Page 104 of Anchor

There it was again, that feeling gnawing at me.

“I do,” I said. “And then what happens after a week? Are we going back to the Blue House?”

“We’re not,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not safe there for us anymore. We’ll go to Dackston first—it’s just three towns over from this one. There’a shop there that sells antiques, and the owner keeps magically reinforced safes in the basement for mages to buy and use—an old, kind-of forbidden spell, a family heirloom. I have money stashed in there, and the car keys to an SUV parked near the junkyard at the edge of town. Easy to find.”

“Okay,” I said, tempted to smile at howspecifiche was.

“The safe is under your first name and my last,” he continued.

“I—wait, what?”

He grinned. “Yep—Rosabel Tivoux.”

“Taland…” I breathed because it was oddly romantic that he’d bought a safe under my name withhislast name.

“Yes, baby?”

I rose on my elbows. “Is that some sort of weird way of proposing marriage to me or something?” It was a joke, of course, but the thought of it, the thought ofhimon his knee, proposing to me, had all kinds of butterflies going wild in my stomach.

He laughed. Taland threw his head back and laughed his heart out, and I felt so perfectlyaccomplishedit was kind of pathetic. But I made him laugh and I’d done all there is to do in this world and now I was at peace.

“No, sweetness. When I propose to you, it won’t be weird nor sneaky. It will be very…straightforward.” He leaned up and kissed me—deeply this time, and for long.

So long that when we stopped, I was already wet between my legs. And we were naked, so…

“Rosabel Tivoux,”I whispered when I fell against his chest again. It sounded right. Exactly right. As it should be.

“The password isTallarose,” he whispered against my hair. “You can remember that, right?Tallarose.”

I smiled against his skin. “My hand is right over it.” And it was—my palm was flat against his tattoo.

He put his over mine and squeezed it without a word.

“And then what?” I wondered. “Where will we go then?”

Taland remained silent for a long time after.

“I’m not sure. We’ll have to lay low, keep hiding.” With a kiss on my forehead, he put me down on the bed gently. “Give me one second.”

He literally took one second to reach for his pants on that armchair and lay down on the bed again. Then he pulled something out of his pocket—this charm that wasn’t even two inches wide. It was oval shaped and made of smooth stone, withdrawings in pale colors on either side. On the one side was a black circle over a white background that spiraled all the way to the middle. On the other was an eye with three colors—black and grey and blue. Taland put it in my hand. It weighed nothing, the object, but the magic nearly suffocated me because I wasn’t expecting it.

“What is this?” I said, a bit breathless as I inspected the thing and got used to its magical charge.

“It’s my mother’s charm. She made it for me,” he said. “It’s a double charm. This side”—he showed the black circle over the white, that actually looked more like a white line spiraling over black ink now—“is for illusions. It reinforces them and holds them in place.”

“You’re joking.” I looked at the charm with a new light.

“Not at all. It’s how I was able to pass through the gates of the Iris Roe and remain undercover the whole game. It took up a lot of my energy to have to cast the spell over and over. It drained me—you remember in the Whitefire challenge, I barely had a few spells left on my feather.”

I nodded. “I do remember, but I thought that was just because you used up a lot to survive!”

“I didn’t,” Taland said, smiling at my fascination, then turned the charm over. “Thisis the important one—the eye of protection. It not only keeps me under the radar, but it also casts a sort of a confusion spell all around me, so that even if someone was close and about to find where I was, they’d be slow and sloppy and give me enough time to run away.”

“Holy shit.” That might be the best thing I had ever heard that magic could do. “So,thisis how you’ve kept under the IDD’s radar. They sent Wayne O’Bryan after you and he couldn’t find you.” I laughed. “I was once sure that you’d left the country!”

“And leave you here?” He bit my cheek. “Never.”

“But wait,” I said when I remembered. “Isawthrough you. In the Roe, I never once saw you as that person. I saw the videos and the pictures, and your name—Jack Collins. I never saw that person, justyou.”

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