Warlock Brothers of Havenbridge 01 - Spell Bound (11 page)

But I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. If I was wrong and Drake wasn’t a were, I’d be needlessly placing him in danger. I couldn’t do that, not even to save my own skin. What the hell was that about?

“Don’t know,” Pierce finally answered with a shrug. He glanced at Thad, who still sat at the piano. “What do you think?”

Thad didn’t immediately answer. He clasped his hands together with only his index fingers pointing up. He brought them to his face and tapped them against his lips. It was Thad’s standard thinking pose. He had a lot of information rattling around in that egg head of his. It sometimes took him a few moments to find exactly what he needed to answer a question. “Maybe,” he finally responded.

“Maybe?” I asked. “That’s it? With as much shit as you read, that’s the best answer you can come up with?”

He straightened the creases in his perfectly pressed shirt and sighed. He only did that when he was about to get really bitchy. “Yes, well, I’m not the idiot who broke the law.”

“Fuck you, Thad.”

“You can be furious with me all you want,” he replied. “Your inability to control yourself is what keeps getting you in trouble.”

“And being a cold, distant asshole is what you’d recommend?”

He nodded. “If it prevents you from having your powers bound by the Conclave, perhaps. What this family needs to learn is how to rein in the emotions that swirl like a tempest inside us. You may find me indifferent, and perhaps in a way I am. But that’s because I’ve learned how to check the warlock tendency of losing our cool. Acting rashly typically gets warlocks nowhere but dead.” He surveyed Pierce and me with one sweep of his gaze. “Or do we need a warlock history refresher course?”

“You know what, Thad?” Pierce asked as he rose from the couch. “I may let my emotions get the better of me from time to time, but I sure as hell don’t need lessons on what it means to be a warlock.” He clenched his hands into fists. A blue aura crackled around them, and the low hum of electricity filled the room. “Because I know exactly what and who I am.”

“You only prove my point,” Thad replied. “You fall back on picking up the hammer when a screwdriver would suffice.”

Pierce’s expression twisted. “What fucking hammer?”

“He’s talking about your powers,” I answered, to which Thad nodded.

“We’re more than just the immense power we wield,” Thad added. “It’s time we all realized that. Even father. We rely so much on our magic that we ignore the baser sides of who we are. We evolved from humans, and we retain human characteristics. Yet we shun them when we should be embracing them. Because, as loath as I am to admit it, Mason might be right, and it will be our humanity that will ultimately make the difference, not our supernatural gifts.”

I had to do a double take. Where was Thad Blackmoor, and what had this man done with my brother? He’d never, in all the years I’d been alive, ever said I was right about anything. “What are you talking about?”

Thad glided over to the living room door and poked his head into the hallway. After seeing nothing, he turned and answered, “What you said at Mabon raised questions I’d never once considered, and frankly the fact that you thought of it before I did was quite a blow to my ego.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Something is wrong,” Thad continued. He rubbed his arms as if he’d gotten as cold as his frigid abilities. “The Conclave doesn’t just appear in the middle of rituals, and they don’t suddenly have blind spots in their powers. But they did and they do. The questions we should be asking are why, and why is this happening now?”

“But what about everything you said last week?” He’d been the one to remind me of the reasons the magical orders had been separated. It was for the good of all magic. Where was that speech now?

Before he could answer, the clicking of our father’s footsteps echoed down the hall.

“Not now,” Thad said. “We can’t do this in front of Dad.”

“What?” Pierce asked. “Why?”

“It’s for the best,” Thad replied. He clutched at my and Pierce’s forearms. “Just promise me you’ll keep what we’ve talked about to yourselves and that you’ll only discuss this again when it’s just the three of us. No one else.”

Pierce gaped at Thad as if he’d gone crazy. Pierce didn’t keep anything from Dad. In fact, he was the first one to tell our father everything. But I couldn’t dismiss Thad’s panicked expression. He rarely asked us for anything. If he was concerned enough to seek us out, that was reason enough to give him my word. “I promise.”

“Fine. Me too,” Pierce said with a loud sigh. “But if I get in trouble because of the two of you, you’ll both find out exactly what it feels like to be a lightning rod.”

Thad nodded in acceptance of Pierce’s conditions, and when our father came back into the room, he arched his eyebrow. It wasn’t often he found the three of us huddled together.

His lips parted slightly as he scrutinized us. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” we answered in unison. That wasn’t suspicious at all.

He shrugged and let it drop. There was obviously something else on his mind. “That was Charles Proctor on the phone,” he said. “When were you planning on telling us about the new dead body?”

Everyone was suddenly glaring at me once again. Man, I just couldn’t catch a break.

A
FTER
I
filled them in on the body and what I’d seen at the top of the crane, the room grew silent except for the turning of pages. Thad was flipping through our Grimoire, searching for answers. “I’m not familiar with any active power involving the bending of light,” he finally said.

“Neither am I,” my father added.

“So what does this mean?”

My father turned toward the bookcases and eyed each and every book, as if he could somehow snatch the answer from within the collective knowledge contained in the room. “I’m uncertain. Perhaps we’re dealing with a new species, one that has evolved from us as we did from humans.”

That was a frightening thought I didn’t even want to consider. We were a pretty powerful bunch. To suddenly come upon a race even more powerful than we were set my nerves on edge.

“I don’t think so.” A familiar smugness clung to Thad’s tone. Mr. Know-It-All had found something. “We might be dealing with a shadow weaver.”

My father crossed over to Thad. “I’d forgotten all about them,” he said. “What Mason described definitely could be a part of their power set.”

I glanced at Pierce, who gaped at me, then shrugged. “And what exactly is a shadow weaver?”

“An extremely powerful warlock with mastery over darkness.”

“Darkness?” Pierce asked. “How the hell is darkness more powerful than directing a couple thousand volts of electricity down someone’s throat?”

Thad motioned to the shadows that filled the room and the land outside. “Because darkness is everywhere.”

I studied the shadows that enveloped the corners of the room. They crawled across the floor, up the walls, and even trailed behind us. If manipulating darkness was the active power of a shadow weaver, the kindling for its ability was always on hand.

“But what does that mean exactly?” I asked as I drew closer to where Thad and our father read from the book. “I get that darkness is everywhere, but so is air. The same can be said for earth or water. What makes darkness so special?”

“For one, it’s extremely rare,” Thad said as he ran his fingers over the text. “Only a handful of shadow weavers have ever existed. The last was one of the most powerful members of the Conclave, Bartram Kane.”

I exchanged glances with Pierce. We remembered that name. The last time we’d heard it had been when we were trying to save our mother.

“For another,” Thad continued, as if he hadn’t evoked a painful memory, “it’s also the only active power that has contributed to a truly corrupt warlock.”

“What? How?” Pierce asked.

“It’s the nature of the power itself,” our father answered. He had finished reading over Thad’s shoulder. “Typical warlock powers, while strong, have limitations. Take mine for example. I can change my body to stone, and while I assume the stone’s strength and durability, it’s still stone, an element bound by the physical world as much as water, earth, or air. But darkness is far more malleable.” He stared at the shadow his hand cast onto the wall. He extended his fingers and its projection grew into talons. He curled his hand, and a spider danced across the wall. “Its uses are only limited by the imagination of the individual because shadows have no true form. They’re an absence of light, and within that void, a powerful shadow weaver can do almost anything.”

“Which has turned past shadow weavers bad,” I said, to which my father nodded. It certainly made sense. Any power had the potential to corrupt whoever wielded it, and with limitless power at his disposal, a shadow weaver might be tempted to do things that shouldn’t be done.

Like Bartram Kane.

“I’ll inform the Conclave we might have a potential shadow weaver in Havenbridge,” Dad said just as the doorbell rang. “But first I’ll get the door.” As he walked away, he said, “You can continue your plotting now.”

As soon as he left the room, Pierce smacked both of us upside the head. “He knows we were up to something.”

I rubbed the pain away while a fire flickered in Thad’s amber eyes. It seemed to be taking everything he had to contain his anger.

“Remember,” he said after a few seconds. “You promised.”

Pierce nodded and said no more. While warlocks typically broke promises made to others if the ends justified the means, promises made to each other were considered sacred.

“Mason,” my father called. “It’s for you.”

Who the fuck was here at this hour? I glanced at my brothers as if they had the answer. When I turned back to the doorway, my father stood with Drake at his side. He carried a gift bag in his right hand. Where was he going, to a late-night birthday party?

“What are you doing here?”

“Well, howdy and hello to you too,” he replied with the same wicked grin he’d first flashed me in the woods. I evidently didn’t annoy him as much as I had before saving his life. That was a step in the right direction.

“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” Dad asked.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” I replied. It wasn’t safe having Drake here, not after I’d cast that spell in front of him. And with a potential shadow weaver on the loose, there was no sense in tempting fate.

Drake turned to my father and extended his hand. “Name’s Drake Carpenter, sir. It’s a real pleasure to meet you.”

“Oliver Blackmoor,” my father answered, shaking Drake’s hand. He nodded to me with a frown. “The aghast father to such a rude son.”

Drake smiled broadly at my father’s jab at me and then laughed. His face lit up like a little boy’s. Did it have to make him so damn charming? My father certainly seemed taken by him. He usually greeted newcomers with a reserved distance, but there he was shaking hands with Drake and laughing beside him as if there might not be a powerful warlock out there murdering people for some reason.

“These are my other sons,” my father said, motioning to my brothers. “Pierce and Thad.”

Drake turned the charm on them. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said to Pierce. He held out his fist for a bump, and I almost fell over when my older brother knocked his fist against Drake’s.

“I’d say any friend of Mason’s is a friend of mine, but Mason doesn’t really have friends.”

Drake laughed again, as if he was incapable of anything else. Where had this cheerful attitude come from? He hadn’t been like this when I’d met him. Was he just trying to be a well-mannered guest? Maybe it was a Southern thing.

When he turned to Thad, Drake didn’t make a move to shake his hand or bump his fist. It was as if he could read each one of us like a book. He simply nodded at Thad and smiled. “I can tell you’re the brains of the family.”

Thad couldn’t have been more stunned if Drake had Tasered him. “Excuse me?” Thad asked, clearly taken aback.

“Vos yeux sont remplis de la connaissance au-delà de vos années.”

A grin stretched across Thad’s lips. “C’est très poétique et très correct. Merci.”

“Speak zee English,” I said in a mock French accent. “We are in America, you know?”

Drake and Thad looked at me and sighed before turning to each other and cracking smiles.

“My brother’s love of language knows no bounds,” Thad said, patting Drake on the shoulder.

“I can tell.” He turned to me and said, “And in case you were wonderin’, I told your brother that his eyes were filled with knowledge beyond his years, and he said I was both poetic and correct.”

I groaned. “Don’t encourage him. His head is big enough as it is.”

“And yours could stand to be a bit bigger,” Thad replied. He locked eyes with me before shifting his attention to my groin. “And by that I mean
both
of them.”

Everyone burst into laughter, and once again I was the butt of the joke. I was used to it from my brothers but not from Drake. I had half a mind to cast the last spell he would ever hear in his soon-to-be short life.

Thad motioned for Drake to sit on the couch. What the hell was going on? We had other things to do than entertain visitors.

When Drake complied with my brother’s request, Thad sat next to him while my dad and Pierce sat down on the love seat. The only place left for me to sit was on the other side of Drake.

“I detect a Southern accent,” Thad asked. “Am I correct?”

“Right on the money,” Drake replied. “I was born and raised in the great state of Texas. Dallas to be exact.”

It was my father’s turn to get all social. “What brought you to northern Mass?”

The sadness I’d briefly detected in Drake’s eyes while he ran and jumped around town, the look that told me he was running
from
something, returned. It shoved aside the carefree, charismatic boy who had seemed to cast a spell over my typically leery family. In his place sat a lost little boy. Why did I suddenly want to put my arms around his shoulders and tell him he’d be okay?