Read Online shaede assassin 05 - shadows at midnight by amanda bonilla - Free Book Online Page B

What was done was done and there was no use living in the past. That chapter of my life was closed. It was time to let the wounds scar and move on.
    Ty made himself at home at the desk in the back office and Levi plopped down on the old worn couch beside Pamela. I closed the door behind me and a shimmer of color passed over Ty’s gaze as the sound from the bar beyond the doorway muted as the latch slid into place. The act took no effort whatsoever. If I hadn’t noticed Ty’s gaze, I wouldn’t have known he’d used an ounce of his magic to silence the room.
    I cleared my mind of any troubling thoughts and leaned against the desk beside him. He reached out and brushed the backs of his fingers against my hip, sending a pleasant shiver over my flesh. I gave him a soft smile and in turn, he studied me, his own expression contemplative.
    “Do you have a map?” Pamela asked quietly from the couch. “And I’ll need something that belongs to the person you’re trying to find.”
    Tyler reached for his back pocket and unfolded a map of Goblin Valley State Park, smoothing it out on the desk’s surface. Pamela reached into a black pouch and produced a pendulum attached to a long silver chain that looked a lot like the key to O Anel . Her stone was a quartz crystal however, whereas mine was an emerald. I reached up and feathered my fingers over my bare throat. If Padma ever discovered the true purpose of what she’d stolen from me, we’d be fucked. Just one more reason to get back to her nasty rat hole of a lair and put the bitch down.
    Pamela took the t-shirt from my hands and wrapped her pendulum in the soft fabric. She held it firmly in her grasp and allowed her eyes to drift shut as she murmured something under her breath. The meditative moment lasted for several minutes and not a single one of us spoke. No point in disrupting her concentration. We had one shot to make this work because with or without a map, we were leaving for Goblin Valley tomorrow.
    Pamela’s eyes drifted open and she swayed on her feet. Levi reached out to steady her but she held out a staying hand. “I’m okay,” she said. “Natural energy gets me wired, that’s all.”
    I moved out of her way as she stepped up to the desk and plucked a black Sharpie out of a pen holder and handed it to Ty. He popped the cap and waited patiently.
    The foreign sensation of magick tingled over my skin as she drew the pendulum from the confines of Xander’s t-shirt. Her power signature was faint, barely enough to register on my radar, but it was potent enough to cause the crystal at the end of the silver chain to glow with a faint white light. Pamela began to chant once again, whispered words that asked for the guidance of her goddesses, the gift of foresight, the ability to find that which had been lost. The entire ritual had a certain poetic beauty to it. The cadence of Pamela’s words lulled me into an almost hypnotic state as I stared at the map, rapt.
    She dangled the pendulum over the map. It remained still in her grasp for the barest of moments before it began to sway back and forth. Slowly, she moved the pendulum over the surface of the map, careful to keep it from making contact with the paper. It swayed back and forth, back and forth in a seemingly endless rhythm that further captivated my attention. Pamela’s whispered incantation was the only sound as we waited in the hopes that she’d be able to pinpoint Xander’s location.
    Soon, the pendulum no longer swung to and fro but adopted a quick, circular pattern. “There.” Pamela indicated a spot on the map and Tyler circled it with the Sharpie. She continued to move the pendulum over the map and it resumed its back and forth sway. It didn’t circle again.
    “I can’t get much more accurate than that,” Pamela said. She gathered up the pendulum and held it in her palm. “I’d say that’s maybe a five mile radius. Give or take. We’re lucky we got that much. Something’s definitely blocking