I didn’t actually know, but I believed him. To a point. The best lies have a kernel of truth wrapped up inside them.
“It worked. I know it did.”
“Then you can lead us to Caroline,” I said.
His eyes shifted away from me.
I grabbed his face and turned it back to me. “You can lead us to Caroline.”
“It worked. I think. I felt the spell close and take hold. I just don’t know how.”
My fingers tightened on his jaw. All that for nothing. I shoved away from him and paced to his work table.
Nathan hauled him up. “I’ve never killed a sorcerer before. I don’t think anyone in our little family has. Hey, that’ll mean I’m the first.”
“Eric will not be happy to have missed this,” Liam said in a bored voice.
“It’ll work. I just have to figure out how it presents,” Peter yelled, trying to escape Nathan’s hold.
Nathan spun him and shoved him against the wall, stuffing a rag he’d yanked from the table in Peter’s mouth.
“Less chatting. More dying,” Nathan said in an upbeat voice.
“Not yet. We may still need him,” Liam ordered before moving toward me. “We need to get that eye healed.”
I touched my cheek in shock. I’d almost forgotten in the rush of sensation from the feeding. It didn’t hurt anymore and if not for the lack of vision on that side I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
His warm fingers touched the skin next to the socket sending tingles that spread in waves throughout my being, calling to my own power until it rose in a rush of feeling to meet his. The eye socket started burning, deepening into an agonizing pain that felt like a white hot poker was being shoved into the eye.
“There,” he said, his touch lingering.
I blinked, looking from side to side.
“I don’t think it worked,” I said.
I closed my eyes before opening them. The world was a white haze that refused to come into focus. My right eye saw fine, but the left only saw blurs in the haze.
Liam’s power shifted through me, searching and probing before withdrawing.
“It looks healed both on the outside and the inside,” Liam said. “You should be able to see.”
I squinted. It was still hazy, but I could see shapes. Sort of.
“Give it time,” he said. “Some of the synapses may be adjusting.”
I nodded, not feeling a lot of confidence in his statement.
Without my left eye I was clumsy, misjudging where the table was and bumping into it when I turned. I stumbled, my hands touching the paste Peter had used for the spell and upending the entire mixture onto the floor.
It reacted oddly. Instead of forming a puddle as a normal liquid paste would, it rolled into little balls before inching its way toward me. I stepped back, hopping away as it crawled faster until it met the wall, where it just stopped, the little balls joining to form one quivering blob.
To my right eye the mixture looked like the same grayish stuff Peter had smeared on my forehead and eye during the ceremony. To my left, it was a strange light purple, mixed with a sickly yellow. The colors were the only relief from the white haze, showing like a neon sign in that eye’s vision.
Peter mumbled against his gag and gestured with his head at the paste in excited movements.
“I think he’s trying to say that’s how we’ll find Caroline,” I said, staring at the paste that bunched next to the wall.
Liam sighed next to me and nodded at Nathan who gave us an incredulous look. Finally he huffed and reached up to yank the gag out of Peter’s mouth.
