“Which is?”
“Have you not been present for this conversation? The ability to help her magic grow. Janey Mack, but I’m losing my patience.”
He shook his head slowly, the stubborn ox, and went back to looking at the water. Niamh checked her phone again. No new messages, but a strange feeling was bleeding through the magical link. Wariness and anticipation. Jessie was on the move, and Earl was with her. No telling who else. She was probably heading to the bar even though Niamh hadn’t responded. Time to go. She didn’t want Jessie to leave before she got there.
She stood, about to tell Austin Steele to think on things, when she noticed his head tilted to the side and a crease between his eyebrows, as though he were listening for a soft sound.
The truth dawned on her. She smiled.
“Ye know…Jessie thinks that if she cuts out her ability to feel her team through the magic,” Niamh said, “the link is severed. When she plugs her ears to us, so to speak, she doesn’t realize we can still feel her unless we also block the link.”
Austin Steele glanced up at Niamh, guilt in his eyes, before looking out over the lake again.
That was all the proof she needed.
“I’ve never corrected Jessie’s thinking on this,” she continued, “because I didn’t want her learning to block the magical connection entirely. Eventually she’ll figure it out, but now, when things are so precarious, we need to be able to keep tabs on her in case she gets in trouble. Don’t you agree?”
He didn’t comment, or look over again.
“She hasn’t been keeping tabs on any of us, out of respect for our privacy. Your privacy, over everyone else.” Niamh stepped a little closer, facing the lake to keep things light. “How strange, then, that you would be monitoring her.”
“I’m not monitoring anything. It’s just since the trouble started. I’m…”
“Worried about her. What’s going to happen when you move away? You won’t be able to block her because of that worry, but what if something happens? How do you think you’ll react if you feel that connection severed and know she died because you walked away?”
Muscles popped out along his frame, the air alive with power. Niamh’s warning sensors turned up a notch. Her feeling of Jessie clicked off.
She frowned and looked back toward the direction Jessie had been, searching for that feeling. Was it because she’d been talking about it that—
Austin Steele pushed to standing, suddenly on alert.
“Do you feel that?” he asked, his deep voice rough with menace and terror. “Did you do something?”
“I feel a lack of something, yes. But it wasn’t me. My giving ye a what if was not supposed to turn into a premonition.” Her phone chimed.
A text from Earl. Are you alive? You and Austin Steele aren’t on bar premises. If you’re alive, they took her. Four mages. Five tried, but I killed one and used her as a shield. The rest took Jessie and got out before Ulric could turn from stone to gargoyle and before Cedric could get his thumb out of his keister. They were incredibly effluence.
“Effluence?” she said out loud. “Autocorrect for efficient, maybe?”
A phone chimed in the cabin, Austin Steele already running for it.
Niamh pushed her sweats down and then tapped Earl’s name to call him.
“It’s Earl,” Austin Steele called out, jogging out of the cabin and tossing his phone at Niamh. “They’ve got Jess. Mages—”
“I know, I know.”
“Hello?” Earl answered, out of breath.
“What’s the status? Where are you?”
“Running back to the house. I didn’t want to change until I could get ahold of you. Ulric is following them from the sky. He’ll report back when he can. If we’re lucky, they’ll stop for food or rest. I’ve called Damarion, but he didn’t answer. Jasper did, and he is going to knock on Damarion’s door. Fine time not to be in that bar, woman. Where is Austin Steele? Those mages had magically tied everyone up. They only killed one of the customers, and the witnesses said it was an accident. Sadly, it wasn’t that hairy creature that always gives Jessie a hard time.”
“Austin Steele is here.” She put the phone on speaker and bent to remove her sweats and stuff them in the bag. “He was at his cabin. I flew out to talk to him.”
“Well, get to Ivy House. I’ll get Damarion to call in all the gargoyles. We’ll be ready by the time you get here. Hopefully, then we’ll have word from Ulric. Blast it—I wish we had a way to magically track him. Jessie has got to pick some—”
Niamh clicked the red “end” button and tossed the phone into the bag. He was just babbling at this point anyway.
“Why didn’t they kill anyone at the bar?” Austin Steele asked, shedding his clothes with quick movements and handing them to Niamh.