Bryn glanced around. “We may need the magic I have left.”
“For Christ’s sake, Lyons!” Zach yelled.
Poppy was whimpering as Zach manipulated the arrow.
“Bryn, we have to help her,” I said.
“Healing’s not my area of expertise,” Bryn said with a grim expression, but he extended a hand and whispered a spell. Warm magic flowed over us, and Poppy seemed to struggle less.
“You can’t pull it out toward you. The barbed tip will tear her flesh and do even more damage,” I said. “You’ll have to push it out the back first and then cut off the tip.”
“Got some experience with arrows?” Zach asked, putting steady pressure on the shaft. Poppy gasped in pain.
“Unfortunately, yeah, I do.”
“Hold her,” Zach said. With one hand he raised her up and with the other he shoved the arrow through. She screamed as the tip pierced the skin and came out her back.
“Careful of that tip,” Bryn cautioned as I tried to break it off.
“Here,” Zach said, brushing my hand away. He pulled his magical amulet out from under his shirt. It blazed purple and gold, making me shield my eyes.
Zach held the end of the arrow and brought his knife down against the shaft. After a few moments it cracked. He unwound the silver on the end to get the tip off and then tossed the arrowhead aside.
“Almost there, baby girl. Hang on,” Zach whispered.
Poppy braced herself with a hand on the side of Zach’s chest.
With a sharp yank, he pulled the arrow out of her chest from the front.
She moaned and fell back to the ground. Zach bent his head and listened against her chest.
“I can’t tell if her lung’s deflated on the injured side,” Zach said.
“I feel cold,” she murmured, holding up a hand to block the rain from hitting her face. Blood stained her hand and ran down her arm.
Poppy looked at Zach and said, “You’re wounded.”
“Just a scratch.”
“Can’t help myself. Gar, wish I could. Bloody unfair. But can help you,” she said. Her lips had taken on a bluish-purple color that could only mean bad things.
“I’m all right. Conserve your strength,” Zach said.
“I can do it. Last act ought to be a good one,” she said through ragged breaths.
“Hang on. Your magic won’t—”
Poppy whispered a spell and the magic burst forth, but it hit the amulet. It sparked and reflected backward onto her. She howled as a blinding light lit the area for a moment, burning our eyes. I fell back, throwing an arm across my face. Finally the magic faded, and Poppy lay still with wide eyes and raised brows.
“I can breathe,” she said, surprised. She took a tentative breath, then a deeper one.
“Your spell reflected off his amulet back onto you. It healed your worst injuries,” I said.
She felt the wound in her chest. “Gar, that still hurts. But I don’t think I’m dying.”
“C’mon. Let’s get the wounded to the van. We can take them to the hospital,” Zach said, picking Poppy up.
“Leave them. Let the hotel call for aid and they can be transported by local emergency services. We need to go,” Bryn said.
They argued as I stood. “Where is Kismet?” I asked, looking around. I started toward the trees, but froze when I spotted a pair of glowing eyes. Two werewolves burst from the woods, the smaller one with an off-kilter gait, favoring one side, I realized. I sucked in a breath and raised my gun, but both wolves stopped several feet from me.
They snarled, but didn’t attack. My finger trembled against the trigger. I didn’t want to shoot unless it was necessary, but they weren’t very far from me. If they leapt, a bullet might not stop them in time.
My heart beat loudly in my ears. The larger dark brown wolf’s mouth closed. He raised his face and seemed to scent the air. Then he looked up in the direction of the ruins. His head and shoulders turned and he walked away. The other wolf watched the first for a moment but didn’t follow. He turned a circle and went back toward the trees, looking over his shoulder twice at me, as though he wanted me to follow.
I glanced back at my group. Poppy stood with Bryn and Zach. They were deep in discussion. I inched forward to the forest’s edge.
The wolf’s body was obscured by a tree when he shifted. A moment later he stepped forward with some scattered bushes between us. It was the man who’d been gravely injured in the Scottish woods.
I smiled when I saw him. “You made it.”
He nodded.
“I’m glad.”
“My family was as well,” he said in that rumbling accent. “She’s your sister? Or cousin?”
“Who?”
“The archer. The fae girl.”
I nodded. “We just met each other, but yes. She’s my family.”
“She’s done things. You don’t—”
A short howl made us both turn toward the ruins. I wasn’t sure what the structure had originally been. Some small primitive dwelling? The dark gray stone walls stood, but there was no roof anymore.
The dark brown wolf walked along the top toward—
I gasped.
Kismet lay on the wall, her hair and leg dangling over the blocks of stone. My breath caught, coming to an abrupt halt.
My feet understood before my mind, because even as I wondered whether she was dead, my legs carried me to the wall. He howled, and I opened my mouth to scream, but he didn’t pounce on her.
She’d been still as a statue, but in an instant her arms came up and a nocked arrow pointed at the wolf’s neck.
He reared up and transformed, shifting from animal to man within a haze of shadow. He threw his arms wide, his chest exposed.
“Go ahead,” he growled, his voice guttural, as if the animal still reigned in his throat.
Her arms were as steady as oak branches on a still day. Water pelted her skin and dripped from her, running in rivulets down the stone.
“Don’t cower from it. Kill me outright,” he yelled, his voice as powerful as the storm.
Her lips curved. “If it’s death you’re after, come and get it.”
He crouched, and my breath caught again.
Zach raised his gun and Bryn a hand, but no one moved except the young man. His shoulder-length hair fell forward as he leaned over her. The tip of her arrow pressed against his chest as he spoke to her. He’d lowered his voice, so we couldn’t hear what he said.
Her eyes never left his face. “Then run,” she said, her voice cool as the drizzling rain.
He pushed the bow aside and lowered his head farther. I thought he would kiss her. That’s what it seemed he would do . . . bring their bodies together. But his nose pressed against the fabric of her shirt and nuzzled her skin. When he lifted his face, darkness stained it.
Blood!
“She’s hurt! Bryn!” I called, running to the ruins.
The walls were slick. I tried to climb, but slipped and landed hard on the ground, my knees thumping and sinking into muddy earth.
I yanked off my shoes and dug my fingers and toes into the cracks. I fell a second time before I managed to scale the wall. The wolf man turned. He was tall, well over six feet. His eyes scanned my face; then he turned and stepped off the wall. He dropped with almost no sound into the wreck of an enclosure. I glanced down. He shifted into a wolf and bolted out.
I crawled to her. “Kis, how bad are you hurt?”
“Bad enough,” she said, tilting her face to the sky and closing her eyes against the falling rain.
I crawled forward as the wolf had done. I lifted her shirt and gasped. There was a jagged gash where the skin had been torn open. I could see a marble-white rib between lines of muscle.
“Oh, my God! Oh, no!”
“Go away,�
�� she said, giving my shoulder a shove.
“We’ll get you down.” I turned and yelled to Bryn and Zach, “She’s badly hurt. I’m going to help her slide over the edge. Zach, you have to catch her. Bryn, use your magic to slow her fall. Get ready!” I said. Each of her legs dangled on a different side of the wall. I grabbed the one hanging down the inner wall and lifted it. She kicked me. Not hard, but I was so startled I fell backward, nearly toppling off the wall.
“I said leave me alone,” she snapped.
I sat up, holding the slick stones to steady myself.
“What are you talking about? I’m not leaving you. I have to help you get down so we can take you to the hospital.”
“I don’t need your help, which is a lucky thing for me.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked, leaning toward her. “Why are you acting like this?”
“While I lay here bleeding, you tended the witch who gave me my wounds. You walked away with a wolf to the woods.”
“I didn’t know you were hurt.”
“Exactly.”
“You could have called out. I didn’t see you.”
“You didn’t try to. After all the times I reached for you across the miles and helped you tap fae power to heal. After the times when your magic was drained away, leaving you empty and I filled you with half my spirit. Could you not seek to help me first just once?”
She held her side and sat up. We faced each other. “You’re no different than the rest of them.” She swung her leg over so she faced the inside of the enclosure. She looked back at my face for a moment, then said, “If I’m nothing special to you, then you’re nothing special to me either.”
I opened my mouth, but she slid off the wall and dropped down. She landed on the mud with a grunt of pain.
“Kismet, wait!” I said, but she strode to her wet pack, which lay in the corner. She grabbed it and climbed out of the ruins. “Kis!”
She didn’t answer or even look back.
17
AFTER I GOT down from the wall, I searched for Kismet, calling her name in the darkness until Zach picked me up and carried me back to the hotel by force.
Poppy tried to argue in her cockney accent, which I learned is a kind of English hillbilly accent, that she’d caught us and that we’d have to come with her. She claimed she was in charge because she could cast the most dangerous spells. I was so mad about her giving Bryn the throat infection and hurting Kismet and being the cause of the rift between Kismet and me that I told her that if she tried to cast a spell, I’d sock her in the nose and then shoot her in the legs so she couldn’t chase us anymore.
She’d seen Lundqvist, so I suppose she knew I was serious. But I also suspected that it was Zach telling her he’d take offense if she tried to cast spells on us again that really kept her from getting aggressive.
Zach wrapped Lundqvist in a carpet, and we took him to the hospital. There were two dead wizards, one courtesy of the wolves, from the look of his torn flesh, and one who’d died of blood loss from a dagger slice through his left groin artery, which was probably Kismet’s work.
We found Kato in a coma with one of Kismet’s arrows next to him. He’d been shot through his spell-casting arm. It wouldn’t have been too bad a wound if the arrow had been removed properly, but he’d torn it out, leaving a lot of damage. Also, I guess he’d absorbed too much of the poison, since he ended up in that coma. We dropped him at the hospital, too.
Lundqvist played dirty by hollering that we’d attacked him. We got out fast, with Bryn casting a spell to short out the security cameras. I hoped it had worked. I sure didn’t want to be on any of Ireland’s most-wanted lists.
“That Lundqvist isn’t much of a spy, yelling like that. What’s he going to say? That we were trying to mug him? He’ll have to make a report. It’s kind of crazy to try to get us detained that way,” I said.
“We heard a rumor that you were planning to go underground,” Poppy said. She’d fully recovered and followed us out of the hospital, threatening us with another toxic spell if we didn’t give her a ride back to the hotel. Rather than have a scene in the parking lot when we were trying to leave quickly, we’d brought her along.
In the van, she rummaged around and started to unzip a suitcase, saying, “Do you have any biscuits? Spelling like that leaves me starving!”
“Biscuits? Those would be all crumbled and dried out by now,” I said.
“By biscuits she means cookies,” Bryn said.
“Why didn’t she say cookies then?” I asked. “There are no cookies. Get out of our bags,” I said, giving her a shove. I couldn’t believe the nerve of the woman.
She shrugged, completely oblivious. I was going to knock her over the head the first chance I got.
“Sun’s up. Now it’ll be easier to follow Kismet’s footprints to find her,” I said to Bryn.
Zach and Bryn exchanged looks, but didn’t say a word. Poppy found some Hershey’s minatures that had fallen out of my purse. She unwrapped them and swallowed a mouthful of chocolate. “Any wine to go with the chocolate?”
Wine at dawn?
“Nope,” I said. “Bryn, we have to look for Kismet. She might be waiting to see how long I search. And we need her, remember?”
“Need her for what? And who is this Kismet? A witch from America? We’ve not heard about her before. And what’s she doing shooting arrows? Some kind of Yank fad?” Poppy huffed a sigh at our silence. “Come on. You know I’m going to find out.”
“You want more chocolate?” I asked, to distract Poppy. I wouldn’t mention Kismet again in front of her. I was just so worried about Kis that I couldn’t stop thinking about finding her.
“No, but we could duck into a market for a bottle of dry merlot.”
“Um, you’re from England, right?”
“Right,” she said.
“So this is morning time where you live, right?”
She laughed, tossing her head back so her fuzzy ringlets danced. “Gar, do you really think I’d hold with convention after the night we’ve just had? I’m bloody Conclave! You’re American outlaws. And we all could’ve died last night. If we want chocolates and wine for breakfast, that’s what we’ll bloody well have. Come on; let’s just get pissed. It’ll give your friend a chance to cool off and come back. And if we have to fight, we can always do that later in the day. Let’s say noon or half past two.”
Even though I wanted to throttle Poppy, that almost made me smile. Despite the fact that we’d had a terrible fight the night before, she didn’t see us as enemies. She was just doing her job. “Um, how long have you been working for WAM?”
She grinned. “Not long enough for them to have cut off my bollocks, if I had them, which I don’t. Though he’s welcome to check me for them,” she said with a wink at Zach.
“No checking necessary, darlin’,” Zach said. “You’re about as female as they come.”
Her smile widened. “Certainly got a nice pair, haven’t I?” she asked, thrusting up her giant boobs.
Good grief.
I glanced at Bryn, who rolled his eyes.
When we got back to the hotel, Zach said, “You guys check out back for our girl who’s gone missing. I’ll come down and help you look in a little while. I’m gonna take a shower to wash my cuts. You need to do the same,” Zach told Poppy.
“I do,” she agreed. “Though I’m not sure I can reach the one on my back.”
Zach smiled. “If you need a hand, all you have to do is ask.”
She beamed and wiggled her way down the hall.
Bryn turned and led me toward the stairs. “If he’s planning to cuff her to something, he’d better be ready with more than his charming-country-boy routine. She fell for that once. No Conclave operative would fall for it twice,” Bryn said.
“If he’s planning to handcuff her to something, I don’t supp
ose he’ll give her a choice about it. He’ll just outmuscle her.”
“She packs quite a punch with her magic.”
“His amulet didn’t seem to have too much trouble deflecting it.”
“Let’s hope he’s smart enough to keep it on.”
I scowled. There was no way Zach was going to strip down and fall into bed with a foreign witch, no matter how big her boobs were.
At least, he’d better not.
* * *
THE DAY BLOSSOMED clear and cold. The soggy ground didn’t show many tracks; it just hardened and crunched beneath our feet. We explored the grounds and a little part of the woods, but there was no sign of Kismet. I made sure to scan the tops of the trees in case she was up in one of them waiting for me to find her. No such luck.
In the woods where the ground had been protected by the tree canopy, we came across wolf tracks leading away from the hotel and followed them for a while, but for all we knew they’d lead all the way back to Scotland, so we eventually stopped and doubled back.
Zach waited for us. He rubbed his left arm and I raised my brows.
“You okay?”
“Right as rain. Any sign of Kismet?”
“Nope.”
“So now what?” Zach asked.
“Let’s go to the Gap,” Bryn said. “There’s supposed to be a faery gate within it. Either she’ll be waiting for us there or she won’t, but no matter what, we’re going in, right?” Bryn asked me.
I sighed and nodded. “I really want to find her, though. Not just so she can come with us, but also because I want to prove that I haven’t given up looking. She thinks I don’t care.”
“She was too quick to jump to that conclusion,” Zach said. “I’m not sure you’re the one who should have something to prove. Seems to me she owes you an apology, not the other way around.”
“Agreed,” Bryn said.
I held out my hands to ward off any more advice. “It’s sure nice of you both to side with me. But I’m not the person who needs people on her side right now.”
“Tamara—” Bryn said, shaking his head. “You may not be able to fix what’s broken with her.”
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