“A cave, huh?”
Mike felt a shift in the air, and that familiar ball of ice formed in his gut. “Yeah. I locked it in a special box that only I can get into. Soul resonance. Trick I learned from the book.” Behind him, the magic fizzled, and he hid his sigh. She had been about to kill him. “Box kills anyone else who touches it. Disintegrates them. Spent my morning crafting the thing out of dragon-hide, minotaur fur and what was left of the succubus.”
“You had those things just lying around?” Some of the edge was gone from Sarah’s voice, replaced with curiosity.
“Emily had tons of weird shit stored all over this place. Granted, the dragon-hide was hard to identify, it was in a box with so many other things.”
“And the grimoire let an amateur such as yourself simply create such a thing? And it wasn’t hard?”
“Oh yeah. It’s like Hardcore Magic for Idiots.” Mike was looking for the path that wound down into the valley, doing his best to pretend like he knew where he was going. The Mandragora vines twitched when he neared them, but were otherwise still. He noticed that their dark green hue had gone slightly pale. He really needed to feed the damn thing.
But not just yet.
“If one such as you with no magical aptitude could achieve such a feat, then I can only imagine what I could do with it.” Sarah was close enough now that she poked Mike in the back with the tip of her knife. It split the fabric of his shirt with ease, and Mike winced, the sensation of warm blood down his back flooding him with terror. It would take no effort at all for Sarah to take his life, and then the others would fall into her hands.
“There was a section in the back that I couldn’t figure out.” The lie came easily, and Sarah’s eagerness to hear them was a blessing. “It was a bunch of diagrams, and some ingredients and stuff I couldn’t pronounce.”
“That makes sense. It likely has to do with the Old Ones. That is the strongest kind of magic.” Sarah’s voice had risen slightly in pitch. Mike looked back and saw her cheeks had reddened. “If one such as you could do Master-level spellwork, then I bet I would have access to the Creation-level ones!”
Mike let out a breath. He had no idea what she thought the grimoire was, but now he really hoped that none of his bullshit was actually true. If such a thing actually existed, he wanted no part of it. It would be the magic equivalent of finding a live nuclear warhead in the Vault.
The path became steep, and Sarah waited for Mike to traverse the longer stretches of it first. She’d hiked up her robes and tucked them into her belt, revealing long, slender legs. Her large breasts bounced pleasantly on the occasions she had to hop down from a rock or tree stump, but her attractiveness ended where her face began. Her face frozen in a sneer, he wondered what drove a woman of such beauty to be so evil. Then again, beauty had never seemed very particular about who possessed it.
“We are almost to the bottom,” he said, surveying the land. Mike was playing a hunch. He’d noticed that the Mandragora vines ran outward in every direction, but always clustered within a couple of feet of the trail itself. The further they walked, the thicker the vines got, and they were now stepping beneath the canopy of the jungle, the floor of the path decorated in the shadows of the leaves up above. “Need to go for a bit in here.”
“How far?” Sarah asked.
“I didn’t wear a Fitbit this morning. I found the cave the other day, after that fire lizard tried to kill me.”
“That was MY fire elemental,” Sarah said, the edge back in her voice. “If we don’t get there soon, I’m going to break both of your legs and make you crawl.”
Shit. He needed to do something. He saw that there were small stones littered along the trail. Looking at the increasingly thick vines all around them, he realized that they had begun to move, twisting around themselves like giant snakes. Every few steps, he shuffled his feet a little, trying to catch the ends of his shoelaces with his other foot. Gradually, he loosened one of them, all the while keeping his eye out for a rock big enough to do the trick.
“Hold up a second,” Mike said when he spotted one the size of an egg. He placed his foot right next to it. “Shoe’s untied, slowing me down.”
“Hurry up,” she snapped.
Mike chanced a look back. Though the wand was trained at him, her eyes were on the jungle. Suspicion was in her eyes-she clearly sensed danger, but could not spot it. After tying the laces on his shoe, he grabbed the rock and casually palmed it.
“Okay, I’m good.” Now that he had a stone, he needed to figure out how best to use it. Did he throw it at the vines, and hope they woke up and noticed him? Or should he try to nail Sarah with it, stun her and then tackle her into the vines? Sniffing through his blood-crusted nostrils, he suddenly knew what to do.
After scratching an itch by his mouth, he pinched his nose and gave it a sharp yank. He heard something pop, and blood flowed fully once again down his face. This time, he let it run down his shirt, caught some on his fingertips and flicked it toward the Mandragora. The vines immediately flexed, sensing prey nearby.
“It’s just up ahead now.” The trail twisted to the side, then switched back. A large tangle of vines lay along the edges of the narrow pass, and Mike wiped his face, coating the stone in his hand with blood. Slowing down to walk through the narrow section of
