“Sera, you’d have to hit me a lot harder than that to hurt me.”
“Still, I’m sorry. I thought you were an illusion. My mind wasn’t all there. I didn’t think it could be you, not there. You couldn’t have found me.”
Kai was watching her very closely, as though he thought she’d pop. “You disappeared in the fighting pit, right before my eyes. I saw you check your phone, then the portal swallowed you up. I knew Finn had you.”
Alden actually, but Sera didn’t interrupt him. She did, however, happily take the bowl of pretzels he was holding out to her.
“Sofia, one of the Magic Council mages we saved from the vampires, is an expert on portals, so I found her,” he continued. “By the time we got back down to the pit, it was too late to follow you through. Sofia said the portal was a fast-fading one. Limited range, no matter how much magic you pour into it, but virtually untraceable.”
“Then how did you find me?”
“The portal was virtually untraceable, but not impossible. Sofia got a fix on a general location of where the portal had taken you, a section of a few city blocks.”
“New York doesn’t have the smallest blocks.”
“It was a large area to search,” he agreed. “But it was better than all of Manhattan. Or the whole city for that matter. The commandos and I went to the area to start our search, but I couldn’t feel your magic anywhere.”
“That’s because of the iron in the walls bouncing magic like a house of mirrors.”
“Yes,” he said. “We had to search manually. We weren’t making any progress. And then Cutler showed up.”
“Cutler?” she gasped in surprise. “What was he doing there?”
“He said he was there to help.”
“And you believed him?”
“No. Not at first. But then he showed us his phone. It showed your location, one block over and many levels down. He was tracking you.”
“But…how?”
“He said he tagged you with an electronic tracker when you two spoke before your match.”
A memory faded in. Cutler touching her arm. So that’s what he’d been up to.
“So he’s not evil?” she asked Kai.
“Apparently not. Nor as stupid as he seemed.”
“Try not to sound so disappointed,” Cutler said.
Sera looked across the room. The man that stood there, framed in the open doorway, had Cutler’s face, but that’s where the resemblance ended. His blond hair, always molded into architected disorder, was combed back with clean precision. Rather than his usual silk shirt and hip-hugging pants, he wore a suit. It was the sort of suit Kai, an executive at Drachenburg Industries, would have worn—if Kai hadn’t had a scathing dislike for suits. Shutting the door behind him, Cutler crossed the room to stop in front of Sera.
“I’m happy that you’re all right,” he told her. There was none of the usual innuendo in his voice, and he wasn’t looking at her like he was mentally undressing her. “And I must apologize for acting like such an ass to you all those times.”
“Why were you…um, acting like an ass?”
The corner of his lip twitched. “I needed an excuse to be close to you, and playing the infatuated idiot was a good way to do that. Acting like a moron also throws people off. Keeps them from suspecting I’m a threat.” He winked at her, a touch of the Cutler she knew in that gesture.
“But why? What were you hiding? And why did you want to be close to me?”
“So I could watch you, Sera, as my mother instructed me to do,” he said. “You see, she is the commander of the Knights of the Occult.”
“I haven’t heard of them.”
“They’re a centuries’ old society of mages,” Kai told her. “Mages from many of the old dynasties are members.”
Cutler nodded. “We have all sworn to protect the supernatural community from ancient threats. Demons mostly, but every so often, something else from our past jumps up and bares its ugly teeth.”
“Alden,” she said, her voice a whisper. “The Grim Reaper.”
“After the recent fiasco with the Priming Bangles, we suspected something was amiss. We didn’t believe Finn capable of such things. He’s neither powerful nor devious enough to pull off something of that magnitude. And then mages broke him out of Atlantis.”
“Alden’s mages.”
“A few of the Atlantis prison guards are in his pocket,” Kai told her.
“We didn’t know it was Alden at that point,” said Cutler. “In fact, we didn’t find that out until I went down into the tunnels with Kai and felt that old power for myself. All we knew was that someone from the past was planning something big and that he was using Finn to do it. I was trailing a mage we suspected to be involved. It turns out he was involved. He got Alden all the pictures of you.”
“You were sitting close to him in the Magic Games audience?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She shivered.
“We had a few ideas about who he was working for. It never crossed our minds that it could be Alden.” Cutler paled. “In all the centuries, all the days of bloodshed and death, the Grim Reaper was the worst villain of them all. He was, as his name suggests, the personification of death itself.”
“Yes,” Sera agreed. The memory of her time in those nightmare tunnels was seared into her consciousness.