Marked By Lies: A Reverse Harem Series (The Marked Series Book 1) by Paige Orr (the red fox clan TXT) 📗

With that he gets to his feet, making a quick exit, and the room falls into silence again. We still have to try and figure out the criteria that the coven is using to pick their victims, so hopefully we can get that don before he gets back. I look through the passage again, trying to look for any clue, and it’s not until I reach the very last paragraph that I find the answers.

I don't know how this could be of use to us though, the ritual calls for the person that’s being sacrificed, to be as close in height and body shape as the person that will take their life. Since we have no idea what these cultists look like, this is just another dead end. I throw the book down in front of me, sick of being so helpless with this. Especially since this just means that the cult is still ten steps ahead of us.

How are we ever supposed to be able to stop them from taking people, when we don’t know who they will take? We can’t even have people guarded, because we still have no idea who is most likely to be next.I don’t know where we are supposed to go from her, but I do know that the situation is just continuing to become more and more hopeless. Fingers crossed we manage to guard the necklace, it’s the only thing we have that could be enough to stop them.

Half an hour later we’ve found nothing else to go on, and the tension in the room is thick enough to cut with a knife. I can’t help but be filled with worry after not hearing anything from Cailean since he left. I have a sinking feeling in my gut, nothing else has gone our way, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this went wrong as well.

The necklace is our last defense against the cult, but if they have already managed to get their hands on it, then I have no idea how we are supposed to stop them. According to what they have written, we don’t have anything else we can do, so we’re all feeling the pressure.

The door slams open behind me, and we all spin in unison, ready to jump into action. We all stop though when we see Zaphyr there, Melissa cradled against his chest, and the smell of blood reaches my nose. I don’t waste another second as I get to my feet, rushing over to them and helping Zaphyr place her down on the couch.

“What the hell happened, Zaph.”

“There was an ambush while we followed the trail that she and Morph found.”

For fuck's sake, it seems that our little detective is a danger magnet. I call on my magic, hovering my hands over the bullet wound I can see in her calf. Usually something like this would be easy enough for me to heal, but there seems to be something blocking me, and with how much blood she has already lost, that’s far from a good thing.

“Was there magic involved, something is stopping me from healing her?”

“Melissa said that their weapons were infused with strong magic, but she doesn’t have experience reading magic yet, so she couldn’t tell me what kind.”

I look over my shoulder, motioning to Annika to join me. I can’t detect what magic the bullet is imbued with, but maybe she has a spell in her arsenal that could narrow it down. We have to hope she does anyway. We need to get the bleeding stopped as soon as possible.

Annika kneels down beside me, muttering a spell under her breath as she scans her hands down Melissa’s leg. The grimace on her face tells me that whatever magic is at play isn’t good for us. That’s only confirmed when she says to me.

“We’re going to have to work together, the magic in the bullets is too strong for just one of us.”

I nod my head at her and wait for her to join me, when both of our magic begins to course through Melissa’s leg, I let out a breath of relief as I see the bullet begin to push its way to the surface of her skin. We continue to work for another ten minutes, until it’s finally sealed over, and all that’s left to remind Melissa of what happened, is a small pink scar. It’s then that I notice Zaphyr, cradling his shoulder with a wince on his face.

“Fucking hell, Zaphyr! You should have told us if you had been hit as well.”

“I know, but the magic doesn’t seem to affect me as strongly as it did Melissa. She needed your help more than I did, I can heal from things that she can't.”

This man drives me fucking crazy! I know that he is used to hiding things like this from everyone around him, but this is beyond a joke. If the magic managed to kill him, then I would be responsible for the death of the Unseelie Prince! I can hear Annika mumbling under her breath beside me, as she rubs a hand across her forehead.

“Fucking men! Always so bloody stubborn.”

We both get to our feet and make our way over to Zaphyr, going through the same tedious process of healing him. Unlike Melissa, it’s not only one bullet buried in his flesh, so the process takes twice as long. By the time that we have him healed enough that his own body can finish the job, I can see that Annika is exhausted.

I help her over to a chair, telling her to rest and that I’ll keep an eye on our patients. We have to hope that the magic won’t leave any lingering effects. We