Of Fate and Fortune: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (Arcane Arts Academy Book 4)

by Elena Lawson

  What?

  That’s it? No stay away from that Vampire, Harper? No you are all ours—we will not share you? No, it’s too dangerous, we won’t allow it?

  The hell was going on here? “You mean if I…liked him?” I said, wiggling in my seat like a fish on a line. “You wouldn’t be…upset?”

  Adrian sat at the third chair to the left of Cal and I at the breakfast table, setting down not one, but two full plates of food. “We talked about it,” Adrian said, and I saw the tension around his eyes grow even more taut. “And neither of us really like the idea, but—”

  “You’re kind of stuck with us,” Cal finished for his brother wolf. “Isn’t that how this works? The witch-familiar thing? We’re stuck with each other for life?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek, my stomach turning a bit. He hadn’t said it as though it were a bad thing, but I couldn’t help wondering if that was how they felt about it, even now. I knew once they hated the idea—tried to reverse the bond at all costs—but we were past that, weren’t we? They’d accepted the bond. And so had I.

  I nodded solemnly. “Until death.”

  “So then, it isn’t fair for us to claim you as our own in more ways than we’ve already claimed each other.”

  “Yeah, and you and that Elias dude had a thing going on before you ever even really knew us,” Adrian added, his mouth half-full of food.

  Cal nodded his agreement, swallowing his own mouthful. “And Draven…well, we won’t pretend to understand it, but we know what a vamp bite does to you.”

  “And the dude is charming as hell.”

  I chuckled, my heart feeling truly warmed. I just hoped they knew how much I wanted them too, and not just because they were my familiars, either. Just like how I wanted Draven more than because of what his bite did to me. And how I’d wanted Elias all long. It was a conversation for another time though, because right at that moment, Draven waltzed into the room, a devious grin turning up one side of his lips.

  He had the shadow of stubble over his jaw for what I thought was the first time since I’d know him and damn if it didn’t make him even more gorgeous than he already was.

  “You think I’m charming?” Draven drolled, going over to where there was a fresh pot of coffee on the counter to pour himself a mug. He leaned against the counter, a work of art in his dark toned jeans, black tee, and that flawless ivory skin. A clash of shades that was very pleasing to the eye.

  I had to force myself to look away and took a nibble of my bacon, soon after deciding to abandon all sense of propriety and stuff my face.

  “Don’t let it go to your head,” Adrian said without turning around.

  A bolt of unease ran down my spine as I realized that if he’d heard Adrian say that he may have also heard me asking what they would think if I liked him. Oh god. I needed to get used to being around a bunch of guys with super senses.

  But mercifully, Draven didn’t say anything about it, he just continued sipping his coffee against the counter as we ate, Cal and Adrian striking up a conversation about going for a run later that day to stretch their wolves’ legs and see if they could find wherever the shifter they’d scented beyond the gate had gone to.

  Hopefully far far away. We had enough to deal with as it was. Though I couldn’t help hoping if they did find the shifter, that they would take the time necessary to help him or her adjust. It must be absolutely terrifying to shift into a beast if you don’t know or understand what’s happening. If you think there’s a chance you may never get control of the animal within…

  They had to know there was a light at the end of their dark road. That with patience, practice, and a little help, they would lead a relatively normal life again. Be able to change and not go full beast-mode during full moons—that sort of thing.

  Unless your bloodline was as diluted as my mother’s had been, apparently. She didn’t have much choice in the matter.

  As Cal and Adrian continued to chat about which direction to go and if it was a better idea to go after dark or not, I finished up my food, my belly protesting at the fullness it hadn’t felt in well over a week, and went to clear my plate in the trash and wash my plate.

  Draven eyed me sideways as I rinsed the dish and set it to dry. I felt his eyes on me like a warm finger tracing my jawline, wandering lower. Fuck. I needed to stop. “So,” I said conversationally, clearing my throat. “Have you found anything more in the journal? Finished deciphering what we found in Donovan’s lair?”

  Draven’s smirk faded and he inhaled as his brows rose. “No and no. But I think I’m onto something. I just need a bit more time to sort it out. It would be helpful if you father had a library here.”

  I shrugged. “He might.”

  It was a big place and we hadn’t explored much of it yet. That was the reason why we were here, after all. Best get to it.

  “Care to take a look around?” I asked him, making my way to the side entrance to the kitchen, wondering where it would lead.

  Draven refilled his mug and handed it to me. I usually took sugar in my coffee, but the gesture was so unlike him I didn’t complain. Besides, the coffee smelled divine. I sipped at it and instantly felt a dull aching in my skull I’d barely noticed before, begin to subside. “Thanks,” I said and called to the others, “We’re going to look around. Come find us when you’re finished.”

  Adrian waved his hand up in the air as though to say, yeah, yeah. Go do your thing. We ain’t rushing our breakfast.

  “Where do they put it all?” Draven asked, his tone light as we entered the narrow hall.

  I sipped my coffee. “I’ve been asking myself that for weeks. Don’t think about it too much. You’ll get a headache.”

  He chuckled, and I found I liked the sound. It was somehow both throaty and melodic.

  The hallway led to a back door, and to the far western wall of the house where there was another, wider corridor going back up towards the front. We followed it, passing by another sitting room that looked fairly nondescript.

  I noticed the sheets that were covering the furniture had been removed and realized Dee had probably readied the house for us while we slept. We probably had her to thank for the newly turned on electricity, too. I hoped she also turned on the boilers.

  Judging by my faint odor and the state of my hair, I was in desperate need of a hot shower. Fingers crossed she cleared away all the spiders, too. I shivered.

  There was a curio cabinet filled with little statues and knickknacks in the far corner of the room. It had drawers below it. And there were two trunks around the room. I made a mental note to go through them later. I wanted to get a proper layout of the place and what was where in my head before we started the real work of searching for the so-called clues Martin thought we may find here.

  A little further down the hallway was what we were looking for. The smell of old, dried parchment and book dust tickled my nose even before we peered inside. Yes. This was where we would find something, I thought.

  Inside the large room was a library and office combined. There were no windows whatsoever in the space, and the two lamps, one on a round wood table beside a plush leather chair and the other atop a mahogany desk near the entrance to the room, pushed up against the wall to my right, were on.

  As if caretaker Dee knew we’d be keen to explore.

  The lamps were old fashioned, with yellowish glass shades that cast a glow similar to the natural light one would find at sunset over the twin stacks of tomes on the wall to my left and the one to my right. They reached floor to high ceiling with iron ladders on rollers to reach the higher ones.

  When we stepped inside, I noticed several of the titles straight away and knew they weren’t of the mortal world. These were alchemical texts. Jackpot.

  Not nearly as extensive as the selection at Arcane Arts Academy, but as my gaze landed on a tome that seemed to contain information on blood magic, I knew at least some of the books here we would never be able to find back at school.

&nbs
p; A tome like that would be banned. Illegal, actually. The only place original texts like that lived was under lock and key in the archives at The Department of Arcane Inquiry.

  Martin was right. This was a massive treasure trove. With what we found here, we might be able to decipher everything in my father’s journal after all! And figure out what exactly that slip of parchment was trying to tell us about the original curses.

  A bubble of excitement and relief flooded me, and I turned to find an equally eager smile on Draven’s face. Then I remembered something and moved to put myself in front of him, blocking him from looking too closely into the library. “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone about this place or what you find here.”

  I was almost too excited to keep a straight face as I set my terms. Showing him this sort of stuff—hell, even having it—was highly illegal. We aren’t supposed to share our knowledge with the other races, let alone let them flip through ancient texts on sigils and blood magic.

  Draven’s mouth pressing into a firm line. “I understand,” he said, a little disappointedly, I thought. “I wouldn’t do anything that would cause you to be…punished.”

  He didn’t have to elaborate. We both knew there were precious few options when it came to the will of council in reprimanding its own. Kalzir Prison. Death. Or the complete stripping one’s inherited magical ability.

  I cowered at the thought. Once I’d thought maybe being stripped of my magic wouldn’t be so bad. Then my screw-ups wouldn’t be nearly as catastrophic. I thought it might’ve even been a relief. But now, the thought made me sick to my stomach. My magic—no matter how volatile—was a part of me. And if they removed it from me, it would be akin to removing some other vital organ. Like my brain. Or my heart.

  Looking into Draven’s eyes, however, I found I believed him. I knew someplace deep inside he wouldn’t do anything that would cause me harm.

  “Then I guess we better get to work.”

  13

  I didn’t have to force Cal and Adrian to promise me they wouldn’t say anything about what we all would find in the library. I did mention it, though, just in case they forgot they weren’t supposed to be seeing these kinds of things and went blabbing by accident.

  They wouldn’t tell anyone. If anything happened to me, it would break them too. It was how I knew I could always trust them—irrevocably.

  After several hours, and three cups of strong Spanish coffee, we’d actually managed to find a few things. Draven had found a language book of sorts that held some deciphering’s of ancient Melîn scrolls he intended to use to finish translating a passage he’d been working on. And Cal and Adrian found a book blood magic incantations and spells—one sigil within in particular looked to make up part of the massive interlocking one on the parchment Donovan had.

  A sigil to draw on the power of the moon. And the curved lines down its center spoke of some kind of binding magic.

  We knew the original spell was used to torture the Vocari and Endurans. Making the Endurans slaves to the moon and the Vocari unable to walk in sunlight. But thanks to what Draven and the guys were able to decipher on Donovan’s slip of parchment—we also knew that the entire rite was constructed to eventually kill the other two races that lived in the immortal lands of Emeris.

  It’s been one afternoon, and we’d already unraveled so much more than I thought we would. It was incredible. And terrifying.

  We’d learned the original curse was meant for the Endurans and Vocari to suffer, and then eventually, to die. Elias touched on this as a theory in his Arcane History class. He’d be thrilled—and likely a little disheartened—to know he was right.

  Except there’s nothing about why the spell never ran its full course. Why it stopped at torture and never got to its final purpose; the genocide of two prominent immortal races.

  It should have eventually killed them all.

  But it didn’t.

  Either something went wrong with the rite Cyprian tried to complete. Or they were stronger than he thought they were.

  Looking at Cal and Adrian—Adrian staring intently at a page in a dusty old leather-bound volume, and Cal, dozing soundlessly in the plush armchair—the tome he was studying still open to the page where he fell asleep on his lap—I knew I’d never have been able to meet them if Cyprian had succeeded. I’d never have been able to form my familiar bond with them if the curse had run its course.

  Cal and Adrian wouldn’t exist.

  Draven wouldn’t exist.

  So many people—families and friendships—would have been torn apart.

  I stood from the chair behind the slim desk where I sat and stretched my joints, my spine popping in several places as I leaned back to alleviate the tension. I cracked my neck and rolled my wrists.

  The book I’d been pouring over was leading me nowhere. I needed to see if another might help more. I wouldn’t pretend to understand blood magic, but that is how the original spell was cast. Cyprian had spilled his life’s blood on that jeweled box in the horrifying vision we were shown during my origin spell.

  And if blood magic was used to create the curses, then it must be blood magic that will undo it…right? I shook my head, trying to clear it off the fog of too many hours spent in a dusty room, trying to stay focused on the miniscule print in that damned book.

  It was hideous—the things I’d found in there. Spells to bring about famine by sacrificing animals. And others to cast a plague on a place or a person by sacrificing an entire limb of your own.

  I almost gagged when I deciphered that one.

  Though it seemed the vast majority of the spells I’d encountered only required a miniscule blood sacrifice to work, which was even more troublesome. But there were none in which the payment for the power was the witch’s own death. The death of a mortal or another witch, yes, I’d seen a couple of those. But none that required a sacrifice of your own life.

  There had to be something more that would lead me to at least an idea of the sort of blood magic Cyprian had used.

  I started fingering through the titles, flipping through a book here and there to see what it contained. I was getting tired, though, and knew that soon I would need a proper break. Maybe a bit of sunshine before it got too dark?

  Perhaps I’d wait until Dee finally got back from wherever town was and she could show me around the grounds. That sounded nice.

  Maybe she would be able to answer some questions about my father. I assumed she was here when he still came to visit based on her age and her admittance that her family had watched over the place for generations. It would make sense then that she’d have known him before he died. It was only eighteen years ago after all.

  Because the trouble of the curse, and its potential reversal wasn’t even our biggest concern. Our biggest concern was finding out why Donovan was draining the blood out of students. And why the other witch blew up that warehouse with all the vamps and shifters inside it—what they were injecting them with… And finally—why my father had to die.

  There must have been a reason. He must have known something. Something the previous headmaster, Atticus Sterling, or someone close to him—like the Magistrate—wanted to keep hidden. Why else would he kill my father?

  I liked to hope my father would’ve kept some form of proof of their misdeeds—if that even was what he’d learned and died for. But he also may have kept the information locked up inside his own mind—entombed there as he was now entombed within the earth.

  There hadn’t been anything in his desk. And I’d whispered the spell Recludo Sanguis to various sections of bookcase when they others weren’t looking to see if another hidden room lay behind one of the shelves here to no avail.

  As I neared the corner of the room, I lifted the book from Cal’s lap and set it down quietly on the side table. I didn’t want it to fall from his lap and wake him. I’d give him a blanket, too, if there was one in the room. There was a tapestry hung on the back wall that might’ve done the trick, but the depict
ion of a dying man beneath a full blood moon made me want to keep the thing far from Cal. Imagine waking up with that image laid across your lap?

  It was morbid.

  But upon examination of it, I noticed a small crevice in the wall near the edge and went to investigate. There was a simple rectangular portion of wall that had seams in a small door-shape right next to the tapestry, half hidden beneath the heavy canvas.

  I shoved the thing aside, disturbing a fair amount of dust and held my breath so as not to breathe too much of it in. It smelled of age and must. Disgusting. I tried to pry at the small seam, but the section of wall didn’t budge.

  “Recludo Sanguis,” I whispered, but nothing happened.

  I turned, a little embarrassed, but found Draven still hadn’t returned from wherever he’d gone to. And Adrian was still hunched over the book he was reading.

  Flustered, I shoved at the section of wall, thinking maybe it would open inwards instead of outwards. It moved in an inch before popping open easily to reveal a small, dark closet set into the otherwise plain back wall of the library.

  After seeing what lay in the closet in the room I had originally planned to sleep in, I wasn’t stupid enough to stick my hand inside blindly. This time, I lifted my hand and breathed the simple incantation. “Lucidus.”

  I didn’t feed too much power into it. Hell, I didn’t even really need to draw any from the earth for that spell, anymore. Whatever was lying dormant, leftover in my veins was enough to sustain it. It pulsed to blue glowing life and I tugged it down in front of me, blinking from its brightness in the dimly lit room.

  Inside the closet was a small wooden handled broom and dustpan leaning against one side. No cobwebs. It seemed almost as though the small space had been untouched by age or vacancy. In fact, there didn’t even seem to be much dust within. It seemed odd.

  I was about to close the door back up when I noticed a dark shape clinging to the interior wall at the back, bulging out a bit in a way that a wall couldn’t. You wouldn’t notice it at all unless you knew it was there, or like me, you shone a light directly inside.