Cat came around the table to look for herself, though Hannah would be right. She was a scribe. Her magic lay in the written word. She spent her days buried in the past, trying to pin magic down in words. It was a type of pattern magic like Niamh’s potions, working power through a specific medium. It made no sense to Cat.
Dylan’s telekinesis was annoying, and Cat was totally jealous, but it was comprehensible. Hannah could not work magic unless she wrote it down. In traditional covens, they were the keepers of the grimoires, recording spells for posterity.
Cat noticed the Griffin Coven grimoire was nowhere to be seen. It was probably still safely locked up in the library. It had no spell for werewolves. Cat guessed most covens didn’t. She ran her hand down the page, reading over the bizarre chant at the beginning: two, three, six, twelve.
She skipped to the middle of the spell. She could almost follow how they put it into place, chaining animal magic into a charm into a living being dipped in healing magic.
The horror struck her all over again. What those witches did to those men was for their own selfish reasons.
“So you’re going to try to do the spell.”
Hannah nodded vigorously, hair flying around her head. “Just the undoing part. You see, there in the end, the unravelling. It’s like a crocheted blanket throughout the body, and if you pull on a stitch, the whole thing goes.”
Beatrice shook her head, and Cat had a moment of hope. She was the healer, using her magic to help other beings. Cat couldn’t believe that she would agree to do so much damage.
“It’s not healing,” Beatrice said. For once, she looked short standing next to her towering twin. “Here you’re just removing the foreign substance.”
Cat bit her tongue. Mateo’s wolf was as much a part of him as his heart, but she’d tried the convince them of that, and that had failed. Now, she just had to stop them.
“Maddie and Sabrina are in Denver, so we’re going to wait until tomorrow so they can get here and then head out to the woods to try to make this happen,” Siobhan said.
Cat nodded once. “I will be ready.”
Siobhan squinted at her, and Cat tried to keep her face neutral, reminding herself again that Siobhan was the least sensitive witch she’d ever met. She had no receptive talent of any kind.
Siobhan nodded once, seemingly convinced of her innocence and regret, and gathered up the books. “I will just keep these safe until then.”
She disappeared, and Cat tried to lean casually into the corridor to confirm she was taking the books to her room.
She closed her eyes. That meant extra wards, extra defenses, and extra risk.
Hannah blinked as soon as the books were out of sight, and Cat realized she hadn’t taken her eyes off them.
“Is the meeting over?” Hannah asked plaintively.
“Yes, dear,” Niamh said and reached out, then yanked her hands behind her back. Hannah hated hugs. She scampered out of the room as quickly as possible.
“Did she eat?” Beatrice asked, and Dylan scoffed.
“Of course not.”
“Well, you have fun with your little werewolf project,” Henry said with a wave and headed toward the door. Cat jogged after him.
“Why did you come?” Cat asked.
He rolled his eyes. “All family meeting. I thought it was for something else.”
Men didn’t have magic. It was passed down to the women in the family. He was totally normal, or as normal as you could grow up in a house full of random witches.
She waited to see if he would go after Hannah. They’d always shared some connection between them in their love of books. He’d become a librarian, after all, running the tiny Carnegie Library in town, but he went out the front door, not up the stairs.
She always wondered if there was more between them, but so far as she was aware, he’d never crossed that line with any of his foster sisters. He kept to himself and his books in town. The only thing that didn’t square with his scholarly reputation was the fact that he was one of the best downhill skiers in the state.He almost made it to the Olympics. Now six days out of seven, he was a quiet, studious librarian, and on Sundays, he drove over to one of the ski hills and took the hardest, craziest routes possible.
She turned back to the sitting room and stopped short when she saw Dylan standing in the archway, still clutching her frying pan.
“The twins may be constantly surprised when someone betrays them, but I’m not. A simple apology to get you back in the fold? I don’t think so.”
“I am sorry. Not just like morally sorry, but ‘I contemplated working for Gary at the hardware store and renting one of his apartments’ sorry.”
