Page 86 of Vengefully Matched

Otho nodded, his face serious. “The first twenty-four hours are crucial. All available Council members will search, and the interns and assistants will hold down the fort here.”

“Who will run things in Agatha’s absence? If everyone is looking?”

“Kevin,” said Otho, sighing. “We had no other choice.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “I do fear he’s too pretty to actually be able to run it.”

“Uncle Otho,” Nancy hissed. “We talked about this. You can’t just say that.”

“Very well.” Otho straightened his jacket. “It’s not ideal, but it should hold until we make some headway into where precisely we should be looking, since we have no trace, and the Loculus moves at something like twice the average of a high-speed train, so it could have gone very far by now.”

“Agreed.” Even as she said it, Priscilla had a fleeting thought that maybe they shouldn’t be trusting an assistant with the oversight of the entire Council, but then again, she wanted to save Agatha as much as the next person. More.

“The other members have set off already, but I wanted to stay to tell you. We’ve split up directions and possible magic hot spots and other lists of places to visit, but since you and the president are so close…”

“Since you are in love with her,” offered Nancy helpfully. Priscilla winced at the open admission of it, but she wasn’t wrong.

“Right, since you are her paramour, we all agreed it best you start with places that Agatha might go, in case the assailant took her somewhere personal. Who better to know where she could be?”

Priscilla nodded grimly and sat up, aching everywhere, but not about to let that slow her down. “I’ll find her, and whoever did this will rue the day,” she said.

Kevin walked into the break room and gave a small double take.

“Yikes, you look worse for wear,” he announced.

Fucking Kevin.

She ignored him and stomped out of the room, snapping her fingers to delay the pain of the inquisition as long as possible and making a mental list of all the places that she might check first.

CHAPTER 28 Priscilla

It had been nine hours since she’d woken up, after an evening of searching late into the night, and a final determination that she did actually need to sleep for a few hours to track Agatha effectively. Priscilla, after torture and hours of frantic, fruitless pursuit, had finally crashed, slept, and then resumed the search.

She’d been to Agatha’s apartment, to all the shops on Main Street, to the grocer’s down the road just in case that sparked any sliver of memory that might help.

For the past half hour, she’d tried sitting in Free Spirits, checking each bathroom, thinking back on everything that they’d talked about last time, trying not to agonize over the gripping fear that maybe she would never kiss Agatha again. Never touch her, never see her, never get another chance to discover the bits of her that made her shiver and whimper at the touch, or the jokes that made her smile despite herself.

That was the worst part, the not knowing. Was she already too late? Had Agatha already vanished completely? Would Priscilla have felt it in the universe, have known it if the woman was dead? Or what if Agatha was in mortal peril, minutes away from her fate, and a lack of trying, a lack of knowing well enough where Agatha could be, was keeping Priscilla from saving her just in time?

Not that it would necessarily help, if the abductor didn’t care about any of that.

Priscilla remembered something her father had told her once. She was young, helping him with the case of a witch who had been abducted by a mundane who’d caught her off guard. The captor didn’t know she was magical, but had bound her hands in a way that made her magic inaccessible. It had been scary, and Priscilla had been sad, and scared, and fretting about not finding the witch as well as what would happen if she, too, fell prey to the baser nature of humankind.

Benedict had told her, when the human police were helpless, and the Council’s search seemed at a dead end, that witches were protected by a sense of magic threading through the universe. Not enough to stop bad things from happening, but enough that if they needed a little bit of luck, sometimes magic could tip the scales. He’d told her to be still, and know that better days are coming. Listen to the shadows and never be afraid.

It was why she had followed the hunch to begin with. It was why she was listing so desperately now, waiting in light and silence for even a trace of the smokelike wisps.

She’d heard her mother say it happened in love, that magic tipped the scales in a missed bus, a party someone didn’t mean to attend but ended up going to anyway, one person happening to catch another person’s eye in a crowded room. Someone showed up for an acquaintance’s birthday on a whim, and bam, there it was, a soulmate. Someone happened to step in something awful and run late, missing the bus and waiting for the next one, and boom, a connection. Witches and mundanes alike could choose their destiny, but the universe could nudge them toward a good thing.

Or away from a bad one. Which is why Priscilla had to hope that if Agatha was abducted, if she was hidden, if she was in some way unable to practice magic, her magic would find a way to put her somewhere she could be helped. Somewhere, if not safe, then at least survivable.

And Priscilla was determined to find her.

The server circled back a third time to ask her if she was absolutely sure she didn’t want to take advantage of any happy hour specials other than an appetizer she had barely touched. And there, at the edge of the menu, she saw it. Just a tiny tendril, a nudge. A shadow.

And it was then that she remembered. Hygge. A cozy cabin in the woods, with a flickering fire and all the amenities of a home, just sequestered away, tucked neatly into the corner of the forest somewhere. Endless time to read, or snuggle, or just be.

Glamping. Agatha’s dream. If there was anywhere to find her, it would be in the woods. And suddenly, Priscilla felt as oblivious as a lamb walking into a slaughterhouse.

She needed to go into the woods, to see what it would be to live without the restraints of her modern life for a moment, just the way Agatha would have. She needed to trust that Agatha’s magic would steer her somewhere safe, that if someone had bothered to take her rather than to try to kill her this time, the goal would not be murder, at least not right away. She needed to trust her magic and her instincts to carry her there. And if there was anyone who could point her in the right direction, it was Connie Witherspoon.