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“Oh, no!” I exclaimed, drawing back in horror. “Oh, Avery—I marked it!” I looked around anxiously for something to clean the ancient grimoire off—though it wasn’t likely there was anything handy that was going to get blood out of parchment. But just then I heard an inarticulate noise from Avery.
Turning, I saw him staring down at the book again. And when I looked myself, I saw why.
Color was swirling outward from the bloody print and washing over the page—over all the pages, I saw. Lines in that same crimson script were appearing by magic—it was like a note written in invisible ink suddenly being revealed.
“They have said that we cannot stay together,” Corinne’s journal entry informed us. “The Elders of the Coven—which I helped to found after the plague—have pronounced that we must be apart for they say when Witch and Nocturne meet and join, the power born of the joining is too strong and it must be curtailed. Because of this, they say our love is unnatural and wrong.”
“They tore them apart,” I whispered, thinking of how awful it would be if someone said I could never see Griffin again. “How terrible!”
“There’s more,” Avery murmured. “Keep reading.”
“The Elders have joined together to make a pact—an Edict—that no Other shall be joined to one from outside his or her race,” Corinne had written. “Thus did they separate me from my love. And I am to go back to working spells in the regular way—no more may I simply prick my finger and let a drop of blood fall to make the magic do my will. I did protest this at the tribunal but the Coven Elders will not hear reason.”
“The Windermere Coven enacted the Edict, not Corinne!” I exclaimed. “And they forced her to stop doing Blood magic! I knew she wouldn’t outlaw her own magic—it didn’t make sense!”
“But how could they force her to do anything?” Avery asked. “If she was already so strong?”
“Keep reading,” I said grimly.
“They have taken my love as a hostage that I shall do as they command,” Corinne had written. “If only I had Blood-Bonded to him when we had the chance! But now they say I must give my word and sign my name to the sacred scroll of truth saying I shall leave him and never again work the magic of the Blood or his life is forfeit. I do not wish to sign my name, which shall bind me to this cursed vow forever. But I do not know what else I may do.
I have no choice—though I love him more than my own life, I must leave him.”
There were blotches on this part of the manuscript again—tear marks, I thought. I could imagine Corinne writing these words as tears coursed down her cheeks, dipping her pen again and again into the ink, which was a faded brown once more, just like all the rest of the entries in the grimoire.
“This is a bitter pill indeed and I curse the day I saved the craven Sisters of the Windermere Coven from the plague which surely must have carried them all away if not for my own true love coming to save us all. I have tried to tell them they must not fear him for he wishes only good things, but they will not listen. We must be parted.”
“Could a group of witches hold a Nocturne hostage like that?” I asked doubtfully.
Avery frowned. “Windermere witches could, I’ll bet. At the time this was written, they were the most powerful coven in the world.”
“And I bet they got that way because Corinne’s Nocturne lover healed them with his blood,” I exclaimed. “The merging of Others increases powers, so they were strong enough together to hold him away from Corinne until she promised never to see him again and to stop doing Blood magic.”
“And signed her name in the scroll of truth—which I guess must have been spelled to make her keep her word,” Avery remarked. “So she couldn’t get free of them and then go off with her Nocturne after all.”
“Poor Corinne!” I exclaimed, feeling terrible for my ancestress. “And how ungrateful of the rest of the Windermere Coven to do that to her!”
“She was right,” Avery said thoughtfully. “She should have Blood-Bonded to him when she had a chance. They could break a marking—even a double marking. But a Blood-Bond would have kept them together no matter what. There’s no magic that can break that—only death can undo it.”
I thought of bonding to Griffin that way and shivered. I was only sixteen and way too young to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, let alone who I wanted to spend it with. But I couldn’t help it—when I looked into my future, his pale lightning and pitch eyes always seemed to be staring back at me. I wanted him—wanted to be with him forever. I didn’t blame Corinne for being upset—I would be devastated too if someone tried to take my Nocturne from me just as hers had been taken from her.
