Chapter Forty-Six
Angel happened to know that tracking someone through a transport spell ranged from difficult to impossible. Very few trackers were capable of pulling it off.
Unfortunately, Jacob Crow was one of them.
Angel recalled feeling unsettled by his skills during the Victor Maze job. She remembered wondering if she’d be able to shake him if she ever needed to. As it so happened, now she would probably find out.
Damn it, she thought as she looked up at the portal walls and watched them change colors yet again. She had no idea where the transport was taking her. The actual tunnels weren’t meant to last this long, but she’d kept the portal in motion on purpose. The gods only knew what kind of effect it was going to have on her. Maybe if she ever had a kid, it would come out with two heads. All she knew for sure was that it took twice as much magic to maintain it as normal.
But she did it for good reason.
As Vega’s second-in-command, it was Angel’s job to know as much as possible about each position that made up a warden clan. In learning about trackers, she’d discovered that although following someone through a portal was rare, when it was done, there were various ways to do it.
One way was by knowing the mark themselves. This method was more like profiling than tracking, and a lot of guess work was involved. So she didn’t really count it.
Another way was by using very specific magic against the trace elements that remained behind the mark’s actual portal, rather like dusting for fingerprints. Through this method, a location match would sometimes be made. But it was painstaking and time consuming. Angel was pretty sure Jake wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole, at least not right now. Not when he was in a hurry.
But there were more rare and much more powerful ways to hunt someone down once they’d transported away. And they were faster, too. One was to modify a scrying spell to allow the tracker to see what the mark was seeing for a very short period of time – namely when they were stepping out of the portal at their destination. Problem solved.
Another modification method was to listen inside the portal for the words of the caster’s spell, hence hearing the traveler’s destination.
But the most difficult method of tracking someone through a portal, hence the most rare and most accurate, was to cast a spell that allowed a tracker to read a mark’s mind while they were in the portal.
Since spell casting inside a portal at all was supposed to be impossible, if not highly dangerous and hence highly frowned upon, any of these tracking methods were impressive to the point of being scary. But the last one made Angel very, very nervous. She already knew Jake could read her mind. And she already knew he was probably the best tracker in the game.
If she put two and two together, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that he could cast up a bit of potent magic allowing him a brief glimpse into her skull that would give her away.
Which was why she kept the portal going and told it to go wherever the hell it wanted. If she didn’t know where she was going, then he couldn’t know either.
It was draining her, though. She couldn’t keep it up forever.
Angel touched her forehead. Again, her fingertips were ice cold on her feverish skin. She was just so confused. What the hell was going on? What had happened to Jake? And Dave?
What was wrong with them?
She shivered violently and hugged herself, sending more magic into the portal so she could think. The truth was, she was scared. How ironic was it that not until after they’d made love and she’d bared herself to him completely did she begin to feel afraid of him?
Ironic or not, that’s what she was.
She took her hand off her forehead and placed it over her heart. But when she did, she felt the bear claw press delicately into her skin. She’d forgotten she had it on.
Angel pulled it out from under her shirt and turned it over in her hands. She sure could use a little guidance from White Wolf right about now. But she guessed she’d have to be asleep for that to happen.
“Ugh,” she muttered, feeling a little dizzy. I have to stop. She needed to spare some magic. She had to bring the transport to a close.
“Okay,” she sighed, letting the transport slow. “Go ahead and open up.”
It wasn’t very scientific, she knew, and it would have served her right to be dumped in the middle of the Pacific. But she still refused to take the chance that Jake could get any glimpses from her mind. Instead, she would try her luck and hope for the best.
She squeezed the pendant tight as if it could give her that luck, and prepared to jump from the portal as it swirled open.
As it happened, the portal deposited her into a fog-filled forest of sequoias. Angel frowned; this was a little too close to home for comfort. But she exited anyway, and when the portal closed behind her, she turned a slow circle, scanning her surroundings.
There was no road. There were no buildings. She looked overhead and saw no wires. Which meant she was either in the middle of a park or preserve, or she’d somehow managed to leave the mortal realm. Since the latter would require more strength than she possessed, she settled on the former.
Angel pulled her phone from her pocket and checked for a signal. There was none. She could always cast a spell to widen its range, but she’d never been very good with electronic spells. And she’d used so much magic on the portal. “Fuck,” she whispered. She didn’t have any choice. She needed to call Gabe.
Angel knelt down in the dark brown earth and held her phone between her hands. “Check out the modern witch,” she laughed to herself, imagining Sabrina the Teenage Witch flying on her vacuum cleaner. “Canetis porto tantum quod tantum stella,” she whispered. The phone began to warm pleasantly in her palms. She looked on hopefully as its screen brightened until it was glowing.
Angel smiled, pressed the button on the bottom of the screen, and reached out for Gabriel with her mind.
It wasn’t until the phone crackled with a connection and started to ring that Angel realized her hopeless mistake. She’d slipped up. She shouldn’t have cast any kind of spell that involved sending any kind of signal at all.
As if to prove her dawning realization correct, when the call was answered on the second ring, it wasn’t Gabriel’s voice on the other end of the line.
It was Jake’s.
Angel froze, wide-eyed and stunned where she knelt in the forest when his deep, sexy voice chuckled softly. Even across the distance between them, the sound was warm and delicious. Longing blossomed to aching life in Angel’s body, drawing a quaking gasp from between her lips. The laughter faded, and Angel closed her eyes.
“Gotcha,” said Jake.
The call disconnected.