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“Explain,” Sirus demanded, not bothering to shield his fury.
The mage winced and took a step back. Barith came up beside her, eyeing Sirus cautiously. “It was just a revealing spell,” she mumbled, shaking her head. “I just wanted to show her—I wanted to show her the truth.” Her eyes darted up to his. “That her magick was real.”
It was the look in her eyes that unsettled him most. The mage was stunned. Utterly and completely. He’d never seen her so shaken. Not since that day he’d found her on the shore all those years ago. When her own uncontrolled magicks had burst out of her like a bomb.
“A revealing spell?” Barith repeated. “That did all of—this?”
Levian put a steadying hand against her stomach. “I—I don’t know,” she replied hesitantly. “It shouldn’t have—it should have been nothing. It’s just a small spell to draw out magick. It’s mostly used to test charmed or bewitched items, but in this circumstance I thought—” She looked back to Gwendolyn, her eyes laced with guilt. “I thought it would help. I thought if she could see, it would help her understand. Come to terms with it.”
The room was a mess. The force of Gwendolyn’s power had cracked the wall and burst the windows, turning the library into a trash pile.
“You wanted to know more about her,” Niah told him. “Now you do.” She was coated in dust and a few scrapes, careful to hover at the edge of the room. Away from him. Their eyes met. She’d been here when it had happened. Near Gwendolyn. He pulled the woman tighter into his arms. He should not have let her out of his sight. This was his fault.
“How?” Barith asked. “How could this be done?”
“I don’t know,” Levian repeated, her breaths shallow. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Even when mages hold back their magick too long it doesn’t burst forth like this. It—” Barith looked to Sirus with unease. “It was extraordinary.”
Whatever lingering suspicions Sirus had of Levian quickly vanished. There was no more coy withholding, no games at play. Her reaction was honest. He did not find it comforting.
“I need to do some research,” she rambled, “to find out more, but this”—she motioned around the room—“is significant.” Excitement filled her face, and she looked up to meet Sirus’s gaze. “The force of it. The ease with which it came to her was?—”
At that moment, Barith snarled a curse, cutting Levian off and drawing everyone’s attention. His expression was grim. “The warding spells,” he told them. “They’re gone. I can sense it.”
If the warding spells were gone, they were exposed. Not only to the Folk, but possibly to the humans as well.
Sirus turned to Levian. “Fix this.”
The mage looked even more stunned by the new revelation. “Yes. Yes, of course.” She made for the door, but Barith stepped in front of her with a touch of concern. “I’m fine,” she snapped, waving him off.
Niah looked down at Gwendolyn in Sirus’s arms and back to him. Something flickered in her eyes and was gone in an instant. “I’ll go with Levian,” she told him.
Sirus nodded. “Go.”
He was rattled. His nerves on edge. Gwendolyn’s eyes half opened for a moment, and she looked at him listlessly. “You’re safe,” he told her, wishing for her to know it. An errant tear trickled down her cheek. That tear made his chest tighten. She’d looked shattered when he’d first come into the room, tears running down her face. When he’d spoken to her, Gwendolyn had looked at him like he were a beacon in the darkness. She leaned her head against his bare chest as she fell back unconscious. The simple act tore at him. That she would trust him in this way. So completely. That she would seek him out in the darkness.
Gwendolyn was a lost lamb, Sirus reminded himself. He was not the light to guide her out of the dark but the monster she should fear within it. She was wrong to want to lean on him. She knew nothing of what he was. What he was capable of. If she did know, she would fear him as all the others did.
He was a vampire. A killer. She was innocent. Frightened.
Barith glanced about the room, then down to Gwendolyn with wariness. “She trusts you,” he observed with unease.
“I know,” Sirus replied coldly.
There was a moment of silence before Barith asked with stark seriousness, “Are you sure about this, Sirus? That this is what’s best for her? Keeping her here?”
No, he was not sure. But there was only one other place Sirus could think to take her, and he would not entertain it. Not yet. They simply needed more time.
The others knew he’d taken the contract to keep Gwendolyn hidden, but they didn’t know it was a contract forged by a debt of blood. The terms were already far beyond the norm. Through this contract, Marcus had transferred that debt to Gwendolyn. Her protection was Sirus’s responsibility above all else. “I will finish this,” he told Barith, breathing in her scent of lilies.
The dragon nodded his understanding. “Good,” he replied. “I swore to that witch we’d take care of her, and I’m keen to keep my word. Plus, I do like her. Even if she did blow up part of my house.”
Sirus glanced down at Gwendolyn’s soft face pressed against his chest. His eyes lingered on that small, dried trickle of blood from her nose.
He was shrouded in so much blood it could fill an ocean. He was darkness and death. Gwendolyn was innocence and life.
“She will need you,” he told Barith. “And Levian. Your guidance.” Their trust and expertise.
The dragon let out a heavy breath. “Aye. And what of you?”
