“I just wanted help. You don’t belong here, Bo. This between us… we can’t… it can’t… I just thought that if I could find someone powerful enough…” My argument tumbled out of me, and he rolled his eyes as he bit out,
“Yeah, well, yer found him, girly.” Bo’s interruption made me wince.
“And with it, the real start to yer problems.”
Silence stretched, thick and suffocating, until he shook his head sharply, snapping himself out of it.
“Panicking won’t help. He’s gone for now, and that means we have a window.”
“A window for what?” I asked before flinging my arm out toward the glass behind his desk.
“Only it doesn’t exactly look like a plausible escape route, and I’m not exactly down for trying to scale the walls like Spiderman,” I pointed out dryly.
“Well, as handy as a spider demon would be right now, I did mean a window of opportunity.”
I swallowed hard, my gaze flicking once more to the locked door.
“And how exactly do you suggest we do that?”
Bo’s eyes shifted to the shelves lining the walls, something calculating flickering there beneath the fear.
“We improvise,” he said at last.
“And we do it fucking fast,” he added, clearly forming some kind of idea in his mind.
The moment the words left his mouth, he was already moving, his small frame darting toward the towering shelves that lined the walls. His sharp eyes flicked rapidly across the spines of the books, fingers twitching as if he were restraining the urge to grab at everything at once.
“Bo,”I hissed, my voice tight as panic clawed up my throat.
“This isn’t really the time to browse his book collection.” He shot me a sharp look over his shoulder, his expression a brittle mix of fear and determination.
“If I were browsing, we’d already be dead.”
Erh, okay, so I didn’t really know what to do with that, so I wisely kept quiet and let him do his thing…whatever that turned out to be.
Thankfully, at least, I didn’t have long to wait as he was soon wrenching a thick, heavy tome free from the shelf. The sound of it scraping against the shelf was far louder than it should have been. My heart leaped violently, my gaze snapping to the closed office door as my body tensed, half expecting it to burst open at any second. It didn’t, but the sense of being watched still lingered, crawling up my spine like an icy serpent.
Bo flipped the book open with practiced urgency, rifling through the old, yellowed pages until he found what he was looking for. He shoved it toward me without explanation, his fingers lingering for only a heartbeat before pulling back.
“Here.”
I stared down at the page and immediately knew two things. The first was that I didn’t recognize a single symbol printed there. And the second was that every one of them made my skin prickle with unease.
“Erm… okay, so yeah, I’m sure that’s great and all, but not sure what you think I can do with it,” I said with a frown.
As for the symbols, they weren’t anything like the Wicca symbols I recognized from my childhood. The ones drawn carefully on kitchen tables or stitched into cloth by my mother and sister. No, these symbols were jagged and layered. Angular shapes overlapped one another as if they had been written without any concern for whether human eyes could ever understand them. They felt old…wrong somehow.
Heavy with otherworldly intent.
He rolled his eyes at me, the wrinkles around them rippling slightly.
“What do yer think I want…? Now quit stalling and do yer thing before he comes back, and then we are really in the shitter pit.”
I shot him a look that was half disbelief, half panic.
“The shitter pit? That’s not exactly comforting.”
“Yer want comforting, or yer want out?” he snapped.
