“I don’t suppose,” she managed between breaths, “that you can do that in reverse? Suck him toward us?”
“No.”
Elsie made out the outline of a door up ahead. She searched for runes but saw none—
“Stop!” she shouted, digging in her heels. Bacchus ran into her, nearly bumping her into a wooden crate against the wall. Elsie had just recognized the symbol glimmering atop it.
“A mobile spell. This would have crushed us.” She crouched and pulled the rune apart, then pushed past the bin unscathed. She cursed. “We have to find another path. He’s getting away!”
Her toe hit something metal on the ground—a crowbar. Elsie considered it for only a moment before snatching it up. She couldn’t cast spells, but she could certainly swing this.
“It will be easier once we’re outside.” Bacchus moved past her and grabbed the door handle, opening it just as Elsie spied the slightest glimmer of a spell.
The ground shifted upward like a giant mouth, knocking Elsie into the crate. Cement, stone, and wood contorted and surged up and around Bacchus—a giant version of the spell he’d once laid for her at the duke’s estate. The one that had seized her shoe.
But this one swallowed him clear up to his neck.
“Bacchus!” she cried, finding her feet and rushing toward him. He might as well have been trapped in a mountain! She ran her hands over its uneven bumps, searching for the rune.
Bacchus grunted, trying to move, but he was pinned completely, his limbs immobile within his close-fitting prison. “Bloody . . . ,” he began, but didn’t finish whatever foul thing sat on his tongue. “He’s getting away!”
Elsie spied the slimmest glimmer in a crack. Her skeleton seemed to puddle inside her. “I found it, but it’s on the other side of the rock. Your side.” She tried to push her fingers through, cutting them as she did, but she couldn’t chip the cement. Stepping back, she wedged the crowbar in. It chipped away at the cement a little more, but it wasn’t hard enough to break the stone. Elsie put her weight on it, but it seemed the crowbar would break before the concrete mound did. Panicked breaths tore up and down her throat. “Maybe I-I can find something else. A hammer—”
“Elsie, leave me. Go.”
She shook her head. “I’ll get you out—”
“You’ll lose him!” he barked. “Go!”
“Can’t you melt it?” Desperation squeezed her voice out an octave higher than usual.
Bacchus shook his head, though he was barely able to do so. “This is stone. Do you know what the liquid version of stone is? And it’s too large to shift to gas. I’ll kill myself and you.”
Her breaths became rapid. “Can you try to change just a little of it? If I can get through—”
“Go, Elsie, before it’s too late!”
“I don’t leave people!” she snapped, hands fisted against the bespelled mound. She panted, seeing red, feeling as cold as Bacchus’s aspected ice.
Bacchus hesitated only a moment. “No, you don’t.”
Swallowing, she glanced up at him.
“Elsie.” His voice was firm yet somehow melodious, his Bajan accent slipping through. In the moonlight streaming from the open door, his eyes glowed. “You’re the one who can stop him. Who can get past his spells. He might listen to you. You need to go now, or you’ll lose his trail, and this will all be for nothing. I believe in you.”
“But—”
“I’ll know you’ll come back.” His eyes were intent, bright as emeralds. “Elsie, please. Go.”
She held his gaze for a heartbeat, cradling her injured fingers against her breast. He was right. She needed to go. But she could only undo spells, not create them. She was armed, somewhat, and after what had happened with Nash . . . she might be able to get past Ogden’s spells if she focused. But what if she couldn’t? She’d die, and Bacchus would be trapped here until a worker found him . . .
Her own possible demise flashed across her mind. Was she ready to die to stop Ogden?
It was what Robin Hood would do.
She started for the door. Paused. Glanced back to Bacchus.
She rushed toward him and, stepping onto one of the crags of his cement cage, lifted her face to his and kissed him on the cheek. His half beard was rough and startling against her jaw. Her nerves sparked, but it was done.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and without a second glance, she bolted out the door and across the dock.
Her employer might be able to slow her down, but in doing so, he left a clear path.
Follow the runes, find Ogden.
CHAPTER 24
There was something oddly familiar about the spells she chased, but Elsie couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
She disarmed an enormous weed that shot up through cracks in the concrete, grown with a temporal spell. Removed, albeit with shaking hands, a rational spell on a warehouse wall that created the illusion of a giant spider. Leapt over a gap a physical spell had created in the boards of the bridge. Disenchanted another that had fused several boards together to create a wall.
There were no dockworkers or security seeking out the cause of the noise, which worried her. Was St. Katharine’s so empty at night, or had Ogden already . . . eliminated them?
Before she followed the trail into the next warehouse, an owl swooped down at her at a strange angle from the direction of the river, and Elsie shrieked despite her need to be undetected. She wouldn’t be able to remove the spiritual spell driving the animal to attack her, so she bolted for the door and slammed it shut behind her, crowbar squeezed in her clammy right hand. The bird’s talons scraped against the door half a second later.
She raced through the warehouse, following runes scattered with a flare of insanity, some placed on the ceiling, others the floor or random places on the wall, even when the location was a poor choice for the spell. Through it all, that strange sense of familiarity nagged at her, but she didn’t have time to think about what it meant. Or the fact that she’d kissed Bacchus Kelsey while he was in a compromised position. Good heavens, what had she been thinking? At least it had only been on the cheek.
At least she wouldn’t have to face him again if one of Ogden’s spells caught up with her. Or if she caught up with the man himself and their reunion went awry. You have to risk it, she reminded herself, searching, listening, feeling, and smelling for opus spells. If she caught up to him and came out the victor . . . it would be all right. It would allow her to right her wrongs, to an extent. God knew she had to try.
She pulled apart a density alteration spell hovering midair, slightly to the left, which made the air too thick to walk through. It was the eighteenth spell she’d encountered.
Her wrists and arms itched as though bitten by a hundred mosquitoes when she pushed open the door at the other end of the warehouse. The burn of gaslight stung her eyes. The moon reflected off the nearly still river water.
And illuminated Ogden as he crouched at the edge of the dock, untying a small fisherman’s boat. A sheaf of mismatched papers—opus spells—stuck out from the collar of his paint-stained shirt.
“Ogden, stop,” she pleaded, raising one hand as though in surrender while stashing the crowbar behind her back with the other. She strode toward him, focused. Casting an opus spell required verbal activation, so at least she’d have warning. “Let’s talk about this.”
Ogden pulled the sheaf from his shirt, and Elsie paused as though he’d brandished a gun. He’d need only to whisper, Excitant, and those spells would come flying for her. “No closer,” he warned. His voice came out hoarse, and his hands shook as they held the papers. Why? Was he afraid? Ill?