Page 87 of Bound to the Wolf
Aya picked up the metal and studied it with those fresh eyes, no longer obscured by a rude little charm. She would be having words with Emerson for that, or worse.
But now that she was looking at the manacle again, there was something familiar about it. Not just because she had been staring at it for hours every day for the past month.
The magic felt familiar.
She recalled the conversation she’d had with Delainey a few days ago, where they wondered if Elise might have been the intended target. That conversation had disappeared from her mind almost as soon as Delainey left, and Aya had thought no more of it. Now she couldn’t help but wonder, especially with the way the remnants of magic in the manacle pulsed.
She wasn’t sure where the rest of the coven was at the moment. She was working alone, and Emerson was thankfully gone, because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to hide the betrayal she was feeling if she saw him in the house.
Aya sneaked upstairs and still felt a little bit like a thief when she ducked her head into Elise’s room. But what else was she supposed to do? She couldn’t exactly ask Elise, and this was a big accusation forming in her mind. If she just let it out into the open, there would be a fight.
Elise’s hairbrush was sitting on her dresser, and Aya plucked a handful of blonde hairs carefully from the tines. Then she headed back to the root cellar.
Every supply she needed for this little spell was ready and waiting for her, and it wasn’t exactly difficult. She realized beforeshe got to work that it wouldn’t technically tell her anything definitive.
Aya worked in sympathetic magic, one thing standing in for another. She created a poppet and tied Elise’s hair around it as best she could. There was a nastier version of this spell that could do real harm, but what Aya was doing was just diagnostic.
It would give her some sort of answer, or at least give her more questions, without hurting anyone.
The poppet was rough work—a twist of straw and cotton thread no longer than her index finger. Elise’s blonde hair wound around its midsection in a tight spiral, pale against the brown straw.
It represented Elise’s magic, and that magic was imbued in the coven she now was a member of, Aya’s coven, but more importantly and even more strongly, it was tied to her bloodline. If someone from Elise’s magical lineage had anything to do with the manacles, the poppet would burn.
Technically, that meant anyone in their coven could have also been responsible, but Aya knew her sisters. While each one of them had wanted to punch Delainey from time to time, none of them would have bound her to a werewolf, kidnapped her off the street, or done anything that had been done to her.
Aya held the manacle in one hand and sank her magic into it. Then she lifted up the poppet and began chanting, searching for the sympathy that might exist between the magic and its spell.
Burning straw tickled her nose before she realized the poppet had ignited, and she dropped it onto the table. The tiny figure caught fast, the straw curling black and the blonde hair shriveling into nothing, a coin-sized circle of char already scorching the wood of the worktable before she could smother it.
“Fuck!” she said.
She hadn’t wanted to be right. But now she had her first sign that whoever had put these manacles on Reece and Delainey was no uninterested third party.
It wasn’t some werewolf with a vendetta. It was someone related to Elise, and Aya would bet her life it was someone from the Wallace Grove coven, like Emerson, or Elise’s parents.
Aya rushed up the stairs just in time to find Serena coming in the back door with her backpack slung over her shoulder. Serena’s hair was pulled into a messy knot at the back of her head, and she was still wearing her teaching clothes, a cardigan over a blouse, the sleeves already shoved past her elbows the way she always wore them.
“Is Emerson still on campus? Do you know?” Aya asked.
“I don’t think he was on campus today,” Serena said, dropping her backpack onto the pile of shoes by the back door. “But it’s a big place, not like I keep track of him. He said something about having dinner with Briana.” She paused. “I thought she was being stupid enough to let him back into her life, you know.”
Serena kept talking like Aya wasn’t busy freaking out right then.
More and more realizations crashed over her. He had shown up right before the kidnapping. He had access to all of them. His mind healing magic could just as easily be used for mind manipulation.
They had all suspected he might be acting as a spy for Elise’s parents, but she had never thought he would dothis.
“What’s wrong?” Serena asked.
“Call Elise,” Aya said, already shoving past Serena toward the front of the house, grabbing her jacket off the hook. “We have to go.”
Chapter
Forty-One
For some reason, this sudden call from Briana felt a little strange, but as Delainey drove them to the clearing, Reece didn’t say a thing about it.
She wantedthe nightmareto finally be over, and her coven could give them that freedom from each other.
