The Legend of the Eight: The Twisted (Book 3)

15: The Storm

FIFTEEN: THE STORM
MAY 7
PHOEBE DOMINGO

THE TIPS OF HER FINGERS tingled like she'd fallen asleep on her arm wrong and caused her hand to become numb. Only, she could usually shake the feeling. But as she stood in that dark room with Drew, watching some man on the television threaten her and everyone in the building, she couldn't make the tingling stop.

It felt like she was being pulled towards something, like there was a magnet drawing her magic out of her fingers and towards something else. She couldn't explain it but whatever was happening, it wasn't a pinched nerve and it certainly wasn't a coincidence.

"What do we do?" she asked Drew after the announcement cut out and the screen buzzed gray after the disconnection. "Who was that? Is he Dark?"

"I don't think he's Dark," Drew said, walking towards the door and checking the hall for company. "The Darks don't know about the Armory. They couldn't track us here."

"Then who was that?"

Drew reached into his pocket and began tapping away, typing a text message—probably to the others. After a few seconds, the replies came in and he assured Phoebe that the others saw the broadcast but were all fine. Then a new message buzzed on his phone and when he read it, he made a face.

"Fi, who are the Shadow Thieves?"

Her breath caught in her chest. She'd done an extensive amount of research looking for her father and in the midst of it, she'd come across a group of people called the Shadow Thieves. They were derived from a different kind of wizards (which were believed to be extinct) called the Shadow Men and rather than practicing Pure or Dark Magic, they practiced Voodoo. In their earliest recorded history, Shadow Men were the only wizards born without their own source of magic and relied on the magic of others to supply them power. This isolated them from the rest of the wizarding community so when the Darks were sent to the Shadow Lands and the Pures monopolized the World of Magic, the Shadow Men fled to the Mortal World. A small group learned they had the ability to syphon the magic from other beings and use it for themselves, creating the Thieves. She didn't know much about Voodoo or if it adhered to the same rules as Pure Magic, only that it was unpredictable and unhinged—making the Shadow Thieves some of the most dangerous beings in the Three Realms.

"HOW DID THEY EVEN FIND out about us?" Drew asked Phoebe while they toured the Armory floor by floor, searching for both the Archives Room and their friends. He was clutching a piece of molding that he'd broken off a doorframe and carried it like a bat. "I mean, I know the cat's kind of out of the bag back home but how did these Shadow Thieves even find out about us?"

"I don't know," Phoebe answered honestly, both scared and exhausted. After explaining everything she knew about the Thieves to Drew (which wasn't much, for the record), Phoebe suggested they continue searching for the Vacancy Stone so that they could escape the Armory before anything bad happened.

"Well it's no mystery why they're looking for us," Drew whispered, checking another door though when it wasn't the Archives Room, he kept moving. "They want our magic. You said they specialize in stealing magic from other wizards, right? Well I think we both know how valuable our magic would be to people like them."

He approached another door and peeked inside. "Records room," he whispered to her before closing it and leading her further down the hall.

Phoebe looked down at her hands again, half-expecting to see some sparks of magic flickering out of them. Drew noticed her staring and stopped walking.