Book Read Free

Blood Magic

Page 10

by Jayne Hawke


  I opened the middle door and found a room that looked like it belonged in a luxury magazine. A high-pile slate-grey rug had been placed next to the nearest side of the super-king-sized bed, which came complete with the most exquisite-looking bedding. I ran my hands over it and found the cotton to be incredibly smooth and soft.

  “It’s fae made. Only the best for you,” Ethan said with a warm smile.

  He really was spoiling me.

  The furniture was heavy hardwood with lots of space for a great number of clothes and weapons. The en suite was beautiful with an amazing bathtub big enough for two. Ethan gave me a seductive smile as he pulled me into a kiss.

  “Just say the word,” he whispered.

  Sinful images played through my mind. The thought of his bare skin against mine and his scent wrapping around me. It felt so right.

  The timing felt so wrong, though. We were hiding in a safe house from assassins. I needed to keep my head in the game.

  THIRTY

  The magic wrapped around the building gave me a sense of comfort. I curled up in a large armchair with Mom’s grimoires and a mug of hot chocolate. It was time to see what information the grimoires had to give me. I needed to come to grips with my magic, and fast. The threats were bigger than I’d faced before, and I wasn’t going to leave Matt alone in the world.

  Mom’s neat handwriting was easy to read, and I found myself slipping between the pages with ease. It felt as though something passed between myself and the pages as I turned them. I would have thought that was ridiculous, but I was reading a book that bit people.

  The opening pages of the first book offered insight into Mom and her childhood. It was all new to me. She’d been trained as a classic witch, but her coven had known there was something weird about her. Witches are taught to use every form of magic, but they are usually stronger with some forms than others. It’s normal and natural. Mom’s gift for blood magic was very unusual, though. She said that her coven became fearful of her as she reached her teens and really came into her skills.

  I felt awful for her, to be turned away by the people you’d grown up with and loved. As I turned more pages, I became torn between wanting to learn everything and trying to look for information on the witches. There was a chance that Mom knew something about them. Her information could tell us why they were targeting the fae, and how to stop them.

  The blood witches we’d seen so far were cold and brutal killers. I didn’t want to become one of them. A thread of fear coiled deep within me as I thought on the euphoria that came with giving myself over to the blood magic. There was a chance that one day I wouldn’t be strong enough to pull myself away from that high.

  A tapping came from the window high on the wall to my right. Frowning, I wondered if Matt had lost his keys already. Standing, I walked over to the window. It wasn’t Matt standing there with a bashful grin on his face. It was the elf assassin, Sin, and he was carrying what looked like a dead pixie over his shoulders like a shepherd carrying a lamb.

  I stood looking at him for a long moment. Ethan was upstairs taking a shower, Dean was in the workout room. The cu sith weren’t happy being in the city unable to stretch their legs through the moors. Still, Ethan had insisted that it was the safest place in the territory.

  Sin frowned at me and mouthed something that I couldn’t quite understand. I didn’t know how he’d found us. The point of the safe house was to hide from people like him. Finally, I gestured to the back door, not wanting a passerby to see him strolling around with a dead body. I unsheathed my daggers and walked around to the back door in the kitchen.

  Opening the door ,I looked at Sin with what I hoped was a fearsome expression.

  He grinned at me.

  “I brought you a gift. He was on the roof of your house, likely waiting for you to return,” Sin said.

  It took me a long moment to really process what was going on. The terrifying elf assassin, the same one that struck fear into the cu sith, had brought me a dead assassin like a cat bringing me a dead mouse.

  “What am I supposed to do with him?” I finally asked.

  Sin dropped the body on the cracked concrete and shrugged.

  “I just wanted to show you that I’m your side. I’ve made my decision. My lord is not worthy of my loyalty.”

  On one hand, I could understand his sentiment. I’d be pretty pissed if I was sold into slavery as a little girl. On the other hand, it wasn’t exactly filling me with trust that he’d turned his back on his lord like that.

  He held up his hands.

  “Maybe that wasn’t the best way to show you can trust me... I will return, though. I’m quite determined to join your pack.”

  “And what if we have no desire to have an elf in our pack?” Ethan rumbled.

  I almost jumped. He’d moved silently. I’d thought he was still upstairs showering. A glance over my shoulder showed him to have wet hair in messy curls and no shirt. His skin glistened and drew my eye down the beautifully carved muscles that formed his torso.

  Sin grinned at Ethan.

  “I’m a very useful pack member.”

  “You don’t seem to be entirely sane,” I said without meaning to.

  Sin rolled his eyes.

  “What about me makes me not sane?”

  “You broke into my house to make pancakes!”

  “Again I ask, what is so wrong with making someone pancakes?”

  “You broke into my house to do it... you, by your own admission, were sent to kill me. What if you do join our pack and you decide to make one of our bounties pancakes instead?”

  Sin laughed.

  “Now there’s a ridiculous idea.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Ok, fine, so my social skills aren’t what they should be. My intent was to show you that I am not going to kill you.” He nudged the dead assassin with the toe of his boot. “And this was an offering to prove that my new goal is help keep you safe.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I told you. You and your boyfriend are strong enough to free me from my bond, and I want to join your pack. I’ve never been part of a pack before.”

  “No. You have three seconds to get out of my sight,” Ethan said flatly.

  Sin sighed.

  “I stand by my word to keep you safe,” he said before he disappeared.

  “He could have taken the dead body,” I muttered.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I’d opted to head to bed early and get some quiet reading in from Mom’s grimoire. It wasn’t the best bedtime reading, given the talk of various methods of obtaining the blood and the impact that had on the quality and type of magic. There was so much left for me to learn. Normal witches spent the first twenty-one or more years being taught everything about their magic. I needed to know why Mom hadn’t told me what we were or given me a chance to learn about my magic.

  I was mostly asleep with the grimoire open in front of me when Ethan knocked on the door.

  “Huh?” I called.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  He stepped into the room with a small frown.

  “Another victim as been claimed. Same M.O., another highborn fae taken right outside of a restaurant. Witnesses say there were three women involved.”

  I groaned.

  “Any connection between this victim and the previous?”

  “Yes, that’s why I woke you. They’re all from the same bloodline. I was hoping maybe there was a mention of that particular bloodline in your Mom’s grimoires.”

  I looked down at the books on my duvet. I certainly hadn’t come across anything like that yet, but I had a few hundred pages to get through yet.

  “I’ll see if I can find anything. Thanks.”

  “Would you like me to help? Or do you just want to talk about...?” he gestured at the grimoires.

  “I’m confused and a bit hurt by the fact she hid all of this from me. There’s no reason why I couldn’t have passed as a normal witch.
Who knows how much that would have changed our lives,” I said.

  Ethan came over in his blue and white stripy pyjama bottoms and tight white t-shirt. I watched the sway of his hips as he did so and looked away before my head went to inappropriate places. We were talking about saving lives.

  “Perhaps she was hoping that you would have a normal life free from fear of the hounds, or other witches,” he said as he sat next to me.

  “She should have given me the opportunity to choose,” I said.

  “I don’t disagree.”

  He put his arm around my shoulders, and I leaned into him as I picked the book I’d been reading back up.

  “There’s so much in here. It’ll take me a year or more to even begin to digest it all, let alone put it to good use,” I said.

  “We have all the time in the world,” Ethan said softly.

  “I’m just frustrated. I could have been making a real difference in the world. Yes, I saved some lives as a bounty hunter, but I could have done so much more with this magic. There are healing spells in here, and protection rituals, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.”

  “And you’ll put it all to good use now you have it.”

  I smiled and allowed the frustration to evaporate. He was right. There was no point in wasting energy on what could have been.

  “Have you looked at the other books? Is it all information on spells and such?”

  I picked up the other two books. I’d only glanced at them. The first one looked to be more of the same. There were complicated diagrams for what looked like ritual circles and potions. The next one was different. I skimmed some pages, and it read more like a journal. I swallowed hard. It felt so person to be looking through Mom’s private thoughts like that.

  We didn’t have time to sit down and read every page. I needed a way to find some useful information. Sighing, I looked for a table of contents. To my surprise there was something like that. Mom had always been so organised. I flipped through to a section about a third of the way through the book.

  Ethan and I read together. Mom’s neat handwriting detailed the types of blood witches.

  As with everything in this life, there are many forms of blood witch. The first is that which dabbles in the art without feeling much call to it. They are the weakest and most common. To call them a blood witch is generous as they have barely more talent for it than an average witch. The next are far rarer. They have much more talent. That talent brings with it a risk. There is a euphoria that comes with working with blood. The magic is unlike anything else and it’s ability to corrupt should never be underestimated.

  These second type of witches are powerful when trained correctly. Untrained they can become dangerous as the blood calls to them. An untrained witch my find herself subjected to whispers calling to her and making promises. The magic is powerful and there are some scholars which believe it is an entirely different form of magic to the rest found on this plane. The whispers will become more urgent and potent. When the witch finally breaks the risk of them becoming consumed by the euphoria and the magic itself is too high. They will die an agonising death, likely taking a great number of people with them. This form of witch must be cremated to stop others from stealing the magic in their veins.

  The final type are not natural born blood witches. They were formed by outside forces. Their own magic is shattered, this makes them unpredictable and volatile. This form of witch should be eradicated for the sake of everyone.

  “Well it looks like we’ve figured out what type of blood witch they are,” I said.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I was unable to restrain the yawns. Ethan pulled me into a gentle kiss.

  “We’ll finish the rest tomorrow. Sleep well,” he said softly.

  “You were just looking for an excuse to get into my bed,” I teased.

  He grinned unrepentantly.

  I put the books onto the nightstand and scooted a little further down under the blankets. They were easily the nicest blankets I’d ever had the pleasure of sleeping under. I was asleep before Ethan had even reached the door.

  My dreams were full of images of blood and crystalline threads within them. The threads exploded into small suns and Sin’s face swam before me.

  “Why?” I shouted into the red void.

  Sin laughed and suddenly everything was shattered and broken like shards of glass.

  I woke up feeling confused. Reading the grimoire before bed definitely wasn’t a good plan.

  When I went down for breakfast I found Dean sitting shirtless and covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Ethan was padding around in just a pair of pyjama bottoms.

  “Sparring sessions,” Dean said before he took a sip of his coffee.

  I tried not to look at him, it felt wrong, but I remembered that they’d told me it was weirder if I didn’t look at them. Shifters were used to being mostly naked around each other.

  My eye wandered over Ethan’s powerful form as he cooked some bacon over the stove. He was standing side on to me as I sat at the main kitchen table. I had a fantastic view of his exquisitely toned torso and muscular arms.

  Dean handed me a napkin. I frowned at him.

  “You were drooling,” he said playfully.

  I threw the napkin back at him with a laugh. Ethan smirked over at me.

  “I was not drooling!” I said to Ethan.

  He laughed and grinned at me.

  Cade stumbled into the kitchen with his hair a mess. He muttered something under his breath before he continued his zombie-like ramble over to the coffee machine.

  “You missed out on sparring,” Dean said.

  Cade made a grunting sound.

  “I’ll remind you of that when you’re too slow and need me to save your ass,” Dean said with a grin.

  Cade ignored him and glared at the coffee maker as it slowly poured coffee into his waiting mug.

  Ethan served the breakfast, which consisted of a small mountain of bacon, eggs, both scrambled and fried, fried bread, black pudding, and hash browns. My plate was only half as full as the cu siths’. They were learning.

  “Ethan said you found something on the witches last night,” Dean said around a hash brown.

  “Maybe. I need to keep reading,” I said.

  I didn’t want to send us down the wrong trail. People were dying; we couldn’t afford to chase down a false lead. It wasn’t as though we had another lead, though. The witches looked like the most likely culprit - not that I’d put it past the fae pulling off something like this. They were very fond of trying to take each other out. Still, it was odd to have such a mix of mongrels and highborn killed. Even if they were from the same bloodline, the mongrels posed no threat to any of the fae that could afford to pull of something like this.

  Witches didn’t make much sense on that front, either. Why would witches try and wipe out a particular fae bloodline? I remembered what Ethan had said about a Lord Fionn in London. Hadn’t he bound a witch coven to him for multiple generations? Maybe these witches were rebelling the same way Sin was. I supposed I should be glad Sin wasn’t pushing back in quite such a gruesome way.

  Yet.

  I had joined Cade on his run down by the river not long after breakfast. Just like the pack, I needed to make sure that I was in the very best physical form. We couldn’t afford to let each other down by slacking off. It was almost lunch time by the time we got back. I ached in the very best way where Cade had set a fast pace and not let up until we were a mile from the safe house.

  Once I’d showered and enjoyed a small (for the pack) lunch, I settled into the armchair I’d claimed as mine and began reading the grimoire again. Ethan had tried to pick it up, only to drop it when it bit him. I’d warned him, but he had insisted on trying for himself. He’d mentioned something about Matt being half cait sidhe. Satisfied that the defence mechanism really did keep anyone but me out, he threw himself into his own research into the witches.

  I picked up a few pages after where I’d left off. The n
otes had taken a turn into the politics of the witches, which wasn’t what I was looking for. I needed to know how they worked and why they might be going after that particular fae bloodline.

  I was on the second page when I found exactly what I’d been looking for. Mom detailed the manner in which these witches had been made by the fae bloodline they were now killing.

  “Ethan, I have something. It looks like these witches are the result of a ‘Lady Morag’ screwing around with witch and fae magic. She experimented on this witch coven, aiming to make a really potent form of blood witch. Her experiments didn’t go to plan, though, as fae magic doesn’t play well with witch magic. Get this: the witches can use blood like I can, but they need to drain the blood of life essence to continue living. If they don’t drain blood regularly, they wither and die.”

  “Vampires!” Cade and Kerry shouted at me from the kitchen.

  I had to finally admit that maybe, just maybe, they were a bit like vampires.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Kerry and Cade were very pleased with themselves about the vampiric tendencies of the witches. They crowed about it for an hour before they finally stopped.

  “They’re not actual vampires. They don’t drink the blood,” I said stubbornly.

  “They need blood to survive, therefore they’re vampires,” Kerry countered.

  “So do ticks,” I said stubbornly.

  “Ok, so they’re human-shaped and need to blood to live. Vampires,” Kerry said.

  I was done arguing about it. Calling them vampires wouldn’t really change anything, so I let them have their fun.

  “Matt’s late,” I said as I glanced at my phone.

  Kerry frowned.

  “He’s never late,” she said.

  “Why don’t we go and see if he’s been caught up in some book?”

  “Sounds good. It’s not a long walk from here,” Kerry said.

  We pulled on coats, boots, and weapons and headed out. The walk took us across the broken concrete and a short way by the river before we turned towards the city. Kerry knew the way better than I did, so I let her lead. We were just starting down the river path when we saw Matt. And he wasn’t alone.

 

‹ Prev