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“This is all a quiet place. Doesn’t mean you should be passing the wards,” he replied.
“I need to empty my period cup, okay? I don’t want to empty it inside the wards in case it effects any of the magic we might have to do,” she snapped back.
The light wasn’t great, but there was no mistaking the man recoiling. “Fuck, okay. I don’t need details.”
“Well, you asked for them,” Ella huffed. The man muttered something under his breath and walked back to a seat by a fire. Ella couldn’t believe that the idiot followed a mage who ritualistically killed people but was repulsed by menstrual blood.
Ella walked through the sunburn slapping ward barrier. It was then that she noticed the piles of bones every five meters in a semi-circle around the beach. She turned back to the camp and bit down a cry of surprise. It looked completely empty.
So that is how they have been hiding from them!Ella didn’t stop and stare for long. She hurried into the trees on the other side of the walking trail.
“Okay, Ella. Think about how you’re going to get a message to Mananan,” she whispered to herself. She kept an eye on the spit of beach where she’d last seen the mage. She didn’t want to lose sight of where she knew the camp to be.
Ella sat down on a rock and tried to clear her mind. Taranis’s potion had to be working still. She had reached out to Mananan before with Chrissy’s help, and she could do it again. She knew the feeling of the magic; she just had to calm her heartbeat down like she had earlier that day.
Mananan, Mananan, Mananan,she chanted like a mantra and hoped to hell he would wake up.
29
Mananan jolted awake, and his hand brushed against the cold mattress where Ella should have been. His eyes snapped open, and he sat up.
“Ella?” He got out of bed and stared around the empty chambers. “Baby? Are you here?”
Mananan pushed opened the bathroom door. Empty. He turned on the lights, and his stomach dropped. There was a circle of salt on the floor and an empty vial.
“What the fuck?” He picked up the vial and smelled the contents. He recognized the magic in it. It was one of Taranis’s brews. Mananan remembered the potion from that morning, and he almost shattered the vial.
Mananan tossed on some clothes and hurried through the empty halls of the castle. When he reached Taranis’s door, he banged on it loudly.
“Get your ass up, baby brother, or I am coming in there!” he shouted.
There was a roar of fury from inside the chamber, and the door was yanked open. Taranis had his hair up in a bun and was tying a robe around himself.
“What do you want?" he snarled.
Mananan held up the vial. “What the fuck did you give Ella?!”
“Just a helper. Why? What happened?”
“I woke up, and there was a ring of salt on the floor and this. She’s fucking gone, Taran!” Mananan said.
Taranis’s eyes focused. “What do you mean gone? Are you sure she’s not getting a snack in the kitchens?”
“No. She’s gone. I can’t feel her.” Mananan clutched at the sudden empty pain in his chest. “Oh, gods, I can’t feel her.”
“Woah, breathe, Manan. She can’t have gone far.” Taranis grabbed his arm to steady him and led him into his bedroom. Mananan slumped into an armchair and pushed his hands through his tangled hair.
“She’s gone. She’s gone,” he chanted, unable to stop.
“We’ll find her. Let me see where she is in the castle,” Taranis said, and his magic warmed the air. “Hmm. That’s… Where the fuck is she?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. She took the potion, and she’s gone.”
Taranis shook his head. “It’s not possible. It was only to remove some of the mental blocks that might be affecting her magic. It wasn’t a teleportation spell.”
Mananan dropped his hands and glared at his brother. “We don’t know the full scope of her powers, and you gave her something to unleash them.”
“But surely teleporting wouldn’t be one of them!” Taranis didn’t sound certain.
