Page 174 of The Beta's Blind Date

I reach for the door handle, but each time I attempt to grab it, my hand phases through the knob. I frown and look to my left, where the scanner is to let us out, and I groan. “Damn it, we need Wesley. The scanner is programmed to his palm since I don’t do torture, and—”

“Reid,” Taryn says, chuckling and covering her mouth. “We’re non corporeal, remember?”

“What’s your point?”

Maya rolls her eyes again and facepalms. “We don’t need a door!”

I look at her and then at the door, where my hand is halfway in and out of the room, and then I, too, facepalm. “Oh, my Goddess. Duh.”

Both of them laugh as I float through the door into the observation room and then back into the hospital cell, crossing my eyes and sticking my tongue out at them when I return.

“Okay, okay,” Maya says after I do it a second time and come back with my non corporeal finger up my non corporeal nose. “Enough goofing around. We need to follow the spell.”

Both she and Taryn try—and fail—to turn their laughing faces serious as we float out of the cell and leave the building altogether. We pause on the edge of the training fields, all of us scanning the grounds and the horizon for a trace of the spell.

“There!” Taryn says, pointing towards the packhouse.

We take off after it, moving faster than we’d be able to in our physical bodies, reaching the steps in seconds. The wisp of the spell floats through the door, and we follow it, winding down the hall and up the stairs to the second floor. It creeps along the corridor of guest rooms, and dread and anticipation pool within me equally the further we move away from the stairwell.

When it reaches the last door on the left, it fades through the whitewashed wood, and we pause, glancing at each other. It’s a split-second moment, but it’s as if time stops, and our breaths are held in that brief reprieve before we all phase through the door into the guest room.

“Oh my Goddess,” Maya says, her eyes widening. “Is that…?”

“It is.” Taryn nods, scanning the scene, her hands clenching into fists.

“I don’t know what to say,” Maya says.

We all move to the coffee table, where a grimoire is open in the center, candles lit around it, and crystals and various other witchy tools I can’t identify arranged in what I assume is a specific configuration needed to work the spell she is casting.

And leaning over the book, her hair unkempt and her clothes wrinkled, is Luna Merina.

Dominic’s mom.

“She’s a witch?” I ask, circling the table to examine her face.

Her palms press into the pages, a crystal pinned between her right hand and the paper. Her eyes are shut, her lips parted mid-spell, and the dark cloud we removed from Dominic coalesces into a spiraling storm above her head.

“No,” Taryn says. “I’ve seen her shift.”

“She must be a hybrid,” Maya says, her voice breathless, her hand trembling as she rubs her chest. “Like me.”

“But why would she want to have control over her own son?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Maya says, but her eyes flick to Taryn. “If she knew about Taryn, then—”

“But Taryn didn’t even know about Taryn.”

“She could have found out. There is no limit to what dark and forbidden magic can do compared to light magic. At a cost, of course, but when people are desperate…”

“Do you think she was behind the potion, too?” Taryn asks.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Maya says. Her head whips around the room, scanning the contents and the arrangement of the elements on Merina’s coffee table and the state of her body. “We should get back. The others may have more insight.”

I nod and move closer to them, my hand reaching for Taryn’s even though we can’t touch. “Lead the way.”

“Ad corporalia,” Maya says, and in an instant, we’re back in the hospital cell.

It’s as if no time passed while we were gone, just as Renée said. Taryn pulls her hands away from Dominic, the golden light dissipating as soon as her hands are off him, and the three of us gasp, catching our breaths, while the others stare at us, waiting.

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