Chapter 22
Chapter
Twenty-Two
A ran grinned at Liam as they walked into the pack house’s workroom. “Sooo, how are your channels feeling? Nice and stretched?”
Liam rolled his eyes. “Yep, and getting more stretched by the day.”
“Good to hear it. I wouldn’t expect anything less from Kade.” He glanced behind them and gave Kade a thumbs-up. “Keep up the excellent work. Liam is so much more fun now that he’s bonded to you.”
Kade seemed unsure how to respond to that, and Liam shook his head in exasperation. While he couldn’t say he was thrilled to have Kade and Aran in the same room, he was glad Aran was there. Hopefully together they’d get this to work.
Elijah and Miles would continue to clear Grant’s territory of spirits while Aran helped Liam for a day or two. They’d gotten most of the medium-sized spirits and were down to a few large ones that only Elijah could tackle and a bunch of small ones that were a pain to find in the forest.
“That book you gave me on plants has been fascinating,” Aran said as they got to work resetting the circle and preparing the room. “I’ve never read anything like it, but I don’t know how useful it’ll be for me. Most of the spells require shifter energy, and that’s not to mention the notes from multiple generations helpfully adding things like, ‘For utmost potency, prepare this herb whilst knotted.’”
Yeah, Liam hadn’t gotten over that yet either. He’d been devouring as many books from the attic as he could. They were filling in the blanks and supporting his theories about mage-shifter bonds in the past. He still hoped, after this was over, Victor would allow him to archive them.
The books were an amazing find, but some of the more explicit marginalia led his mind into spiraling fantasies of what it would be like if Kade bent him over a workbench, fucked him, then knotted him. How he’d get any work done after that, Liam had no idea. He could only imagine attempting to brew a potion with shaky hands as Kade ground into him, trailing kisses over his bite mark, a hand sneaking down to stroke his cock, to get him hard again as they—
From where he was leaning against a wall as they worked, Kade cleared his throat, and Liam blinked back to reality to find Aran smirking at him.
Aran didn’t look away as he said, “So, Kade, would you be up for—”
“Your blood or mine?” Liam asked, cutting him off. He didn’t need to know what Kade might be up for.
Devilish glee glittered in Aran’s eyes for one moment before he sobered. “I’ll do it this time. We’ll see if it works, then go from there.”
The supplies were still on the workbench from Liam’s previous experiments. He’d already prepared a basic contract, the parchment waiting for the finishing touches, so Aran grabbed a knife. He pricked his finger and drops of his blood splattered into the inkwell.
Liam passed over a mixture of finely ground herbs that Aran sprinkled into the blood as Liam drew a circle on the wooden tabletop.
With a careful hand, Liam dipped a pen into the blood until the inkwell was clean glass again. He drew the binding sigils at the bottom of the contract, and Aran flipped open the lid of the box, beginning to channel his magic, feeding it through the blood on the paper and reaching out to the spirit.
The spirit was pulled from the box, and the blood took on an odd glow as it absorbed the spirit. Liam finished writing the final sigil of the binding contract.
Aran released his magic, and they stared at the paper, holding their breath, but the spirits stayed firmly attached, the sigils flickering. The soft yellow pulsed into sharp orange, almost appearing to move on the page.
They eyed each other and shrugged.
That much seemed to be working. Liam exhaled. Now for the tricky part.
“I want you to stay in here,” Liam told Aran. “If this backfires, you need to trap the spirit. Don’t check on us; get the spirit. We can’t risk it escaping.”
“I can do that.”
Liam stepped into the center of the circle, and Kade came over and sat across from him, holding out his hands.
“Here’s to no unexpected releases,” Kade said.
Liam snorted. He really was surrounded by far too many perverts, but he took Kade’s hands.
Kade’s energy filled him, bringing with it the exquisite burn of being completely full, the lurid temptation of letting it consume him, the guilty delight of using so much of it. Then he channeled that energy and his magic into the contract, like he had with the box and the binding contracts before it.
As he flooded it with magic and energy, the parchment began to glow until it was red-hot, and still he poured more energy into the paper, putting all his strength and effort into it.
The spirit resisted his magic, resisted Kade’s energy, but slowly it started to lose ground, started to be washed away in the tide of power scorching through the contract until it was nothing but ash and soot held together by the memory of the parchment alone.
Sweat poured down his brow. His breathing grew labored, and his heart raced.
He could do this. They could do this.
It just needed a little more.
He pushed an extra burst of magic into the spell.
There was no explosion this time.
When it finally gave, it imploded. The contract was sucked out of existence, only a dusting of ash remaining.
The sudden lack of force caused Liam to collapse forward, and Kade did the same. They sat there, panting, their heads almost touching.
Liam glanced around and sighed with relief when he saw no trace of the spirit.
They’d done it. He was exhausted, but they’d done it. He wouldn’t be able to do more than one of those a day, if that, but they had something that worked.
Aran walked over. “That was fucking impressive. But I can’t do that, and neither can Miles. If that’s what it takes, you and Elijah will have to do them all.”
Liam grimaced. Given how many spirits there were and the fact that even Elijah would be limited to one or two a day, it’d take them a month to destroy them all, and that was before they captured the ones on Niall’s territory. If this was their only option, they’d do it, but it was a shitty option.
He opened his mouth to say as much, when out of the corner of his eye, a light flickered. Yellow, then orange. He turned, but nothing was there.
“Did you guys—” He didn’t have to finish that sentence. Their heads jerked to the side, and they cursed at what they saw.
The tiniest speck of light floated around the room, pulsing a brighter orange and growing steadily as Liam’s annoyance at his inability to defeat these fucking things increased.
Aran ran to the workbench to grab a box. It didn’t take much for him to recapture the spirit, but that didn’t make the situation any less frustrating.
Liam groaned as Aran snapped the lid shut. “What the hell are we going to do?”
“We’ll figure it out.” Kade sounded as tired as Liam felt, and for the first time since this had started, Liam truly doubted whether or not they ever would.
Kade reached over and squeezed his shoulder, looking him in the eye. “We’ll figure it out,” he said again, with more determination and certainty behind his words than Liam was capable of mustering.
Liam sighed and nodded. “We’ll figure it out.”
He’d think of something that would work. He had to. There was no other choice.
But over the next week, as they waited for the new moon, everything they tried, every increasingly convoluted, overly complicated plan he came up with, every single idea he had, failed, one after another. Each drained him and Kade of their magic and energy, but with no results to show for it.
Yet somehow, Kade’s belief in him remained unwavering, and that made Liam want to keep trying, no matter how disheartening his failures were. And no matter how exhausted he was at the end of the day, settling into bed with Kade and reading their vastly different books was more comforting than he ever could have imagined.