Witch's Diary: A Paranormal Urban Fantasy Tale (Lost Library Book 4) (29 page)

“Angela? Is that you?” Gwen’s voice drifted through the small slot.

Kenna stopped about a foot from the door and dropped down to the ground. She laughed, just once, then choked it back. The hysterical sound had come out part laugh and part sob.

Her mom’s face appeared on the ground. “Kenna? What are you doing here?”

“We’re here to get you out. Hang on, Mom.” Kenna hopped to her feet. She squeezed her eyes shut. It was good to see her mom. Blinking, she shook her head. Damn, they needed to hurry.

Harry, Alan, Angela, and Walter were huddled together, whispering intensely amongst themselves.

“So?” Kenna asked.

Harry turned first. “We’re going for the door. And if the rest starts to unravel, we grab your mom and run like hell.”

Kenna’s phone rang. “Fuck.”

She’d blocked all calls but Harrington’s. She answered her phone. “Margot’s hacked the dummy site. She knows the money hasn’t been transferred,” Harrington said grimly. “You asked for a Plan B, and you’re getting it. I’ve made a call—I’ll explain later. But whether my backup guy comes through or not, you need to get out now.”

“Got it.” Right before she ended the call, she heard her name. She lifted the phone to her ear again. “What?”

“Tell him I’m proud.” And the phone went dead.

“Shit, fuck, shit.” Kenna’s heart raced.

“Kenna, get a grip. Harry’s working.” Alan had grabbed hold of her shoulder and was shaking.

She nodded. She was not giving Harry the message—he’d have a heart attack from shock. Then she saw exactly what Harry had been working on. The door, and only the door, was lit up, but not like their little cutting board. All of these colors were muddy. Where their little board had shone with a multi-hued, silvery brightness, the door throbbed with muted shades. Kenna shuddered. The throb reminded her of a beating heart.

Slowly, the colors were separating out, and just like before, magic was escaping into the environment. Great—she’d been on the phone and wild magic had been tooling around the house.

Angela yelped. “Y’all, I can’t use this magic.”

Harry was still unraveling the magic bindings around the door. Angela, Alan, and Walter—visible from the hallway but now working in the much larger living room—exhibited varying degrees of frustration.

“No luck?”

“Some,” Walter said. “It’s incredibly difficult to work with. Not like the magic from our cell.”

“I can’t touch it. I tried channeling it into the grass outside and it…” Angela hesitated. “It bit me.” She grimaced, probably realizing how crazy that sounded.

Alan lifted his hands. “No biting, but it’s nasty, slippery stuff. I’m with Walter.” That left—crap, fire magic.

Kenna dropped to the floor. “Mom!”

Her mom knelt down.

“Harry’s unraveling the magic attached to the door, and that releases a lot of magic. Angela, Walter, and Alan are having a hard time dealing with the excess, and we can’t just let it loose.”

“No!” Gwen’s harsh reply echoed down the hall. “It’s not safe, Kenna. You have to contain it somehow.”

“I know. We’re working on it, but can you do something to help?”

“I can try. Definitely when Harry has the door cleared.” A frantic look flashed across her mom’s face. “Go; help the coven. There’s already too much death magic loose.”

“Sure.” Kenna stood up with the words “death magic” ringing in her ears. What the hell could she do?

“Kenna.” Harry looked like he was doing complex math and trying to hold a conversation.

“Yes.” She bounced up and down. “You have an idea?”

Harry nodded. She could see sweat drip down his nose. That might be bad.

“Candle?”

She yanked one out of her back pocket and lifted it up. Do what with the candle? She waved it. Hello. But she was afraid to say a word, because Harry looked…he looked done.

She could light it. Extinguish it. Use it as a focal point. Maybe store magic. Bingo. Store magic.

Forget the maybe. Forget that she’d asked the witches about storing fire magic and hadn’t gotten a decent response. If magic could be stored and this wild magic was actively seeking a place to go… But this tainted wild magic acted differently from the dummy cell’s magic. Hell. Time was flying by and she wasn’t exactly acting like a part of the solution right now. She yanked a candle out of her back jeans pocket and stepped back into the kitchen. She lit the candle and found her little, misty, energized cloud of magic. Then she herded it to the nearest flyaway wild magic. The wild magic zipped right through. Dammit. She tried again. This time, she was ready. Before the wild magic passed through the cloud, she herded her little cloud closer to the candle. And the flyaway magic zipped right into her candle.

The candle felt odd in her hand, so she quickly dropped to the floor. After dropping a dab of wax on the ground, she stuck the candle to the linoleum floor. She planted her ass on the cold floor and pulled up her little sparkly cloud. This time when she caught a bit of wild magic, it flew to the candle. With each successive pass, the flyaway bits of magic flew more readily to the candle. Eventually, the candle greedily gulped at the wild magic. Her eyes burned and she forced herself to blink. Her butt was numb and her knees sore, and everyone, even her mom, stood in a circle around her. How much time had passed? When had they busted the door of Gwen’s cell open? And why were they all standing around her staring at the small white candle, still stuck to the linoleum floor?

“How long have I been here?” Kenna couldn’t bite back the urgency that pushed at her. “Uh—and glad you’re out, Mom.”

“Kenna, you’ve been staring at that candle for, like, fifteen minutes.” Alan gave her a funny look.

Walter said, “We didn’t want to break your concentration.”

Harry nodded. “You seemed to have a system going that worked.”

Something was off; everyone was acting weird. But her neck hurt from looking up at them and they all needed to leave, so she ignored how odd everyone was acting and stretched out a hand. “Help me up? I didn’t tell you before—Margot knows about the fake site. We need to leave.” Kenna stopped. No one seemed concerned about the collapsing plan. “Hey. Escape. Now.”

Gwen helped Kenna to her feet then hugged her. “We can’t leave quite yet. We’re waiting for the candle of death to sop up all the stray magic.”

Had Kenna entered the Twilight Zone? She looked at the candle on the ground. And just as her mom had said, it sat there as magic zipped through the air and was pulled into it.

What the… “Did I do that?” Kenna asked.

“Partially. Maybe.” Harry crossed his arms. “Either way, we can’t leave that candle. Especially not here.”

Kenna looked around. She didn’t see much magic left. “Well, I think it’s almost done. Let’s grab it and go.” Kenna leaned down, but a series of loudly yelled “nos” stopped her. “What?”

“There’s a reason you set it down,” her mom said. “We’re guessing it can’t be touched. At least, not while this”—she waved a hand at a stray flash of wild magic—“is going on.”

Kenna’s eyes got big. They were all crazy, because it was past time to go.

“I think once the candle has stopped absorbing, we can pick it up.” Harry’s gaze followed another zippy bit of magic as it was sucked into the candle. “The rip in the door worked, but then the entire cell unraveled. Hence all the magic.”

Harry looked completely wiped out, so she probably shouldn’t pick on him.

“Ha,” Alan exclaimed. “I think it’s done. The candle’s got all the magic.” He pursed his lips. “Who wants to give it a try?”

Kenna scooped it up and tucked it in her back pocket before anyone could say a word. And—shocker—the world did not explode. “We’re leaving.”

The sound of an approaching helicopter was unmistakable.

“Is that a helicopter?” Angela asked. “You have got to be kidding. They get reinforcements? We’re the outnumbered underdogs.”

“If that’s Margot, I swear, I will never forgive you guys for making us wait on a candle.” Kenna moved to a window and peered through the curtains. “Backup plan, anyone? We’re completely surrounded by men with guns.” Kenna squeezed her eyes shut. She contemplated chanting “there’s no place like home” three times but decided she’d avoided reality long enough. And maybe this had something to do with Harrington’s backup plan. Right. Hand on the doorknob, she asked, “How long did you say I was hanging out on the floor with the candle of death? And why are we calling it the candle of death?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Angela said. “You were in a kind of trance state.” She wrinkled her nose. “You couldn’t hear us.”

“It’s called focus,” Kenna said. Not really—because she’d be damned if she had any memory of those fifteen minutes. And, at some point, she’d want to know how it was that the least qualified, least knowledgeable, least magical witch in their group managed to pull off the candle trick. “And what’s up with the candle of death?”

“I’ve got that one. And I have an actual answer for you.” Harry gave her a narrow-eyed look. “The only thing besides elemental magic in our experimental cell was a touch of healer magic. However this cell was originally created, part of the process was to permeate it with death magic.”

“Ugh. So when the wild strands of magic escaped, they weren’t neutral like our wild magic,” Kenna said.

“No. That’s serious nastiness stuffed inside your emergency candle.” Harry raised his eyebrows. “Which is now stuffed inside your back pocket.”

Kenna wrinkled her nose. “What? I won’t lose it. My jeans are snug.” Kenna shook her head. She was stalling, and she could hardly blame herself. Bad men. With guns. Geez. Why was she even worried about guns? They were all witches and could probably set her on fire or drown her. She took a deep breath. “Before I walk outside, does anyone have an excellent, last-minute, all-contingencies-considered backup plan?”

Silence.

“All right then.” She opened the door.

Chapter 25

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance that the Idaho Pack has a helicopter?” Jack asked as a copter headed to a point very near their rendezvous location.

Max estimated they were only three minutes from arrival, unless they had to alter course.

“I’m pretty sure they don’t.” Max pulled his phone out of his back pocket. No message—but that could mean Kenna had her hands full. Or that she no longer had access to her phone.

Max caught movement in his peripheral vision seconds before a voice shouted, “Drop your guns.”

Apparently he and Jack didn’t comply fast enough, because Gage—and he was certain now that it was indeed Gage—added, “We have your co-conspirators. Drop your guns now.”

Max exchanged a glance with Jack, and then both men carefully placed their rifles on the ground.

“Walk forward,” Gage said. After they’d gone about ten feet, he said, “Stop.” When Max and Jack complied, Gage walked in front of them. “The boss just contacted us, and he wants you unharmed at the house in five minutes. So you’re going to shut up, follow my men, and not cause any problems—or I’m telling him you were a problem and we have no choice but to shoot you. Nod if you understand.”

Grim-faced, Max and Jack both nodded.

They moved at a good clip and made it to Gwen’s holding cell house in under five minutes. When they arrived, it was clear the helicopter occupants had beaten them. A young guy, so blatantly the man in charge that even Max paused at the power he exuded, held another man by the throat. He didn’t grip him tightly, just cupped the throat of his victim with his thumb and two fingers. It was enough.

Gage, his five men, and Max and Jack came to a stop about ten or fifteen feet away. The confidence Gage had displayed after meeting Max and Jack in the woods had completely disappeared. The man looked terrified.

Max flipped his gaze back to the man being strangled—a gurgling sound interrupted his thoughts. As the victim spewed and coughed fluid from blue-tinged lips, Max amended his conclusion: not strangled, but drowned. The victim was drowning in his own saliva, bile, maybe blood. Max could feel his nostrils flaring, as he tried to maintain a semblance of neutrality. Probably best not to speculate exactly what fluids were drowning him, because then there was the question of where those fluids came from. Max averted his gaze. The man was in an obscene amount of pain.

It had to be Bentley. Relieved from the visual image of torture, Max’s brain started to fire on all cylinders again. Gage was quaking in terror, the sweat dripping from his face visible from several feet away. It made sense the man being tortured in front of them all was his boss. The question was why.

And why were Gage and Bentley’s men, the ones holding guns and surrounding Gwen’s cell, not coming to their boss’s aid? Who was this new player on the scene? A water witch, certainly. Could this be Ethan Peterson, the Coven of Light supreme leader? And if it was, what the hell was he doing here? Now?

Gage’s terror had escalated. While Max tried to sort out the players and motivations in this bizarre turn of events, Gage pissed himself. Max could hardly blame the guy. Peterson stood over the man’s dead boss. And he had to know his death would be neither quick nor painless. So, yeah, pissing himself didn’t seem so strange.

Max couldn’t help giving Bentley’s crumpled body one last look, like the train wreck you couldn’t help but watch. Blood leaked from his eyes, and foamy brown fluid stained the corpse’s nose and mouth. But the look on the dead man’s face… Max hoped like hell Peterson’s plans didn’t include drowning him or Jack in their own bodily fluids.

Chapter 26

As soon as Kenna opened the back door, light shone directly into her eyes. She blinked, blinded by the glare of a floodlight. A few more blinks. Make that a flashlight. A flashlight that was shining directly into her eyes. She squinted and put her hand up to her face. “Who’s in charge?”

“I am,” a dark figure answered. He lifted a hand. “The light.” That must have been a cue to his underling, because the shine in her eyes disappeared.

Well, shit. The cavalry, in the shape of Max and Jack, were standing next to the guy in charge. Young to mid-twenties, slight build, average height, medium brown hair. Her gaze swung back to Max and Jack. They looked relieved. Hm. The magic light show might have been a little terrifying from outside the house. She’d have to ask if she lived past the next five minutes.