8. Obfuscari

eight

“Touch me.” Milla stretched out her arm, reaching for the witch at the edge of the bed. “Please.”

“I am touching you.” A shade wisped free from Darkly, winding around her wrist and swirling up her arm. She shivered at the silken cold, her skin burning beneath his gaze. Gembright eyes flitted up from her chest and her fingers, and he flashed a quick smile. More Shades stretched across the bed, up her calves, cradling Milla’s thighs. His gaze darkened, and one Shade wafted up her exposed front, circling a breast and pooling in the hollow of her collarbone before cradling her cheek.

She flinched.

It was an instinct, a reflex to having her fevered flesh caressed by something cold—something intangible. The tiniest flinch, but he saw it. The Shade wafted away, and Darkly eased off the bed, his jaw clenched and hurt, dragging his mouth into a frown. The Shades retreated, disappearing into him and darkening his eyes further.

“I’m sorry.” Milla sat up, adjusting her bra and covering her breasts before reaching again for Darkly.

“Dinnae.” He leaned away and ran a hand through his hair. Loose strands fell over his brow and he shook his head, looking at Milla with an expression that was as hungry as it was sad. “It will get better.”

“When?” She hopped off the bed and grabbed her shirt from the floor, yanking it over her head. “It’s been three days.”

He raised his index finger, cheek dimpling with a slick smile. “It’s only been three days.”

Milla crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. “Don’t be cute right now.”

Darkly puffed out his chest, half-heartedly preening and deflating when Milla’s glare failed to soften. He cleared his throat and rubbed his hand over his heart. “I ken this is hard for you—”

“How could you possibly ‘ken’?”

“Because I know what was in that shite tea, Milla, and why you drank it. You were poisoning yourself, and now you can barely tolerate your Way. It’s gonnae take time.”

“I don’t have time,” she spat. “I have a demesne to run.”

“A demesne that is overrun with Enforcers,” he countered. “You need to be here, where it’s safe.”

“I need to be cleaning up my mess.”

“I’m happy to—”

“It’s my demesne, Darkly. It’s my job . I can’t lose it again, not after I—” A lump in her throat choked off the rest of the sentence. Her fingers trembled, and the next breath she took was thin and weak. “After she—”

“I ken.” He sat on the edge of the bed, hands dangling from his knees. Silence bled from the Dark Witch, drowning the room as deeply as his Shades.

Wake up, Milla.

It stretched and stretched, longer than Milla remembered it lasting, until every thread connecting her to Darkly went taut and snapped, save for one.

A jarring, tinny, electric song ripped through the hut. Milla whirled around as Darkly’s phone began buzzing along the makeshift table, the name Luminescence flashing across the screen.

“Bollocks timing,” he grumbled, grabbing Milla’s shoulder with a cool, slick hand and giving a little shake as he passed by. She tensed at the touch, staring at her shoulder. “Aye?”

She did not remember that happening, nor did she remember him touching her or when his hands had ever had that texture—like worn, supple leather.

Wake up.

“Another one?” He ran a hand over his face and glanced at Milla. “Aye, an hour.” Lou’s voice rose, and he winced. “I’m tired, Lou, and it’s nae as if the body is going anywhere, just—aye, yes. I understand, but—” His brows pinched, and Darkly turned his back on Milla, dropping his voice to just above a whisper. “Gies an hour, please? I cannae risk getting lost.” A long beat passed where neither Simmons sibling spoke. Lou’s voice hummed over the line, and Darkly sighed. “See you soon.”

He ended the call and dropped his arm, phone clutched tight. Veins popped along the back of his hand. Milla followed the taut line of his arm to his shoulders, and his neck, spotting the muscle working in his jaw. “I need tae—”

Horned God, Probuditna, wake up.

“Just go.” She sat on the edge of the bed, counting specks in the worn blanket as he pulled on his Enforcer blacks, hesitating in front of Milla on his way out the door. When she didn’t look up, he sighed and left.

The door clacked against the crooked wooden frame, and only then did she lie down, jolting upright with a startled gasp. Heat flared down her arms, butting against her wrists and curling over on itself. Every inch of her skin crawled as tingling receded from the tips of her fingers and toes. She sucked in a harsh breath through her mouth and nose, choking on the acrid stench of harsh vanilla and burnt sugar, sweet rot, and a clean, almost astringent aether. The stink of it all churning her stomach. She clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from heaving, squinting in the dark until her eyes adjusted to the dim light bleeding in through the open door; only then did she notice the darkened silhouette of Agent Sterne.

“You are awake.”

She nodded, afraid that if she spoke, she’d vomit on her bed. Not that it would be a tragedy.

“Good.” He gave a terse dip of his chin, his accent cutting the word off with a crisp snap . “You have a visitor. Come.”

He led her through a twisting warren of tunnels burrowed deep within what Milla thought might be a mountain, which made no damn sense. On the walk to the cells, the hallways were long and nauseating, their walls pulsing under layers of illusions and terrible mid-century fluorescent lighting.

Hadn’t they?

Water dribbled down coarse white stone walls hewn to follow the earth’s curve. More glass orbs filled with conjured light hung high on the dry side of the passageways, brighter than the lamps outside her cell. She squinted and kept her eyes lowered, hyper-aware of the space she occupied.

How long had she been in that cell?

Long enough to become so used to her own four walls that the stretch of the hallway felt too big and foreign. This space was too open, there was too much light, and he could be anywhere. She clenched her fists against the urge to cling to Agent Sterne and the rising desire to turn back and run to her cell, focusing instead on the pain of nails digging into her palms.

The floor shifted, rising higher. Her thighs began to burn, and her breathing grew raspy and uneven from the climb, but she pressed on, only stopping when they passed a narrow window and she caught sight of the landscape beyond her prison.

“No.” Milla rushed the wall, pressing her cheeks against the stone on either side of the window. The sear of salt was immediate, but every speck of her awareness in her body was on the view: a narrow valley, the bend of a river fat with winter run-off, and the red-tiled rooftops of a quaint, medieval town. “No, nonono.”

She reeled away from the window and saw the hallway with clear eyes for the first time. Tunnels burrowed in the heart of a mountain, glass orbs filled with conjured light, and the dribbles of water—a measure taken to disrupt the Ways of the witches housed in the salt and marble cells of ?esky-Krumlov.

“Keep moving, Ludmilla.” Agent Sterne moved to grab her arm, and Milla twitched away from his touch. Her panic was an animal, thrashing madly in her chest and strangling the air in her lungs.

This was impossible. She was in Florida, in the holding cells beneath Jacksonville, not in the salt and marble. Not in ?esky-Krumlov. Not … home.

“I can’t be here,” she whispered, flattening her back against the rough-hewn stone and shaking her head. “This can’t be happening.”

“They get stronger the deeper we go,” Agent Sterne replied. He gripped her wrist, peeling Milla from the wall and dragging her through another bend in the hall. She caught glimpses of ?esky-Krumlov through more narrow windows. Light glinted off the surface of the Vltava. A flock of birds burst from the dark green spire of St. Vitus, and a cluster of students ran across the footbridge into the old town.

She faltered at the fourth window, tracking the birds as they flocked around the spire, resettling along the rooftop and steep eaves of the church. Agent Sterne released her wrist, stepping away. When Milla looked at him, he wore the same stern expression as always, but he tipped his head toward the window behind them. “Do you see?”

She backed up a step. Another. And when he did not move, she retreated to the window, staring at the same scene.

The birds burst from the spire in a thick, undulating cloud of feathers. The students ran across the bridge, and a bright flash glinted off the river’s surface. Milla squinted and stepped closer, reading the scene as Ezra had taught her. She searched for consistent inconsistencies and found them in the students huddled together at the end of the bridge when they should have been disappearing into the warren of cobbled streets that made up her hometown.

“It’s an illusion.”

Agent Sterne nodded. “Obfuscari.”

“No.” She moved to the next window and the scene reset. The children rushed across the bridge, and she forced herself not to squint at the bright flash of light off the river. “Those illusions are in the mind. This is obnubilari.”

“Are you so sure?”

“You see it too, don’t you?” She looked at him then, noting the intensity of his gaze, searing through Milla as if looking for something. He had to know she’d been trained by the Morgenhexe, a master illusionist, and mentored by Ezra, C.R.O.W.’s darling obnubilari, before Milla left him in the dark. Agent Sterne nodded. “Then yeah, I’d say I’m pretty positive on that point.”

The deep cut lines at the corners of his mouth softened, and blue flame danced across his fingertips. He snapped, and the illusion in the window vanished, revealing blank marble. Milla’s mouth fell open, shock and awe competing for space, and before she could form a word, he tipped his head down the hallway. “Come along.”

Approaching a heavy oak and iron door, he pressed his hand against the wood and muttered under his breath.

Pressure built in her skull, forcing Milla to work her jaw as if they had gained altitude. A heavy bolt thudded into place, and the door swung open. Her guard guided her through, and bubbles popped behind her eardrums, the torpid, drunken feeling from the cells vanishing.

Wards , she realized with a start, stumbling at the giddy, unbearable lightness. Crossing into a warded space normally felt like walking through a wall of static but, Waybound as she was, this felt like layers of sodden cloth being ripped away from her body.

“Where are we going?”

Agent Sterne slowed his pace from a march to a stroll. “You have a visitor.”

“I’m allowed visitation?”

“You are imprisoned, Ludmilla, not interred.”

She cast a leery eye at the hewn marble walls and ceiling, then lifted her eyebrows. “Are you sure about that?”

In lieu of an answer, she received a quiet snort. He turned them once again, revealing a brightly lit hallway. The floor became checkered tile, the Way-infused orbs switched to LED track lighting, and through the open door at the end of the hallway, sitting in a metal folding chair with her fingers laced on a metal table, was the Nachthexe.