Page 13 of Faerie Hunted

“Tavi, please come with us for a moment.” Mike held out a hand for me and I had to break contact with Noren to grab my IV pole. The three of us, wolf included, followed the queen toward the door.

She motioned for the guard to remain on the opposite side as we sidled into a separate chamber. “Michael, if you would be so kind…”

Mike moved into position and closed his eyes. The damping spell started at the floor and rose to encompass the door, keeping whatever we might say inside the private chamber between us.

No one from the outside would be able to hear us until Mike lowered the spell.

The strength of it took me aback. He’d been practicing without me.

This wasn’t, as I’d originally thought, a bathroom. Instead, the chamber had been outfitted as a meeting room with a separate door on the opposite side and several couches facing each other.

“Your father should be here,” Laina began, working her hands.

“He’ll come,” Mike said in the dull silence, picking up on the conversation from before. “I know he’ll come. He’s just…late.”

“I’m not content to wait and see.” Laina shuffled over to the couch and folded herself down on the cushions with much less than her normal grace. “Thus the need for privacy. Tavi, if you’ll keep your…friend…across the room, I’d be grateful. I find he gives me a bit of the creeps.”

When the queen tells you to do something, you do it.

“I’ll stay over here with him.” I found myself reluctant to pry my hand away from Noren’s comforting ruff.

“What are you going to do?” Mike asked his mother.

Laina smoothed out the fabric of her skirt and fixed him with a look that told him not to ask stupid questions. “It’s a simple spell,” she explained regardless. “One of the first they teach young witches. It needs nothing more than my own power and a scrying mirror, which I happen to carry with me at all times.”

The queen drew a small circle of black glass from one of the hidden pockets of her skirt. The gilded frame reflected the dull overhead glow of the fae lights and I saw nothing in the darkness, not even her reflection.

Laina gestured for us both to sit and I nestled against Noren, close enough to watch whatever spell she cast while still keeping a respectful distance.

The two of them huddled together, the family resemblance once again startling me even though it shouldn't.

Sometimes it was too hard to reconcile Michael, the same Mike who’d shared my bed, with the crown prince who would one day follow in the footsteps of his father the king.

“The scrying spell will allow me to catch a glimpse of what’s happening above us,” Laina continued.

She laid the glass out flat on the wooden table between them and held her hands above it, palms faced down.

How quickly had they shepherded her down here? I wondered. My palms went clammy. If anyone caught us?—

The hard knot in my stomach grew tighter as I watched Queen Laina start to chant under her breath. The words were obscured, too strange to my ear for me to make out, and all of them done in an undulating monotone.

The fine hairs on the back of my arms stood to attention and Noren leaned hard against my side, just as rattled as I was.

The air became charged, filling the room with some kind of unfamiliar scent. When I glanced back, images floated above the black mirror and the scene unfolded.

At first we saw empty hallways as the spell sought out whatever target Queen Laina had pinpointed, whether it was the king or the intruder.

And when the slender form hidden in the shadows of the throne room finally clarified, my spine snapped to attention and my breath disintegrated one atom of air at a time.

I knew that woman.

The bottom dropped out from under me.

The witch of Everly Lane had infiltrated the castle.

Hoarder, apocalypse prepper, chain smoker, whatever you wanted to call her—Barbara habitually wore baggy overalls and an old red-and-black flannel shirt.

The material hung from her thin frame as she swept her attention across the throne room.

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