Murder of Crows (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 2) by Annie Bellet

got in real trouble she’d appear. She always had before.
    Alek and I had agreed to play it by ear and hope our combined strengths could deal with it. I wished I had time to figure out how to make a knife or something “ghost touch” like in the DnD manuals, but enchanting items hadn’t ever been one of my fortes. It was possible, however. Anything was possible with sorcery, provided you could focus the power and summon enough of it.
    I pushed away the thoughts of what we couldn’t do or deal with, grabbed my D20 talisman with one hand, and focused on the knot of hair strapped to my other wrist. My magic flowed through me and I pushed it into the knot, casting the tracking spell. The spell was pretty crude, telling me only direction. The knot pulled on me, pointing the way, leading us into the woods.
    We moved cautiously for a while, passing through the warded boundary of the camp. I spotted one of the boundary stones, now that I knew to look for it, and made a mental note to come back and examine the hunk of white granite when I didn’t need my focus to keep the tracking spell going.
    The woods were quiet. No insect or bird sounds. Even the brush didn’t seem to shift or rustle except where we disturbed them and there was no wind. The spell pulled us north and a little west from the houses, into older woods, the underbrush falling away as the canopy above grew denser. It was easier to move here, but dimmer. The dead lower branches of the coniferous trees stuck out like accusing fingers, jabbing at us and obstructing longer distance vision.
    We’d been walking carefully along for at least an hour, not speaking, just following the spell. Alek drew up beside me and held up his hand. I stopped and looked around, keeping my concentration on the knot of hair but trying to peer into the dim forest. I heard nothing for a moment, and then the sound of footsteps, the crunching of dead pine needles and the snap of little sticks.
    “Carlos?” Alek called out, his ice blue eyes focusing on something I couldn’t yet see. “Wait!”
    The footsteps sped up, retreating. Alek took off after them. I started to follow but a flash of red caught my eye. Emerald, in a red sweatshirt, moving parallel through the woods with us. What the fuck was she doing here? I had to get her to go back before she ended up missing or worse.
    “Em, damnit! Come here.” I turned and waved at her. She shook her head and ran off in a different direction than Alek had gone.
    I didn’t even think about what I was doing and charged after her. She was only twenty or thirty feet away, I could catch her.
    I stumbled through the trees, following the elusive red sweatshirt, muttering curses and calling out to her to come back. A broken-off spear of dead branch swiped my arm, cutting into my skin and drawing blood.
    The sudden pain cleared my mind for a moment and I jerked to a stop as the girl in the sweatshirt disappeared. I summoned my power, using it the way I had the night before, pushing it through my body and mind like cleansing fire. It took a lot more energy this time and I felt an intense ball of rage and resentment and confusion push back. It was almost tangible. The spirit.
    “Oh fuck toast on a stick,” I muttered, looking around. No Alek. No Em, though I suspected she had never been real. The spirit was here and it was royally fucking with us. We’d broken the cardinal rule of adventuring.
    Never. Split. The. Party.
    I gripped my talisman and kept my power going through me, though I knew between that and holding the tracking spell, I was going to tire sooner rather than later. It was eating more concentration and power than I liked to just hold off whatever that thing was. Better exhausted than dead, I guess. I had to find Alek before the spirit did. No, I wasn’t going to think about Alek splayed and dead and bloody and oh fuck.
    For a moment I panicked, my heart pounding and blood rushing to my head. I forced the panic down with careful,