Chapter 31
Wells looked into the three hostile faces currently sending daggers his way and blinked, confused. The last time he’d seen these three, they’d been laughing and joking with him.
Now they all looked like they could happily see his insides on the outside, and he wasn’t sure what it was he’d done to effect that change.
“What is it?” Gwyn asked, stepping forward, her hand falling from his.
“Yes, did I commit some kind of holiday faux pas here?” he asked, hands in his pockets. “Because if I did—”
“It’s you, dude,” Sam said, standing, arms crossed over her chest. “You’re the reason Gwyn’s lost her powers.”
It was such an unexpected reply—such an absurd one—that Wells actually laughed in disbelief. “What?”
No one else was laughing, though, and for all that he had teased Gwyn about her coven of Baby Witches, in this moment, each and every one of them seemed very grown-up. Very serious.
And very pissed off at him.
“What are you talking about?” Gwyn asked them, her face thankfully looking as confused as Wells felt. But she wasn’t standing as close to him anymore, and when Sam bent down and picked up a heavy leather book, she took it with eager hands.
“It’s an old spell and really hard to do. I mean, it would take years to find all the stuff you need,” Sam said, tapping a page as Gwyn read it, her eyes narrowed. “We didn’t even look at it at first because who could do this kind of magic? And then Parker saw the reference to the ring and remembered another spell.”
Now Parker stood up, their face solemn in the candlelight as they held out another book. “That’s why this has been so hard to find. It’s two spells combined. So I looked up the one about using a ring, and that’s when I saw this.”
They pointed to something on the page, and Wells saw Gwyn stiffen, her throat working.
She looked up at him, and her face might as well have been a mask.
“Your ring,” she said, and Wells looked down at his hand, where his father’s signet ring rested. The jewel looked black in the candlelight, but there was nothing more sinister about it, no sense of power clinging to it.
“This?” he said, holding up the offending hand. “This . . . it’s a family heirloom, not a spell. Been in the family for generations. Surely if it could take power from a witch, it would have done so before now.”
Wordlessly, Gwyn handed him the book.
Wells took it, and he realized his hands were shaking. With anger, yes—ridiculous to think he’d have had anything to do with taking Gwyn’s power. But with fear, too. He could admit that.
That distant look in her eyes . . .
The page was difficult to read, English and Welsh crammed together on narrow lines, but there, inset in the right corner, was a drawing of a ring.
A ring that looked very much like the one Wells currently wore.
“No, this . . . this isn’t . . . I don’t see how—”
“Who gave you the ring, Wells?” Gwyn asked. She stood there, flanked by Parker and Sam, Cait still sitting at her feet, her face just as stony as the others’, and Wells began to feel something like real panic crawling up his throat.
“My father,” he admitted.
“Right before he sent you here to steal Gwyn’s magic,” Sam said, and Wells shook his head, rubbing a hand over his hair.
“No. No. I volunteered to come. My father didn’t want me in Graves Glen, to tell the truth. The, the ring was a gesture, nothing more.”
“Give it to me.”
Gwyn held out her hand, and Wells didn’t hesitate, pulling the ring off his finger and placing it in her palm. This was all a mistake, after all. Gwyn’s students were good kids, but they were still young witches, still prone to fuckups, and that’s all this was. A monumental fuckup, same way they’d thought Morgan was to blame.
“Gwynnevere,” he began, but she was already turning away.
“Is there a way we can find out for certain?” she asked, and Sam nodded, moving back to the circle.
“We can use our magic to fuel you, but just for a few seconds,” she told Gwyn. “That should be long enough, though.”
Gwyn nodded, and as the others sat back down, she moved into the middle of their circle.
Sam lit another candle, and Parker sketched another rune on the floor as Cait began murmuring words under her breath, the candles flickering.
Gwyn sat there, her eyes closed, his ring held out in front of her as the other three joined hands. It took a moment, but Wells felt it, then, a slow pulse of magic, rising from them, centering on Gwyn, and as he watched, her red hair blew back from her face, like someone had just slammed a door.
Then the ring started to glow.
First the silver itself, then the jewel in the center, pulsing with dark light, and Wells felt a sudden sharp stabbing pain in his hand, like he’d been burned.
He glanced down, and there, on the finger where his ring had sat, a small black band appeared.
It slithered over his skin as he watched in horrified fascination, and when he looked back up, Gwyn was watching him.
“I swear,” he told her, his heart pounding, almost dizzy. “I swear on everything I am that I don’t understand what’s going on here.”
“What’s going on is that your father gave you a ring cursed with ancient blood magic that slowly drains power away from another witch’s bloodline,” Parker told him, their eyes dark. “Probably because he was pissed off about Gwyn and her family replacing your family’s magic in the town.”
“No,” Wells said, shaking his head. “My father is many things, I’ll admit to that, but this . . . this is evil. He’s proud and arrogant and not always the kindest man, but he’s not this.”
He thought back to that night in the pub when his father had seemed so broken. So sad but accepting when Wells had said he’d go to Graves Glen. He’d called him son and slipped that ring off, that ring Wells had seen him wear his whole life.
There had to be more to it, something he wasn’t seeing.
“Gwyn,” he said now, and she turned to him, but those lovely eyes of hers were blank, her arms wrapped around her body. “Please. You have to believe me.”
“I believe that you didn’t know,” she said, her voice flat. “I believe that you would never do something like this. But yes, Wells, I believe your father would load you like a weapon and send you here to destroy my family.”
“You don’t know him,” Wells insisted. “I’m telling you, this is . . . it’s something else. We were wrong about Morgan, we’re wrong about this.”
“I don’t think we are,” she said, and he moved across the room, wanting to touch her, needing to touch her, to make her see that they could fix this together.
But she moved back, and his hands dropped to his sides, an ocean opening up between them.
“Is there a way to take the magic out of the ring? Put it back in Gwyn?” he asked Sam now, turning to look over his shoulder.
She shook her head, eyes bright, and Wells realized she was trying not to cry.
“No. The magic isn’t in the ring. It’s in whoever’s blood created the spell in the first place. And pulling magic out of one person to put into another without some kind of cursed fucking object is pretty hard.”
“Right.”
Wells stood there, thinking, trying to ignore how he felt, like someone had just stabbed him in the chest, his blood seeping across the chalk runes on the floor.
This was his fault, so he had to be the one to fix it.
And there was only one place he could think of to start.
Reaching into the pocket of his waistcoat, his fingers curled around the Traveling Stone he kept there. “I’m going to make this right, Gwyn,” he said. “I promise.”
He focused on Wales, on home, on Simon.
And then Gwyn and her sad eyes vanished from view as everything went black.