“Yeah, I noticed that,” Austin replied to my question. “I figure Bridget needs you in one piece until the spell is completed. This lot is just intended to slow us down, I imagine. None of them are even trying to kill me.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” I agreed, shooting another half-formed shifter in the throat. “She wants your strength too, remember? She’d only be weakening herself if she killed you guys now.”
“Well, in that case, we must still stand a chance of stopping her,” Wesley offered, panting with exhaustion as he got a short reprieve between attacks, thanks to my silver-plated bullets. “Otherwise why bother trying to slow us?”
“Fucking good point,” Austin grunted, throwing the immobile corpse of another half-wolf off him. “Push forward then. Let’s get Christina to the atrium as quickly as possible.”
Bolstered by the knowledge that these shifters weren’t actually trying to kill us, our progress was a little easier. Tyson offered damn good help in the fights, too, being quicker and more brutal than the shifters.
By the time we reached the leafy atrium, the guys were both panting with exertion, and my gun was already out of bullets. Not a good thing when we had yet to even start on the real fight. Nothing could have prepared us for what we found, though.
“River,” I gasped, spotting him first across the emptied-out room.
He was being held by two enormous, half-shifted creatures that seemed to be some variety of bear... maybe. Whatever they were, their teeth were longer than River’s head.
Casting my gaze around, I spotted Cole in a crumpled heap in the corner, while Vali was being dragged out of the opposite corridor by his ankle. He was totally unconscious, from what I could tell, and both their bodies were covered in a glittery sort of dust.
“Christina, darling, you made it!” Bridget crowed from her seat on top of the ornately carved silver box. “Hope you don’t mind; I have to stack the deck in my favor, you know?”
A small movement out of the corner of my eye was all the warning we got before Nicholai appeared out of the shadows and blew a sharp gust of shimmery, glittering powder at the three of us. On reflex, I sucked in a breath and choked as the dust infiltrated my lungs. It only caused me to cough a few times, though, and then I was fine again.
Austin and Wesley, not so much. They both collapsed into boneless heaps, just like Cole and Vali. Tyson winked out of sight the second Austin lost consciousness, too, so I was alone on my side of the room.
“They’ll be fine,” Bridget assured me, her blood-red lips split in a toothy grin. “This will just take them out of commission for a few hours. I wouldn’t want my new harem of men to be harmed in all of this, now would I?”
“I don’t understand,” I puzzled. “Why didn’t it affect me?”
“Because right now you’re nothing more than human. Same, it seems, as your other handsome friend here.” She hopped off her box and prowled towards River on spike-heeled shoes, her velvet gown dragging across the ground behind her. “Imagine my surprise to find you haven’t even changed one of your guardians yet! Not to worry, though. It’s the very first thing I will rectify when I have your magic.”
River’s golden eyes met mine across the room, and his feelings were clear. There was no way in hell he would let that happen.
“Bridget,” I started, taking a step toward her.
“Stop!” she cried out, and I froze. “You foolish child, do you know nothing? If you step on the wrong rune, you’ll be incinerated.”
Foot frozen in mid-step, I peered at the floor a little closer. It was dark within the artium, the only light coming from the stars and the slowly rising moon, but I could still make out vaguely familiar runes etched into the stone floor.
“These are...” I frowned, crouching to inspect the designs more closely. “These are actually cut into the stone?”
“You have no idea how long that took me,” Bridget informed me. “So don’t spoil all my hard work by dying now.”
Pursing my lips, I looked at the runes a little longer, trying to pick out the pattern. It had to be possible to walk across them; Bridget had just proven that herself. So it must just be the occasional rune that wasn’t safe.
Trouble was, these weren’t the mage runes that the twins had taught me. These were Ban Dia runes, the same as on my ring or that appeared during a bonding. Runes that I knew nothing about. Thanks, Mom.
“You’re playing with fire, girl,” Bridget snapped as I tentatively slid my foot closer to the nearest design. But her words gave me an idea. Twice now she had made fire references, which meant the runes to be wary of could be fire runes. If Ban Dia magic followed a similar formula to Mage magic—which stood to reason—then all of the elements would be incorporated into a major spell such as this. So if I just...
Ah-hah.
I spotted one that seemed to vaguely resemble the Mage rune for water and hopped onto that, squeezing my eyes tight shut and praying for the best. When nothing happened, I heaved a sigh of relief and opened my eyes to grin triumphantly at Bridget.
“Lucky guess,” she spat, ignoring River and stalking confidently back to her silver chest. I could see now that the top was laid out with a few candles and herbs, but I got the feeling the majority of the preparation had been in her cutting the runes all over the floor.
I shrugged at her comment. Lucky or not, it was right. That was all that really mattered, wasn’t it? Confident in my guess, I didn’t bother trying to decode another safe rune; instead I just hopped across a few more water-type runes until I’d reached almost the center of the room.
From there, I could see something seeping out from some small holes at the base of the silver chest. A blackish sort of fluid that I couldn’t make out in the darkness was seeping from the chest and into carefully cut grooves in the floor. They were lined up too damn perfectly for it to be a mistake, and the fluid was slowly filling the etched designs like it was inking them in.
“You may as well just give up, child,” Bridget told me in a condescending way. “As much as I do appreciate you bringing my new lovers to me so I wouldn’t need to hunt them down, your presence really wasn’t required for this part of the spell. As soon as all of the runes are joined and the moon reaches its zenith, all of your magical essence will transfer across to me.” She held up her own wrist where a twin gold band glinted in the moonlight. “See, the funny thing is that this is the spell my mother was trying to create to strip me of my magic. She was missing this part though. The receiver’s bracelet. She just thought she could strip my magic and have it dissipate into the earth. But it doesn’t work like that. That’s why it all backfired on her, foolish old woman.”
“Right,” I said, nodding like I was appreciating her genius. “So, she had all the other components in place, like the runes cut into stone and the, er, liquid stuff?” I indicated to the box she was perched on, which almost seemed like it was bleeding. “And the full moon... but just not the second bracelet?”
I wasn’t as dense as I was sounding; I was just trying to get her to fill in the gaps if there were any other important factors to the spell. So far, my only hope was in stopping the slow-moving fluid from filling all of the furrows in the ground.
“Yes, that is what I just said, isn’t it?” she snapped at me, and I sent up a mental thanks that she had given me up as a kid. I couldn’t imagine she was very good mom-material.
Pausing where I was in the middle of the floor, I needed to make a choice. Get to River and try to free him from the huge fanged creatures, or work out how to stop this spell, which was already underway.