Page 40 of Against the Veil (Endangered Fae #3)

Kara rolled her eyes. “How did you manage to make that sound dirty?”

“Natural talent.” Even through the teasing, Nate remained uncharacteristically grim. “We grab Finn and the sergeant, and we figure out how to do this. How to find this place.”

“Finding a place when you don’t know where to start. Like dowsing for water,” Minky said in a distracted murmur. “We need a map.”

The dragon crystal remained dark. Diego barely controlled the urge to fling the damned thing across the room. Without the distractions of sentiment, he should have developed a better leash on all his emotions, but the anger only grew inside him like an invasive weed.

Beyond the frustrations of dealing with politicians, of seeing his plans moving too slowly, he couldn’t fathom where the terrible depths of fury originated. It smoldered under the surface all the time now, sparking and blazing forth with the slightest provocation.

Like scrying crystals that refuse to answer . He had still been learning to use it before his change, though he had reached the point where he could ask it to show him people he cared for. It wouldn’t even show him Finn anymore and Finn was his .

“Damn dragons and their fucking superiority complex,” he muttered to the crystal.

Dragons…those would be barred from the human world under the new laws.

He had to make sure of that. Too much wild power—he theorized their renewed contact with the human world might well have escalated the return of magical maladies in humans.

Why else would the world suddenly have vampires again?

As if the thought conjured him, Theo’s mental voice called to him. “Jefe ? Could you open the door?”

With a shift in concentration and a spare flick of his fingers, Diego reopened the door to the Memphis location they had used earlier in the day. Theo hurried through and stood clear so the door could snap shut behind him.

The boy didn’t look happy.

“ Jefe .”

Diego failed to keep the snarl from his voice. “You didn’t find him.”

Theo shifted from foot to foot, gaze glued to the floor. “No. I’m sorry. I found the trail…then lost it again.”

Not his fault. With a measured breath, Diego softened his voice. “You did what you could. I should have realized he wasn’t with us when I opened the door.” He rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the tightness. “If the authorities have him, we’ll hear about it.”

“And if not, jefe ?” Theo’s head came up, his expression troubled. “If they have him?”

Diego rolled the crystal in his fingers, his mind racing. “Our poor little Jasper will most likely say something he shouldn’t. He isn’t as…experienced as you, mijo , and some of the fae can extract information from an unguarded mind. We need to be prepared when it comes.”

“For what?”

“The assault.”

“There you are!” Nate descended on them in a dusty whirlwind. “Come on, you guys, you have to come! We’ve got something going, we think and—”

“Slow down, kiddo. Haven’t you even had a shower?” Zack scrambled up, hovering between alarm and amusement at Nate’s wild-eyed eagerness.

“No time! Come on! Heersford Asylum, Jasper said. We’re gonna try and find it.”

Finn’s head snapped up at the name. He seized Nate’s hand and ran from the cavern without a word.

“Hey! Whoa!” Nate scrambled to keep up on the stairs. “What’d I say?”

“Heersford…” Finn muttered. At the top of the stairs he stopped short, suddenly perplexed. “Where are we going?”

Nate held up a hand as he caught his breath. “Den…set up in the den.”

The direction sent Finn barreling forward again, and while Zack kept up easily enough, his friend’s behavior had him a little concerned. Either he’s remembered something or the poor pooka’s cracked under the strain.

The kids had pushed the coffee table to the center of the floor and knelt around it. Diego’s huge atlas lay open to a political map of the world.

“You won’t need that.” Finn flapped his hand at the map. “I know where it is.”

“Aw, man. Just when we were getting ready to try our coven thing,” Kara said on a huff. “Well, where is it?”

Finn settled on the carpet and stared bleakly at the atlas, muttering, “I hate maps. How can anyone make sense of these blasted things? Zack, would you point to New York, please?”

Trying to keep up with events, Zack shouldered in between Kara and Brandon and put a finger on New York.

“Ah. Good. And now where is New Brunswick? I suppose St. John’s, specifically.”

Will reached out and placed his index finger over the coastal city.

“There.” Finn flashed a triumphant smile. “It is somewhere between New York and St. John’s.”

The youngsters all gaped at him with varied expressions of disbelief and confusion. Minky buried her face in her hands.

“Um, dude…” Brandon finally found his voice. “I thought you said you knew where it was. That’s kind of, ah, vague.”

Finn’s smile vanished. “Well, at least you won’t be looking in Australia,” he said in a small voice.

“Maybe if you explain to us where this revelation came from, bud.” Zack gripped Finn’s shoulder and gave him a little shake. “It’s better than Australia, but it’s still a lot of ground to cover.”

With a shaky breath, Finn finally seemed to settle enough for explanations.

“Before Diego began to open magical doors helter- skelter, we would drive to New York for visits. He liked the drive, he said. It helped him think. He would tell me things on those drives…stories about towns we passed and the people who lived there. Somewhere on one of those drives, he talked about Heersford. He said it was built some hundred years ago, meant to be the best place for treatment of various madnesses.”

“I’m not sure that’s a word,” Minky said softly. She had edged nearer to him, as if to encourage him, and Finn smiled down at her. Odd to see the bond growing between them, but Zack sure as hell wasn’t going to interfere. It was good for Finn, to have someone else to think about.

“Perhaps. In any case, the place had problems with money and fell into disrepair. Eventually, its caretakers left it to molder in the countryside, its gardens gone wild, its halls abandoned. Diego said he had seen it once and that a strange, peaceful melancholy clung to it.”

“But you don’t remember where he said it was?” Will asked.

“Not…precisely. No.”

“That’s okay.” Minky turned the atlas toward her and leafed through until she found a detail map of the North Atlantic. “You sure narrowed it down a lot.”

“That’s right. We’ll just do what we were going to in the first place.” Nate bounced to his feet and tugged on Finn’s arm. “Come on, big guy. You gotta back up a little. You’re in our circle. You too, Sarge.”

Mystified, Zack sat in the armchair across the room to give them space with Finn perched hipshot on the chair arm.

The kids obviously had something magical in mind and he’d take any effort on behalf of the cause right then.

Kara drew a silver chain from around her neck from which dangled a bat pendant made of some shiny black stone.

Focal point, maybe? God, the stuff he didn’t know about magic still could’ve filled volumes.

Kara got up on her knees so she could dangle the bat over the map. “So do we have to, like, hold on to each other?”

Brandon shrugged. “Can’t hurt, right?”

“I think this first time, yeah.” Minky nudged one and the other of them to points significant to her around the table, then settled herself between Nate and Kara.

Five of them…five points… Zack poked at his tired brain to get a rise out of it and the abused gray matter managed to pull itself together to realize Minky had made them into a pentagram. Those with free hands joined them and Minky held on to Kara’s right shoulder, since she held the bat necklace.

“Now what?” Kara muttered.

“Everyone concentrate on Kara,” Minky suggested, though she cringed when she said it, as if certain she’d get an argument. “Reach for the magic like the dragon lord showed us and think about finding Heersford.”

For a long, agonizing minute, nothing happened. Then Nate closed his eyes and shuddered. Trails of magic flowed to him from around the room, little trickles until Zack’s newly developed magical sense picked up an odd glow around him.

From Nate, it flowed through Minky until Kara began to pull in pieces of magical energy as well, hers coming to her in bright, dancing layered ropes rather than trickling streamlets. Strength. Yeah, the girl has that.

Brandon let out a gasp as a huge surge of power rushed into him, so fierce it should have shot through the top of his head and punched a hole in the ceiling.

It didn’t. Zack narrowed his eyes, leaning forward in the chair.

Will pulled Brandon’s hand to his chest and channeled that terrible, untamed power, acting as a goddamn magical transformer, stepping it down until he could send it on.

Once shared around the circle, the power hummed and crackled around them, each young person adding and changing it subtly, each one an end and a beginning in the closed loop of increasing magical flows.

“Now, Kara,” Will whispered. “Try now.”

A tremor ran through the silver chain and the little bat began to sway gently from side to side.

The pendulum motion became circular as Kara concentrated on the bat, eyes wide, bottom lip caught between her teeth.

The circle described the entire map, at first, swinging in a wide ellipse from Philadelphia to the Atlantic Provinces.

Kara’s eyes narrowed. The bat began to tug at her hold, pulling toward the north.

The circumference of the ellipse tightened until the bat quite insistently circled over Maine.

The taut edge to Kara’s voice was urgent, almost desperate. “We need to zoom in…shit! I feel like it’s trying to pull me into the map!”

“Hold on, hold on,” Nate murmured. He pulled in a deep breath and let it out slowly. As he exhaled, the atlas’s pages turned. Nate kept up a constant murmur as the states flipped by. “PA, Jersey, New York, Nutmeg Land…come on…come on…”