I loosen the string and fold back the linen. Inside rests a journal—simple, cracked, softened by time. The moment my fingertips make contact, the faint pulse beneath the leather quickens in recognition.
Magic answers. Not violently—purposefully. The floorboards hum, candles brighten, and Newt lets out a startled sound from the bedroom as though jolted awake.
Slade steps closer, placing himself between me and whatever memory is rising from the past.
The journal warms beneath my palm, as though the centuries have been waiting for this exact moment. A presence stirs—not a voice, not words, but intent, brushing against my senses like the echo of a name.
Recognition moves through me in a slow, pulsing sweep.
Bellamy.
Not spoken, not heard—felt.
My breath stutters. I pull back instinctively, but Slade steadies me with a firm hand at my elbow. His voice is quiet, measured. “It’s responding to your lineage.”
I swallow hard. “Slade… what is this?”
He holds my gaze, thoughtful rather than fearful, the steadiness in him grounding the unsteadiness in me.
“We don’t know yet,” he says. “It could be a memory. A spell. A remnant of whatever pact Veda made. But it isn’t demonic, and it isn’t anything I’ve seen before.”
A low hum rolls through the journal again, warm and patient, almost like acknowledgment.
Slade’s expression shifts, the severity in it tempered by something gentler. “Whatever Veda offered herself to,” he says, “we’ll find out together.”
The journal pulses once more beneath its wrap—soft, deliberate. And for the first time, Irealize—the danger here isn’t Slade. It isn’t even the curse.
It’s the story Veda left behind. And the truth waiting inside that journal has been reaching for me across five hundred years.
***
The journal—or what I thought was a journal—lies on the island between us, its leather cover warm beneath my fingertips. The pulse inside it has steadied, no longer a sharp summons but a deep, rhythmic insistence, like a heart that has waited far too long to be heard.
Slade stands beside me, close enough that I feel the heat of him along my arm, but he doesn’t touch me. He’s watching the grimoire with the kind of patient intensity that feels almost tender, something threaded between worry and restraint.
“It’s not just a journal, is it?” I whisper.
“No,” he agrees quietly. “It’s her book of shadows.”
The air thickens in response, as if the name alone shifts the atmosphere. A subtle weight presses against my skin, not threatening—simply present. A presence that has been trapped between pages long after its author vanished from the world.
I open the cover.
The grimoire opens easily beneath my hands, the leather soft with age, the pages sighing like they’ve been waiting to breathe again. There’s no glow, no dramatic flare—only a warm thrum under my fingertips, a pulse that answers something in my blood.
Slade stands beside me, close but not touching, as though he knows I need room to take in whatever waits inside these pages.
The writing is elegant, dark, a script that curves with emotion and precision all at once. I expect a story. A diary. Maybe a warning.
What I find instead steals the breath from my lungs.
The page pulls me straight to Veda’s most painful memory. She begins with the night everything changed—the night she believed would bind her to love and power forever. Christmas Eve. The old rites. The winter solstice still humming in her veins. That was the night Lucifer promised eternity. The night he told her she was his chosen, the one who would stand beside him as queen of every realm that touched shadow and dawn.
Slade stiffens when he sees Lucifer’s name scrawled in her looping hand, but he stays silent.
I read on.
Veda had loved him. Not blindly—boldly. Fully. Enough to let him shape her magic into something sharper. Enough to share the power heoffered her. Enough to accept his request when he asked for a child—ason—to anchor their union. She believed their bond was real. She believed he was her mate.
