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Chapter One
LUCAS
I’d rather be in hell right now than stare at this damn whiteboard any longer.
My eyes roamed over the information I’d been compiling for three months. All kinds of clues had been tacked up and connected by strings. The longer I looked at it, the less it made any sense.
I eyed the drawings of the Oaken Wands, along with other clues we’d replicated from memory. Journal entries from Helena’s diaries had been ripped out and tacked alongside the photos. We thought we’d find clues that her late husband had left behind, but Nicholas hadn’t told her where he’d hidden the Wands. His journal was long gone, so we had nothing to go off of.
My vision blurred the longer I stared. I couldn’t remember the last time I slept.
“It was the butler,” Nadine muttered. “It’s always the butler.”
“Huh?” I whirled toward her. She’d been quiet for so long, I’d forgotten she was there.
Nadine sat at a table in the sunroom we’d commandeered for our research purposes. A thick layer of clouds blanketed the September sky, and raindrops trickled down the windows around us. She set aside the thick binder she’d been flipping through, then hit pause on the phone in front of her.
“I said the butler did it,” she repeated. “Are you listening to the podcast?”
I’d totally forgotten it’d been playing. Nadine had started listening to true crime podcasts a week after our friends left to investigate the Oaken Wands. I’d portaled them to different supernatural societies in order to help us gather clues. They reported back twice a month, but so far, no one had learned anything useful. Even though Helena and our cats stayed at the safe house with us, it could get boring and lonely sometimes. There was only so much Oaken Wand research we could do when we were stuck here. Nadine thought true crime podcasts would help us pass the time, and we’d both gotten really into it. We tried to solve the mysteries together, and it was a lot of fun.
Today, though, I couldn’t focus on any mystery that wasn’t our own.
“Sorry, I wasn’t listening,” I said. “I’m trying to find answers before everyone else shows up. I’m portaling them for check-in today. We’ve got to give them something.”
Nadine sighed. “I know this is hard, Lucas, but we can tell them the truth.”
“The truth is that we’re no closer to finding the Oaken Wands than we were three months ago.”
“We’re getting closer,” she insisted. “Grant and Talia have made allies in Malovia. They’re meeting with their contact as we speak. This contact might know a way inside the Abyss. We’re so close to finding an entrance, so that we can find the Mentalist Wand that we lost through the demon’s portal.”
Hence my point—I’d rather be in hell right now. At least then we’d be closer to the Mentalist Wand. We’d decided three months ago that we’d walk through hell for that Wand. Without it, the other four were useless to us. We needed all five Oaken Wands to end the Waning and win our fight against the priestesses’ tyrannical rule.
“I’m not any closer to making Abyss portals, though,” I pointed out. “If I could make portals to the Abyss like I should, we wouldn’t have to send Grant and Talia to a warring fae nation who places every witch they come across at the end of a noose. Malovia is in the middle of a civil war. They’ve got two monarchs competing for the throne. It’s dangerous enough as it is for their own people, let alone witches and warlocks. Don’t forget what they did to Kenna and her family a few months ago.”
Kenna and her parents hadn’t even been in Malovia when they were captured and hanged. They’d been visiting Paris, and the fae took it as a threat because they were too close to the country’s border. I didn’t want to think about what would happen to Grant and Talia if the fae found them inside their borders. Their sentence would be far worse than hanging, for sure.
“Grant and Talia know the risks,” Nadine reminded me, though she sounded worried.
I raked my fingers through my hair. It felt pretty grimy, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I showered, either. This research had practically consumed me. “I just thought we’d have answers by now.”
“You should sit down,” Nadine suggested. “The last time you were standing this long, your leg started giving you trouble.”
My broken leg had healed, but it still twinged painfully if I was on my feet forever. Still, I couldn’t sit down right now, even if I wanted to. I was too on edge.
I began pacing instead. “I don’t want to sit down, Nad. I want answers.”
“Have you ever considered that maybe that’s not your job?” she asked calmly. “Our friends are out there getting answers. Our job is to be a safe place for them to come back to.”
I gritted my teeth and pointed to the stacks of textbooks on the table in front of her. “Our job is to do our research and draw connections. And I feel like a fucking idiot because I can’t see how it all connects!”
“It may be simpler than we think,” Nadine pointed out. “Perhaps it isn’t this big puzzle that needs solving but just breadcrumbs to follow.”
I turned back to the whiteboard and tapped my chin as I surveyed the information we had. “All right… breadcrumbs. Where do we go from here?”
The room went silent, and I was starting to get really freaking pissed. What did I expect? For the whiteboard to answer back?
“Maybe a new perspective will help…” I mused. The whiteboard hung off a frame on wheels, so I spun it ninety degrees. It probably looked like I was crazy, but it was the only thing I hadn’t tried yet.
