I snickered a laugh and sat back in my seat. “I sense the start of a war.” I glanced at Cole, and he snorted.
“Oh, Vix babe, you have no idea.” He shook his head, turning out onto the street and following the signs north. “The last time this started...” He clicked his tongue, and I heard a chuckle from the backseat.
“Something tells me I’m going to find out when Wes wakes up?” I asked, and this time I needed no reply. Living in the middle of nowhere with my guys was going to be fun; there was no question about that.
It was a decent drive from where we’d been staying in Toronto to our new home, and Wesley was predictably pissed when he discovered his inked on moustache. Even more pissed when he found it was permanent marker and that he’d been chatting with us for over an hour while we held back giggles. It hadn’t been until we stopped at a gas station for fuel and snacks that he’d caught sight of himself in the reflection of a fridge door.
Foolishly, Caleb then fell asleep against the door not long afterwards, so Wes went to town with the permanent marker, giving him a monobrow, a goatee, and a monocle.
“How much farther is it, do you know?” I asked Cole, stretching my neck and rubbing at my lower back. Sitting in cars for too long always made me feel all sorts of kinked up.
Cole scratched at his chin for a moment before replying. He looked like he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, and fuck, it was sexy on him. He and River pulled off three-day stubble like no men I’d ever met.
“Shouldn’t be too much further. Maybe another hour or so?” He glanced over at me and nodded to the glove compartment. “There’s a map in there with the exact location marked.”
“A map?” I chuckled. “How very old school.”
“Not old school, Vixen,” Cole corrected as I flicked open the latch to the glove compartment and pulled out the folded paper map. “Secretive. According to Vali, this house isn’t listed anywhere online, and he didn’t want to go plugging coordinates into Google only to have Omega intercept them somehow. Paper is much safer.”
Sounded sensible, so I nodded and unfolded the paper to inspect it. Sure enough, there was a little dot inked on the paper with a red circle around it.
“Okay, so we are just passing...” I looked out the window, checking for a location on the shop names of the little town we were passing through. “Bravenherst. I think.”
I inspected my map again, located the town of Bravenherst, and absentmindedly circled it with the marker I’d stolen from Wes and Caleb to prevent any more facial features being added to either of them.
“And we need to get to here...” Using the tip of my pen, I tapped the dot that marked the house. “Ugh, that still looks like a ways to go. I wish we could just magic ourselves there.”
Now, one might have assumed that I’d have been more careful about the words I used and the intent behind them... especially when handling ink... but in my defense, I was still really new to the whole magic thing and I was really tired, dammit!
There was no warning or time to react. One minute we were driving sixty to seventy miles an hour down a deserted road on our way out of Bravenherst, and the next we were about to drive straight into the side of a gorgeously extravagant log cabin.
“Shit!” Cole yelled, slamming his foot on the brakes and skidding to a halt some inches from the side of the house. “Vixen!”
“That wasn’t me!” I screamed back, even though I was at least sixty-eight percent sure it was me.
“Well, it wasn’t fucking me,” Caleb snickered from the backseat. “My rune circles can only take, like, one extra person, not an entire SUV and four people with luggage.”
“Uh-oh,” Wes muttered, and I whipped around to look at him.
“Uh-oh, what? What now?” I demanded, starting to panic a bit that I’d done something like... give myself a unicorn horn. As discreetly as I could, I ran a hand over my forehead just in case.
“That.” Wesley nodded out his window to the furious faces of Austin and River as they stormed across the grass.
“Crap,” I groaned. “Cal, uh, any chance you know how to make me invisible?” I tried pleading with my eyes at him, but couldn’t take him seriously with an inked-on monobrow and eyeglass.
“You’re on your own, Kitty Kat,” he smirked. “Don’t think I don’t see you trying not to giggle.”
“Dammit,” I hissed as Austin and River reached our SUV and Austin came around to my side.
Ripping the door open, his scowling face got all up in my business as he yelled. “Christina! I know this was your doing! What in the ever-loving fuck were you thinking? What if people had seen you pop out of thin fucking air here? What if you’d fucked it up and only half the car made the jump? What if you’d all ended up splattered through the fucking car like ketchup? What if—”
“What if you stop yelling at me and consider it was a goddamn fucking accident?” I screamed back at him, unclipping my seat belt and pushing him out of the way so I could exit the car.
Best defense was a good offense, right? Besides, I was not the kind of girl to sit back and be scolded like a damn two-year-old for an accident!
“Do not walk away from me, Christina!” Austin bellowed from behind me, but I didn’t bother stopping or looking back. Instead, I flipped him off and brushed past River to get to the front door of the house.
Fuck. Him.
My anger was burning way hotter than the situation really called for, and part of me knew it was Austin’s anger that was clawing at my throat and making it hard to breathe. I needed to... I didn’t even know. Run? Hit something? Something!
A commotion was going on with the guys still by the car, and Austin was yelling something about reckless use of magic and could have killed us all, but I blocked them out. My only concern was to find a way to calm the hell down before I accidentally blew something up or teleported the entire house somewhere. Hell, I didn’t know what was possible, but I did know that my temper was not going to be good for controlling magic.
“drag?,” Vali’s voice sounded from nearby as I paused in the foyer to the jaw-dropping house.
“Wilderness cabin?” I narrowed my eyes at him standing in the open doorway to the kitchen looking beyond sexy in a tight gray T-shirt and blue jeans. “Vali, this is a fucking mansion.”
The foyer where I stood opened into a huge sunken living area with floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over a lake. A lake that I probably would have known was there had we arrived via road and not popped out of thin air in the driveway…
Vali shrugged. “Language barrier. Come, I’ll show you your room.”
I snorted a laugh at his language barrier excuse. Damn Romanian spoke better English than I did. Still, it was better than standing in the foyer fuming with anger and clenching my fists.
“Sure,” I huffed. “Find me somewhere to hide until I lose the urge to rip Austin’s fucking head off.”
“Mmm, his head? Or his clothes?” Vali arched a brow at me then flashed a devilish grin and led the way up the grand wooden staircase.
Muttering weak denials under my breath, I followed him and raised my eyebrows when we entered a bedroom that must have been directly above the living area below. The huge bay windows showed the same view of the lake, and an enormous California king bed took up barely half of the tastefully decorated bedroom.
“This is my bedroom, huh?” I asked. Having expected a pretty basic kind of fishing cabin or something, the shock of this opulence was taking some of the burn out of my anger. Austin was still furious though, and it was keeping my own temper stoked.
“It’s the master suite, yes,” Vali nodded. “Seeing as you’re the master in this little crew of misfits, I thought it appropriate.”
“That’s... really sweet of you, but it’s your house. I don’t mind taking one of the other rooms.” I frowned, trying to rein in my foul mood and be polite but really struggling.