CHAPTER TEN || LEE #2
“Don’t be so sure.” He dragged in a sharp breath.
“There’s more. The thing is, I was looking for a way to break the geas.
I spent years trying. And after your dad passed away, you were so alone.
And I wanted you to know who I really was—all of me.
I would’ve done anything to stop keeping it a secret.
Even something stupid and dangerous.” He paused, grimacing.
“I just thought it would be stupid and dangerous for me.”
He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, but it didn’t seem to help. They were still wet when he pulled his hands away. And he suddenly looked more frightened than I could ever remember seeing him, as though afraid that what he was about to say was going to ruin everything.
“Daniel—”
“No, you don’t understand!” His voice rose and his eyes were filled with so much guilt and grief. “The night you got split, I was casting a spell my family had forbidden for a reason. I knew it was wrong and dangerous! I knew it! But I did it anyway!”
Hunter and I exchanged a look, and I saw the same awful understanding I felt reflected in his eyes.
“I was practicing the power-amplification spell, a forbidden and dangerous piece of magic. Because I was trying to gain enough power to shatter the geas.”
“Because you wanted to tell us you were a warlock,” Hunter said tonelessly. “That’s what this was, all along. You wanted to be honest. And then when we climbed in through the window and broke your circle—”
Daniel nodded sharply. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have messed with it.
” His lips turned down again and I got the sense he wanted to look away but couldn’t make himself do it.
“My family was right to forbid that spell. If I hadn’t been such an idiot, you could have had a totally different life. I did this to you.”
I heard Hunter’s sharp intake of breath beside me, which meant he probably felt the exact same way I did. Because Daniel was talking about the spell that had split us into two people. The spell that had ended one life—Hunter Lee Jameson—and created two in its place.
It had been an ordinary night, about four months after our father had passed away from prostate cancer—they’d caught it too late and it had already spread too far to fix.
And we were feeling miserable and lonely, not to mention stressed out—the mortgage was way past due and we were about to lose the house.
A laborer’s salary wasn’t enough to cover all the bills.
To distract ourselves, we were watching some stupid action movie on television that our dad had liked. Feeling a little lost, we’d turned the TV off and decided to go surprise Daniel—we’d needed some cuddles pretty badly. After all, he was right next door. And not answering our texts.
Then we’d climbed through his bedroom window, the way we’d done so many times before, and we’d seen him there, sitting cross-legged in his circle, his eyes rolled back in his head, surrounded by a ring of candles, an angry-looking purple vortex of raw magical power swirling above him.
And we’d thought he was in terrible danger.
We hadn’t thought twice about saving him, even though what we were seeing had made no rational sense.
And when we’d rushed forward in a blind panic, breaking his circle to pull him to safety, there had been a blinding flash of light.
And then pain. The worst I’d ever experienced. Every nerve ending exploded in anguish as if it had been dipped in gasoline and then set on fire.
Absolute agony, as though we were being ripped in half.
Because that’s exactly what had happened.
But Daniel hadn’t been doing it for power or curiosity or out of sheer recklessness, the way we’d always imagined.
He’d been doing it for us. He’d been trying to break the chains his family had put on him so he could tell the person he loved the truth about himself.
Daniel hadn’t chosen secrecy. He’d been caged by it, against his will.
And rather than accept the cage, he’d tried to claw his way out—an eighteen-year-old warlock, performing forbidden, dangerous magic alone in his room, trying to overpower a spell cast by his entire family—all because telling us the truth mattered more to him than his own safety.
That’s what had caused everything. Not carelessness or arrogance. It had been love.
The irony was so brutal it almost made me laugh. Almost.
“The Henbanes are powerful,” Daniel continued, his words tumbling out faster, as if a dam had broken and everything was now pouring out, all at once.
“They’re way more powerful than me. The whole family cast the geas together.
I couldn’t match any of them individually and definitely not as a group.
The amplification spell was supposed to give me enough power to break through it on my own.
” His face crumpled again and he let out a ghastly-sounding laugh.
“And my spell worked like a charm. I broke through the geas. But I couldn’t banish the power I’d conjured up—I was trying, but I still wasn’t strong enough.
It was too volatile.” His voice went flat and toneless.
“And then you know exactly what happened next.”
His amplification spell did the only thing it could on a person with absolutely no magical power—it doubled us. Or, more accurately, it tore us in half and created two versions.
Hunter Jameson and Lee Jameson.
Except, that was never supposed to happen to an ordinary human being. And our life force began rapidly dwindling to nothing. We’d both been dying.
I’d been in and out of consciousness after it happened. I barely remembered Daniel getting me into the back seat of my truck. I hadn’t even been aware of Hunter’s existence yet, that’s how messed up I’d been. I’d passed out on the drive to the commune.
And then I’d woken up as a wolf hours later, discovering that I now had a twin, that every plan I had for the future was suddenly gone, and that the man I’d trusted more than anything had hidden a whole other life from me for as long as I’d known him.