Page 50 of Wind Called

“You heard something,” he said at length, and Bellamy nodded.

“I did. The voices were pretty clear this time, but I also felt clearer, too. On Devil’s Bridge, it felt almost as if I went into a trance or something. Today, though, I remember every bit of what happened.”

“Which was?”

Briefly, she explained how the voices had told her about the Collector’s servants, how there seemed to be a whole lot of them.

“So I’m pretty sure the person who broke into Connor and Angela’s house isn’t the same one who tried to get into yourprima’slibrary,” she concluded. “Which means those bastards could be all over the place.”

Marc frowned, and she could tell he was less than thrilled by that piece of information. “But the voices said we should be able to tell who these servants are?”

“Well, that’s what they told me,” Bellamy replied. “But they didn’t give me any hints as to exactly how we’re supposed to manage that.”

“Especially when it seems as if they’re pretty damn good at evading security cameras,” Marc said, brows still pulled together. He was letting the truck drive itself, which she thought was probably a good idea. Right then, he looked way too distracted to be piloting the thing on unfamiliar and curvy roads.

“Yes,” she said, and didn’t quite sigh. While they had a bit more information than they’d had before, the voices’ message had still been pretty cryptic. “But I suppose all we can do is pass along what the voices told me and see if the elders and Connor and Angela can figure it out.”

Even as she spoke, she wished she could do more. Sure, it was the responsibility of theprimaandprimus— and the elders — to really delve into problems like this, but at the same time, the voices had reached out to her, not them.

Which meant she should probably be doing more than just sitting back and twiddling her thumbs.

Marc reached over and took her hand, fingers warm and reassuring as they wrapped around hers. He still had his left hand ready to reach out and touch the steering wheel in case something happened with the self-driving system — even though incidents like that were few and far between these days — but it still felt good to have him make that contact, to let her know she didn’t have to go through this alone.

“We’ll go back to the Airbnb and look at that map Clint gave us,” he said, and his voice was also comforting, calm and sounding as if not much was going to ruffle him.

And boy, did Bellamy need that, considering how rattled she felt at the moment.

Looking at the map would be a good place to start. If nothing else, they’d be able to tell if the ranch had its own vortex energy, something that had awakened a part of her powers she hadn’t even known existed.

Leaning over, she pressed a kiss against Marc’s cheek.

“Sounds good. And after that” — she paused and finally allowed herself the sigh she’d held back a few moments earlier — “after that, maybe we’ll have a better idea of what we should do next.”

14

“There’s definitelya vortex at the ranch,” Bellamy said, one fingertip touching a small blue sunburst off Dry Creek Road. “It’s not huge like the one at Red Rock Crossing or some of the others around town, but….”

“But maybe it was still enough to awaken something in you,” Marc finished for her.

They’d made it back to the Airbnb without incident and now sat at the small round table in the dining area, poring over the map Clint Greaves had given them. A couple of tumblers of water sat nearby, although neither of them had been touched yet.

Bellamy’s mouth pursed, and Marc got the feeling she wasn’t a huge fan of that interpretation of the situation. As far as any of them were concerned, your witchy powers were supposed to be the same your entire life after they manifested when you were around ten or eleven, sometimes as late as twelve. They weren’t supposed to take on new and strange dimensions over time.

But no one had really known what being exposed to the vortexes over an extended period could do to a witch or warlock. Once again, Marc wondered why those long-ago Wilcoxes and McAllisters had concluded that the area shouldn’t be settled by witch-kind. From what he’d been able to tell, the two clans hadn’t exactly been best friends back then, and arriving at any sort of an agreement should have been extremely difficult…if not downright impossible.

Maybe something about the energies in Sedona had frightened them, had made them realize they’d encountered a force they really couldn’t control. That might have been enough to keep them away.

“I suppose so,” Bellamy allowed in response to his comment, although she continued to focus on the map, nodding to herself as if what she saw confirmed suspicions she’d been harboring for a while. “And here’s another vortex at the Devil’s Bridge, so I suppose that explains that incident.”

“It’s interesting,” Marc said as he stared down at the street grid of Sedona with its overlay of little blue starbursts. “There really aren’t any in the main part of town, except for one at the very end of Uptown just before you head up into Oak Creek Canyon. I wonder why.”

“Maybe the civilians who settled here instinctively knew they shouldn’t be living right on top of a vortex,” Bellamy replied. “Or maybe it’s just that vortex energy concentrates in the wilder areas.” She paused there, lips pursing. “I think we need to go back to the ranch.”

He’d somehow known she would make that suggestion, so her comment didn’t throw him off too much. “To see how the vortex there works on you?”

“Yes,” she said. “And on you. It might be sort of against my agreement with Ike to have you staying there, but I know the vortex didn’t work on me until I’d slept there for a night, so we need to see if it does the same thing to you.”

Very scientific. Maybe he wasn’t super thrilled about being a lab rat, but on the other hand, Bellamy had survived sleeping at the ranch just fine. Yes, she’d come out of it with her gifts strangely enhanced, and yet possibly that was a good thing. His prophetic gift seemed to have taken a hike the past couple of days, and if staying at the ranch might kick it into high gear so it could show him a vision of the Collector’s minions, whoever they were, then that would put him and Bellamy in a much better position than they were now.

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