Magic Bound
Magic Bound
JAMIE CAMPBELL
Chapter 1
When I asked my mother once why we never spoke to Grandma, she frowned and said, ‘You’ll understand one day’.
Today might have been that day.
I sat in the passenger side seat of her retro corvette convertible watching the trees and buildings pass us by. One thing I already discovered: my grandmother was a speed demon. If I could actually speak in the windswept car with the top down, I would have asked her to slow the hell down.
All I could do was hold on. My mind was swarming with all the questions I had for her. Most of all, I wanted to hear what she had to say about my powers—or lack thereof.
After driving for twenty minutes, she pulled the car over to the side of the road and switched off the engine. The woman I’d only met for the first time days earlier looked so much like my mother it was freaky.
“I think it’s safe to talk here,” she said. Still, she looked around one last time to make sure we were alone. Apart from trees and wilderness, it was difficult to see anything else.
“What’s going on, Grandma?” I asked. May as well cut straight to the chase. It was cold, the wind made it even worse, and I just wanted answers.
She hesitated, taking a few deep breaths before finally speaking. “Tell me, when you turned eighteen, did your powers appear like they should have?”
“No, they didn’t,” I admitted. I hated saying those words aloud. I hated every part of it. “What do you know about them?”
“I was warned this would happen.”
“Warned by who?”
“When we met the other day, you said you had been reading about the Supernatural Civil War of 1985. That it was partly me who started it.”
“Yes, you and a vampire fell in love,” I replied. What did that have to do with my powers? I was itching for answers.
She couldn’t maintain my eye contact. Grandma was looking everywhere except at me. “It sounds so simple. His name was Drake Isagold and I loved every bit of him. I was so lonely when my husband—Joanna’s father—passed away. I never thought I would be able to find anyone to love as much as I loved him.”
That was actually really sweet. Hearing anything from my family’s heritage was good. I would want to hear many stories from this woman one day. Today, I just needed her to get down to business.
“It was by chance that I met Drake. He volunteered at the local hospital where I was a nurse. We got talking one day and discovered so many things we had in common.”
“A vampire volunteered at the hospital? That wasn’t to get blood, was it?”
She shook her head with a smile. “Nothing like that. He couldn’t get sick so he was the perfect person to speak with all those afflicted. He would spend hours reading with those who didn’t have any family or were too ill to have visitors.”
“In that case, he sounds like a nice person.”
“Oh, he was. So lovely in every way. Our relationship developed quite quickly. We didn’t even think about being from different factions. We were Samara and Drake, not witch and vampire.”
I tried to picture my grandmother as a young widowed nurse with a small daughter to look after. Having someone sweep her off her feet must have been nice. Perhaps one good thing to help heal her grief.
“As our relationship grew, more people became aware of it. Eventually, it made its way to the top. We had a visit from the Vampire Council and the Witch Council within days of each other.”
“There wasn’t just one council back then?” As far as I knew, we only had the Supernatural Council. There must have been details I’d missed in my textbook.
“Five councils, one for werewolves, witches, vampires, seers, and shapeshifters. The Supernatural Council was formed with the Peace Treaty of 1985, after the Civil War. I guess you can thank us for that too.” She smiled briefly before her eyes started to get misty again.
This part of history I did remember. The Peace Treaty put an end to the fighting and thereby saved the few supernaturals that were left. We had been rebuilding our numbers ever since.
“What happened after the council visits?” I prompted. I was still trying to piece the details together and see how they affected my powers.
“We were banned from seeing each other.”
“But you were in love.”
“And not hurting anybody. There was no possible way Drake and I could leave one another alone. We tried and failed miserably. We were two halves that made a whole. We couldn’t live as two halves again.”
“So I’m guessing the councils didn’t approve?”
“Not at all. We petitioned them to allow us to be together but they refused. Then the blame started happening. The witch council blamed the vampire council for failing to stop us and vise-versa. Then the other councils chimed in with their opinions. It escalated too quickly.”
“Why would they care so much about just two people?” I asked.
“To cut a long story short, they didn’t. There was always underlying tension between the factions. They were waiting for an excuse to fight. We were it, I’m afraid.”
“You were the scapegoats.”
She nodded her head slowly. “We sure were. Everything after that was just crazy. Many people hated us for what we had caused.”
“But it wasn’t your fault.”
“We had refused to stop seeing each other. People didn’t care about the other factors. We were the targets for violence and abuse. We couldn’t leave the house.”
“Is that why Mom doesn’t speak with you?”
“I think it’s one of the reasons. She was only seven years old at the time. It was very frightening for her to live through that. I know she blamed me for having a terrible upbringing.”
The picture she was painting for me was not a pretty one. I was starting to see why my mother didn’t want a relationship with her mother. Maybe there wasn’t a way in this world to make up for her lost childhood.
Still, it must have been terrible for both of them. Grandma was still a person too, she still had a heart that held love in it. She would have only been forty-five at the time of the war. She was facing many years of loneliness ahead of her without the vampire.
Speaking of which. “What happened to Drake?”
“He died in the war. They forced everyone to fight. Most people never returned home.”
“Did you fight too?”
“We all had to. I served my faction with magic. I have always been blessed by Aurodite with very strong abilities. My coven and I were tasked with defending our own with our powers.”
“It must have been horrible losing Drake,” I said. To go through all that and not even be together afterwards? They were both robbed by fate on that one.
“It was like losing my husband all over again. I vowed I would never let it happen a third time and I have remained true to my word to this day.”
“You’ve never loved anyone again?” It sounded heartbreaking. All I could feel was pity for this woman. I guessed my own mother wasn’t as removed from it as I was, she wouldn’t see it as I did.
“Never. Only my daughter and she doesn’t want to accept it. That’s okay, though. A mother’s love never wanes, even if they don’t want it.”
I didn’t have any children, but maybe one day I would fully understand what she said. Until then, I still didn’t see what all this had to do with me. “You mentioned my powers. Do you know why I didn’t get my magic on my birthday?”
Her lips pursed before she sighed. “That was my fault. I told you many people hated me for causing the factions to crumble into war. There was one coven in particular. They lost h
alf their witches in the war.”
“What did they do?”
“They decided to punish me by placing a curse on my lineage.”
“What kind of a curse?”
“One that would prevent all future generations from receiving their powers. And that generation starts with you.”
Chapter 2
It was difficult wrapping my brain around what Grandma was saying.
“What do you mean a curse?” I asked. It was only the first of approximately ten million questions that came to mind.
“I told you I was blessed with very strong powers. They call a witch with strength like mine a ‘child of Auradite’,” Grandma explained. “The coven that cursed me didn’t believe I deserved that kind of power. And they didn’t want to risk me passing it on to any future generations. They couldn’t take away my magic so they did the next best thing.”
“Why does my mom have powers? Shouldn’t the curse have affected her too?” I knew my mother’s powers were strong too. I guessed that was exactly what the coven feared.
She shook her head. “Joanna was already born and her powers were already fated. They couldn’t block her inheritance. You were the first one born after the curse, and therefore you have to suffer the consequences.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was perplexed to say the least. A whole busload of emotions coursed through me and I didn’t know which one to stick with first.
My grandmother’s actions were the reason I had no powers. If not for her love affair with a vampire, I would be sitting in class and learning how to use my magic to the greatest of my abilities.
The curse robbed me of my future.
It sentenced me to death.
It took away something that was engrained within me and left me as an empty shell.
There was too much to process all at once. I started with the easy questions first. “Does my mother know about this?”
“No. To be honest, a part of me hoped the curse wouldn’t work. I prayed to the goddess that the coven did something wrong so nobody would have to suffer the consequences of my actions.”
I wanted to be angry with her. I was angry with her. But my grandmother looked completely defeated. Her shoulders slumped inwards, her eyes were downcast, and she kept worrying her hands together in her lap. She bore nothing of the woman I had met just days earlier. She was a shell too.
She turned and looked me straight in the eyes. “I’m so sorry, Eden. If I could turn back time, I would. I never intended for anyone else to suffer for what I did.”
Being furious and yelling at her wasn’t going to solve or change anything. It wouldn’t make me feel any better either. There was no point in making her suffer. She was obviously beating herself up enough for the both of us.
“You only fell in love,” I said. “You shouldn’t apologize for that. The heart wants what it wants.”
She reached over and placed her wrinkled and pale hand over mine and gave it a squeeze. “Your mother raised you very well, sweetheart. I wish everyone was as understanding as you are.”
I leaned back and let the headrest catch me. I may have been understanding but I was still screwed. “Is there anything we can do about this curse?”
“I consulted my coven about it when it was first placed. They’d never heard of anything like it so they couldn’t offer any advice. We truly hoped it didn’t work. I have been praying for that very thing every day since.”
“How did you know it worked?”
She offered a small smile. “The other day, when you turned up, I just knew. You wouldn’t have come to seek me out after all this time if there wasn’t a problem. That boy that you were with, does he know?”
I thought back to Liam and how he’d tried to kiss me in the forest. He definitely wouldn’t have done that if he knew the truth about my inability to do magic. “No, he doesn’t.”
“Does anyone?”
“This girl, she’s a werewolf, she worked it out. But we’re friends so she has promised she won’t tell anyone.” Cress was a saint, that was for sure.
“Nobody can find out about you,” Grandma warned. “They kill all non-supernaturals.”
“I know. I’ve been sick over it. I honestly have no idea what to do.” It had been the biggest thing on my mind since my last birthday. But was there a glimmer of hope now? “If the council knows about the curse and everything, will they still think I’m a roach and destroy me?”
Surely I couldn’t be in the same category as a roach? It’s not like I didn’t have powers for no reason. I was a witch—my magic was just bound so I couldn’t use it. Maybe there was a technicality that I could use to save my life.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, they won’t care about the why, only the fact you can’t perform magic.” Sadness crinkled all the lines around her eyes. “They will think you’re as dangerous as anyone that knows about the supernatural community but cannot be a part of it.”
It was a ridiculous law. The council expected the worst of everyone when I was certain nobody would actually tell all the humans about the community. And even if they did, humans probably wouldn’t believe them anyway.
What person in their right mind would believe that witches, werewolves, vampires, seers, and shapeshifters actually existed? They would be taken to the asylum for touting such stupid things.
Maybe.
Perhaps not, I didn’t know. People were pretty gung-ho about believing things these days.
I thought back to the lockdown we’d had at Shadow Academy over the weekend. Liam said roaches had black flecks in their aura and that was what gave them away to the Black Cloaks that worked for the council. I didn’t have those flecks and now I knew why.
I wasn’t a roach but still non-magical. Perhaps there was hope I could still go undiscovered. If it wasn’t obvious I couldn’t use magic, maybe I could complete my supernatural schooling and disappear into the regular world after graduation.
Who was I kidding? I could barely keep a straight face as I thought about it.
I explained about the black flecks in the auras to my grandmother. She listened intently. I was pretty certain she came to the same conclusion I did.
“You’ll have to return to school,” she said. “Blend in as much as possible.”
“I can get through all the theory-based subjects but the ones that actually require magic will be impossible to hide from.”
“We’ll have to come up with a plan.”
“What kind of a plan?” I asked. I was keen to hear any helpful suggestions. I was desperate for a way out of the situation she had caused.
Grandma thought about it for a few moments before replying. “There might be a spell or something I can do to make it seem like you have magic.”
“Really?”
“I haven’t come across one yet but I’ll start researching as soon as I get back. I’ll ask my coven for help too.”
“They won’t snitch to the council?”
“We’ve been through a lot together. They will keep our secret.”
I hoped that was true, otherwise we could just be doing the exact opposite of biding our time.
She continued. “The best thing you can do is pretend nothing is wrong. I’ll spend every day and night searching for an answer. I promise you.”
I did believe her. At least I wasn’t trying to figure things out on my own anymore. It felt slightly better knowing I had help from a very powerful witch that I could trust.
“You mustn’t tell anyone about the curse,” Grandma said. “If the coven responsible for all this finds out you are my granddaughter, they will report straight to the council. It is imperative nobody knows we’re related.”
I did a mental check as I tried to remember who I’d told about being related to the great and powerful Samara Oakford. Liam was the only one that I could recall. At least that number was small.
“I’ll make sure nobody knows,” I vowed. Another potential problem popped into my mind. “One of Mom’s old school fri
ends is a professor at the academy. She said they were best friends once. Do you think she would be able to connect me back to you?”
“It depends on what your mother has told her. Be wary of her, okay? Keep your eyes open at all times.”
“I will.”
We returned back to Shadow Academy with heavy hearts. Grandma didn’t want to come back onto school grounds so she dropped me at the wrought-iron gates.
The place was quiet as everyone was in class. I was going to have to fake an illness to explain my absence. Lying to any supernatural was treacherous as you never knew what anti-lying powers they might possess. Witches and seers were particularly good at picking up lies.
I hung out in the library for the rest of the day until classes were over. My mind churned over everything my grandmother told me hundreds of times. Having the new information didn’t put me any more at ease.
Stopping by the dining hall before the crowds started pouring in was on my to-do list. I grabbed some dinner to go and then headed to the male dormitories. I needed to make sure Liam didn’t tell anyone about my heritage.
I had no idea which room was his. Then I started to question whether he even had a room in with all the other students. He was the principal’s son, he probably lived in one of the few private apartments on campus with his dad.
Without having any magic for a locating spell, I had to resort to old fashioned methods. I waited in the corridor near the dining hall. He had to eat sometime and his appetite was almost as large as Cress’s.
His face appeared in the crowd after seventeen minutes. I’d already eaten my dinner by then. I raced to catch up with him before he could enter the hall.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” I asked.
Storm clouds raged in his eyes. It took me by surprise for a moment until I remembered the last time I had seen him. I’d run away after he kissed me. I guessed he had a reason to be angry.
“It’s important,” I feebly added.
He looked away as if the answer was written somewhere for him to see. Then his gaze shifted back to me. “You weren’t in classes today.”
Magic Bound (Shadow Academy Book 2) Page 1