CHAPTER EIGHT || DANIEL
The bar was locked and all of the blinds were drawn over the windows when we arrived. There was a note in Reed’s handwriting taped to the door that read: CLOSED FOR PRIVATE EVENT.
Hunter knocked on the door and Lee opened it, his face set in grim lines. He ushered us inside and threw the deadbolt on the door.
Two tables had been pushed together in the center of the room and Robert Callahan was laid across them, unconscious, a folded jacket under his head that looked like it might’ve been Reed’s.
Dr. Langley, the town’s doctor and medical examiner—the only mundane human who knew about us, apart from Sally—was bent over him, one end of her stethoscope pressed against Robert’s chest and the other in her ears, listening to his pulse.
Lee came to stand beside me, his arms folded over his chest. Hunter stopped at my other side, his eyes widening with surprise as he took in the scene before us.
“What the hell?” he breathed. “No way.”
No way was right. It wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to guess we were all thinking about last night’s dream. The way Robert had intruded on us and then promptly collapsed. If this was a coincidence, it was a pretty big one.
Hunter suddenly went tense and stepped forward, putting himself bodily in front of me.
Startled, I looked up from Robert’s unconscious body and saw why.
There was a vampire in the room with us.
Topher stood near the long wooden bar, apart from everyone else. He was slim with sharp features and sandy blond hair, dressed in a green long-sleeved button-up shirt and brown slacks that looked oddly formal for Crescent Springs.
He arched a brow at us, his expression hardening as it lingered on the way Hunter had put himself in front of me, but he didn’t say anything.
I didn’t really know Topher that well. He was relatively new in town—he’d only been here for a few months.
He worked at the bookstore down the street and, apart from a few brief encounters where he’d sold me books, we hadn’t spoken.
His sole purpose for being in Crescent Springs—at the behest of Nathaniel Bailey, Seattle’s vampire king—was to help the pack.
I was pretty sure he’d been tasked with giving periodic reports to Nathaniel as well.
The vampire king was concerned about the bleeds, ever since he’d learned of their existence.
As far as I knew, Topher had never caused any trouble.
But vampires made wolves uneasy on a fundamental level, and the fact that Reed had called him in meant this situation was serious.
“Is this medical or supernatural?” Reed asked, apparently oblivious to the silent exchange between Hunter and Topher. He’d moved to stand on the opposite side of the makeshift examination table, frowning at Dr. Langley.
She sighed, straightening up and unhooking the stethoscope from her ears.
“Hard to say. We’ve got a fifty-seven-year-old man with no discernible injuries, no signs of stroke, and so far, no medical explanation for why he passed out.
” She paused. “His pulse is weak and his skin is sweaty but cool to the touch. His bloodwork might tell us more about what’s going on here, but there’s nothing obvious. It could be almost anything.”
“Harris is investigating his house as we speak,” Reed said grimly. “He wants to rule out medications that could’ve interacted or something.”
Dr. Langley nodded. “That’s smart of him.”
Reed smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “If there’s something to turn up, he’ll find it.” Then he added, “Robert said he had memory loss. Right before he passed out.”
Hunter stiffened beside me. “Wait. Memory loss?”
Reed nodded. “He said there was an entire month gone. The last thing he remembered was early June.”
I looked down at Robert’s unconscious face, feeling increasingly alarmed. Last night’s dream was replaying on a loop in my mind. A quick look over at Hunter and then Lee told me they’d probably landed on similar conclusions.
Reed turned his attention to me. “Is there any magic you can do to help us figure out what’s going on with him? Or what might’ve happened?”
“I can try a diagnostic spell,” I said, already running through options in my head. “There’s a spell called the Sword of Helios. It illuminates a person’s magical history—if any magic was ever done on him, or near him, it’ll show up in his aura.”
Reed nodded, looking relieved. “Perfect.”
What I didn’t tell them was that the Sword of Helios was ordinarily cast by a group of witches or warlocks working in concert.
Performing it solo was dangerous—it required channeling a significant amount of magical power, more than a single conduit usually possessed.
Which was a polite way of saying it could burn me out if I wasn’t careful.
But if there was possibly a monster in Crescent Springs stealing people’s memories, I needed to help.
“Alright, stand back. I need to create a circle.”
Everyone else stepped back to give me room.
I set my messenger bag—which was filled with my on-the-go witchcraft supplies—on the table beside me and pulled out a piece of chalk.
I began drawing a large circle clockwise on the floor around the tables Robert was resting on.
I envisioned a sphere of light forming around me as I muttered an incantation for raising and containing magical power.
The circle wasn’t strictly necessary, but it would help contain the magic I was about to channel into the spell, so it didn’t go anywhere else by accident.
I was going to need every scrap of power I could muster.
When I closed the circle of chalk around Robert and me, the magic snapped into place and the atmosphere of the room shifted immediately, becoming denser.
Dr. Langley frowned at the boundary of the circle I’d drawn, her eyebrows climbing toward her hairline. “Well, I think this is my cue to head out and start analyzing the blood sample I took.” She glanced at Reed. “I’ll call you if—when—I have something conclusive.”
Reed nodded at her and walked her to the door. He closed and locked it behind her when she left.
“You don’t usually need to cast a circle,” Lee commented, frowning at me. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you do this before.”
“It’s just a precaution,” I said evenly. “We’ve got magical surges happening. This will stop that from continuing while I work.”
Only partially true and far from the main reason I was doing it. And from the way Lee and Hunter’s expressions both tightened in unison, I knew they didn’t fully believe me. But if I explained my real reasoning, they’d try to stop me.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Hunter demanded.
“I’ll be fine,” I replied, hoping that was true.
Without waiting for them to protest further, I positioned myself at Robert’s head, closed my eyes, and began to chant.
The spell was slow and fussy to cast—twenty minutes of sustained incantation, each syllable carrying a thread of power that I wove into the diagnostic framework building around Robert’s body.
I spoke carefully because even a small mistake would’ve meant starting over from the beginning.
The room faded away from my awareness as I worked, until there was nothing except the spell and the unconscious man it was affecting.
By the ten-minute mark, I could feel the strain of it taking its toll on me. A dull ache that started behind my eyes, a tremor in my hands, the sensation of my magical reserves draining steadily away, channeled into the spell. All to be expected. I pushed through.
By fifteen minutes, the ache had sharpened into outright pain that pulsed in time with my heartbeat. My vision blurred at the edges. My heart began to pound in my chest.
I was dimly aware of Hunter’s presence shifting closer to the edge of the circle, which meant he’d probably clocked the change to my pulse, but I blocked it out. I couldn’t look away from the work for even an instant. He didn’t try to interrupt me.
At the twenty-minute mark, after finishing the last word of the incantation, my head was pounding, my vision was blurry, and I felt so magically depleted and exhausted that a wet noodle could’ve done more magic than me right then. But the spell was complete.
I felt a surge of satisfaction—the Sword of Helios was one of the trickier and more unforgiving spells out there and I’d cast it word-perfect from memory.
Take that, family, I thought triumphantly. No matter what you guys think, I do have a little bit of power to work with.
A moment after I finished, Robert’s aura ignited with a bright golden glow as more magic flooded out of me and into the spell I’d just cast.
Too much, in fact.
In the same instant, I felt sudden warmth and wetness trickling from my nose.
I touched it and my hand came away bloody.
I wiped my palm on my jeans, hoping no one else noticed.
No such luck. Hunter stiffened on the other side of the circle, his wide eyes locked onto my face. “Dammit, Daniel!”
Beside him, Lee’s expression was pinched tight with concern. Like his twin, his gaze was zeroed in on my face. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine,” I told them both, feeling sweat break out across my brow. My legs suddenly felt weaker than they had before. I gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “Don’t worry. I can do this.”
Both of the twins scowled at that, trading a dark look.
Then the golden glow of my magic subsided, the light of the Sword of Helios stabilizing. I forced myself to take a deep breath and wrench my gaze from the twins, turning my attention back to Robert’s now-illuminated aura.
I immediately saw that it was all wrong.
A healthy human aura was a shimmering field of color that extended several feet from the body.
But Robert’s was barely there and it lacked any color at all.
It was a faint, grayish film, extending perhaps six inches past his skin, and so thin it was almost transparent.
It reminded me of a spent candle guttering in its last moments, right before it burns itself out.