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

way.
    The spirit wouldn’t have left prints. Wolf didn’t, anyway. Perhaps the intermediary we’d speculated about? Gah. I hated that all the things I found just led to more questions. The tracking spell pulled downward. So Peter was in there. Or Peter’s corpse.
    I looked down at Wolf and took a deep breath. My magic flowed through me and my mind felt clear, so I hoped I was making this probably incredibly stupid decision of my own free will.
    “Wolf,” I said. “I need you to find Alek. You have to protect him from the spirit or whatever is doing this, okay?”
    She whined a little and turned her head east, her nose lifting as she scented the air. She looked back at me as though wondering if I was serious.
    “I’m serious,” I said. “Please go protect Alek.”
    With another whine, she vanished. I pulled my light ball back and made my talisman glow instead. Keeping that going while I kept the tracking spell up and kept my head clear of spirit interference was going to suck, but I didn’t have a choice. I told myself to just think of this as more practice. If I couldn’t handle running a few concurrent spells and finding a lost kid, I had no hope against Samir.
    With that cheery thought, I faced the gaping mine entrance.
    “I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” I muttered. It almost made me smile. Almost. Cautiously, I stepped inside, following the pull of Peter’s knotted hair down the main tunnel.
    The walls changed from earth to stone as I descended. The mine had been active back a century or more ago, but while the shaft dropped at a sharp angle, it was clear of most debris. I would have thought it would fall in after all this time, but the thick timbers reinforcing it held. The ground layer had built up, especially once the opening leveled off a few hundred feet and the first split came.
    The tracking spell tugged left, so I took the left channel. Water dripped somewhere ahead. Or maybe behind. It was impossible for me to tell. The glow from my talisman only illuminated a few feet around me. Had Peter just wandered in here and gotten lost? I doubted it. The kids I grew up with used to dare each other about how far we could go in. I’d gone with John and Connor, trusting them and their flashlights, feeling like a really important person that they would let me go along when they normally shut me out of all activities.
    The mine had felt like a horrible maze then. It seemed smaller, less ominous now in some ways and even more terrifying in others. Smaller, because I had magic now, a way to defend myself, to get myself out of here. More terrifying because there was a spirit possibly down here waiting to fuck with me. I kept my magic flowing, ignoring the headache that was starting to tighten a vise around my skull. I couldn’t afford to get distracted or lost down here, not if I wanted to find the kid and get out again.
    Besides, I kinda wanted to encounter the intermediary and kick the unsub’s ass. That way I would know they weren’t doing something awful to Alek.
    I don’t know how far underground I went. The tunnel dropped again, branched twice more, and dropped deeper. The walls were all rock now, timbers in the ceiling obscured by darkness, though the height wasn’t much and I had to duck. No roots nudged through down here, I was too deep for that, I guess, somewhere into the rocky soil or perhaps even the bedrock.
    Then the tunnel opened up, the walls no longer close beside me. The smell of crushed pine needles and cooked meat flooded my nose. The hell?
    I pushed more power into my talisman, making more light. The shaft had ended in a cavern, the ceiling somewhere overhead and out of range of my limited sight. I could make out furniture to my left, a table of some kind in the dim edge of my vision. I moved toward it, my glowing D20 casting crazy shadows in the space.
    One of the shadows moved oddly in the corner of my eye and I spun to the right, gathering power into a shield. I was too tired, too