Page 1 of Spirit Storm

CHAPTER ONE

We’ve been locked in this room for forty-five minutes. I know because Asher is watching the giant timer on the wall and barking off the count every few minutes like a military drill sergeant.

"Forty-seven minutes." He’s sitting cross-legged on the stone floor with his chin in his hands. "That's longer than most flights to Vegas. We could be in Vegas right now."

Rowan snorts, but doesn't look up from the puzzle box she's dismantling with shadows threaded between her fingers like black ribbons. "Nobody wants to be in Vegas with you, blondie."

"Orion does."

Orion, who has been methodically working through a series of rune locks along the far wall, turns enough to level a look at Asher that would stop traffic.

Asher grins and winks. “Yeah, baby.”

Our escape room—if you can call it that despite us being nowhere near the goal of actually escaping—started out as a perfectly reasonable cobblestone chamber with torches on the walls and a few puzzles that seem like they'd been designed for a group of mildly magical teenagers.

That was before the algorithm, or spell, or whatever Mitch Moore has stitched together in his back-room studio decided we needed a challenge.

Now the ceiling seems to be lowering.

I stand up from where Wylder and I have been examining a series of glowing sigils carved into the floor and point upward. "Is that my imagination, or⁠—"

"It's not your imagination." Wylder reaches above his head and presses his palm flat against the stone above us. A faint green light pulses under his skin, and he frowns. "The room is restructuring again.”

For the fourth time.

"Great." I roll my shoulders. "That's great. Very fun. Incredibly good time."

"You said this would be a quick job." Rowan finally looks up, fixing me with smoky gray eyes that somehow manage to be both accusatory and amused at the same time. "You said, and I quote, it'll take an hour, tops."

"I said it should take an hour."

“You said tops,” she insists, looking to Asher. “Back me up here, dude.”

Asher nods. “You did say tops, Pops.”

“Et tu, Brute?” I cross back to the center of the room, where a large iron pedestal holds an orb that has been glowing a smug, pulsing amber since we arrived.

I tried breaking it.

Wylder tried disrupting its power supply.

Asher tried hitting it with his new angel mojo.

Orion tried to brute-force the thing off the pedestal.

And Rowan wrapped it in shadow, which the damned thing just absorbed. The orb actually got brighter after each of our attempts, which just feels personal.

"Okay." I press my fingers to my temples. "Think. The original spell obviously has an adaptive difficulty enchantment. It reads the group, scales the challenge. Which means⁠—"

“We’re damn impressive.” Asher waggles his brows.

“That’s one way to look at it, or…?”

"It knows what we can do," Wylder says.

"Exactly. It knows what we can do individually." I look at the orb as it pulses mockingly at us. "It's been countering us one at a time. What happens if we hit it with everything simultaneously?"

A beat of silence.