When we entered the vault before, I could feel the residual magic from the vampire key,Oberi said.This time, I can’t feel anything.
My stomach hollowed, and I slowly approached the pedestal. Hands trembling, I opened the glass case, then lifted the top of the box.
My fingers met nothing but the soft silk of the pillow inside. The key was gone.
“Frank conned us!” Danny cried.
“No, he wouldn’t,” Ava insisted, though she sounded unsure. “Something else must’ve happened.”
I grabbed the box and twisted it around in my hands. We were too late… again.
Fuck!
I threw the box at the wall, and it clattered to the ground.
Kallie hastily picked it up and put it back on the pedestal. “Calm down. We’ll figure this out.”
“Not from this time period,” I snarled. “Let’s go back home. Danny, release the employees and get this vault sealed back up again. Kallie, get us out of here.”
“It’s cute you’re addressing me by name, toots,” Danny cooed.
If I ever wanted to hit somebody, it was him right now.
We returned to the demigod training room. That was good news, because it meant when we went back eighteen years, we didn’t change enough to affect our location in the present.
It was the only bit of good news I’d had all day.
“Fucking hell!” I roared as I paced around the room. “What is it going to take to get this key?!”
“I don’t understand what went wrong,” Ava mused. “Frank had to put the key in the vault, because the box was there when we arrived. The key should’ve stayed there until the night before we broke in, when someone else stole it out from under us. Except this time, someone got to it decades before.”
“We can’t know that for sure,” Danny pointed out. “Frank could’ve changed his mind.”
“Great,” I snarled. “You scared him off. I knew telling him about us was a mistake.”
“There’s a way to figure that out,” Kallie stated. “But we’re going to need Chancey’s help.”
Kallie left the room. I paced the area impatiently, waiting for her to come back. I was so pissed off nobody said anything— not even dumbass Danny.
She came back a half an hour later with Chancey in tow. “Chancey’s agreed to do another past-life regression, so we can learn what happened after we spoke to him in Paris.”
“I’ll help in any way I can,” Chancey offered. “But this better not hurt.”
“It’ll be just like taking a nap,” Kallie promised.
Kallie conjured a bed and instructed him to lie down. I heard the rustling of pages as she rifled through a book.
“What spell are you going to use?” Ava asked.
“The same one from my grimoire that Marcus used on me months ago to make me remember my life as Princess Amalie,” she responded.
“We shouldn’t use that spell,” I immediately objected. “It went wrong the last time we tried.”
“The spell has to be performed by an Unseelie sorceress, and I’ve got Unseelie blood. We fucked it up last time because Marcus cast it. This time, it’ll go right,” Kallie promised.
I hoped it did, because we needed some confirmation. Kallie took a breath and began to recite. “Phantom Doe of Shadow, Neva, Goddess of Time, take us back through distant past, make clear through path divine. Answers found in ancestors, hidden soon be known, through graves of ancient ones we dig, blood to blood, bone to bone.”
Unlike the last time we performed this spell, everything was still and quiet. No monsters or spirits appeared to interrupt the meditation, and Chancey didn’t start to shake. I didn’t hear anything except Chancey’s soft breaths. Everyone else was too on edge to even dare to make a sound.
