Words of Power (Alice Gray Book 3)

18

"You guys can see that, right?" I asked, unsure if this was another effect of my re-emerging magic.

"The Third Eye." Evan's voice was little more than a whisper.

"Not exactly," Anne said. "Evelyn said that it's the All Seeing Eye, and the spell only works if a certain type of ingredient is used. If you know what I mean."

"Everybody knows what you mean, Anne. But even if we didn't. I can see what this is. It's Blood magic."

"What do you mean?"

"The colours. Gold and crimson. Gray magic, and something else. The original Alice Gray had a hand in this."

"How can you see that?"

"My magic is back."

Three shocked faces zeroed in on me. "I knew it," Lucas said. "The bond, it's so much stronger than before."

"When?" Anne asked, excitement bubbling over as she clasped her hands together.

"At the club, the music, it did something to me, stimulated my life-force or something."

"Opened your Third Eye," Evan said, awe seeping out of his tone like thick tar.

"I guess. Anyway, it opened some sort of channel. The ancestors caught me up in their creepy chants. But it wasn't their usual drivel, the warning was for someone else." I paused, wondering how to describe what I'd seen so that they'd take it seriously.

Nobody had much sympathy to spare for my father. He'd taken prisoners for decades, torturing them with their own uncontrollable desire for our power. I knew that Lucas would view it as karma, no matter what the vamps were doing to him now.

That's how pack law worked. You reaped what you sowed.

But Lucas hadn't seen it like I had. The horror of Jonathan's suffering in a cycle of destruction and regrowth, his skin flayed from his body, over and over. That's what his new vampire genes allowed, and that's what they were doing. The question was, why?

"Madness, corruption, despair, destruction, that's what the ancestors chanted. If those guys thought it fit to show me what was happening to Jonathan, they must want me to do something about it, right?"

"I guess," said Evan. "But why do they care what happens to a bastard like him."

"Look, I don't have the answers, not right now," I said, putting a comforting hand on Evan's arm.

It was hard for Evan to put his past with Jonathan behind him. My father had driven Evan to do awful things when he was under the spell of our silver magic. It was hard for me to forget too. Evan had attacked me. It had been hard to see him for who he really was when Jonathan had twisted him into a perverted monster.

I trusted him now, loved him even.  The pack bond had done that for us. Lucas's wolf had chased away any last trace of silver corruption in Evan and let his rich blue life-force shine out again.

Corruption. The word rattled around in my mind, just like it had echoed around the club when the ancestors had reached out to me.

"Don't you see? Jonathan really is a victim of his own magic now. The Baroness's vamp blood has corrupted him. It's driving him to madness, and the vamps are using him for experiments."

"To what end?" Lucas asked.

"I don't know, but whatever it is, I'm betting no good will come of it."

The room fell silent as we contemplated what a group of powerful but power hungry vampires might do with a vessel that held both potent witch magic and the blood of one of the oldest vampires that had survived into modern times.

"They know about the Eye. They want it for themselves," Evan whispered, verbalising the only conclusion that made sense.

I looked down at the scrap of paper that Anne had brought from the coven. The gold and crimson particles hovered above the words, making the triangle and the eye glow with life.
Vampires couldn't access witch magic because it derived from the natural world. Vampires were dead, nature perverted and corrupted by dark, heavy, anomalous magic. Their otherness was a fundamental truth of nature.

Except that it wasn't. Vampires were part of nature.

The eye sparkled and winked its crimson lights at me, mocking my slowness in reaching a conclusion that seemed so obvious now. Hell, I'd even seen crimson in witch magic before. Jennet Device had veins of blood magic running through her life-force, like little lightning bolts of darkness fizzling in her natural witch energy.

James Device was her brother, their different paternity meant that in true life his blue life-force was pure. Yet after he'd been brutally turned as a teenager, James had retained a form of witch magic, perverted though it was by his vampire nature.

I'd thought that James was an anomaly, an unexplainable freak happening in nature's plan.

So had he.

But when Jonathan absorbed the Baroness's power, James had seen an opportunity.

And he didn't care about the ethics of vivisection while he explored its possibilities.

Is Alice finally getting some answers?