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“I want you to find Maddy so we can go get her. She’s out there in the middle of bloodlust with nobody. Nobody to coach her or help her figure it out.” Starving is the hardest part of the change.
“Maddy’s smart, and I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Galina says.
Caleb frowns and turns to Cora. “Did she seem like herself when she took off?”
“Not really, no.” Cora purses her lips and moves to a table along the wall to pour herself a glass of blood. She holds one of the empty glasses up to Caleb. “Water? Humans need water. Have you had any since you’ve been turned?”
Caleb shakes his head. Water won’t fix his problem. Kenna advances like she wants to interrupt his attempts, but he glares at her, so she takes a step back. He gestures to Galina. “Go ahead.”
“Do you have something that belongs to her?”
Cora steps forward with a hair tie. “She dropped this back in the lab.”
Galina puts her hand through the hair tie so it circles her wrist. Then she begins her conjuring in the center of the room. Her lips move as she draws magic into herself, her hands clasp, moving faster than Caleb’s brain tracks. That’s new.
If anything he knows Maddy, and she’s going to be as happy about her own change as he is about his own. They’re two pawns in the middle of a chessboard, being moved without any thought to their wishes. Kenna practically handed him to Malcolm by turning Caleb human, and now as a human, he’s more than limited in the ways he can protect Maddy. He punches the padded arm of the sofa and nearly knocks himself to the ground. He’d grown more to depend on his vampire senses than he’d realized.
“Anything?” He’s in a hurry, and his worry makes his stomach churn.
Galina’s lips compress, and she’s got bad news she doesn’t want to give him. It’s all over her face.
“Well?”
She raises her hands as though she’s soothing a spooked horse. Slowly, she shakes her head. “There’s something blocking my spell. She’s—”
“Blocking your spell?”
“She’s out there, and I’m able to get a trace of where she was, but not where she is.” Her shoulders droop slightly. “She must have a masking spell around her, and I can’t break through it.”
“Masking spell?” Why would she do something like that? Why would she make herself impossible to find?Maddy…
“At least we know she’s able to access her powers. That keeps her from being completely helpless.”
Caleb turns to Cora. “Can you track her?”
Cora freezes with her glass of blood on her lips. Cautiously, she lowers it, licking an errant drop from the corner of her mouth. “If I could have tracked her, I would have.” Her brows furrow as she thinks for a moment. “Before you turned human again, I was able to find you using the bond between us—the sire bond. Vera is the one who turned Maddy, maybe she can help.”
Caleb’s knees shake, and he takes a seat on the sofa to hide the trembling. “Then where’s Vera?”
Cora places her glass on the table and continues speaking as though she doesn’t hear him at all. “Now that I think about it, maybe Vera turned Maddy for a reason. I mean, with everyone in the lab at the time, why would Vera turn Maddy? There has to be a reason. Why would she need a vampire-warlock hybrid?”
Kenna nods. “Vera’s the only one who can answer that question, and she’s probably the only one who can find Maddy.”
Galina nods. “At least as long as Maddy has herself wrapped up in a cloaking spell.”
Caleb scrubs his hand over his face and then through his hair. Maddy’s location isn’t going to be easy to find, but Vera seems to be his only chance. “Where’s Vera?”
No one speaks.
Caleb bites back a frustrated sigh. “Can we use the locator spells on her?”
They all stare at him, but none of them move.
“So we don’t have anything that belongs to her? Of course not.” He mutters the last bit to himself. It’s obvious none of them have anything of Vera’s. “Then we’ll do this the old-fashioned way. We’ll use a monetary reward to get someone to talk. It’s unlikely Vera’s disappeared from this world, so we’ll get someone to turn her in.”
“Good idea,” Cora says, but she seems to be the only one interested primarily in what Caleb wants right now.
Kenna and Rachel whisper to one another, and he can’t hear any of it, thanks to his new human ears. Galina joins them.
