Page 98 of Illusory

“Magic.” I let out a deep breath. “So, you think someone’s doing this to you on purpose then.”

“What else am I supposed to think?”

“Who would want to…” I turned back toward the churning river as her words slowly started to click into place. “Nikki,” I realized and then glanced back at her.

“I think she knows that I’m helping you guys,” she admitted, sounding incredibly pained by the thought of it. She was, after all, her best friend. Or at least used to be.

“How could she know that?” Suspicion immediately crowded my mind as I studied her. So help me God, if she was playing me, I was going to kick her ass with her own fucking foot.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” she said as she watched a small branch float by through the current. “The best I can figure is that maybe the sisters saw us working together the same way I saw them working with Nikki.”

“Maybe,” I agreed and then thought about it. “But why go after you? If they can cast that kind of spell without even beingnear you, why not go after me directly?”

“Maybe that’s what they’re planning to do. Maybe they wanted to make sure I didn’t see them coming.”

I let that sink in as I tried not to dwell on the snake pit that had just awoken in my stomach. It would definitely be the smart thing to do…if they were planning some kind of attack against me.

And yet, something still wasn’t fitting.

“But…why bother?” I wondered mostly to myself. “It’s not like we’re actively going after them.”

At this point, we were only keeping an eye on them, making sure we knew their whereabouts and that things weren’t escalating into something much bigger and more dangerous than we could handle right now.

Other than that, we haven’t pursued them or even made a single threat of it. And if the sisters had been able to get some kind of magical line on us, wouldn’t they have seen just howunfocusedon them we actually were?

“Wait. You’re not going after Nikki?” asked Morgan as though she were surprised to hear that I wasn’t chomping at the bit to murder a pregnant woman and her unborn baby.

Granted, that woman was Nikki, and her day was definitely still coming, but not like that. Not when her life was still tied to someone who’d never even asked to be brought into this world in the first place.

“I’m not a baby killer, Morgan. Demon baby or otherwise. As long as your bestie’s stillwith child, I’m not touching a hair on her head. And same goes for the kid. He can walk out of her womb throwing fireballs for all I care. Until the day he actually hurts someone, he’s not my problem.” I picked up a stone and tossed it into the river, watching it get sucked away by the rushing water. “I’m kind of offended that you’d think otherwise.”

“It’s nothing personal,” she said without meeting my eyes. “People around here usually fall in line and do whatever the Order tells them to do. It’s just the way things are done here.”

“Well, I don’t usually do what people tell me to do anyway, so there’s that,” I answered truthfully because when the hell did I ever follow an order in the entirety of my life? “Why else do you think the Order’s so desperate to tie me to the Horseman? It’s basically the only way they’ll be able to get me to do whattheywant.”

She looked at me then, her green eyes inspecting me a little more closely. “I guess I assumed wrong.”

I picked up another rock, turning it over in my hand before tossing that one out into the water too. “You wouldn’t be the first.”

“Is that why you’re sitting out here in the middle of nowhere with gross, puffy eyes?”

I snorted and then shook my head at her. “No, actually. That’s a whole different kind of problem.”

She glanced at me again and then back up at a crow circling an evergreen across the bank. “Did you want to…like…talk about it?”

“Ew. No.” I looked at her like she was crazy. Morgan and I were definitely cool now, certainly more so than we used to be, but we definitely weren’tthatkind of cool.

“Thank god,” she said and shuddered as though the thought of it were as horrifying to her as it had been to me. She glanced back out at the crow as it began to caw louder. “So, if you’re not planning on going after Nikki and her baby, what’s your game plan now? Are you just going to sit around and wait to see if the sisters decide to come after you?”

“I’m not so sure they’re going to be doing that either,” I said unable to shake the feeling that something was justoffabout the whole thing. Like I was missing somethingimportant.

“Then why would they mess with my visions like this?”

“I mean, do we know for sure it was them? I’m not exactly convinced they did that, either.”

“What are you talking about? If not them, then who?”

That was the question—who. Who had motive? Who would gain the most by doing this?

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