Dara stared at the pair of us, her eyes flicking between us whilst Wilder and I waited in silence. It was a strange feeling being the one who was being assessed. Usually it was me doing that, staring down my targets as I waited for the truth. I often found silence was the best method of torture. A target couldoften reveal more about themselves in those quiet moments than they ever wanted to.
Not me though. I was a locked book. She wasn’t going to get anything from me.
“Shit,” she finally said. “I thought we had more time.”
My eyebrows flew to my hairline in genuine surprise.
“What do you mean?” Wilder asked.
Dara strode towards the bookshelves and pulled down a large leather tome. “What do you know about Shadow Witches?”
“That they’re legendary and often found in folktales,” Wilder said as he folded his arms across his chest defensively.
Dara huffed as she dropped the old book on the table and started flicking through the pages rapidly. “Yes, but they’re more than that. They’re witches—”
“Caught between two worlds,” I said, interrupting Dara.
She paused in her page turning and looked up at me in shock. “Yes. How do you know that?”
I snorted. “I’m an assassin for a vampire mafia boss. It pays to know.” I turned to Wilder and waggled my eyebrows. “See? I’m not just a pretty face.”
“No,” he snapped. “You’re a dickwad, too.”
I leant closer and dropped my voice to a whisper. “That means you think I have a pretty face.”
He turned to look at me, his eyes blazing like fire. “Oh my God, Byron will you—”
“Hey, focus,” Dara said, snapping her fingers. “You can flirt later.”
“We’re not flirting.” Wilder sounded positively outraged at the idea.
“Byron is right,” Dara continued. “Shadow Witches exist between two worlds but there hasn’t been one in existence for centuries, certainly not in my lifetime. Not until you were born.”
“But I don’t have that kind of power,” Wilder spluttered.
Dara hit him with a hard look. “That’s because you’re not twenty-five yet.”
That sounded ominous. “What happens when he turns twenty-five?”
“He becomes one of the most powerful witches ever to live.”
“Bullshit,” Wilder spluttered. “You’re joking, right?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “The visions are influences from the other side and if you’re blacking out, I’m assuming they’re getting stronger?”
Wilder swallowed. “Yes.”
She turned to look at me. “And you held his magic?”
I nodded. “Yes. His sigil was left on my skin until it returned to him.”
Her eyebrows shot skywards. “Interesting. His magic has chosen you as his tether.”
What the fuck did that mean? “Tether?”
“Yes,” she said as she flicked through a few more pages of the book until she found what she was looking for. “Here it is.”
She rotated the book and slid it across the table towards us. The pages were old and handwritten in some form of old English. There was a picture in the centre that showed the process of a witch stepping into the otherworld. It depicted the image of the witch in the middle with a ghostly shape on one side and another man on the other. There was a circle of arrows between the witch and the man, with the words ‘vessel or tether?’ written underneath them and then under the figure of the ghost, there were the words ‘shadow realm or beyond the veil’.