“Are you sufficiently caffeinated yet?” he grumbles. “Gonna tell me where we’re going now?”
“Maybe.” I grin at his grumbled response and lean forward to take another big bite of muffin. Z’s eyes heat momentarily as I lick my lips, a heat which is immediately dowsed as I chomp down.
I guess I owe him some kind of explanation. “So, it hit me the other day. Weknowthe Bad Vamps aren’t going to stop. They’ll kill a bunch more people and try again. And I can’t imagine the Archarcans are going to be fighting too hard until they recognize how big a threat the vamps are. They’ll write it off as a fluke or something, maybe have a few meetings and then by the time they’re ready to take action, a bunch more people will have been hurt as collateral damage.”
“Sounds about right.” He raises an eyebrow. “And you want us to be the ones to save the world?”
I shake my head. “I don’t want people to keep winning just because they force themselves into a position of power.”
Part of me understands exactly where the angry people of Nexus are coming from. They’re angry as hell, and I get that. Maybe we should raze the entire city to the ground and start new, with a city and a society that’s not so obsessed with its fucked up classism and obsession with hierarchy.
But then I remember that most of the people in this city are just trying to live their lives. They’re doing their best to survive here and they don’t deserve to have their lives torn apart.
Sure, they might be people whose eyes skimmed over me and Rook when we were homeless kids, or when we were living in barely habitable places. Or when we barely had enough money to feed ourselves. But does that mean they all deserve to be drained by vamps or ground down by witches who are born to the right family and wound up with acceptable types of magic?
I don’t think so.
Between us, we’re all plenty powerful in our own way. The Nexus mages have money and connections, but the rest of us have connections to some of the hidden corners of the city and beyond.
“What’s the plan, then?” Zeph asks.
I’m conscious, despite having raised my mental walls sky high, I don’t want to just blab my brainwave out loud in the middle of the street and risk Ember overhearing.
“I’ll tell you as soon as we get to where we’re going,” I tell him.
“You’re being cryptic,” he mutters. “It’s annoying.”
I go up on my toes and peck him on the jaw, grinning up at him as he scowls. “Do you think that maybe there’s a reason I’m holding off on telling you?” I widen my eyes, hoping he remembers we both have a snoop in our heads. There’s no way I’ll be able to focus on my mental walls while I have this much sugar buzzing through my veins.
We reach an ancient, crumbling building that’s just a few streets away from where the judiciary took me for their little interrogation. The entire area is pretty run down and has a few office blocks and not much else. It also has a little-known chamber inside what used to be a laboratory, which has long been abandoned for a fancier location in another part of the city.There’s one thing they weren’t able to move though, which now is barely used apart from as a niche tourist destination for magic lovers.
“The Dead Zone?” Zeph mutters, his eyes scanning up from the dirty old carpets and grubby walls to the sign in front of us. It’s covered in a thick layer of dust, which makes the words barely visible.
“Have you ever been here before?”
“Have I ever been to a place called the Dead Zone before? Can’t say I have. You have some pretty weird ideas of date locations, Little Witch.”
I snort and shake my head at him. Until I wound up in this area the other day, I hadn’t thought about this place in a long time. Not until my panic over my magic being nulled triggered a buried memory from my teenage years.
“Rook and I used to sneak in here when I was about fourteen,” I tell Zeph. “When my magic was this overwhelming thing that would greedily try to suck up anything and everything, he brought me here.”
“It’s kind of creepy, no?” Zeph says.
I glance around at the smooth walls and door. It’s like being inside an egg made of solid metal.
He lowers his voice, pressing his body close to mine. “Is this a kink thing? Like a sensual deprivation thing where I fuck you against the wall and no one can hear you scream?”
“Maybe later.” I smirk at him. He doesn’t look opposed to the idea. “It would be nice to let go, knowing that Ember’s not accidentally listening in.”
“The fuck?”
Ah, seems like I hadn’t shared that little traumatic tidbit with Zeph.
“So, this place is a kind of magical Faraday cage,” I tell him. “It nulls any magic that’s trying to influence us from outside, and it nulls both of our powers as soon as we’re closed in here.”
It’s like my insides are totally relaxed. The usual grasping of my magic is totally calm. My shoulders loosen and my jaw relaxes.
“Allright then, other than fucking you against one of these walls, what else are we here for?” Zeph spreads his tree trunk thighs and tugs me to rest between them until I’m straddling his lap. “Spill.”
