“And you’d have no choice but to leave us behind at the mercy of the traps,” Scarlett added.
The glow of Scarlett’s light ball was almost completely blocked by Desmond’s stupid shoulders, and our voices were startlingly loud in the dark. My mother and I were the only ones making any noise as we moved. Last time I’d been in the dark surrounded by monsters, that silence had freaked me out. Now I expected it. That said something profound about my life that I didn’t want to investigate too deeply right now. Not without Mory safe and about ten ounces of single-origin Madagascar chocolate at hand.
“Three traps, and then the one that got Kandy. Five of us,” I said, focusing on the immediate issue before me. Trying, for once in my life, to work out the puzzle before it jumped up and smacked me in the face.
“There will be more,” Kett said. His voice sounded farther away than he actually was physically.
I stopped. Then slowly and methodically, I stretched my dowser senses forward and to the sides as far as I could. I had become accustomed to dampening my senses as much as possible when surrounded by this much magic, afraid it would overwhelm me. Now I tried to filter out Desmond, Kett, and Scarlett.
“Something up ahead …” I said as I caught the glimmer of Blackwell’s magic. The earthy red-wine notes of his magical signature were obvious, but the sorcerer always worked with some sort of magical object to set or store his spells. This intermingled and disguised his taste enough that it was taking me longer to separate it from the tastes of the witch, shifter, and vampire behind me.
The cave itself smelled of old salt water and dried seaweed. I assumed that it flooded occasionally but hadn’t for some time. My shoes were going to be ruined, but I wasn’t shallow enough to care … or okay, I cared enough to notice. I wasn’t anywhere near freaking perfect. I made cupcakes for a living, not pacemakers or brain surgery tools.
I was a baker, not a savior. A baker who was blatantly trying to distract herself from her present circumstances via meaningless internal banter … yet again.
Some seconds/minutes/hours/days, it was difficult being me. But I wasn’t sure I could do anything about that.
What I could do was keep moving forward.
So I did.
∞
McGrowly smashed his fist through the fifth trap we found. It had been directly and completely blocking our path, and Desmond eventually got frustrated by Scarlett, Kett, and me poking at it.
The spell — similar to the one that grabbed Kandy — blew open and wrapped around Desmond’s arm, yanking him to one side. I slashed at it with my knife, severing its connection to Desmond but not nullifying the spell completely. The residual on McGrowly — thwarted from its purpose — seared into his skin. He roared with pain while I tried to get my hands on him, trying to see if I could help by siphoning the magic back into the box or something.
Unfortunately, the second half of the spell — the part that was still functioning — grabbed Scarlett by the shoulder as it snapped back, yanking her off her feet. Kett grabbed her by the other arm, and for a moment, she hung suspended — half in and half out of the cave wall.
McGrowly boiled out of his human skin, changing to counteract the spell, but also managing to knock me farther away from being of any help to my mother.
Then Scarlett’s arm — the one in Kett’s grasp — snapped. She screamed, a howl of pain I would never want to hear from anyone, let alone my mother.
“Let the scion go, vampire!” McGrowly yelled. His words were mangled by his double cat fangs, but still understandable. Five-inch cat fangs.
I scrambled to my feet as Kett released Scarlett and she was completely pulled through the wall. “Mom! Mom!”
I pushed by the two monsters blocking my path, even though I shouldn’t have been able to move them an inch.
“It’s all right, my Jade.” Even muffled by the spelled rock wall between us, Scarlett’s voice was pained.
I started slashing at the magical barrier between Scarlett and me. She’d taken her ball of light with her, so I couldn’t see much except for the glimmer of the ward blocking my way. That was enough.
“Sugar, it’s all right,” Scarlett said again.
I realized I’d been repeating, “Mom, Mom, Mom,” over and over again.
“Same as Kandy on this side,” Scarlett reported, her voice stronger than before. “I can feel a breeze. I must be near some sort of an exit.”
“We have no idea how far we’re above the ocean here,” I cried. “Climbing the side of a cliff for Kandy is nothing —”
“Jade Godfrey,” Scarlett snapped. “You will not underestimate your mother. I have stabilized my arm and numbed the pain. A few more healing spells, well-spaced, will heal the break.”
I turned on Kett. His magic illuminated his pale skin, making him easy to identify in the dark. “You!” I hissed. “What were you thinking?”
“That the spell couldn’t be that strong.”
“Well, it was!”
“Yes.”
Yes? What sort of answer was that? “You broke her arm!”
“You slashed an unknown spell with your knife.”
“Desmond was caught in it. And it wasn’t unknown.”
“That’s enough children,” Desmond said, his voice warped through stretched vocal cords and fanged teeth. The magic in the tunnel shifted, flooding my taste buds with much-needed deep, dark chocolate as Desmond once again adopted his human skin. His human skin, which would be clothed only in tattered jeans and a stretched-out T-shirt now — but I couldn’t see anything but magic in the dark. There were no silver linings to be had today.