32

R ebecca didn’t know how long she’d fixed her blank stare at the ground in front of her shoes, her insides squirming at the new discovery she wasn’t quite ready to face.

It must have been a little too long, because when she looked up, she found Maxwell staring at her in concern.

What was she supposed to tell him? What could she say?

Some unknown thing had slipped itself into her jacket pocket while they were running for their lives, and she didn’t want to pull it out in case this unknown thing blew up in their faces and killed them all anyway?

Was that even likely?

Completely oblivious to her concerns, Rowan kept spinning this way and that, making choking noises of disbelief.

That was enough of an irritating distraction to pull Maxwell’s focus away from her; he had no idea what the hell Rowan was going on about.

Neither did Rebecca.

Until she finally looked around to see for herself what had gotten him all riled up again.

This was not where they’d started.

Definitely not standing at the side of an enormous metal dragon statue off I-70, with their cars parked across the street at the Macs.

She couldn’t say where they’d ended up, just that they were outside again and that nothing was the same as where they’d entered the Peddler’s hall. Including the door Rebecca had slammed shut behind them.

She turned to inspect it, finally noticing the difference.

It was still a metal door, but the similarities ended there.

This one looked like a panel to an oversized breaker box, or maybe a backup generator.

Maxwell leaned past her, grabbed the handle—which definitely hadn’t existed in the dragon statue’s door—and gave it a quick series of vicious tugs. It didn’t budge.

“Great!” Rowan tossed both hands in the air and let them smack back down against his sides. “I can’t believe this.”

Maleine stood off to the side, arms folded as she watched him from the corner of her eye, looking ridiculously smug. She chuckled and muttered, “This is just too good…”

“We went through all that just to come out who knows where with zero information and fuck all to show for it!”

Commanding her hand not to tremble and expecting it to anyway, Rebecca cautiously pulled the new, unknown item from her jacket pocket.

Maxwell was the only one who’d noticed so far, his eyes widening as he glanced back and forth from her face to the long, narrow roll of ancient, yellowed parchment whispering in her hands.

“We paid for that information,” Rowan ranted. “Fair and square.”

“With some pretty unsatisfactory palm reading,” Maleine remarked.

“Didn’t cost you that much,” Rebecca muttered.

“Yes. Thank you.” The Blackmoon Elf gestured brusquely toward Rebecca as he glared at his sister. “See? It’s not what we paid. It’s the principle of it. And I have never been double-crossed by anyone I do business with. I don’t care if they live in a creepy hole in the ground trying to buy corpses or the High Seat of Lashir’i. You don’t screw over somebody you just shook hands and made a deal with!”

Maleine snorted. “You’re just mad that Peddler beat you to it.”

“Well yeah … There’s that too.” Then Rowan whipped his attention toward Rebecca and Maxwell, spreading his arms. “What? What’s so important you two can’t be bothered by actually matters?”

Staring at the rolled parchment in her hands, Rebecca could have sworn she felt it pulsing with a familiar power despite no outward physical change—which was probably the least effective indicator of any important magical artifact anyway.

“I…wouldn’t say we got out of there with nothing to show for it,” she muttered.

“What’s that? Huh?” With his attention now fiercely redirected, Rowan marched back toward them, his eyes wide. “Is that what we paid for? Directions to the records’ location? Fine. Lemme see.”

Before he got anywhere close, Maxwell sidestepped in front of Rebecca to cut the Blackmoon Elf off, warding him off with nothing more than a fiercely warning growl.

Rowan instantly lifted both hands in concession and gave up trying to investigate Rebecca’s new find for himself.

Maleine let out a simpering chuckle. “Whatever you’re feeding him, I’d like some. Wanna come bodyguard me awhile, shifter? Little change of pace?”

Rebecca shot the elf woman a scathing look but said nothing.

The pulsing power within this skinny, harmless-looking scroll kept pulling her back. Tingling in her hands. Beckoning her to just open it up and take a peek…

Nothing about the rolled parchment offered any indication that it was dangerous. Then again, it didn’t offer any indication it was harmless, either.

What she felt within it, though, thrumming just beneath the surface?

That was all the warning she needed to stay well enough away.

If she’d known where the scroll had come from, if she’d taken it some shelf somewhere or unearthed it from beneath a pile of dusty, forgotten relics, she would have put it back.

But this thing had shown up in her jacket pocket all on its own. It certainly hadn’t been there when she’d bought herself a new last-minute wardrobe at discounted prices just a few hours ago.

Now that she thought about it, she didn’t even know if they’d escaped the Peddler’s hall the same day they’d entered it. The sun had sunken slightly lower in the sky than when they’d reached the Kaskaskia Dragon statue. But had they been down there for only a few hours? Or for that plus an entire day? Or two? Or three?

“Something wrong with your fingers?” Maleine asked haughtily as she finally approached them too.

“You’re gonna open that thing, right?” Rowan asked, staring at the scroll.

Maxwell’s insistent, searching gaze tingled across the side of Rebecca’s face, but she couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look away from the scroll.

Something felt wrong.

“Anyone know what day it is?” she murmured, her voice airy, almost as if it disappeared while she spoke.

“Um… today ,” Rowan quipped. “Who cares? Let’s see what we got for our payment .”

Rebecca finally pried her gaze away from the mystery roll of parchment in her hands and looked around, seeing their surroundings but not really seeing them.

It wasn’t simply that they’d emerged from the Peddler’s hall in an entirely different place, unfamiliar and unknown. She recognized the shape of trees, the shimmer of sunlight across the grass at their feet, the blue sky, the shape of a road stretching into the distance, but all of them slightly blurred and wavering, shoved together in a mismatched landscape that didn’t make any sense, and she couldn’t figure out why …

And what the hell was a breaker-panel door doing in the middle of a field off some random road? It wasn’t even attached to anything.

“Where are we?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Quit stalling !” Rowan barked.

Maxwell shot him another warning growl, then swept his gaze across their surroundings again. He didn’t seem particularly alarmed by the senselessness of where they were, or the fact that no place natural place in the world could have held all these individual parts all smashed together just to create a scene.

The shifter leaned protectively toward Rebecca to murmur in her ear. “It’s all right. Take your time.”

Time wasn’t the problem.

The problem was… Rebecca couldn’t name the problem, and that was what scared her.

She should have been more scared of what would be revealed on the other side of this muggy, hazy illusion cobbled together around them, but the buzzing pulse of magical energy and concentrated power surging from the scroll and into her hands kept dragging her attention back to that instead.

Maleine sighed. “Am I missing something?”

“Just shut up !”

The siblings’ continued bickering washed over Rebecca without sinking in, drowning itself out beneath the growing rush in her ears when her fingers slid toward the top of the scroll and the faint hint of glowing golden light peeking out from beneath the rolled corner…

She peeled that thin, fragile corner away just a fraction of an inch, and the glow brightened.

Maxwell sucked in a sharp breath. “Is that…”

“Maybe,” she whispered. “I think so. But I don’t know if I should…”

“Yes,” he murmured, sounding breathless himself now. “You should.”

If that wasn’t enough to make up her mind, would anything?