Page 22 of The Wolf and his Witch (The Descendants #1)

According to the car’s navigation system, Muir Woods was a forty-five-minute drive, traffic conditions permitting.

Gabriel made it there in under half an hour and jagged a parking spot on his first circle of the lot.

He was out of the car, striding toward Stef and Isobella before the engine had stopped ticking over.

Stef eyed the Christmas present in his hand. “You found it?”

He tore the wrapping off and held up the grimoire. “Yeah. I got it.”

Scrunching up the gold wrapping and silver bow, he shoved them into his pocket as they entered Muir Woods.

Once out of sight of other hikers, tourists and day-trippers, Isobella led them off the path and they pushed deeper into the woods.

At a large tree, she stopped, dropping her backpack. “This is where Annabelle performed the spell.”

Gabriel studied the forest, opening up his wolf senses.

Nothing but the scent of damp earth, the rustle of the breeze in the trees and the hint of bird song.

He nodded. They were far enough away from the trails.

No one should interrupt them. He looked down at the book in his hand.

Old and fragile, the worn binding had splotches of blood all over it, faded over the centuries to a dark brownish-red.

A blood witch, like Annabelle, had owned this grimoire.

Given it contained a spell to travel through time, it had probably belonged to Cordelia, the witch Maxime’s ancestor had written about.

Stef and Isobella leaned over his shoulder as he gingerly turned the pages. Pages and pages of spells.

Stef grabbed the edge of the book. “It’s in English. Modern English.”

“ Oui. And look at the spelling.” Gabriel pointed to a word, then another. “ American English. No wonder Annabelle’s boss thought it was a fake.”

He kept flicking through the pages.

Isobella gasped.

Gabriel paused. “Is this the spell?”

Isobella shook her head. “No. It’s just…

Some of these spells…” She flicked a page back and pointed at the scrawl on the page.

“This one is a spell to set a person’s blood on fire.

It would boil you alive from the inside out.

” She turned another few pages back. “This one is to spread a blood-born disease. You could kill a lot of people with it in one go.”

“Isobella, have you ever met Cordelia King?” he asked.

Isobella grimaced. “Once. That is one creepy old lady.”

“Did you get a close look at her eyes?”

Stef raised an eyebrow at him. “What’s this all about?”

“When I spoke to your brother, before the crash, he mentioned an evil time-traveling witch our ancestors had come up against. Her name was Cordelia. Apparently, she had two different colored eyes.”

Isobella sucked in a breath. “Cordelia King has two different colored eyes. One blue, one green.” Isobella recoiled. “Are you saying this grimoire belongs to Cordelia King?”

Gabriel shrugged. “It has a spell for time travel in it. It belonged to a blood witch. An American blood witch.”

“But that would mean, all this time, our coven has harbored—”

The horror in her eyes mirrored his own feelings, but Gabriel didn’t have time to dwell on it. He handed the book to Isobella. “I need the spell Annabelle used.”

Isobella cringed, as if the very essence of the witch who’d once owned the book would seep through the pages and into her skin, but she took it and flipped through the pages. She stopped at the back of the book.

“There.” She turned the grimoire around for him to see. “That’s the spell she used.” She pointed to the bottom of the page. “And that’s the one she used to get back.”

“Will I really need that? I’m only going back a few days.”

“Then what? Then there’s two of you running around for a few days?” Stef grimaced. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Gabriel.”

Good point. Gabriel pulled out his phone and took a photo.

“Now what do I do? Do I just make myself bleed and recite the spell?”

Stef cuffed him about the head. “ Imbecile. ”

He held out his hands. “What?”

“Alain would roll his eyeballs at you right now. Have you learned nothing from watching him over the years?”

Alain was adept at casting spells. Small, simple ones to prank his fellow wolves. Larger, more complicated ones to help the pack. Many times, Gabriel had guarded his back as he’d prepared… Oh .

He raked a hand through his hair. “This could take days.”

“Annabelle spent a few hours preparing for it,” said Isobella, “but you’re a shifter. You’re stronger and you heal faster. Perhaps you don’t need as much prep time.”

“I’ll take that risk.” His body was still healing from being hit by a truck, but he wasn’t going to waste another minute.

The most important person in the world to him, his mate, he’d failed to protect.

Someone, most likely that connard, Dutton, had taken her from right under his nose.

What was he doing with her? What was Cordelia doing with her?

If Dutton was involved, then so was Cordelia King.

He’d not missed the tension in Maxime’s voice when he’d spoken of her.

Cordelia was no ordinary witch. Approach with extreme prejudice.

Gabriel would do whatever it took to get her back. Alive and whole. Then he was never letting her out of his sight again. “Let’s do this.”

Isobella shrugged her shoulders. “Okay.” She began pulling things out of her backpack—a bowl, some candles, a jar of something crushed into tiny pieces, some herbs and a few red berries in a Ziploc bag.

“Candles to light your way. The bowl to hold your blood and mix the spell. Crushed snail shells to ward against witches. Hawthorn to ward against the cunning, blackthorn against the forceful and rowan berries to ward against magicians,” she explained.

“I’ve tried to cover everything.” She pulled a small vial of blood from her pocket. “You’ll need this, too.”

Gabriel quirked an eyebrow.

“It’s my blood. You’ll need the power of a witch’s blood for the spell to work.”

“So I use yours instead of mine?”

Isobella shook her head. “You’re the one going back in time, so it’s going to need your blood, too.”

“What about when I want to come back?”

Isobella handed him a second Ziploc bag with similar ingredients. “All sorted. You’ll need to find something to put them in, but you’re only going back a couple of days. It shouldn’t be a problem.”

With a stick, Isobella drew a pentacle in the dirt, lit the candles and placed one at each of the points. In the center, she placed the bowl and a mixture of all the ingredients.

She motioned for him to kneel before the pentacle. “Now it’s your turn. You need only enough blood to sprinkle over the ingredients.”

Gabriel took a deep breath and exhaled on a long sigh. If this didn’t work… It had to work.

Alain’s words from earlier came back to him.

It’s all about intent.

Keeping Annabelle firmly in his thoughts—the winter sun on her hair, the way she tucked herself into his body at night, the fire that danced in her blue eyes when he challenged her.

Wrapping himself in his deep need to protect his mate and his determination to save her, he willed his canines to drop and he bit into his wrist. For the second time in as many hours, he bled for Annabelle, letting his blood drip into the bowl and splatter over the herbs, the berries and the snail shells.

Stef gripped his shoulder. “Go save your mate, Gabriel.”

Isobella stepped forward, holding the book so he could see. “Are you ready?”

Gabriel read over the spell. Seven lines. The words blood and time and body jumped out at him. “It’s a little dark.” Tear what asunder, exactly? Time? Him?

“Yeah, it is. The witch who wrote this book was never in line for a humanitarian of the year award. Can’t say I’m shocked it was Cordelia King.”

The chill of the forest settled over his shoulders, and an oily sensation curdled in his stomach.

He didn’t like the thought Annabelle had already used this spell a number of times.

Nor that Isobella would need to use it soon.

He gritted his teeth and read over the words once more. He was doing this. For Annabelle.

Isobella’s gentle, dark gaze settled on him. “When you’re ready, as you say the words, you need to think about where you want to be. Try to picture it in your mind. Whatever you do, don’t get sidetracked.”

Gabriel pictured Annabelle parking her car a block down from Rarity, and held on tight to the image, playing it over and over in his mind.

“You’ll need to say the words out loud. And you need to get them right. No mistakes.”

Merde. Gabriel had never been so glad Alain had insisted he be the one to guard him every time he cast a large or risky spell, watching on as Alain had prepared himself, settling himself into a meditative state.

He’d often encouraged Gabriel to prepare with him.

Had told him it would hone his skills, help him establish calm in any situation.

Had Alain known he would need this skill? That it would come to this? It made Gabriel feel a little better, a little more confident he was taking the right course of action if Alain had foreseen this moment.

Centering himself, calming his wolf, he focused on the image of Annabelle and the timing of his jaunt back into the past.

“Blood and bone and hair and skin,

Rend a hole in time so thin.

Thy body held not in place

Instead to thine imagined space.”

As the words rolled off his tongue, tendrils of smoke curled up from the contents of the bowl. Berries wilted, and the herbs curled and blackened, releasing a pungent smell.

He kept reciting.

“ Bleed mind and soul to point, to plunder ,

To change, to bend, to tear asunder.

So mote it be.”

The smoke grew thicker and the scent stronger, taking on a smell like burning motor oil.

Before he could stop it, the image in his mind changed.

Instead of seeing Annabelle getting out of her car, about to go into Rarity, he saw her body thrown against the door, the windscreen shattering and steam rising from the crumpled engine.

No! Putain.

He tried to get the original image back in place, but it was too late.

The forest, Isobella and Stef, had disappeared and a blackness so thick it had substance pulled at him, sucking him into its depths.

Pain lanced into him like a thousand knives.

He gritted his teeth and let it pull him in.

His body protested, a sense of being folded and forced through a sliver of time, and then being forcefully hurled forward until he slammed into something solid.

The darkness leeched away, and he was lying on the pavement, his chest heaving and his whole body a throbbing ball of pain.

He groaned. L’enfer. Was that what Annabelle had experienced every time she’d used this spell?

How had her fragile human body managed it?

How would Isobella cope? He wanted to curl up in a fetal position until the pain subsided, but that would take precious minutes he couldn’t afford to waste.

Gabriel forced himself to his feet and leaned against the wall of a building.

Where was he? Had anybody witnessed his sudden appearance?

He took in his surroundings. He was in a side alley between two buildings.

Car horns blared, and a siren wailed in the distance.

He stepped out onto the street, the sun high in the sky.

Traffic had stopped and silence hung heavy in the air.

Two buildings down, a crumpled wreck crushed by the grill of a truck, blocked the road.

He took off running toward it, mindless of the weakness of his limbs.

No, no, no, no. He was too late.

A white van pulled up to the wreck, doors flew open and Dutton and another man, a man whose scarred face was all too familiar, jumped out, reached into the wreck and dragged out a screaming Annabelle.

He called on his wolf for a burst of speed, but they had her in the van before he could reach them, peeling away from him with a screech of tires.

No. He had not come this far to fail now.

He searched his surroundings. Several motorists had stopped to help.

One had left his door open, his car running, and Gabriel didn’t hesitate.

He slid into the driver’s seat, slammed the door and took off after the van, ignoring the owner of the vehicle running after him and waving his fist as he weaved his way through the traffic.

Keeping a close eye on the white van, he followed it as it left the city.

He dug out his phone and dialed a number.

“Stef, it’s me. Listen, I don’t have time to explain. Get Pierre and Louis to track my phone. I think I’m going to need backup. Dutton has Annabelle. He’s not working alone. And it’s not the DGSE. It’s the fucking Faucherians.”