Lu bent and inserted the key into the keyhole.The door flushed with blue-white light, sigils catching fire and spreading to kindle more magical guards and symbols along the walls.
She pushed open the door.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to step into the room.
Stone floor and concrete walls, the space was big enough to walk around in and also to hold a cot and small side table set up along one wall.There were no windows.
The room was absolutely soaked in magic, smelling of pine, of all things, beneath a metallic tang of copper.
Electric lights from above burned yellow, and a fan set high in the ceiling cut the light into slow wedges that rotated around the room.
The floor was carved, painted, chalked, and salted with more magical sigils, containments, and spells than you could shake a witch at.
Right there in the middle of the spells, in the middle of the floor, covered by the black shadow cloth, was the witch’s box containing the book.
“I’ll shut the door.”Abbi darted back to make sure it closed.
The click was absolutely claustrophobic.
I rolled my shoulders and stuck my hand in my back pocket to keep from grabbing Lula and getting us both the hell out of here.“All right.How are we going to approach this?”
“Lula should touch it,” Abbi said.“I mean, then we’ll know if the room magic can hold the book magic in.”
“How?”The enormity of the task ahead of us seemed impossible.I felt lost already.“How will we know if the gods can tell that we’re touching it or using it?”
Abbi tipped her round face up, her nose wrinkled, her eyes sparkling with mischief.“I can see them, Brogan.”She made her eyes go wide.“I have big ears too.”
She leaned into my arm, then skipped to the far side of the room.“I’m looking.I promise.If I see a god, I can tell you and you can shove the book back in the witch’s box.Easy!”
“Easy,” I muttered.
“No instructions,” Lula said.“We could wait for Cardamom, but we just need to see if the wards are strong enough to contain the magic.”
“Can’t test the wards with the book in the box,” I said.“Unless…we could do this tomorrow.”
“And spend the night worrying about it?”She wasn’t calling me a coward, but yeah, she was calling me a coward.
“Hell.”I moved toward the box.
Lu stopped with the toes of her boots outside the painted line that created a circle around the box.I stopped beside her.
“Think we need permission to step in the circle?”I asked.
“Abbi?”Lu asked.
“Elmer didn’t ask for permission when I put the box there,” she said.“He said we could cross in and out.But the book couldn’t.”
I mopped my hand over my face.I was sweating, even though the room was several degrees colder than the rest of the hideout.“On three?”
“Three.”Lula stepped forward.
I stepped after her.
No explosions, no light show, no affect at all.
“Abbi?”I asked.
“Nothing.No gods.”
