“I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t talk about it. I just need… I don’t know what I need.” I sobbed, turning in Rowan’s hold and clutching him. I could feel the rest of them placing their hands on me, trying to offer some semblance of comfort.
“Do you want these?” Damien asked. I glanced over at Grayson’s eyes in the center of his palm.
“Are you fucking serious?” Alister asked, and Kian shivered.
“Why would she want those?” Rowan asked.
“At least put them in a jar first,” Rhett muttered.
Thorn phased in behind Damien and pinched his brows together. “I was in the Ice Kingdom, but I came as soon as I could. What the chrysanthemum happened?” He came forward and moved my bangs to rest his hand on my forehead. “And why does Damien have two eyeballs? Wait. Are those Grayson’s?”
The eye balls dissolved into black goo, dripping down Damien’s hand. “Ew, fuck!” His shadows slipped under the goo and threw it off him into the snow, where it dissipated. “What the fuck?”
Sheer terror pounded through me. What had Grayson become, and why did it have to happen now?
FORTY-THREE
Rhett
Islammedthetableton my desk and poured a shit ton of pheromones into my office as sweat beaded on my temple.“Fuck!”I kicked my desk, spinning around and thrusting my fingers through my hair.
If the bond had been in place, I would have known she was in danger. How the hell was Grayson even on academy grounds? He was expelled for Fate’s sake, and Rowan watched him leave the wards! He should have never gotten through them.
Bile inched up my throat as I remembered Rowan mentioning that Grayson had made contact with my stalker, which happened to be two fucking succubi, and he also watched the night Wren and I had been intimate. It violated both of us, and it pissed me off that my mate was being thrown in the middle of it. How the fuck had three invisible beings gotten into Damien’s room that night without any of us knowing? Had we been that drunk on passion? Why hadn’t any of them tried anything on us? We had been so fucking vulnerable that night.
And what was that with Grayson turning into black goo? I’d never heard of such a thing before.
I let out a long sigh. It had to have something to do with the dark magic. Tabitha could probably figure it out.
A knock sounded at my door.
“Don’t come in,” I growled.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.” A female voice came through, and my horns inched out of my skull as the door swung open. The blonde student that had given my mate so much trouble stepped in.
“What do you want, Mirella?”
“It’s about Grayson.” She frowned, and her shoulders trembled.
From what I’d been told, she hadn’t actually been a problem since Wren put her in her place. I briefly wondered if Nate had put a charm on her to make her come at Wren the way she had. Fucking Fallon deserved to suffer more than she did to put that fucking plan into action.
Tabitha actively looked for the charms and had found a couple dozen on students. When the charm was removed, they felt indifferent about Wren, not one way or the other. That alone was impressive. Kian had inspected a charm and confirmed it was enchanted by a necromancer. I wondered if they had found one on Mirella.
“You knew Grayson was on campus, yet you didn’t speak up?” I snarled.
She took a couple of steps back as her eyes glazed over, clearly being affected by my pheromones. “Um…”
“Get out of my office. We’ll talk in the hall.”
She stumbled backward and left my room.
I sucked in as much of my pheromones back as I could before leaving and shutting the door behind me, locking the rest of my pheromones in. “Tell me what you need to.”
She gathered her hair to one side and ran her fingers through it. “The academy witch came to me a couple of days ago and found something like a bug on my earring.” She laid out a frustrated sigh. “Don’t get me wrong. I never liked Wren. She was too stupid.”
I growled. “Watch how you speak about my mate.”
“My point is that I never actually wanted to hurt her. The witch told me that the bug was a charm placed on me and made me obsessively hate Wren. In turn, it made me obsessive over Grayson. When Tabitha took that charm, I started seeing Grayson for who he really was.” She swallowed hard. “I thought Grayson and I actually had something… but he has been acting really weird with me. I had still been sleeping with him, but he kind of let himself go with hygiene.” She winced. “So I hadn’t wanted to lately, and he told me that he was spying on Wren recently, and that he was going to approach her. I just wanted to warn someone. Wren may have attacked me, but unlike her, I don’t want her dead.”
