“There's an ancient magic,” Sylara explains, choosing each word carefully. “Dark magic. Forbidden for millennia. It's called Shadow Bond.”
Sabina lifts her head suddenly.
“What exactly does it do?”
Sylara closes her eyes before responding.
“It rewrites the victim's feelings. It's not mind control, it's not ordinary manipulation. It's... worse. Much worse. The victim truly believes she loves her captor. She feels it in every fiber of her being. She would die for him. She would kill for him. And the worst part...” she pauses, as if the next words burn her throat, “is that the victim believes she's happy. Genuinely happy. Because for her, that love is real.”
The silence that follows is so dense you could cut it with a dull knife. Sabina has started to tremble.
“It was forbidden because entire peoples were enslaved using that magic,” she adds.
“Can it be broken?” the siren insists. “There has to be some way to...”
“There are ways,” Sylara admits. “But they're extremely difficult. And dangerous. And no one has practiced them in over a thousand years.”
I approach Sabina and take her free hand. It's frozen. Althea hugs her from one side, me from the other, and Sylara joins the group, surrounding all of us with her arms.
It's the first time the four of us are this close. I can feel Althea's warmth, Sabina's coolness, Sylara's solidity. And something more. Something that vibrates between us like an electric current.
It's the bond. It's there. I can feel it forming. It's still very tiny, insignificant. But I know it's there.
Before any of us can say anything more, Sabina's phone vibrates again. A message.
She separates from us to look at it. And for a moment I think she's going to faint.
“What does it say?” I ask with my heart in my throat.
She shows me the screen with trembling fingers.
“Your sister is very happy here, Siren. And Niletta... you should ask yourself why your mother ran from us. Why she hid you. There are so many things you don't know about her. About me. Maybe someday I'll tell you the truth. Or maybe you'll discover it yourself, and it will be too late.”
Suddenly, I remember the words he said when I met him. “We were bonded. Before everything went to shit.”
But my mother was human. Bonded is the word they use to describe a Quad. A magical connection between elementals. Or was he talking about another kind of bond?
“Nell?” Althea's voice pulls me from my thoughts. “Are you okay?”
“He lied to me,” I whisper, though I'm not sure what part was a lie, maybe everything. “Kaelisar lied to me about something. About my parents. About my mother. I can feel it deep inside me.”
“Kaelisar lies about everything,” Sabina says with bitterness. “You shouldn't be surprised. It's nothing new.”
“I know, but this is different,” I assure her, shaking my head and trying to order my thoughts. “When he talkedabout my mother, when he said she was human... there was something weird in his expression. Like he was enjoying something only he knew.”
“Do you think your mother wasn't human?” Sylara asks.
“I don't know,” I admit with a long sigh while I rub my temples. “I don't know what to believe anymore. I just know there's something he's not telling me. Something important.”
“We could investigate,” Althea proposes. “There must be records somewhere. About who your mother really was.”
“And where do we look?” I ask. “On Google? We type: 'Lasara, possible magical creature, married a Fae and had a half-human daughter'.”
“In Aifshara,” Sylara responds. “If your mother had any connection to the Fae world, there will be records there. But accessing them won't be easy.”
Sabina lets out a bitter laugh.
“Won't be easy? Nothing with Kaelisar is easy. We can't go there. We need a damn portal, in case you don't remember. And the Fae would kill us as soon as we arrived. At most, maybe they'd let her in,” she adds, pointing at me with her chin.
