Warlock Brothers of Havenbridge 01 - Spell Bound (3 page)

“Just me,” he said after placing the books he always seemed to carry with him everywhere on the foyer table and shrugging out of his backpack. Thad didn’t have dark hair and baby blues like Pierce and me. He’d inherited our mother’s strawberry blonde locks, hazel eyes, and fair skin.

Pierce stood next to me in the hall, eating a protein bar. “How’s school, Brainiac?”

Thad scowled and arched his reddish eyebrows at our older brother. “Enlightening,” he answered. “It’s funny how much you can learn when you aren’t fucking or drinking your way through college.”

I couldn’t help but smile. This was how the Blackmoor brothers hugged.

Pierce snorted. “You’d be surprised how much you can learn that way.”

“Yes, I would,” Thad replied.

It always surprised me how different the three of us were from one another. Pierce had always been the super-popular jock who partied his way through life, while Thad had always been more serious, as if he had something to prove. He was always studying and had no personal life that I had ever seen. I wasn’t even sure he’d ever had a girlfriend or boyfriend. Hell, I didn’t even know if he was gay like me, bi like Pierce, straight, or asexual.

But no matter how dissimilar they were, my brothers had one thing in common. They were powerful warlocks in their own right. They weren’t nearly as strong in their magic as our father, but they had both tapped into their active powers. That was one thing that separated them from me.

I had yet to come into mine.

“So how go the spells?” Thad asked me. He and Pierce stood side by side. They clearly hoped I’d finally learned to master my magic.

“Um, they’re coming along just fine?”

Pierce slowly shook his head and went back into the kitchen. Thad crossed his arms. “You’re not practicing, are you?”

“Every chance I get.”

“Liar!” Pierce accused from the kitchen.

“Bite me!”

“Um, that’s just gross.”

“Will you two stop it already?” Thad asked. His narrowed eyes told me to get ready for a lecture. Thad launched into a speech about how important it was for me to study my magic and all the other blah blah blah he always spouted. It wasn’t that I didn’t realize everything he said. I just wasn’t good at it. My spells either didn’t work or backfired, as everyone knew, including that pain in the ass Miranda Proctor.

Maybe that was why I projected my badass persona at school, to make me feel less like the loser I really was. And everyone at school had bought the act. They sensed the power within me even though I didn’t know what to do with it.

But here at home or around Miranda, I was reminded that it was all just that: an act.

I suddenly noticed that Thad had stopped talking and tapped his foot on the wood flooring. Pierce had returned. He leaned against the doorframe, eating a banana.

“You didn’t hear a word I said, did you?” Thad asked.

“Why would I? You say the same damn thing all the time. I’m sick of it.”

“Well, if you’d listen, I’d stop.”

“Why don’t you just stop anyway? Who do you think you are, Mom?”

Thad inhaled sharply, as if I’d slapped him. Pierce stopped midchew and frowned at me. It had only been six months since our mother passed away, and we were all dealing with it the best way we could. Thad had taken her death the hardest. They’d been super close and had done everything together. When he’d lost her, he’d lost his best friend.

Before I could apologize, Thad’s hazel eyes turned copper in anger. “Fine. I’ll stop. If you’re satisfied with being the first worthless warlock in the Blackmoor family, then keep doing what you’re doing. Nothing.”

He stomped up the stairs.

I glanced at Pierce, who silently shook his head before following Thad.

This day just got better and better.

I
SAT
in the kitchen, drinking root beer. The sweet, slightly licorice taste of my favorite beverage helped take the sting out of what I’d done. I hadn’t meant to be such an ass, but dammit, Thad seemed to bring it out of me more than anyone else. He’d always taken a more parental role with me than a brotherly one. It was like he saw me as a screwup he had to fix.

And since Mom had died, well, it had only gotten worse. As had the distance between all of us.

I didn’t need another mother. I needed a brother. When was Thad going to realize that?

Still, I had to apologize, which wasn’t something the Blackmoors did easily. It left a bad taste in our mouths, as if it somehow weakened us, and warlocks shunned things that did that above all else.

Of the three orders, our black magic was the wildest, much more so than white or gray. It was far more unpredictable and derived directly from the chaotic energies that emanated from the Gate.

That was partly why I found it so difficult to control. I had a harder time dealing with chaos than the rest of my family. I gained a certain amount of pleasure from order, like the wizards of the gray. Sure, they were boring as all get-out and about as much fun as a wet blanket and an army of ants at a Sunday picnic, but their lives weren’t affected by the sometimes-nagging pull of the chaotic black magic or the extremely pure white. They had balance, and I sometimes envied them that.

“Who’s got you crying in your root beer?”

My father stood at the entrance to the kitchen. He was dressed in his favorite black suit, which brought out his dark hair and the deep blue of his eyes. He scratched at the facial hair he’d grown in the past few months. Pierce believed he’d done that to sex himself up in preparation for bagging some hotties. Thad didn’t agree. According to him, Dad had grown the beard and mustache in an attempt to separate the man he saw in the mirror in the morning from the one who stood next to our mother in the family pictures scattered throughout the house. It was his coping mechanism or some shit.

Whatever the reason, he looked great.

“Who else?” I asked.

He nodded and walked over to the fridge. He took out a root beer, which was his favorite too, and sat opposite me at the breakfast bar. He popped open the can and took a hearty swig. “So Thad’s home, huh?”

“Yup. Pierce too.”

“I know,” he said. “His motorcycle is parked in my spot in the garage.”

“Why does he always do that?”

He snuffed. “To piss me off.”

Dad only pretended to be annoyed. He actually enjoyed these little power plays of Pierce’s. After all, when dad was no longer with us, Pierce would assume his mantle as high priest of the Blackmoor coven, and it was important that our leader be the strongest warlock in the family.

“What happened between you and Thad this time?”

I swallowed down the bitter taste in my mouth. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“What do you want to talk about, then?”

Holy shit! I’d almost forgotten. “I need to tell you what happened at school today.” When I’d finished filling Dad in on the dead body and what Miranda, Elliot, Edith, and I had learned, the worry crease in his brow deepened. “That is bizarre. Miranda sensed nothing at all out there?”

“Not a thing.”

“What about you?” he asked. “Witches are sensitive to a life’s passing, yes. It disturbs their more life-affirming ways, but warlocks are far more attuned to death. It represents chaos at its strongest, especially if it was a murder, which your description clearly indicates to be the case. What did you sense when you cast your spell?”

His raised eyebrow told me he already knew the answer. I hadn’t cast one. Truthfully, the thought never even crossed my mind. Thad was right. I was worthless as a warlock. “I didn’t cast a spell,” I finally admitted. “But I didn’t sense any magic whatsoever, and I don’t need my abilities for that. It’s just something we can all do.”

My father stared at me in silence.

“I guess, since Miranda didn’t sense anything, I didn’t see any reason to cast my own spell.”

He nodded and finished off the root beer. “And that is yet another mistake,” he said. His volume had dropped to barely a whisper. When he was really mad, he didn’t yell. He got deadly quiet. “I understand that you don’t feel comfortable with your powers, but not using them isn’t really going to solve that, is it?”

I shook my head.

“We are a proud warlock family, Mason. Our ancestors were chosen generations ago as a protector coven. You do realize the honor in that, right?”

Why did my family have to remind me of things I already knew every time they were disappointed in me? But saying that right now wouldn’t be smart, so I nodded instead.

“You need to start using your magic and that brain your mother and I gave you. Out of all of you on that field, you had the best chance of revealing what we need to know. You could have called upon the dark energy of death and manipulated its lines for information. Miranda can’t do that.”

His nostrils flared, and his hands clenched. Warlocks had hair-trigger tempers, and when they were set off, you had to either duck or hope you were wearing a bulletproof vest. I’d been on the receiving end of so many of my father’s angry outbursts that I’d grown almost immune to them. That was a perk of being the sole member of the family whose incompetence constantly pissed everyone else off.

“You need to think about what you could have done,” he said before standing. He evidently realized he needed to put some space between us before a stray gesture sent me flying through the kitchen wall. “I need to go wash up for tonight, and so do you.”

By the time Dad’s footsteps reached the top of the staircase, I’d swallowed the rest of my warm root beer and tossed the can at the trash basket. I missed, and it skidded across the marble-tiled floor.

It looked like this day was going to suck all the way around.

A
FTER
QUICKLY
putting on dress slacks and a blue button-down shirt in my room, I ran down the steps to the main floor. I had to get downstairs before everyone else. I wasn’t ready to deal with their disappointment. Through the wall I shared with Dad’s upstairs study, I’d overheard him talking to Pierce and Thad about what I’d told him. They’d taken the news about as well as expected.

Pierce had snorted in derision while Thad went on and on about how lax I’d been in my magical studies, so I didn’t want to be up there when they all came out of Dad’s room, shaking their heads in judgment.

I was frustrated enough with myself that I didn’t need to add their further displeasure to the dark tidal wave of failure under which I drowned.

But how was I supposed to fix things? Thad didn’t think I pored over the books we had or studied the family incantations in our Grimoire. But I’d been doing that. I had read through a lot of our books, and whenever Thad didn’t have our family’s book of spells by his side, I’d tried to cast the spells it contained.

It never worked right, and I’d been on the verge of giving up.

After what Dad had said, though, I couldn’t toss in the towel. I had to find a way to connect to the magic that was my birthright and manipulate it the way our species had learned.

I closed my human senses and tried to clear my mind, opening myself up to the constantly flowing energy. I reached out to it with my thoughts, but it jerked away from me, as if I were something it didn’t recognize. The patterns suddenly went crazy, surging left and right, trying to get away. Was it running from me or from something else?

But then a faint whisper drifted on the breeze. I strained to hear what it said, but the voice was too low. I could tell it wanted me to go outside, though.

I stood at the top of the stone steps leading down to the sprawling, manicured rear lawn of Blackmoor Manor. A stifling, hot breeze shifted the air around me, buffeting my lightly bronzed flesh with scorching waves of heat more suitable for south Texas than northeastern Massachusetts. A heat wave had settled into our little town about a week ago, and it seemed in no hurry to slink back to the southern border of the country.

I drew the searing air into my lungs, and I detected the light, breezy aroma of the asters growing along the perimeter of the estate. The heat had not only scorched the flowers but singed their scent as well. A burning, almost pine-like odor drifted with the typically sweet bouquet.

It made my nose twitch.

But on the air drifted another smell, something foreign yet familiar, subtle but still unmistakable. It hid underneath the hundreds of other scents that floated around me. My sense of smell had always been better than my family’s. I sometimes wondered if I was part shifter or something, the way I could detect the slightest changes that traveled on the wind. But that was foolish. Both my parents were full-blooded warlocks, and no shifter blood intermingled with our magical lineage. We were pure members of the Order of the Black.

I sensed something, though. Why did it remind me of pancakes doused in bleach? It was an odd combination, but the unpleasant odor intrigued me. It called to me and to my magic, which lay dormant inside, crackling within my soul.

I took several deep breaths, centering myself as my father had instructed. To access my power, I had to become one with myself. I had yet to learn how to truly accomplish that particular task, but the strange scent tugged at me, daring me to follow its trail back to its source.

It was a challenge I wasn’t about to let go unanswered.

That wasn’t what a warlock did. If I’d been a holier-than-thou white-magic witch, I’d have been burning sage and anointing myself with patchouli oil in order to establish a connection with whatever crept around the outskirts of ordinary perception. I’d have been conjuring up a spell to create a bond and connect my spiritual force with whatever was out there.

That wasn’t lame at all, right?

Thankfully, black magic was more about manipulating the energies instead of trying to create some kind of magical kumbaya. I just had to find the right words that would lead me to the source.

As I was about to speak the incantation that would spirit me away to whatever lurked in the forest beyond the house, a jolt of electricity sizzled into my left shoulder and sent me tumbling down the steps to the warm carpet of grass below.