No Witch Way Out (Maeren Series Book 2)

by Mercedes Jade

  “It will stop dream tracing, that is all,” Victoria said. “And no, it doesn’t wash off. I’ll redo it whenever you notice the glyphs fading on your skin, so check them every day.”

  Rats. She was hoping for more, especially since she hadn’t dreamed of the dragon yet or Daemon.

  It still was best to guard against tracing if Victoria’s dragon had tried it. She was sure Geer wouldn’t be far behind in his own attempt.

  She was tagged, but not trapped yet.

  Familiar To Me

  “We need to discuss the familiar on your shoulder,” Kim said, turning the conversation in the direction Elizabeth wished she could avoid.

  Before Maeren, Elizabeth had grown closer to Kim as she trained. Kim had even offered to take her on as a magic student.

  Elizabeth had been tempted to accept, wondering if her mother would permit her to finally tell someone, outside their family, about the lightning that drove them all to live on the edge.

  Kim could have been a friend.

  Elizabeth yanked her pants on. She definitely needed more clothes for this conversation.

  “Getting the claim or familiar off is the only thing I need to discuss,” she said. She put on her bra and sweater.

  She was lucky that the claim hadn’t flared hard enough yet to pull Daemon’s familiar into reality.

  Her sense of near death was clearly not the same as most witches, if being surrounded by dragons in the cave hadn’t been enough. Perhaps she’d gotten too used to taking risks as a vampire slayer.

  “Let’s sit,” Kim said, taking a seat herself on the floor, at the edge of the cutout for the circle.

  Her feet touched the edge of the chalk outline, making the white glow for a moment.

  Jill joined them and their mother followed, taking off her high heels, after a moment, when she saw the rest of them were barefoot.

  The twisted scar of their mother’s left ankle caught Victoria’s eyes as she settled down, beside her.

  All of them carried scars, even if some were well hidden.

  “The power will go back to Daemon if you remove the mark of his familiar,” Kim said.

  She didn’t make that sound like a bad thing.

  “Do you mean he’s weakened now?” her mother asked.

  She also didn’t make that sound like a bad thing.

  “Naturally,” Kim answered. Her voice was a mixture of pride and worry as she explained. “It takes a lot of power to transfer your familiar. The only way to do it is tie it to the blood bond with a claim. Daemon won’t be without magic, but he will drain quicker and need to charge frequently, which means he will need to feed often and deep. Even a demon won't be able to keep that up for long.”

  “Maybe he meant to take the familiar back before you suddenly left,” Victoria said. “I’ve never heard of transferring a familiar. It sounds risky.”

  Victoria was nervously tapping her foot against the chalked circle, but unlike when Kim did it, the line remained dormant.

  The princess got anxious whenever they discussed Daemon because she was stuck in the middle, with her blood oath to Elizabeth and her Lasier promise to Daemon.

  If Victoria knew she was sitting beside the Blue Queen, it would probably result in a well-deserved meltdown.

  “Daemon may have meant to do a lot of things, but he got too busy, overthrowing the kingdom, to remember little details, like the witch he left his familiar inked all over,” Elizabeth said.

  “That’s bullshit! He can’t keep you,” Jill said.

  Elizabeth totally agreed.

  “Language,” their mother said.

  Twentieth-century women's rights in the human realm clashed with Maerenian norms.

  Daemon had claimed Elizabeth, but did he really want her?

  Had it just been about power, like her mother accused before their family ran away?

  The thought of all the extra feedings Daemon had to be doing to make up for transferring his familiar to her, left Elizabeth unsettled.

  It shouldn’t matter. She’d even watched through the blood bond connection as he’d fed on the royal feeders. Still, Elizabeth hadn’t grown up in Maeren, with its polygamous harems.

  “What if I feed another vampire to drain the claim? There’s always hungry vampires around here,” Elizabeth suggested. “Its an occupational hazard to lose a pint to a sneaky pair of fangs. I’ll stake him back to hell once he’s had a drink and the dragon familiar should fly home to Daemon. No harm, no foul.”

  “If you trigger the claim, it could cause the dragon to manifest immediately,” Kim said.

  Yikes. Definitely, a bad idea.

  “Can he use his familiar against me?” Elizabeth asked. “Like call it into reality, without the claim triggering?”

  There was a bomb on her shoulder. Leaving Daemon without saying goodbye might have lit the fuse.

  “The glyphs will hide you to prevent him from connecting with you and using the blood bond,” Victoria reassured her.

  “Thanks,” Elizabeth said. She really had to learn more about glyphs.

  “The protective glyphs will prevent Daemon from literally transporting you, through your dreams, but they won’t be able to stop a bond that strong from letting him into your dreams at all if he really wants in,” Kim said. “He also should be able to communicate with you the same way your dragon mate did, if he uses the right spell.”

  Mates?

  “Excuse me?” Elizabeth choked out.

  “Oh, Maeren, she’s right!” Victoria said, sounding horrified herself. “Mates are said to share a mate bond once activated . . . with a bite.”

  “What the heck is a mate bond?” Jill asked, sounding just as upset. “In fact, what is a mate? Nobody mentioned mates in the ‘Guide to Maeren’ we were given.”

  They were so naive. All of those years living in the human realm really had put them at a disadvantage. A few weeks of training with Kim and lectures from their mother couldn’t make up for that loss of experience.

  “Mates aren’t discussed anymore,” Kim said. “They’re not outlawed, but such bonds have been discouraged for witch safety, ever since the demons started gaining popularity.”

  “Is it some way to control a witch? Does the male do something during the bite . . . ?” Elizabeth asked, trying to think if she’d ever been under Daemon’s control.

  Geer certainly couldn’t make her do anything against her wishes.

  “No. No, that’s not—Mates can be a wonderful thing. Demons perverted what was once the match of magical souls, perfect for each other. It has to do with the sharing of magic that we discussed between blood bonded, earlier.”

  “My father always warned me against following a mate bond. I should have listened to him,” her mother said.

  Elizabeth shivered. Oh, such regret could only be over their traitorous father.

  Had their mother had a mate bond to him?

  She certainly had never mentioned it. If that was true, though, it meant the magic of the mate bond sure wasn’t infallible.

  How could their mother had been fated to be with a husband that would trade his children for power?

  “The dragon in my head, uh Geer, he told me that you were the grey dragon’s gaisa,” Elizabeth said, remembering that Geer had used it to excuse what they had tried to do to Victoria.

  “That is the term for a dragon life-mate. Some vampires use the term as well, although others simply use ‘mate.’ They’re all in regard to the same thing, to address a bond pair, between two magical souls that are meant for each other,” Kim said.

  Jill cleared her throat. She probably was thinking the same thing about their mother and father and the cruel fate that had tied them together.

  “How does the mate bond work?” Jill asked, focusing them on the logistics instead of emotions.

  Elizabeth gave her sister a thankful look.

  “Think of it as the same straw between blood bonded, except much more than the trickle of power from a claim can be shared be
tween mates. Unlike a blood bond, a mate bond cannot ever be closed off, except by the death of one of the mates. It is said to feel like having a limb cut off, a phantom ache for the loss of the mate for the rest of the surviving mate’s life,” Kim explained.

  She was bonded to a dragon and she didn’t even know what he looked like yet. Kim also seemed to be implying the Daemon was her mate. Two mates! Both of them on her bad side.

  This was disastrous.

  “How do demons come into this?” Jill asked, still keeping it academic.

  “The shared magic is a boost to a vampire mate. It isn’t quite the level of a demon, but when a vampire draws on his mated witch’s magic, he gains significant power. This is reinforced by feedings. It is thought the first demon was accidentally made when a vampire took too much from his mated witch in his hunger for more power,” Kim said.

  Elizabeth shivered. It sounded completely true.

  She could easily see how a male would get a taste of more power than he was born with and get addicted to that strength.

  Maeren—without technology—relied on magic, and power could affect status and riches.

  Yet, Daemon was stronger than her, and already a demon. What had he to gain from bonding to her? The same could likely be said of Geer if he was anywhere near as strong as the other dragons she’d encountered. His power was unclear to her still.

  “Fathers used to take their witches, who had come of age, to tasting balls to find mates, not just for harem positions. There weren’t as many harems, back when mates were more popular. Vampires didn’t need to rely on them as much. A single witch was able to match their binding-protein needs easily when it was the witch’s own magic they were sipping along with protein in the blood, a perfect match,” their mother explained.

  Their mother had known about mates. It was obvious why she had never mentioned them to her daughters, given how having a mate had turned out for her. It must be painful for her to talk about it even now.

  “It sounds like a stupid system,” Jill said. “What happened to free choice?”

  “Witches are always given a choice, Jill,” Kim said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re always happy with the choices that they make,” she added.

  Kim looked at her mother and Elizabeth knew that her mother had shared at least some of what had happened in her disastrous marriage.

  “The problem starts when the vampire mate refuses to let his witch go, if she changes her mind later on. The bond cannot be severed, as I mentioned, and it complicates things,” Kim said.

  “Easier to drink a witch to the quick than to risk losing all that power,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes, unfortunately,” Kim agreed.

  “My father never wanted me to search for a mate,” Victoria said.

  “Mates are not all terrible, but it is a risk that many a caring father may not want his daughter to take when happy marriages can come from non-mated bonds,” her mother answered instead of Kim.

  It sounded like the opinion came from experience.

  “So, both Victoria and Elizabeth have mate bonds to dragons,” Jill stated calmly.

  “Yes, although Elizabeth has at least two mate bonds,” Kim said.

  “Seriously?” Elizabeth exclaimed.

  She had hoped she’d misunderstood Kim’s implication about her son, earlier.

  That hope was about to be dashed.

  “Daemon has put his familiar on you. That amount of magic would require a mate bond to transfer,” Kim said.

  Oh, Maeren. She had run away from her mate.

  At least, she could honestly say she hadn’t known at the time.

  “Would Daemon have known I was his mate?” she asked.

  “Yes, he would have noticed your magic. Perhaps not right away, but once the bond established itself, the feel of witch magic is said to be distinct in their chi. The little magic he would have gotten from a tasting bite or feed would wear off quickly, and all that would be left is the magic coming from the mate bond.”

  He never said a word. He came into her room, every night, and fooled her into exchanging blood with him, probably to reinforce that mate bond that he hid from her.

  Then, he marked her with his familiar, without saying what it had all meant.

  They were connected—their magical souls, chi—and she had no idea how to separate them.

  Perhaps she needed to fight the magical bond with strong magic. These glyphs Victoria had given to her had to do something!

  “Okay, I have two mates,” Elizabeth said with a tired sigh. “I know you said I can’t break the mate bond without possible repercussions like Daemon’s claim firing, but as long as I keep my glyphs reinforced, the bond won’t let my mates steal my magic or make me vulnerable to them, right?” Elizabeth asked.

  If the answer was no, she didn’t know what she was going to do.

  The only other way to end the bond was by permanently ending her mates, two very dangerous Maerenian males.

  It would have saved her family a lot of trouble if she’d killed Daemon before they escaped, but that was a line she had been unwilling to cross.

  Daemon deserved a fair trial.

  They’d never even talked about her mother’s assumptions before Elizabeth had run.

  “Have you dreamed about Prince Daemon?” her mother asked. “Has he tried to use the bond?”

  “Yes, I dreamed about him, but I don’t know if it had anything to do with the bond.”

  Elizabeth had thought they were just dreams, had even expected them after everything that had happened.

  The nightmares about her childhood still happened on nights with bad thunderstorms.

  The nice dreams about Daemon were a different kind of torture.

  She desperately tried to remember if she had said or done anything to let Daemon know where her family was hiding.

  She had even dreamed of the others she met from her time in Maeren, but it hadn’t seemed as realistic as what happened to Victoria.

  “Nothing Daemon does to you in the dream will be real now, remember that,” Kim said as if she was reading Elizabeth’s thoughts. “He won’t hurt you.”

  Did that come with a written promise?

  Elizabeth had bought what Daemon was selling, without checking the fine print carefully enough.

  “Will he remember what happens in the dreams?” Elizabeth asked.

  She should have paid more attention, especially when she knew he shared her lightning magic and the connection it could forge.

  This mate bond had doubled her ties to him.

  “Of course,” Victoria answered. “If he casts the spell to enter your dreams, he’ll actually be awake and aware of everything. He can control the dream, unless you realize what is happening and fight back.”

  That sounded like advanced Maerenian magic.

  Elizabeth sighed.

  So far, she figured they had ruled out trying to drain the claim, in case they set it off, and they established that Daemon was still dangerously tied to her by her dreams.

  There was nowhere she could run with his familiar on her shoulder.

  A claim would fade, but this? He had handed her a piece of his soul

  ‘’Why would Prince Daemon do this? How does he gain from having his familiar on Elizabeth?” her mother asked. “I’m not understanding his purpose. It seems risky to mix his familiar with a claim.”

  “I wouldn’t expect any of you to know much about familiars. Most witches probably would have thought a familiar was a high-level spell, manipulating the magic, if they saw one accidentally, instead of realizing it was part of a magical soul, manifested. Only royals know how to bring out their familiars,” Kim explained.

  Kim had left a big hint for Victoria in that speech.

  It did explain why her mother never told them anything about familiars.

  Elizabeth suspected that wasn’t the only magic that the royal family was keeping under wraps.

  “Familiars are powerful. Like firing a gun, when
the rest of us are fighting with sticks and stones. Knowledge of familiars was outlawed after the clan wars. Only the king and his direct descendants are supposed to use a familiar,” Victoria said.

  Were these two royals honestly deaf to the hints about their backgrounds that they were throwing around so casually?

  “Why are familiars such a secret anyway?” Jill asked.

  She had loved her snakes and it had been a fight to convince Jill to leave her fire sword behind when they ran.

  Unlike the twins, Jill hadn’t anywhere to hide the sword on her body, when they snuck out.

  “They’re forbidden!” Kim said. That sounded a little more ominous than outlawed.

  “Then when Vic gave me the fire sword and showed me how to call out my familiar . . .” Jill said, waiting for Victoria to fill in the gap.

  Victor had barely known Jill and he had broken the king’s rules to show her magic that could have save her life.

  He hadn’t owed her anything, had no reason to risk his father’s penalty for breaking his sanction.

  “I’m pretty sure Vic wasn’t planning on your running away with the knowledge, when you promised to feed him,” Victoria said, making it sound like a commitment similar to an engagement. “He would have discussed keeping it secret, if you had given him a chance.”

  Victoria was still angry about Jill poisoning her twin.

  Jill hadn’t talked about it since the first day when she and Victoria had nearly burnt the house down in an argument about trust, promises, and boys.

  Kaila had blown them out the door and told them to take it to the barn because she was going to tear it down anyway.

  The cold air had tempered the argument, but it still simmered under the surface, waiting to boil over at the slightest burst of heat.

  When both girls had slammed back into the house, Victoria had threatened Jill to just wait until Victor found her.

  Jill had answered that Victor wasn’t the first prince she’d taken down.

  Elizabeth had to snuff this argument out before it fired up again.