Page 67 of To Crave Truly

“So, you stole the lapis lunae,” I said to Lori who blanched a little at my words.

“Yes. I had to in order to keep Jasper safe.” She reached out and wrapped her hand around his. “I couldn’t tell you because Selene had cast a Silencing Spell on Iver and me.”

“Do you know what he wants to do with it?” I asked.

She nodded. “He intends to use it on the Blood Moon to destroy the Underworld and kill Lucifer. It was Mordecai who has syphoned the witches magic and he’s using Selene to store it until he needs it.”

Fenris leant forwards, his elbows resting on his knees. “But only a Celestial can strip power so that begs the question, who is working with Mordecai? Camael?”

“I didn’t see any Celestials in Mordecai’s lair,” Jasper added. “But I was kept in the same room for most of the time I was there.”

“Doesn’t mean he isn’t communicating with one somehow,” I added. “What about Iver?”

“He stayed when Jasper and I escaped,” Lori said, biting her bottom lip. “I think he’s trying to be our eyes and ears down there.”

“Do you trust him?” Cassian asked, his mouth ridiculously close to her ear. I mean, was that really necessary? And there I went almost growling again.

“Yes,” she replied with a nod.

“Then we do too.”

What was happening here? Since when was Cassian, of all people, so trusting?

“Are you okay, Alec? Your face is all…” Lori made a circling motion with her finger, “…confused.”

I snapped out of it. “Just adjusting to all this. Anyway, moving back to the problems at hand. It’s only two days until the Blood Moon and we need to figure out where he’s going to be.”

“Do we?” Saskia asked, her brows drawn down in a frown.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Saskia’s eyes blazed with her excitement, her red curls bouncing around her face. “Well, think about it. Mordecai needs Lori and he’s her Sire now. I’m pretty sure he will just mind call her or something.”

“Mind call her?” Jasper scoffed. “You know that’s not a thing, right?”

“I don’t,” Lori mused, snuggling back into Cassian, “seems a pretty accurate description to me.”

“Is it possible?” I asked, looking at Jasper.

He cocked his head to one side. “Yes. Sires have the ability to communicate telepathically with their sirelings. It’s entirely possible that Mordecai will send her a vision or a location of where he wants her to be.”

“Okay, so what, we just sit around and wait?” Lori asked, her voice and shoulders tense.

“No,” I replied firmly. “I’ve sent for Edwin to give you a crash course in being a Shadow Mage.” Her ears perked up at that. We’d been remiss in not training her mage abilities and my theory was, that if she could control every part of her, she’d be able to unite all the elements that made up the Triune. At the moment, it seemed like she was acting as one part or another, never as the three sides of her altogether. I believed that was the key to saving her and defeating Mordecai. “The rest of us will resume training, and I am going to take a visit to the Witch Queen. I want to look her in the eye to ask her how she feels about the sacrifice of her witches.”

Violette had told me at the Yule Ball that the sacrifice of a few outweighed the loss of the whole. Even now, those words still haunted me. I’d seen the devastation the mages had caused when stealing the witches and I wanted to know if Violette knew what Mordecai’s plans were all along. I wanted her to look me in the eye and tell me that she knew what she was doing. And then, I was going to invoke the abdicare legem. The abdication law. That bitch was going down.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Lori

Alec was behaving strangely. I hadn’t been around him in a while, and I didn’t know if this was his new normal or if something was wrong. He was moody and short-tempered. I assumed it was because he’d only been with his heart for a short while and he was still learning to control his emotions after being without them for so long. It felt like it was me though. Had I done something to upset him? He kept looking at me with a bitterness in his honey-coloured eyes and it hurt that I might have put it there.

I also wasn’t sure about this crusade to see the Witch Queen. She was the one who’d stolen his heart in the first place. Surely that kind of history was going to cloud his judgement where she was concerned.

Cassian nuzzled the soft spot below my ear, distracting me from my thoughts.

“You’re so tense, princess.” He nipped the skin and I shivered against him.

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