Page 46 of Alpha's Magic

He nodded, looking up at me with a tear-stained face. “Yes.”

“Did you think it was some other kind of potion?”

He raised his tear-stained face. “I t-thought it was a love potion.”

“A love potion?”

“Yes. My mother made them for the people in the village all the time. I heard her talking to Rozamond and telling her she was making one for my father. She said it would fix him. So I thought she meant it would fix him, so she could love him again. I knew she used to love him, but she stopped. They argued all the time.”

“But that’s not how love potions work, Leo. It would have been your father who would have been affected and not your mother. The one who took it is the one who falls in love.”

“I was only ten. I got mixed up, I guess. I didn’t always listen closely. I thought if I took it instead of my father, it might fix me so she could learn to love me.”

“Oh baby,” I said, hugging him to me. “And it turned you into Banshira instead.”

“Yes,” he wailed and buried his face against my neck, sobbing. I held him a long time, until he finally fell asleep and then eased him down beside me. I opened my cape and wrapped us both up in it and settled down to sleep.

The idea that he’d taken what he thought was a love potion trying to get his mother to love him was heartbreaking, and though I knew how cold Alfrid’s entire family could be, I couldn’t imagine anyone treating Leo so badly. Maybe I didn’t want to imagine it.

Love potions could be nasty things and were best left strictly alone. I remember my lessons about them from my teachers long ago when I was first learning magic. Once a love potion wore off, the feelings of love could rebound violently and turned to hatred. And once any feelings of love were dead, they could never be rekindled. Not by a witch or by anyone else. Love spells were powerful and could even turn deadly. Not only that, but if a person were already in love with someone else, then it wouldn’t work on them at all. It didn’t even work that well. Creating true love, for example, was impossible, because true love couldn’t be made to happen. Nor could it be stopped once it had already taken hold. We loved who we loved, and there was no magic more mysterious or powerful in the universe.

Aside from all that, I wondered why on earth this Lady Rowena had been making a potion to turn her husband into a monster—a beast. He was the father of her children. And Leo said Rozamond was helping her, but could he have gotten everything all mixed up and wrong? The two women had a strong resemblance to each other. Was it Rozamond who had given him the potion?

Another question I had was why hadn’t they kept looking for Leo after the catastrophe that had befallen him? If it had been my son, I would have never stopped searching for him. Not ever.

Could Rowena have made it right by providing some kind of antidote? If so, why hadn’t she? There were things here that I didn’t understand, and I hated mysteries.

I fell asleep still thinking of them and turning them over and over in my head, and I must have been more tired than I thought, because I allowed a stranger to walk right up on us as we lay sleeping early the next morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise.

I only awoke when someone put the tip of their boot none too gently against my hip.

“You there!” said a gruff voice. “Wake up! You’re trespassing.”

I jumped to my feet quickly and had my sword out brandishing it over the other man’s head with the tip of my dagger under his chin almost before he could cry out. His face blanched with fear.

“Who the fuck are you?” he managed as I concentrated on waking up fully and assessing my surroundings. And getting my eyes open all the way. I was mortified that I had allowed someone to sneak up on me before I woke up. I really was getting soft.

Aware that Leo was awake beside me and making soft, growling noises at the visitor, I made a greater effort.

“I could ask you the same thing, sir. Who the fuck are you?” I roared back at him.

“I’m the caretaker of this house, John Trask.”

“I see,” I said, pulling my dagger away a few inches. “I’m Lord Asher, and a representative of the king. This is His Majesty’s property.”

“Oh yes, of course, sir,” he said, trying to bow. “Excuse me, but I had no way of knowing—no one told us you’d be coming, Your Lordship.”

“You think the king owes you explanations?” I replied, being extra arrogant and unpleasant, because he had frightened me a bit, and I was embarrassed, though that was no real excuse. Leo was crouching beside me, holding onto my leg with one hand and to his dagger with the other, and I was both proud of him and a bit appalled at how bloodthirsty he was. He could be a fierce, little thing.

“Put your weapon away, love. This man works here.” He did as I asked, giving Trask a long, unpleasant look.

“I expected the house to be occupied by the caretaker,” I said, though that was a lie. I expected no such thing after talking to the man in the village. But I was trying to brazen this out.

The man rolled his eyes a bit. “Oh no, sir. No one stays overnight in the manor. It’s haunted, you know.”

“Haunted? Don’t be ridiculous. There are no such things as ghosts.”

He looked up at me, and I could see how torn he was between arguing back that there were indeed things haunting the manor and not wanting to dispute my word, especially considering I still held weapons.

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