Magical Midlife Battle （Leveling Up, #8）(64)

“What’s happening in five minutes?” she asked him.

“Jessie will be here. Ulric, Jasper, and Nathanial with her. I wasn’t sure if…you know.” Edgar rolled his finger through the air. “If you needed to hurry up and torture him before she shows up. She is mostly against that sort of thing, if you remember correctly. Except when she loses control and does something awful, but usually she frowns upon medieval-style emasculation or castration. I’ve seen it done a time or two, though, should you need some help. I just barely escaped from getting my own penis and testicles sliced off. It was a situation of lucky timing. The female in question wanted to kill me herself, you see. Instead, she was killed and I was turned into a vampire.” He frowned, looking downward. “Or was the vampire part a different time? I’m losing track—”

“What is that?” The mage was looking at Edgar now. “What is that thing? It’s not natural!”

“Well now…that hurt my feelings,” Edgar said, squinting at the mage. “But you know what they say, sticks and stones might break your bones, and surely get your penis and testicles chopped off…”

Sebastian started laughing again, definitely a defensive reaction.

“Edgar, you go stall her,” Nessa said, looking at the shelves in the back of the garage now.

“Tristan, you wait here and guard him. I’ll put a little duct tape on his mouth… Where is the duct

tape? Every garage in the history of the world has a half roll of duct tape lying around.”

Edgar took off at a lope.

“Ah-ha! Here.” Nessa snatched something from a peg on the wall. “Never been used.” She stalked across the garage and slapped it against Tristan’s chest. “Put that on him. Elliot, a word?”

She dragged him outside and then around the corner, out of earshot of Tristan. Still, Sebastian applied a sound-deadening cone over them to make sure. Nessa stood at the edge, one eye trained on the side door.

“We’re up shit creek if that mage gets back to Momar,” she told Sebastian. “This guy isn’t sleek enough, suave enough, or arrogant enough to be one of the elite spies. He’s a middle-range runner, that’s it. When he goes back, he’ll get a dose of truth potion. They’ll torture him for more information once they realize he was caught here, Sabby. They cannot know we are here. They cannot know you’re the mage rumored to be helping Kingsley.”

“Nessa, I’m not stupid, just tired. I know all of that.”

“Really? Because you’ve just randomly started laughing multiple times tonight and occasionally powered down to drool. I don’t think your mind is online. Which leads me to my second point. We need information from this guy, and while I’m pretty sure we could get Jessie and her people to lower their standards enough to get it, I don’t think Kingsley is going to allow it. He doesn’t even want us cleaning out the border towns, for God’s sake. He’s a Boy Scout, and Austin is hesitant about pushing him. We can’t take the chance of this guy getting away alive, for any reason.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“First, you need sleep. A lot of it. I need you fresh. Then, while the powers that be argue about how to peel the information out of this guy, we frame his escape so we have some time to interrogate him properly.”

“Where are we going to take him, though?” Sebastian asked, rubbing his face, willing the fog to clear from his mind. “We can’t have him screaming in a motel room in a small town, not to mention stealing a car to get there is probably going to be noticed. It’s not like there are woods we can run through and hide in.”

“I’ll figure that out. You get some sleep, then start thinking of ideas for how we can get him out of here without anyone being suspicious. We need to magically hide his scent, too, remember.”

“Okay, okay.” Sebastian nodded, now squeezing the bridge of his nose. “We should come up with a reason for why we can’t interrogate him right now. Just in case Kingsley or Austin have a few questions and our guy gets chatty when he has one of those big alphas in his face.”

“I don’t think he’ll be any worse off with them than with the monster gargoyle and all his party tricks. C’mon. Let’s get to Jessie before the alphas come back.”

SIXTEEN

Tristan

THE MAGES PAUSED to tear down their ineffective sound-deadening spell, which hadn’t done much more than fuzz their voices a little. For him, anyway. Sebastian should’ve known that. His fatigue was affecting his performance.

While they were occupied, Tristan silently strode along the wall of the garage and stepped back through the door, walking in far enough for his gargoyle magic to fall away. He crossed his arms over his chest a moment before Natasha came into sight, stopping in the doorway.

His heart beat a little faster as she smiled radiantly and gave him a thumbs-up, her eyes shining with cunning intelligence. With laughter, trying to hide her fear.

“You okay to hang?” she asked, her gaze turning just a bit intense. Her pulse sped up to match his

—he could feel it inside her. And then came the lightning bugs of energy sparking and zooming between them—something that often happened when they were together. The lights pulsed and danced, ethereally beautiful.

She couldn’t see them, which meant she wasn’t open to him or to that facet of her magic. Not yet.