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Damon shifted in his seat. “What’s the alternative?” he said. “Let the bastards hunt us down? I’m sure we can find ways to at least let the people we care about know we’re okay. To get a little money to my mom here and there. Your magic was strong enough to beat these assholes before.”
Maybe I could find a way to let them keep some contact with home without putting us in danger. It was hard to think that far ahead. I rubbed my forehead.
“For now, let’s just find a good spot to hide out, and then we can make longer term plans from there,” Jin said, turning to look back at us. He smiled at me. “One thing at a time.”
“Yeah,” I said, but the knot in my stomach didn’t relax.
What could I have done differently in those months since I’d arrived back home and fallen back in love with the guys who’d always been there for me? I couldn’t really say. Pretty much any other option I could think of would have ended up with me enslaved, in agony if I didn’t perform magic to Dad or his chosen consort’s orders, or one or more of us dead. My stepmotherwasdead, I had to assume because Dad and his associates hadn’t wanted to risk her revealing her part in the plan.
That meant there had to be a significant portion of the witching community who wasn’t part of that conspiracy, didn’t it? If they felt they needed to resort to murder to cover their tracks… they must be covering them from a lot of people.
I just didn’t know who I could trust. I’d used to think I could trust my father. I’d used to think I could trust the entire Assembly. So much for that.
What did I know about the faction that had supported Dad’s plan? It definitely included Charles Frankford, who was high up in the Assembly—head of the Education division. He was the one who’d been casually chatting with Dad about strategies for controlling my magic. There’d been those dozen or so people in the prison building, but I couldn’t be sure even all of them were in on the plot. I didn’t think more than five or six had been involved in the interrogations at any given time.
“When the investigators came to talk to you in your cells,” I said, “was it always the same people? Or did different ones come each time? What did they look like?”
“It was always the same woman with me,” Gabriel said. “And one time a guy came to talk to her, but he never was part of the questioning. The woman was really small—short and thin—and maybe in her thirties? With a ponytail—blond. I think she was in the group that ‘arrested’ us.”
“I only saw one woman, but not that one,” Damon said. “The one who was badgering me had dark brown hair, shoulder-length I guess, and she was pretty tall. She was in that first bunch too.”
Jin nodded. “I saw one woman and one guy. The same woman as Damon, it sounds like.”
“And I saw the one with the ponytail Gabriel mentioned,” Kyler said.
Seth pitched his voice back toward us, his gaze still on the road. “I saw the one with the blond ponytail a couple times, and another one with long black hair once.”
And then there was the mousy-haired woman and her partner who’d stood by for my interrogation. So definitely at least five witches and a few male interrogators as well. I bit my lip. “And what did they ask you about? Did they say anything about what they wanted, what they were trying to do, that sounded useful?”
“Mostly they just asked about whether I was your consort and which of the other guys was too,” Damon muttered. “I told them they were way too obsessed with other people’s sex lives.”
I bit back a laugh. “Yeah.”
“I got the same line of questioning,” Kyler said. “They didn’t really talk about anything else. I don’t think they figuredwecould tell them anything else useful.”
The other guys were nodding. “It’s because of the bond, right?” Gabriel said, watching me. “They didn’t want to keep us around, but they were worried about how it’d affect you if they got rid of us.”
Ah. I shouldn’t be surprised that he’d figured that out. Maybe the other guys had too.
“Something like that,” I said. “I mean, as well as I can guess. They didn’t tell me what they wanted either. Other than I have to assume they wanted me alive at least for now.” Or we’d all already be dead. “I have no idea what for.”
“After what they’ve already tried to do to you, I think we can assume it’s nothing good,” Jin said.
“There was something else one of them mentioned to me.” Gabriel frowned, his eyes going distant. “Something about a cliff? The way he said it, it sounded significant. Like that’s the name of some special place: The Cliff.”
“The Cliff,” I repeated. “That doesn’t ring any bells. But there’s clearly a lot I didn’t know about certain parts of witching society.”
“That phone I lifted from the woman in the prison died,” Kyler said, holding it up. “I didn’t even think about buying a charger that’d work with it during our rush at that last stop. But as soon as we go through someplace I could buy one, I’ll do some more digging on it and see what I can find. I might even be able to find a backdoor into their network.”
Damon snorted. “If we ever see anything other than trees again.”
“We could pass through a decent-sized town in about an hour,” Jin said, consulting the paper map we’d bought. “If you think—”
His voice cut off with a hitch of breath. Beside me, Gabriel flinched. A wave of magic hummed through the air around us, thin but obviously potent enough to do some damage.
The enforcers. They’d latched onto us somehow, determined our location—or maybe it’d been a general sweep.
My arms had already started moving before I needed to think. I worked my hands through the protective motions I could now draw with full strength, unchained. A deflective hum of my own magical energy coursed through the bonds between me and my consorts and wrapped around Gabriel. The painful probing spell dissipated.
