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“You will.”
I climbed out, watched him drive away, and then headed into the café, making sure I locked the front door before I headed upstairs. After making myself a cup of tea, I pulled the book on dark sorcerers out of the bookcase and sat down to read the pages Aiden had marked. They really didn’t offer up any more information about our dark witch, although there was one small side note that rather interestingly said that for the first week or so after a soul transference, the older soul often had to contend with a thick need for sex dark in tone, thanks to the nature of the spirits who help them through the ceremony. Which was exactly what I’d seen in Abby’s mind.
It might be a way to find him—with Abby now dead, he’d have to find someone else to satisfy his darker urges. Unless, of course, he’d gone off the reservation to both deal with those needs and to regain his full strength.
I snapped the book closed then pushed to my feet and walked over to the glass sliding door, opening it up and stepping out onto the balcony. Despite the heat of the day, the night air was quite cool. I shivered and crossed my arms, but didn’t retreat inside. An odd sort of restlessness was stirring through me, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. It wasn’t a premonition—not exactly—and there was no sense of evil slipping through the darkness. I walked across to the railing and leaned my forearms against it, studying the nearby buildings and then the darkness beyond them. The whole area was quiet aside from the occasional roar of an engine as a car sped along the street. The gathering clouds hid the moon’s brightness, but her power nevertheless shivered through me, and oddly seemed to fuel the restlessness.
I frowned, pushed away from the railing, and walked back inside. After locking the door, I grabbed my cup and finished my tea in one long gulp. As I did, the pages of the book fluttered and flipped over, and an underlined paragraph caught my attention. No matter how strong the dark forces employed to help steal the body of another are, it said, there will be a period of adjustment in which the body tries to reject the soul that has taken it over. This leads to an aura that appears to be at war with itself as well as a very tumultuous energy flow. Such energy infests the air, and can be used to track the dark witch, but it must be done in that first week of the old soul’s rebirth into its new body.
Infests the air…. That’s what I’d been sensing in Abby Jones’s place—the twisting, tumultuous energy of the man who’d killed her.
And if I went back there…. I stopped the thought cold. I wasn’t going to do anything. Not alone. I took a deep breath to calm the instinct to get my keys and go, and walked down to my bedroom to grab my phone out of my purse.
Ashworth answered after the sixth ring. “Do you know what fucking time it is, lass?”
I gl
anced over at the clock and grimaced. “Sorry, I didn’t realize it was nearly eleven.”
He grunted. “Well, it is but I’m awake now, so you might as well tell me what you’re ringing for.”
In the background, a voice muttered something and bedsprings squeaked as someone moved. Eli, no doubt.
“I’ve been doing some research on dark witches,” I said, “and I found a rather interesting passage in a book—”
“What book?” he cut in. “Because there’s not much information on those bastards that can be found outside the halls of the HIC, let me tell you.”
I hesitated. “It’s something of a family heirloom that’s been handed down to Belle. It has all manner of unusual information in it.”
“Is that where you’ve learned some of your spelling from?”
“Yes,” I said, “but that’s not important right now.”
I told him what the paragraph had said and then added, “It’s possible that if we go back to Abby’s house, we might be able to catch a sense of his energy and use it to track his current location. But we’d have to do it before it fades.”
“No,” a deep voice said in the background. “You’re not going out there—not in your current state.”
“Eli,” Ashworth implored, “be reasonable. This bastard has to be caught and Lizzie can’t—”
“Aside from the fact you can hardly move without wincing in damn pain at the moment,” came Eli’s retort, “you’ve chugged down a bucketload of painkillers that will slow your reactions. You’d be a liability out in the field more than anything else.”
“It’s okay,” I said hastily, “I can—”
“No, you damn well can’t,” Eli said. “And you know it, otherwise you wouldn’t have rung Ira in the first place.”
Eli, it seemed, was as blunt as Ashworth. “I know, and I’m sorry, but I just thought he could provide some backup and advice—”
“Well, you were wrong,” Eli said. “However, I can.”
I blinked. “You can’t leave Ashworth alone—he has no hands to manage the basics.”
“I’m not a damn invalid,” Ashworth grouched. “And I’m quite capable of going to the toilet by myself. Besides, even if it does turn out that you can track the heretic through his energy, I’d suggest no one actually attempts to do so until the new HIC witch gets here tomorrow afternoon.”
“What time is he coming in?”
“About four, I think. I believe a councilor is heading down to the airport to pick him up, and they’ll drop him off here so we can update him. If you and Eli are successful tonight, we can head out tomorrow evening.”
“Will it be safe to hunt him at night?” I asked. “Don’t their powers increase with darkness?”
