Page 128 of Surrendering Hope (The Hope Legacy)

“Sure.” He blips out of existence. I twist on my chair to face Jed. “Can you get Zac plus anyone else who might know the locations of where we could boost magic.”

“Nathan,” Jed says, running a hand through his hair and standing up. “Back in two,” he says as Duncan appears with Emi.

“Bloody hell,” Zee mutters. “It’s like Grand Central Station in here.” Emi bounces over to Aaden and sits on his knee.

“Where’s Jed?” Duncan asks.

“He popped out to get Zac and Nathan.”

He smiles. “That’s grownup of you.”

I fold my arms. “Since when am I not grown up? I’m twenty-six years old. Well, in this body anyway.”

He rolls his eyes as Jed appears with Zac and Nathan. Nathan studies the cave, dissecting his surroundings. Zac sits at the head of the table and glares at me, then Emi.

“You have the spell?” he asks me.

I nod. “We do, now what we need is a plan.”

“He wants the Jar, he’s been playing cat and mouse with you because he’s a sadistic fuck who likes to play with his food.”

“You’d know all about that,” Emi mumbles.

I need to avoid a Justice War battle. “He needs me on board to enact his little plan to dominate Tartarus and wipe out humanity. It’s more like buttering me up, than playing with his food.”

Zac snorts as Nathan takes the seat across from me. “So what is your plan?” Nathan asks, shooting a warning look when Zac opens his mouth.

I smirk. “I want to revisit my earlier suggestion. We should allow him to kidnap me, so he will offer me for the Jar.”

“Good plan,” Zac says. Whilst everyone else shouts their disagreement.

Zee jumps out of his seat and points at me, then Zac. “This is why you brought him here, you knew he would support your suicidal plan.”

I grit my teeth. “He can see the logic, he isn’t held back by the shackles of being one of my protectors. He’s thinking straight, you aren’t.”

Duncan sighs. “Nathan, what do you think?”

Nathan narrows his eyes on me. “Explain this plan of yours in more detail.”

Zee groans. I ignore him and the rest of them.

“I arrange a meet with him, offering to hand myself over to him, and he will believe me-”

“Because you can’t lie?” Zac interjects.

I nod. “So we fight, but I allow myself to get captured. I explain to him I don’t have the Jar, I only have the key, and only Jed will know where it is.”

“But that’s a lie,” Jed says.

“Yes, but we can make it so it’s not a lie. Anyway, I tell him the only way he will get the hands on the Jar will be to ransom me.”

“Then what?” Zac grumbles.

I roll my eyes. “We meet, but when you go to hand him the Jar, we enact the reversal spell, pulling him back into the Jar.”

“And leaving Archan unpossessed,” Emi says.

I nod. “There are so many ways this can go wrong,” Duncan says.

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