Without glancing down, he palmed the other cup and drank slowly. “I’m starting to like this flavor.”
Certain he hadn’t spiked my drink with a truth spell or a worse additive, I settled in for the ride.
Not long after, he pulled onto a winding dirt road with nothing but trees for miles.
“What caused this dryad to go off the rails?” I sat up to pay attention. “They’re usually pretty chill.”
“The paperwork says pollution in the water supply where she sprouted caused a psychotic break, but it’s rare for a dryad to land on our radar. As you said, they’re pretty chill. They don’t cause problems.”
“Do you have the file on you?”
For a beat, Asa drummed his fingers on the wheel. “It’s on the floorboard behind my seat.”
Clay, who couldn’t fit shotgun easily, must have left it back there when he finished reading.
“This says magical pollution.” I skimmed for more details. “It doesn’t say what kind. That’s important, right?”
“No one expected this to escalate. Another case of allowing preconceived notions to color expectation.”
The bulk of the vehicle made parking fun, assuming we wanted to get out again without requiring a tow.
The SUV Clay had arrived in was nowhere in sight, which puzzled me, but there were other roads.
“Are you armed?” Asa reached into the console to retrieve his service weapon. “Or do you need to be?”
The modified Glock used ensorcelled rounds that blasted magical shrapnel throughout a target’s body.
“I’m good.” I patted the leather pouch. “I brought my own firepower.”
Interest sparked in his eyes before he slid out his door onto the grass. Interest in my magic. Not in me.
After giving his drink the stink eye, I joined him in the field and did a thing I rarely did these days.
I drew my wand.
The length of twisted wood resembled a crooked finger and had come from the magnolia tree that grew above my mother’s grave. Most wands required an emotional link to infuse the carved base with power.
For white witches, it was a familial element. For black witches, it was a link to an important death.
For me, it was both those things. I hadn’t traded wands when I changed disciplines. Mine covered both.
A steady thumping noise drew us deeper into the woods, where all suspicion Asa had ulterior motives in bringing me along vanished as we discovered the spot where the agent in charge of this retrieval lost her life.
Death didn’t bother me. I had caused too much of it to be squeamish. But this was a bad way to go.
The killing blow crushed the woman’s skull. The dryad had decided to smash her brain to jelly for funsies.
I squatted next to the body, as if there could be any doubt the woman was dead, and there it was…
A tingle along my senses that alerted me to the presence of power ripe for harvesting.
Her heart was intact, and like an addict jonesing for a hit, I salivated as I stared at her chest.
“Clay must be over there.”
On a breath that was part mercy and part desperation, I murmured a spell and touched the wand to her.
The body incinerated in a fever-bright rush of magic pulled straight from my core, leaving fine white dust that would scatter on the winds, lifting her soul to whatever afterlife she believed in.