Page 2 of Cast in Shadow
Could she sense it?
She was on the move, her faint magical trail snaking through the thinning crowd toward the massive weeping willows separating the festival from the stretch of forest beyond. She’d made at least a coven’s worth of enemies already, I knew that, but they’d been content to reclaim what was theirs and banish her from their circle.
Most wouldn’t have been so kind.
Her deceit and subsequent failure should have sealed her fate, relegating her to the kind of low-level spellcasting most independent practitioners could do without the compounding power of a coven. A witch in her position shouldn’t have had enough juice to do what she was doing, but all the evidence my team had gathered pointed to her as the lone witch behind those damned summoning spells.
Which opened up a whole host of questions. Where was her power coming from? Why was she gathering it? How powerful was she, really?
We’d managed to track her through the effects of those dark spells and reports from our network, but Megan had remained just out of my grasp, until tonight.
Awareness crawled across my skin, and I paused in the crowd. Someone was watching me, their heavy gaze like an invisible weight that settled across my shoulders and banded around my chest.
I turned in a slow circle, taking in every face in the crowd and the barely-there flow of the hundreds of strands of magic around me as I searched for any shadows moving in between. Nothing in the Alius could touch me here. The creatures in that realm were trapped by the veil, but the predators that prowled the human realm? That was a different story.
A pulse of energy pulled my attention to my left, and I traced Megan’s path forward, seeing all too easily where she was headed before turning to check my surroundings again.
Another twinge of warning skittered down my arms, raising goosebumps despite the warmth of my canvas jacket. And yet, nothing in the crowd jumped out at me.
Unclenching my hands from the fists they’d worked themselves into, I rolled my shoulders back and followed Megan’s dull glow through the thick curtains of willow boughs and into the shadows.
Was she here to summon more dark magic?
The thought had barely skipped through my mind when a small clearing came into view through the swaying strands of narrow leaves. It was the perfect place to harness the power of the natural world without being seen, if that was her plan. But my gut was telling me that wasn’t the case.
As if in response to the unease pooling inside me, the pulse of the ribbon grew stronger, filling me in an unspeakable way. It had a way of gifting me with a sense of invincibility that had gotten me in trouble more than once. While I’d found a way to outlive the average human, albeit unintentionally, I was far from invincible.
It had also been decades since I’d experienced the kind of anxiousness that was currently gnawing at me.
I stepped through another thick tapestry of dangling branches, inhaling a bouquet of damp dirt and fresh air, to find the woman I was hunting. Her magic clung to her skin like a soft dew that infused the air around her. It was like seeing her through green-tinted sunglasses, but there was darkness there too. It turned the flowing, gossamer layers of her dress into a shroud and colored her hair a sickly shade of greenish brown.
Megan Navali—the reckless, selfish witch—had gotten her hands on something truly powerful, and it was poisoning her soul.
She was still several yards away with her back to me, swaying to the beat of some silent song as swirls of darkness surrounded her. They spun in lazy spirals up from the ground and around her legs, climbing her curves.
The sight brought me to a halt with my hand up, holding a branch out of my face.
The darkness slithering around Megan worked its way up her midsection, coiling up her chest as she spun in a slow circle with her face to the sky and her arms outstretched, as ifwelcoming the contact. When it spread around her neck, she let out a sensual sigh, completely lost in the moment.
She was definitely pulling power from somewhere, but it wasn’t until I traced the darker threads of her magic that I saw another gentle trail leading from the festival straight to the black mist pulsing at her feet.
Anger crawled up my spine and anchored itself at the base of my skull.
She was drawing power from the crowd. Not only was it one of the least efficient ways to gather power, given how little regular humans had to spare, but the risk involved would have turned any reasonable witch away from the act.
I narrowed my gaze, focusing on the energy surrounding her.
How could she have grown strong enough to do what she was doing and still be so foolish?
Stealing magic wasn’t just dangerous for the victim, who could be drained to the point of death by someone with enough power. It also stripped away the good within the thief, peeling back their humanity, leaving a void that would inevitably fill with darkness.
I lowered the branch silently and turned to move around Megan to take her down from behind. There would be time for questions later, once I had her locked up safe and sound back at headquarters. But I only made it one crouching step when my entire body locked up. My legs became awkward pillars anchoring me to the ground. My arms were caught mid-movement.
The moment it happened, I knew exactly who was behind it. My stomach sank. Dread flooded me. And something deep inside me twisted and stretched, like a monster coming awake after a long nap.
No. Please, no.
“Senna.” Emerson’s unforgettable timbre filled my mind, drowning out everything else.
