Chapter 129
Heather
For a second I got my hopes up that it was Brent or Serena, but I knew better. I’d have to look into finding the journal later. I straightened the rug back in place and headed downstairs.
"Daniel," I said when I spotted the visitor. "What do you need?"
"I’m here to start your training." He was wearing a pair of jeans and a pressed button-down. His hair was still wet from a shower, but I smelled a faint hint of cloves under his soap.
"Training?" I asked.
"Yup. Mom wants me to make sure you’re well versed in our ways. You’re not here for too long, so I figured it was better to get started on it sooner rather than later."
Daniel was the guy that the coven—or maybe just Luciana—had wanted me to end up with. And apparently they still did. The brujos didn’t have mates like the pack did, but I’d bet my life that if Luciana could arrange my marriage to her son, she would.
All the better to bind me to the coven.
I hoped Luciana wasn’t trying to manipulate some sort of relationship between us by sending him here. Because that so wasn’t going to happen.
This was perfect. Brent wasn’t going to like this at all. "All right. Where do you want to work?"
"They have a room here for working craft. We’ll head that way."
I nodded. "Okay." He led me to a room down the hall behind the living room.
When he opened the door, the first thing that hit me was the smell. So many different dried and burnt things. The room was dark. Only a small window opposite the door let in a little bit of light. The walls were painted black.
Black counters topped the waist high cabinets that surrounded the room, and black-painted shelves took up every inch of wall space starting a foot on top of the counters. I wasn’t counting, but I guessed they held hundreds, if not thousands of glass bottles.
It was like the Metaphysics supply room on steroids. The bottles were older. Some of the glass bottles had that old-timey warped look to them. The handwritten labels had yellowed with age and were marked with beautiful, scrawling scripts. A beaten wooden worktable took up the center of the room, and stacks of books were piled underneath—I made a mental note to keep an eye out for any brown books with a teal pattern. A small iron cluttered the working surface.
Now this was what came to mind when I thought of witches. "What’s all this stuff?"
"For spells. Each family has a fully stocked room. We try and make sure that we have anything we might need in case of emergencies."
"Do you have a lot of emergencies?"
He laughed. "No. But you never know. That’s why they’re called emergencies."
I grinned. Maybe Daniel wasn’t so bad after all. Not everyone could be judged by their parents. "Right."
"So, I figured there were plenty of things we could start out with—lighting a fire, levitating an object, becoming invisible—"
The proverbial light bulb went off. "That’s how Luciana snuck into the full moon ceremony."
"Exactly. But I thought it’d be more useful to you to learn a basic protection spell."
I did my best to not look disappointed. "Okay."
"You’re in a place where you don’t trust anyone. I thought it’d be better in light of that, but hey, if you want to start with lighting candles, we can do that, too."
I waved a hand through the air. "No. You’re right. I’m being dumb. Protection will be much more useful. It’d be good to not get spelled again—like what your mom did—"
Daniel winced. "Sorry about that."
"Did you do the spelling?"
"No."
"Then why are you apologizing?"
"Because she’s my mother. Look, I know that maybe things would’ve worked out differently between us had you not gotten bitten, and I was a little—okay, probably a lot—disappointed about it, but fate is what it is. It wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t meant to be."
Daniel was shorter than Brent by inches, but still taller than me. He was fit, but not like the werewolves. Not ugly by any means, but I felt zero attraction to him. Not that attraction hinged entirely on looks, but the chemistry was missing. That zing. With Brent, it was so strong that I sometimes couldn’t feel anything else when we were together.
Whatever Luciana had planned, marriage to her son was never going to be in the cards.
"So, the good thing about protection spells is that they have more to do with the motion and will than with saying the right thing—which can get tricky for spells in Latin."
I shrugged. "Makes sense."
He dug around in one of the cabinets. "Claudia?" He called.
She appeared at the door with a box of glasses. The generic kind that came in sets from Target—eight tall and eight short. "Sorry. Forgot you wanted these." She set them on the worktable. "Want me to stick around?" she asked me.
"Nah. We’ve got it covered," Daniel answered.
Claudia kept her eyes on me. I shook my head. "Thanks." I’d be fine. If I couldn’t handle this guy, how was I going to be able to handle his mother?
"We’re going to make them shatterproof," he said as Claudia left. "Once you get that down, then you can extend it to any object or person. You can even cast spells so that anyone who wishes you harm can’t enter your room or house."
"Like a supernatural security system?"
"Exactly!" He grinned.
That would totally come in handy. "Cool."
He dug around under the stack of books until he found what he was looking for. He opened to a page, and it looked like a book of Celtic knots. The pages were worn and a little wrinkled, but the colored knots still stood out brightly on the faded paper.
He flipped a few pages. "The spell knots are color coded. Some knots—" he flipped to the back of the book—"require using two kinds of intent. So, if a knot is drawn in more than one color, you know when to switch intent." He went back to the beginning of the book. "But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. This is a basic knot that can make an object or material stronger. If we perform the spell correctly, it’ll make the glass unbreakable for as long as a week, depending how successful we are."
"Nice." I was a total klutz, so this could actually come in handy. I might never crack another iPhone screen again.
"The key is starting and ending the knot in the same place. That’s what holds the spell together," Daniel said.
"Wait. Do we literally draw the spell? Like with a pencil or something?"
"Nope. It’s mostly mental. You trace a knot with your fingertip wherever you want to spell applied."
Okay. This was getting ten times harder. "If you’re not using a pencil, how do you know where the knot starts and ends?"
"That takes practice. It’s best to envision a point and start there. Then you just have to remember to go back to that point when you end. Don’t worry. We have plenty of glasses to work with, so we can do some trial and error. By the time you’ve gone through the box, you should have that knot down."
"Got it."
He started me off by tracing the paper with a finger over and over. It seemed like a waste of his time to stand there watching on the lines than I expected.
Once I made a successful knot twenty times in a row, Daniel said we could move on to the first glass. "Remember to make sure you’re incorporating your will into the knot. You have to believe—you have to know—that the glass isn’t going to break."
That seemed a little counterintuitive. How was I supposed to know it was going to work if I’d never done it before?
"Here goes nothing," I muttered to myself as I picked up the first glass. It was a tall one with a slightly squared shape.
Don’t break. Don’t break. Don’t break. I thought to myself as I traced the knot onto the glass with my fingertip. When I was done I placed the glass on the table.
"What now?"
He reached into a cabinet and dug out a large plastic bucket, a hammer, and two pairs of goggles. "Now, we try to break it." He handed me a pair of goggles, and I popped them on.
I placed the glass in the bucket and lightly tapped it with the hammer.
The glass didn’t just shatter—it turned to dust. It completely disintegrated as soon as the hammer touched it.
"Whoa!" Daniel said. "You barely tapped it. I’ve never seen a knot backfire like that."
I tried to keep my cheeks from heating. That was a total disaster.
"Let’s try again. This time really focus on thinking about protecting the glass."
"Right." Because I’d totally done the opposite before.
I did the same thing. I put all my will into believing the glass wouldn’t break. I chanted it in my head as I drew the knot.
Once again, I put the glass in the bucket.
Instant dust.
Okay. Something wasn’t right.