Chapter 157

Theodore’s POV

In one breath, the love of my life laying still in the grass let out a gut-wrenching scream and the High Priestess dropped to her knees. I lunged for my wife but was thrown back by an invisible force. When I pulled myself upright, the High Priestess had a hand outstretched, clearly using magic to hold me back.

Won’t harm her, my ass.

I had barely decided to lunge for the High Priestess next when she looked at me over her shoulder, her eyes wild like I had never seen them. Her tell-tale calmness was nowhere to be found, her expression simultaneously commanding and pleading. “Trust me,” she beseeched.

Then her gaze became unfocused as she repeated the words. “Trust me.” She repeated them in the magic language, over and over, like a chant. I realized the words were intended for me as much as they were intended for Violet.

I could attempt to stop her from what she was doing and probably fail based on the power she just displayed. Or I could help her.

I opened the tether between me and Violet, her panic bombarding me through the bond. I noticed though that there wasn’t an ounce of pain coming through and that steadied me. I sent two words back with as much love and faith as I could muster.

Trust her. Trust her. Trust her.

As if sensing my change of heart, the High Priestess dropped her hand, allowing me access to Violet. Not wanting to further distract her from focusing on my wife, I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity and risk disrupting the altrosis.

I held strong to my trust in the High Priestess to protect her niece and my trust in my wife to hold her own.

Staying put on my knees like the High Priestess, I swallowed my pride, my fear, and my ego, and waited, my heart thundering in my ears as Violet’s scream slowly receded back into silence.

Violet’s POV

I had forgotten what I was supposed to do. The terror that had gripped me had pulled me under until my heart was beating in rhythm to the words echoing inside me: trust me, trust her, trust me, trust her.

I relaxed into the new sensation.

It was near impossible to conceptualize what had happened. It might have been akin to living one’s life in black and white only to see color for the first time – except with every sense, not just sight.

With one tug of those ice-cold fingers, my entire life was fuller, richer, more nuanced and complex than anything I could have imagined previously. The shock of it had terrified me.

But as I remembered to trust my Auntie, as my mate’s strength flowed into me, I forced myself to stop screaming. I allowed space for the extra pressure of those ice-cold fingers in my chest.

As I did, they tugged once more on the thread, following it along, down toward my navel. It snagged there, and the fingers paused to fix it. Threads of my existence stitched back together, and then I was slammed into a familiar, red room.

My father’s younger face came into view. Was this another hallucination? Was this part of the unstable magic?

“Render her magic useless!” he yelled, and I remembered the dream I had had. This was not a hallucination. This was a memory.

Then with a snap, the memory clarified, as if whatever had electrified and intensified my senses had cleaned up this memory, too.

I was a child, and my father was yelling, but not at me. I turned to follow his line of sight, and there she was: my mother.

I had forgotten how beautiful she was.

Even with her tortured expression twisted in indecision, she was breathtaking.

“Render her magic useless!” Father yelled at her while pointing at me. Then he fell to his knees, his face breaking in fear and pain, into the gentle man I remembered.

“Please, my love,” he begged my mother, “cast the spell. If she wields accidentally again, if the wrong person finds out, they will kill her.”

I looked around the room, half of it scorched as if flames had devoured it mere moments ago. And I remembered they had. I had done it accidentally with my magic I hadn’t yet learned to control.

“Repressing her magic will make it unstable over time and that will kill her when she’s older,” my mother cried. She wasn’t mad, merely torn. She didn’t have a solution she could live with.

“Better she have a few decades than not even one,” Dad argued, his own heart clearly breaking at the bargain he was willing to strike. “Please, my love, I cannot protect her from this. Only you can.”

My mother’s beautiful eyes flitted back and forth behind her tears, searching desperately for a better solution. “If she becomes pregnant, the hormones will trigger her magic beyond what I’ll be able to suppress, especially if her baby has magic. Hopefully, by then, she’ll be strong enough to embrace her magic so that it can stabilize, but she’ll be old enough to understand the importance of hiding it for her safety.”

“Yes, good,” Father cried, terrified. “We will teach her about magic, and we will find her a husband so that she can get pregnant sooner rather than later. We will protect her.”

Then my father froze, as if he had been paused on a screen. My mother turned to face me, wiping her tears away.

“This next part never happened,” she kneeled in front of me, brushing my hair back from my face. “This is not part of your memory; it’s a message I have secreted away, weaved into the spell that suppressed your magic.”

By the Goddess, how I missed her.

“Your father is a good man,” she told me, “but he is old-fashioned and afraid. He will be desperate to find you a husband so that you can get pregnant and break this spell, even if the man is not the right match for you. But if he is not the right match, he may not be accepting of your magic.”

She stood, stepping back to her original seat, and I understood that her message was coming to a close.

“So just between us girls,” she winked at me, “I’m adding to the spell: you will only get pregnant with your true mate, the one who will love all of you, including your magic. You’ll find him, and when you do,” she turned toward my father, gazing at him adoringly, “love will make all the difference.”

With one last, longing glance to me, she said, “You will always be my greatest gift.”

Then my father unfroze, crying as he took my mother’s hand in his. “It is done,” she said. “She will not remember this until she must.”

“Thank you, my love. Thank you.” Father stood and scooped me up, kissing me on top of my head. I basked in his love, not realizing quite how much I had missed him.

Then the room melted away, the ice-cold fingers receded from within me, and my body went limp in the clearing.

“Alari,” Theo called, but I was too exhausted to answer.