CHAPTER 6 #3
Michael approached the bedroom while I was stacking my books in the large bookshelf near the fireplace. I paused in my work and turned toward him.
“Settling in?” he asked. He’d removed his jacket and rolled his cuffs up, but his tie was still firmly tied around his neck.
“Yeah. I like this room.”
He glanced around it. “Marlena is to thank for the décor.”
Right. His fiancée. “Well, she has good taste.”
“Do feel free to change anything you want.”
“I will, thanks.”
“I made a phone call during the drive,” he said.
“I could tell. It gave me a minor case of road rage.”
Amusement, barely detectable, ghosted through the bond, but, frustratingly, it didn’t show on his face. “No doubt that was the one I made to our CFO,” he said. “The one I speak of now came toward the end of the drive.”
“You want to come in and tell me about it?”
He was standing on the threshold like he didn’t want to intrude. After another long moment, he stepped inside but didn’t get far, pausing to lean a hip against a large dresser and cross his arms over his chest. I looked away from the sight of his shoulders straining against the fabric of his shirt.
“How many bonding ceremonies have you attended?” he asked.
“Just one other.”
“And was it anything like last night’s?”
“Nope. It was about three times longer and didn’t end with the apocalypse.”
Another hint of amusement, larger this time, flared from him. I looked up to see the corner of his lips twitch, so subtle I almost missed it.
SMILE, DAMN IT! I wanted to scream.
He didn’t. “The acquaintance I called was unable to uncover any record of a ceremony becoming similarly corrupted.”
“That sucks.” It would have been nice to talk to someone else who’d been through this.
“He was inclined to blame the priestess conducting it.”
“Mystic,” I corrected. “And I don’t think it was her fault.”
“Why not? The woman must have been in her eighties. Perhaps she didn’t have the stamina, and the spell collapsed in on itself.”
“Look, I don’t know Antoinette. Before last night, I’d never even seen her.
But one of my mom’s closest friends is a mystic, and she was in the crowd near me.
She said something else interfered with it, and I trust her.
Especially since Antoinette is supposed to be one of the strongest mystics alive. ”
“Your Goddess interfered?” he said.
“That was what Antoinette seemed to imply, wasn’t it?”
He remained quiet.
“What’s your theory?” I asked.
“Witches.”
I shook my head. “I would have smelled a witch there.”
“Not if they cast a spell to mask their presence.”
I didn’t know they could do that.
“No,” I said, still adamant. “Their magic is different from ours. Our mystics would have sensed it.”
He cocked his head sideways, reminding me a little of his mother. “Is it different?”
“From everything I’ve been told, yeah.”
“Hmm.”
I watched him for a full minute before my impatience got the better of me. “Out with it.”
“Our creation story comes to mind.”
“Which one? I’m chasing the werewolf myth, remember? I could give you a couple dozen options from around the world.”
“The one that most of us here in the States believe.”
“About the witches and the vampires?”
He nodded. “It has enough truth to it that it renders the rest… plausible.”
There was a lot of truth to it. Witch blood did give vampires a temporary boost in power.
But I just couldn’t bring myself to believe the rest. That it was witches who created us to act as guard dogs against their enemies.
That eventually the magic that created us changed, turning us into a species with agency and magic of our own.
A magic that Michael now hinted wasn’t much different from that of our alleged creators.
I looked at him, a self-confessed nonbeliever. “You don’t buy it, though, do you?”
He straightened with a shrug and then slid his hands into his pockets. “Like I told you, I believe in magic. That we are creatures of magic. The witches are creators of magic. I see no reason to therefore discount the possibility that they created us.”
“Why don’t you use your influence to sniff out an ancient vampire and ask them if that’s how it went down?”
He frowned. “Vampires don’t speak to Kolbecks. Just as Kolbecks don’t speak to witches. Here in the city, you’ll find that regardless of what you believe, old hatreds run deep between our species.”
“Is that why you think it was witches? That they’re pissed at you for some reason and they sabotaged our ceremony?”
He nodded.
My head was starting to hurt. “Hold up, if we weren’t bonded by the Goddess, then what do you think this is between us?”
“Oh, I’m not arguing against the fact that we’ve been tied together, but perhaps, when we gather en masse, so does the magic that suffuses our DNA. When we spill our blood, when we chant our ritual words, we’re not summoning a goddess, but casting a spell of our own.”
I had to give it to him. “Okay, that’s a pretty logical assumption. I can respect that.”
“Just as I respect your faith,” he said. “Regardless of what we each believe, it would behoove us to keep our guard up.”
I opened my mouth to tell him my mom had given a similar warning, when his phone rang from the living room.
“Apologies,” he said, excusing himself.
I returned to putting my books away, thinking over everything he’d just told me. If there was any truth to the similarities in magic between witches and wolves, it was possible that they’d been the ones to interfere and our mystics just couldn’t trace it.
I almost hoped that was it. That it was as simple as someone lashing out over a grudge. Because if it was our Goddess interfering instead, I worried what might come next.