Chapter 13
Cat stood there dazed as her lips pulsed.
Mateo stepped back, calmly took the mug out of her hand, and took a deep swallow.
“You’re driving me crazy. Nothing in my life makes sense anymore.
And you make the least amount of sense of anything, so why did I feel like I was coming out of my skin until I could see you again?
Also, you smell so good, like the first day of spring and Christmas wrapped together, which I was never going to tell you.
Oh shit, that really was a truth serum.”
Yeah, none of that was helping with the noise in her head. He leaned down to press his nose to the notch at her throat. “No, seriously, you smell so good.”
She plucked the mug away from his hands. “Okay, you’ve had enough.”
“And your family is insane!” he added, looking around. “Who has weapons in the foyer? Do they really think any of that could hurt me? And when will this wear off? Why did I think this was a good idea?”
“I personally think it was the best idea I’ve had in a long time,” Cat mused as she watched him turn in a full circle. “And these aren’t their only defenses.”
He abruptly spun toward her, looking massive in the tiny, feminine room.
“What are the rest of their defenses?”
She waved a hand vaguely.
“No, you have to show me right now. I have to know all of their defenses right now.”
Alarm flared in her gut, as well as guilt over the opportunity that just presented itself. “Why? So you’ll know how to overcome them?”
“No, so I’ll know what’s coming for me. Nobody can get hurt. You would never forgive me if I ate someone you loved.”
Cat’s jaw dropped and then she nodded. “You’re right. And that’s a new fear unlocked, thanks.”
He gripped her arms hard, too hard. “I would never.”
“I know.”
His dark eyes seemed to blaze in his face, and though he hadn’t touched his hair, it was now sticking up. “I would never, ever! I drank your blackmail potion, so you have to believe me.”
She sealed his lips to his. “I know.”
She tasted mint, a little leftover truth serum that obliged her to say, “I trust you.”
“So show me the weapons,” he said seriously.
“You’re not going to let this go.”
“I really can’t.” He sounded almost confused about it. “It’s like there’s a hook inside my chest, and it’s pulling me forward, and if I don’t find out this information, I will die. Which I know makes no sense, but I can’t make it make sense. Make it make sense?”
She kissed him again and bit back her laughter.
She’d seen other people under the influence of a truth serum, but they hadn’t ever seemed so giddy.
He was surprisingly sensitive; with his bulk, it shouldn’t have worked that well.
She paused. He had a werewolf inside to contend with. Did that mess with things?
He squeezed her arm again and then deliberately let her go, a finger at a time. “Please, Patchouli.”
“How come you call me that if I smell so damn good?”
“I am trying to remind myself not to lick you from head to toe. I am trying to remind myself that you are entirely wrong for me and not to make decisions based on random coincidences of astronomy. I am also trying to remind myself you’re a witch. You cannot be good for me.”
Some of that was insulting, she knew, but her brain got stuck on licking her from head to toe. “And you’re good for me? The man who seems to have a computer for a brain and will not trust his gut, and is part of the capitalist horror show that our country has become, and is a werewolf?”
“Capitalist horror show?” he said with deep insult.
“You are everything wrong.”
She braced for anger and told herself to shut up, but he just smiled.
“Surely not everything? We can blame James Watt for climate change, for instance?”
“What?” Her brain stumbled at the non sequitur.
“James Watt invented the steam engine. Actually, not invented, but made it commercially viable? And now we’re in the Anthropocene Age because of a lever from James Watt. Remember that anytime you don’t think you can change the world.”
“Wait, is that why we measure electricity in Watts?”
“Exactly!” He looked delighted.
She laughed. “I don’t think most of us are going to measure electricity when we grow up.”
“No, but maybe we could negotiate peace between one coven and one pack? Maybe we could make this work?” The wild light was leaving his eyes, and the words were calmer.
“That’s just the truth serum speaking.”
“I had to get it out before it wore off, and I didn’t dare say it.”
She allowed him to draw her into his arms, even as she shook her head. “It’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible.”
“We’re not all James Watt with a new steam engine.”
“But we could be enough,” he whispered to her hair.
He kissed her again, and this time she didn’t taste mint, only man. It was entirely unfair that he was the best thing ever.
He drew away abruptly and looked around. “Okay, but before this goes any further, I really have to see that room.”
She groaned.
“My wolf is going to shift without me and hunt it down in a second.”
“How did you know it was in another room?”
“Because you kept looking down the hall? Show me.”
She drew away but kept his fingers tangled with hers as she walked down the hall.
The grandfather clock boomed, and he almost crushed her hand as he jumped sideways.
She laughed. “Sometimes I think the clock is magic. It only goes off when someone is right next to it.”
He eyed it like he wanted to eat it, and she pulled him along the corridor.
She ducked into the archway on the right and showed him the library.
The shelves were a little emptier than before.
The books had been part of a self-defense spell which Siobhan had rigged and Niamh had still not forgiven her for.
The good news was that it was relatively safe to be in this room again.
Mateo pulled a book off the shelf and showed her the cover. “21st Century Cross Stitch? I’m terrified.”
She just shook her head and pulled on the carved statue of the wolf to release the hidden latch.
“I should have guessed,” he said flatly, and she missed the wild enthusiasm of the truth serum.
The shelf swung toward them, and they both stepped out of the way as it revealed the double secret werewolf room where the twins had been collecting weapons, potions, and a giant library of every book ever written that they thought could help protect them.
“Holy shit,” Mateo said and stepped inside.
She felt cold without him touching her, or maybe it was just the room, filled with so much violence and hatred.
It looked less violent now because all the weapons were arranged in the foyer and not on their hooks on the wall.
He looked around the room and stepped toward the bookshelves.
He flipped one open and showed her a gruesome drawing of a half man half wolf. “Do they honestly believe this shit?”
She leaned against the doorjamb, strangely unwilling to go any further. “Honestly, I don’t know.”
He closed the book and started rummaging through the others.
There were books from every age, including a couple of old wrinkled scrolls, but he bypassed them to pick up a heavy tome she had never seen before on the second-to-bottom shelf in the back.
He shook out the hand not holding it. “Should I be worried that this book is tingling?”
“What on earth? Don’t open it; maybe it could be a—”
He opened it. Nothing happened.
“—charm,” Cat finished.
“A charm would be a bad thing?” Mateo asked as he eyed the book.
“A charm is a stable piece of magic that doesn’t need a witch to activate it. It could be a very bad thing. Or not.”
“So this is a book and a charm?”
Cat looked down at the book and gasped. “That’s not a charm. That’s a grimoire.”
“What’s a grimoire?”
“A coven’s spell book. Another talent is scribing, written magic.” Cat spun back to the library to check that the Griffin’s grimoire still had pride of place under a bespelled plastic dome in the library proper. “And that’s not the Griffin’s grimoire. Whose is it?”
She took it from him and blinked at a flash of magic that whited out her vision.
“Not now,” she said through gritted teeth.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head, dispelling the sparks, and flipped through the book gingerly, more and more shocked.
When did the twins pick up another coven’s grimoire?
Usually, a coven ended up with one after a hostile takeover.
The twins’ entire project of finding witches in foster care was to not do that. So where the hell did they find this?
She started searching the other shelves but couldn’t distinguish anything in the avalanche of paper. She rolled her eyes and called on her magic. Normally, she had to focus it through water or crystal, but this was the simplest question on earth. “Anything else?”
Her hand was drawn down to the bottom shelf, where she pulled out another thick tome, this one done in purple leather instead of red. She swallowed and touched it, bracing for another flash, but nothing happened. She hauled it into her arms and cracked it open to be sure.
They had two grimoires.
“What on earth are they thinking?” she mused.
She switched to the red one. The moment she opened the cover, the pages started flipping.
“That was a rhetorical question,” she whispered as the book’s pages flipped and flipped. They went faster and faster, and she held her breath until it settled close to the front of the book, where the oldest spells would be written. They met each other’s eyes and then looked down.
She read, “Two, three, six, twelve, the essence, the jewel, the life, and the beast for each. Two conjoined, the last of four, all on one hallowed ground.”
“Mysterious,” he said with a hint of humor.
She shook her head and stepped away. “I’ve heard that before. Where have I heard that before?” She thought back. “I’ve said it before!”
“I think most people have done the six times table,” he said gently.
She couldn’t help but grin at him, falling a little bit in love.
“I think you’ll find most people have immediately blocked it from their memories before they leave third grade.
That’s not what this is. I don’t know what it is, but I foresaw this.
” Again and again, those words swept through her mind at the start of other visions.
Normally, she needed a medium, and she needed quiet and time to summon her talent. It was only the most powerful prophecies that ever broke through without her seeking them.
She gulped when she remembered the whole of it. “It was the day the first wolf came back to the land. Your minion who was setting up the house.”
“Matt? The one who took a vacation and disappeared?”
“I said this sequence. I didn’t know what it referred to.”
He kept reading, his hand skimming down the page. “This is a spell to make werewolves.”
“What?”
He pulled the other book from her hands and scanned through the pages to the front of the book.
“Careful!” she hissed as one almost tore. She didn’t believe, like some witches, that grimoires gained sentience from so much magic over so many generations literally carved into them, but she also didn’t believe they were just random, mundane objects anymore either.
“It’s in here, too. No, not quite the same.” He held a book in each hand, and she goggled at his casual strength.
He squinted at the dusty pages. “But it’s got a similar code. It talks about a stone instead of a jewel and a tree instead of a flower, but it’s similar. What is this?”
Before she could answer, he snapped the book closed. “You know what this means?”
“I have no idea.”
“Witches made shifters. There’s no other explanation. These spells create shifters. These books have to be at least a couple of hundred years old, right? We’re talking Middle Ages or earlier. I’m not saying that there are no other ways to make a shifter or no other ways it happened, but...”
She couldn’t take the implications. “But we were enemies. We fought each other for centuries.”
“I don’t understand. How did we lose this piece of our history?”
Cat glanced at the towering shelf of books. “I don’t think it was lost. I think it was hidden. I still don’t believe it.”
“Find me another explanation. Two different families of witches have two different ancient spells to turn a man into a wolf. Why the hell would they do that?”
This she knew. “Why does a coven do anything? They were scared of something. It wasn’t really safe to be a witch in Medieval times. It had to be for protection.”
“I hope you’re right. That might be the least terrible reason.”
She laughed humorlessly. “Oh, good, I’ll take some version of my history where I was the least bad.”
He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I didn’t say good.”
“Right.”
“Do you know what it means?” he asked again, tapping the book.
“That witches made shifters? Didn’t we just go through this?”
He grinned. “I meant the numbers and flowers and everything?”
“I have no idea.”
“You don’t know? You were just spouting off random numbers, and you don’t know what they mean?”
“No.” She braced for his censure. She’d seen a glimpse of the way his mind worked with brilliant intuitive leaps backed by solid fact. That he could look at a book and intuit what that spell was, when it was written, and why, took her breath away. She certainly hadn’t connected the dots as fast.
He folded her into his arms and groaned. “That must be so terrible, to get a glimpse of what’s coming, but not enough information to act on it or understand.”
“It mostly sucks.” Her shoulders dropped away from her ears, even though the hug was awkward with two books digging into her sides. “There’s a reason the prophet is never the hero of a story or gets a happy ending.”
“Joseph,” he said.
“What?”
He pulled back so he could meet her eyes. “From the Bible? The guy with the multicolored coat. He was a prophet. He saw dreams, and he ended up ruling Egypt, or not ruling, but doing something. I forget. Sunday school was a long time ago.”
“If you believe in any kind of god, I will eat my hat.”
“There’s not enough data, and there never will be, so I find the question unanswerable.”
She laughed. “Of course it is.”
“You said there was no prophet with a happy ending. He had a happy ending.”
She crossed her arms. Ruling Egypt was fun and all, but… “Did he find the love of his life and have a family?”
Mateo burst out laughing.
“What?”
“His two sons are the fathers of two of the tribes of Israel, so yes, canonically speaking, fatherhood was a key part of the story.”
“Take me to bed,” she said.
He looked around at the violence and death. “How about you take me to your bed?”
There was still every reason under the sun why this was a terrible idea, not least because her family was at this moment chasing a wolf around Silver Spring and preparing for a massive fight, but she wanted him.