Tenebrys never thought he would have a mate. He wanted to kill Narcisse and then himself. That was all he'd wanted for decades.
Delphi was human. Well, mostly. The witch blood in her meant there was fae somewhere in there.
Tenebrys's mother had been fae, and she had mated with his father just fine. It was why he was a shifter who could also do magic. Not much, he had never given himself over to his studies, preferring to be a warrior like his father.
Tenebrys cleaned himself up before going back into his rooms. He lay down on his stomach on his massive bed, carefully trying not to jostle his wounds. He tried to think rationally through the panic coiling inside of him.
Delphi had enough magic that some high fae asshole could feel it all the way into another world.
Whether it was her magic or her physical presence itself, the magic in the château was also coming alive again because of Delphi.
Now, he had a fucking knot telling him that Fate had chosen her for him as his mate.
Tenebrys knew that allowing any hope to creep in was a bad idea, but could Delphi break the curse on them after all? She had the magic, just not the knowledge.
She said she needed books... An idea flashed through Tenebrys's mind, and he managed a smile despite his rising panic.
It would seem that he had the perfect way to get her books and confirm if the château was waking up because of her, all in one move.
14
The following day, Delphi was elbow deep in the piles of papers her parents had left behind. She had tidied them the previous day but hadn't gone as far as reading any of them.
Now she was slowly trying to piece together what they had done to Tenebrys and the others. One notebook was written in both of their handwriting. It was short entries on different tonics and poultices that they had been using.
Delphi could see examples of where Narcisse had been trying complete nonsense remedies that he had learned about from doctors in the cities, and then Cassia's hand would be crossing things out and correcting them.
It felt horribly familiar. Delphi had taken over cleaning up after him in more ways than one.
The plague itself seemed to only affect the shifters, not humans that came into contact with them. There was vomiting and diarrhea; they would get lumps and boils; their lungs would start to give out, and they began coughing blood before dying.
Those that had any fae blood in them, like Tenebrys, seemed to fare a little better. To have survived a brutal war only to waste away from sickness would have been heartbreaking.
Delphi read the dispassionate observations of different patients, and she could barely stand it.
How had they been completely unaffected by the suffering around them? Delphi had only been around Tenebrys and Felix for a few days, and she could never have written about them in such a way. Did Narcisse see them as nothing more than rich animals?
Delphi slumped back in her chair with a frustrated sigh. A moment later, a small 'mew' sound had her turning around. A sleek black cat was looking at her. It walked toward her, and Delphi gasped when she saw the two black wings on its back.
"Hello, little one. Aren't you a pretty thing?" she cooed at it, holding out her hand. The cat creature bumped its head against it and allowed Delphi to scratch it under the neck.
"How did you get wings? You must have been all tangled up in the magic of this place, too, huh?" That made it an ancient cat, but it didn't look old. Maybe there was something in the magic that kept it alive.
Delphi had found some odd references in the notebook about 'the heart' of the château. She couldn't be sure without confirming it with Tenebrys, but it sounded like the château itself had some kind of magic fueling it at one stage. Her parents left notes about how they could access it and use it.
The further she got through the notebook, the more she could see how they had begun to move toward magic rather than medicine.
The cat leaped onto her lap and lay down. It seemed content to stay there, so Delphi left it where it was. She went back to the book and turned another page. Her mother's neat handwriting had taken over from Narcisse's the further into magic they went.
N. is going outside of the wards tonight to try the summoning. It is a full moon, and we remain hopeful that we can access the power we will need.
Delphi frowned. What wards? What summoning? There had been no mention of a summoning before that, only needing to fight magic with magic.
On the next page, the arcane circles began, each discarded with a line through it. A cold chill trickled down her spine. She had only heard about this kind of thing in reference to demons.
"They can't have been stupid enough to try this. It's absurd," she whispered and skipped a few pages.
On it was a sigil that hadn't been crossed out. She had no idea what it did, but around the circle, there were symbols she did recognize as Narcisse's cipher. She had been reading it her entire life. The words spelled KAELIS. Was it a name? Or some kind of other nonsense word?
