“We aren’t looking for a basiccure me of the common coldorhelp me find some luckspell,” I muttered.
“You can do that?” Hudson asked.
I arched my brow. “Cure the common cold? No, but I can mask the symptoms.”
“Give me luck,” he corrected.
“Do you need it, Principal?” Sebastian asked as he rounded the corner. “Is your game off when it comes to my dearest friend?” He pouted.
I rolled my eyes. “Sit and stop antagonizing him.”
Sebastian blinked but didn’t question the olive branch I was offering. I’m pretty sure he expected me to throw him out the door. I couldn’t win this war alone, and I certainly couldn’t fight one on all sides. It would take all of us working together to defeat the common enemy.
Liz rotated the book and drummed her fingers on the top of the page. “This isn’t Eloise’s book exactly, more like a copy I made of the books she made us study. Actually, it’s a copy of all the things she didn’t want us to see. But she was one person, and her daughters were many. Between us, we worked out how to gather her knowledge, just in case.”
“In case she became evil and tried to take over the world?” Dave drawled.
Sebastian snorted. “That woman was always evil, which was why you made a copy. Deep down, you knew one day it would come to this.”
Liz huffed. “This? No, never. But you are right that we suspected her plans wouldn’t always be contained to one faction or be for the benefit of all.”
“In her head, she believes this benefits everyone,” Hudson pointed out.
They bickered around me as I scanned the page with growing interest. A tendril of excitement and hope unfurled inside my chest. I read it again, making sure I hadn’t misunderstood, before meeting the watchful gaze of my aunt.
“We can use this,” I whispered.
“In a number of ways, yes,” she agreed.
“How?” Hudson demanded.
“This is a description of the curse she altered,” I explained.
Something scraped on the floor above us. We all paused and glanced at the ceiling for a beat. Silence. Maybe that was the end of their shenanigans for the morning?
“You already have the info on the curse,” Sebastian said.
“No, we have the original curse and the one adapted by my great-grandmother Eunice that made sure Eloise was a hugely powerful elemental. What we don’t have are the intricate details of how that change affected each generation after her. Liz was her first.”
“So that means she drained your father to produce you?” Dave checked, glancing at Liz.
She pressed her lips together. “That’s the story, yes.”
According to the family tree, my grandfather was a powerless nobody. But he was the only one who ever threatened to take her heart, and for that crime, he had paid the ultimate price—death by Eloise’s hand.
“Wait, shouldn’t you have drained Abbadon?” Sebastian asked me.
“No one can command the power of an archangel. My father would have flicked the drain away like swatting a fly.”
“So why aren’t you powerless?”
“Same reason. You can’t command the power of an archangel, even a half-born.”
“But you have elemental magic,” Dave said.
“Yes, I do, like all angels.”
He blinked, and I could see him storing every bit of information he gathered inside that vast, suspicious brain of his.
