Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Blair
“That’s an interestingly shaped burn.”
Blair blinked through a heavy haze of exhaustion.
A pink-haired witch—no, mage—inspected the angry red mark left by the bloodstone.
Beside them, a fire crackled in the infirmary.
Earlier activity had died down, and the warriors who remained lay on the cots lining the wall.
Healers hovered nearby, checking in on their patients’ wounds.
The scent of ointments reminded Blair of Mirella, but that was where the similarities between the werewolf village and home ended.
“It’s a perfect circle, with two half crescents on each side,” the mage continued.
Blair fought the urge to snatch her hand back, for she’d lied about how she’d gotten the injury.
A mishap with a torch, she’d said. A mortifying excuse surrounded by warriors who fought demons, but Blair wasn’t ready to investigate why the bloodstone had left a mark, let alone admit to others what had happened.
“It’s almost like three moons—”
“What did you say your name was again?” Blair asked.
“I didn’t.” The mage’s lips fell into a thin line. “It’s Linx, and I’m hurt to learn Kade nor Evelyn mentioned me. My colorful hair usually gives me away.”
“You can blame me,” Blair said. “I’ve spent very little time with them.”
“I see.” Her catlike yellow eyes gleamed. “I guess you’re a rebel now. Like the rest of us.”
Blair shifted in her seat. It was like Linx saw too much. She swallowed, uncertain she liked what the term rebel implied while on the contrary, her shadows hissed with excitement.
Linx sighed. “I’m afraid I don’t have reserves of my power to heal the burn completely. Does it hurt?”
Like it was more than a burn. As if venom pulsed in Blair’s hand. But did she risk more questions regarding how it happened?
“Only a bit,” she lied.
Linx scoffed. “Right. Well, I can make you up a salve to ease the bit of pain.”
“Thank you.”
The mage busied herself with a pouch and a mortar and pestle.
The silence crept over Blair. She’d fled straight here after putting out the flames with Belle.
A reunion had begun with Evelyn and the others, and then she’d spied Tovi.
Blair didn’t have the stomach, words or rational thought to face her once friend.
So, she’d retreated into the village and found herself in the infirmary.
Blair craved a distraction. Something. A conversation that took her mind off vast unknowns lying ahead of her.
“Earlier, you mentioned reserves regarding your power,” Blair said, trying to deflect her unease. “What does that mean? Is it your magic?”
“Magik.” Linx blended herbs, and crushed calendula and lavender perfumed the air.
“Mages are connected to the land around them. It’s like a doorway to energies, but the more we use it, the doorway closes and then shuts altogether.
” She shrugged. “Similar to a witch’s magic, which I’ve heard described as a muscle. You keep strong and rested.”
Blair sighed, her own fatigue washing over her. A danu from the eastern coast all the way across Sorin had taken a considerable amount of magic. Her body screamed for sleep, while her mind remained restless.
“Which god gave mages their gift?” she asked.
Linx shook her head, pink buns bobbing from side to side. “Mages aren’t gifted like witches and werewolves. We’ve learned the art of connection to the land. Gods gave you all your power, a seedling inside your souls.”
Blair snagged on Linx’s last word, and a recent conversation with Jace resurfaced.
A god’s soul is so grand, it embeds in the earth as gems after they die. But that’s if gods can even die.
But what did the gods have to do with a witch’s magic?
Of course, Blair knew the tale. Demons came to be, and mortals in Torren prayed to the gods for a means to defend themselves.
The Sun Goddess graced them with a single touch over their hearts, granting them her power.
Light. It transcended generations, running through bloodlines for a millennium.
Werewolves had a similar origin story but with the Moon God.
The word soul nagged at her, like she was missing a key detail in how to get her sister’s lost magic back. The tips of her fingers itched. Goddess, she needed to get her hands on some books.
Linx rose with a heavy sigh and handed her a petite tin with freshly made salve. “Use this twice a day—once in the morning and then at night. If the burn blisters, come find me.” Linx pointed south outside the infirmary. “Two streets over and on your left, you’ll find the library.”
Blair gathered her cloak and stood, taking the salve and slipping it into her trousers pocket. “Thank you.”
But she didn’t mention she knew exactly where to find the Drengr Library.
Blair inhaled the scent of books. The werewolves’ library wasn’t as grand as Nūa’s, but the books invited her all the same—as it had, many, many years ago.
Mahogany shelves spiraled up three stories, round and round, like a serpent with bones made of paper, spines, bindings, and ink. Above, the sun shone through the center skylight, peeking through scattered clouds.
Blair climbed the stairs on determined feet.
She swore she smelled soot on her tired, wary limbs, like the smoke of her burning life’s work had embedded itself into her pores.
She tried to ground herself in the library and breathe in the leather, parchment, and promise.
These weren’t her books, but they were comforting all the same.
She’d spent the latter half of the morning pouring over texts, an idea coming to life.
A dangerous, wicked theory. But if Blair presented this to Evelyn and Kade, she had to be sure.
Her hand tightened on the banister of the third level, pausing as she calmed her racing heart.
She’d avoided the highest level until now, but she was certain that the book she needed resided in the upper sections.
Rook flew at the center, his onyx wings silent as he climbed alongside her. She passed a few werewolf scholars and sent them warm smiles, or at least, she tried to. Blasted books, her skin felt like glass. It might break at any moment if she continued to force a false sense of calm.
So much had begun in this library. Finding her familiar in the rafters.
Exploring love. Envisioning her dream home, one with marigold flower beds on a street with mismatched colored doors.
A place with dozens of shelves filled with books and trinkets.
She’d made the dream a reality in the years after she turned her back on the eastern lands of Sorin.
Now, her townhouse was ash and memories.
A rebel like the rest of us.
Yet, Blair was a scholar, through and through, not a third born. Her insides fluttered to life here, in the safety of a library, surrounded by histories and answers.
The section ended, and Blair found herself at the precipice of the Drengr Library’s secret—a hidden attic.
Curiosity had gripped her a decade ago as fiercely as it did today, and she’d checked beyond the bend.
Wedged between the wall and the bookshelf’s end, a set of stairs, no larger than a shoulder’s width, spiraled out of sight.
Pain and yearning warred within Blair’s heart. She planted her foot firmly on the first step and climbed. Step by step, her breath came out hollow. At the top, she discovered the hideout hadn’t changed. Not one inch of it.
A lone love seat sat on one side, overlooking the smallest of windows facing east. Lost behind the library’s roof, one wasn’t able to spot it down below, but that didn’t rob the window of the view straight to the snowcapped mountains lining the horizon.
Blair hovered her fingers over the remaining things.
The abandoned books. The two dust-filled mugs.
Her forefinger caught a splinter near the set of initials carved into the wall, but it didn’t compare to the sting of heartache.
Loose strands of the neatly folded blanket reached out to her fingers. It smelled of smoke and moss. Of him.
A boy who’d broken her heart.
Bittersweetness coated Blair’s tongue. She’d lingered too long in a space she no longer belonged, and she returned to the stairs and descended on the balls of her feet.
On the next level, movement caught her eye.
A spider, no bigger than her thumbnail, hung from a web glinting like spun silver, scrunched like a crumbled leaf at the end.
Blair paused, tilting her head, staring into the beady, globe-like eyes of the tiny beast. Most would run, yet her magic leaned towards the otherness.
“Hey there, little one,” she whispered.
The spider remained, and she swore the tiniest hello sang through the corridor.
The creature lingered for a moment and scurried back up its strand of silk.
It jumped onto a book’s spine and waited, pincers twitching as it stared at Blair.
She squinted, reading the worn chrome-lettered title: Tales of the Otherworld.
She laughed. It was the exact text she’d been searching for.
“Why thank you,” she said.
The spider scurried out of sight as she grabbed the book, dust falling away with it. The spine creaked as she peeled it open. Pages crinkled by time stuck together, as if desperate to hold on to one another to hide their secrets.
The next moments blurred together as Blair simultaneously read and returned to her studying area on the first floor.
The Otherworld, according to more scholarly texts, was the realm where the gods oversaw souls once they parted the land of the living.
This text was more suited for a child’s bedtime stories with its richly painted visuals and fabricated tales of the gods, but it mentioned how those in this realm visited the Otherworld.
With her head down and lost mid-paragraph, she turned the corner based on muscle memory, expecting the table and chair she’d abandoned, but collided into a tall, solid frame. Strong hands gripped Blair’s shoulders, holding her steady.
She blinked and peered up. “I’m so sorry—”
Blair stilled, boots melding to the floor. It was him. Golden eyes. Hair as black as night. Still towering over her like years ago. But blasted books, he was no longer a boy, but a man.
“Lorkan,” Blair whispered. “I assumed you’d be at Vísdómr.”
Or she’d hoped. He was a well-known professor at the university attached to the oldest and largest library on the continent, a place they’d once discussed visiting together. If she’d known the risk of bumping into him, she’d never have wandered into the Drengr Library like a fly to honey.
“Eldrick asked me to return home.” He pushed his metal-framed glasses up the bridge of his proud nose.
Compared to the beastliness etched into Kade and Eldrick, severity clung to the middle Drengr brother, like he was sharp-edged stone.
After all this time, the sight of him still made Blair’s stomach flutter.
“I see . . .” She trailed off, catching the paper he held in his hand. It was the entire prophecy, the copy written by Opal and given to Evelyn.
Lorkan drew a hand through his hair, dropping the note back onto the table. “I’m sorry. I came to start my research when I came across this, and I couldn’t help myself—”
“It’s alright.” Actually, Blair was the farthest one could be from “alright,” but the lie was a needed filler to push aside her rising emotions. “You and I could never outrun curiosity once it found us.”
The edges of Lorkan’s lips twitched. “That at least has not changed, I suppose.”
Ah, but so much else had. But Blair didn’t linger on what, not when her interest drew her to Lorkan’s filled-out frame, and especially when the prophecy was right there and the fate of their homeland was at risk.
The broken heart of a teenager felt rather trivial in comparison, no matter the jagged pieces she’d never truly mended.
The heartache she’d endured from Lorkan’s rejection had honed her into the dedicated scholar.
She’d learned then not to step out of line, to follow the path fate had paved for her.
To be back here with him in the space where she’d dared fall in love with a werewolf felt like fate was a sadistic bitch. Above all else, though, Blair had her pride. They were older. Grown. Established adults, their adolescent years more blurs than memory now.
Liar, Blair’s inner voice taunted.
Perhaps, she argued back.
But she refused to reveal her scars.
She swallowed her nerves and sauntered over to the desk and gathered her things. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“I actually came looking for you,” Lorkan said.
“What?” Blair halted.
Lorkan’s expression was unreadable. “Eldrick sent me to fetch you. He’s called for a meeting.”
Confusion rippled through her. She’d not told anyone where she’d headed. Not even Evelyn. “I don’t understand. How did you know I was here?”
Lorkan ran his hand through his dark hair. “Wild guess.”
Blair swallowed, gripping her book tighter. She fought the shake in her voice. “Why didn’t you send someone else?”
“And risk—” Lorkan cursed, sucking his teeth.
Blair scoffed, rolling her eyes. “Go on then. Risk what?”
Lorkan met her stare dead-on, his cheeks and chin etched with a coldness that hadn’t been there during their youth. “If I’d objected to coming and finding you, it risked revealing . . .” He clamped his eyes shut as he struggled with words. “That we knew one another.”
Blair stumbled back. Words on the tip of her tongue.
Angry, loud words she wanted to shout into the silence of the library and disturb it all.
And not because it was a lie. Everyone knew that.
They’d been the scholars of their families, off with their books.
But knowing put it so fucking lightly, Blair raged.
She’d cherished his dreams, fought away his fears, recalled how he tasted.
That was more than knowing. But what good did saying those words out loud do?
It edged close to that line that Blair no longer crossed—and how much of her anger was actually fueled by her sense of grief for everything she’d lost?
“Next time,” she said, “send someone else to fetch me.” She spun on her heel and marched out of the library without a backwards glance.