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“Check all of the rooms. Look under the beds. Look in the dressers. I don’t fucking care. Just find her!”
She had to hurry.
She didn’t have a lot of time.
Moving swiftly, but quietly, Tabitha hurried to wear she knew the dumbwaiter would be. She stopped at the little door. There was no handle. The door was still there, perfectly preserved in the wall, but the handle was gone.
Once more, she pulled her knife from her boot and wedged it quickly between the door and the siding. She was very relieved that she had brought it along with her. Apparently, the handy little object was going to save her twice in one day.
“Try upstairs,” a voice said, and she knew she was out of time.
The door popped open and Tabitha eyed the little dumbwaiter. The bottom portion of the makeshift elevator was designed to move boxes, trays of food, or small items. It wasn’t necessarily designed to hold a human, especially not after so much time had passed since its last use.
Was it going to be safe for her to climb on it?
She looked at it warily. She didn’t exactly have a lot of choices. If she did climb inside and the entire thing broke, she could create an energy ball to place under herself that would prevent her from being injured when she fell, but she couldn’t exactly stop it from falling.
“Upstairs?”
“The door is just there.”
She heard footsteps and she knew they were heading up the narrow staircase to the attic. The lights were still turned off, but if these were shifters, they’d be able to see her clearly even in the darkness.
Tabitha looked at the dumbwaiter one last time. Judging by the amount of dust that had been kicked up, she was guessing that it had been many years since this thing had been used. Luckily, despite the fact that it was an older system, it was still powered by electricity.
“Smell ya later,” she muttered, climbing inside the narrow opening with the painting. Tabitha folded up her body, sitting on the platform. Then, inside of closing the door to the dumbwaiter, she reached outside of it and pressed the button to lower it. She wasn’t sure whether it would go all the way to the first-floor kitchen or whether it would stop along the way, but it didn’t matter.
As long as she kept moving, she’d be fine.
Only, as soon as the dumbwaiter began to move downwards, she heard a strange, distinctive squeak.
Squeak.
Squeak.
The dumbwaiter was so old and dusty that the cables were making noises as she moved downward.
Well, shit.
So much for her brilliant plan.
There would definitely be guards waiting for her on the first floor or wherever the dumbwaiter ended up stopping. She was going to have to fight her way out after all, and that was the one thing she didn’t want.
A mage’s power wasn’t something that would last forever, and she had to keep herself powered up. Simply resting wasn’t going to be enough. If she used up all of her magical energy, she’d need to take the appropriate steps to replenish that power.
There were a lot of ways you could do that.
One of the biggest legends was that making love to a dragon shifter would give you a huge energy boost so that your magical abilities would last for days...maybe even weeks. That was something she could get on board with.
Not that she’d ever met a dragon.
Not even close.
Tabitha had a sneaking suspicion that was how Ursula had stayed so powerful for all of these years. Legend was that she was guarded by a dragon: a big, powerful one. Tabitha knew that before she could kill the witch, she’d have to do more than that.
She’d have to kill the witch’s dragon guard.
She had to get there first, though, and the map was going to guide her.
