Page 38 of Wizard of Most Wicked Ways

He’d barely even registered the trek to Marshfield. The pain of Silas’s magic coursing through his bones, trying to scrape his spells free.

Shivering, he continued, “Even with Cora, I knew I could protect myself and get away, if I needed to. I still had autonomy.”

Granted, his autonomy had ended very suddenly when the ceiling had collapsed on the back half of his body, but before that, he hadn’t been truly vulnerable.

They sat there, quiet, a long moment. A spider dangled down from a web above Owein’s shoulder; he pinched the filament and tossed it toward the grape fern. Fallon resituated herself, kneeling facing him, unbound hair wild around her shoulders, a line of worry pressed between her eyebrows.

Swallowing against a tight throat, Owein confessed, “I don’t know if I’m enough.”

“You’re not alone.” She matched his hushed tone. “We have a small army on this island. Most of them with a spark in their blood.”

“But they won’t always be here. Silas waited nearly five years to return. What’s another five to him? And if we do kill him, what then? Maybe he’ll just hop to another body, like he did before.”

Fallon shuddered. “Not if there’s no body for him to hop to.”

“There’s no guarantee. He’s too strong.” Reaching over, Owein absently petted Aster’s side. “We have a woman who can literally see the future on our side, andthere’s no guarantee.”

He wasn’t being fair, he knew it. But these were his thoughts, his burdens, and he needed to express them. Needed someone to help him hold them up, and Merritt’s magic made him too fragile, Hulda was too anxious, and Beth was too absent to lend a hand. They’d already affirmed that Owein had kept them alive the first time. But what if he couldn’t do it again? The cost of failure waseverything.

He was about to apologize when Fallon said, “I know where Hulda’s facility is.”

A shock straightened Owein’s spine. “What?”

She glanced away. “The facility. The BIKER one, where they do the experiments. I know where it is.”

It took ten seconds of stunned silence for her to meet his gaze. He searched her face, the green wheels of her eyes, the curve of her nose, the tightness of her forehead. “No one knows where that is.” He’d never found any information about its location, only circumstantial evidence that it existed. “Hulda ... I don’t even think Merritt knows where it is. Legally, he can’t.” Not with the United States government involved.

She shrugged. “I followed her once. A couple of years ago, when I was headed back to Ireland. I wanted to see what she was in such a huff about. It’s in Ohio, southwest of Columbus. Kind of near that other state? With theK?”

Owein realized he was fish-mouthing. Wetting his tongue, he asked, “Kentucky?”

“Yeah, that one. I ... I think I could find it again. I’m pretty sure.”

Owein stared at her. Huldaneverspoke about the facility. Even her prickles got prickly if anyone so much as brushed against the subject, so Owein snooped about on his own. He knew the facility had a medical license, it had just received new funding, and it studied the genetics of magic and the potential synthesizing of it. Hulda didn’t keep a lot of paperwork for it in BIKER headquarters, but he’d found some; she didn’t use magicked locks the way Cora did.

Owein didn’t know more than that, but what hedidknow was if anything could help him fight Silas Hogwood, it was in that facility.

He let out a long breath. “I ... How long would it take us to get there?” Leaning forward, he sketched out a rough outline of the eastern United States in the dirt between weeds. “How close to Columbus?”

Fallon rolled her lips together. “Not very close. I don’t know anything else in Ohio but Columbus.”

He drew in rough approximations of state lines and tried to remember the maps of public transport. “There’s a kinetic tram line that runs from Portsmouth to Baltimore.” His finger created a track in the dirt from right to left, “and I think a train should run from there to Cincinnati. A regular train, nothing enchanted. After that, it would be a horse or a coach. Something privately hired; the facility wouldn’t be in a major city.”

“It’s not in any city,” Fallon confirmed. “It’s in the middle of nowhere. There aren’t even any trees. It’s really small, from above. Maybe bigger inside? I didn’t try to get in.” Beside his map, she drew an uneven square, plus a smaller, rounder building beside it. “Like this. She went in a door here.” She marked anXon the south side of the square. “I could scout ahead to make sure.”

“They won’t let us in,” Owein said. “Whoever is there.”

“Since when has that been a problem?”

She sounded sincere. And she had a good point. Magic like Owein’s ... take away its natural consequences, its only real limitation was the imagination. And one could come up with a lot of interesting ways to use the same handful of spells when trapped alone with them for hundreds of years. He could find a way in. He was sure of it.

“If you want to go,” Fallon continued, touching his arm, “you should go now, while the English wizards are here. I wouldn’t have told you if they weren’t here. I wouldn’t want you to leave the others unprotected.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” He wasn’t surprised she’d spied on Hulda—Fallon was as bad about eavesdropping as Owein was. But they’d always been very open with one another.

She bit her lip. Hesitated. “I didn’t know if you’d be upset. And it didn’t really matter if I knew where it was then. But it matters now, doesn’t it?”

Owein studied his makeshift map. “Sixteen hours, I think,” he said. “We could get there in sixteen hours, if we don’t sleep. Or eat.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “If we push, we can be there and back in three days, if the coaches run on Sunday. It’d be exhausting, but we could do it.”

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