15. Ember

15

EMBER

"O ne thing." I paced across the living room, turned on my heel, and paced back. "Why can't one thing be easy?"

"To quote our High Priestess, ‘Where's the fun in that?'" Ash dropped the two-thirds-complete amulet into the plastic container.

At least, I hoped it was two-thirds complete. If we were missing any more pieces, I might… Ugh. "I've had all the fun I can handle." I resumed pacing.

Shade sank onto a stool at the counter. "We'll find it. It has to be somewhere in Salem or Boston."

"Does it?" My fists clenched, my nails digging into my palms.

"Could it be buried here?" Miles asked. "Since she put up a ward to temper your magic, maybe she left a piece somewhere outside."

"There's nowhere to bury it," Ash said. "And the spell she used on our house wasn't strong enough to require magic like that."

"And we don't even know if she had all the pieces." The heels of my boots thudded on the hardwood. "Was Chrys the one who broke it, or did Isabel do it? Or one of her descendants? We have to scry again. Halloween is next week."

"I'll set it up." Ash padded to the kitchen and filled a bowl with water. "We should all do it together."

I lit two candles and set them on the table. Ash put the bowl of water between them, and everyone took a seat. I laid my hands on the table, and Ash rested her palm in mine. Mayhem hesitated, his questioning gaze dancing across my face, and I nodded.

The moment his skin touched mine, a jolt of…something…shot straight to my heart. My chest tightened, and for a moment, I forgot to breathe. Apparently, this was what holding hands with your soulmate did to you.

The sensation wasn't unpleasant in the slightest. I'd grown used to the pinpricks skittering across my skin, but now they burrowed deep inside me, making my nerves come alive. He must have felt it too, because a hint of a smile lifted the corners of his mouth as he offered Shade his other hand.

Wariness tightened Shade's features, but he recovered. When everyone had joined hands, I inhaled deeply, centering myself and trying my best not to think about the hot-as-sin demon sitting next to me. Don't get attached, Em. Don't get attached.

"Everyone ready?" I asked.

"I don't know how to scry." Mayhem squeezed my hand. Definitely not unpleasant at all.

"You just have to share your energy with us," I said. "We'll focus it into locating the amulet."

"Very well." He opened to me before I was ready, a surge of demon magic coursing through my psyche, making me gasp.

Shade's brow furrowed. "How about a little of that over here?"

Amusement sparkled in Mayhem's eyes as he withdrew a fraction of his magic and offered it to Shade. My stomach looped at his playful expression, so I focused on the water bowl instead. If I didn't get myself under control, this would never work.

"Let's begin." I gazed at the water in the bowl, the candle flames filling the periphery of my vision until everything started to blur. I allowed my sight to remain unfocused and thought about the amulet.

Forged in the depths of the Underworld. A joint project between Hecate, our goddess, and Hades, their god. Why would a god and goddess need an artifact that increased a being's power beyond compare? I couldn't fathom it. Then again, I'd never met a deity. Who knew how their brains worked?

Picturing the red stone in my mind, I held on to the image, visualizing the broken piece and how it would fuse with the rest of the gem. Ash's energy vibrated high on my right while Mayhem's low rumble pulsed on my left.

I invited both into my psyche, letting them mix and meld in the core of my being, pulling me deeper and deeper into the trance. Though my eyes remained open, I saw nothing but the darkness of the ether, which I sifted through as if it were sand running through my fingers. All I felt was the void.

"Does anyone sense it yet?" My mouth felt dry, my tongue sticky.

"Nothing yet." Ash's voice was hoarse and thick, a side effect of the scrying trance. "Let's go deeper."

I inhaled and let out a slow, controlled breath before allowing myself to slip in further. The outside world ceased to exist. I couldn't feel the hands I held nor smell the burning wax. With all my senses focused into the ether, I searched for the energy of the amulet.

A tickle formed in my consciousness, the sensation pulling me forward. " I feel something, " I said silently.

" Share it, " Ash replied in my mind.

I did, allowing it to seep into our shared trance, and a vision began to form. It wavered, sparkling around the edges and fading in and out. My only thought the matter at hand, I focused harder, bringing the amulet into clear focus.

The sparkles dimmed as the image took shape, an unassuming red stone attached to a shimmering gold chain.

" That's it, right? " I asked the demons, but they couldn't reply. Even though they shared their magic with us, they weren't part of the collective trance.

" It has to be, " Shade said. " Pull back so we can see where it is. "

I pictured the area around the stone. It lay nestled on a pillow of black velvet. Pulling back further, I saw the plexiglass container holding it on a shelf. It sat in a massive storage room, with rows and rows of shelving units. Jewelry, hand-drawn maps, and pottery filled the shelves, and antique furniture lined the floors.

" What the hell? " I pulled back more and found security guards armed with assault rifles at the entrance to the room. The vision wavered, the sparkles returning to the edges.

" Stay in the trance. We need to see where the building is. " I sent out another wave of magic as I pulled back in the vision. A lobby. Three sets of heavy double doors. More armed guards. Finally, I made it out of the building, a brick and glass structure that stood at least ten stories high.

" I recognize this, " Miles said. " I know where it is. "

" Let's pull out, then. We've used enough vim. " I took a deep breath, bringing my senses back into my body. The candles' blurry flames flickered in my peripheral vision, and warmth from Mayhem's and Ash's hands seeped into my palms. I blinked the water bowl into focus and gasped, letting go of Ash to press my hand to my chest.

Mayhem held my other hand tightly. "Are you okay?"

I looked at him, the concern in his gaze making me feel things I didn't know how to name. "I'm good. Everyone good?"

"Yeah," Shade said, and Ash nodded.

Miles's brow furrowed. "I'm okay, but…someone put the rest of the amulet up for auction. It's in New York City."

"A heavily guarded auction house. Fabulous." I rolled my neck from side to side, stretching the tension from my muscles and hoping my spine would crack to relieve some of the pressure threatening to build into a massive headache. Sadly, it didn't help.

"Human guards will be no match for a Prince of Hell and his fire witch. We will simply go in and take what is rightfully ours."

"Whoa. There are so many things wrong with that sentence." I tugged from his grasp and stood before extinguishing the candles and carrying them to a shelf. A trace tingle of Mayhem's magic still danced across my skin, so I shook my hand, chasing away the sensation.

Mayhem stretched out his legs, clasping his fingers behind his head. "It makes perfect sense to me."

My teeth clicked, the tension in my jaw adding to that in my neck. "Let me dissect it for you. A: We don't know for certain all the guards are human. That's a high-paying job, and witches have to work too. So do shifters for that matter, and New York is home to plenty of them."

He started to respond, so I held up a hand to stop him. Miraculously, he obeyed, though I didn't miss his smirk.

"B: Even if they are all human, I can't stop a bullet, and if I die, you get vanquished. You have to remember that."

He lifted one shoulder dismissively. "I would never let that happen."

"C and D: I'm not your fire witch, and however we decide to handle this, we will be working as a team. We are a team. No more solo side quests."

Ash nodded her appreciation.

"And F?—"

"You're on E," Shade, ever the helpful one, chimed in.

"E is for everyone. F: There won't be anything simple about this. In addition to the armed guards, the building will have cameras and an alarm system to notify the police if anything goes awry. As much as Higgins is a thorn in my side, he protects us from the law here. He can't do that there."

"So we're screwed." Shade lifted his hands and dropped them in his lap.

Ash took the bowl to the sink and dumped the water. "Not necessarily. We could find out when the auction is and go there to bid on it."

"That's a possibility." I paced the length of the living room. "Miles, do you know the name of the auction house? Can you look it up?"

"Yeah." He swallowed hard, sadness tightening his eyes. "Ginger and I spent a weekend in a hotel nearby. We'd hoped to sit in on an auction, but nothing was planned for when we were there."

Shade's brow crumpled. "I'm sorry."

Mile's face twitched before his expression turned neutral. "It's alright. Let me grab my laptop. Can I use your wifi?"

"Of course."

He rose from the table and took his computer to the living room, setting it on the coffee table before sinking onto the sofa. I recited the password, and after he connected, he pulled up the auction house website.

"I'll have to make an account to see the items up for bid." His fingers flew across the keys.

I sat next to him. "Use a fake name. We don't need anything traced back to us if we have to steal it."

He gave me the side eye. "I work in IT."

"Right." I raised my hands in surrender and let him do his thing.

Mayhem sat in the chair adjacent to my spot on the couch. I could feel his gaze on my face as Miles created a fake account for Boyd Anderson from Houston, Texas. He even used "BigOil" as the email address.

I laughed. "Why do I get the feeling you've done this before?"

Miles cleared his throat. "I'm in."

"You claim to be light witches, yet you are firmly grounded in the gray." Mayhem still watched me.

"It's okay when it's for the greater good." I didn't dare look at him, lest he derail my thoughts all over again.

"The auction is scheduled for tomorrow evening. In person only." Miles clicked the event and opened the page of items that would be up for grabs.

"How long is the drive to New York?" I asked.

Ash typed on her phone. "About four and a half hours without traffic."

"We can manage that." I watched as he scrolled through the items, many of them artifacts we'd seen when we scried. He found the amulet in the list between an eighteenth-century vampire-hunting kit and a gem-encrusted swan figurine and clicked the entry.

"‘A genuine nineteen-carat Burma ruby attached to a twenty-inch gold chain of twenty-four karats. Circa 100AD.' I wonder where they got that information?" I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees.

"The amulet is no earthly gemstone," Mayhem scoffed. "It was created in Hell, not in Burma."

"The humans don't know that." I patted his thigh, and he sucked in a quick breath. Jerking my hand back to my lap, I glanced at the others. They either hadn't noticed, or they were choosing to ignore the whatever-it-was going on between me and the demon. Thank you, Hecate.

"Bidding starts at $400,000," Miles said.

I blinked before squinting at the screen. "Are you sure that's five zeros?"

He zoomed in so I could see it clearly. Yep. Five zeros. "I don't think bidding is an option. Or…is it?" he asked.

I barked out a laugh. "Maybe if we sold the house, all our weapons, and the library."

"Don't you dare touch my books." Ash's phone buzzed, and she swiped open the screen before letting out a dry chuckle. "Patrice wants to know if we've mended the veil…and if the demons are back in the Underworld."

"I wish." I stood and sidestepped Mayhem to resume my pacing. "I mean…not the demons back in Hell part." I made the mistake of looking into Mayhem's eyes and found fierce determination staring back at me. Why did I get the feeling that returning to the Underworld wasn't on his agenda?

Her phone buzzed again. "She said things have been eerily quiet today. They haven't battled a single beastie."

"It must be Hecate's work. Cinder's letter mentioned they were trying to hold it together from that side." My head spun, the vim depletion from the scrying session finally surfacing above my adrenaline.

"She did mention that even a goddess can't hold it forever," Mayhem said. "Discord must have convinced Hecate to help."

"Or Cinder did." I dug my fingers into the muscles at the base of my skull, massaging the tension. "We have no clue what's happening across the veil right now, but we need to take advantage of the quiet."

Pain ached from my skull, down my neck, and into my shoulders, but I couldn't focus on that right now, because… "We need to plan a heist."