Page 137 of Blood and Trouble

“Sol wasn’t mated when Marx abducted her,” Orion said from his spot next to Kodiak.

“Neither was Maeve,” Mill added.

“But Ava was,” Poe said. “At that point, Ava and I had already marked each other.”

“Theoretically, that’s true,” Bridge continued. “But then Lycan marked you and opened up a whole shitstorm of possibilities.”

“Explain,” Kodiak said.

She rubbed her neck. “Look, I’m not a shifter. I don’t know how your bonds work, but us witches have our own variation.” Bridge gestured to Leander. “When a Harlot gets patched in, she gets assigned a warrior to protect her, to give energy when she needs it to keep casting. Leander is mine. For a long time, we didn’t think a witch could have two warriors.”

That got my attention, and my wolf perked his ears, instantly curious.

“My cousin, Marta, got two when she patched in,” she continued. “Now, they were all blood-bound at the same time, but there’s a symbiosis to their magic. Two doesn’t work without the third.”

“So you’re saying Lycan fucked up when he bit Poe,” Moose said. “Typical.”

I sneered and gave him the finger.

“Maybe,” she said. “Poe’s shifter accepted both bonds, which threw off the equilibrium. The only way to fix it was for Lycan and Ava to bond as well.”

“What does this have to do with Evelyn’s curse?” Poe asked, bringing us back on topic.

Bridge shook her head and shrugged. “There are some archaic spells that require untouched blood…virgin blood.”

“Ava wasn’t a virgin,” I said.

“The translation’s a little tricky,” Bridge cut in. “Untouched blood could also mean unbound blood. Unmated blood, in this case.”

Gravity shifted under me as it all fell together, everything we’d learned until this point. I thought back to what Evelyn had said, what bits of it I could remember.

“Her fucking spawn weren’t supposed to receive the moon gift. They weren’t supposed to shift. That’s what we were paid for.”

“She needed an unmated female from the Kennedy line to fix whatever they started and couldn’t finish,” I murmured. “It was meant to keep the Vanderbilt children from shifting, but Priscilla interrupted the curse. Her children shifted.”

Put together with all of this, I understood Ava’s actions in that ritual room on a different level. Her marking me, me marking her, Poe marking me—it had saved us. There was no way she could have known that, but it had. That bitch had been hunting down my mate, and my brilliant wife did the one thing that could have brought the rotting vampire to her knees. No wonder she ran off like a coward.

I glanced at Poe, watching as he put it all together himself. His jaw tightened, and grim satisfaction rolled through our bond. We were always meant to be a three. This confirmed it.

“The bond the three of you had going into it was incomplete,” Bridge said. “As far as magic this old is concerned, Ava was still unmated. Still viable. When you completed the mating, she stopped being the sacrifice for the curse.”

“So it’s done,” Moose said.

“No. It blew back onto Evelyn, same as it did the first time,” Bridge said. “Twenty years ago, Priscilla stepped in front of it and took the magic into herself, so the spell never finished. But it was still tied to Marx and Evelyn. It was intended for Priscilla’s children, but it went to her instead. That caused a blowback, and they’ve been rotting ever since. My guess is they never knew where it failed.”

“What changed?” I asked.

“Uther died,” Kodiak said.

“Percy sold Sol to Marx days after Uther went into the ground,” Orion said, his voice dropping to a growl. “Marx got close enough to smell what she was. A shifter about to go into transition.”

“She reeked of pheromones as soon as she stepped into the Fiver,” Poe said. “We all smelled it.”

“Which shouldn’t have happened if the spell had worked,” Bridge added.

“No one comes looking for a man’s wife,” Mill said. “He could have kept her for years, waiting for her to turn.”

“And she ran into a blizzard instead,” I added.