I come out on the inside of the barrier and step into the shadow of a mountain that’s directly in front of us. I pause for a moment, disoriented because when I was on the outside of the barrier, it looked like this was sparse trees and flat land.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Torrez rages at me when he makes it through the barrier too. I turn, ready to reassure him that it’s all fine, but the angry look on everyone’s faces has me shutting the fuck up.
Shit.
“My bad,” I offer weakly, knowing if one of them had gone off script like I just did, I’d be just as pissed.
“I’m going to try really hard to not sound like some fucking caveman right now, but, Vinna, you can’t just pull shit like that!” Torrez growls at me. “Your actions and choices don’t just affect you anymore, and the lack of consideration you just showed all of us is not fucking cool.”
“Fuck, I know. I went all raccoon, I saw the shiny and just went for it. I’m fucking sorry,” I offer, looking each of them in turn.
Torrez pauses, suddenly not sure what to say. “You should be sorry,” he adds, floundering.
“I am. Seriously, I get it. I won’t pull that shit again,” I vow, and more than one of them gives me a questioning look.
Torrez runs his fingers through his hair and huffs out a frustrated breath. “Real talk, I thought she was going to defend herself. I’m not sure what to do now,” he leans over and mumbles out of the side of his mouth to Sabin.
I chuckle, as do a couple of the other guys.
“You can punish her in all the best ways later,” Sabin tells Torrez conspiratorially, and my vagina makes it known that she really likes the sound of that.
Torrez releases an amused snort and shakes his head at me. “No more solo vigilante shit, Witch,” he scolds again.
I run a finger over my heart in the shape of anX. “No more solo vigilante shit,” I agree.
Everyone seems appeased by my declaration, and the focus goes quickly from me to our surroundings.
“Looks like we have more hiking in our near future,” Ryker observes, his head tilted back to take in the big mountain eclipsing our presence on this side of the barrier.
“Yeah, I kind of thought there’d just be a big city waiting here for us, and maybe we’d get, like, a parade and shit,” Becket voices, and I shake my head at him while fighting an amused smile.
“What if there isn’t anyone here?” Knox asks, the question promptly wiping the amusement from my face. “I mean, we all just thought there’d be others on this side of the barrier, but what if there isn’t? What if the barrier protects nothing now and just...is?”
That thought flaps around the group like a pest no one wants to land on them. I run my gaze over the shadowed trees, grass and shrubs surrounding us.
“Yeah, that thought never really crossed my mind,” I confess.
“Me neither,” Bastien and Valen both say at the same time.
“Well, the only way we’re going to find out is to either go up this mountain or around it,” Enoch observes, and we all tilt our heads back to take in the high peak above us.
We all let out groans and growls of annoyance. None of us had any idea what kind of welcome we would receive, but we were all thinking that getting to the other side of the barrier would mean no more walking.
“All those in favor of going around?” Sorik asks, raising his hand to cast his vote.
Everyone else follows suit. Without another word, he heads off to the right, and we begin our trek to skirt around the base of the rocky mound that’s now in our way.
“If there is anyone here, how long do you think it will take before we’re on their radar?” Kallan asks.
And it’s right at that moment that heat runs through me. It’s like Kallan’s question alone has activated my runes in some way. They start to glow, and I heat up. At first I’m confused by the sensation, because there’s something oddly familiar about it, which makes it even more strange.
“Um...something’s happening,” I voice at the same time that several of them ask, “Do you feel that?”
It’s that question that triggers the memory of the last time this happened. Magic builds inside of me like I’m a pressure cooker, and I know that any second now, it’s going to explode out of me and do something to the barrier we just walked through. The last time this happened was when I first crossed the magical barrier onto Lachlan’s property. My magic sort of just… highjacked it. I suspect that the same thing is about to happen, but the magic that’s rushing into me now is a hell of a lot more intense than anything I experienced the last time.
I wince at the force of magic building in me, and my eyes land on Siah’s worried gaze. He opens his mouth to say something to me, but my head fills with a rushing sound, and I can’t make out what he’s trying to communicate. All of sudden, his runes light up, and it’s as if someone just flipped the on switch for all of my Chosen.
Their glow is blinding, and I try to turn away from it and shield my eyes, but I can’t move. I strain against the magic filling me, and just when things are bordering on painful, the magic explodes in a brutal flash like a bomb just went off. My scream is lost to the thundering sound of magic pouring out of everything that I am. It doesn’t ripple out like it did at Lachlan’s barrier, but blasts straight up until it slams into the dome of the barrier above us and then umbrellas out.
