Chapter 5
Victor
When I get to the hill that overlooks Taryn’s house, the other car is gone. I assume that means the house is empty. If it isn’t, I can subdue whoever is inside. They won’t be any match for me.
I shift into human form, get dressed, and continue on foot.
There are more cars on the road now. A few neighbors are pushing strollers, walking dogs, and jogging down the sidewalk.
That’s fine. I’m good at staying out of sight, even in the daylight.
It’s just easier when I don’t have to be so careful.
Once I make it to the sliding glass door, I make sure there’s nobody nearby and examine the lock.
It’s a simple mortise lock. Cheap. Careless.
It wouldn’t stop anyone, especially me. There isn’t even a security bar to keep someone from forcing their way in.
I give the door a firm tug, lift the hook over the latch, and slide it open.
“Nobody will even know I was here,” I mutter to myself, pulling the door and curtains closed behind me.
My nose wrinkles in disgust as I look around.
The basement is chilly and damp. There’s mold growing in places I can’t see, but I can smell it.
There’s water damage everywhere, especially on the walls and floor.
It looks like someone slapped on a fresh coat of sealant and decided that was good enough, rather than repairing the damage.
There are signs that she’s tried to make it better, tried to make it more livable. The posters are covering the worst stains. There’s a folded blanket on the back of the couch, and when I move it, I see that it’s hiding a hole someone tried to repair.
There are a few cheap candles lined up on the shelf. A brand new wax warmer is sitting on the table, but it doesn’t look like she’s used it yet. It won’t do much. At best, it’ll be a pathetic attempt to hide the musty smell that lingers in the air.
None of it makes me feel better. It just makes me angrier. My mate shouldn’t have to decorate neglect until it looks like a fucking bedroom.
“She lives in fucking squalor,” I growl. “Beneath this fancy house.”
I should search the basement for the spell, since that’s the most likely place to find it, but I want to know more about my mate, the girl these people keep in their basement.
I know it’s the mating bond that’s making me so protective and possessive, but at least I don’t have to fight this part of it. I have an innate dislike for injustice.
I stomp up the stairs and carefully open the door. Once I’m sure there’s no security system, I step into the kitchen and look around. It’s like walking into an entirely different world.
Everything around me screams luxury and wealth. I open the fridge and see plenty of food. Same with the pantry. The kitchen is spotless, except for some coffee still in the pot and a mug in the sink.
I’m not here to steal from them. I’m here to understand what kind of people keep my mate beneath their floorboards.
“World’s hottest lawyer,” I snark, reading the mug. I guess the wife is the one making all the money, because that diner certainly didn’t provide this life. I’d be surprised if it turns enough profit to keep the lights on.
I sort through their mail and learn their names: Melinda and Frank Morris. I find mail for someone named Shana Morris, then a piece of junk mail that belongs to my mate.
“Taryn Good,” I say, running my finger across her name. “Well, you’re not a Good girl, are you, mate? No, you’re a naughty, foolish little girl who has fucked everything up.”
I explore the rest of the house, putting pieces together, but it doesn’t all click into place until I get upstairs.
Pink letters spelling “Shana’s room” decorate a door off the main hallway. From the mail, I know Shana has the same last name, so she must be their daughter.
I look through Shana’s room, and the search reveals a little more. Shana is their daughter. Taryn isn’t, but the girls have been friends for years. There are several photos of them together from when they were younger, and there’s another girl named Madison in almost all of them.
So, she’s their daughter’s friend, and she doesn’t even get a room in the house? I sigh, shaking my head as I leave the bedroom.
That makes me even angrier when I find a guest room down the hall next to the master bedroom.
The guest room is clean and warm. There are pale blue walls that look like they’ve been recently painted.
The sheets on the bed are fresh. A quilt is folded at the foot of the bed.
There’s even a vase of fake flowers on the dresser and a candle on the nightstand that smells like linen and lilacs.
No mold. No water stains. No toilet sitting out in the open. My claws try to push through my nails before I force them back. There’s absolutely no reason for my mate to live in their basement when there’s plenty of room upstairs.
But I remind myself that I don’t know the whole story, just bits and pieces.
Maybe she chose the basement. Maybe my protectiveness is twisting everything I see into an insult against her.
Maybe she had nowhere else to go. That still doesn’t make it right.
You can’t even call it charity when all you’re doing is the bare fucking minimum.
I’m just wasting time. though. I need to find that spell. I turn away to head back downstairs.
That’s not the only thing driving me. I can still feel the tightness in my chest, the knot in my stomach. My instincts want me to be close to Taryn, not digging through her pitiful life like some kind of stalker. Finding the spell she cast has to be my top priority.
I return to the basement and start looking around.
I find a photograph of the same three girls.
My mate, Shana, and Madison. It’s the only photo of them I’ve seen in the basement.
It looks like they’re in high school, going through a goth phase, but they’re in the same basement I’m in now.
There’s an inscription on the frame that reads “Best friends forever, no matter what.”
“How long has she been living down here?” I sigh, putting the photograph back on the shelf. Does she not have any family? She mentioned a grandmother, but there is no evidence of a grandma living here. I doubt this is her house.
There’s a box under the shelf. It’s not labeled, and since it’s on this side of the basement, I assume it belongs to Taryn. I move it to the table and open it. The smell that rises from the box is mustier than the basement.
I don’t have to dig through the box to find what I’m looking for.
There’s an old book on top of everything else, and bitter magic clings to the cover before I even touch it.
The title is in a language I’ve never seen before.
When I examine it closer, I realize it’s not a language.
It’s a cipher. I’ve never seen anything like this before, but I’m no expert.
When I lift the book, I find birthday cards, old photographs, a few pieces of cheap jewelry, and a scarf that still holds a faint trace of the woman who wore it.
But underneath that lavender and vanilla fragrance is something else.
Someone held this in their hands while they sobbed.
Grief has a scent and wolves easily recognize it.
It clings to the things people can’t throw away.
Laying the scarf gently back in the box, I pick up the old book again.
Is this where she found the spell? How did she decipher it?
I thumb through the book, noticing that several pages have pieces of notebook paper tucked between them.
Someone spent a lot of time trying to crack the cipher.
Whoever worked on this was mostly focused on the ingredients for the spells and the phrases required to activate the magic.
It doesn’t look like they figured out enough to actually make them work.
They must have figured out one of them, though. I growl angrily, continuing to flip through the pages, frustration and what I think might be disappointment rush through my veins.
I find a spell that has been deciphered more than the others. The paper looks newer, too, so this was done recently.
“Moon. Love. Desire. Hunger,” I read, my finger moving to the ingredients. This has to be it.
Now that I’ve found what I’m looking for, I’m less careful.
After I return the box to its place, I slam the book closed, shove it under my arm, and walk to the sliding glass door.
I glance back at the damp basement, still pissed off that my mate lives in such horrible conditions.
But I’m not here to solve all her problems, no matter what my instincts demand.
I’m here to break this fucking spell so I can be free of my little would-be witch.
I exit the basement through the sliding glass door and make sure the lock is in place. Then I hurry to my campsite, sit down, and pull out my phone. I take a few pictures of the book, open it to the spell, and snap several more. I send them all to Saul, hoping he can give me some sort of answer.
My phone lights up with a call from him a few seconds later.
“What the fuck did you stumble into, Victor?” Saul asks, concern in his voice.
“Exactly what I told you,” I answer. “That’s the spell, right? I don’t think any of the others are fully deciphered.”
“I’m surprised they deciphered as much as they did, but they still missed a lot,” he says. “Still, I know what we’re dealing with now. It’s not witch magic.”
“No? What is it then?” I ask.
Saul goes quiet. That worries me more than anything he could have said out loud. Saul always has something to say. A warning. A lecture. A dirty joke if the situation is bad enough. This time there’s only silence.
“Saul?” I prompt, checking my phone to make sure we weren’t disconnected. “Still there?”
“Yeah, sorry. Just… This is something a lot older than witches and warlocks,” he says. “This is druid magic.”
My blood goes cold. Every wolf knows enough old stories to fear druidic magic.
“I thought the last of the druids died in Mesopotamia,” I say. “They were betrayed by Gilgamesh.”
“That’s what the stories say. Gilgamesh welcomed them at first because he wanted the secrets of shifting. When they refused, he tortured the secrets out of them,” he explains. “Then he used that power to slay Ishtar, their goddess, so no one else could learn what they knew.”
“We’re proof that didn’t work out as well as he hoped,” I respond. “That still doesn’t explain the book.”
“No, it doesn’t. Someone copied these spells from a druidic tome and hid them behind the cipher. Probably so that nobody would accidentally cast anything if the book fell into the wrong hands,” he says. “Which it obviously has.”
“Clearly.” I can’t keep the derision out of my voice. “What about the spell? She said it was a love spell.”
“I can’t fully decipher it, but druids didn’t cast spells to make people fall in love with them,” he goes on. “There’s more to it than that.”
“It doesn’t matter. How do we break the spell… curse… whatever? That’s all I really care about,” I feel my impatience coloring my tone.
The tightness in my chest and stomach says otherwise, though.
That’s the last thing my instincts care about.
Even now, my wolf is clawing inside me, hungry for her.
Anxious to be near her. I want to do so much more than follow her around and watch through a glass sliding door.
Being inside her home just made it worse.
Every minute away from her feels like something is hooked beneath my ribs, trying to pull me back. I can still fight it. But it will continue to get worse while the mating bond is forming. Much worse.
“It still should be relatively easy to break. Now that I’ve seen the spell, I don’t think she cast it right, so it’s probably just a weak curse mimicking the spell.
Only a druid should have the power to cast it correctly,” Saul says.
“I’ll gather what I need and come to Covington.
I know you won’t be able to leave her until we free you from this curse. ”
“No, it’s hard enough just being across town from her, so you should probably hurry,” I reply, trying not to sound desperate as I glance at Taryn’s house.
“You should stay close to her,” he suggests. “Don’t lose her scent or her trail. We’ll need her to break the curse.”
“That won’t be a problem,” I say. “As strong as her scent is, I think I could find her anywhere.”
After I end the call, I return to the diner.
Taryn is in the middle of the lunch rush, moving between tables with a pot of coffee in one hand and an exhausted look on her face. She’s pale and still obviously affected by the curse. Still working because the man who keeps her beneath his house apparently doesn’t care if she can barely stand.
Joe is in the kitchen, but he’s watching her every time she passes. Same eager look in his eyes. Same tooth-deprived grin. My instincts flare into a protective rage, but I stifle them.
If Saul is right, and we need Taryn to break the curse, then I can’t keep watching from the shadows forever. I don’t know how long it’ll take Saul to find what he needs, but it’ll take him a couple days to get here.
I haven’t eaten today, but that’s not the only thing that makes me slip out of the shadows and walk toward the diner. It’s time for me to meet my mate in person. Time for the foolish little girl to see who she’s lured to Covington.
If she’s lucky, I’ll be able to keep my instincts under control.
If I can’t… well, that’s her fault, isn’t it?