Runebinder (The Runebinder Chronicles #1)(77)

“What happened?” Tenn asked.

“Go...” Devon stammered. “Go look.” He pointed a shaky finger at the trailer he’d just left.

Tenn looked at Dreya for support, but she was focused entirely on her brother.

He stood, doing his best to steel himself for whatever was waiting inside. If it had been enough to scare Devon...

He crept up to the trailer, Earth blazing in his stomach and his grip on the staff tight. The door opened with the screech of hinges.

The interior was dim, barely illuminated by the dying light outside. But it was enough.

The trailer was perfectly intact—the bed made, clothing folded on the nightstand, a cold mug of tea on the counter. Everything looked normal. Everything, save for the lump on the edge of the bed. At first glance, he’d thought it was a pillow. Only pillows didn’t drip crimson.

It was a body.

Half of one.

And there, splattered on the wall in the corpse’s blood, in Matthias’s jagged script, were two words.

your move





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

TENN BURIED HIS second body at nightfall, the only light coming from an orb of magic hovering in the air.

It was far less ceremonial than with Tori. Tenn didn’t even try to be gentle as he pulled the body down into the earth.

There was no point.

They’d never found the other half of the corpse.

“What are we going to do?” Dreya asked.

There weren’t any more bodies. Devon was still in shock, his arms crossed around himself tight. Tenn didn’t blame him. After seeing what had happened in the twins’ past, he knew another dead Witch was hitting far too close to home. Rage burned in his chest even as Earth ate at his insides, his limbs shaking from magic and anger.

Matthias would pay. For all of this, Matthias would pay.

“We follow them,” Tenn said.

“Do you have a plan?” Dreya asked.

“Yeah,” he said. And he did. Mostly. It had been forming ever since he found the empty cabinet that once held the bowl. It was suicide, and it probably wouldn’t work, but it was the only hope they had.

“What is it?”

“Runes,” he said. “I’ll explain on the way.” He looked to Devon. “Do you think he’s well enough to travel?”

She nodded.

“Don’t worry about him. He has been through much worse.”

They all had. Hopefully, after this, Matthias at least would be out of the picture.

*

They stopped atop a small hill overlooking a field. Tenn had a feeling the hill hadn’t been there before, considering it was strewn with the rubble of toppled houses, and the base ringed with overturned cars. The necromancers had set up camp below—a few tents, a few campfires. It was, without a doubt, the rest of Matthias’s army. It made Tenn’s blood boil, made him want to burn the whole world down. But he had to stick to the plan. To get the Witches out alive, they had to be tactful.

“I know where they are taking them,” Dreya whispered. Her words were tight. Clipped.

“Where?”

She nodded to the black horizon.

“There is a Farm ahead. A few miles. I can smell it.”

Tenn’s gut twisted. The Witches had been safe until he’d come along. Now, they were set to be food or new recruits to the Dark Lady’s army. Matthias was definitely playing him: What worse fate was there for a bunch of pacifists than to be turned into bloodthirsty monsters, or food for them?

“Then we’ll have to finish this tonight,” he said.

As though there’d been another choice.

They set to work immediately. They gathered a handful of stones, and Tenn slowly carved the tracking rune into each of them. Then he flipped them over and carved in the symbols he’d memorized from the trees, runes of misdirection and hiding. He hoped he’d remembered correctly.

But the runes seemed to whisper in his head as he wrote them. The rest of the world fell away. It was like writing a language he’d always known, a string of runes that spelled a phrase that tingled on the tip of his tongue. It took only a few minutes, but it felt like hours—sweat dripped down his forehead and his thoughts spun in a haze. He felt high. If not for the weight of what he was about to do, he might have drifted off entirely.

Then, using the end of his staff, he traced a large circle in a space cleared of rubble, the line cutting through the frozen dirt. He traced more misdirection runes along the perimeter while the twins waited impatiently inside. When it was done, he stepped back and stared at the runes. They glowed faint and green, just like they had on the trees, the entire circle a dim neon.

Luke had said runes required energy to work. Tenn had assumed the energy from the earth powered the cloaking runes; it looked like he was correct.

“Do you see that?” he asked, his voice quiet with awe and not a small bit of...not pride...humility.

“See what?” Dreya asked.

“The runes,” he said. “They’re glowing.”

Dreya raised an eyebrow but said nothing. It was Devon who spoke.

“They just look like chicken scratch to me,” he said.

“Never mind,” Tenn said. He held out a hand. “Give me your wrist,” he said to Dreya.

She didn’t even pause before holding her arm out. He took it gently, pulling back the layers of her coat and sweater. The skin beneath was pale porcelain, her veins just visible beneath the surface.