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I faced Cassian. “Do you know where her cottage is?”
Shaking his head, he answered, “No. I had no idea she had one.”
Griffin arrived, and we explained everything that was going on. Cassian threatened to kill Morgan with his bare hands, demanding her head on a platter. All I could think was get the ax, but Griffin was still holding out hope that his friend wasn’t the devious monster we believed her to be.
“Look, I know Morgan can be off-putting, but do you really think she’d hurt Emily?”
“I do,” I answered, a finality to my voice. Because now I was absolutely certain that she would. “Listen, I’m about to tell you something I don’t tell very many people.” I took a deep breath and said, “I can see people’s auras.”
Griffin stared, not in disbelief, but in worry. It was as if I were about to confirm his own suspicions that he didn’t dare recognize. “And Morgan’s?” he asked, swallowing hard.
“Pitch black.”
He nodded, saying nothing else. No denial, no defensive behavior. Just a nod.
“Can we do a tracking spell?” Cassian suggested.
“Not without Emily’s blood,” I answered, pulling at my red hair in frustration.
“What about her hair?” Griffin asked, pointing toward the bedroom. “There might be some on the pillow from when she stayed here the night before.”
I shook my head. “It needs to be blood. But maybe if I had an object of Samara’s, I could channel a vision somehow.”
Griffin snapped his fingers. “We’re fresh out of those.”
Cassian scowled at his joke, offering another idea. “What if we used an object of Emily’s to channel a vision of her location?”
Would it work? Probably not. But what else could I do? I had no other leads.
We headed back to the apartment and straight to the bedroom to look for something of Emily’s that was strong enough to hold her emotional energy. A drawing sat in her bag, and I pulled it out, observing it.
Two parents running in a field with a child. My hand brushed against the drawing, and it came to life—through the child’s eyes, I was running, my hands locked into my parents’. Only, they weren’t the parents I grew up with. They were the parents in the picture. Just a flash, it disappeared as quickly as it came.
“Who are these people?” I asked, desperation in my voice.
Cassian shrugged as Griffin said, “Emily had a dream about them. She said they were her parents. But the girl, she couldn’t figure out.”
Intrigued, I pressed my palm against the drawing and saw a flash of Emily hiding in a small space. A bathroom? Closet? It was hard to make out. Then, I saw eyes. Black eyes.
I tried to focus, to dig harder, but I lost it. Damn.
At the edge of the woods, the cottage waits. The path is within your mind.
A voice. Who said that? Was it Balthazar? A headache formed, and I wasn’t sure if I should attribute that to the stress, the power, or the voice. But I focused in again and in my mind, just as the voice said, I saw a path.
We rushed outside, piling into Cassian’s truck because it was the closest vehicle, parked almost on top of the sidewalk outside the bar. He was lucky it didn’t get towed.
We drove for over two hours to somewhere in upstate New York. As we got closer, almost reaching our destination, thunder and lightning struck through the sky in a monstrous rage.
When we arrived, the cottage was at the edge of the woods, ablaze in flames. The entire building was burning. Actually burning to the ground, and there were no firetrucks because it was in the middle of nowhere.
Surrounding the cottage there were trees, dirt, and debris everywhere, as if a storm had blown through and wrecked the place.
We gasped in unison, dread ripping through my heart. Griffin tried to run inside, but Cassian jerked him back, stopping him.
“It will collapse on you if you go in there!”
They listened for Emily’s heartbeat, hoping they could pick it up through their wolf senses or the mating bond—hell, any way they could hear it would work, so long as they could. But it was too hard to make out above the crackle of the flames, and the boards that broke from the destruction, caving in on one side.
Please, oh please, tell me she isn’t in there.
“Emily!” I called out. “Where are you?”
