She played with her salad, considering whether she should drop the other shoe and bring up the idea of leaving Dallas before Marko could catch up to her. But as she opened her mouth, Connor spoke, the words rushed and his voice uncharacteristically nervous. Which was another first.
“I was talking to Gage today. He mentioned your situation to a supernatural expert that we lean on now and then. Her name’s Davina and she’s a witch. She’s already looking into what Marko might be up to, and I thought maybe she could help you, too.”
“Help me?” she echoed, her fork halfway to her mouth, not sure where this was going. “Help how?”
He looked down at his plate. “Well, I was hoping you could talk to her and, maybe between the two of you, come up with some way to beat this familiar spell so you don’t have to turn back into a cat. Not that I don’t like you as a cat. It’s just…you know?”
“Yeah. I get it,” she said softly, putting her fork back in her bowl and playing with her salad again. “And if it means anything, I would definitely prefer to be human instead of a cat.”
Connor lifted his gaze to hers, his expression hopeful. “So you’ll talk to her?”
“Definitely. I’ll call her later,” she said. “But it’s unlikely that Davina will be able to come up with some magical answer to this thing. Unfortunately, magic doesn’t work that way.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, looking so confused and lost that her heart spasmed in her chest. “If magic did this to you, can’t magic fix it?”
“In theory, yes, magic could fix it,” she said, wishing it were that easy. “But in reality, with the binding spell Marko put on me, there are only two people in the world who’d be able to break it—him or me. He’s obviously not going to do it, and with the majority of my magical gift inaccessible, it doesn’t seem like I’ll ever be able to do it, either.”
Connor frowned. “Maybe I don’t understand how magic works, but what’s so special about this binding spell Marko used on you? Why can’t someone like Davina be the one to fix it? And how can you say your magic is inaccessible, especially after the way you stopped that wall of fire Tatum Graves tried to kill me with? It was amazing.”
Kat ate a few bites of salad, chewing slowly as she tried to come up with the best way to explain it.
“To understand what Marko did to me and how I stopped that wall of fire, you first need to realize that witches and warlocks don’t create or possess magic,” she said, using the same words her grandma had said to her so long ago. “When I say Marko is stronger than I am—stronger than anyone—it’s not because he’s carrying around this huge stash of magic in his back pocket that he can whip out and throw around whenever he wants. It’s because he’s more naturally gifted at channeling magic. Does that make sense?”
Connor took a big bite of his sloppy joe, chewing thoughtfully When he was done, he shook his head. “Nope, not even a little.”
“Okay, let’s back up,” she said, nibbling on her own sloppy joe. “Remember what I said in Addy’s room about magic being all around us and in every living thing? That’s the magic that witches and warlocks normally use to do their spells, charms, hexes, and curses. There’s natural magic in me, too, but that’s not the magic that any sane witch would want to use. You can, but it’s never a good idea to drain your own core because it can kill you. That’s why I was so exhausted after the fight at the farmhouse. I was so tired from everything that has happened to me over the past few days that I had no choice but to use some of my own magic to fight Marko’s people. Especially when it came to stopping Tatum and his fire.”
“You could have died from that?” Connor asked, eyes wide in alarm.
She smiled. “Relax. I’m smart enough to know when to stop. I was able to pull back before I got too weak. But back to what I was saying about using the living magic that’s all around us. That’s what a magic user does. They simply tap into the magic around them. We draw it in, refocus it for our own purposes, and then send it back out. The only difference between someone as powerful as Marko and me is how much of the living magic we can take in and then send back out. How much we can channel. Get it now?”
“I think so,” he said slowly. “But I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with the binding spell Marko used on you or why your magic is inaccessible.”
Tears formed at the corners of her eyes as Connor’s question forced her to replay the memories of what had happened to her and her coven, and she quickly looked down at her plate before he could see.
“The ritual Marko used on my coven sisters ripped the gift from their cores and their ability to channel magic and gave it to me,” she explained softly. “He was going to make me into this super conduit for magic, which would allow me to channel more of it than any human has ever been capable of, then bind me to him as a feline familiar. He would then be able to access that power through me, while I’d be trapped and bound to him forever.”
“But he wasn’t able to finish the ritual, right?” Connor said, looking concerned and worried all over again. “You got away before he could finish the binding part of the spell.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I was able to get away before he finished the binding part of the ritual. The spell he used to hold me down to the altar was made for a human. When he turned me into a cat, the spell loosened long enough for me to slip out a paw and smudge the ritual circle. Everything unraveled after that. I used the distraction to slip out of the circle and run.”
“But?” he asked slowly, apparently picking up on the fact that there was more to the story than she was letting on.
She let out a sigh. “But while Marko wasn’t able to bind me to him as a familiar, he was able to block a good portion of my channeling gift. He’d done that early in the ritual, afraid that I’d somehow find a way to channel magic from inside the circle and screw everything up. Truthfully, I think he was terrified that once he’d sacrificed my coven sisters and given their channeling gifts to me, I’d be able to turn all that power on him. So he controlled the amount of magic I could channel to little more than a trickle. And since I broke free and ran before the ritual was over, he never had a chance to reopen the channel.”
“But the things I’ve seen you do…” Connor said, still plainly confused.
“I’ve learned to be extremely efficient with the limited amount of magic I can access so I’m not helpless, but don’t mistake that for anything more than it is—me doing the best I can with a bad situation. I can only tap into a fraction of the power I could before the ritual and none of the power that should be mine now due to the addition of my coven’s gifts.”
“So Davina won’t be able to help then?” he asked.
The hopelessness in that question almost made her lie to him simply to make him smile again. But she knew that would be wrong and would only bring him more pain later.
“I’ll talk to her,” Kat promised, reaching over to take his hand. “But I don’t expect much to come out of it. If there were a way to break the binding or help me access more of my gift, I think I would have found it over the years. But who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky, and she will be able to help me.”
That part seemed to offer at least some consolation to Connor, which is why she’d said it in the first place, and soon both of them went back to eating, the tone lighter now, especially as he continued to praise her cooking skills. That made her smile.
After they finished dinner and loaded the dishwasher, she thought they might sit on the couch for a while and watch some TV, but instead Connor took her hands in his and turned her to face him.
