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She twisted to look up the road where she had stopped the truck just short of the wards.
She ran for the barrier and glanced at two trees with their trunks woven together in a loose braid, the sign his mother had told her to look for. She gasped as she traced the beautiful loops. The only way that could’ve happened was if the tree had grown that way.
She thought of Aiden’s mother planting this tree thirty years ago to protect her son.
Sadly, Goldie still didn’t see how to open this door, but she could rip everything to pieces. She was excellent at that.
Rip it down, tear it apart, let me free, so mote it be.
With that thought, she plunged her hands into the barrier. She grabbed handfuls of the intricate patterns and pulled with all her might. Her magic mingled with Kathleen’s, and she usedthat connection to trace its vital structural support. The whole thing came unwound in a rush of light and heat so bright she was blown off her feet and nearly passed out again.
She lay there staring at the sky, the breath knocked right out of her. Pattern witches ordered the universe. She just sent an enormous burst of complexity straight into chaos.
Her diaphragm unlocked, and she gasped and coughed. “I am so sorry, Kathleen.”
For the second time that morning, she climbed to her hands and knees and crawled to Aiden. There was more blood on his fur, and he still had not moved.
She started a spell to gain more strength, but the moment she lifted her arms, Aiden floated off the ground. There was a ton of free magic in the air, and she had absorbed a lot as she’d pulled the spell apart. For once, she did not need written words.
“Small mercy,” she muttered as she used magic to haul both her and him up. She pulled him toward the truck and laid him in the back. She had to spend a precious five minutes getting the truck unhooked from the destroyed horse trailer before she could slide behind the wheel and gun it.
The road continued, rocky and uneven, for another two hundred yards before it ended in a small parking lot with several vehicles gathering dust. She could see a small horse path that led out of the clearing. The obsession with privacy was spectacular.
“You couldn’t have made one big road? It would have killed you?”
She could not haul Aiden bodily through the woods. She didn’t have the magic or the strength for that, and he didn’t have the time.
She examined the path and tried to measure the width.
“Close enough.”
She gunned it again and was completely relieved when Aiden groaned in the back, even though it meant she was hurting him. He was still alive.
The truck crashed along the path, branches scraping the sides. One close tree took off her mirror, and another cracked the passenger window. Just when she was convinced that she was heading deeper into the woods, she burst through the trees into another clearing.
She almost ran over a man on a horse, but he reeled out of the way, the horse rearing until he stood almost vertical. The horse crashed back to four legs, and the man nearly went over the front but miraculously kept his seat.
She tried to hit the button to lower the window, but it wasn’t working.
She forced the door open and asked, “Where’s Harpers Ferry?”
“Who the hell are you?”
She realized two things. He could see the wolf in the back of her truck from his vantage point on the horse, and he didn’t seem at all surprised. Another dire wolf? Naively, she’d assumed they’d all been trapped in the wards with her.
She floored the accelerator as she slammed the door. Minutes later, she surged onto a county road. She was at mile marker seventy, but that did her no good at all. She fishtailed around a truck with West Virginia plates, almost slammed into a car from Maryland on a blind corner, and sped up again. None of that helped her. She already knew she was in West Virginia close to the Maryland border.
When she finally reached a turnoff, she saw a sign for Shepherdstown, twenty minutes from Harpers Ferry. She’d gone to school in Shepherdstown since Harper’s Ferry was too small for a high school.
She took the turn into town so hard two wheels left the ground, and only sheer will and lingering magic kept her on the road.
When they crashed back to earth, her teeth jarred and her pounding headache pulsed, but Aiden was silent in the back.
“No!”
She went faster, squealing into town doing ninety. She headed for a side road out of Harper’s Ferry where her cousin Andie, the coven herbalist, lived with the magical green goo.
She slammed to a stop outside a tiny acre of land full of trellises and covered beds. An old hound dog howled in delight as Goldie jumped out of the truck.
