Cerri narrowed gleaming eyes at me in warning. Finally, I sighed in defeat.
Her lips broke into a wide grin. “Good doggy!”
I mockingly recoiled. “I never want to hear that out of your mouth ever again.”
Cerri laughed and turned to start organizing her potion ingredients. I explained the situation to her and watched her busy hands go still as she listened. Cerri lifted her gaze, clearly aghast.
“We need to break that curse. ASAP.”
I snorted. “No shit.”
I hadn’t told her that I’d almost killed Ryder. Sometimes, when no one was talking or when I was all alone, I could feel the knife in my hand. My mind tumbled backwards, into the darkness deep within me. Panic would hit and my heart would race, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
Alvin had taught me that I often had no control over what happened around me. Through all that, I’d had autonomy. I’d made every decision to take his punishments onto myself. Every bit of pain I’d endured had been an act of defiance on my own part.
Now, Alvin had control of my body, too. He didn’t have full control yet, but the ritual arcana was still looking for ways to dig deeper. Soon, it would get past my walls and take up place in my core. There, it would be able to puppet every part of me, even my arcana.
I recalled the way it’d siphoned my command arcana. A hand rose to my throat. A fact settled into my mind. Though I tried to ignore it, I didn’t have enough hope to hold onto.
At the end of the day, I had become too powerful to fall into the wrong hands. If Alvin had complete control over me and my arcana, then everyone would be in danger.
We couldn’t let that happen.
“You’re blaming yourself again,” Cerri said, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Knock it off and tell me what the ritual components looked like. It will keep you from thinking about everything, and it might help me figure out what to do.”
She lit the burner under her cauldron. The air around the black pot shimmered with more than just heat. Cerri’s magic filled the room with a heady herbal aroma that comforted me. I let out a breath and described the ritual once again.
Oddly enough, going back to that moment didn’t hurt as much as one might expect. The ritual itself wasn’t what haunted me. It was the aftermath.
Ryder was working with the pack today. They were doing group exercises to become stronger together. Vi and Addie were there, watching over Ryder for me because Bri had gone back to Colorado.
Bri’s goodbye had confused me. I kept expecting her to hate me. Ryder and I had been sleeping in the same bed for days while she’d been alone in her hotel room. But Bri had pulled me into a tight hug and whispered one last thing in my ear.
“I hope you get everything you’re looking for,” she’d said.
Of course, I’d been confused as hell at the time. I mean, I was still very confused. Bri had to know that I loved Ryder by now. The way she watched the two of us, she had to know. The smiles she’d given me while watching us spoke volumes. I only wished I understood the language those smile spoke.
Because I didn’t have Bri to watch Ryder’s back for me, Addie and Vi offered to be his bodyguards. Audra had closed the café for the week so that we could all focus on what needed to be done. Though I was grateful for my boss’s decision to close the café, I sorely missed my paycheck.
“Here’s the first potion,” Cerri said as she pushed a still-warm bottle into my hand. “I don’t know if this will work, but I guarantee it won’t give you an out-of-body experience like the last time.”
I’d come to Cerri for help shortly after Ryder had entered my life. The witch, the one working for Alvin, had revealed a bond between Ryder and myself. At the time, I’d wanted the bond gone. Filled with guilt and regret, I’d asked Cerri to break the bond so that Ryder wouldn’t have to be tied to me.
I rubbed the back of my hand. The bond I’d wanted to break was gone now, and I desperately wanted it back. The light that had glowed under my skin wouldn’t even give me a flicker anymore. If I searched for it, I found a broken tether floating on an imaginary wind.
With a broken sigh, I threw back Cerri’s potion. It seared my throat and landed in the pit of my stomach like a ball of fire. Cinnamon whiskey had nothing on this concoction. I grimaced, my stomach turning.
Silent, Cerri and I waited for several breaths. She watched me expectantly. When nothing happened, I gave her a shrug. Cerri groaned.
“This curse is going to be more stubborn than I expected.” She leaned back against her potion table and chewed on the tip of her thumbnail as she stared me down.
I swallowed. “So, you think this is a curse?”
She tilted her hand back and forth. “It is only by classification. It hurts you, therefore it’s a curse.”
“Ah, so that means we can’t break it the way that you and Addie broke the curse Harvey tried to put on my car?”
A while back, Ryder had caught Harvey trying to put a curse on my car. The little black stone had radiated evil, so much that it’d made us all sick just to look at it. Cerri had the brilliant idea to use Addie’s arcana as a counterbalance.