“Describe the magic user from your previous altercation.”
“Certainly. The man I saw accessing The Plain was lean, had longish dark hair, and was very beautiful,” he says lewdly, adjusting the front of his pants in apparent remembrance.
Ew.
“Yes, you said that before. Was there an address listed for this Apprentice—here or in Nashville?”
Withers moves to deny access to that private information, but Carnell waves a hand dismissively.
“Why do I even bother asking?” He sighs. “And the other matter?”
“In the wind. But the magic is still in place—that’s all I can tell you. I’ve put a compulsion on the bond, but if I pushtoo hard, I could accidentally terminate it. Then the entire arrangement becomes moot.”
“You mean, I’ll be a sitting duck.”
“I would never say it in those words, sir.”
“You would be the only one of you to hold yourselves back to date.” Carnell exhales sharply, brushing nonexistent crumbs from his lap.
“You say Apprentices cannot practice without a mentor or guardian. So we have two magic users in my son’s employ? Why, I wonder? Where have they gone? They were at the club, the hospital, and the Archive. Now they’ve disappeared again. What is that bastard up to?”
Withers huffs in barely concealed amusement at the implication that, while it’s technically Gideon’s pack—in Carnell’s mind, it is Jay who is thwarting him.
While Grayson finds that amusing, too, he is far more concerned that Carnell knew they’d been all over Clearwater and Tampa yesterday. At least he doesn’t realize the new magic user is Grayson. Or that he isn’t a trained Adept.
But more importantly, what does Carnell know about Jay’s parents’ murder? Does he know about Nimue?
A frisson of fear skates down Grayson’s spine.
“Sir, we mustn’t forget—the Adept was very strong. No doubt he’s hiding them. Our attempts to draw Rhodes out—”
“Stop. Saying. His. Name,” Carnell growls at the human, slamming his fist on the top of the glass table. It’s followed by a crack as the glass shatters and the tea service crashes through the frame to the patio stones below.
The hair on the back of Grayson’s neck stands up as Withers subtly draws on The Plain, anticipating an attack. Where Nimue’s connection had appeared orange and alive, Withers’s is an oily brownish-black, carrying that same rancid odor of decay on the humid breeze.
How Carnell hadn’t gagged on his raisin scone is beyond him.
“My apologies, sir.” Withers bows again but doesn’t let his magic go. “Perhaps we could play our last cards?”
Carnell smiles suddenly, his brand of polluted slime oozing from every pore—enough to make Grayson flinch in disgust. Standing, he stretches his arms over his head, the picture of nonchalance easily replacing his earlier fit of psychotic temper.
“Indeed. Let’s apply some pressure on both ends. Can you locate this Adept?”
“For sure. His signature is bold—beautiful, even. It’ll be easy to find him the next time he uses it.”
He’d told himself it was the babies. That all the changes unraveling inside him—the wildness, the sense of something burning under his skin—were just part of becoming a father.
But then he’d stood before Nimue and he’d felt it. Magic. Glowing, alive, pouring through him like a river.
Addictive and dangerous.
The MRI explosion had shown him what happened when he didn’t control it.
He couldn’t let that happen again—not with Nix in the blast radius.
There’s a hard pull in his chest—his bond with Nix reacting to the words—and Grayson has all of ten seconds to realize that Withers is talking about tracking him through his access to The Plain.
Grayson lets the magic he’s been unwittingly pulling for defense stutter as he takes a defensive step back in the flower bed—and falls.
