Of course, it remained to be seen whether he would come at all, given the way Austin had left.

Eleven

“Okay, ready?” I asked Austin, who stood across the clearing in the woods behind Ivy House with a knife in hand.

My son, tired from touring the town and surrounding nature on foot, had been content to play his video games for a while, so I’d snuck away to train. I wasn’t ready for him to see me bumbling around with magic. It would strip my new “rad mom” tag right off.

“Go for it.” Austin flared his arms from his sides a little, ready for my pounding.

“Now, Jessie, remember what the book said.” Edgar hunched over the large volume of the second training book, tracing the lines he’d recently translated. The spells in this book were much easier for him to read than the ones in the first volume. “It’s a spell meant to disarm. Too much power and you’ll literally rip an arm off. We’re starting to get into the big leagues now.”

“She’ll have this one just fine,” Niamh said, standing to the side with Jasper and Ulric. Mr. Tom stood behind Edgar, peering over his shoulder. “She has no problem following directions. It’s when she tries to change the spells that everything goes tits up.”

“Yes, thank you for that lesson on what we already know,” Mr. Tom said.

“If he knew it, why’d he say that?” she snapped.

I flexed my fingers, chancing a glance at Sebastian, who sat to my left on a log, placidly watching us. He’d suggested that I train as usual—he wanted to gauge where I was, magically speaking, before he gave any suggestions.

“You sure you’re ready?” I asked Austin, licking my lips. I hated this part. He was my human guinea pig, and most of the spells I tried out caused him pain or discomfort.

He nodded, and nothing but expectation and support swirled through the link.

Why did the connection feel so completely different now than it had last night? It had almost felt like his actual hands were cupping my breasts, and his slow thrusting—

“Where did yer mind go?” Niamh shouted, bracing her hands on her hips. “This isn’t the time to think dirty thoughts, girl. Keep yer head in the game!”

My face flared with heat and lust blasted through the connection from Austin.

“I made it different. I know how to control the link, and you don’t,” Ivy House said. I’d apparently broadcast my internal debate to her. I occasionally did that without realizing it. It was like talking to myself, but with an audience. “You’ve been a prude for far too long.”

I formed the spell without thought. Niamh was right—I could always perfectly execute the spells in the book. The act of Edgar reading them planted them in my brain as if they’d always been there, waiting to be released.

“You know how to alter the link?” I asked as I released the spell.

“You don’t?”

I frowned at her as the spell reached Austin. It swirled around his body. The knife fell out of a suddenly limp hand. His expression didn’t change, but pain bled through the link. He sank to his knees, his muscles popping, straining his tight white T-shirt and pushing at his sweats. Trembling, he struggled to stand.

“What’s happening?” I asked, my focus narrowing in on him as I jogged over. “What’s it doing? I thought it was supposed to just disarm him.”

“He’s a shifter,” Sebastian said. “His animal is a weapon.”

“But…” I looked at Edgar. “What’s it doing to him?” I shouted.

“Let me just…” Edgar’s finger moved faster over the book.

“I’m…good…” Austin wheezed, on his hands and knees, head bowed. Pain drowned me through the connection.

I could fix his pain. I could numb him. But I worried that if I did, he’d stop fighting against whatever the spell was doing. If I numbed the sensations, I worried the spell might kill him.

Fear ate at me as Edgar said, “Here’s the counter-spell.”

“No—”

A flash of blistering heat and a blinding light cut off Austin’s voice. Fur erupted from him as his body shot up and out, his animal form taking over. Suddenly, a massive polar bear stood in the clearing, much bigger than its counterparts in the natural world. His shoulder was at about the level of my head.

His roar thundered through the woods. The pain fizzled before dying, shed from him like a snake shed its skin. He shook himself before standing on his hind legs, a second roar shaking my bones and jittering my nerves.

Yesterday, I’d thought I could tango with this massive beast. Clearly it had been too long since I’d seen him in his animal form. Raw power pulsed into the clearing, squeezing something inside me left over from my ancestors. The fight-or-flight response to danger in the wild. Right now, it was screaming at me to run.

He lowered back down to all fours before huffing, the clearing dead quiet. A moment later, the heat and light made me flinch, and there was Austin again, his ripped and ruined clothes at his feet, his robust, muscular body on full display.

I was too frazzled to take notice.

“Wow.” Sebastian ran his fingers through his messy hair. “That was…” A cockeyed grin spread across his face. “Very cool. I am literally shaking right now.” He held up this hand. “I am so scared that I am literally shaking. I honestly do not know if I could magically fight that monster.” He paused for a beat. “No offense intended, sir. Just… Wow.”

“Take a number.” I blew out a breath. “Someone run and get him some new sweats. Try to find something other than purple, if you can. He hates the purple ones.”

“I have gray for him, in the laundry room with the others,” Mr. Tom said as Ulric straightened out of a crouch and took off jogging. “Mind the size. I ordered the wrong size the first time around. Get the larger ones. He’s bigger than you—”

“He’s already gone; he can’t hear ye anymore,” Niamh said, waving her hand to quiet Mr. Tom. “Austin, what happened there, then?”

“The spell was trying to cut out my ability to shift,” Austin replied. “Fighting it…hurt.”

“Saying it hurt is a severe understatement,” I said, bracing my hands on my hips. “I didn’t want to numb you and possibly cut out your resistance. Was that a good idea or bad idea?”

“Numbing the pain would’ve made me submit to the spell. It was working through my limbs to my middle. If I hadn’t been able to feel it, I wouldn’t have known how to fight it.”

“Why fight it at all?” Sebastian asked. “It would have kept you from shifting, sure, but the effects would have been nullified by the counter-spell.”

Austin studied him for a moment. “I don’t like being controlled. I would succumb if Jess explicitly asked me to, but she is the only person in the world I would allow to have that much control over me.”

“So if I tried that spell on you?”

“I would not stand still to fight it like I just did. I would fight it as I ripped your throat out.”

Sebastian shivered. “Jesus, you’re intense.” He draped his arms across his thighs. “She said you were in incredible pain. I couldn’t tell.”

“Thanks for the update.” Austin looked back at me. “What’s next?”

“Are all shifters this selfless?” Sebastian asked. “Allowing someone to magically experiment on them even though it causes them great pain? I assume this isn’t the first time you’ve done this.”

“To be an alpha is to sacrifice,” Austin replied. “If I can help Jess by undergoing something so trivial as pain, then it’s an easy decision.”

“Many shifters will tolerate a great deal to help their packs,” Niamh said. “Most successful alphas will sacrifice a great deal more, like he said. But only one in a million could endure the sort of magical treatment Jessie throws at this great lummox, and still he comes back for more. Some of the spells are brutal. Sometimes I wonder if he’s touched in the head.”

“That started out so promising,” Mr. Tom mused. “But I see you quickly slid back into your trough of bad manners and name-calling.”

“Ye are much too sensitive, ye donkey,” she replied.

“Yes, that’s the ticket, double down on the bad behavior. Fantastic. I do so enjoy your company.”

“Yer about’ta enjoy my foot up your hole in a minute.”

That crooked grin worked at Sebastian’s lips as he watched them argue.

“Right.” I took a deep breath and shook out my fingers. Now for the hard part. “While Edgar translates the next spell, I should probably work on tweaking this spell so I can use it for smaller stuff. Like knocking away your knife without taking away your ability to change. Or”—I snapped—“I know. It would be really good to quickly know what sort of dangers a person is hiding. This spell, if tweaked just a little, should be able to tell me that.”

Austin nodded and looked down at the knife. “I don’t have anywhere to put this at the moment. Maybe we should wait until Ulric is back with the sweats so I can hide it on my person?”

“Well…ye do have somewhere to put it. It just won’t be entirely comfortable.” Niamh’s eyes flicked down and then back up.

“I’m not going to make him put a knife up his keister, Niamh.” I rolled my eyes. “Okay. Sebastian, this would be a great time for you to instruct me so Austin doesn’t get hit with something ugly.”

“I want to see how you problem-solve. I don’t want to teach you spells; I want to teach you how to create spells. How to figure them out. You’ll be able to make your own, improve others’, and tear them down.”

“Give a man a trout, fill his belly for a night,” Edgar muttered, still looking at the book. “Teach a man about trout, fill him for a lifetime.”