Page 13 of Azure Mania

Alice McBeth lived over three hundred years ago, and she was way before Octavia’s time. Alice was rumored to have forced a mating bond between her and another supernatural being, but without any proof, no one was ever able to do anything about it.

At some point, when she was around fifty, she suddenly vanished. No one has ever seen nor heard from her again. She disappeared, but the whispers and rumors about her abilities, immense power and dedication to the craft followed even centuries later.

“Alice’s diary?” I ask, sitting down under a tree, tucking my knees under my chin. Octavia follows suit, laying down on the soft grass. “What’s her diary got to do with this? Do I even want to know how you found it?”

“I bought it off the black market.”

My eyes close, and I take a deep breath. I’m one second away from strangling the life out of her. Out of everything that I could’ve heard, the words black market weren’t even in the top one hundred.

“You what?!” I look at her, the way she’s nonchalantly looking up at the thick branches of the trees. “You went to the black market?! Do you understand how dangerous, insane, and utterly useless that was?!”

“Well, not useless, since I bought the diary.”

I breathe out, counting down in my head. My heart is racing, the implications of what this could mean for me.

“Do I want to know how much you paid for it?”

“No, you do not,” she responds immediately. “I haven’t gone through the entire thing, but she wrote some very, very detailed things about her lover, and the supposed ‘forced’ mate bond.”

“Go on,” I urge.

Octavia plops onto her elbows, legs sprawled in front of her on the grass. “Basically, during The Great War between vampires and werewolves, she found this werewolf, Cliff, and healed him. He was in a haze, and traumatized, and well… I guess he saw her as an enemy, even after she helped him.”

I remember the war vividly. As witches, we’re supposed to be neutral and not to get involved. But staying neutral in a war is no different than siding with the oppressor, and I’m guessing Alice had the same thoughts too.

“Oh?”

Octavia nods. “In her diary, she goes to explain that she cursed him on a whim, and that ended up binding them together. Just like it happened with you and that wretched thing.”

I breathe out, leaning against the tree. “So, what does it say?”

“Well, Alice allowed herself to… lean into those emotions, and the connection. That was a mistake, though. Each time she kissed him, slept with him, or even so much as held his hand, the connection grew stronger. Which is why you cannot let that happen between you and Lucifer, got it?”

I freeze.

“Uh, what?”

Octavia’s sharp instincts pick up on the change in my demeanor, and she narrows her brows. My avoidance of her gaze doesn’t help, either. She’s scrutinizing me, head to toe, until it finally clicks.

“Tell me you didn’t,” the pleading tone in her voice makes me flinch. “God, Yvonne! I left you for a day! A single day! How the hell did you manage to fuck him already?!”

“It sort of happened!”

“Sex doesn’t just ‘sort of happen’, Yvonne!”

“Well, it did!” I defend, my voice getting squeaky. “What else does the diary say? Did she find a way to break this godforsaken bond, or why it happened in the first place?”

“Nothing for breaking it, unfortunately,” she sighs. “As for why it happened… Alice believed it happened because her heart wasn’t in it when she cursed him.”

I blink. “What?”

Octavia nods. “Since she did it on a whim and didn’t use proper spells, she believed that her desire to curse him was fleeting. We both know that for curses to work fully, you need to mean it. You have to want for it to happen, and you can’t change your mind.”

“This is just fucking fantastic,” I groan, rubbing my temples.

Yet again, my mind wanders back to the day I cursed Lucifer. I can’t remember most of the things I did or said. That’s normal, since it happened over two hundred years ago. But I think my heart was in it.

I think.