Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
L iam let himself into the apartment with his spare key, and Kade followed him inside. Miles sat up in the bed, blinking at them, groggy and confused. Aran did the same from the floor.
“What are you guys doing here?” he asked, his voice sleep-rough, but Liam ignored him and headed straight to the stacks of books.
God, how had he not put this together? He was a dumbass.
“He’s had a light-bulb moment.” Kade shrugged. “But he’s refusing to tell me until he gets confirmation.”
Liam already had his confirmation though. Lady was perched on the books he’d brought for his personal research again, glaring at him.
“I take it I’ll be needing those,” he said to her. She let out a short, disgruntled trill before stretching her way off the pile leisurely and sitting beside it, her eyes accusing him of being ridiculously slow.
He shuffled through the books until he found the one he wanted.
“I’m an idiot,” he announced as he leafed through the pages. “I should have made the connection before. It’s so obvious.”
He located the entry he was looking for, only reading halfway through before nodding. He pointed to it. “Here. This has to be it.”
“And for those of us not fluent in… is that Greek?” Kade asked. In Liam’s mind, he was a buzz of emotions—that catlike thread of curiosity, but this time strung tight with tension. It was the clearest Liam had sensed him when they weren’t touching, but he couldn’t concentrate on that, not now.
“Oh, right. Sorry. It’s Ancient Greek.”
Kade and Aran stared at him expectantly, while Miles was slowly reading the passage, a furrow between his brows. He knew enough Modern Greek that he’d understand the gist of it.
“This book is about Greek myths with possible mage or shifter origins,” Liam said.
Miles cocked his head. “Pandora’s jar?”
“I thought it was a box,” Kade said.
“In the original, it was a jar,” Liam explained. “That got mistranslated in later retellings, and it became a box. But we’ve literally been trapping evil spirits in boxes for days.”
Kade frowned. “We’re fighting Pandora’s jar?”
“What’s this part here about tainted magic?” Miles asked. “I’m missing something in the translation.”
“Okay.” Liam needed to start from the beginning to get everyone on the same page. “Mages who cause harm with their magic—forcibly draining a shifter of their energy, taking more than they need, using dark magic, things like that—it causes their magic to become fouled. It makes it unclean. It’s impossible to use that kind of magic for anything good. For healing, for most spells, honestly. It’s unbalanced, and the more tainted their magic becomes, the more it affects the mage. They can poison themselves with their own magic.”
“And that leads to evil spirits in a jar, how?” Aran asked.
“The mage who wrote this had a theory about the Pandora’s jar myth. She thought a family of mages had a spell that let them siphon the taint off their magic, or at least enough that they could continue to use their magic normally. Basically, it would skim off the filth and corruption. But it wasn’t a one-time solution. They had to keep doing it, and that filth couldn’t be destroyed. It had to be stored.”
“In a jar?” Kade asked. “That someone opened?”
“I think it fits.” Liam flipped the page to a list of the contents of the jar. “Here. There are nosoi : personifications of plagues and diseases. Phthora : rot, decay, and putrefaction. That was probably the first spirit Elijah trapped.” A shiver of memories twisted through their bond, and Liam rushed ahead before Kade fixated on it. “Pretty much everything I’ve made a sigil for is listed here. Negative emotions, environmental problems, illnesses, and more.”
“That would be extremely forbidden magic,” Miles said. “No one should be able to do that. If the mage council knew about it, it’d be outlawed immediately.”
Liam doubted anyone willing to do this would care about the mage council’s rules. “Theoretically, if the author is correct, it was a single family doing it.”
Maybe some compartmentalization of knowledge wasn’t so bad after all.
Aran’s eyes narrowed at the page. “So they scrape off the taint, store it in a sealed, warded container, and when it gets released, it turns into everything corrupt and evil in the world, and they use that as a weapon. Release it on some unsuspecting pack. That would explain what happened to the California pack I found. In which case, it’s not just one jar. If there are two—that pack and here—there might be more.”
Liam winced. Who knew how many of these jars existed? The book had no information on how tainted the magic had to get before a mage could siphon the corruption off, or how much was needed to fill a jar. There could be dozens of these things waiting to be let loose.
“Whoever is behind this… their magic must be so twisted and corrupt.” Miles’s face was pale and drawn.
“It has to be Victor’s father and that evil fucking bastard of a mage who owned the shop before Elijah. As revenge for Victor overthrowing and exiling his father and for getting the mage council to punish that asshole,” Kade said with a growl.
That seemed the most likely scenario, though Liam hoped for Victor’s sake that his father wasn’t involved.
“But why like this?” Miles asked, gesturing at the book. “Why go through all this when they could target Victor directly? This seems like so much more effort.”
“Alphas get strength from their pack, just as packs get strength from their alphas.” Kade’s tone was grim. “Want to make an alpha too weak to protect their pack? Weaken the pack first. Hunters would love it. They wouldn’t need to take down shifters one by one. Once the pack was weakened, they could take them all out, if the spirits didn’t do the job for them.”
Those words hung heavy in the air, oppressive and painfully true. If Elijah hadn’t captured the decay spirit, Victor’s pack would already be dead.
Kade finally broke the silence. “You’re thinking this… jar, or whatever, was opened on our territory? So we should search for a container of some sort to prove it?”
Liam considered it before answering. “It might not need to be on your territory. The spirits start small and grow as they gain strength. They have to gather energy before they become personified. I don’t think wards would pick up bits of emotion floating through them unless they were keyed to block it. What ward would stop a wisp of sadness from getting through? At least not until that sadness had strengthened to the point where it could cause harm.”
“But if they release them outside the wards, how do they guarantee they attack the pack?” Kade asked.
“If I had to guess? It’s shifter energy. Shifter energy is attractive to mages. It feeds our magic. If the spirits are some corrupt byproduct of magic, it stands to reason they might also be attracted to it and feed off it.”
“That would explain why the decay spirit was the first to get so strong,” Aran said. “Sadness wouldn’t feed off the pack wards, but a spirit of corruption could latch on and eat away at them while the rest passed through to find better energy sources.”
Kade’s brow furrowed. “If the wards don’t stop it, or wouldn’t have stopped it before Elijah reinforced them, are there spirits outside our wards?”
Liam jerked his head up and glanced at Miles and Aran.
Miles hurried to his bag and took out his map. When he returned, he held it out for them to see. Victor’s territory comprised almost the entirety of the map, with a dozen or so spirits still roaming it—small things, little smudges. Nothing was outside the territory. But then…
“Did Elijah spell the maps to look for spirits on Victor’s territory, or simply to look for spirits?” Liam asked.
Miles and Aran shook their heads. They didn’t know either.
“We need a bigger map,” Liam said. “Kade, can you message Victor and Elijah and tell them our theory?”
Kade pulled out his phone to do that.
“There has to be a map of the surrounding area with the pack territories marked out somewhere in this place,” Aran said.
Miles nodded. “Worst-case scenario, we’ll run to a gas station and grab a local map.”
They headed downstairs to rummage through Elijah’s office.
After a minute, Kade followed. “Elijah says there’s a map in the storage room on the second floor. The one he hasn’t completely organized yet.”
When they’d moved Elijah into the shop, it had been an absolute wreck. The mage council had forced the previous owner to leave without notice, multiple enforcement mages showing up to send him on his way and supervise him packing his belongings.
The storeroom had shelves lining its walls—overstock and various magical supplies filled every inch of them. While the room wasn’t a complete disaster like the last time Liam had been there, it was far from the well-organized chaos that sprang up around Elijah. The fact that Elijah had managed to organize the shop as much as he had in a year while running the business was impressive enough.
The four of them scattered and poked through the boxes. Liam cracked open a wooden crate and blinked at the dozens of glass vials inside. Most were empty, but a few held a single dried flower each. He pulled one out and examined it. The petals were white and in a shape that should have been familiar, but he couldn’t place it. The box gave off a soapy-peppery scent.
Liam’s curiosity got the better of him. “Aran, what kind of flower is this?”
Instead of the quick answer Liam expected, Aran frowned. He took the vial and turned it around in his hand. “No clue. Hey, Miles, have you ever seen a flower like this?”
“If you don’t know what it is, I definitely don’t. How do you not know?”
“Eh. I’m better with wood. Twigs and berries, I’m all over. Anything with a nice, long piston, really. But seriously, I have no idea what these are.”
Kade snorted, but before he could say whatever perverted comment was about to come out of his mouth, his phone vibrated, and he answered the video call, holding it so they could see.
“Did you find it?” Elijah’s voice scraped like sandpaper.
“Well, well, well.” Aran smirked. “It’s nice to know someone had fun last night.”
Even from across the room, on that little screen, it was clear Elijah had been thoroughly fucked. His hair was a mess, and dark marks littered the pale skin of his neck.
Elijah wisely ignored Aran’s comment. “Look for a file box on the bottom shelves. It’s full of old paperwork I need to sort through. There’s one in there, if I’m remembering correctly. Victor’s gone downstairs to grab a map for me too.”
Miles ran over to the box and began to dig through it. As he did, Aran asked, “Hey, Elijah, what’s with this case of white flowers?”
“Oh, those. No fucking idea. I was assuming someone was buying them regularly, given how many empty vials there were, but no one has requested any. I kept meaning to check with you, but it’s been so far down my to-do list. You saw how messy that asshole left the shop.”
“Do you mind if I take a few? I want to figure out what they are.”
“Knock yourself out.”
Aran pocketed two of the vials, and Liam was sure he’d have the flower identified in no time.
“Victor’s back with a map,” Elijah said. “I’m going to do the spell on my end. If you can’t do it on yours, I’ll show you when I’m done.”
“Sounds good,” Liam said.
“Got it,” Miles called out, holding up a map.
They stepped into the workroom, and Miles spread the map out on the floor while Aran grabbed a vial of ash from the more organized of the two storerooms.
A string of curses came through the phone, and Liam looked over, but when Kade flashed the screen at him, it was nothing but a ceiling.
“You seeing what I’m seeing?” Elijah asked.
“Give us a minute,” Liam said.
Aran dumped the ash on the map, and Liam reached out, Kade’s hand finding his. He ran Kade’s energy through the ash, then stared at the map in horror.
Victor’s territory was mostly clear; that wasn’t the problem. It was the rest of the map that was making him sick, making his chest feel tight. No, making Kade’s chest feel tight. He squeezed Kade’s hand and heard him take a breath, the pressure around Liam’s lungs easing, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the map to check on him.
The ash had pooled over what Liam had to assume were the other two local territories, now teeming and swirling with ashy masses within their borders.
“Fuck,” Aran said.
Liam couldn’t agree more. They’d been too focused on Victor’s land.
“Okay.” Elijah paused, pulling himself together. “So this means it’s absolutely attacking the other packs.”
“What are they being affected by?” Miles asked. “There seem to be large spirits over both territories. The one closest to town is jagged and spiky, and the second is hazy.”
He was right. The predominant spirits on both covered a disturbing amount of land, but smaller spirits also darted underneath.
“Niall was acting super paranoid when I saw him last,” Elijah said.
“Same here,” Victor agreed from off-camera. “He wouldn’t show me his back and kept looking around like he expected someone to attack him. And I haven’t been able to reach Grant since he sent me that message. Something about sleeping. He seemed tired the last time I saw him, but that was over a month ago.”
“Alright,” Elijah said. “The remaining spirits here can wait. These are more urgent. They’re even bigger than the decay spirit. We’ll make two large boxes as quickly as we can. Two very fucking large boxes. The spirits do condense when they’re trapped, but not enough that I want to try to get these into the boxes we’ve been using. Let’s meet on the main road outside Niall’s pack wards, since his territory is closer to town. It’ll take you about thirty-five minutes to drive there. Hopefully we can have the boxes ready and arrive around that time.”
“And then what?” Liam asked. “If they’re paranoid, will they let us help?”
Elijah grimaced. “We’ll see.”
“Okay, we’ll meet you there.”
Miles and Aran rushed upstairs to get ready, with Liam and Kade close behind.
This was so much worse than he’d thought. They’d arrived knowing they needed to help Victor’s pack, but now three packs were in trouble, and the spirits they’d been facing were tiny in comparison.
“If Elijah struggled to trap the decay spirit, will he be able to trap these?” Aran asked as he stripped out of his night clothes.
“If anyone can do it, Elijah can,” Miles said.
“And if not,” Liam added, “we’re here. We can feed him our magic to help.”
It had to work; they didn’t have a choice.
Miles and Aran put on fresh clothing. Kade hadn’t glanced at them once as they’d undressed, which was foolish on his part, Liam had to admit. They were both nice to look at. But Kade was a jumble of emotions, too distracted to notice as he fell into his memories.
They weren’t standing close enough for Liam to reach out and squeeze his arm, so instead, he pushed a sliver of magic at Kade through the tether.
Kade’s head whipped toward Liam, his eyes wide.
Liam caught his gaze, hoping to get his question across without asking it.
Are you okay?
They were about to face massive spirits, more powerful than the one Kade had been possessed by. That would shake anyone, and Kade had more reason than most to be shaken.
As they stared at each other, Liam sensed Kade’s presence settle, determination taking over. Kade didn’t want to let these spirits control him, not anymore. He wanted to defeat them.
Good. They couldn’t do this without him.
Liam turned to see if Miles and Aran were ready. They were both standing there, eyebrows raised.
“You just had an entire silent conversation, didn’t you?” Aran asked.
“No.” Liam scoffed. “Of course not. It’s not like we’re Elijah and Victor.” He exited the apartment and descended the stairs.
Wait.
They had, hadn’t they? Huh. That was weird, but their bond did seem to be getting deeper. He’d have to talk to Kade about that later and ensure there wouldn’t be any problems when they severed it.
They piled into Kade’s car and sped toward Niall’s territory while Liam wondered what awaited them.
When the spirit of decay had gotten large enough, when Elijah had been a genuine threat to it, it had possessed Kade and manifested itself physically, creating golems to attack the people trying to stop it. Would they be attacked by monstrous creatures as well? Were the packs possessed by those spirits?
He opened his codex and started to sketch a sigil for paranoia. For the other, he had to guess what the spirit might be. If Grant had looked tired and sent a message about sleeping… Insomnia, perhaps?
He wasn’t sure, but he’d have it prepared just in case.