Page 38 of Iridian

This from Seth.

He was grinning ear to ear as he looked at the screen of his phone, and we all narrowed our brows at him in confusion.

“You…gotit?” asked Aurelia, as skeptical as the rest of us.

“Yep.”

She shook her head and whispered, “How?”

Seth shrugged. “I asked ChatGPT.”

I burst out laughing together with a few others, while we all rushed to Seth to see what his phone was telling him. He had pulled up the maps app on his phone and was showing us someplace calledTriadesin West Virginia. According to the map, it was about four hours away by car.

“Are you sure that’s the same?” asked Radock, and Seth zoomed out the map again to show him.

“Look,” he said, pointing at the roads, and then at the curved lines on the parchment that had come to life with sunlight. “And this town here—Franklin. And a branch of the Potomac River right here—look! And the North Folk Mountain in the west. It’s all right there.”

Hard to see with so many people trying to look at that small screen at the same time, but I could just make out everything he was saying.

Holy shit, Seth was right.

“Send it to my phone,” Kaid said.

“And mine,” said George, and Aurelia, and soon Seth was sending the location to everyone, while Taland and I stepped aside and continued to look at the beautiful shimmer on the parchments.

In the heart of it was the location we were looking for—or at least where we thought David Hill had gone to find a dead army of Laetus soldiers.

No way is this real,a part of me said, and I almost laughed at it, but how could I blame my own mind for being skeptical of this reality?

“Perria,” said Taland, putting his arm over my shoulder. “Over there—that’s Perria. It has to be.”

He was pointing at the middle of the map, right where I’d been looking, too, to those big pointy structures that could only be mountains. Five of them, two bigger, three smaller, set in an almost perfect circle.

“That’s where they buried the Army.” And the words sounded just as strange out there in the world as they did in my head.

“Assuming this map opened to Hill, that’s where we’ll find him,” Taland said.

“I can’t believe you actually memorized all that spell.”Impressedwas a small word, and despite knowing that Madeline was behind me somewhere and could probably see me, I leaned in and kissed him on the side of his neck.

Shivers erupted down his arm that was over my shoulders, and I saw the hairs on his forearm rising.

He growled low in his throat. “I’ve memorized your moans and screams of pleasure even better,” he whispered, so low I would have never heard if his mouth hadn’t been right next to my ear.

Those butterflies that hid in my stomach and only ever came out when he was around went nuts.

Heat between my legs.

“Not the time,” I told him because everyone else was preoccupied with that map location and we were over here, getting turned on.

“It’s always the time, sweetness,” Taland said with a chuckle and kissed my temple. “When we’re done with Hill and we come back, every second of every day will be the exactly right time.”

Didn’t that sound like heaven. “When we’re done with Hill and come back, we’re going anyway, Taland,” I said. “We’re going far away from Maryland, to another country, maybe another continent. And we’re going to just…be.” That’s all I wanted, to justbewith him, take our time together without fear and without lies and secrets keeping distance between us.

“Done,” said Taland. “We’ll go wherever you want and stay as long as you want. We don’t ever have to come back.”

He stuck his nose in my ear and sniffed hard, making me laugh a little.

“We’ll see about that. We’ll see—but first, we leave here.” Everything else we could figure out.

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