Chapter 26 Strength in Numbers
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
Samuel wrinkled his forehead. “Define more witches.”
Didi straightened, her expression the one she wore when delivering compliance verdicts nobody wanted to hear. “Six. I think six witches combining their powers might be enough to stop Esmeralda.”
“So, five including you?” I asked warily.
Didi nodded. “Mrs. Chen should be one of them. I know she likes to keep to herself, but she’s pretty powerful.”
Surprise jolted me at this. I never realized my old neighbor had that kind of rep in the Amberford witching community.
Didi hesitated. “Melody and the Ashgrove witches have the right kind of magic to help us.”
Barney raised an elegant eyebrow. “You want to recruit people who are already under the enemy’s control?”
“I think there might be a way around that.” Didi tapped the ley line map.
“Arthur said a three-line convergence amplifies magic exponentially. Esmeralda will be operating at a power level no witch can match individually. Not me. Not Mrs. Chen.” She leveled a hard stare at us.
“But coordinated magical firepower over a convergence could work.”
Gavin’s nostrils puffed with alarm.
I chewed my lip. “What about Daria? She’s the Alliance chair and one of the strongest witches in Amberford. Wasn’t she due back imminently?”
“I checked with Cornelius this morning. Daria’s flight back from the West Coast was delayed. Something about a dispute between two covens in Portland that escalated into a weather event.”
“A weather event,” Samuel repeated leadenly.
Didi made a face. “Apparently someone hexed the rain. She won’t be back for a couple of days at the earliest.”
My stomach churned. “We don’t have a couple of days. And if Esmeralda moved the sisters from the warehouse because she knew we were close, she could move them again. Or worse.”
“The Lincoln sisters might be swimming with the fishes by then,” Bo contributed glumly from under the table.
“Thanks for that comforting thought,” Samuel muttered.
The unspoken possibility of the Lincoln sisters’ fate hung in the air like a nasty smell.
“Barney is right though,” Gavin said nervously. “The Ashgrove witches and Melody are under the influence of that witch. Unless we break the subjugation spell they’re under, bringing them onboard now will only alert our enemy.”
Didi’s jaw tightened. “That’s where Abby comes in. The kind of binding this witch used requires proximity to unravel. The spell is woven into the Ashgrove witches and Melody’s magical signatures at a fundamental level. The only way to break it is to overpower it.”
Barney’s pupils flared. “Ah. So somebody whose power doesn’t play by the usual rules could do it.”
The vampire and the witch looked at me like I was steak at an all-meat diner.
Amber flared in Samuel’s pupils, his displeasure singing across the mate bond.
“Abby’s not a witch,” my alpha said coolly.
Bo poked his head out.
“Yeah,” my dog huffed. “She couldn’t hex a carrot if she tried.”
I decided to ignore my dog’s insult.
“The barriers at the Holts’ ball and under the Chamber of Commerce were static ones,” I protested weakly, my pulse quickening. “This is binding magic that’s alive inside people.”
“Which is exactly why it might work,” Didi said.
Her gaze had sharpened. “Your power doesn’t just break magic, Abby.
At the Holts’ ball, you issued a command that overrode every supernatural in the room.
Alphas, vampires, fae. Things that should have been impossible.
” She paused. “Subjugation magic forces a witch’s will into submission.
I think you can do that too. And I believe you can do the opposite.
You can nullify control. That’s how you broke the crystal skull curse. You overwhelmed it.”
My mouth went dry. I’d never thought about it that way.
Didi wrinkled her brow. “I also think your powers are strongest when you’re near a ley line or a convergence.”
“This is all speculation,” Samuel said reluctantly.
The glance he shot me felt like a warning to keep quiet about my new white wolf powers.
“It’s the best theory we’ve got,” Didi said flatly.
Bo’s ears flattened. “Can I say that walking into a dark witch’s lair and hoping for the best is the kind of plan that makes me want to poop? And I mean bad poop.”
Didi narrowed her eyes. “There is no good poop.”
Gavin’s tail was twitching nervously. Barney looked like he had opinions about this proposal that centuries of aristocratic restraint were barely containing.
Still, the final call lay with Samuel.
I felt him reach a decision across the mate bond.
“How do we contact the Ashgrove witches?” he said, frowning. “They’ve gone dark and the witch controlling them is unlikely to make it easy for them to communicate.”
“Melody might be able to get through to the ones in her coven,” Didi said. “Of course, there’s no guarantee they’ll agree to help. The binding might not let them.”
“Shouldn’t we break the spell now?” Gavin said, puzzled. “They’ll be able to cooperate then.”
Didi shook her head. “Esmeralda will feel it. She’ll know we’re coming. We have to get them to the property and do it there.”
I considered this with a frown. “It’s a risk. She might catch on to what we’re planning.”
A muscle jumped in Samuel’s jawline. “Right now, every option is a risk.”
A knock at the conference room door interrupted us. Mindy’s head phased through the wood, making Gavin yelp.
“Sorry.” She didn’t look sorry. “Nigel says there’s been unusual activity on the magical monitoring network. Three spikes in the last hour, all originating from the same area.”
“Let me guess,” Samuel said sourly. “North of the Crossroads.”
Mindy blinked. “Yes.”
My belly clenched.
“She knows we’re on her tail,” Didi said in a voice filled with ice. “Whatever she’s doing to the Lincoln sisters, she’s ramping it up.”
Samuel’s expression hardened. “Abby, call Mrs. Chen. Didi, talk to Melody. Convince her that this is the only way she’ll escape that witch’s control and have her bring the Ashgrove witches onboard however she can. We move at dusk.”
He ended the meeting.
I headed out to my desk, Bo padding silently by my side with his squeaky toy in his mouth. My mind raced as I sat down and reached for my phone.
Events were accelerating at a pace that should have made me uncomfortable. Still, I knew the plan we’d come up with was our best chance to rescue the Lincoln sisters.
Mrs. Chen picked up on the second ring.
“I was wondering when you’d call,” she said.
I blinked. “You were?”
“I’ve been feeling disturbances in the ley lines all morning. Something or someone is drawing on them aggressively.” Her tone sharpened. “I take it you found out who took the Lincoln sisters.”
I gave her a condensed version of what we’d discovered so far, including our findings at the warehouse and the Thornwick Family Trust, and carefully omitted any mention of my glamour-piercing and magic tracing capabilities.
Mrs. Chen was silent for a brief moment.
“A spell that can drain the Lincoln sisters of their magic would explain the ley line activity,” she finally murmured.
I told her what we intended to do next.
“That’s an insane plan,” the witch said bluntly.
“It’s a pooptastic plan is what it is,” Bo murmured from under the desk, his toy squeaking forlornly.
I sighed. “It’s the only one we have. Didi believes coordinated witch power is the best way to fight Esmeralda.”
There was a longer pause this time.
“Dorothy is right,” Mrs. Chen agreed reluctantly. “A three-line convergence can be used offensively, but it can also be turned against someone who’s drawing on it. If we get enough witches working in concert, we might be able to redirect the convergence’s energy.”
“Didi’s trying to reach Melody and the Ashgrove witches now. She said their magic was the right kind to fight this witch.”
“I know the Ashgrove witches personally.” Something steely entered the old witch’s voice. “Tell Didi to pick me up. I’ll talk to them.”
I hesitated, conscious I was asking the elderly witch to deliberately expose herself to danger.
Mrs. Chen sensed this. “Don’t worry. I survived Cordelia Thornwick’s attempted coup forty-six years ago. Another Thornwick witch doesn’t scare me. Even if I was, I’m too old and too stubborn to let that stop me.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
Bo wagged his tail hesitantly after I hung up.
“Mrs. Chen is terrifying, in a bad poop kind of way,” my dog huffed.
He wasn’t wrong. Our former neighbor was a pensioner who apparently didn’t think anything of fighting a dark witch.
“Ellie better watch herself,” my dog added with a somewhat morbid gleam in his eyes. “She might get turned into a toad if she steps out of line.”
I pursed my lips. Ellie could step out of line by just smiling.
Gavin appeared at my desk, his horns retracted but his tail twitching.
“So,” the dragon newt said, fidgeting. “While we’re all still alive and not facing imminent magical death.”
I stared. “Yes?”
“Nigel finally set a date for his dinner with Mindy.”
Janet’s ears pricked by the water cooler. Barney’s fingers froze on his vintage typewriter.
I blinked. Of all the things I’d expected the dragon newt to say, that was not one of them. “He did?”
“Yeah. Thursday.” Gavin’s tail swished happily.
“Where did he pick?” I asked carefully.
I didn't need wolf senses to know Janet and Barney were hanging on to our every word.
“That new supernatural tapas place on Ninth. The one with the enchanted menus. It can accommodate a boogeyman and a ghost and it doesn’t have a dress code that excludes tentacles.”
“Good choice,” Bo observed like a connoisseur.
Gavin shuffled closer, his voice dropping to a whisper.
“Also, Nigel wanted me to ask you something.” The dragon newt went pink.
“He wants to know if you have any tips. For the date. Because you and Samuel are the only successful office romance he knows of.” He rushed through the last part so fast the words nearly caught fire.
I saw Janet and Barney grimace out the corner of my eye.
I was about to advise that Nigel should just be himself when I realized we were talking about a boogeyman who sprouted extra appendages and eyes, and who lit up like a Christmas tree when startled. I hesitated.
“Tell him to keep the tentacles to a minimum until at least the third date.”