Page 33 of Road To Runes

The difficulty of making my way through a forest in the middle of the night wasn't made easier by the fact that Hecate had wanted to come along on foot rather than on my shoulders.

"Can you just make this easier for both of us and let me carry you?" I muttered to the dark grey blob that moved around by my feet. I didn't want to step on her again.

Hecate batted a paw at the sore ankle she had already sliced tonight and I winced."Your spiritual energy clouds other people's if I'm too close to you,"she said."Unless you don't care if we're caught?"

"Yes, all right sassy pants." I grabbed the branch of the tree next to me and stepped cautiously around her. "Although if you were really so good at detecting energies, you might not stand right in my path."

Hecate hissed in response. She could never admit when she was wrong.

I dropped back a bit to let her put some distance between us, but my next step gave me little choice but to stop.

"Ugh." I shook my leg as a set of brambles dug into my trousers. Didn't these people have groundskeepers or something?

"Let me." Asher picked his way over to me and grabbed the brambles with a gloved hand. For one begrudging moment, I let him tease the thorns free from my clothes.

"Thanks," I muttered, with no tone, and stepped over the bush to continue our jungle trek. "So. Are you going to explain why you're suddenlysookay with me power-snatching that you actually want to help?"

"Yeah, I'm not telling you that."

I inhaled a pine-tinged breath to calm my irritation. Even before we broke up, Asher loved taking a cheese grater to my last nerve.

"You're going to just threaten me with outing me to the others and then refuse to tell me why?" I asked. "Dick move."

"Sounds like a you problem." Asher met my glare with complete indifference.

Okay, turn that cheese grater into a chainsaw.

"Yeah, you've made being here my problem this whole trip, actually," I said, spitting venom into each word. "If I'd known us breaking up would get me this much attention I would have done it years ago."

Even in the darkness, I could still make out Asher's unnervingly smug grin.

"You still want attention from me? Cute," he said.

My stomach tied itself into knots and squeezed so tight I was about ready to throw up my dinner. Had I seriously just said that?

"In your dreams," I muttered. Ugh, what a lame comeback. "This isn't over, you know. I'll find out what the hell you're up to."

"Got it."

I chewed my entire bottom lip to stem the annoyance, but it did little to help. Instead, I tried to focus on the plan to get into the Franklin house.

Old buildings had old parts, and rooms and passageways that no longer served purposes in the modern day. The Franklin home was no different. In fact, it was better. Whoever had built their home had installed a merchant's corridor underneath the house, through which servants brought food shipments.

To separate the how-to-do household from the working class that served them, the corridor had a hidden access point on the far side and only connected to what had once been the servants' quarters. If my intel was up to date, those quarters were used for storage these days, which suited me just fine. Who even entered their storage rooms once they'd dumped their stuff in it? That was just one reason our attic was chock full and covered in dust.

We would encounter some enchantments, I was sure of that. But so far, Hecate and I had encountered nothing we couldn'thandle. So long as Asher stayed out of the way, we would walk away with what we wanted.

I carried on fumbling through the dark until the floodlights from the Franklin home seeped between the trees. Not daring to use a torch or a light crystal until we were inside, I had counted on the house's obnoxious outdoor lighting to get us to the entrance of the merchant's tunnel.

I checked the blueprints on my phone until I stepped on something hard that rattled when I quickly lifted my foot from it.

"Hec," I muttered. She could see better than I could.

"Cellar doors. Looks like they're chained shut."

"Any enchantments?"

"Nope. Seems suspicious, don't you think?"

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