Page 86 of Bound to the Wolf
“We’ll tell you later,” Briana said. “We are getting prepared.” She hung up, which, okay, rude. Delainey would have appreciated a bit more detail, but suddenly her mood was about ten times better, and she grinned over at Reece.
“This nightmare is about to be over,” she told him.
His expression turned dour.
“Nightmare?” The warmth fled his eyes. His jaw set into the hard line she hadn’t seen in weeks.
Delainey wondered if she had misspoken, but what else was she supposed to say? “Briana thinks they have a way to break the bond. We’re going to meet them tonight.”
“So we’re just going, without you even asking me beforehand?”
“Do you need me to ask if you want us free of this thing?”
“I guess I know where you stand,” Reece said, and he turned away from her on the trail. He plowed ahead of her and headed for the house. Delainey had to jog to keep up before he broke the thirty-foot boundary and pain washed over them both.
Chapter
Forty
Aya was working in the root cellar and reached for something on the shelf when her bracelets snagged on a screw and the clasp broke.
The root cellar was narrow and low-ceilinged, its stone walls lined with deep wooden shelves crammed with glass jars, clay pots, and bundles of dried herbs, all of it lit by a single bare bulb on a pull chain that threw deep shadows into every corner.
“Damn it!”
The charm clattered to the floor, and the stone in the middle cracked open. The thin braided cord of the bracelet lay on the rough stone floor in two pieces; the small glass bead split cleanly in half, a faint shimmer dying along the broken edges.
Between one breath and the next, it felt like Aya was coming out of a trance. Clouds she hadn’t realized were in her mind cleared, and she looked around as if she suddenly had twenty-twenty vision.
“What the—?” She reached for the charm on the ground and picked it up, examining the two broken pieces. She held them close to her face.
She could feel the remnants of magic, but without doing any sort of research, she didn’t know what exactly the charm had contained. Emerson said it had been for protection and mental clarity, but her mind felt sharper than it ever had. A mental numbing spell, perhaps?
But why?
Not just numbing, she realized, as she sent a spark of her magic into it to try to diagnose the issue.
Mind manipulation. Not mind control, not exactly. That took a lot more power. But this had been like a look-away ward, except worn on her wrist.
What had it been making her look away from? What the hell was Emerson up to?
Aya cast her mind back over the last month and tried to figure out what he could possibly be doing. Did this have to do with Delainey and Reece getting kidnapped? Emerson had shown up before that for his meeting at the university.
Had he been plotting this whole time, or was this something else?
She felt so fucking stupid.
He had been in their house for weeks, an entire month, and while she had questioned it vaguely, she had let it pass because that was hospitality, and Emerson was an old friend of Briana and Elise.
Except he was no friend of Briana. He had broken her heart and scattered the pieces on the wind. Briana had been nothing but a shell of herself when they broke up.
How could she be letting him back into her? What was he doing to them?
Aya set the shattered charm down and looked at the manacles with fresh eyes. The cuffs sat on the worktable amid a scatter of notes and reference books.
That was too much of a coincidence to ignore. Emerson showed up, and then Delainey was kidnapped, and mind magic was done to Aya.
It would take more than one witch to do it, or the resources of a large coven.
