Page 149 of Enchanted Shadows
I wanted to send out my power across my entire room searching for a mass of darkness, but something stopped me. What was the noise at the door? It seemed we were being lured outside.
As I took one more look around the curtains, I stilled. There onthe ground by the door were two small flat stones. Just like the ones Kessara and I always threw across The Dead Lake trying to see how many skips we could manage.
Miles was cursing up a storm, getting himself hyped for what he was sure would be an altercation.
I moved to open the door handle, but Miles stopped me, pulling me back. “What are you doing?”
I threw him off and opened the door only an inch, reaching down and picking up the small pebbles. So small, and yet I knew for a fact they hadn’t been out here earlier.
I held one up to him. “It’s Kess.”
CHAPTER 48
“Owen.”
If Kessara was sending me a message with these stones, there wasn’t a thing Miles could do to stop me. I was going. I didn’t give him the courtesy of telling him where I was going either. My focus was on one thing and one thing only. Kessara.
I jumped off the balcony and headed for the forest, sword still in hand.
I felt and saw Miles next to me as he followed. “This could be a trap,” he breathed out as neither of us slowed.
“I don’t care if it is,” I told him. “It’s better than nothing.”
So we ran, using our magic to push us there faster. We had a narrow window to get to The Dead Lake. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did.
I ran past a man standing guard outside the hedge of the courtyard and into the meadow without slowing. He tried to speak with us, but I didn’t dignify him with a response. When I met a few members of Team One in the meadow in charge of watching the forest for the night, I ran right past them too.
“Owen,” Miles bit out. “We need to take backup.”
“I don’t know that we need a thing yet,” I argued over my shoulder. Like hell would I be slowing down. For anything. This could be yet another dead end. Or it could be everything.
A wild unadulterated hope surged me forward.
Miles quickly barked a few orders before following.
With every step toward The Dead Lake, I willed this to be it. That after three days of hiding out and no news, finally there would be news. Good news. That I wasn’t running right into a trap, rather I was running toward my wife to finally bring her home.
Please.
I didn’t know who I was begging or asking, but I was.
I took the fork in the path toward the lake at record speed. I had to get there. And I hoped like hell that she’d be there. If she wasn’t.. . I would be wrecked. Wrecked beyond repair.
It was still so dark out we used the power in our veins to light our way. It was only a few hundred yards off that Miles whispered, “We need to stop. Our glowing will give us away. They’ll know we’re there before we even arrive.”
It went against my instincts to not get there as fast as possible, but even this focused and hellbent on arriving at The Dead Lake, my training couldn’t be totally ignored. Miles had a point, dammit.
So we shut our Enchantments down, forced to slow to a walk beneath the darkness of the forest around us. It would be dawn soon, and that sunlight couldn’t come a moment too soon.
We came into view of the lake first, moonlight reflecting around the branches and reaches of darkness. We took it in a moment from around a tree, not seeing anything amiss.
But as I looked toward the hydrangea tree, all blood fled from my face.
I ceased breathing but not moving.
“Owen,” Miles hissed, grabbing my arm. “It could be a trap.”
Something beyond my understanding was going on with the purple hydrangea tree which housed the former queen’s magic.
