Weirdest of all was that fact that Preceptor Bellmore was normally coolheaded, walking around the coven in her black clothes and heavy leathers, with her chic blond buzzcut and her no-bull attitude. It was almost scary to see her so rattled. I hadn’t thought it possible, but something was definitely keeping her up at night. Judging from the bruised bags under Bellmore’s eyes, she hadn’t slept in days.
“What brings you out here to Dennehy’s World of Wonders?” Wade pressed.
She shrugged, regaining a sliver of composure. “Just a personal project. Preceptor Gracelyn was out of a couple of things, so I thought I’d pick them up here instead of waiting around for the order to come in. You know how it is.” She looked to Wade, as though he might understand.
“They didn’t have what you needed at the store?” Wade replied.
I stared at him. Playing with fire much? Pot… kettle… black?
“I needed something to go with the ingredients that the store didn’t have. I thought Dennehy’s might have it.” Her eyes held a warning. If we told, so would she.
I frowned. “Are you okay, Preceptor? I don’t mean to be blunt, or rude, but you don’t look too peachy.”
“I’m a little stressed over the newly implemented charms that Alton wants put all around the coven, but that’s all. Nothing I can’t handle, don’t you worry,” she said coolly. “How about you? How are you feeling?”
“The same.”
“Anything I can help you with?” she asked, nodding to the bag of greenery that Wade clutched in his hand. It had other leaves aside from cypress—a kind of foliage free-for-all—which I hoped would put her off the scent.
I shook my head. “Just a bit of research into building a basic dreamcatcher. It seems pretty straightforward. Nothing too tricky.”
Sloane Bellmore was a preceptor, but that didn’t mean we could trust her. I had no way of knowing whether Alton had told the preceptors about finding Jacob and Isadora, and I wasn’t about to risk a security breach. Plus, with her being a Shapeshifter, I couldn’t read her to try and figure out if she was trustworthy or not. For now, we’d have to accept that we were lying to each other.
“Well, good luck with that. I really ought to be getting back to the coven.” She paused, arching an eyebrow. “You two should probably think about doing the same. With the threat of Katherine looming over all of us, Alton is tightening security. I wouldn’t be surprised if he puts a curfew in place soon enough.”
“Thank you, Preceptor Bellmore,” Wade said. “I hope everything goes well with… whatever your personal project is.”
Without another word, she hurried up the lighthouse stairs and disappeared into a room at the top. A few minutes later, she reemerged, making her way out of the shop by climbing up through the manhole tunnel, with a small paper bag tucked under one arm.
“Weird,” I muttered.
“Very weird.”
“Anyway, we should probably get our stuff and go.”
Wade nodded. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll meet you back upstairs. It’ll probably be easier if I grab everything we need.”
“Agreed.” As he continued down the spiral staircase, I turned around and hurried back up.
Ten minutes later, we were headed up the rickety ladder with a parcel full of wolfsbane root, dried cypress leaves, and a new vial of mercury. Making our way back through the dingy maintenance room, we passed a few shady-looking characters lurking in the shadows of the coolant pipes. There were no words written on any of the manhole covers and no labels to indicate what any of the other places were, but my interest was piqued.
“What’s down the other holes?” I asked, as we made our way back through into the main body of Waterfront Park. This time, I let Wade lead us toward the Maritime Museum exit, rather than taking the long way around and risking a second soaking.
“A casino, a couple of dive bars, another shop that sells contraband,” he replied. “I wouldn’t advise going there again, unless you really need something without the preceptors or Alton knowing about it. Which you shouldn’t really be doing anyway—neither should I, for that matter, but this is an exceptional set of circumstances. A whatever-means-necessary sort of deal.” I could tell he was trying to talk himself out of his guilt. It swirled in his stomach, making him pale.
I flashed him a smile. “Noted.”
Exiting the doorway that led straight out into the Maritime Museum’s parking lot, we sprinted the last couple yards to Wade’s Jeep and hopped in with barely a drenching. I set the box on my lap and pulled my seatbelt across my chest as we pulled out of the parking lot and merged onto the main road.
I turned the heat on full blast and glanced at Wade. “For your nipples.”
He laughed shyly. “They thank you for your kind gesture.”
“Don’t mention it.”
In a curious bubble of contentment, with the rain lashing down against the car, we headed for the coven, and the spell that would hopefully lead us to Jacob and Isadora.
Back in the familiarity of the Luis Paoletti Room, Wade and I gathered around one of the small tables with our ingredients spread out across the splintering surface. My heart thundered in my chest as Wade delved into one of the bottom drawers and pulled out his trusty wooden bowl and kitchen scale. When performing this particular spell, everything had to be exact. A single gram off, and the whole thing could explode… quite literally.
“Are you sure the last email you got from Jacob hinted that they were still in California?” Wade asked. “If not, we’re in for a hell of a night.”
I nodded. “They’re definitely somewhere in California. The emails are never detailed, but I can get bits and pieces from them.”
“Okay then. You ready?”
“Yep, I’m warmed up and ready to run like hell, or drive like the devil, when that spark goes off.”
He smiled. “Me, too.”
“Okay, so we need twenty grams of diamond powder and thirteen of the jasper,” I said. Silently, he weighed out what remained from last time, before tipping the correct amounts into the wooden bowl using a silver spoon. The sparkling powders merged, white and yellow, creating a sandy mixture at the bottom of the bowl.
“Do you remember why we only use silver spoons for mixing ingredients?” he asked.
I frowned. “Ah, I know this one… something to do with binding agents? They act like binding agents, to avoid bad stuff happening?”
“More or less,” he said, chuckling. “Now, how many cypress leaves?”
“Three.” Plucking three from the mixed bag, he dropped them into the bowl. They were already dried, needing no help from his Fire power. “And then, five drops of mercury and nine drops of venom.”
“Five drops of mercury and nine drops of venom,” Wade muttered back to himself.
Using a pipette, he measured the exact ingredients and added them to the mixture. He glanced at the waxy scroll and picked up the silver spoon, using it to stir the ingredients three times counter-clockwise, then five times clockwise. As he made the movements, my memories of the last tracer spell came rushing back. Finch was becoming a frequent fixture in my head these days, and I didn’t like it. He refused to speak about his mother, the brainwashing running deep, but unless he could give us some kind of info on her, he was of no use whatsoever. I just have to break you… make you see what a monster she is. But how?
“Harley?” Wade’s voice broke my distant train of thought.
“Sorry, what’s next?”
He pointed to the bracelet. “I’m going to put the bracelet on top of the mixture and then cover it with three spoonfuls of the stuff, moving the spoon from the left. I’ll chant the spell once it’s covered.”
“Okay, I’ll be ready.”
He took in a breath, before covering the bracelet with the concoction. “O, filia luna, cum venenum sanguinem, da mihi oculos, sic ego can reperio dominus hoc obiectum,” he chanted, his rings lighting up red.
As I stared into the bowl, the shimmer of the mixture intensified, spreading out until it enveloped the bracelet entirely. The rest of the ingredients dissolved into a subtle, rusty-red mass, while the bracelet lay below, as clean as it had been when we’d put it in there. Finch’s spark had been green, but this one was copper in color. What does that mean? I wondered as I braced my legs to sprint.
Without warning, the spark shot up and darted out of the door. I sprinted after it with Wade in hot pursuit, both of us hurtling down the labyrinth of hallways and out of the coven’s front entrance. Fortunately, with it being so late and so grim outside, most people had retreated to their bedrooms for the night, leaving the corridors empty and collision-free.
Outside the Fleet Science Center doors, the reddish spark lingered in the air for a moment, as though sniffing out the location of the bracelet’s owner. It zipped this way and that, visibly figuring out its next move. I wondered if it had something to do with Jacob’s skillset, confusing the spark for a little while as it scented out the pathway that he and Isadora had taken between wormholes. It recovered quickly, zipping away with renewed certainty. However, the brief hesitation gave Wade and me the split second we needed to jump into Daisy, who was waiting on the curb, before we tore after the bright light with a skid of wheels on asphalt.
There was no way of knowing how far away Jacob and Isadora were. All we could do was follow the spark as it guided us away from the coven and into the unknown.
Ten
Santana
Hours had passed since Raffe first turned, and I still couldn’t wrap my head around the djinn’s full manifestation. I’d joked about it being like Jekyll and Hyde before, but I’d had no idea how close to the truth that was. The djinn shared the same body as Raffe, but I was surprised at how clear its personality was. It was like two distinct people for the price of one. Either that, or I’d been around the diablo for so long that I was finding nuances in its character. Whatever the case, keeping up was a chore.