Wildfire Witch (The Cursed Coven of Spells Hollow)

8. Ceridor

CERIDOR

For a moment, the apartment was still, save for me pulling at my hair and chanting, “No. No no no!” The extra wind I’d summoned up with my staff raged around me, shrieking and slashing at the walls of the apartment. It matched the turmoil I felt within.

My wife was gone…again. The longer I stood here, the further away her enemies dragged her. These “Fire Brotherhood” shifters who’d thrown themselves so eagerly into my spinning air blades.

The magical tattoos that formed a half sleeve on my lower right arm tightened and pulsed with heat. A familiar sensation that warned of pain to come, the ebb and flow of agony an echo of what Nix felt.

There were consequences to invoking the universal language of the fae, used only for permanent bonds and vows. I had known the price when I’d made my vows to Verity Carmine that I would be loyal, and always protect and cherish her. It became my truth. She was my fated mate, but my words made her the only woman I would ever desire.

I had never expected her to suffer for over three centuries from the curse of a petty sorcerer. I’d assumed she was mortal, and would take my heart from me when she died and the tattoos representing our handfasting faded permanently. Instead, my vows remained, and the marks punished me with an echo of every negative experience she felt.

When she started again as a babe, the marks were silvery, nearly the same as my skin tone, only darkening when she came of age. Each time she died, it felt like my skin was melting off my body and I screamed and clawed at the tattoos, wanting more than anything for the suffering to stop for both of us.

She’d died too often, the number of times a horrific counter in my head that I swore would not go up again. That was why I’d agreed to work with Seth, to allow him to touch my wife. Otherwise, he would be as dead as the shifters who littered our apartment for daring to have his stars crossed with hers.

He still lay unconscious in a heap on the floor. For longer than I want to admit, I entertained the idea of leaving him here to deal with the fallout of this fight, the dead bodies, and the gunshots our neighbors had no doubt already called the authorities over. But…Nix needed him. And the vehicle they’d stolen her away in could be several blocks in any direction now.

Sighing, I still cursed myself for going soft as I rifled through his packs until I found the medical equipment. He kept the magically enhanced items in a compartment underneath the first aid supplies ordinary humans expected. I found a syringe of orange-tinted potion made to cure head wounds and stuck him with it.

Three heartbeats later, Seth gasped and sat up, while I was still blowing shards of glass off of him and his surroundings. He clutched the lump forming on his skull with a groan.

“Close your eyes. It’ll be a couple minutes before the magic heals your scrambled brain,” I advised.

He shut his eyes after taking a squinting look around. “Where’s Nix?” he asked.

“Taken,” I answered curtly.

“No…” he muttered with the same kind of denial that I felt.

“We have to abandon this place as soon as you’re up. Is there anything you can’t leave behind?”

“Fuck,” he muttered, lifting to his feet. “I’ll get it. Do you need to grab anything?”

“Already done.” I didn’t have much here, only what was necessary to pretend to be a human with a steady job. Most of my belongings were back in the Wind Court, whereas Seth had his whole life here and tacked to the wall.

I grabbed his elbow, steering him past the bodies of a couple of fallen shifters. I took down the information on Nix’s many lives while he fiddled with his electronics and packed most of them away. “A fire dragon shifter knocked you unconscious and flew off with Nix. You said you did something with her phone last night?” I prompted.

While he could impress with his skills as a cook or a medic, Seth’s true talent was in computers and mortal electronics, the kinds of things a fae like me had been scoffing at for centuries. But it could be the miracle we needed now to locate her again.

He took on an irritated tone. “I charged it for her.”

I scowled over at him, the last wisps of a magical breeze tousling my curls as my anger surged. That wasn’t what I’d asked him to do last night when I noticed she’d put the device aside.

“I also got her number and turned on her location services in an app I could track her phone with, if those shifters didn’t destroy it,” he added. He didn’t quite meet my gaze, frowning and slumping with discomfort. “But I didn’t want to put full-on tracking software on it.”

“Yes, yes,” I sighed, waving away the budding argument he could’ve produced with a slash of my hand. We’d been over this. He thought I was overbearing, but he wasn’t the one with the unbreakable vow inked in his flesh who hadn’t seen his wife in an eternity. “We have to go.”

I walked back into the mess left behind in the main room, shoe scuffing on a discarded piece of paper. Stooping, I turned it over. The circular array Nix had been working on stared back at me, the meticulously inked alchemical formulas around it now marred with dirt and brown stains. My throat tightened as I folded it and put it in my pocket. It was a valuable glimpse into her brilliance, as she used to be. I was terrified she would die again and lose that scientific mind and her memories…especially those of me.

Standing and turning back to Seth, he and I exchanged a look over the luggage we’d already packed. “Grab as much as you can and I will get the rest,” I directed, then reached for his face to place a minor glamor on him. It would make his features indistinct on any cameras we passed.

I glamored myself human next and lifted all of our spare bags with wind once we were both laden with as much as we could carry. Those floating bags, I hid with another bit of magic.

“I sure hope this works out,” Seth muttered. We hustled down the stairs together. My pointed ears picked up the sounds of approaching sirens—several of them.

While I secured the bags in the trunk and backseat of his car, he took a few moments to snap pictures of the license plates of several vans and trucks that we hadn’t seen parked in the apartment complex before. He took the passenger seat once he was done, and I eased the car past a fleet of emergency vehicles and police cars that were just rolling into the parking lot.

The gates in and out of the complex were busted. It looked like a van had run headlong into them and won, twisting up the metal and the opening mechanism. As I took the turn out onto the road, navigating more carefully for the heavy load in the car’s backside, I shot Seth an impatient glance.

“It’s loading. Just drive for a bit and I’ll get us on the right path,” he suggested.

I steered us in a straight line away from the apartment complex, occasionally checking the mirrors to be sure nothing was following us. Seth fiddled with his phone more in the meantime and opened his laptop in his lap, managing both while likely putting them to two different tasks.

“Looks like they’ve hit I-90, going east.” He cursed immediately after saying this, as I swerved the car across two lanes to navigate our way toward the interstate behind them. “Don’t get us fucking pulled over, man.”

“I would not stop for the human authorities,” I scoffed.

He muttered under his breath, something like, “Why do I trust a fae to drive my car?”

I rolled my eyes, saying impatiently, “How many miles ahead of us are they?”

“Hard to tell. The connection isn’t exactly stable,” he replied.

We didn’t make it far at top speed before I had to merge us into sluggish traffic. Honking the horn in frustration only set off a discordant symphony of blaring, with no extra forward progress to show for it. Seth didn’t look up, focused now on whatever he was typing into his computer.

The only solace I took in the situation was that Nix’s kidnappers had to be stuck in the same traffic as us. We would eventually catch up to them, even if I had to drive day and night to close the gap between us.

When he had something else to share, Seth would speak up. He made the occasional noise as he clicked and typed away.

“This isn’t how it’s supposed to go,” he said sullenly. I snuck a glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He was staring ahead, unfocused, talking like he was sharing his thoughts out loud. “I thought the foretelling of my life would end with romance, not a car chase. I sure didn’t think she would immediately get kidnapped right out from under us.”

“It’s not time to despair yet,” I muttered. I really was the last person who should be trying to comfort him. “The one thing that foretelling did right was make sure we formed a partnership. We’ll find her, save her from her enemies, and break her curse.” I was too proud to say that I was glad of his assistance.

He’s a worthy partner, even if he doesn’t know how to fight well. I had to remind myself of this, since it could be easy to blame him for losing Nix in the first place. Yet there was little Seth or I could do against a fire dragon, the rarest and most deadly breed of draconic shifters. We’d been caught by surprise—why hadn’t Nix mentioned the shifters hunting her?

Her hesitation haunted me. In the stillness of the car as we inched forward, the moment came back in perfect clarity.

“Do you truly remember me as your husband? Or am I still a stranger to you?”

She’d bitten her kiss swollen lips, hesitating. Her flush of desire was offset by the confusion in her gaze. Nix had looked at me like she was truly lost and that I was not the salvation I wanted to be for her. “You’re both. You’re neither.” Her answer stung like a thousand nettles over my skin. “I don’t know for sure.”

I was clearly too much of a stranger to trust with such vital information. Maybe if we’d had more time, she would’ve opened up about it and why.

“Recognize this?” Seth’s question pulled me out of my ruminating. He’d focused on seeking out information, his way of helping. He turned the image on his screen toward me when traffic came to a dead stop. It was of a tattoo placed prominently on a man’s flexing arm, showcasing a stylized fist holding curling flames. The whole thing was made of red ink.

“Should I?” I answered coolly.

“Some of the shifters you killed had this tattoo. They all probably did. It’s the mark of the Fire Brotherhood, said here to be a supernatural gang composed of an alliance of a mixed race group of shifter packs united under one of the last flights of fire dragon shifters. The list of crimes is…impressive.” Seth whistled low as he scrolled with increasing speed. “And the bounties for their leaders are all seven figures or higher. Dead or alive, too.”

I grunted. “As interesting as all that is, I don’t hear a motive for them to kidnap Nix.”

He scrolled and tapped, lips moving as he read a few sections on one tab before navigating to another. The supernatural side of the internet was more open and informative about the activities of the world and its various pockets of magic users. I’d learned how to use it to keep track of phoenix sightings and—my guilty pleasure—the ever-complicated dramas between fae courts. Watching my kind scheme against one another was never not entertaining.

“There’s nothing that would suggest a reason why they took her,” he finally said. “But before you daydream of flying away from this car to go get her on your own, membership in the Fire Brotherhood is suspected to be about five hundred shifters.”

“I would kill them all. Gladly,” I said, fingers tightening on the steering wheel.

He dropped his voice. “I know, Cer. But you have to think strategically. They’re going to be expecting a pissed-off wind fae and his water witch sidekick now. If they bring in iron weapons, we’re fucked.”

I scoffed. “They have my heart. I’m fucked anyway.”

“Yeah, well, who says you have to fight them in the first place? Your glamoring magic clearly works on tattoos.”

Both my brows raised straight to my hairline. The fae in me approved wholeheartedly in the trickery he was suggesting, but… “They will know we smell off.”

Seth grinned, already having a quick answer for that. “Someone’s clearly never been hunting the human way.”

He outlined his plan from there and I nodded along, won over. All it would require was a scent blocker humans had devised for hunting deer, of all things, plus the clothes and glamored identities of two Fire Brotherhood shifters.

Then Nix would be back in my arms, where she belonged.