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Lucas nodded. “Then I’ve got to utilize that somehow to force the girls out of my head. It’s strange… I can’t even feel you trying to read me.”
“That’s one of the things that makes teleinsight so powerful,” Talia said. “You don’t know it’s there.”
Verla drew another deep, calming breath. “You’re doing great, Lucas. Now imagine another layer of protection expanding from your third eye. Visualize a wall being built between you and the girls, to force them to retreat.”
Lucas closed his eyes again and got a deep look of concentration on his face. Minutes passed. I meditated alongside him, following Verla’s instruction. I expanded my aura outward and created a second shield around my mind, but I couldn’t tell if it worked.
“You’re all doing great,” Verla encouraged. “As you practice, you’ll be able to extend this spell outward without exposing your aura, so no one will be able to tell you’re doing it. Chloe, Talia, why don’t you try reading Nadine?”
My focus faltered, and though I couldn’t feel the girls in my mind, I was certain my spell wasn’t strong enough to rival the Oaken Wands.
“She doesn’t think she’s strong enough,” Talia said, reading my mind.
“You will be,” Verla told me. “This is hard magic, so your skill to block out mind reading has to be better than the person casting the magic, even with the Wands. You’re stronger than me, Nadine. If I can do it, so can you. It will just require practice.”
We continued to meditate and learn from Verla, but over an hour passed, and no one had managed to protect their minds.
“You must practice this every day,” Verla pressed. “We can’t afford for the priestesses to get into your head.”
“Even if we can’t shield ourselves from power like this yet, this power is in our hands,” I pointed out. “Teleinsight gives us hope, because we can use it against the priestesses.”
“How can we utilize it?” Grant wondered. “We’d have to get close enough to them.”
“We don’t need to use it on them directly,” Lucas suggested. “They’ve built a movement and a following, which means that when we go up against the priestesses, we’re going to have to face all of Miriam’s Chosen.”
Chloe understood what he was saying. “We’ll have to destabilize the cult before we can move in on the priestesses. We can’t go in guns blazing and kill off these people’s cult leaders, because they’ll never listen to our side. Just because we kill the priestesses doesn’t mean other people won’t rise up. We need to understand the priestesses’ motives and plans, as well as how these cult members think. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter what kind of power we have, because they already have their hold on the coven.”
Talia tapped her chin. “We’ll have to figure out who the cult’s major supporters are and get rid of them before we take out the priestesses. Which means Chloe and I will have to sneak around the outskirts of Octavia Falls and learn as much as we can using teleinsight.”
“It’s dangerous,” Verla protested. “You could be caught.”
“You’re right, but it’s a chance we have to take,” Chloe insisted.
“If we’re going to destabilize the cult, it’s our only choice,” Talia agreed.
This was powerful magic that the priestesses didn’t know we could use against them.
We just had to get close enough to them to put it work.
Chapter Seventeen
LUCAS
Our Yuletide celebration had been a welcome reprieve to the worry that plagued us each passing day. Nadine and I had agreed to wait to make a final decision on our future until Christmas. December twenty-fifth arrived, and we weren’t any closer to breaking the Reaper’s Shadow curse for good. We had until the end of the day to solve this mystery, and at this point, it was going to take a miracle.
I’d become a mad man obsessed with obtaining the Mortana Wand. If we couldn’t decipher visions from the Seer Wand, then I was certain the Mortana Wand was the answer to breaking the Reaper’s Shadow curse. We had to locate the remains of all the Reaper’s Shadows who came before Nadine, and remove the curse on their bones. All the other Reaper’s Shadow women had to be dead by now, so surely a Wand with the power of death could track them down. It had to, because that Wand was our last hope.
To get it, I had to pass the Warlock’s Trial. I still didn’t know what that entailed, so I was researching as much as I could about the afterlife. Each supernatural society had a different way of crossing over. The Elementai were greeted by their ancestors to be welcomed into the Ancestral Lands, while the fae were escorted to the Great Hunting Grounds by their gods. Witches, of course, had reapers to lead them to Alora. Each method was so similar, yet the magic was entirely different.
I was poring over the books in the library Christmas morning when I heard the front door burst open. Heavy footsteps sprinted down the hall, and Grant burst in.
“Lucas,” he called breathlessly, doubling over in the doorway.
I shot out of my chair. “Is someone hurt?”
“Executors,” Grant said. “Two more of them.”
I rushed out of the room and followed him down the hall as quickly as I could. I threw on my coat, but Grant had already raised alarm bells all throughout the house. Nadine and Talia had been in the kitchen making lunch, and they hurried to our side.
