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“What is wrong with you?” she whispered.
Fear. There was fear in the way she looked at him. It was enough to break the hold the mating urge had on him. Because he’d rather peel off his own skin than have his mate be scared of him.
He took a deep breath—through his mouth, not wanting to intensify the assault of her scent on his senses—and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he was in control of himself, the insistent, pounding drive of the mating urge now tamed to a quiet throb in his chest.
“Ready?” he asked her, and yikes, his voice was barely more than a growl.
Her eyes still holding a wary glint, Hazel nodded.
He splashed the blood from the jar against the wall, right at the spot where Hazel’s old blood was flaking off the wallpaper. The sigil flared to life, bright red lines that curved into one another, pulsing with old magic.
Immediately, Hazel began a chant, and at her words, power suffused the air. Whatever she did held the sigil for longer than before, and magic snapped between the symbol and Hazel’s circle. Without a pause, she went from the chant to the words of the locator spell.
“From ties that bind, through blood and beyond,
I’m looking to find the lost parts of this bond.
A family divided is one that will fall,
Let me see where they are, to gather them all.”
The pendulum she held over the map began to swing, slow at first, then faster and faster, while the air throbbed with her power. It raised all the fine hairs on his arms and neck, but where other demons might have cringed away from witch magic this potent, he wanted to lean into it, feel it pulse against his skin like an electric blanket. She could give him a shock with it that would lay him flat, and he’d thank her for it with a smile on his face.
Yep, he was officially a goner for her.
The power spiked, and the pendulum struck down into the map, its pointy end embedded in the paper. As if pulled by an invisible hand, the pendulum then flew up again, only to strike back down, marking another spot on the map. Twice more it rose and fell, before it trembled in the air and then hung limp from Hazel’s hand.
The magic in the room hushed, the pop from the flickering candles the only sound.
Eyes wide, Hazel looked up at him.
“Four,” she whispered. “There are four sigils.” The muscles in her throat moved as she swallowed. “The witch has already killed four people.”
CHAPTER 27
“This right here,” Tallak said, pointing at a spot on the map. “This is where we are.”
Hazel nodded, the lines on her face tight. “Let’s check out this one here first.”
She indicated the spot closest to their current location, though still halfway across the Portland metro area, from Sherwood to a rural stretch of land off Route 224, near Eagle Creek. None of the sites the pendulum had marked were anywhere close to each other. The witch seemed to have committed her murders all over the place, with no clear pattern visible.
Hazel packed up, her movements tense. She’d become despondent after the pendulum revealed the other locations, clearly disturbed by the realization that the witch had already left a bloody trail of bodies. Tallak didn’t give a fuck about dead humans, but he did about Hazel, and seeing her in distress made him want to go out, find the witch responsible, and deliver her to Hazel so she could bring her to justice and finally breathe easy again.
The car ride over to the sigil’s location was quiet except for Hazel’s directions, the air threaded with tension.
“We’re getting close,” she said as he steered the Tesla down a small road toward the Bonnie Lure State Park.
It was still raining buckets, and the visibility through the windshield was shit. He squinted at the trees looming ahead.
“How precise is this locator spell, exactly?” he asked.
“Well, just going by the mark on the map, it would give us an approximate location.”
“Don’t tell me we’ll have to canvass the entire fucking woods in this shit weather.”
“We don’t.”
She sounded just a tad smug, so he glanced over at her.
