“What?” The word slips dumbly from my lips. Of all the things I expected Gwen to say when I finished with my fucked up story, that wasn’t one of them.
“Come here to me,” Gwen commands, her gaze moving over my bare arms. “I want to see your scars.”
I’m so surprised by what she’s told me that I immediately get to my feet and circle the table to sit in the other chair beside her. My mates bristle at our proximity, and I can sense just how much they’re not okay with the situation, but I ignore them. Compared to any other avenue I’ve found, Gwen is the absolute best source of magical knowledge.
If she wanted to kill me, she could have already.
I repeat the words over and over in my head as I extend my arm toward her.
Her fingers are cool against my skin as she takes hold of my forearm and turns it toward the firelight, exposing the pale flesh of my wrist. She studies the series of slim, pearlescent scars on my skin for a long moment, before she says, “Call up your power. Just a bit, just enough so that I can see the magic on your skin.”
I flush hot, and it has nothing to do with the fire in the hearth. I hate seeing those black marks pop up on my body and color my scars. But I shove aside my misgivings and close my eyes, focusing on the magic I can always feel just out of sight inside me. It’s like opening a door and letting the energy out—it blossoms through me as if black smoke is flooding every limb.
When I open my eyes, my scars are painted black.
Gwen traces a few lines with her fingertip, her eyes narrowed and dark with worry. She leans closer, examining my bicep before shifting her focus up and over my shoulder to my collarbone. “Are there more?”
I nod and lift the front of my tank top, cringing at the sight of the marks all over my stomach.
She keeps her hands to herself this time, but as her gaze moves over my torso, her face hardens. “These are binding sigils. You’ve been bound to someone, likely to another witch, using the magic of these sigils and through a sort of psychic link that’s been built out of them.”
My mouth falls open. My skin chills deep to my bones as I release my shirt back over my stomach. I let go of my magic as if it’s burned me, shoving it down as deep as I can, and the black marks fade away, leaving my scars the same pale tissue they usually are.
Uncle Clint gave me each and every one of these marks. I always thought… I just thought he cut me up to feel good about himself, because making me hurt made him feel powerful. Even when he was dying and confessed that he tortured me to try to force the witch or wolf out of me, I came to the conclusion that carving into my skin had been yet another way to try to make me snap.
But it wasn’t.
Or at least, it wasn’t just that.
He was marking me with sigils. Sigils that connect me to someone.
What the hell? Is that why I keep having these weird episodes? Why the darkness whispers horrible things to me?
“Do you have any idea who this witch might be?” Gwen asks, jarring me from my thoughts.
I shake my head. “No. I mean, it could have been my fake uncle, but he’s dead. He found me after I ran away from him, in a cabin out in the woods—I always wondered how he managed to track me down, but now I think he must’ve used magic. But if we were connected, wouldn’t his death have…”
Then I recall the words Clint spoke before he died, and my voice dies out on a whisper.
You better hope she doesn’t find out about you.
I asked him who “she” was, demanded to know, but he didn’t have a chance to respond before he lost consciousness. Or maybe he just decided to take that secret to the grave, one last way to fuck with me.
Could the woman he referenced be the person I’m bound to?
“What should I do?” I ask Gwen, and my voice comes out tight and strained. “I don’t understand what this means. Can you please help me?”
The witch drinks from her mug, a line etched between her brows as she stares at me over the rim. When she sets it back down, she sighs.
“It seems likely that it didn’t bind you to the man you thought was your uncle, although he’s the one who cast the spell. Bonds formed by a third party are never as strong, although given the number of sigils he put on you, he was trying to make it as powerful as possible. Still, there’s a possibility that if that other person doesn’t know about you or the bond, they might not have noticed the link between you.”
I have no idea how Gwen can deduce all of that just by studying the sigils scarred into my skin, but I’m suddenly grateful as hell that we managed to reach her cabin. Without speaking to someone who knows magic like she does, my mates and I could’ve spent days or weeks guessing at answers without ever getting closer to the truth.
“I think, first and foremost, we should attempt to find out who this person is,” Gwen says, eyeing me with a look of curious fascination. “If manipulated correctly, the bond will help you do that. You can creep into this person’s mind and get a glimpse of who they are and what they know, and they’ll be none the wiser about your presence.”
Ridge lets out a small whine from the other side of the table, and I voice what I’m pretty
