Page 105 of Bright Soul

Between our mating bond and our connection in the circle, she would feel my restlessness without a doubt. Maybe even thatI was having a conversation with Braza and plotting over some of the finer details before the coming confrontation. “Aren’t pennies worthless?” I asked.

“Well, your thoughts aren’t,” she said.

I leaned in, whispering in her ear, “What if I was mentally undressing you?”

Braza’s presence in my mind faded in an instant, and both Ben and Geo faltered mid-sentence to turn their heads our way. Blushing, Cress reached up and tapped me on the nose. “You know what this means,” she whispered back. “Horny jail.”

I tugged on her sleeve, exposing the edge of my mating mark. Giving it a lick, I felt her tense and bite her lip to cage in a gasp.

“Oh no, horny jail,” I teased, stealing her away to the closet with me on a wisp of shadow.

It was much later that night that Geo and I sat at the base of the powercore and he allowed me to pull his crystalline heart free from his chest. I began the painstaking task of writing down the runes that encircled his heart, borrowing most of Cress’s drawing ability to diagram it.

I hadn’t had to ask for permission, since she was sleeping off our visit to the closet. It seemed the magic would continue working even if one member of the circle was unconscious.

I used her skill to write down and study the numerous chains of spell runes that led from the heart back into Geo’s body, noting them down on a separate page somewhere in the middle of Cress’s sketchbook. I felt Braza watching over my shoulder. “Do these match what you can remember?” I asked her.

“They are animation spells. None concern the identity of the soul inside of the heart,”she replied.

We both had the same translation spell, which made these human-made runes something I could read and understand. Unfortunately, she was right. At some point, I’d started copying down the same threads of runes—his heart was like a central nervous system while he was in gargoyle form, connecting to each limb, muscle, and tendon.

I manipulated these threads with care, relying on my shadows to keep from tugging one free of its connection by accident. They were intricately wrapped and would only unravel from each other so much before there was tension. The edge of a shadow brushed the strand of runes they were all wound around, and a fission of pain ran from it straight to my fingers and down my arm. I jerked away with a hiss. That’d felt like trying to grab a bolt of lightning.

“Let me try, Father,”Braza said. Her powercore presence pressed into the gaps where I’d threaded my shadows.

In the meantime, I inspected my new wound that ran from fingertip to shoulder, branching like the shock had been electricity. I noted it at the bottom of a page. Geo wasn’t entirely helpless even while his heart was exposed in gargoyle form. That magic had to be guarding the most important runes keeping him animated.

I flipped the notebook back to the first page while Braza hummed and shifted around the magic, murmuring to herself. The portrait Cress had drawn from my memories gazed back at me. Our son. She saw much of me in the boy, but in this quiet moment, I noted how he was human in his smile and the curve of his ears.

The Void had seen a future where he lived. I was struck breathless by hope, no matter how unlikely it seemed that a witch could carry a dimensional child to term. If we lived andMyuna died, he could exist. Perhaps Cress would agree to name him Teziel,meaning victorious. I had met many good males with that name in my time.

Braza tapped on my thoughts, and I glanced up.“May I see?”she asked politely.

“We have no other secrets. This one certainly is not one,” I replied.

She took in the drawing and squealed in delight.“He looks just like you both.”

“He was foretold by the same vision that showed me you and Ravai,” I told her, faltering for a moment. “He is still an idea, a kind dream before I remember I live on this unforgiving world now. I do not seek to replace you, Brazita.”

Her tone implied a smile.“I understand. You might have a future with both of us. I was able to inspect this.”

She pushed an image of the central link of runes connected to Geo’s heart. I flipped back to my sketches and added these runes, heart thudding hard in my chest as she sent two more memories from different angles. It was a woven braid of several spells concerning control, identity, intelligence, duty, and the protective spell meant to electrocute anyone who touched the chain directly.

I smiled to myself. Given time, I would unravel each of these runes into their component spells. My clawed finger followed the path of the identity spell, already spotting where it was written for the soul in the crystal heart to forget its past life and start again with a baseline of the duty that it was entwined with.

Geo shuddered back into existence and shifted back to his human form with a grind of clashing rocks. He coughed out a plume of dust. “Well?” he ground out.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “I will have my daughter back because of you. Words cannot express my gratitude…butperhaps you would welcome an idea that will elevate you in the eyes of our mate.”

He straightened slowly, having spent this whole time hunched over with his heart exposed. “I’m listening,” he stated.

37

BEN

“That one casts Starsear, a level-five spell,” Cress’s handbook informed me when I held out one of the pieces of paper attached to Evening Guidance. My father had stored a trove of spells on the staff, and I was still trying to figure which were useful. Most were priceless—spells I’d find nearly impossible to replace once they were used up.

At my core, I was still a blood witch, but I could still cobble up enough celestial witchery with Cress’s help to channel these spells. Very few witches, even those in varied mating circles like mine, had the ability to switch between affinities. I wasrare. But that didn’t mean I was powerful, and I crammed every second I wasn’t training with Cress or sleeping. It was the evening of our third day of serious training, with one more to go before we joined the push to save everyone we could.

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