Chapter 26 #2
She sighed and gave me a stern look. "Just be careful, honey. I suppose pairing with another powerful supernatural is preferable to a human, but you never know how the wolf-shifter community would truly react if they knew about us. It’s still a risk."
I just nodded. I trusted Mave’s family one hundred percent, but I had no idea if Monroe or Hayes had informed the Alpha of my extra abilities.
Ian was not pleased when I told him what I'd done since I probably could have handled the situation without showing off quite so much.
I'd just been holding back a lot of aggression toward Monroe since that first day of school, and, in hindsight, I'd probably let things get a little out of hand.
Ian and I just agreed to keep our guard up until we knew more.
Mary had replaced our salads with some kind of chicken dish during our conversation, and I quickly cleaned my plate. I was ready to get started on our task.
After all, it would be cool if my being subjected to Aunt Augusta’s prying hadn’t been for nothing.
"I’ll take that shelf if you’ll start looking through this one," Ian said as we both scanned the interior of the coven archives’ basement level.
The room smelled musty and felt damp, and it was clearly a place that coven members rarely visited, if at all.
The archives consisted of a large pristine library at the back corner of the coven mansion’s first floor and a basement accessed through a door in that library.
The basement contained all of the older and out-of-print spellbooks, historical texts, personal diaries, and family grimoires spanning back at least five hundred years.
We were currently in the last section of the basement among the oldest, dustiest texts, having just spent two hours in the first basement section with no luck.
The only light in the dank room came from lanterns that hung from the ceiling and had to be lit with actual fire because the coven was obnoxious like that.
Thanks to my training with Ian, I’d been able to direct my fire element into each lantern with ease, and the room was now lit with a soft orange glow.
"Remember, we’re looking for anything that would have information on moon bonds or moon magic, and any spells relating to bindings or bonds in general," Ian called from in front of his shelf at the left-hand side of the room.
I stepped in front of my assigned shelf. Old, worn covers of many different shapes, colors, and sizes stared back at me. I started pulling books at random.
Medicinal Potions, 1609.
Nope.
Collection Concerning the Air Element, 1743.
Not that one, either.
Trends in Tarot, 1820.
No.
I looked over at least twenty more books over the next half hour, yielding the same results. Nothing even remotely close to a text on moon bonds, mates, or shifters.
Feeling frustrated, I finally pulled a small black leather-bound book from the corner of the topmost shelf. It was worn and stuffed full of loose leaves of paper threatening to fall from between the bound pages.
Rufus Agnon Grimoire, 1479.
I decided to take a load off and flip through this one, if anything just because I was curious.
All covens and mage families collected spells and other magical recipes and invocations in grimoires, and there were a lot of them floating around from over the years.
Ian had a copy of the current collection in his condo, which amassed the last fifty years’ worth of spells and other items the coven members deemed important enough to record.
Some mages kept their own personal collections as well, and this appeared to be an old one of those individual grimoires.
I sat down at the single reading table that was positioned under one of the lanterns in the center of the room, and I began to thumb through the pages of Rufus Agnon’s grimoire.
He had all kinds of wild shit in here, including spells for pig fertility, all sorts of love and lust spells and incantations, and an honest-to-God penis enlargement potion recipe.
It was no wonder Rufus’s grimoire had been relegated to the old dusty retired section of the coven archives—he might’ve been a little batshit.
I was about to swap the book for another when a spell on one of the loose leaves of paper caught my eye.
Unbinding Spell for the Familiar Bond.
"Ian!" I shouted excitedly, startling him from whatever he was looking at on the other side of the room. "I think I have something here."
Ian crossed the room quickly and peered over my shoulder.
"Holy shit, Blake," he whispered as a read through the spell. "This is a find! I can’t believe I didn’t think about the binding spells for familiars. It’s been a thousand years since mages regularly had them."
"So this is what I think it is, then?" I asked. "Our ancestor Rufus found himself in need of an unbinding spell because he had bound himself to a familiar?"
"Possibly," Ian replied. "If he had, he was either an idiot or an extremely confident, powerful mage."
"Based on what else is in here, I’m going with the first one."
Ian chuckled. "Either way, mages stopped binding animal familiars to themselves a very long time ago because they discovered that it caused so much more harm than good. The spells were never able to cause the animals to actually want to be in service to the mage, which made it basically akin to slavery. So, many of them ended up causing a lot of problems or even committing suicide. And it was also discovered pretty quickly that by killing a mage’s familiar, you would actually kill the mage.
It was just too dangerous to have one, so those spells became obsolete. "
"But do you think this is the right spell to tackle the mate bond?" I asked. I had a good feeling that this could be our breakthrough.
Ian read over the spell for a few seconds before he said, "Yes. I think this could work. We just need to figure out the right tweaks to the elements. This looks like it’s derived mostly from the fire element, and I don’t immediately recognize the incantations there.
But it’s definitely a start. Let’s make a copy of the spell in the library upstairs.
We can sit down and work on this where it’s brighter and less… dusty."
Grabbing the loose page containing the spell, we made our way out of the basement and back up into the twenty-first century.
The coven’s main library had ornate chandeliers dangling low over every table, and the collection of newer, more modern-looking books was filed neatly across the twenty or so shelves.
I plopped down at the nearest table and opened my backpack. I’d brought along the book I’d secretly borrowed from the shifter library at the Academy, as well as some of the basic spellbooks from Ian’s place.
Ian sat down next to me with two copies of the Unbinding spell.
"I’ve had an idea," he said as he grinned at me. He rummaged through his own bag (a very metrosexual man-purse satchel thing), and pulled out a worn copy of a book I vaguely recognized.
Basic Elemental Magic and the Zodiac.
"Ah," I mused, "Didn’t you make me read some of this when I was working on my water affinity?"
"I did," he replied. "Recall that we discussed how the magic we use is based almost entirely on the elements.
Earth, fire, air, and water. More complicated magic is done using spells, which use incantations and multiple elements to weave together the desired effect.
But we also have some notion that there are other sources of magic out there.
We know for sure, for example, that shifter magic is derived from the moon.
We also believe that there is power in the stars, though at least for us, we are only able to draw on it indirectly. "
"Right; you were on some kick about me practicing my water element a ton last month because Mars was in retrograde," I said. "I didn’t really ask you much about why."
"Well, each element is tied to certain stars or other celestial beings in certain theories of astrology. We’ve found that sometimes our magic is influenced that way. Have you heard of the Triplicity Rulerships?"
"Uh, no," I said. "Haven’t really been super into reading my horoscope or anything, Ian."
"Just open your mind. Look here." He cracked the book open and pointed a chart out to me.
"So you see, the reason I wanted to tie Mars into your water training is that Mars is the night ruler of the water element. The theory is that you can gain strength or power when the celestial rulers are in your corner."
"Okay," I said, only sort of following his train of thought here. "So, what does this have to do with the Unbinding Spell and the mate bond?"
"Well, from what we’ve researched, the mate bond magic is derived from the moon, correct?"
"Right…."
"So, my thought is that we look at the elements of the Unbinding spell and see if we can swap out the correct element that will work with the moon bond rather than the familiar bond."
Oh, shit. That sounded like it might actually work. I felt my heartbeat kick up a notch from the new surge of anticipation and adrenaline of finally solving this puzzle.
"Shit, okay, so." I pulled Ian’s book in front of me and slid the copy of the Unbinding spell next to it. "Like you mentioned earlier, this spell uses the fire element for the most part."
"Yep," Ian replied, leaning over me to flip a few pages in the Zodiac book and quickly looking over what he’d found.
"Yes, that definitely makes sense. See here: according to the Triplicity Rulership chart, Fire’s ‘day ruler' is the Sun. It says here that the Sun represents identity and is the force that drives the expression of the true self. It also represents ego and consciousness. That makes a lot of sense as to why it’s the element used in the spell for the familiar bond—in old times, a mage’s familiar was essentially an extension of his or herself.
The spell would tie the animal familiar to the mage and extend a sort of second consciousness to it. So fascinating…."
"Right," I said, pulling him back in before he got off on a tangent. Ian could be distracted by medieval history, magical or not, for hours. "So according to the chart, then, we should swap the fire element in the spell for earth."
Ian looked at me and raised his eyebrows. "Excellent thinking, Blake. Now, show your work."
I rolled my eyes at him. "Well, it makes the most sense from your chart, right? Not only is the Moon the night ruler for the earth element, but Venus is the day ruler. You don’t have to be an expert in all of this astrological nonsense to know Venus is associated with love.
So that’s a double whammy—Moon magic and love magic.
I think it’s the best fit to convert this spell to fit the moon-blessed fated mate bond. "
Ian beamed at me like the proud teacher he was.
"And it just so happens that Earth is your strongest element.
I think this has a lot of potential." He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes for a few seconds.
"And it would make sense, also, to do the spell under the full moon. Not only is that the source for Mave’s magic, but it would in theory boost your Earth affinity to use that power when the moon is at its strongest."
"Fuck, when is the next full moon?" I whipped out my phone and typed out a quick search. "Shit, it’s a week from tonight. Next Saturday."
"Soon, then."
"Yeah, but once I tell Mave, this will probably feel like the longest week of her life. What with the anticipation of finally getting free of this thing and also the uncertainty that it’ll even work."
He clapped me on the shoulder and rose from the table. "Have a little faith, Blake. This was a great find by you down in the basement. I’m feeling good about this."
I gathered our books and papers and shoved them into my backpack. "Fuck, let’s go to bed. I’m beat."
"Agreed," Ian said as we made our way back to the main living area of the mansion. "It’s been a very long day, and I know you want to get on the road back home as soon as possible. I bet we’ll have some visitors again in the morning before we can get out of here, though."
It had been a long fucking day, but if this was our spell, then it was worth it a hundred times over. I was confident Ian and I had the right recipe to tackle the problem—unbinding a moon-blessed fated mate bond had to be pretty similar to a mage-to-familiar bond.
Right?
We stayed the night in a couple of the guest rooms in the mansion. I hadn’t been able to speak to Wolf Girl since she was at the Pack party, probably being suffocated by wolf politics and subjected to all kinds of pressure from the Alpha regarding the bond with Knox.
My head had been in the coven books for the majority of the evening, so I’d been distracted enough from worrying about her, but now I felt the anxiety increase.
I knew she could take care of herself, and after meeting her dad, I didn’t doubt he could tangle with the Pack Alpha if need be, but I still wished my girl didn’t have to deal with any of this.
I sent her a goodnight text with a note that I had some good news, and I fell asleep hoping tomorrow would pass quickly so that I could see Mave again, and so that we could move forward with severing her connection with Monroe once and for all.