Page 72 of A House of Fangs & Deceit

The ring I wore on my pinkie had two small, embedded gems, one blue and the other red. The dark silver band vibrated slightly, and the blue gem glowed, alerting me to Rynn wanting to chat.

It was midafternoon and I was sitting in my chair by the window reading through one of the books Roth had brought. They’d had an absolute conniption when I had placed a cup of tea down on the table with the rest of the books, so this was our compromise. I could have one book with me and sip tea while reading it while in this chair, a healthy distance away from all the other reading material.

I wasn’t exactly sure what they thought I was going to do. Dump my tea over all the books while laughing manically?

But the argument hadn’t been worth it. So I worked from my spot while Alaric and Roth both posted up around the table. They were both faster at skimming the books than I was; I tried to only glance at the pages looking for the symbol, but I kept getting caught up in what the book contained.

I’d read some Unseelie texts while at Drudonia, but not many. Roth had been quite busy with collecting all these books and scrolls. It was impressive what they’d managed to track down over the past few years.

“Rynn is coming,” I said, putting down the book I’d been so engrossed in for the last hour.

The ring vibrated again, and I held my finger against the glyph that was engraved on the bottom of the band to let Rynn know we were ready. A few seconds later, shadows swirled in front of me until Rynn’s form appeared.

“I think I found something,” she said immediately, holding both hands up in earnest.

“Really?” I leaned forward in excitement.

“What did you find?” Alaric asked as both he and Roth quickly rose from their seats and came to stand closer to Rynn’s shadow form.

“Sam, remember how you said the outpost you’d visited was built on top of an old human town?” she replied, and I nodded.

I’d only mentioned that detail to Rynn in passing because I’d never seen old human buildings, and it’d stuck with me.

“Well, I did some digging, and while I wasn’t able to confirm this for every outpost, at least half of them were built on top of human settlements. And I wasn’t able to rule it out for the others. There simply aren’t enough records for me to prove it one way or another.”

“Why would it matter, though?” I furrowed my brows together, trying to see where Rynn was going with this. “I mean, aren’t a lot of the outposts built on top of old human settlements?”

“Yes, but when you look at the outposts that are attacked, it doesn’t make any sense,” Rynn said quickly and started pacing, leaving trails of shadow in her wake. “The attacks have been all over Lunaria, and there isn’t a pattern that I can see, exceptthat the outposts I know for a fact havenotbeen built over human settlements haven’t been touched.”

“Assuming Rynn’s theory is correct, and it is the old human outposts that are being targeted,” Alaric said, “why are they being attacked now? And why?”

“I didn’t see anything specifically targeted at the outpost we visited.” I frowned, trying to think back and see if there was something I missed. “The buildings stood out to me, just because of the architectural difference, but they were just old buildings, and there wasn’t anything done to them that hadn’t been done to the rest of the town.”

“The ritual,” Roth murmured before stalking over to a box they had tucked underneath the table.

We all watched while Roth yanked out scroll after scroll and tossed them aside. I didn’t think it was fair that they freaked out over me placing a cup of tea on the table, a careful distance away from any books, while they haphazardly yanked scrolls out, but Alaric and I had quickly learned over the last three days that it was best to just let Roth be Roth and not comment on any of their eccentric tendencies.

“Here!” They pulled a scroll out and held it up in the air before quickly walking across the room to where they had set up a large board.

Roth picked an empty space on the board and unrolled the scroll. As they did so, the dark red ribbons they kept wrapped around their forearms unraveled and looped around the board and its edges, pinning it in place.

I’d never encountered anyone who used blood magic the way Roth did. All Moroi were capable of blood magic, as our blood held magic, and we could use it for all types of castings. The simplest way was to use glyphs. Each glyph was a basic symbol that served as an instruction.

Heat was represented by a triangle. Water by three wavy lines. When combined, those two glyphs gave us hot water.Such a simple trick, but damn, it practically created pure bliss.

Technically, the glyphs could be anything. We’d originally learned how to do this by studying old Fae spells, but over the years, we’d added our own. New glyphs were documented at Drudonia so that we could keep track of what they all meant and scholars could experiment with crafting more complex spells like improved wards and defenses.

Glyphs for silence and healing were the most common. We’d also learned that some of the old Fae spells could be reawakened with our blood. The wards we had around the Houses and outposts had been based off Fae wards. At first, we’d simply reactivated their wards, but over the years we’d learned to improve them even more.

Before I married Demetri and moved to House Laurent, I’d been a lot more interested in learning new blood magic castings. It didn’t quite reach my obsession with training with a bow and throwing daggers, but I spent many nights reading through old books filled with Fae spells until the sun rose. I’d create small but useful castings like the one I used to protect letters I sent via strikers.

The ribbons that Roth kept wrapped around their forearms had been soaked in their blood, and Roth had enchanted them so that they could control them within a twenty-foot radius. Usually, they used them to pin scrolls in place or grab books off shelves that were out of their reach, but I was pretty sure I’d had more than one dirty dream about other things those ribbons could do.

Roth caught me looking at them a couple of times and had only smirked, which caused me to blush like crazy, and Alaric to ask what the hell was wrong with me.

But I was hardly going to explain to Alaric that I was having dirty fantasies about Roth and the ribbons that followed their demands.

Roth had also enchanted a pen that could write while they telepathically dictated to it. For some reason, that one deeply upset Alaric, so he always sat facing away from it, but I was determined to get Roth to show me how they did that. My handwriting had never been great, so maybe an enchanted pen would make it better.

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