“Cass! It’s safe to come out,” I yelled, pulling up Tianna’s contact listing on my phone. I knew we’d agreed that she’d come up with a spell that would go into the gate and notify him it was safe to return, but I couldn’t discount the possibility that he might be able to hear me and come out on his own. No point making things complicated if we didn’t need to. The less time my bestie spent in the underworld, the better.
“Cass!” I called again right as Tianna answered her phone. “Hey,” I said to her while Brock filed in behind me. “The agents just left. I’m calling to Cass, but I’m not sure he can hear me. You should probably head out here to do your spell once you’re all clear over there.”
“I can’t,” she said, voice tight. “I’m trapped here.”
“What?” I squeaked. “Is everyone all right? What’s going on?”
Tianna chuckled. “No need to freak out, girl. We’re all fine. So fine that the agents skipped right over us. Johnny did some kind of last-minute high-level cloaking spell that disguised the location of the entire coven. We saw the armored vehicles driving by on the road, but they couldn’t find us.”
“No doubt they intended to surprise us all at once so we couldn’t warn each other,” Brock grumbled from where he was listening to the conversation at my side.
“That was smart,” I said to Tianna.
“A little too smart maybe,” Tianna said. “It was such an advanced spell that Johnny is having a bit of trouble taking it down now, and I’ve never seen anything like it before. We’re trying to figure out what’s glitching. The cloaking sort of backfired and locked us in at the same time. No one can leave the property.”
“So you might be a while, then?” I asked.
“Seems like it. I’m sure we’ll get it figured out with time.”
“All right … well, I’ll just keep calling to Cass until you can get here. He should be fine to wait in there a little longer.”
“Uh, Evie,” Brock said, and I spun to face the direction of the gate.
“Hold up,” I spoke into the phone. “The bartender is climbing out of the gate.”
“Hey, man,” Brock called out.
The large demon bartender, who’d come on to me when I first met him, was grim. His face looked ashen, and his mouth was pulled into a frown.
“What is it?” I asked, my heart thumping in my chest already. That was the face of someone with bad fucking news to share.
“They took Cass,” the bartender with the horns said in a gruff voice.
“What do you mean, ‘they took Cass?’” I was going to be sick.
“They came out of nowhere and snatched him before we had the chance to react. They snuck up on us, knocked me out.”
“What the hell is going on?” Tianna asked through the phone, but I couldn’t answer her yet.
I forced the words through a throat that was suddenly bone dry. “Who’s ‘they?’ Who took him?”
“Three sirens. We didn’t even see them coming.”
“Tianna,” I snapped into the phone, “get that spell down as quickly as you fucking can. We’ve got a big problem over here and I’ll take all the help I can get. These bitch sirens have Cass, and I’m getting him back. And then I’m going to kill every motherfucking one of them.”
* * *
“What’s happening to her?” Brock asked my father with panic in his voice. I was pacing the living room floor; arcs of purple magic flared off my skin, lashing out at the walls and leaving dark marks there.
“She is angry, and her magic is becoming unstable.” My father spoke as if I wasn’t there. I knew I needed to calm down, that weird shit was happening to my body, but I couldn’t. My best friend in the entire world had been taken. Calista and her psychotic evil sisters had turned my life into a shit show and I was pissed. If one tiny pink hair on his head was damaged, I would eviscerate them all.
“Ev. Can you focus on my voice?” Brock said quietly.
I stopped pacing. “I can hear you,” I snapped. “I’m trying.” Then I resumed my pacing.
I couldn’t go into the gate because it would kill me. I wasn’t demon in origin. I didn’t have any demon bounty hunter friends or anyone I could send in after Cass, and while the bartender was willing to help as much as he could, let’s face it, he was a fucking bartender—useless in a fight against three nasty bitches.
A crash pulled my attention as a painting ripped off the wall and slammed onto the floor.
