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Flint
My blood boiled, but I sucked down a few breaths to calm myself. Arden had been sitting on that information for days, days that we desperately needed. Our only consolation was that none of us knew how the artifact worked. Each of us had unsheathed it and tried some spells to activate it, but nothing happened. I doubted the Moon Oracle would figure it out any faster.
I gestured for the others to come closer and waved my hand between the three of us, creating a spell to prevent Arden from hearing us.
“What do we do?” Lex asked, looking at her over his shoulder. “We hunt down the Moon Oracle? If the Forsaken Lunars sense we’re after them, she might move.”
“We use Arden,” I said. “We have to give her a little more freedom. She can be in touch with her Forsaken Lunars contacts and get the information as she normally would.”
The other two thought that over for a moment.
“Okay. What else would we do?” Jagger shrugged. “We need her.”
“But we need rules. Boundaries,” I added. “Just because she trusts us to some degree doesn’t mean that we can let her go back to her old life unsupervised.”
“True.” Lex reversed my spell and walked back over to Arden, who was sitting with her coffee in between her hands. “We need more from you.”
Her eyes widened. “What else could you possibly need?”
“Access to the Moon Oracle,” I said, sitting down across from her. “We need you to keep in touch with the Forsaken Lunars. Don’t do any jobs for them, but try to find out more of what the Moon Oracle is doing.”
“How am I supposed to make money if I’m not working for them or for Muddy Mugs?” she demanded.
“You don’t need to work. You have everything you need right here.”
She shook her head, shifting in her seat. The robe she wore parted slightly, revealing some smooth, creamy thigh. Had Jagger barged in on her like this? She was almost naked.
“I need to work. I’m not relying on you three.” She pulled the robe back into place. “I don’t want to rely on any man.”
“Fine. We can keep you here and give you whatever you need, so you’ll be able to save money. We’ll pay your rent and have someone who’s glamoured to look like you go in to air the place out, just so your neighbors won’t be suspicious.” I glanced at Lex and Jagger, who were standing behind me.
Neither of them objected to that.
Her eyes lit up for a moment. “So, I can just…leave?”
Jagger snorted. “Of course not.”
“Agreed. You need someone with you all the time, whether it’s one of us or an enforcer,” I said.
The light left Arden’s face, replaced with the skepticism and annoyance we’d seen a lot of in the past few days. “So, you’re saying that I’m supposed to go work at Muddy Mugs and just have an enforcer there? Won’t that raise even more suspicions?”
“We’ll have them use a cloaking spell,” I said.
“My boss has counter spells against that kind of thing.”
“And we have counter spells to those counter spells. We hardly have to expend energy to get past them.” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees and locking eyes with her. “We’re trusting you, Arden. We need you to agree to all of this and to help us get the artifact back.”
Arden bit her bottom lip, not taking her eyes off of mine. “Fine.”
“Good.” I sat back. “You have a month to recover the artifact. After that, all of this leeway we’re giving you ends. Understood?”
“Understood.” She looked at the clock on the wall. “If we’re going to do this, I should probably get to work. I need to be there in a half hour.”
We left and let her get dressed, stopping in the hallway.
“You really think this will work?” Jagger asked.
“I think so. But we’ll definitely need to keep an eye on her,” I said. “I’ll go with her to work today, then we can trade off.”
