The Nethertons descend from a witch from Darisius’s original unit from the war, a woman named Siobhan Netherton who was skilled in charm craft. Siobhanaccumulated an immense fortune, and nourished her family with her gifts until her death only seventy years ago.
After Siobhan’s death, the Nethertons didn’t take their wealth and flee to a magic-less city like so many do. They stayed. Relations between the Nethertons and Weavers have soured, particularly as technology has increasingly shrunk the gap between the magic-less and magical.
Conclusion: The Weavers aren’t involved with my curse, but they are too important to ignore for geopolitical reasons. For my sake, I hope this research turns out irrelevant.
Gentry spotted the gargoyles after an embarrassingly long amount of time milling around the packed academic building. They were short, squat beasts who were easily lost in the crowd, and their absolute stillness made them no easier to find. In total, there were five and their dramatically ugly faces were in varying states of torment. Their slitted eyes were all pointed upwards at the flying witches as if they were envious.
A red-faced boy with too many books in his hands was the first to sit atop a gargoyle. She then watched as the gigantic creature shook itself to life, its wings spreading out and furling as it shed its rock into leathery wings and flew up to the second floor, depositing the student, and then promptly going back tohis pedestal, where he calcified again. A janitor swept up the pile of rock that it had shed prior.
Robotically, Gentry walked to the same gargoyle, not letting herself second guess for a second whether it took magic to wake the gargoyle up from its state.Act like you belong here, she told herself.It's just like any old scam. Attitude is half the battle.At least that's what she hoped.
Thankfully, it took little effort for her to hop on top of a gargoyle's back, her trusty backpack throwing her balance. She hugged its neck. The student she'd watched had merely kept his arms loose, but she didn't know whether that man had the grace of magic or not. She certainly didn't. The reaction was immediate. The cool stone underneath her slid away until she felt warm, breathing flesh beneath her thighs. She felt a great, large neck breathe between her arms, and then they were up in the air, the gargoyle growling, like he didn't appreciate Gentry trying to choke the life out of him.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, only releasing her grip when those great wings had stopped and they were on the second floor. She stepped down and the gargoyle blinked two huge, yellow eyes at her as if asking how she dared wake him from his slumber.
Gentry half-bowed as she slouched her way out of a walk and went down the hallway to look for the break room Kit had told her about. She knew the gargoyle was gone when the hairs on her neck no longer stood up. An elevator. What was so hard about installing an elevator? It was a thought she couldn't get out of her head even once she found a gorgeous break room where groups of students sat with their books open as they talked animatedly.
"I heard that the laboratories that the Weavers have are open to auditions soon. Potion contest!" a young man gushed. One of the girls made a face, and they all lapsed into an impassioned argument about whether or not the Weavers really cared aboutinnovation. Gentry looked at the faculty members who were all eating their lunches, but all three were female. She sat down, pulling one of her journals out from her backpack and pretending to be engrossed in whatever she was looking at. Luckily, even if someone were to look over her shoulder, she suspected that her notebook wouldn’t look terribly far off from what the students were studying.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a long-haired man with silver locks come into the break room, books piled up in his well-muscled arms. He scanned the room before looking rather disappointed. There was her mark.
"Dr. D?" Gentry approached with a smile. "I'm Visha’s friend. She said you could help me with something."
The professor stiffened like a spooked cat, his silver mustache rising as he curled his lip. "Visha would have stated as much in her letter to me," he told her primly. His eyes went up and down her as if somehow he could weigh her worth by merely looking at her. "Besides," he sniffed, "she doesn't associate with non-magicals. We've spoken at length on the matter."
Oh, so Kit had a prejudiced girlfriend as well as a murderous one.Gentry wasn't surprised and also couldn't judge, considering her grudge against witches all these years. "That's true," she agreed. "But my situation is... interesting. Fascinating," she said. "All of her herbs and remedies couldn't heal me, no matter how much I paid her." Gentry then flashed $300 at the professor from her closed fist.
Dr. D changed his tune quickly. "Follow me," he said, and Gentry obeyed, following him into a tiny, cluttered office with blinded windows. It was a surprising contrast from the grandeur of the rest of the building, and she surmised that Dr. D couldn't be regarded as terribly important among the faculty. The observation made her nervous. What if this guy didn’t know anything about her curse?
She sat down on an awkward little stool as the professor quickly put the cash in a locked drawer of his desk. The motion reminded her of a squirrel hiding his nuts before winter. The observation gave her no more faith in the guy.
But then Dr. D sat at his desk and focused on her, his eyes growing sharp. “May I?” he said, holding his hand out. Gentry placed her hand on his, aware that once again, a witch's palms were best at sensing magic. He lifted her hand up by the wrist and flipped it so that he was looking at the webbing on her palm. His dark eyes narrowed in thought. Then he dropped her hand and sighed.
"Soul magic," he said. "Your soul's been bound to another's." His salt and pepper eyebrows drew together. "It's interesting indeed. The magic is closely related to the soul magic used to stitch souls back into vampyre bodies. Only instead of forcing a soul back into its corpse, the caster is merely entwining two souls together. Taking a pinch"—he gestured with his hands—"of one soul and tying it to another's. It's fairly powerful magic. It only takes a little bit of soul to tie two life forces together. You've noticed injuries that weren't yours before?"
Gentry nodded, her heart thudding loudly in her chest that the professor had used the same word as Kit had:Soul-bound.Only Kit had said there was no cure.Please, please let there be a cure.
"I'm sure that whoever you've been tied to," the professor continued on, "also feels your injuries. There's little benefit to the practice unless one party is completely in control of the other." His eyes pinned Gentry in place and she tried not to squirm. "Or if one user is non-magical, such as yourself, and the other party is a witch."
Gentry cleared her throat. "I believe that's the case. Yes.”
His dark eyes turned pitying. "A disgusting practice, for sure." He sat her hand back down and patted it. "I assume that you want me to tell you how to break this curse?"
Gentry stopped fidgeting, aware that she was mere seconds away from learning whether her life was salvageable or not. "Yes. I couldn't find answers about it anywhere online."
The professor's eyebrows rose. "Finding anything reliable about magic online is highly doubtful, particularly for magic like this. The rich and privileged protect their rituals."
He means the Weavers and the Nethertons."But you know the secrets, right?" Gentry said, pressing into the issue.
"Yes," he said primly. "Anyone with curse expertise such as myself can look at the basic ingredients of soul-binding and postulate in different ways to break that curse, even if historical examples and theory have been wiped from those texts." His tone was disgusted as if withholding information from books was worse than stealing a part of someone's soul.
"And your theories are?" Gentry asked.
“Provided a necromancer didn’t curse you — which I highly doubt because they are rare — then we’ll assume a soul seamstress is the one who tied your soul with another’s. A soul seamstress is one who stitches soul using the power of necromancer bones. These bones have a good way of grabbing souls, gripping them apart and putting them elsewhere. If you could find the original piece of bone that was used to tie you and your soul-bound together, then it should be able to reverse your bond in two ways.”
Dr. D held up a finger. “The first way takes quite a bit of skill. A skilled witch could neatly cut out parts of the displaced souls and put them back where they originally were meant to be, disentangling you. But the side effects can be quite fearsome, and I cannot emphasize enough the skill it would take. It’d be akin to how you magic-less cut each other open and perform surgery.” The professor’s tone made it clear he found surgery barbaric.
Gentry resisted the urge to slap the arrogant man upside the face for dissing surgeons. “What’s the second way?” she asked, hating the way Dr. D seemed to enjoy pausing and withholding the information from her.
