Filed to story: The Alpha’s Pen Pal Book
“Mitte in planum astra!”
There is a tug, like someone reaching into my soul and yanking at the fibers holding me together, followed by a rush of air in my ears. I hold tight to Taryn and squeeze my eyes shut, tensing against the unexpected roller coaster ride we’re sent on, feeling like I left my stomach behind as my body shoots into space at over one hundred miles per hour.
And then, as quick as it all happened, it stops. I’m no longer rushing through time and space on a wild ride, the wind no longer whirling around me and dragging me to who knows where. Everything is still and quiet. No chanting of spells, no beeping of hospital machines. Just an unending silence, heavy and pressing.
I open my eyes and find Taryn, Maya, and myself floating above our bodies and the bodies of our friends and Dominic.
“Oh, shit!” I jump backward, staring down at myself with Taryn in my lap, our eyes closed and my arms wrapped around her as she sends her magic into Dominic.
None of the bodies around us move or react to our presence. I glide over to Wesley and wave my hand in front of his face, but he doesn’t blink.
“They can’t see us,” Maya says. “We’re in the astral plane, remember?”
“Can we mess with them?” I ask, and she quirks an eyebrow at me. “You know, like draw on their faces or move them into different spots of the room, so when they unfreeze, they’re confused?”
She rolls her eyes and rubs her temples. “We’re non corporeal, so no, we can’t.”
I exhale and shrug, my hands on my hips. “It was worth a shot.”
A wisp of the dark cloud from Dominic’s aura flits by us, and we all track it with our eyes as it darts around us and then floats away through the walls.
“Let’s go,” Maya says, taking off after it.
I reach for the door handle, but each time I attempt to grab it, my hand phases through the knob. I frown and look to my left, where the scanner is to let us out, and I groan. “Damn it, we need Wesley. The scanner is programmed to his palm since I don’t do torture, and—“
“Reid,” Taryn says, chuckling and covering her mouth. “We’re non corporeal, remember?”
“What’s your point?”
Maya rolls her eyes again and facepalms. “We don’t need a door!”
I look at her and then at the door, where my hand is halfway in and out of the room, and then I, too, facepalm. “Oh, my Goddess. Duh.”
Both of them laugh as I float through the door into the observation room and then back into the hospital cell, crossing my eyes and sticking my tongue out at them when I return.
“Okay, okay,” Maya says after I do it a second time and come back with my non corporeal finger up my non corporeal nose. “Enough goofing around. We need to follow the spell.”
Both she and Taryn try—and fail—to turn their laughing faces serious as we float out of the cell and leave the building altogether. We pause on the edge of the training fields, all of us scanning the grounds and the horizon for a trace of the spell.
“There!” Taryn says, pointing towards the packhouse.
We take off after it, moving faster than we’d be able to in our physical bodies, reaching the steps in seconds. The wisp of the spell floats through the door, and we follow it, winding down the hall and up the stairs to the second floor. It creeps along the corridor of guest rooms, and dread and anticipation pool within me equally the further we move away from the stairwell.
When it reaches the last door on the left, it fades through the whitewashed wood, and we pause, glancing at each other. It’s a split-second moment, but it’s as if time stops, and our breaths are held in that brief reprieve before we all phase through the door into the guest room.
“Oh my Goddess,” Maya says, her eyes widening. “Is that…?”
“It is.” Taryn nods, scanning the scene, her hands clenching into fists.
“I don’t know what to say,” Maya says.
We all move to the coffee table, where a grimoire is open in the center, candles lit around it, and crystals and various other witchy tools I can’t identify arranged in what I assume is a specific configuration needed to work the spell she is casting.
And leaning over the book, her hair unkempt and her clothes wrinkled, is Luna Merina.
Dominic’s mom.
“She’s a witch?” I ask, circling the table to examine her face.
Her palms press into the pages, a crystal pinned between her right hand and the paper. Her eyes are shut, her lips parted mid-spell, and the dark cloud we removed from Dominic coalesces into a spiraling storm above her head.
“No,” Taryn says. “I’ve seen her shift.”
“She must be a hybrid,” Maya says, her voice breathless, her hand trembling as she rubs her chest. “Like me.”
“But why would she want to have control over her own son?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Maya says, but her eyes flick to Taryn. “If she knew about Taryn, then—“
“But Taryn didn’t even know about Taryn.”
“She could have found out. There is no limit to what dark and forbidden magic can do compared to light magic. At a cost, of course, but when people are desperate…”
“Do you think she was behind the potion, too?” Taryn asks.
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Maya says. Her head whips around the room, scanning the contents and the arrangement of the elements on Merina’s coffee table and the state of her body. “We should get back. The others may have more insight.”
I nod and move closer to them, my hand reaching for Taryn’s even though we can’t touch. “Lead the way.”
“Ad corporalia,” Maya says, and in an instant, we’re back in the hospital cell.
It’s as if no time passed while we were gone, just as Renée said. Taryn pulls her hands away from Dominic, the golden light dissipating as soon as her hands are off him, and the three of us gasp, catching our breaths, while the others stare at us, waiting.
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?