Page 2 of November Reign
For his trouble, Oak earned himself the bird tossed his way as Damon finally summoned a fireball and launched it towards the construct I’d made.
The golem dissolved on contact with the magic, leaving Damon looking smug and a sprinkle of sand on the wooden floor.
With a wave and a few muttered words, I whisked the sand into the pile so I could reform another, larger golem.
“That was great,” I praised as the new construct took its place. I moved to stand next to Oak to get out of the way of the fighting.
“Stop babying him,” Oak growled. “He’s unfocused and dangerous.”
Damon clearly heard him and frowned. He didn’t try to defend himself because we both knew Oak had a point.
“You’re too hard on him!” I shot back, unwilling to let it slide. Damon had to know I was on his side. Our fledgling relationship had grown fractionally since I revealed who he was to me. We weren’t brotherly, not that I really knew what that was. But it was something. Baby steps towards what I really wanted.
A family.
This house, having Cody and Toth with Hela, Damon and Mori, Barr, Parker and Gregoris living here, was chaotic. All of them made up something like a family, especially given that Cody was Mori’s son, and Parker and Damon were adoptive brothers.
The connections between them all made me feel like an outsider. Even though Damon was my baby brother, I was on the outside looking in. We weren’t anywhere near close.
“Grab a drink before we take the next round. Using magic dehydrates you.” I urged Damon towards the small table in the corner where the pitcher of water and cups were before settling back intoplace next to Oak.
Oak gave a sigh and again muttered something about me babying Damon that I decided to let slide. I didn’t want to start another argument.
It would have been easier to get on with Oak if he wasn’t still icing me out. Really, the guy’s attitude towards me hadn’t softened one bit, even with proof I hadn’t done anything to let Basil know where we were, or who Damon was. All he had to do was look at him! Damon was a mixture of our dad and Fern. There was no question of his parentage, not when you touched him and got the buzz of magic that made up his natural wards.
Ever since I’d unlocked his magic in April to protect him, Damon had been struggling with his control. Don’t get me wrong, he started off strong. May and June were fantastic with leaps and bounds with his control and spell words, not that he really needed them. He just had to think the magic into being. The words were just there to focus him, form the magic into something he could use.
Then July happened. He had his birthday. We’d all celebrated in style in the demon realm and once we’d returned to Northarbor, it was a battle to get Damon to come back to training. I’d beg and plead, he would try for an hour, then go off to do something risky like set up cameras on the top of the house!
Damon got bored so easily we had to make the training sessions fun for him or he’d find some other chaos I’d have to talk him out of. Like with the camera. He’d eventually relented and let Mori hold him while Mori used his wings to hover in place to put them up instead of Damon’s climbing plan.
The main issue with him was his unwillingness to use the power he had been born with. That, coupled with the extra magic both of us had gained from his mother, my best friend, Fern, meant he was a walking time-bomb.
It was already September, and it seemed like we’d barely broken the surface of Damon’s magic. Sure, he could do the basic things, like make wards. They were strong and held well under pressure, but there was more to being a witch than that. His ability to hold onto his control had worked, but not from anything me or Oak had done. Witch training 101 was a big F.
Now, if Damon was being graded on how to handle his power using demon techniques, then he’d be getting an A. An A for Amorandes. The two of them were joined at the hip. We barely got any time to train Damon anymore because he was too busy shadowing Mori to the demon realm to see to the businesses he owned there. Mori had turned over the heat club, Heatwave, to an omega and elf pairing from the Sweetwater pack. He still owned the place, but foreveryone’s safety, he couldn’t be there daily. It was too open to being attacked. Hardly fair on the omegas who relied on the place to get through their heats safely.
The club was a substantial source of income thanks to the demon population who used it for a feeding ground, siphoning off the worst of the heat from the omegas. Mori was donating the profits to the coven since Poppy’s shop was closed. She and Zinna, her wife, and their baby, Sage, were still spending most of their time in the elven realm, where it was safer for them. Having those finances kept the coven afloat, especially with so few members.
Truthfully, in the months since the move, all of us were slipping with things. We had let down our guard a lot, lulled into a false sense of security now that Poppy and Zinna had their magic back and things were mostly quiet on the Basil front.
My brother, Basil, had been lying low since the failed attack. He’d come out of it with nothing. Had shown his hand. Now his supporters were out in the open, leaving the coven heavily divided.
Since we had moved into this new place and worked on the wards for the old meeting place we used when necessary, some of our witches had returned to us. They were apologetic about being scared, which I got. Oak, not so much. So many of them just wanted to practice magic, use their goddess given talents to helppeople. They weren’t in it for power struggles, none of them even saw themselves as better than any other supernatural like Basil did.
Damon didn’t care about them. These people were strangers to him for the most part. They didn’t have his trust, and he didn’t have their loyalty.
Pulling the coven back together was an uphill battle, one I was mostly doing myself.
Oak had backed off from everything bar training Damon. He spent a lot of time researching the magic Basil had used to steal his sister’s magic in the attack. He wanted to figure out how to ensure the coven’s safety from my brother by warding the book from previous owners.
The grimoire we used was one that had been with the Northarbor coven before there was even a Northarbor. It had traveled with our witches from Europe when the first settlers came to America. Unlike the humans, the witches had integrated with the indigenous people, sharing magic and traditions with them. Our magic had grown thanks to their influence.
Being so old, the magic the book had been imbued with meant it had an almost sentience. It chose the next leader, usually through touch and picking the strongest witch, hence why Damon had been chosen.He was more powerful than any other witch I knew, if only his magic was stable.
Oak learning about it to protect it was a good thing. I admired his dedication to protecting his family and the coven.
Occasionally, there were moments where I saw the softer side of Oak. He would ask me questions about magical theory. Then I saw the Oak I really liked. He just blew so hot and cold.
