Braving the Elements (Darkness #2)(35)

He answered by putting a hand gently to my jaw and giving me a light kiss on the lips. “Will you dine with me in the morning? Every morning? As our last stop before bed?”

I winked, trying to stay casual, but did a happy dance on the inside. “Maybe.”

The very corners of his lips tugged as he shook his head. As he walked away, I swore I heard, “Complicating…” before his words got lost in the noise.

“Well, at least now he’s in a good mood.” Charles put his plate in the dirty dish tray. “And he got us off the hook with Darla. Thank the gods for their mercy! I’ll be half dead by then and really wasn’t looking forward to going.”

“How many gods do you guys worship?”

Charles did a double take as we made our way to Jessiah. “Talk about one-eighty?”

“No, you mentioned gods. That didn’t come out of nowhere!”

Charles ignored me, staring at his sexual nemesis, who waited under a tree monitoring our approach with an uncustomary grim face. “Why’s he dressed all commando, I wonder?”

Jessiah’s eyes widened when we got closer, probably noticing whatever mark he could see or smell that I couldn’t. His face went white as he stepped forward. “Hi. I wanted to get deeper into the woods today to surround ourselves with dirt. Follow me.”

Charles looked around with his customary loathing. “We’re surrounded by dirt right here. That’s what the brown stuff is called.”

I elbowed him, following after Jessiah’s quick steps. “You would do better if you kept an open mind.”

“I would do better with better teaching. Where the hell are we going?”

“Given the nature of Sasha’s mark,” Jessiah answered even though the question had been mostly rhetorical, “I figure it’s best if we wander even farther. People will catch a whiff and come to investigate otherwise.”

“How good is the smell you people have?” I wondered quietly.

Charles looked behind them. “Not so good that we have to go all the way—”

A surge of magic cut Charles off and had my bones vibrating. My limbs banded together with glowing orange light and my draw from the elements snapped. As I fell to the ground, stunned and completely bewildered, I noticed Charles encased in a long box of the same orangey glow. A protective spell. The kind he had a helluva time breaking loose from.

Fuck.

Eight pairs of boots crunched the earth, stepping toward us in a surrounding circle. By my head stood one more, the pair I recognized. Traitor!

“Sasha, use your magic!” Charles commanded in a rage-filled, gruff voice I’d never heard before.

“I can’t—the source is cut off somehow. What’s going on?” I cried.

“Get her up. Leave him, let’s go.” The speaker used a honeyed voice I almost recognized.

“Reach for that source, Sasha. You can do it! Break through,” Charles yelled.

“You want me to leave him, sir?” another speaker asked. “Won’t he tell the others?”

“He won’t be able to get out of that spell. Not without the counter, and Jessiah assures me he doesn’t know it. Plus, he’s hard to kill—I don’t want men dying trying to manage it when he inevitably gets that one chance. We leave him. We don’t need him.”

A blindfold went around my head before I could see any faces but one. Jessiah’s. Satisfied and smirking. He’d sold me out.

*****

Stefan sat with his top council, going over the territory breaches and logistics, when a shot of pure panic bled through the link. He sat up straight, focusing on that feeling. Panic, pain, fear, and betrayal, intensifying.

“Boss?”

Stefan held up his hand to Jameson, silencing the other man. “Something is…” He stood slowly, the feelings going on and on, not changing to embarrassment like normal when Sasha made a mistake in class. The fear escalated, if anything.

A blast of pain, then emptiness. Sasha had lost consciousness through some sort of trauma.

“She’s been taken!”

Fear gripped him in an icy hand, squeezing his heart and making it difficult to breathe. Counting to ten, he let the bonfire of rage warm him back up. Whoever dared take his female would die a gruesome death.

“Sasha?” Jameson asked, rising. His eyes stared at Stefan’s arms. “It’s true then, she can wield black. And you’ve taken her blood.”

Stefan glanced down quickly, mind still whirling. His tattoos were white with only a faint gold, his power stepped up a notch because of the power he’d ingested from Sasha. It felt good. He felt invincible. Except that someone had clutched him by the vitals by taking her.

“We need all the intel we’ve got.” Stefan rushed out of the room, needing his leather and weapons. Every army man in the room flocked to his side. “She’ll be taken to Trek. He’ll probably want to bleed her, among other things.” White-hot rage filled his body, clenching his jaw. If anyone so much as laid a hand on her…

“Can’t she break free? If she is that powerful?” Sturg asked, a battle-honed man with a great many years under his belt. He specialized in the sword and attack spells.

“She is untrained. Largely untrained. Darla did next to nothing and Charles didn’t trust…” Jessiah was the instructor for elements. That’s where Sasha should be right now. With Jessiah. That maggot.