The Spellcast Gate (Accessory to Magic Book 5)

by Kathrin Hutson

  “It was. And it still is.” Leandras brushed down the front of his shirt one more time and shook his head. “They’ll be back at it again sooner than you think.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No passage of time in this place, Jessica. Though I imagine all the frivolity does grow rather tiresome without an actual end. Ah.” He nodded toward a group of magicals who hadn’t drunk and danced themselves silly. “I see Railen’s been waiting up for us.”

  She swallowed and glanced over her shoulder at the tent, which looked only slightly less destroyed on the outside. “I hope not.”

  They approached the group of Laenmúr gathered in a circle on the ground to chat away the endless night before the celebration’s apparently imminent continuation. Railen looked up as they neared, studied each of their faces, and cracked a wide smile. “I hope you two have enjoyed yourselves.”

  “Immensely.” Leandras grinned. “Of course, I can’t speak for the both of us.”

  Jessica playfully rolled her eyes and nodded at the mage. “Thank you.”

  “Our pleasure, Jessica.” Railen pushed himself to his feet and gestured for them to step away from the group with him. “Though I’m not exactly sure what you’re thanking us for.”

  “You know. The warm welcome, I guess.” She shrugged. “That hasn’t really been a thing since we got here. Kinda nice to have a bubble beyond time to just take a break for a while.”

  The mage chuckled and extended his hand. When she took it, he covered it with his other hand as well and dipped his head. “As the Guardian sees fit. I’m sure we’ll be thanking you as well, once we reach the end.”

  “Yeah.” When he released her, Jessica couldn’t figure out what to do with her hands, so she folded her arms instead.

  The entire original Order of Laenmúr was counting on her to get them out of their solidified isolation beyond time, and then... Well, then Jessica would be counting on them to show up when she needed it so they could send the Dalu’Rázj one final fuck you and end this nightmare for good.

  Railen turned to Leandras, and his smile faded. “I assume you’re off to speak with Ocaiye now.”

  “And alerting you, as requested.” The fae man dipped his head. “We’ll see you on the other side, Yafi-ít.”

  They clasped forearms again, and Railen cocked his head. “It will not be as joyous a reunion as ours.”

  Leandras raised his eyebrows. “I know. But it must be done.”

  Once they released each other, Leandras settled his hand on Jessica’s lower back, and she didn’t actually squirm beneath the urge to pull away this time.

  Great. One figurative night spent in the arms of this fae, and now he could touch her like that without either of them paying for it.

  There were worse things.

  He gazed around the clearing, then chuckled. “Forgive me, Railen, but I seem to have lost the location of the breach.”

  “Yes, darkwine has a tendency to muddle the finer details.” The mage looked back and forth between them with a knowing smile, then held Jessica’s gaze to add, “Among other things. You’ll find it behind the tent you shared.”

  She raised an eyebrow and pressed her lips together.

  Okay, fine. The secret was out. It wasn’t like either of them had a way to hide the char marks and ripped exterior of the tent across the clearing.

  “Thank you.” Leandras dipped his head, then turned and led Jessica back across the strewn bodies of snoring Laenmúr.

  “The breach.” When she looked up at him, the fae man removed his hand from her lower back and kept walking straight ahead toward the line of tents. “We’re not going through another Xaharí portal.”

  “No. We’re merely collecting the last item in this world to finish what we started in yours.” He shot her a sidelong glance. “I left the Umur’udal in Ocaiye’s hands. For safekeeping.”

  They slipped between the destroyed tent and the perfectly intact one beside it. “Railen made it sound like we’re about to walk right into another shitstorm.”

  His eyebrows flickered together as he scanned the trees lining this side of the clearing. “Ocaiye and I have a certain...history. She may be rather opposed to seeing me now with you.”

  Goddamnit.

  Just when Jessica had hoped they wouldn’t be walking into another danger zone for this last stupid artifact, he had to pull out his history with another magical in this world. A woman. Who wouldn’t be happy to see them together.

  “So she’s one of your exes.”

  Leandras stopped short and looked at her with wide eyes. “Absolutely not. You’re far more intimidating than most, Jessica. But I would never dare engage Ocaiye in any form of intimacy.”

  She wrinkled her nose at how absolutely ridiculous it sounded when he put it like that. “Great. That means it’s something a lot worse.”

  “Oh, come now. Don’t say you didn’t enjoy yourself.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes but couldn’t help a small smile. “For now, why don’t we leave what happened in that tent in that tent?”

  “Trust me, we’re in complete agreement where that’s concerned.” He stepped into the trees, and she was forced to follow without a clue about where they were going or who this Ocaiye woman really was.

  The forest thickened and grew dark around them surprisingly quickly, and though they moved farther and farther from the Laenmúr clearing, the sounds of drums striking up a rhythm again and rising laughter followed them.

  “Wow. They really don’t stop.”

  “As I’ve said, Jessica. The lulling periods don’t last long. They can’t stop.”

  She swallowed thickly and spared one more glance over her shoulder just as the crack of expelled magic echoed through the forest. A second later, the blaze of another multi-colored bonfire shooting straight into the air lit up the dark trees with flickering shadows.

  An endless loop of partying into all hours of the night, because all hours were the night. The Laenmúr couldn’t leave.

  Suddenly, the idea of staying behind in that tent with Leandras made her skin crawl.

  They’d gotten their time to rest and enjoy themselves for once without being interrupted by the next deadly thing heading their way. But that clearing was nothing more than a prison designed to look like complete freedom.

  “There.” Leandras pointed toward a shimmering wall of light stretching between two trees, the trunks of which rose and bent inward toward each other to create a natural doorway. “Through there, we find the final piece.”

  “You said no more portals.”

  “We’re not leaving the forest, Jessica. Merely entering another plane of it.”

  “So...what? This Ocaiye chick got kicked out of the party?”

  The fae man might have tried to smile, but the distaste in his expression made it look like a grimace. “She chose solitude over camaraderie. So yes, I suppose that’s relatively accurate to say she kicked herself out.”

  “To spend eternity alone in the woods?” Jessica scowled at the wall of light between the trunks of the natural doorway. “Why would she do that?”

  “That will make itself perfectly clear when you see her.” Leandras approached the doorway and stopped to look over his shoulder at her. His smirk had returned, which lost all its appeal when he added, “Coming?”

  Chapter 11

  Jessica couldn’t just stand there glaring at him after the fae man had so flippantly gone from a cryptic warning like that to joking about her hesitation. She wanted to, though.

  How could anything on the other side of that doorway be good news for either of them if a Laenmúr member holding Leandras’ third artifact in this world had banished herself to a different plane of the forest for thousands of years?

  “Not if you’re about to tell me you stuck this Umury doll into her chest too,” she quipped.

  Leandras closed his eyes with a weak chuckle. “I assure you I’ve done no such thing. And if you must call it by name, Jessica, I urge you to c
orrect the enunciation. Umur’udal.”

  “Fine. Yeah, I’m coming.” She approached him, and they walked through the wall of shimmering light together between the trees.

  The world lurched around her, bringing a debilitatingly strong wave of dizziness that faded as quickly as it had appeared. Jessica blinked furiously and shook her head. “Whoa.”

  A strangled breath came from the fae man after he swallowed thickly. “Indeed.”

  At first, this small bit of the forest didn’t seem that much different here than from the other side of the doorway. Then Jessica saw the small, thatch-roofed hut behind the next line of trees.

  Not a tent. No bonfire and dancing magicals. No darkwine and cheers at long millennia of waiting finally at an end. No sound at all.

  Whoever Ocaiye was, she’d certainly taken this exile of hers pretty damn seriously.

  Leandras led her through the trees until they stood at the entrance of the hut, which had been lifted off the forest floor by three feet and boasted two crooked steps of roughhewn wooden planks leading up to the doorway. That doorway was completely black, with no sign of light or life inside. The forest was too dark to illuminate much more than those two steps—too quiet to betray any sign that there actually was a magical inside.

  Jessica shrugged. “Let’s do this, then.”

  She started to walk forward, but Leandras caught her hand and held her back before whispering, “We do not enter.”

  “Um...okay.” She frowned at the empty doorway that looked more and more like a black hole by the second. “You have a plan, though, right?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Leandras—”

  “Plans are as effective with Ocaiye as threats are with you, Jessica.”

  Oh, yeah. Nice way to bring up some of her more frustrating qualities on the verge of trying to get their last stupid artifact.

  Leandras brushed his fingers down her arm and whispered, “I’ll handle this.”

  Even weirder than how free he was with all the touching was the fact he’d never said that before.

  Sure, he’d barked at her to do as he said, aim her magic at the gold coin and the Gateway instead of him, stop asking questions, be ready to run. But “I’ll handle this”?

  That was a new one.

  He stepped forward and stopped two feet from the bottom step leading into the hut. With a deep breath, he sank down to one knee on the damp earth coated with leaves and uprooted vegetation and spread his arms for an incredibly low bow over his foot still planted in the dirt.

  Jessica frowned at the overdone prostration, but the urge to search the dark doorway instead was too strong to resist.

  Ocaiye was a member of the Laenmúr, right? She had to be if she’d been cast aside from the rest of this world to spend forever in the solitude of timelessness before the Guardian and the Laen’aroth arrived to take back the Umur’udal.

  But Leandras hadn’t bothered with any kind of strange ritual when they’d met with the rest of the order. Not counting all the dancing and darkwine and who knew how long spent in Ahárra.

  Even with all his posturing, nothing moved in the hut’s dark doorway.

  With a heavy sigh, the fae man bowed his head as well and muttered something in Xaharí.

  Whatever he’d said, it was apparently the perfect line to rouse Ocaiye from her deathly silence. Something shifted inside the hut, followed by a knock of a heavy item thunking down on thick wood. Floorboards creaked, a rustle of beads and smaller adornments clacked against each other followed, then a figure slowly emerged in the blackness of the doorway.

  Dark eyes glittered within a young, smooth face the color of golden wheat sand. The woman’s lips were painted black, a single line of the same color stretching from the top of her bottom lip and down the strong curve of her chin. Dozens of thin, pure-white braids cascaded from her head and over her shoulders, making the few that had been dyed a blood-red stand out in stark contrast. She was covered in draping strips of fur pelts, one of them hanging halfway off her shoulder to reveal the same golden skin beneath and a mark as black as her lips settling over one shoulder.

  It looked like the wingtip made of stone Jessica had barely recognized when they’d stepped through the Gateway and into the crumbled remains of Cálindor. Judging by the detail of that mark and the fact no one else was here in Ocaiye’s self-imposed exile, the rest of it had to be one hell of a tattoo.

  And Ocaiye did not in any way look happy to see Leandras kneeling at the base of her stairs with his head bowed and his arms spread wide.

  Jessica almost expected the same outcome here as their trip to the Naruli den beneath the desecrated Xaharí wasteland, but in the underworld, Leandras hadn’t shown nearly as much respect as this.

  Maybe because his normal joking display of respect was now tempered by fear.

  Great. So this meeting could honestly go either way.

  Ocaiye’s long fingers curled around the frames of the nonexistent door, as if she meant to propel herself out of her hut and fall upon the fae in rage. The scrape of her nails digging into the rough wood were the only sound in the clearing until she spoke. “The Laen’aroth returns.”

  “Yes.” Leandras didn’t lift his head. “To—”

  “To flaunt his deception at my doorstep,” Ocaiye spat. “To boast of his exploits while his Roth’akán devises anew.”

  The muscles of Leandras’ back tightened as he held that ridiculously groveling posture. “I have no interest in deceiving you, Ocaiye—”

  “Do not say my name!”

  The entire forest shuddered around them, wobbling in and out of clarity. A heavy wind gusted through the treetops and sent swirling storms of leaves scattering across the steps and the thatched roof of the hut.

  Jessica took a step back, expecting to feel the ground tremble beneath her to match the shuddering tremor of everything else. But the ground didn’t move. Leandras hadn’t been knocked aside, and Jessica had no need to stabilize herself.

  She was, however, ready to run again if that was part of the fae’s plan.

  Ocaiye dropped one of her hands from the doorway and stepped forward on the top step, though the nails of her other hand dug even deeper into the wood she gripped with surprising strength. Splinters already rose from the craters beneath her hand. “I told you never to return, Leandras.”

  Maybe it was the use of his name, but Leandras finally seemed to think it was safe to look up at her. “And I told you I would.”

  “But at what cost?” Not once had this strange, fur-wrapped magical looked at Jessica—either she didn’t want to, or she didn’t care. Which was weird for a Laenmúr member who’d been waiting for the Guardian as long as the rest of her order.

  “The cost is mine alone,” Leandras muttered. “I don’t intend to share it.”

  Ocaiye hissed and swiped her clawed hand down the doorframe, throwing splinters and shaved bits of wood down onto the step at her feet. “That is your claim, but your loyalties are as illusionary as our prison.”

  He stood slowly, holding the woman’s gaze, then gestured toward Jessica. “My loyalties lie with the Guardian.”

  Not even then did Ocaiye acknowledge Jessica’s presence. “You come too late.”

  “No. There’s still time. Certain truths have revealed themselves, and I—”

  “Enough.” The woman walked down the two steps on bare feet, glaring at the fae man. She stopped not in front of him but beside him, her gaze roaming across his profile as he stared straight ahead. “I’ve had enough of your truths. They’ve lost their potency by now.”

  Her upper lip curled into a sneer, then she brushed past him and headed straight for Jessica.

  Not exactly the best way to make a new friend who was supposed to help them. And Leandras didn’t even bother to turn around and watch.

  Which probably meant things would get a whole lot worse if he tried to intervene, and Jessica had no idea what this glowing magical with obviously insane power and deep blac
k pools for eyes wanted from her. She cleared her throat and hoped Leandras would offer even the slightest bit of a clue.

  Because if his millennia worth of arrangements and deals didn’t mean shit here, Jessica was the perfect magical to screw everything up.

  When Ocaiye finished stalking across her own private clearing, she was close enough to either kiss Jessica or smack her across the face. Maybe even stick a blade in the Guardian’s side. A knife would have been entirely possible to hide under all those draping furs.

  “Do not look at him,” Ocaiye hissed. Her breath washed over Jessica’s face in an icy rush like another gust of wind through the trees. That was all Jessica could smell, but the cold was even more off-putting than bad breath would have been. “Look at me.”

  Steeling herself, Jessica pried her gaze from Leandras’ rigid back and looked into those black orbs inches from her face. As soon as she did, Ocaiye started circling her, moving slowly across the forest floor without disturbing a single leaf or making even the faintest sound.

  Seriously creepy.

  And yeah, it was safe to assume she was deadly as hell too.

  “The Laen’aroth claims loyalty to you,” the woman whispered. “How is it the Guardian has come to accept such a claim to stand by his side?”

  Jessica had learned enough about what magicals did here when someone else spoke out of turn; spinning around and telling this one to back off with the sinister staring and cryptic questions was a bad idea. So she stared at Leandras’ back again and replied, “I trust him.”

  As soon as the words left her lips, the fae straightened where he stood and lifted his chin, his back swelling with a deep breath.

  Had he not expected her to say it?

  Yeah, there was the truth wrapped up in one neat little fucking bow.

  She did trust him, because if she didn’t, nothing they’d been through so far would make any sense at all. And nothing they did together from here on out would keep either of them from dying before they did what they had to do.

  Ocaiye hissed and finished her slow circling until she stopped uncomfortably close in front of Jessica again. “What did he promise you?”