by Tasha Black
I went over to the crackling fireplace and made a show of warming my hands, even though I wasn’t cold. It was awkward to come here to talk and ask advice. I had no idea where to start.
“What’s up?” Luke asked lightly.
“We’re stretched too thin,” I told him, chickening out and talking about the missing page instead. That was much easier than talking about Cori. “We screwed up last night. That tree was the ash they needed, not an ash tree at all, just ash from the oldest tree.”
Luke shook his head and sighed.
“We don’t even know what half the things are on that list,” he agreed. “It’s hard to guard stuff you don’t know anything about. But I know Bella and her friends are working on that.”
“Even if we knew about all of it,” I said, “there aren’t enough of us to keep an eye on a list of items that long.”
“We don’t need to keep an eye on all the things,” he replied. “Just the rare ones.”
“They already have the rarest,” I muttered.
“Jared,” he said on an exhale.
We both went silent for a moment, thinking about our lost brother in arms. The panther shifter had gone missing almost two years ago. I felt his absence every day.
Our kind were slow to form bonds, other than the mate bond. And we were slow to let go too. The pain of losing one of our own had very nearly torn us apart.
“We tried,” Luke murmured.
I nodded. We had tried. The search had been dangerous and long. At first, some of the other guardians believed Jared had run. But Luke and I knew better.
We didn’t give up the search officially until a year had passed.
And I didn’t know if Luke knew it, but I still searched for clues.
At this point, I knew we would have heard from him if he had run, which meant he had been captured by the Order of the Broken Blade. And the Order would not have kept him alive.
Some of the guardians worried that Jared might reveal our secrets under pain, but I never gave that a thought. Our friend would have been loyal until the end.
I hoped at least to find his remains and bring them home to the guardians one day. It was the least I could do for my brother.
The big panther had always been kind to me. He would have known how to help me with Cori.
“How’s it going with the girl?” Luke asked knowingly.
“Awful,” I admitted. “I actually came here for advice.”
“Better come back when Bella’s here,” Luke said, looking a little alarmed.
“I came because she’s not here,” I told him. “How am I supposed to do this, man? She’s so mad at me.”
“What did you do?” Luke asked in a reasonable tone that made me want to tear his house apart.
“Nothing,” I retorted. “I tried to keep her safe and she ignored me.”
“She didn’t ask for this,” Luke said carefully. “Until last night, she looked out for herself.”
“I didn’t ask for this either,” I said. “And the worst part is having to be human so much of the time. You know I don’t like being human. And she doesn’t want to be mated to an actual bear.”
“You came here today as a human,” he said, frowning thoughtfully.
“So we could talk,” I hedged.
“You walked through the woods as a human,” he said.
“How did you know?” I demanded, frustrated to have been caught.
“You have, um, forest stuff on your clothes,” he said politely.
I looked down at myself. I was covered in leaves, pine needles and mud. I had tracked it all over his previously clean house.
“Sorry, man,” I said. “I guess I’m really not used to being in this form that much.”
“You don’t like spending time as a human because you’ve never met a human worth spending a lot of time with,” Luke said quietly. “But I think that has changed.”
I whipped around to look at him, but he was studiously brushing invisible dust off his sleeve with one of his big hands, leaving me with nothing to do but think about what he had said.
I exhaled loudly and marched back out his door without saying goodbye.
14
Cori
I piled food on my tray absentmindedly, thoughts of Reed and mate bonds filling my head, leaving no room for something as mundane as lunch.
I’d spent the whole morning in a stupor, unable to concentrate on my lecture class, bumbling into people as I traversed the halls. It would be good to talk with my friends over lunch, maybe pull myself back into the present.
I stepped out of line, tray in hand, and spotted them the big table in the back corner of the cafeteria.
Anya and Bella were on one side with an empty seat left for me. Across the table, Nina and Lark chattered excitedly. There was an empty seat on their side that Kendall might or might not fill.
Kendall was tall, blonde, athletic, and a member of the exclusive group of popular girls who called themselves legacies or “legs” because their parents were alumni of Primrose Academy.
She was in Bellwether house, just like Anya, Bella and me. And she had pledged herself to our cause, stopping the Order of the Broken Blade from using their stolen spell to wake the Raven King.
It was a big commitment, but Kendall still seemed to float between groups, as if she could be one of us and one of them at the same time.
“How’s it going?” Bella asked as I approached. Her long, dark hair was pulled back and her deep blue eyes were filled with concern.
If anyone understood what was happening to me, it was Bella. She’d gone through it all herself, only a month ago.
“I’m… overwhelmed,” I said, sitting down beside her.
“It will get easier,” she said, putting a comforting arm around me. “But your life has changed. The sooner you can accept that, the sooner things will start to feel normal.”
The rest of the table had gone silent as everyone listened. It was weird to be the focus of all this attention. But I didn’t care enough for it to stop me from talking to Bella.
“Do things feel normal to you?” I asked her.
“Not really,” she said with a smile. “Not yet. But they feel right. Does that make sense?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, it does. You got a good one. Luke is super nice.”
“Reed is his best friend,” she told me in solemn voice.
“He’s bossy,” I said dismissively. “He treated me like a child.”
“That’s their whole deal,” she told me. “It’s not personal. That’s just his natural instinct bubbling up, demanding that he protect you. It’s what he’s been training for his entire life. Try to be sympathetic.”
I nodded, but I couldn’t help but think about him yelling at me in front of my friends like I was a naughty toddler.
“Are you guys getting anywhere with the list?” I asked, ready to change the subject.
“Clearly we got the part about the ash wrong,” Nina said, shaking her head.
“We were pretty close on that though,” Lark said, straightening her purple cat-eye glasses. “And we’re making progress with some of the other items.”
“Even if we figured out every one of them, there just aren’t enough guardians,” Bella said quietly. “Luke and I were talking about it, and he says it’s going to be very difficult to stop them.”
I thought about that. Our current plan was to identify the items on the list and get to their sources before the Order could. But Bella was right, unless we told the rest of the witches, we wouldn’t have enough coverage.
And we would never do that, because it would involve telling them that Bella had taken a book from the restricted section of the Library and spirited it out of the castle.
She was incredibly lucky that the school was allowing her to continue her education even after being mated. Something like that would get her kicked out for sure, and maybe mess up our relationship with the guardians, since they knew and the witches didn’t.
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“Even if we told the witches, there wouldn’t be enough,” Anya said, clearly thinking along the same lines I was.
“We can’t let them bring back the Raven King,” Nina said. “I’ve been reading a lot about the fae. Bringing down the veil would be disastrous for humanity.”
“There has to be a way to fix this,” Bella said. Her voice was pitched slightly higher than usual, the tension in it palpable.
“It isn’t your fault,” Anya told her. “If you had known what could happen, you wouldn’t have taken it.”
“You’d only been here a few days,” Lark added. “We just have to stop the spell. And we will, somehow.”
Stop the spell.
“My God,” I breathed.
“What’s wrong?” Anya asked.
“In Sora’s class, she was talking about how to stop a spell,” I said. “The best way is what we’re trying to do - stop it before it happens.”
“Right,” Bella said.
“But if you can’t do that,” I said, “then you can do a spell that opposes it, like ice to stop fire.”
“Like the professors did with the tree,” Bella noted.
“But there is no spell to put the raven king to sleep,” Nina said. “At least none that any of us could perform.”
“What about a counter spell?” I asked.
Everyone was quiet for a minute.
“We’d have to gather all the same materials,” Anya thought it through out loud. “But at least we wouldn’t have to stop the Order at every turn.”
“We’d need to be able to actually do the spell,” Lark said.
“Anya never messes up a spell,” Bella pointed out.
“How would we know when they plan to cast it?” Anya asked.
Damn. That was a good question. We couldn’t cast a counter spell unless we knew exactly when the actual spell was happening.
“There are some guidelines in the spell,” Lark noted. “Stuff about the conditions for casting. I bet if we put them all together, it would tell us the best time and place to perform the ritual. And the Order would definitely shoot for the ideal casting conditions to maximize their chance of success.”
So maybe we were actually onto something here after all.
“We’d need to figure out all the clues,” Nina added, looking down at her notebook, where she had already reassembled the list.
“Let’s each pick an item,” Anya decided. “We’ll work on the clue and then try to retrieve the item.”
There was an excitement at the table, a sense of renewed hope.
I bit my lip and tried not to grin.
“Nice thinking, Cori,” Lark said, winking at me from across the table.
I wasn’t exactly a good student, or a respected witch. But I had just come up with an idea that might work. Witch pride was an unfamiliar but welcome feeling. I winked back at her.
The others were passing the notebook around, putting their names next to various clues and snapping pictures with their phones. We might not be able to use our phones to communicate with the outside world as long as we were at Primrose Academy, but they still had their uses.
I jotted my name down next to a random ingredient and snapped a pic.
“That’s a tough one, Cori,” Anya said.
“Reed will help her,” Bella said softly.
Nina giggled and Lark joined in.
“Guys, come on,” I protested. “It’s not like that. We kind of hate each other.”
“Sure you do,” Lark laughed.
“It’ll get better soon,” Bella said, waggling her eyebrows at me.
I scowled. I didn’t want things to be better with Reed.
But if I could get him to help me solve this clue, and find the ingredient for the spell, that would be nice.
I could get used to feeling like a useful witch.
15
Cori
After my afternoon class, I sat on my bed staring at the ingredient clue on my phone.
Written in cochineal from a source that has never seen sunlight...
I had already looked up cochineal. It could be a red dye used for food coloring. Or it could refer to a red pigment created from the shell of a beetle.
The food coloring angle seemed like a long shot. Food coloring wasn’t uncommon. Plus I doubted that there would be anything on the list that we could pick up at the local grocery store. And since modern food coloring was produced and kept indoors, why would not seeing the sunlight be important?
No. It had to be the second definition.
But beetles lived outdoors. How could I find pigment from a beetle that lived indoors?
I thought briefly about zoos and aquariums. Maybe even a pet supply shop would have some sort of feeder bugs.
But the spell book predated all that.
So I was looking for an honest to goodness beetle that lived its whole life indoors.
No. Not necessarily indoors - just out of the sunlight.
After a quick trip downstairs and a few quizzical looks, I was back in my room ten minutes later with everything the Primrose Academy library had to say on the fascinating subject of beetles. I cracked open the first book and got down to business.
First, I learned about darkling beetles, but they didn’t have scarlet shells. In fact, none of the nocturnal beetles I found seemed to have them.
I threw the book onto my bed and paced a little.
I wasn’t looking for a nocturnal insect, not just something that lived under a rock. The forest nearby wasn’t entirely dark, even in the thickest parts.
What was I missing?
I pictured the campus, the maze, the woods, the lake below, the cliffside.
“Of course,” I said out loud. “A cave.”
I searched the indexes for cave beetle and the second book led me to an entry about them. Sure enough, they were long, ant-like, and red.
Jackpot.
I congratulated myself inwardly and pulled on my boots. If we left now, we might make it to the cliffside and back by sundown.
I hustled back down the hallway, ignoring the stares of the other women.
It was probably weird to them that the worst witch at Primrose Academy had been chosen by a guardian.
And to top it off, I wasn’t exactly the prettiest girl at school either. I loved my strong, curvy body and my mop of dark curls, but you didn’t see a lot of women who looked like me on the covers of magazines.
Reed on the other hand… Reed was beautiful. He was legitimately, over-the-top gorgeous.
I wondered what we had looked like together to everyone.
Then I remembered that he had been a bear when he chose me. So we must have looked like an ordinary woman, and a bear. Which was odd, to say the least.
It was hard not to wonder why he had come to me as a bear.
I shook my head to clear my thoughts as I headed up the stairs of the tower.
The door at the bottom had been unlocked, which was a sign he would be waiting for me. And speaking of signs, the one warning students away was gone. Now that my classmates knew there was a bear in the tower, I guessed the headmistress thought they weren’t very likely to go poking around up there.
In any case, I was glad I didn’t have to use my magic to get through the door again. I couldn’t afford to be confused right now. I had a clear idea of what needed to be done.
The stairs seemed to go on and on endlessly. It occurred to me that the last time I’d been carried up. I’d been a bit embarrassed at the time, but there was something to be said for skipping so many steps.
When I finally reached the top, I knocked on the door.
After only a few seconds, the door opened and Reed stood before me, in man form.
I thought the stairs had taken some of the wind out of me, but the sight that greeted me left me absolutely breathless. Reed wore a pair of worn jeans, and nothing else, leaving his feet and incredible torso bare. His hair tangled around his shoulders in a shaggy mane. His golden eyes blazed.
“You’re early,” he growled.
I gaped at him for a moment before I could clear my thoughts.
“Stop leering at me,” I told him firmly. “You’re coming with me.”
“Where are we going?” he asked lazily.
“We have to get a beetle out of a cave,” I told him. “You know where all the caves are.”
“Oh, I see,” he said. “Because I’m a bear I know where all the caves are?”
Shit. Was that racist, or… species-ist?
“Well, do you?” I asked.
“Yes, obviously I know where all the caves are,” he said, grinning. “I’ve been a ranger in these woods since I was a teenager.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Put on some clothes and meet me at the maze in twenty minutes.”
“Sure you don’t want to come in first?” he offered in a smooth, golden voice, one eyebrow arched.
My body surged with lust, but I forced myself to turn away.
“Twenty minutes,” I yelled over my shoulder as I headed back down the stairs.
My heart was pounding and I had to admit that I was feeling really excited about seeing him again for our adventure. I had to remind myself to slow down and think about the reality of the situation.
He might be super-hot, and he might be attracted to me, but at the end of the day, he was the kind of guy who would yell at me in front of my friends - the kind of guy who thought he always knew best.
My magic might be beyond me at the moment, but I wasn’t ready to be anyone’s pet.
I had just reached the bottom of the tower stairs and stepped out into the hallway, when someone touched my shoulder, making me jump.
“Cori,” Miss Twillbottom’s voice was always a bit high-pitched, but today she sounded downright anxious. “Headmistress Hart would like to see you.”
“Sure,” I said, turning to see Miss Twillbottom scurrying off in the direction of the headmistress’s office, an envelope in her hand.
I followed her, wondering what I’d done wrong now. It probably had to do with my make up assignments.
