Page 11 of Speak No Evil
Kayla hisses at me. “You defiled yourself? Permanently?”
Yeah, no. As much as I would have liked to have the pointy teeth so indicative of my kind filed down, I didn’t have the stomach for the dental work.
Summoning interplanar being? Sure. Dentists? Pass.
Instead, Veruca and I came up with a glamor so fool-proof and low maintenance, I don’t even think about it anymore. I’ll have to tell her we did such a good job with the working, it fooled my former coven leader.
Movement behind Kayla catches my eye, and once again, my heart stops in my chest as another familiar figure enters the coven temple.
“You!” It’s hardly more than a hiss of breath, but the weight of the accusation hits Noah dead on.
He winces slightly.
“You did this?” I ask.
The abjured wolf-shifter who’d been sleeping with my best friend smiles at me with half his mouth. “They paid a pretty penny for intel on you.”
I strain against the bindings around my wrists. I fuckingknewhe was no good.
“Mmm. You fucked up, wolf. Big time.” I give him a twisted grin. “And the second I get out of here, I’m gonna rip that stupid face of yours right off your skull.”
His smile falters for a moment, eyes going wide like a prey animal, before he rights himself. But his tight smile doesn’t cover what we both know.
I intend to keep that vow.
Noah tries once again to clear the tension from his face, this time with a smirk as he crosses his arms from behind the circle of witches. “Yeah. I don’t really see that happening.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You used her,” I hiss, leaning into the righteous anger, a feeling I much prefer over the useless, trapped anxiety this place and people conjure. “You used my best friend, shit stain. And the fuck of it is, you don’t even know how badly you fucked up.”
A little crazy leaks into my gaze, and only about half is there because I want it to be. “Honestly, you’d have been better off coming at me directly.”
Noah leans back. The change is almost imperceptible. It’s barely more than an inch, but Noah putting even that much additional space between us is so very telling.
Even with a circle of witches between us, he still sees me as a threat.
Fucking good.
We’re locked in a staring match for several moments before something new flashes across his face. “Yeah, well, there’s not much you can do from the center of a devil snare, is there?” He sneers at me, and his gaze drops to the floor.
The core of hot anger I stoked to keep my shit together blows out completely as I track his gaze to the temple floor directly in front of me.
No.
They didn’t.
My mouth falls open as the air rushes out of me in a voiceless sob.
They did.
A glittering summoning diagram, twisting with several colors and layers of magic, encircles all four legs of the chair.
Encirclesme.
A double binding diagram.
They fucking bound me.
In the back of my mind, I can’t help but admire the expert working. It’s a terrific bit of magic.