Page 96 of Fated Exile

"I might know." Bastian's voice is soft and shy as he slides into the room. His hair is still damp from the shower, pulled back into a tight queue, and he smells like honey and body lotion. I try to quell the spark of heat that dances inside me as he moves close to the table, his warm, masculine scent wrapping around my body. "When I found you this morning, Delilah, I felt drawn to you. I'm pretty sure the gems were calling out to me in some way. They felt like that voice inside my head used to feel—like some kind of an invader. I don't think they were supposed to be in my mind. Somehow they hypnotized me."

I look over at Kerry. "Have you ever heard of anything like that?"

"Magical items being used to hypnotize victims? Yes. But nothing that could be plucked out of a mindscape." She yanks the waffle off the iron, sets it on a plate, adds two slices of bacon to it, and pushes it in front of me. "You should eat this to restore your energy. You've had a long night and a lot of stress. Then... we should get to work so you can perform a new spell."

Considering the grinding, mind-numbing work she's had me do so far, I don't look forward to this. "Shouldn't we find out why the gemstones called out to me instead? What's going on, and why can't I remember getting up to find them?"

"We'll find that out—though I have an inkling. Something about the mate bond made you channel Bastian's feelings." She grabs a second plate, makes it up, then passes it over to Bastian. "However he was hypnotized, some part of his mind remembers, but the memory has been locked away from him. You're going to learn the strongest truth spell I know so that you can wrestle the memory out—the way only a bonded mate can."

I swallow, and Bastian meets my eyes, looking a little concerned. In a low voice I ask, "Will it hurt?"

"Him or you?"

"Both."

Roarke grumbles, "Ideally it should hurt neither of them."

I'm touched by his concern. Kerry says, "It shouldn't cause any physical pain, but it may be mentally and emotionally difficult. These are buried memories we're talking about here, after all. There's a reason they don't want to be known. But the sooner we can unearth them, the better—because whatever these gemstones are, they're dangerous.

"I thought they'd been neutralized by being removed from their host, but clearly I was wrong. It's possible that whomever their maker was is still controlling them in some way, gaining access to influencing you and Bastian through the connection they had to his mind and body."

I don't like that they made me do things I couldn't stop and don't remember. If they present some kind of danger to Bastian still, then I like them even less. "Let's do the spell, then. I want to know where they came from. And if it's possible to know what made them call to me last night, I want to know that too."

"That's our morning plan, then. Just eat your breakfast first—I promised Cat that I'd feed you."

I pause with the bacon strips on the way to my mouth. "Where is Cat, by the way?"

Finn eyes me sideways. "You didn't guess? She's with Niall."

I should've known. At least she's found a hobby.

* * *

The spell Kerry teaches me is meant to unfurl the truth from where it's buried, to pluck it out from dark places and bring it up to the light. It has a somewhat beautiful, almost creepy rhyme that she makes me memorize perfectly. The rhythm of the words, and even their cadence, matters as much as the words themselves.

Liars, liars, ivy and briars,

How thick your tongue does grow.

It creeps and crawls on stalwart walls,

Until it breaks and downward falls.

The spell evokes an image of a giant tongue wrestling with a brick wall, which is not something I wanted in my mind. It's the ivy that creeps up the walls like truth, Kerry insists, but spells aren't meant to be literal. They're created over time, words shored up with meaning as each witch adds and takes away, and just by believing in them she makes the spell blossom.

Kerry touches my forehead and does the spell, her tongue unfurling the words simply. "...and downward falls."

I feel a memory bloom in my head, like a waking dream. It's fast and evocative, the late night venture from Finn's apartment condensed down into simple moments.

I got up out of bed. Threw off my borrowed shirt and shifted into a wolf. Leaping out of the doors to his garden, I raced across the miles between his place and my home. Once there, I shifted back to my human form, and walked in a trance towards the drawer where I'd stowed the gemstones, then promptly made myself forget them.

They seared my palms as I held them, the raw flesh I'd stripped open from running so hard stinging at their touch. As they caressed my palm, I heard voices in my head, strange and eerie. Their glowing orbs reminded me of the eyes of the Elder statues the night of the Mating Ceremony. It was as if they looked into me and beyond, but they had no home to sit in, no statue that held them, so they were restless and uneasy.

I walked them out into the backyard, stared directly at a thick oak tree, and asked them silently if they wanted to be placed there instead. With a buzzing in my head, they urged me to put them in my mouth and swallow. I felt a sense of unease then, my toes curling into the garden soil, and the grass beneath my feet seemed to swell and twist around my ankles.

It was then that I woke up.

I hiss as I open my eyes, the truth spell causing a headache to form in the base of my skull. It's good to know what happened, though it doesn't answer many of my questions. Kerry's instincts, it seems, were right: the gemstones reached out to me through whatever tenuous connection we had, and almost tricked me into letting them take over for good.

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