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“Okay, fine. I had no warning.” I lean back against Ezra again. “But I don’t blame him for that.”
Cohen flashes me a smile and then pushes to his feet, stretching his arms over his head in a way that pulls up his shirt and reveals a sliver of rock hard abs. I pointedly look away, because there is no reason for me to get all kinds of hot and bothered right now. Or ever again over Cohen.
Yeah, right Rosalind Juliet. That ship has already sailed. You now know what he can do with his magic and you are going to obsess about it forever.
Just like he fucking wants.
“Okay,” Gideon nods, as Cohen retreats to his chair again. “We can admit you have some skills that we don’t have, but that doesn’t mean you’re better equipped to teach Ro what she needs to know to pass the trial.”
“To pass the trial? No, you’re probably right,” Cohen agrees as he sits back down. “But to teach her what she can do, all the possibilities open to her? Fuck yeah, I’m the best person to do that.”
All four of them scowl at him. He sighs and shakes his head. “Look I get it. If our positions were reversed, I wouldn’t trust me either. Especially with Rosalind. She’s worthy of your protection, believe me, I know it. That’s why I’m here. Because I want to help protect her, but I also want to make sure she can protect herself. And the best way to do that is to teach her everything. Not just what your coven thinks she needs to know.”
“We’re already doing that,” Gideon says stubbornly. “She has the runes for all the elements. She can access them.”
I hate that they’re talking about me like I’m not here, which is why I sound like a petulant child when I say, “I found that out by accident on my own, Gideon. You didn’t teach me that. And if I hadn’t been a complete newb stumbling through learning the basics of magic essentially by myself, I probably never would have even realized I could do it. It took some convincing for you to understand that it’s something we can all access, because you’d been told that you’re limited to the element of your sect.” I point a finger at Fielder. “You all but told me to skip the chapter on elemental magic because Shadow and Veil doesn’t have it. We have illusions and…demons, apparently. But no elemental. If I hadn’t read that chapter anyway, I never would have been doodling and accidentally realized I could call air.”
I motion at Cohen. “He already knew that. Guys, he can teach all of us so much simply because he hasn’t been told he can’t have access to certain magic. If the overall goal here is to get me named an heir and to eventually overthrow all the elders, to claim the coven for ourselves, then I’m sorry, but I think we’re going to need more knowledge than you have.”
The four coven bound witches in the room look at each other, and I know without even asking that they are having a conversation that doesn’t include me and Cohen. He seems to realize that too because he settles back in his chair even farther, his legs splay even wider, and his gaze runs over me hungrily as his tongue swipes over his lower lip.
My body goes hot and achy, and I’m immediately pulled back into the bedroom upstairs, to our bodies grinding together, to the feel of his magic inside me. I shift on Ezra’s lap uncomfortably, and Cohen grins. He knows what’s going on in my head.
I look away from him, back to the black mass on my forearm. A form that feels comfortable to me. That’s what he’d said, something that feels right. I try to think of something I’d be okay having on my body, something that would be useful in a fight. So the only tattoo I ever considered getting of watercolor peonies is out. What would I do? Shower my enemies with flower petals? That definitely wouldn’t be any good.
No, it needs to be an animal of some kind, something with teeth and claws and… I don’t know venom? Like Cohen’s snake. But maybe something with wings in case I needed to make a quick getaway.
Either way, I’ll have to figure it out in the next thirteen days, because showing up to the trials with a moving storm on my arm will not help me in any way. Or maybe it would? Maybe they’d take one look at my shadow and name me heir without all the hassle of a trial.
I know for a fact Julie Colms can’t summon a shadow.
I sigh and tip my head back against Ezra’s shoulder. He idly strokes a hand up and down my arm, while they continue on with their silent conversation and Cohen devours half of the candy on the table.
Finally, Gideon asks, “how do you know all of this about shadows and demons? How did you teach yourself witchcraft if you aren’t a part of a coven?”
Cohen spreads his legs a little wider, giving off a hell of a lot of big dick energy. “I taught myself, mostly through trial and error. I failed a lot, nearly killed myself a few times-”
“Pity that you didn’t,” Fielder mutters.
“And then five years ago I stumbled across a Librarian.” Here he pauses like this is something significant, like meeting a librarian has some kind of special power, which, I suppose, if you love to read then you’d think librarians have a superpower, the key to a thousand worlds.
“Bullshit,” Ezra grinds out. “You didn’t find a Librarian. Those don’t exist.”
“They don’t?” I say. “Isn’t Mrs. Carlyle a librarian?” She is. It’s a rhetorical question, because she runs the library at Septem Stellae.
They all flash me these looks that are a cross between thinking I’m adorable, and frustration. “Not a normal librarian, love,” Hardin says, picking up my hand and pressing kisses to my fingertips.
“A Librarian, with a capital ‘l’,” Cohen continues, watching as Hardin keeps brushing his lips over my skin. “Has access to The Great Library of Alexandria, that was magically hidden by witches rather than destroyed.”
I think my eyes just about bug out of my head. “What? Really?”
He grins at me and nods. “Yeah, it has every book ever written, so it’s huge and there is no way you’d be able to walk through the entire thing. Unless you spent days there.”
“Every book ever written,” Fielder muses. “So that means grimoires.”
Cohen nods. “Exactly. So long as the witches writing it bound it into a book, there is every grimoire from every coven. A few scrolls, too. Some journals. I’ve learned a lot in the last five years.”
There is something in his tone as he says that last sentence that is no longer pleased, instead it’s turned hard, uncompromising, like he’s remembered something he learned that… maybe hurt him? Or enraged him. Something that I think is what put him on this path of revenge.
