Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
BLAKE
“Just head into the parking lot behind the house here," Ian said as I pulled my car into the circular driveway of the coven’s large, historic mansion just outside of the French Quarter in New Orleans.
I pulled the car behind the house in the small parking lot nestled in the middle of large, flowery bushes, lush green grass, and tall, willowy trees.
The mansion was made of dusty white stone, and the rust-red roof sloped gently down over the top of the third story.
An open balcony ran around the entire length of the second story, and the first story was bordered by a large wraparound front porch set off by pairs of white columns.
The house allegedly belonged to my great-aunt Magda, one of many great aunts whom I’d never met.
She’d retired from coven life a few years ago and moved into a small studio somewhere nearby to be alone with her spellbooks and to read tarot to tourists on occasion to amuse herself.
No one lived at the house, but it was tended to by a housekeeper and groundsman who lived in smaller dwellings on the premises.
According to Ian, it was still used for family meetings and housed all of the various texts, potions, and other mage paraphernalia accumulated by the coven over the last few hundred years.
It was nearing evening by the time we’d gotten to New Orleans after getting a late start. It had taken great personal strength to remove myself from Mave’s bed this morning, having woken up wrapped around her peacefully sleeping form.
True to his word, Ben had prepared her parents for the fact that I had spent the night there, and they were surprisingly chill when I appeared downstairs for breakfast in my soccer sweats, holding Mave’s hand.
Mr. Fortune was truly a giant man, made only slightly less intimidating by the wire-framed glasses, polo shirt, and dorky khaki shorts he was wearing.
I could sense right away that his internal Alpha power was off-the-charts strong, which had me slightly panicked that meeting my girlfriend’s father for the first time by emerging from her room after a sleepover was not the brightest idea I’d ever had.
But he just gave me an appraising once over when I shook his hand, while Mave’s mom just excitedly hugged me and welcomed me to the family.
Breakfast had been pleasant and mostly consisted of small talk regarding our soccer game and school, but Mave’s dad did turn the conversation to my mage background and our bond-breaking project just briefly.
I’d let them know I was off to New Orleans for more research later that day, and both parents had profusely thanked me for what I was doing to help Mave.
So, after a long kiss goodbye with my girl, I’d headed back to Ian’s, and we were on the road after lunch.
Five hours later, we made it to the coven house and were planning to make an evening of scouring the archives for anything that could give us a clue to the right spell to break a Moon-blessed fated mate bond.
"So, I may have neglected to mention that my sister is meeting us here," Ian said with a guilty look as we climbed the steps to the mansion’s front door.
"Aunt Augusta is here?" I asked, groaning. "Ian, come on. She’s always trying to meddle in my family’s shit."
"I couldn’t exactly come to town without letting her know, especially not with you in tow, buddy," he replied, smirking at me. "You knew that interacting with the coven on a more regular basis was part of the deal when you moved down here."
I did, but I thought it would be limited to the few coven meetings held each year. This was not that, and we were here on a mission. We didn’t really have time for Augusta’s prying into my life and her usual bullshit, and I certainly didn’t want her knowing what we were really up to.
Augusta and Ian were both my dad’s siblings, but Augusta had been the main coven envoy that made regular visits to DC to try to convince my parents to move back to New Orleans, especially after I came into my power.
She was relatively harmless but also kind of intense.
The coven believed in the work my parents were doing in government, but they always wanted members of the family to return eventually.
According to Ian, there were around forty members of my extended family living nearby in New Orleans and the surrounding area, and maybe another ten or so scattered around the country.
The front doors opened and the woman in question appeared in the doorway.
She was a petite little thing at barely five-foot-two, and she wore a blood-red pantsuit with a frilly white shirt.
A long string of pearls wound around her neck, and her dark brown hair was twisted into a bun on the top of her head.
She was close to my dad’s age, in her mid-forties, and her light green eyes ran over me with interest.
"Ian! Blake!" she crowed excitedly. "Come on in. Mary was just making dinner for us—wouldn’t want you two having to conduct your research on an empty stomach."
Ian embraced her, and I did the same, then she led us through the ornate foyer into a spacious formal dining room.
"Please, sit." She gestured to the long wooden table. I plopped into one of the wooden high-backed chairs, noticing that it had symbols representing the air element carved into its wood. Purple fabric covered each of the seats.
"Augusta, you didn’t have to do all of this," Ian said as he slid into his own chair. "Blake and I are just down to browse some of the older coven spellbooks and grimoires. His training is coming along well, so I thought he could benefit from a little bit of a magical history lesson."
"Of course, Ian," she replied smoothly as Mary the housekeeper appeared with plates of salad and gingerly set them in front of us. "But there’s no reason you and our handsome nephew couldn’t make some time for dinner with little old me. I wouldn’t have seen either of you until the next coven gathering in January, otherwise. "
"Well, here we are," I said as I shoveled salad into my mouth. "And we have shit to do, Augusta, so get your picking and prying in now."
"Honestly, Blake," she huffed and rolled her eyes at me. "I haven’t seen you since my trip to DC what, three years ago? Of course I want to know how you are!"
"I’m great. Ian is training me, and we’re both confident I’ll be proficient in all four elements and have sufficient mastery of basic spells before I graduate high school. Then I can head off to college without the coven needing to supervise me."
"We have so many great colleges down here in New Orleans, too," she said with a smile.
"I hope you plan to stay close so you can continue your magical education with the coven.
Also, there are several members of this coven who are prominent members of the community who can get you an internship in just about any career you could want. "
She paused and gave me another once-over. "However, I suggest you remove those ghastly things from your ears and don’t even think about getting anything else pierced. At least all of those tattoos can be covered by a smart business suit."
I rolled my eyes and Ian choked on a laugh.
There it was—Augusta was the coven’s biggest champion, and she had opinions about image, to say the least. She hadn’t seen me since I was fifteen, so the piercings and the tattoos were new to her.
I can’t say I hadn’t been thinking about pissing off the coven at least a little bit when I’d gotten them.
"Augusta, let the boy be a teenager," Ian chided her. "You’ll scare him right back to DC where his parents will continue to ignore his considerable power, and you’ll have an untrained mage loose in a major city where he could accidentally take down the power grid or something equally frightening."
"Yes, well," she replied, apparently not bothered by any of this. "I only want what’s best for the coven, and keeping family close is the best way to stay safe. And you’ll of course want to make sure you’re at every mixer we have for our single mages.
We’ve got the coven from Austin coming to the next one. "
I sighed and rubbed my temples. This was another reason I’d been avoiding the family.
Mages were rare and integrated fully into normal human society, so it wasn’t uncommon for us to marry humans.
But all covens forced mixers with others when they could in the hopes that mages would pair with other mages, thus ensuring the continuation of the magical line in future generations.
A mage could be born of a mage-human pairing, but it was a roll of the dice, and generally the power that child could wield as a mage would be at least slightly diluted.
"I have a girlfriend, Augusta," I said. No sense in lying about that since I wanted to be at a forced coven inbreeding mixer about as much as I wanted to tongue-kiss Knox Monroe. "So I’ll be skipping the coven speed dating parties."
"I understand, honey," she said, patting my hand and giving me knowing look. "We all date humans. But you’ll never know if you spark with another mage if you don’t at least come meet the others. No harm in just looking."
"His girlfriend is an Alpha wolf-shifter, Augusta," Ian chimed in. "Pretty interesting pair, don’t you think?"
She sat back in her chair in shock. "Blake! That is dangerous. You know the shifter council that sits over the entire country still has a capture order out on any mage or other non-shifter supernatural that is discovered? They’ve never removed it, even after all of these years."
"You know that feud is ancient, Augusta," Ian replied, smoothly. "The vast majority of shifters still think mages are extinct, and even if they didn’t, I hardly think that open magical warfare is in anyone’s interest in these modern times."
"And I’m in love with her and don’t really give a fuck about shifter-mage politics, Augusta," I interjected. "She’s extremely powerful, but so am I. It’s a good match."