Chapter 33
After a week of staying in Bowen’s shack far up in the mountains, Wells was beginning to understand why Bowen was the way he was.
For one, the bloody thing was miles from any kind of civilization, and also bloody hard to find. Wells had spent days searching for him, even with the Traveling Stone. Turned out, Bowen had enough enchantments around the place to send any witch on a wild-goose chase. But Wells had been determined.
If anyone knew how to fix what Da had done, it would be Bowen, up there in his hut, doing whatever strange and esoteric magic shite he did, and Wells was now single-minded: He was going to undo this.
And if that meant scrambling up the wrong mountain for three fucking days, so be it.
By the time he’d found his brother, he’d felt almost feral with worry and anger, and had clearly looked it, too, because Bowen had let him in with only a grunt and a “Fuck happened to you?”
By the time he’d told his younger brother the whole story, Bowen’s fists were clenched, his jaw set, and he’d gotten to work.
The hut was small, barely furnished except for a couple of camp cots, and there was an outhouse situation Wells hoped he could eventually wipe from his memory, but what Bowen lacked in amenities, he made up for in magic.
If there was a book about it, Bowen had it. If there was a spell ingredient, it was tucked away on a cubbyhole bookshelf that, as far as Wells could tell, contained an infinity’s worth of cubbyholes. Everything in the hut was pared down in the service of magic, and within a few days, Wells hardly minded the lack of indoor plumbing.
He barely ate, he hardly slept, and Bowen was at his side for all of it, the two of them paging through books, testing out other rings, other stones, anything that might work.
Bowen thought they were close to something now. Once he’d learned that Simon’s spell was a combination of two spells, he reasoned that the same would probably be needed to reverse it.
“It’s tricky,” he said now to Wells as they stood over the one solid piece of furniture in the hut, a massive table covered in spells, books, pieces of paper. “But that’s magic, eh?”
“This also seems to call for . . . my blood?” Wells said as he read over what Bowen had sketched out, and his brother clapped his shoulder, a hint of teeth appearing in all that beard.
“Love is pain,” he said, and Wells grunted in reply.
Christ, he’d clearly been around Bowen too long.
Still, he held out his hand and let Bowen slide a silver blade in a quick stroke over the meat of his palm, wincing as the blood dripped into a small mother-of-pearl dish.
“Where do you get all this stuff?” he asked his brother, trying to distract himself as he bled.
“Here and there,” Bowen replied in his typical Bowen way.
“Thank you,” Wells said. “As always, you are a font of information, overflowing.”
One corner of Bowen’s mouth lifted. “Shops,” he clarified. “Other witches. Some humans deal in magical artifacts, and I know one of them.”
“That sounds danger—ow!”
Wells glared at his brother as Bowen slapped some kind of salve on his cut. It stung like a bastard, but whatever it was healed the cut almost immediately, and Wells studied his hand, reluctantly impressed.
“How soon do you think it can be ready?” he asked, and his brother shrugged as he turned away.
“Never can say with this kind of stuff,” Bowen replied, heading for his cabinet and setting the dish of blood inside. “When did you tell her you were coming back?”
“I didn’t.”
Bowen paused. “What?”
“When I left,” Wells said, distracted as he read over the spell, “I just left. And once I’d learned the truth from Simon, I knew I had to fix this, so I came straight to you.”
“So you . . . buggered off. After she found out our father was the reason she’d lost her magic.”
“If there’s a point here, Bowen, now would be the time to approach it.”
“Ever occur to you she might think you were in on it, then? That you flew back home to Da, job well done?”
Now it was Wells’s turn to pause.
“I . . . I couldn’t go back without a solution,” he said because that had been the dominating thought in his mind. He had caused this, and he wouldn’t return until he could restore her magic.
“Still, maybe a phone call?” Bowen suggested. “Text message? ‘Hi, really sorry my family’s so fucked up, I’ll be back as soon as I’ve unfucked things’?”
“Shit,” Wells muttered now, running a hand over his beard. It wasn’t quite as shaggy as Bowen’s yet, but it was definitely getting there. “I should have done that.”
“Yeah, you should’ve,” Bowen replied, then shook his head. “How is it that I stay up here all the bloody time, no woman in sight, and yet I’m smarter about this shite than you and Rhys? Fucking riddle me that, mate.”
“Because being in love makes you insane and also quite stupid, I think,” Wells said, his stomach still sinking.
Did Gwyn think he’d left her for good? Or, worse, that this was all part of his father’s plan?
“Look, we need to get this spell working as soon as possible,” he said, turning to Bowen. “I’ve got to get back to her, I’ve got to—”
One minute, he was looking at his brother.
The next, Sam, Cait, and Parker were standing there between him and Bowen, their eyes wide, their mouths open.
“Ohmigod that was so scary,” Sam said, and from behind them, Bowen scowled.
“Who in the hell are you and how did you get on my mountain?”
“Werewolf,” Cait whispered, staring at him, and Sam’s eyes swung around before settling on Wells.
“Oh, thank the Goddess!” she yelled, and then all three of them were rushing him, babbling at once, and he was so surprised to see them that he couldn’t even make sense of anything they were saying, until he heard, “She took Gwyn!”
“Enough!” he barked, his voice a sharp crack, and all three of them went silent, their faces pale.
“What,” Wells asked, trying very hard to stay calm even as his heart threatened to beat out of his chest, “is going on?”
“Morgan took Gwyn!” Parker blurted out, and Wells stepped back, confused.
“Morgan?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”
He could tell they were all about to start talking at once again, so he pointed at Parker, delegating them. “You. Tell me everything.”
Parker’s eyes darted nervously around, but they nodded, licking their lips. “So after you left, we kept looking for ways to reverse your dad’s spell. And when we were looking through Gwyn’s stuff, we found Morgan’s file.”
“That file didn’t tell us anything,” Wells said, and Parker nodded.
“I know. But I used this on it.”
They pulled out that coin they’d had the day Wells had taken the file. He remembered it, the spell that was supposed to absorb what was written and write it out somewhere else. Wells hadn’t used it, though, he’d just taken the file, and now Parker added, “I was just messing around, waiting for Cait to finish with the book she was looking at, so I ran it over the file, just seeing if it worked. But when I put what was in the file on another piece of paper—”
“The file was enchanted,” Sam said, thrusting a sheet of paper at him.
Wells took it, his eyes scanning, and there, where on Morgan’s original file it had given that vague thing about “inappropriate magic,” now a much different—much darker—story was spelled out.
“Bloody fucking hell,” Wells whispered.
“They almost killed a student,” Cait said. “Like, drained her of blood, vampire-style, all because I guess her ancestor had been some powerful witch. The only reason the college didn’t go further was because the girl had volunteered for it.”
“Apparently she thought she was gonna get all powered up, too, but they were just using her,” Sam added, and Wells was pretty sure his own blood had just been replaced with ice water.
“And you think Morgan’s taken Gwyn?”
“Her booth was empty at the Fall Festival, and someone said they saw her leave with a dark-haired woman and not come back. And when we went to Morgan’s house, there’s a major magical-force-field-type thing around it. We couldn’t get in,” Parker said.
“And we didn’t know what to do because Vivi and Elaine are still gone, and we’re not powerful enough to take on a bunch of dark witches, but then we remembered there was a Traveling Stone in the back room at Something Wicked,” Sam went on.
“And, like, we’re mad at you and stuff, but we didn’t know who else to go to, so we just thought of you, and then poof!” Cait summarized.
“Wait, you poofed onto my mountain? In one go?” Bowen was staring at the three with a mixture of suspicion and interest, but Wells was already moving, gesturing to the spell on Bowen’s table.
“Finish this. Quick as you can. Then meet me in Graves Glen.”
Bowen nodded. “Go help your girl.”
“Can the three of you get back all right?” he asked Sam, and she pulled out the Traveling Stone.
“I think so. Should be easier going home than coming here.”
“Good.”
Wells pulled out his own Traveling Stone, trying not to think of Gwyn, magic-less, helpless, at the mercy of Morgan and her coven.
Bringing her face to mind, he squeezed the stone tight and thought one word.
Home.