Page 21 of Wildfire Witch

Sighing, I still cursed myself for going soft as I rifled through his packs until I found the medical equipment. He kept the magically enhanced items in a compartment underneath the first aid supplies ordinary humans expected. I found a syringe of orange-tinted potion made to cure head wounds and stuck him with it.

Three heartbeats later, Seth gasped and sat up, while I was still blowing shards of glass off of him and his surroundings. He clutched the lump forming on his skull with a groan.

“Close your eyes. It’ll be a couple minutes before the magic heals your scrambled brain,” I advised.

He shut his eyes after taking a squinting look around. “Where’s Nix?” he asked.

“Taken,” I answered curtly.

“No…” he muttered with the same kind of denial that I felt.

“We have to abandon this place as soon as you’re up. Is there anything you can’t leave behind?”

“Fuck,” he muttered, lifting to his feet. “I’ll get it. Do you need to grab anything?”

“Already done.” I didn’t have much here, only what was necessary to pretend to be a human with a steady job. Most of my belongings were back in the Wind Court, whereas Seth had his whole life here and tacked to the wall.

I grabbed his elbow, steering him past the bodies of a couple of fallen shifters. I took down the information on Nix’s many lives while he fiddled with his electronics and packed most of them away. “A fire dragon shifter knocked you unconscious and flew off with Nix. You said you did something with her phone last night?” I prompted.

While he could impress with his skills as a cook or a medic, Seth’s true talent was in computers and mortal electronics, the kinds of things a fae like me had been scoffing at for centuries. But it could be the miracle we needed now to locate her again.

He took on an irritated tone. “I charged it for her.”

I scowled over at him, the last wisps of a magical breeze tousling my curls as my anger surged. That wasn’t what I’d asked him to do last night when I noticed she’d put the device aside.

“I also got her number and turned on her location services in an app I couldtrack her phone with, if those shifters didn’t destroy it,” he added. He didn’t quite meet my gaze, frowning and slumping with discomfort. “But I didn’t want to put full-on tracking software on it.”

“Yes, yes,” I sighed, waving away the budding argument he could’ve produced with a slash of my hand. We’d been over this. He thought I was overbearing, but he wasn’t the one with the unbreakable vow inked in his flesh who hadn’t seen his wife in an eternity. “We have to go.”

I walked back into the mess left behind in the main room, shoe scuffing on a discarded piece of paper. Stooping, I turned it over. The circular array Nix had been working on stared back at me, the meticulously inked alchemical formulas around it now marred with dirt and brown stains. My throat tightened as I folded it and put it in my pocket. It was a valuable glimpse into her brilliance, as she used to be. I was terrified she would die again and lose that scientific mind and her memories…especially those of me.

Standing and turning back to Seth, he and I exchanged a look over the luggage we’d already packed. “Grab as much as you can and I will get the rest,” I directed, then reached for his face to place a minor glamor on him. It would make his features indistinct on any cameras we passed.

I glamored myself human next and lifted all of our spare bags with wind once we were both laden with as much as we could carry. Those floating bags, I hid with another bit of magic.

“I sure hope this works out,” Seth muttered. We hustled down the stairs together. My pointed ears picked up the sounds of approaching sirens—several of them.

While I secured the bags in the trunk and backseat of his car, he took a few moments to snap pictures of the license plates of several vans and trucks that we hadn’t seen parked in the apartment complex before. He took the passenger seat once he was done, and I eased the car past a fleet of emergency vehicles and police cars that were just rolling into the parking lot.

The gates in and out of the complex were busted. It looked like a van had run headlong into them and won, twisting up the metal and the opening mechanism. As I took the turn out onto the road, navigating more carefully for the heavy load in the car’s backside, I shot Seth an impatient glance.

“It’s loading. Just drive for a bit and I’ll get us on the right path,” he suggested.

I steered us in a straight line away from the apartment complex, occasionally checking the mirrors to be sure nothing was following us. Seth fiddled with his phone more in the meantime and opened his laptop in his lap, managing both while likely putting them to two different tasks.

“Looks like they’ve hit I-90, going east.” He cursed immediately after saying this, as I swerved the car across two lanes to navigate our way toward the interstate behind them. “Don’t get us fucking pulled over, man.”

“I would not stop for the human authorities,” I scoffed.

He muttered under his breath, something like, “Why do I trust a fae to drive my car?”

I rolled my eyes, saying impatiently, “How many miles ahead of us are they?”

“Hard to tell. The connection isn’t exactly stable,” he replied.

We didn’t make it far at top speed before I had to merge us into sluggish traffic. Honking the horn in frustration only set off a discordant symphony of blaring, with no extra forward progress to show for it. Seth didn’t look up, focused now on whatever he was typing into his computer.

The only solace I took in the situation was that Nix’s kidnappers had to be stuck in the same traffic as us. We would eventually catch up to them, even if I had to drive day and night to close the gap between us.

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