A man must be made good, then a God.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
12 Hours Until Sunset—
When I woke up, I was freezing. There was something wet near my ear. My hands groped the ground and returned only fistfuls of dirt. The first rays of sunlight peeked out of the sky.
Had I been out here all night?
Vern.
I looked around for my flashlight, wincing at the pain in my leg, but it was nowhere to be found.
What if Vern had gotten worse? What if his heart couldn’t take the Magic? What if a million things and here I was, too far away to do anything about it. I didn’t even have the objects I needed for the spell.
I scrambled to stand, tentatively testing my weight on what I realized was a sprained ankle. That’s when I stepped back and stifled a scream.
Crouched a few yards ahead of me, digging through my pack, was a man.
I scrambled for my phone. Mercifully, it hadn’t fallen out of my pocket when I fell. Turn on, come on,turn on.I bit my lip hard.
I wanted to scream. No service.
My objects were in that bag, so that put Magic out of the question. I dug around in my pocket for something—anything to defend myself.
I gripped my keys hard between my two fingers, ready to jab for his throat or sternum. I waited for him to turn around and steadied my voice, praying with everything I had that it sounded braver than I felt.
“My friends know where I am.”
The man laughed. “Yeah, and you’re goddamn lucky, too. I had to pinpoint your last location from your phone.” He turned around, and my shoulders sagged with relief. “What were you thinking, Cel?”
“Jesus, Max! You scared me half to death.”
“I scaredyou? What gave you the bright idea of going down into a ravine in the middle of the night? I thought you were dead.”
I held my stomach. My head swam, my ankle ached, and I tasted bile on my tongue. “I thought if I could find her third object, I could do the spell on my own, in case you …”
He looked down. “I was always going to come back. I just had to take care of a few things, in case we were going to … well, you know.”
“In case we died, you mean.” We both winced. That was me. Always so eloquent.
“Yeah.” The silence stretched taut around us. He ran his fingers through his hair, quickly. “Well, did you at least find anything?”
“No.” I looked around, but everything looked so much different in the daylight. I realized this wasn’t the place at all that we’d seen the people chanting. I sighed, shoulders tugging down. “I didn’t even make it back to the place where we were.”
“Think again,” he said, pointing to the shelf of rock above us, a short distance from where I’d climbed down. “That’s the rock we hid behind the other day.”
He bent down to study the dirt, and my eyes widened.
Hidden in the outcropping of rock, barely visible except for its movement in the stiff breeze, was a rope ladder. It was on the other side of the rock face, across from where I’d climbed down. If it had been daylight, I might have even seen it while I was climbing.
My eyes followed the line of the ladder and stopped at the mouth of a small cave. It was nearly hidden from three sides, the perfect cover for doing something you didn’t want other people to see.
Max chuckled, clapping me on the back. “Shall we?” He offered me his hand, and I frowned. My hand wasn’t bloody anymore.
“I wrapped it to stop the bleeding,” he explained, “but you’re going to need stitches when we get back.”
“Thank you,” I said, leaning on his forearm to take some of the weight off my ankle. I held my breath at the precipice of the cave, a cool draft of air drifting past the opening.
