Page 45 of Magic Betrayed

I froze, my gaze fastened on his with a vulnerability that terrified me. There was no time to hide my feelings. No chance to conceal what his words did to my heart. It cracked yet again, and the widening gap in my walls threatened to unleash a pain I hadn’t realized I could feel. Memories I’d forgotten. Hurts I’d buried so deep I believed them dead. Gone. Past revisiting.

“It’s okay,” he said softly. “Okay to feel. Okay to fall. But there’s no hurry either. Just remember—I’m not going anywhere, and I regret nothing.”

I swallowed the feelings that surged up—feelings I couldn’t even begin to name—and nodded. I didn’t have the bandwidth right now to process what his words meant, but I knew I would hear them over and over again in my memory, and wonder…

Did I believe him? What did it change if those words were true? And when would we have a moment of peace where I could allow myself to be vulnerable enough to find those answers?

Certainly not tonight.

With a single, tremulous nod, I slipped out of the SUV and moved towards the van at Callum’s side.

As we approached, he used his phone to take pictures from multiple angles, then tried the passenger door. No surprise, it was locked, but that, at least, was something I could fix.

“Don’t!” I yelped, as I saw Callum’s hand clench around the handle and his shoulder muscles bunch in preparation. I’d already seen a dragon pull the door off a car, so I knew it was possible. It just wasn’t necessary.

“Why do you dragons seem to think tearing things apart is always the answer?”

He looked down at me, eyebrow tilted in amusement. “Are you actually going to complain?”

No, I was not, given that the last time, Ryker had used this particular technique to prevent us both from burning to death.

“Watch and learn,” I insisted, and thankfully, in spite of my nerves, managed to pick the lock in record time.

It would have been unspeakably embarrassing if I’d failed after those smug assurances.

Once it was open, I let Callum lean inside first. After a few breaths, he turned around, his expression grim.

“Whoever they are, they were prepared. It smells like a perfume factory in there. They obviously anticipated being followed by shapeshifters and didn’t want to risk leaving a scent trail. Might mean we’re on the right track.”

“Can we get in the back?”

He nodded and leaped inside, dropped into the driver’s seat, and pressed a button somewhere on the left side. I heard a click as the locks released and raced around to open up the rear doors.

The space was clean and empty. No matter how hard we searched, there was nothing to indicate that the vehicle had ever been used by a genuine electrician, but no signs of serial kidnapping either. No blood, no hairs, no rope. No scraps of cloth or smudges of makeup. Only the bare floor and the overwhelming scent of something sweet and flowery.

“We’ll need to get it towed back to my place.” Callum stood by my shoulder, a frustrated glower tugging at his mouth. “Looks like they were careful, but there’s bound to be fingerprints or DNA that we can match to Kes and the kids if they were in here.”

“Can you actually pay someone to do that kind of thing on demand?” I probably sounded skeptical, but I knew all too well the indifference of human law enforcement to the problems faced by Idrian citizens, so it wasn’t like we could ask the police for help. “Do Idrians even keep fingerprint records?”

“We don’t, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be compared.” He shot me a reassuring nod. “I’m sure we can find someone to take prints from your apartment and the van, see if anything lines up.”

After a quick text, he shut the rear door and snapped one last picture. “I’ve asked Faris to send out a tow truck. All we can do now is wait.”

It was frustrating to be forced to wait for answers yet again, so I headed back to Callum’s SUV and turned the headlights on, using them to illuminate a path from the parking lot towards what appeared to be the promised swamp. It was probably seventy or eight yards through patchy brush to the edge of some seriously murky looking water. According to the map, this was just a dead-end offshoot from the main river, so the ground was soggy and much of it muddy underfoot.

I wasn’t sure how long it had been since the last rain, but once I left the pavement and headed towards the water, I noticed several sets of footprints, some of which were dried around the edges, but a few that were not. In fact, when I bent down to feel the depression left by someone wearing boots a fair bit bigger than my own, I noted that the entire print was still sticky, with a freshly broken twig crushed into the tread-mark.

Someone had walked here quite recently.

“Callum, come take a look at this…”

I heard a thud from behind me, like a body hitting the ground. Then a slight squelch from somewhere ahead in the darkness, accompanied by a whispered curse. My hunch magic screamed in warning, so I threw myself to the side just as a brilliant orange ball of fire flew past my head.

Not dragon fire, I recognized grimly, as I kept rolling and came up in a crouch. That was elemental fire, and it was followed by a roar that sent me scrambling backwards on hands and feet.

Again, not a dragon.

A burly mass of dark fur charged out of the darkness into the beams of Callum’s headlights and roared again, with lips pulled back from a mouthful of teeth meant to rend and tear. Not Sasquatch, thankfully, but a bear shifter. Smaller than Yolande—who’d fought beside me at the Symposium—but big enough, and it was not alone. It was flanked by one, two… four humanoid companions.

---