“Because that’s not going to happen, hunter,” Obie snarls. “I’m not putting my friends in danger.Never.”
“Myplan,”Locke stresses, slowly and clearly, “was to cast the binding spell on you and force you to tell me where Roma and JJ are. This—” He gestures between them, frustrated. “This is just bad luck.”
The sheer annoyance on Locke’s face implies that he’s telling the truth. Still, Obie isn’t about to risk his friends for a hunch. “Yeah, well, your luck just got even worse. I’m not calling them.”
Locke rakes a hand through his hair. Under the streetlights, his pale skin is washed out and his dirty blond hair looks almost white, but his hazel eyes are as dark as ever. “Fine. Damage control, then. You’ll have to come back to the Sanctum with me tonight, and then?—”
Obie scoffs. “Not happening.”
Locke glares at him. “I have to make curfew, Smith. There’ll be hell to pay if I don’t.”
“That sounds like a ‘you’ problem, not a ‘me’ problem.”
“Well, it’s going to turnintoa ‘you’ problem if I refuse to leave this spot all night,” he says, and then, like a five-year-old proving a point, he sits down cross-legged on the blacktop. “I’m not above sleeping on the ground. And, since you can’t be more than twenty feet away from me, it’ll besoeasy for the Sanctum to take you down when they come looking for me.”
Obie rolls his eyes. “Please. No one in their right mind would’ve signed off on this piss-poor excuse for a plan. You’re flying solo right now.”
Locke smirks. “Yes, but Ididleave a note with this address on mydesk. Just in case you killed me before I could bind you. If I don’t check in before curfew, they’ll search my room and find it—along with all my other research into you.”
Obie stares at him. “You really thought I was going to kill you that quickly?”
Locke’s expression shuts down. “I wasn’t blind to the possibility.”
“Then why did you even risk it?”
“BecauseI want my friends back,Nostringvadha,” he spits out.
Obie twitches at the sound of his real name in Locke’s venomous voice, but that’s not what bothers him about the words. No, what bothers him is the fact that Locke actually sounds sincere. He actually sounds like he’s upset that he didn’t accomplish his goal, upset that he couldn’t find JJ and Roma.
And Obie has been in Locke’s head. He’s seen how devastated Locke looked whenever he saw JJ post-defection.
Chester Locke might be a brainwashed attack dog, but he truly does miss his friends. He truly does think he’s doing the right thing by trying to drag them back to the Sanctum.
Obie wouldn’t go so far as to call any of those redeeming qualities, but they certainly mean Locke isn’t as much of a sociopath as he could be. He lets out a slow breath, weighing his options. Clearly, bringing Locke back to Obie’s house isn’t an option. And if Locke really did leave his location in his room, then Obie doesn’t want to still be here when the strike force inevitably arrives.
The only real option is to follow Locke back to the Sanctum. But that might not actually be such a bad thing. If Obie is invisible, then Locke won’t be able to stop him from doing some low-level snooping, maybe even stealing some intel.
Getting the concrete evidence they need to bring the Sanctum down. “All right,” Obie relents. “One night. Do you have the spell book in your room?”
Locke shakes his head. “It’s in the restricted spellcasting library in the prison, so we’ll have to wait for tomorrow. It’ll raise too many red flags if I swipe in while I’m not on shift.”
Obie bites back a grimace. Looks like his espionage plans will have to wait. “Fine. We’ll analyze the spell tomorrow and figure out how to break it. Hopefully, it won’t take more than a few days.”
“Hopefully,” Locke says dourly, glaring at a point over Obie’s shoulder. “Back to the Sanctum, then?”
Obie swallows down his misgivings. “Back to the Sanctum,” he agrees quietly, and he peels open a rift to just outside the property, ushers a scowling Locke through it, and steps straight into enemy territory.
5
Chester barely sleeps.
Honestly, when he wakes up bleary-eyed and exhausted the next morning, he has a dazed moment of surprise that he fell asleep at all. Between the horror of the binding spell going so catastrophically wrong and his fury at himself for screwing it up in the first place, there are a lot of reasons why Chester spent most of the night tossing and turning.
But the biggest reason, of course, is still sitting right where Chester left him last night: on Chester’s rolling chair with his feet kicked up on Chester’s desk, scrolling through his cell phone. “Oh, good, you’re awake,” Smith says without preamble, not even glancing Chester’s way. “Let’s get moving, puppy. We need to head down to the prison and figure out how to break this binding spell.”
Chester slowly pushes himself up to sitting, rubbing his eyes. “‘Puppy’?”
“Yeah. Not only are you about as threatening as a particularly small dog, but you’re also as stupid as one.” Smith gestures meaningfullytowards the door. “Come on. Chop-chop. I need to get my hands on that spell book.”
