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“Yes, someone got to her first,” Damiel agreed, frowning.
“And that’s bad?” I said. “I mean, weren’t you going to kill her anyway?”
“This wasn’t just about killing the hunter,” Nero told me. “It was also about retrieving the immortal artifact that she’d stolen.”
“The artifact was here recently.” Cadence paced across the campsite. She waved her hands through the air in swimming-like strokes. “I can still feel its residual magic.”
“There’s a lot of magic,” Damiel added. “The artifact must be powerful.”
“Must be powerful?” I asked them. “So you don’t actually know what this artifact does?”
“No, but Sunfire didn’t make immortal artifacts to serve as light switches or vacuum cleaners, Leda. Their power is far less benign,” replied Damiel. “Whatever the stolen artifact does, you can be sure it’s nothing good, especially if it ends up in the wrong hands.”
“What makes you think the person who stole it from the hunter has evil intentions?” I asked.
“Well, they did kill her in order to steal it,” said Damiel.
“And you were planning to do the same,” I pointed out.
“That’s different. We’re eliminating a threat. Which the artifact thief now is.”
“We need to retrieve that immortal artifact before he uses it,” Cadence told Damiel. “We need to get it back to Eva and Jiro in the Keepers’ lodge for safekeeping, before he tries to unleash its power.”
“He?” I wondered.
Nero drew in a deep breath, through his nose. “The thief is male. With very powerful, very complete light magic.”
“Like an angel?” I asked.
“Or a god,” Nero told me. “Yes.” He inhaled again. “Definitely a god.”
Great.
“Ok, so any idea where this god went after he killed the hunter and stole the immortal artifact?” I asked.
“No.” Cadence waved her hands through the air again. “Whoever he is, he isn’t stupid. He must have realized we were after the hunter, so he burned his magic trail.” She shook her head. “We can’t track his magic. And we can’t track the immortal artifact’s magic either.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“Nowhere,” Nero told me, his jaw clenching up. “It leaves us nowhere.”
5
DATE NIGHT
“Come on. Try to hit me.”
Despite my invitation, Nero didn’t attempt to break through the ring of fire I’d cast around myself. Instead, he yawned.
“Wow, thanks. Nice of you to make a girl feel special,” I grumbled.
“It’s not you, Pandora.” He yawned again. “It’s the two hours of sleep I got last night.”
He’d been out all night with his parents, searching for leads on the mysterious thief who’d killed the last hunter and stolen an immortal artifact off her corpse. He’d gone out hunting every night for the past two weeks.
“Any luck?” I asked hopefully.
“No,” he ground out. “We still have no idea where the thief is, who he is, or what he’s planning to do with the immortal artifact.”
