AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Sure enough, I’m swiftly dropped to his half-mumbled voicemail greeting.
“Don’t freak. He could be in a dead zone,” Jaden murmurs, slinging an arm around my neck.
“Gee. What a shocker,” Kell inserts. “Come on, chica.” And then scoops up one of my hands. “Let’s try the parking lot—or whatever it is in Iremia speak. Maximus told us he caught a signal out there.”
“Yeah,” I reply, brightening. “That’s right. He did.”
Though I can’t be blamed for not booting up the memory right away. Not after the news Maximus took away from that conversation. Thinking about Professor Erin Levin is no help for my climbing anxiety levels.
Not when I theorize, even for a few seconds, that maybeshe’smixed up in all this secret weirdness across Iremia too…
Possible?
Perhaps. Witches and harpies have a lot of good reasons to band together, starting with their similar beefs with history. Both began as beautiful, helpful, and magical beings—brands that, thanks to centuries of hearsay and rumors, got shoved into descriptor boxes like spiteful, wrathful, and sinful.
But probable?
No. My intuition zings with the word. The parallels shouldn’t, and don’t, make them all sudden besties. If that amity were a real thing, why did Megaera run for refuge at President McCarthy’s house, having to cloak herself as Erin to do so? Why didn’t she head straight for Iremia instead and make peace with Maximus and me in the doing?
Magaera.
Drumming up the subject is no more fun now than a couple of days ago, especially because it’s more sludge for my perplexity pile—which doubles in size once my siblings and I arrive at the gravel expanse that serves as Iremia’s entrance pad.
“Mmmph.” I glare at my phone. “I’ve got more bars, but he’s still not picking up.”
“Long shower?” With hands in his back pockets, Jaden shrugs. “Sometimes that’s where I get some good thinking done.”
I shake my head. “He showered last night. I’m a reliable eyewitness.”
“Fun concept,” he counters. “But not with you in the visual, sister. Moving on.”
“Maybe it’s time to try the locator,” Kell suggests. “Even if the app is sketchy, it might give you a general idea of where he’s hanging. Since it’s definitely not there.”
She indicates toward the truck that Maximus parked under some eucalyptuses when we first got here. The big vehicle’s only twenty feet away but seems half its original size right now. I fight to ignore the incriminating feeling while acceding to her smart idea. If Maximus’s signal shows him over by the cottages—my optimal wish—I’ll head for our place by the stream. But if he’s out on another hike, I’ll hang with Jaden and Kell and all the nags of my impatience.
Either way, he couldn’t have gone far…
After the better part of a minute, those same words spill from me in a baffled mutter. But after circling the whole canyon with my finger, even in ultrazoom mode, there’s no telltale ping on his phone. Not even one of those frustrating generalities stating he might bein the area of.
So what areaishe in or of?
“This is…weird.” I gulp hard as punctuation, not daring to voice the other adjectives that bombard my mind. Things way worse thanweird.
Liketroubling. Andscary. Andnot freaking good.
“Uhhh, yeah.” Especially when Kell’s undertone goes ahead and invokes all of them. “And so is that.”
My gaze bugs as she pinches her fingers in order to increase the locator’s search perimeter. At once, the boundary pings into enough new territory to fit a few small European countries. To the north, it encompasses Malibu, Thousand Oaks, and Point Mugu. On the southern side, it extends all the way to—
“Downtown?”
It spills from me like the ping really has just come from the middle of Croatia. Right now, at least to my mind, they’re the same.
“What’s he doing?” I don’t even tap at the pulsing map pin, convinced it’s going to vanish any second. “No. He can’t be… Okay, why is he… And where is he…”
“Alameda.” Jaden speaks it as soon as he and Kell are fully flanking me. As she taps the pin, he translates the location on the downtown grid. “He’s at the university.”
“In the library,” Kell finishes as soon as the map focuses down. “But now I’m as stumped as Kara. How’d he get there? And why sneak out like that?”
