Page 72 of Assisting the Alpha
The last thing my mate needs is to be distracted worrying about me, and frankly, I’m okay with sitting this one out. There’s a difference between being able to handle myself if I’m attackedagain and trying to keep the peace at a supernatural protest that could descend into violence before we even arrive.
Not to mention being caught in the middle of Teo’s prowl, the task force made up of my fellow coven members, and my new team. Pack? Whatever. The most useful thing for me to do right now is to find out if the story I remember is a real thing. If we can figure out who the murderer is, especially if it turns out to be one of my coven, we can get Xana freed and the real murderer apprehended.
Of course, it could be Xana, but Ethan doesn’t think so and neither does Teo, and both are good judges of character.
I rise on tiptoes and peck his lips. “Completely. Go.”
“And you’ll stay behind the flat wards? I don’t like leaving you alone, not when the murderer is likely still out there.” He’s still got a worried wrinkle to his brow.
“Of course. No one can get to me in here, I promise you. And if I find anything in the grimoires, I’ll message in the team chat.”
Ethan presses a hard kiss to my mouth, taking the time to deepen it in a way that has me off balance when he pulls away all too soon. He rushes out of the flat before I can even remind him to stay safe himself.
Ah well. He can handle this. I’m not worried.
Okay, I’m a tiny bit worried.
I head back to the grimoires, which prove to be a good distraction. Miraculously, it only takes me another half an hour to find the story I’m looking for.
Holy shit, it’s actually real.
I take a few photos on my phone and send them in the team chat. Ethan mentioned that Cal knows Latin, and while they’ll all be too busy for the next few hours to look at them, it means I’m not the only one with the knowledge. It’s something my mum taught me when I was too young to understand why it might matter. It made more sense after she died.
I read through the pages thoroughly. It turns out the mage who did the shifter spell was actually one of my relatives and was a sorcerer, not a mage. Her name was Simbisai, and she was concerned that the wolf pack in the city was growing too powerful. She grew increasingly worried that the coven weren’t magically strong enough to defend themselves against the ‘bullying, feral beasts.’ There’s some stuff about how the wolf pack were terrorising the other supes in the city, although that may or may not be true. This woman had a crazy level of anti-shifter bias based on the rest of her grimoire,so it’s hard to tell how much is grounded in reality.
She did a lot of research into solutions, blah, blah, blah, and found a ritual in an ancient text that turns any powerful enough magic-user into a Nagual—a magic-user who can shift at will. Interestingly, it says here that when in animal form, magic can still be used as long as all spells are activated prior to shifting. She suggests protections such as a shield spell and various other things like hiding one’s scent.
This is it. This fits. But fuck, who is it? I’m the only sorcerer in my coven. The mages are fairly powerful, so I guess in theory it could still be one of them. They may have had to find a way to boost their magical power, though. That would give us a way to narrow down suspects, based on the available options.
It also might explain why my magic didn’t work the night Irving and I were attacked. It might not have been a concussion, or not just a concussion. It could be that I was up against spells I didn’t account for.
I dive back in, determined to absorb everything so that by the time the team have dealt with the protest and task force, I’m a Nagual expert. Or expert-adjacent.
The story goes on to warn of things that could lead to the Nagual’s downfall. If a shield isn’t activated prior to the shift, larger shifters will be able to defeat the Nagual. A more powerfulmagic-user has the potential ability to strip them of their magic if they get through their protections.
She references a page in one of the older grimoires here, so I immediately search for the grimoire in question. When I finally locate the correct page in the ancient brown leather book, a grimoire so stuffed full of loose-leaf pages that its binding looks severely under threat, I take another photo and send it on the team chat.
I scan the instructions for entirely stripping another magic-user of magic. There are also instructions for binding their magic temporarily, which I plan to be the option I use to capture the murderer since stripping a person’s magic is irreversible and incredibly cruel.
My mum did it once when I was eight. It was the judgement of the coven that the man in question was guilty of unspeakable crimes I wasn’t allowed to know about. I saw the punishment enacted though, because I snuck into the room and watched. His screams gave me nightmares for weeks.
I absorb as much as I can about both methods. Hopefully I can come back to this later before we attempt an arrest. I go back to the original grimoire so I can read the rest of it and have just reached the bottom of the page when the fire alarm for the building sounds.
Shit, that’s not good. I can’t put spells on the grimoires themselves, which means I need to add to the protections already on the flat. I could layer in the necessary spells to the ward I built the first night I stayed here, but that risks detection by humans if the building burns down and Ethan’s flat is the only thing left intact. But the grimoires are insanely important. I can’t have three hundred and fifty years of family history go up in flames.
I grab as many grimoires as I can carry and rush to the bedroom, shoving them all under the bed along with my mum’sgrimoire, which is already there. It takes me four trips to get them all in one location, but it gives me a much smaller area to protect. Hopefully, if the place burns down a small, undamaged area won’t look too suspicious.
Fingers crossed it’s just a test or a false alarm, but I won’t find that out until I get out of here, and time is running out even though it must take a while to evacuate a building of this size.
I clutch my focus, mainly for reassurance, and my moonstone pulses weakly. I’m really not recovered enough to be using this much magic so soon, but what choice do I have? I won’t access the ley line without someone to pull me back out.
It doesn’t actually take me long to put fire retardant and waterproofing spells on the area under the bed. By the time I’m done, my limbs are heavy and I just want to lie down and sleep. I force myself to summon the energy to shove my feet into my shoes and leave the flat.
As I suspected, people are still making their way down from the higher floors. I sway a little on the stairs and am saved from tumbling head first when someone grabs my shoulder. “Whoa, are you okay, mate?”
“Dizzy,” I murmur. Fuck. My focus lies cold and lifeless around my neck, which is seriously disconcerting.
“Here, lean on me, Ayo.” My magic says it’s a wolf shifter, so I agree, vaguely recognising the man from visits with Zaiden and Dante. At least I won’t weigh him down like I would if it were a human.
