Inside Straight by Mark Henwick

Author:Mark Henwick [Henwick, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912499090
Publisher: Marque
Published: 2019-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 36

The shouting stopped relatively quickly after the Hecate’s bombshell.

I sat at the conference table feeling oddly disconnected, like I’d been pumped full of drugs or something. Yes, the last day had been weird, but my life was like that sometimes. I couldn’t sense anything eating away at me.

Could I?

Except...

Nothing like being told something’s wrong with you, for you to start thinking there’s something wrong. That incident with Zane last night? Pulling that power during the fight? The dark magic itself? The bursts of anger and adrenaline this morning?

Flint and Kane looked as if they were becoming convinced. Apparently, they’d thought the oddness they’d seen in my aura had something to do with using blood magic.

Too out of it to join the discussion, I went on autopilot. While they were arguing about what constituted blood magic, I managed to connect the video conferencing system to Haven, and a few seconds later, Alice appeared on screen.

“No, not yet,” the Hecate said, looking up at the interruption. “We have to nullify that working first, Amber. We can talk later.”

“What working?” Alice leaned forward. “What’s going on?”

Diana appeared on the screen, and a second later, Kaothos, in the shape of a lizard.

“Can I have a moment’s quiet, please?” I said.

Everyone subsided.

“Thank you.” I pointed as I made introductions. “Diana Ionache, Alice Emerson, Kaothos. This is the Hecate of the Northern Adept League, Gwendolyn Enkeliekki, and her colleague Gabrielle Desmarais.” My voice sounded strange in my ears. Blurred. “The original purpose of this call was for me to pass the whole problem of communicating between the League and the Assembly on to wiser heads—”

“Our primary request was to talk to the dragon,” Gwendolyn interrupted, her eyes fixed on the screen.

I ignored her, ignored the flaring irrational anger, concentrated only on speaking slowly and clearly. “All of which has just been derailed because apparently someone has hit me with a secret working that only the Northern Adept League is trained to spot, and it has to be fixed right now for some reason.”

“Why is the League so familiar with this working?” Bian asked.

Her knife was back in whatever hidden sheath it came from, but the suspicion wasn’t.

“We’ve been seeing it in Adepts from the Denver community.” It was Gabrielle who spoke. Her voice was much quieter now. “All of them had workings like this. It’s so good at hiding itself, none of them realized it. Part of the disguise is achieved because the working moves so slowly. But Amber’s is more complex and faster. Much faster.”

My body was flooded with adrenaline. My legs felt so weak I slumped back down in a chair. Sounds began to fade into each other.

“Who made it? What does it do?” Diana.

“The questions should be the other way around,” the Hecate. “If we know what it does, as a whole, then we would know who made it.”

Those icy blue eyes drew mine to them. “What does it do?” she said. “From what I can sense, it’s a twisted bundle of compulsions, each wound tightly around the other.

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