Spirit Storm (Emberwood Witches #3)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

We’ve been locked in this room for forty-five minutes. I know because Asher is watching the giant timer on the wall and barking off the count every few minutes like a military drill sergeant.

"Forty-seven minutes." He’s sitting cross-legged on the stone floor with his chin in his hands. "That's longer than most flights to Vegas. We could be in Vegas right now."

Rowan snorts, but doesn't look up from the puzzle box she's dismantling with shadows threaded between her fingers like black ribbons. "Nobody wants to be in Vegas with you, blondie."

"Orion does."

Orion, who has been methodically working through a series of rune locks along the far wall, turns enough to level a look at Asher that would stop traffic.

Asher grins and winks. “Yeah, baby.”

Our escape room—if you can call it that despite us being nowhere near the goal of actually escaping—started out as a perfectly reasonable cobblestone chamber with torches on the walls and a few puzzles that seem like they'd been designed for a group of mildly magical teenagers.

That was before the algorithm, or spell, or whatever Mitch Moore has stitched together in his back-room studio decided we needed a challenge.

Now the ceiling seems to be lowering.

I stand up from where Wylder and I have been examining a series of glowing sigils carved into the floor and point upward. "Is that my imagination, or—"

"It's not your imagination." Wylder reaches above his head and presses his palm flat against the stone above us. A faint green light pulses under his skin, and he frowns. "The room is restructuring again.”

For the fourth time.

"Great." I roll my shoulders. "That's great. Very fun. Incredibly good time."

"You said this would be a quick job." Rowan finally looks up, fixing me with smoky gray eyes that somehow manage to be both accusatory and amused at the same time. "You said, and I quote, it'll take an hour, tops."

"I said it should take an hour."

“You said tops,” she insists, looking to Asher. “Back me up here, dude.”

Asher nods. “You did say tops, Pops.”

“Et tu, Brute?” I cross back to the center of the room, where a large iron pedestal holds an orb that has been glowing a smug, pulsing amber since we arrived.

I tried breaking it.

Wylder tried disrupting its power supply.

Asher tried hitting it with his new angel mojo.

Orion tried to brute-force the thing off the pedestal.

And Rowan wrapped it in shadow, which the damned thing just absorbed. The orb actually got brighter after each of our attempts, which just feels personal.

"Okay." I press my fingers to my temples. "Think. The original spell obviously has an adaptive difficulty enchantment. It reads the group, scales the challenge. Which means—"

“We’re damn impressive.” Asher waggles his brows.

“That’s one way to look at it, or…?”

"It knows what we can do," Wylder says.

"Exactly. It knows what we can do individually." I look at the orb as it pulses mockingly at us. "It's been countering us one at a time. What happens if we hit it with everything simultaneously?"

A beat of silence.

"Define everything," Orion says.

"All five of us. Same moment. Different angles." I turn to face them. "Spirit, shadow, plant, strength and—"

"Devastating charisma?" Asher offers, flashing me one of his sexy smiles.

I laugh. “Or you could try to transport it somewhere.”

He blinks at me. “Where exactly should I try to send it?”

"I don’t know. Get behind the pedestal, and if we knock the bloody thing off its base, send it somewhere. The enchantment locking us in here is seated in the orb. I’m sure of it. If we get rid of the orb—"

"The spell destabilizes." Wylder is already moving to his position along the left wall, drawing up a slow, coiling green from the floor, moss and thin vines threading up through the grout between the cobblestones. "That could work."

Rowan doesn’t look convinced, but she's already rising from the floor, shadows gathering at her shoulders like a cloak pulling itself on.

Orion says nothing. He simply rolls his neck once, and when he looks back at the orb, his pupils have gone narrow and vertical, silver-blue catching the torchlight.

"On my count," I say.

Asher pops up off the floor, bounces once on his heels, and disappears with a quiet crack of displaced air.

I gather what I have, spirit magic building inside me like the rising of a tide. The orb seems to register our intentions, and the amber deepens toward red. “It is recalculating.”

“Then let’s do this quickly,” Orion says.

Rowan throws the shadows. Wylder's vines detonate upward around the pedestal’s base. Orion grabs hold of the orb, and I hit it with everything I have.

A crack splits across the orb's surface like it’s been struck with a hammer. Fractures run through the amber glow in spiderweb patterns.

The grinding of stone intensifies as the ceiling falls faster.

The orb screams.

There is no other word for it. A high, sustained magical shriek rattles the torches and sends dust crumbling from the ceiling.

“It’s dropping faster!” Rowan shouts.

I curse. “Asher, get that thing out of here!”

Orion growls, and with a Herculean force, rips the orb right off the pedestal and sends it flying.

It hits the cobblestones once and bounces into the air. Amber light breaks through the cracks, shooting through the fractures and lighting up the room like a spotlight on a spinning disco ball.

Asher dives full-bodied through the air, and then it’s gone.

The five of us freeze, then look around.

Rowan is crouched low, wide-eyed. “Is it over?”

There’s a low click somewhere in the wall, and then the ceiling starts to rise.

All five of us stand in the abrupt, ringing silence, and I look around. “I can’t believe that worked."

Mitch is waiting for us in the anteroom with the expression of a man who has been listening to things go wrong for nearly an hour and has run out of ways to pace.

He's twenty-something, sandy-haired, with ink stains on his left hand and the particular look of a person whose ambitious idea has just been escorted off the premises.

"Oh, thank god." He surges forward when the door opens. "I'm so, so sorry—the adaptive matrix, it wasn't supposed to—it keeps rewriting itself and I can't reach the kill switch from outside—"

"Mitch." I hold up a hand.

He stops.

"You built a spell that gets smarter when it encounters resistance?"

"Yes."

"And then you locked five empowered people in a room with it?"

His jaw moves. "When you say it like that—"

"Is there a way to say it that makes it a good idea?"

Wylder, to his credit, keeps his expression entirely neutral despite his fingers being curled into white-knuckled fists at his sides.

Asher does not possess the same self-restraint. "Mate, have you never watched an AI movie? I, Robot? Atlas? The Matrix? Terminator? Any of this sounding familiar?"

"It wasn't supposed to—" Mitch catches himself and seems to reconsider. "I genuinely thought the safety parameters would hold."

Rowan crouches down beside the shattered orb pieces and picks one up between two fingers.

"Are these runes supposed to be your safety parameters?”

Mitch nods. “Yeah.”

Wylder scowls as Rowan shows him the shard. “These runes aren't safety parameters. They’re decorative etching. Who the fuck taught you runes?"

Mitch’s face goes a very odd shade of gray. “I, uh… looked it up. Okay, I’ll double-check the rune work again. Sorry about that.”

Really? That’s all he has to say about nearly pancaking us? Oops, my bad on the safety protocols.

We stay another twenty minutes while Wylder goes over the runes with him. Mitch, to his credit, follows Wylder’s instructions without complaint. Although, Wylder also made it clear that he either does as he’s told or we’d dismantle the room completely.

“Lesson learned," he says at the door with the earnest devastation of someone who genuinely means it.

"No more sentient rooms," I confirm.

"No more sentient rooms," he agrees.

The evening air hits cold and clean when we step outside. The five of us make it approximately twelve steps down the pavement before Asher breaks.

He busts up laughing and shakes his head. "Demons, witches, hell-bound blood curses, and we nearly bought it by being crushed by a sentient ceiling.”

I roll my eyes. “Go team.”

The restaurant Wylder chose sits on a quiet corner of Wrenhaven's main street, the kind of place with cloth napkins and candles burning low in little glass holders and a menu that requires actual consideration.

Not pretentious—just good.

The kind of good that takes its time.

I'm wearing a dress. A real one, blue-black and fitted to my curves, and to show off my thighs. My vibrant blue hair is pinned up in a way that took three attempts and Violet's intervention.

It was worth it, though. When I came down the stairs, Wylder looked at me and briefly forgot how to speak. I am absolutely filing away the memory of that look for personal use later.

Now he sits across from me with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, a glass of red wine half-finished beside his plate, and the particular ease on his face that only appears when no one is currently trying to destroy anything.

I'm obsessed with it.

"Okay." I point my fork at him. "We are not allowed to be interrupted tonight. I'm manifesting it."

"You can't manifest things."

"I can try."

"That's not how your magic works."

"Wylder," I set the fork down. "Let me have this."

The corner of his mouth curves. He lifts his wine glass and raises it toward me in a toast. “To manifesting.”

We've both cleaned our plates—Mediterranean lamb served over parmesan polenta for him, and a mushroom risotto for me that is worth every minute of the half-hour drive—and now we exist in the comfortable aftermath of a genuinely good meal with nowhere urgent to be.

It feels almost illicit.

Like we're getting away with something.

"I can’t believe Mica's been gone three weeks." I turn my wine glass slowly by the stem. "One second she's there, and then the next, the Cinderheart Forge just took her. Is that normal? Is she hurt, scared, trapped…”

"She's fine."