Page 37 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

“But…” I floundered. “You’re an excellent tactician. You have connections everywhere. The sheer amount of magical knowledge?—”

“Gabriel,” she said sternly. “I am, as you say, an excellent tactician. So, trust me when I say I’m needed more elsewhere.”

I rubbed a hand over my stinging eyes. “I can’t change your mind, can I?”

“Of course not.” She stretched up to kiss me on the forehead. Her lips lingered for a moment, dry and cool, then she stepped away and moved the screen separating the sleeping quarters from the lounge area. Her luggage sat on top of the bed. She must have been waiting for me to wake up before she left.

“It would behoove you to remember that there is someone in the family who has been plotting how to get rid of that witch for a long time. I’m sure he has the fragments of several plans that he hasn’t been able to string together yet. Luckily for the fate of the magical world, you got your smarts from me, not him.” She swept up her luggage and kissed my forehead once again, then swept out the door.

I stood at the window for a long time, looking down at the sleeping firebirds curled around each other and their eggs. My mother was right. There was someone who had spent years figuring out how to destroy Morgana, and his name was Roland De Montclair.

14

EVANGELINE

Iwoke up that morning tangled together with Gabriel, feeling lazy and rested. He’d been in a weird mood the night before, and, given everything that had happened, I didn’t blame him. The conversation he’d snuck off to have with his mom had rattled him, but when I’d asked, he’d shaken his head and tugged me down to the bed. We’d curled up together, trading the occasional sleepy kiss, but mostly we enjoyed holding each other. But we couldn’t stay in bed forever, not with everything that was at stake. Plus, as tempting as Gabriel was, ancient and powerful magic was tempting, too, and it required practice.

As much as I hated to admit it, being rested did make it easier to handle the magic. I didn’t want a repeat of the clumsy series of jumps it had taken me to get Gabriel out of the citadel, so I decided to practice my teleportation. To keep it as low-risk as possible I was only taking us around the forest, but it was still exhilarating even when the sights that greeted us were pretty much the same. Power crackled through me as I dipped into the flow of the ley lines over and over again, flickering in and out of existence. Every time we slipped back into the material world, Lissa whooped and cheered.

I’d been working on my newfound skills solo for most of the morning, trying to improve my control, but then Lissa made big, sad eyes at me every time I stopped back in at the safe house. Finally, I relented and agreed that I should be practicing with a passenger.

“That’s amazing,” Lissa told me when we stopped for a break. We’d found a rocky spot halfway up a mountain and were sitting on the sunbaked stone. “So exhilarating! If I were you, I’d never go anywhere the old-fashioned way.”

I decided not to ask what ‘the old-fashioned way’ meant for someone who was almost two hundred years old. “I am kinda limited by where the ley lines cross. It’s gonna make it a lot easier to get around a city as magical as Eldoria, but it’s not like I can use it to zip down to the kitchen when I want a snack.”

“Still, it’s great fun,” Lissa said. “And it’s nice to get out into the fresh air and relax. I don’t know what it is, but whenever I sleep in an unfamiliar place, I have the strangest dreams. This is an absolute delight after the night I had. What about you, Evangeline? Have you been having any unusual dreams?” She watched me with a lazily contented expression. Any minute now, she was going to whip out a bottle of nail polish and give me a manicure while we talked about boys.

She was angling for something, but I had no goddamn idea what. “Uh, I guess,” I said. “C’mon, I bet I could do it with another passenger.”

With her hand tucked into the crook of my elbow, I slipped us into the flow of wild magic and took us back to Marcus’s place.

“You couldn’t have landed us a little closer?” Lissa asked, peering at the old mill through the trees.

“The intersection is here.” I shrugged. “Blame magic, not me.”

She huffed, then pouted. “But it would take a human ages to walk all that way.”

I eyed the distance. It wasn’t more than a three-minute walk. Before I could point that out, she shifted her grip on me. The world abruptly went sideways as Lissa hoisted me up over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes and ran to the house with vampiric speed. I let out a startled shriek, but by the time I’d processed what was happening, she was already setting me down at the front door and dusting off my jacket.

“Uh,” I managed, blinking rapidly. “Thanks?”

“Don’t mention it,” Lissa said cheerfully, like she hadn’t just deadlifted me with no warning. “Come along. Let’s find a new victim to whisk around with us.”

“Let’s maybe not phrase it like that when we’re looking for volunteers,” I said, swept along in Hurricane Lissa’s wake.

Inside, a few of the tables on the first floor had been pushed together in the middle of the room. The white paint was scratched away in places where runes were etched, leaving the battered wood of the tabletop visible.

Marcus was bent over the table fiddling with pieces of silver wire, and Isabella stood on an ottoman that floated several feet above the table. She was stretched up on her toes, drilling holes into the ceiling. Sawdust drifted downward, but the small bucket zipping around Isabella caught the dust before it could hit the table. Every time she finished screwing something in, she hung a colorful bit of string off it. Each one had a small pendulum at the bottom, metal or stone or wood. If there was any logic behind which ones went where, it was lost on me. The strings were long enough that the pendulums hung a foot or so above the surface of the table. She didn’t stop working when Lissa and I came in, but Marcus glanced up, sliding his glasses back up his nose.

“You need a victim?” he asked mildly. “What sort?”

“Not a victim,” I insisted. “Victim makes it sound nefarious.”

“Is it nefarious?” He turned to Lissa. “Is she being nefarious?”

“No!” I said.

“No,” Lissa reported. “She’s practicing her teleportation.”

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