His expression lit up as he accepted it. “Thanks. They’re my favorite.”
“I know.” I took in his appearance. Black jeans leading down to heavy black boots. A black-and-gray-plaid flannel open to reveal a black turtleneck. He even had on a black stocking cap. “You plan on robbing a bank in that getup?”
He nodded at my faded jeans, tennis shoes, and rather stylish puffy jacket. “You plan on posing for an Eddie Bauer ad in that getup?”
“Touché.” I bowed, conceding to him as the winner of this round.
“You don’t have any boots? The woods are going to be muddy. You’ll need traction and something to protect your ankles if you step wrong.”
“I’ll be fine, nature boy. Let’s go.” We stepped up to the barrier and paused, looking at each other. “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Passing through the barrier was never the issue. It was what waited for us on the other side that usually bit us in the butts. Then again, maybe with Graves attempting to merge the two sides of our world, dark elementals wouldn’t try to attack us every chance they got.
We braced ourselves as we stepped beyond the barrier and into the woods, glancing around and listening for any slight noise announcing we had visitors. So far, so good. As we moved deeper into the shelter of the trees, the ground grew spongy, the mud thick and slippery. It stuck to the bottom of my shoes and crawled up the sides. I kept losing my footing and reaching out to Bryan to stop me from falling on my ass.
“Told you that you needed boots.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I scraped the mud off my shoes on a nearby fallen tree. The very next step, I had even more mud caked to me. Awesome.
The woods had a very distinctive smell during the winter, like a cross between wet wood and wet animal. Even though it wasn’t raining, water droplets dripped off the ends of the sagging underbrush. Every so often, a slight breeze would whistle through the trees, forcing us to pause to see if a dark elemental had blown in with it.
After the first hour of searching in silence, I started up the small talk. “How’s alchemy going?”
“I’m getting a lot better at my elixirs. Yesterday, I created one that cured the hiccups. It’s not turning lead into gold, but it’s something. Monday, we plan to create one that heals broken bones like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“That’s very cool. Too bad it wasn’t around when I broke my wrist last year. Wearing the cast for so long totally sucked. My hand looked all pale and wilty when Syd removed it.”
“You’d be amazed at the things we’ve already done. A powder that melts through metal. Elixirs that make you see in the dark. A serum that removes scars. We even turned a rock into a crystal.”
“Are you going to chase the dream of creating that one stone of immortality?”
He shook his head. “The philosopher’s stone is a myth. It doesn’t exist.”
“Tell that to Harry Potter,” I teased. We both laughed before falling silent once again.
We’d been searching for hours before I called it. My stomach grumbled, reminding me we forgot to bring something to snack on. Then again, we didn’t think it’d take all damn day. “I don’t think they’re here.”
“Stace said the coven was west of the school. This is west of the school.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” I’d never been able to tell the difference between north, south, east, or west. I had a hard enough time with left and right. I drew in a breath to tell him we’d try again tomorrow when something caught in my senses. Was that bacon? I sniffed the air. That was definitely bacon. The glorious aroma of salty awesomeness cut through the stench of wet everything. “Do you smell that?”
“It smells like Sunday morning.”
“Huh?”
“Every Sunday, my granddad would come over and make breakfast. It was kind of his thing. He would start with a giant batch of bacon. I’d wake up to that smell every Sunday morning and race out of my room to help him cook. It was…some of my better memories of him.”
“That’s why you don’t eat breakfast.” I put it together. Hell, I wouldn’t eat it either if it was a constant reminder of the man who epitomized darkness. Bryan’s granddad was a legend on the dark side, one so powerfully evil that to this day, some people still labeled Bryan as dark for sharing the same last name.
We followed the smell and spotted the source. Renee stood above an open fire, poking at a pan full of sizzling meat. Around the fire sat at least a dozen other women. She didn’t look up as we approached, simply waved for us to have a seat near the fire. We gladly did and both held out our hands to warm them. The rest of the woman all stared at us but said nothing.
“I was wondering when you’d open your eyes.” She kept her attention on the pan.
Again with that phrase. “What do you mean?”
“You passed us several times before you allowed one of your other senses to lead you here. The scent of the food pulled you in. You knew it was bacon, knew it was out of place in the middle of a forest, knew it had to be us. You trust your sense of smell.”
“It’s never let me down.”
“You listened to the breeze, listened for anything out of place, listened for any sign you’d been followed. You trust your sense of hearing.” She finally glanced up from the pan and regarded me with warm eyes. “You need to trust your sight as much as you trust your other senses. Open your eyes.”
I nodded and stared at the fire. She was right. I really needed to work on my trust issues. My sense of sight wasn’t just the physical sense. It was my insight, my intuition, trusting my gut.
