Page 80 of Bewitching the Wolf

“There’s absolutely no pain,” she exclaims, bearing weight through the leg. “Tippy-Anna what did you just do?”

I smile. Shrug it off. “Just a new technique I learned recently.”

But I know it’s much, much more than that.

It’s my wixen magic getting stronger.

And it’s happened because I am mate bonded to a wolf.

CHAPTER 22

JAX

Bam!

I land with a jolt.

It takes me a moment to get my breath back, but luckily I’m not too shaken around. Immediately, I can see through the cape’s folds as clearly as if I’m looking through a glass pane. Seems the new runes are doing their job.

And what’s more, we’ve hit the bullseye—Devine Tower.

Hidden in the folds of the cape, I start to move swiftly along ornately decorated corridors lined with gilt-framed paintings of self-important looking humans.

Soon, I reach a set of grand double doors, and the cape just glides right through them like a hot knife through butter.

I know this room.

Although I’ve never been in here, I remember it from the weekly broadcasts the mayor made when I was a kid.

We’re in the Opal Office.

Now I understand how it got its name. Every wall is shimmering opal stone. Precious opal from the Labyrinth, pulled out of the ground on our lower levels and shipped up here to be made into fine jewelry for Sparkle residents, sold at DeVines department store.

Or, as here, turned into wallpaper.

What a fucking waste.

Everything else in the high-ceilinged room is equally ostentatious.

A huge painting of Ronald DeVine, with a gold crown on his head, a scepter in his hand, and his signature smug smile, takes up most of the wall behind an equally huge desk and a throne-like chair.

My lip curls with disdain. I guess that’s Ronald’s ultimate aim: to be crowned king of all the domes.

Ever since I was a kid, we’ve been subjected to billboards of his fake smile, his tan skin and dyed black hair. To endless broadcasts of him rambling about how he loves every single resident of Sparkle like his own children.

What a crock of shit.

When Mom disappeared, I wrote to him, brought the letter right here to Devine Tower. I got told to leave. On my second attempt, I got thrown out onto the street. I tried several more times after that, to no avail.

So much for our caring benefactor.

Soon we will know the real story behind all that Sparkles. What DV Medical and Biotech are up to, the fertility programs using minotaur sperm to increase human births, and the research they are doing into breathing Earth air, which is why they want our younglings to experiment on.

What—and who—is behind the demand for more munitions, more guns, more armored cars?

That is what we have to find out. And quickly.

We timed this mission carefully. Ronald is at a golf tournament today. He won’t be back for hours.