The Blood Spell (Ravenspire, #4)(91)

A chill scraped over Blue. “A recipe. She wants one of Mama’s old potion recipes. Something with a rare ingredient.”

Grand-mère’s eyes sharpened. “Does she, now?”

“She made me go down into the root cellar to look through Mama’s things.”

“Oh, Blue.” Grand-mère grasped Blue’s hands tightly. “I’m sorry.”

Blue blinked away the sheen of tears that gathered, and said, “I took some old parchment from the closet in Mama’s old bedroom here and created a potion that I passed off as one of Mama’s. Added volshkyn bush as the rare ingredient. Dinah was thrilled, and we haven’t had to search through anything else, so I think she was satisfied.”

“So maybe she was looking for something to sell, like she let you assume.” Grand-mère turned Blue’s hands over again and looked at the healing cut. “Or maybe she was looking for a very specific old potion, and once she realizes she didn’t get it, she’ll be furious.”

Blue’s breath caught in her lungs as terrible possibilities unfurled before her. “You think she wants the spell Mama used to lock away the wraith? Why would anybody want that?”

Grand-mère looked grim. “I think we have far too many coincidences here not to acknowledge it as a possibility. Of course, she won’t find the spell. Valeraine never wrote it down. Wouldn’t even tell it to me in case someone thought to force it out of me.”

“But that also means that if the person who is feeding the wraith figures out the spell’s ingredients, we won’t know how to reverse their spell. We won’t know where to start.”

“Oh, I think my granddaughter would know where to start.” Grand-mère turned Blue’s hands over again and looked at the cut. “I’ve always wondered something.”

“What?”

“Your magic helps you find ingredients that want to be used. Helps you instinctively know how to bond them into something new.” Grand-mère lifted her eyes to Blue’s. “Magic is in our blood.”

Blue’s heartbeat thundered in her ears. “And you think when my blood was exposed to the wraith that it wanted to bond with me?”

“Have you ever had anything strange happen when you’ve bled on your ingredients?”

Blue flashed back to the dancing fern leaf in her basket. The one that had mysteriously bonded with the walla berry juice without the usual alchemy she used to combine them. She’d cut herself right before harvesting them. “In my basket on the porch.”

Blue explained what had happened as they hurried to the porch. Grand-mère lifted the leaf and examined the deep purple veins where the walla berry juice had fused with it. “You bled on this?”

“I must have. I’d cut myself, and there was blood smeared across my palm.”

Grand-mère held the leaf up to the light and then said softly, “You know what this means?”

Blue shivered. “That my blood not only calls to plants but somehow performs alchemy on them too?”

“Yes. And the wraith is a living being, just like everything else you harvest. Your magic must be interpreting the monster’s longing for freedom as a need to be harvested.” Grand-mère’s voice shook. “If you had touched it, if it had sunk its teeth into you and drank your blood, it could’ve bonded with anything else you were touching.”

Blue’s knees trembled, and she abruptly sank onto the porch beside her basket. “I was touching Kellan.”

Grand-mère lowered herself to the step beside Blue. “And you were touching freedom. You were touching the world outside the gate.”

“Did you suspect this? Is that why you didn’t want me to go?”

Grand-mère gave a short, hard laugh. “If I’d suspected this, you would never have come within an hour’s walk of the Wilds, Kellan or no. No, I didn’t want you to go because I saw what the wraith did to children while it walked our streets. And I heard your mother cry for months afterward whenever she tried to talk about locking it away. She made me promise I would keep you from the wraith. I thought it was simply because she didn’t want to risk losing you. Now I wonder if she already knew what your blood could do.”

“She wasn’t trying to protect me from the wraith,” Blue said softly. “She was trying to protect all of Balavata from what the wraith could do through me.”





THIRTY-SEVEN


THE PROTECTION SPELL Blue had begun two days ago was ready. She donned gloves, grabbed a pair of tongs, and set out fourteen small glass vials. She’d already placed a hair from each person who needed protection into a vial and marked the bottom with their initials. Now she lifted each vial with the tongs and carefully poured an ounce of the spell inside. The liquid swirled in streaks of pink and silver and smelled like honey and musk.

When each vial held an ounce, Blue scraped the bottom of the cauldron she’d used to brew the potion and came up with slivers of the pink sapphire she’d used to concentrate the power of the spell. Slipping one tiny shard of the jewel into each vial, she corked them, sealed them with a dab of black wax, and pushed one end of a silver chain into the wax so the chain would be permanently attached once the wax dried.

Lucian waited by the storeroom door. Dinah still hadn’t made an appearance, and Blue decided that meant the woman had what she wanted and would now leave her alone.