Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
The next time I opened my eyes, bright light from the window immediately blinded me. I blinked and waited for my eyes to adjust.
I guessed I didn’t die in my dream realm.
I lay on Torin’s bed, and I let out a sigh, grateful for waking up in the physical realm, injured but alive.
“Anna,” a strained voice said, and I turned to the man.
Torin sat on the side of the bed. Two long bloody streaks marked his cheeks.
I squinted to study his face better. Dark shadows encircled his amber eyes with puffy eyelids, but I couldn’t stop staring at the red fluid remnants of tears in the corners of his eyes.
I blinked and blinked to make sense of the crimson tears.
“I thought I lost you,” he said, wrapping his arms around my torso.
He pulled me into a tight hug, and although I enjoyed the sensations of our touch, my body ached. I groaned, and he released me instantly.
His black hair was swept to his temples, revealing creased lines on his forehead and a deepening wrinkle between his furrowed brows.
He let me rest on the bed again, and I rubbed my temples to try to massage the throbbing out of my head. But I didn’t disconnect my gaze from his eyes.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, and there was so much emotion in his voice that it made me choke up.
I cleared my throat. “I’ll be fine. What happened? Did she take the book? Do you know the witch?”
I had so many questions ready to fire at him, but the frown on his face told me he wouldn’t share.
Cordelia had warned me about both dangerous men. How well did she know my mates and how? She might have been surprised to see both of them in my dream realm, but she wasn’t surprised by them.
“Cordelia Faith,” he said. “The most powerful dark witch in our realm.”
I observed Torin’s face. “I was able to glimpse inside her memory of a family member or a friend burning at a stake. Cordelia got mad at me for intruding.”
“I can see how that would piss her off,” Torin said, and his face didn’t show any other emotion than his frown.
Didn’t he want to know how I could access a witch’s dream realm? Didn’t he want to know if I was a witch? Why did I find witch books? Why did I have a witch symbol as my birthmark?
I sighed. It would all be over once I returned to the kingdom. I swallowed the bitter taste on my tongue and stayed silent. Watching Torin defeated only increased the tightness in my chest.
I guessed he thought my encounter with Cordelia was his fault, or at least he blamed himself for not protecting me. Was he scared of the King’s wrath once Dad learned about this incident?
Torin wiped his face, and the bloody moisture smeared on his cheek. There was no sign of his vampire, but I felt he was on the surface. I was more attuned to Torin’s beast now.
“Your tears are so unique, Torin.”
A groan left his lips, but he said nothing.
I propped myself on my elbows and extended my hand to his face. Upon touching his blood tears, a storm of emotions overtook me and shook me as hard as an earthquake.
He felt and looked so broken that my own tears ran down my cheeks.
As I watched the Alpha, it suddenly hit me. Tears.
“Torin, do you still have The Grimoire Book of Athame?”
He nodded. “The witch had to retreat without the book. I kept it safe.”
“Thank you.”
Torin stood and disappeared into his closet. After a moment, he sat beside me with the book in his hands.
“You look too eager for someone who should be in lots of pain and covered in bruises,” he said.
He handed me the book, and I smiled.
I flipped the book over and read the riddle out loud. “I am the words of your heart. I am the storm in your eyes. You may think of me as a weakness, but instead, I can heal your heart.”
Whoever created this riddle wanted to make it difficult to open the book. Tears weren’t an obvious answer at first glance, but the more I re-read the riddle, the more I was sure about it.
With my other hand, I touched the moisture on my cheeks. My gaze fell on the daisy wheel symbol at the corner of the cover. Torin’s tears were not a sign of weakness. He showed vulnerability in front of me, and no one else, and that meant a lot to me.
I rubbed my wet finger into the leather cover where the words of the riddle were carved. The flap unsnapped, and the book opened right in the middle, with about equal pages on each side.
I gasped while Torin moved closer to my side. His arms snaked around my waist, and I guessed he was ready to whisk me away from the magic book if needed.
“I don’t feel any evil presence or dark ambiance coming from the book. It feels different from the dark aura of the witch.”
“You can feel that?” he asked.
I only nodded, not discontinuing my gaze from the book.
The paper had the orange tint of age and was blank. Little dots of light arranged in a cluster and lifted from the pages, hovering above the book.
The bright dots started moving, hitting each other in erratic motions, bouncing off. I stared, unblinking, at their movements that made no sense. They reminded me of how the kids played at the children’s corner in the London library, running around and playing games they made the rules to.
The titles and riddles of the two books only appeared after I touched the wiggly lines. What if I touched the tiny specks of light, too? I reached out to the dots, when Torin’s body tensed next to mine. But he didn’t intervene, and I was grateful for his support.
The magic dots were like grains of sand on my fingertips. Upon my touch, they abruptly changed direction and rearranged in the air, forming a pentagram above the pages.
While the familiar pentagram symbol was suspended in the air by magic, the dots unscrambled and changed on the book pages to display the contours of a knife like in a drawing.
The magic athame.
The short blade was triangular—not a combat dagger. Witch athames were used in rituals to give power to an item that could be used as a weapon. But the athame wasn’t the weapon, only the conduit of magic. The handle was black, with golden lines streaking the blade.
I held my breath as everything happened so fast. As soon as the bright pentagram in the air moved, I flew my gaze to it. The symbol with all the bright dots dropped onto the other page.
One page of the book displayed a drawing of the athame, and on the other, the pentagram. The four elemental symbols, as I remembered them from my dream realm, appeared at the four points of the star. One was still missing.
I blew out a heavy breath, fascinated by the magic. The book shook—it wasn’t done with whatever it was supposed to do yet.
The top two pages with the images tore up from the rest of the book. An invisible force like a wind carried them away from the rest of the book. They lifted into the air and connected into one longer page, the size of a regular print paper.
The book, resting on the bed, suddenly exploded into tiny fireworks of the same dots that slowly faded away as they fell on the mattress and disappeared.
The only page left of the witch book fell on the mattress like a feather. I did a double take at the blank paper.
“Where did the drawings of the athame and the pentagram with the symbols go?” I muttered.
The book only gave me a glimpse of the drawings before making them disappear. Strange.
But ink lines bled through as I stared at the blank yellow page.
There was something on the other side.