The coffeepot sat cold on the counter, an inch of old brew in it. I wasn’t going to offer Landon any. Being tricked into merging my mind with a goddess bent on taking me over had left a bad taste in my mouth.
Landon seemed to gather himself as the muted, musical voices of Ellasbeth and Trent dissolved into a rise and fall of sound. “You have a nice spelling area. You cook here, too?”
My attention flicked to his and held. “Not at the same time.”
Sucking his teeth, Landon shifted his feet. “Bis around?”
I nodded, glancing at the ceiling. “He’s sleeping, but he wakes up occasionally.” Especially when I was upset, but Landon already knew that.
From the back room Trent’s voice rose. “I’m willing to die for Lucy’s safety. I’m not about to sell her to you for a little less blackmail or my returned standing. You don’t have anything I want, Ellasbeth. Get used to it.”
My God, Trent could be callous when the situation called for it, and I propped my elbows on the stainless steel counter between Landon and myself.
David had once told me I’d saved Trent’s life, not while being his security, but by causing him to grow, to lose his at-any-cost outlook that the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many, that the ends justified the means. I’d seen it. Hell, I’d lived it while a mink trapped in his office, watching him kill his head geneticist to preserve his secrets and his money flow. But he’d tempered himself. Because of me, if David was to be believed, and it had saved his life because, as David had said, he wasn’t going to make the world live through another Kalamack bent on elven supremacy. Perhaps Landon had risen to fulfill that role instead, and I stifled a shudder at the thought because where Trent had a conscience, Landon did not.
“Why are you here helping me?”
Landon rose, his mood guarded as he spun the book Trent had brought over to face him. “Trent told me he thinks the undead will walk into the sun if they get their souls back. I tend to agree with him. I think it’s fitting that giving the vampires what they want will bring about their end. I don’t mind being a part of that.” He hesitated, and my heart thumped at his stillness. “My question is, why are you doing this if you think it will drive them into suncide?”
“Because Ivy’s life is more important than one lousy vampire who’s already on his way out.” Uneasy, I rubbed a watermark on the counter. Fear that the vampires would take their revenge out on Ivy and me if things didn’t go the way they wanted was never far from my thoughts, coloring my hopes—and my decisions.
Landon made a sound deep in his throat, and I jumped when he shut the book with a snap. “Trent’s charm won’t work.”
“Why not?” I said, not liking that he’d startled me.
“Because it uses the auratic residue left in the mind and body to adhere itself with, and the undead have completely polluted theirs with the auras they take in to survive.”
It was exactly what Trent had said, and grimacing, I steadied myself for some major boot licking. “You have another way?”
Landon pulled his attention back from the soft conversation in the living room. “In theory. The charm dates back several thousand years. I’ve never heard of anyone trying it.”
He was lying. I could tell in the way he was standing. “So . . . it’s a black charm?” I prompted. Elves were reluctant to label their charms as black and white—but a white charm never went out of style. “I won’t kill anyone.”
His eyes came up, mocking. “Lucky for you you’re dealing with people already dead.”
Oh God. It was a black charm. “What does it do?” I asked, my gut tightening. I can do this without trusting him. Hell, I used to work with demons.
Landon shifted the book between us until it was perfectly square with the counter. He was thinking, and my mistrust deepened. “In theory? It fixes the soul of an elder to a newborn. It was said to have been used to extend our collective knowledge past the grave.” He looked up, jaw set. “I’ll write it out for you.”
“Let me guess. You have to destroy the newborn’s soul to do it.” Yeah, the demons probably had a version of this. Ugly. It was just ugly the things magic could do.
Neck red, he didn’t say anything, finally turning to pull a few sheets from Ivy’s printer. “Pretty much,” he said as he took a pen from his pocket and began to sketch a pentagram as I might draw a smiley face. “The original soul must be forcibly ripped away and the old soul fixed into its place. Most times, the recipient became psychotic, which only added to the mystique of being a high priest back then, I suppose.” He looked up, reading my disgust. “I did say there’s no record of this charm being performed for several thousand years.”
“But you still know how to do it,” I accused.
“Aren’t you lucky for that,” he shot back. “You can’t get a soul to spontaneously attach itself and hope it sticks, even if it’s his own soul and his own body. It left once, it will again.”
He was right, and I tried not to look so pensive. The thought occurred to me that he might be giving me a black charm in the hopes of damning me with it. It wasn’t illegal to know black magic, just to do it. And destroying the soul of a newborn so an old man might live again was about as black as it got. “No wonder the demons hate you,” I said under my breath.
“Oh, are we going to compare past atrocities now?” he said even as he began writing a list of ingredients beside the pentagram.
I cocked my hip and watched him; his penmanship was as precise as his dress. “Stealing healthy babies and substituting your own failing infants is pretty nasty.”
“So is a thousand years of slavery. Or creating a species for your own pleasure, one that necessitates acts of perverted brutality to survive, acts committed on the people you love.”
He was talking about the vampires. “No worse than destroying your enemy by attacking their unborn children.”
Landon stopped writing. “They did it first.”
But who really knew the truth? I couldn’t solve a puzzle two thousand years dead.
His motion cocky, Landon spun the paper to me. Listed was a mix of plants, objects, and ley line equipment designed to sympathetically harness intent: blood, hummingbird egg white, sunrise spider silk, aspen sap, a copper Möbius strip, silk scarf, salt—probably to scribe the pentagram with—and a familiar phrase of Latin. Tislan, tislan. Ta na shay cooreen na da.
My lips parted and a wave of disconnection flooded me as the words rose from my mind. “That’s the phrase Trent used to move my soul,” I said, my voice sounding hollow, as if from outside myself.
Landon frowned, actually doing a double take as I blinked to find myself. “Trent has done this? Are you kidding me?”
“Not this one,” I reassured him. “But he held my soul in a bottle for three days while my aura replenished itself. I remember the words.”
Ta na shay cooreen na da. It flowed through me, and I held the counter as if it wasn’t real. I’d been trapped in my mind, standing at this very spot making cookies that faded away until Trent and I worked together, a symbol of us joining our minds so he could pull me out.
“Kalamack put your soul into a bottle?” Landon said, his disbelief obvious.
My breath came in a rush, as if I’d forgotten how to breathe. “My aura was burned off when I fought Ku’Sox. My mind thought I was dead, and he kept me on life support until my body was recovered and my aura was strong enough.” It had taken a kiss to break the spell, seeing as it was a very old charm to “wake the princess” from a lifesaving coma. I was starting to think that was when I’d begun to love him.
Oh shit. I love him.