Page 65 of Of Flames and Crows

Cortes arched an eyebrow. “The familiar normally chooses their magic user.”

Mae looked at Brimstone. “They do?”

The fox huffed in agreement.

Julius called the team in the van and told them where to turn off the road. Undergrowth snapped and rustled around them as they headed into the darkening forest.

Nikolai kept the headlights off.

The shadowy outcrop of a hill loomed out of the trees to their right a mile later. They passed an abandoned cabin and soon pulled up on the edge of a lake.

Julius stared out over the dark waters. “There’s nothing here.”

Vlad scanned the inky gloom. “Where’s the town car?”

Mae blinked. She’d just sensed something. Something faint, but dark and insidious, nonetheless. Brimstone’s hackles rose.

There’s a portal to Hell close by, he growled.

Nikolai startled when Mae opened the passenger door and jumped out with the fox. “Where are you going?”

“There’s something here.”

Mae walked to the water’s edge. The others joined her as she squatted on the shoreline. Crimson magic flared at her fingertips. She dipped her hand in the shallows, concentrated her power into a faint, thin line, and aimed it at where she’d felt the anomaly.

Weak ripples broke out as the magic thread danced beneath the surface of the lake. It arrowed straight and true toward the center of the body of water, only to vanish after some four hundred feet.

Power surged through Mae. “Reveal.”

The air trembled with a violent, red haze for scant seconds. Shadowy ramparts and towers with lit windows shimmered dimly into view before disappearing behind the invisible rift that had shielded them from sight.

“What the hell?!” Julius mumbled.

“Hell is exactly what we just looked through,” Mae said bitterly.

“Was that a castle?” Violet asked.

She and Miles had joined them.

“It sure looked like it,” Vlad said grimly.

“I can’t see any boats.” Cortes was looking around with a frown. “There must be a tunnel somewhere close by.”

They returned to their vehicles and did a U-turn. The cabin appeared between the trees. They stopped outside it.

The place looked like it had been lived in recently. Julius found clothes belonging to a man in a closet and blood pressure tablets in the cabinet in the bathroom.

It was Brimstone who sniffed out the body buried in a shallow grave behind the ramshackle building. Anger stirred inside Mae as she studied the decomposing corpse of the elderly man they’d dug up. His neck had been snapped.

She crouched and scanned his remains with her powers. “I can sense a faint trace of the Dark Council’s magic.”

“And I can smell engine oil,” Cortes said.

He was staring at the hill blocking out the lower half of the sky to the west.

Mae squinted.This guy really does have the instincts of a beast.

Indeed, Brimstone murmured.He would make a great demon general.

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