Page 11 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

Poppy cast a nervous look in my direction. Perhaps she had correctly intuited that it wouldn’t matter to me one bit what I would have to do to stop this from coming to pass. Or how much risk I would take.

I decided, then and there, that even if it got me killed in the process, even if I had to go full-dark, no stars, I would do anything I had to do—anything at all—to protect Bryan.

Ethan shot me a worried look too, as though he was having the same realization as Poppy. He grimaced at whatever he saw in my expression. He and Nathaniel traded a dark look before the vampire king put a hand on Ethan’s back. The touch seemed to steady Ethan because his voice was even and mild when he replied.

“Yes. Show us everything you know about how, when, and why Bryan is killed.”

CHAPTER THREE || BRYAN

The crumbling book of necromantic spells stood on the breakfast bar in front of me, open to the page about warding away the various different types of ghosts. I had to admit, I was proud of myself. It had taken me about an hour of prep time, but I had mixed ordinary table salt with a small amount of holy water to create a compound the book referred to as ‘blessed salts.’ Then I’d mixed the blessed salts with iron filings and used the resulting blend to create what was an admittedly lopsided circle around the breakfast bar I stood at. No ghost—regardless of what type—could cross the boundary of the circle in order to get at me.

Allegedly. According to a sketchy book of necromantic spells I had, erm—borrowed—from Tobias’s coven archives.

But still.

I was here. I was doing the thing.

I was at the house at the end of Pickery Road, where the murder had taken place last week. I had expected it to still be an active crime scene, with law enforcement and lab techs coming and going. But the house had been completely dark and quiet when I had parked one street down and trudged through the narrow pathways between houses, picked the lock on the back door, and let myself in.

My goal was pretty simple: I needed to figure out exactly what kind of ghost I was dealing with so I could banish it properly. According to the book of necromancy I knew that there were many types of ghosts capable of killing a person and, because nothing is ever easy, they each required special tactics in order to banish them properly.

For instance, revenants and wraiths manifested similarly, but left different markings on their victims. And while wraiths could be dispatched by piercing them with an iron weapon that had been coated with a blessed substance, like holy water, doing that to a revenant would just piss them off. Revenants required a sharpened oak stake coated in blessed venom, which was snake venom mixed with a dash of holy water and prayed over, which would do exactly nothing to a wraith.

There were other types of ghosts, too. Poltergeists, for example, were easily hypnotized by music and movement. It was impossible to destroy them, though. Instead, they needed to be trapped inside of an object enchanted for the sole purpose of imprisoning ghosts. I hoped I wasn’t dealing with a poltergeist, because if I was, I had no idea how I’d go about trapping a spirit and the book I had was a little sketchy on the details of how to create an appropriate housing object to do it with. Probably because it required an experienced witch to create it.

Or an experienced warlock.

No, I reminded myself for the umpteenth time. I gritted my teeth against the sudden pang of longing that probably would have caused my heart to go all pitter-pat, provided it could still beat.

I absolutely, positively, in no way, shape, or form, was going to call Tobias for help.

You’re doing this all on your own, I told myself firmly. And you’re doing a super good job of it already.

I had even cut my own palm to draw a bit of blood so that I could sketch a few of the manifesting sigils from the spell book around the outer edge of my protective circle, which was supposed to attract the spirits of the dead and give them the power to manifest physically, which was helpful if I wanted to discover the spirit’s nature. It was also necessary for the spirit to be in corporeal form to dispatch it properly.

Supposedly, the sigils would work even if you didn’t possess the ability to cast spells. An experienced warlock could make them out of anything, but for the rest of us, they had to be drawn in blood.

I didn’t need Tobias, or anyone else. I was going to get this spirit to show itself to me so I could figure out what type of entity I was dealing with. Then I’d return, fully prepared to fight it.

Simple. Easy. How hard could any of this even be?

Though, as the afternoon turned into evening, it became clear to me that the ghost didn’t agree with my plan, because it was a total no-show.

I should have at least brought a book. One that I actually wanted to read. Or at least some scrap paper to draw on. When I’d been mortal, I’d been a fair artist, though it had never been more than a hobby for me. Still, I hadn’t considered how boring staking out a ghost would be, but I was getting ready to tear out my own hair.

The last thing I wanted was a bunch of uninterrupted time to think.

For the tenth time, I frowned down at the symbols on the crumbling parchment page opened before me, trying to figure out if I had drawn the manifesting sigils incorrectly.

And yet again, I had to conclude that they seemed correct to me.

Then my cell phone rang.

Tobias, yet again. He had called me at least a dozen times in the last twenty-four hours. He’d left me several long voicemail messages, which I hadn’t listened to. He’d also sent me a dozen more text messages I hadn’t opened.

Though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t the teeniest bit tempted to answer it, just to hear his steady and reassuring voice, I let it ring. I had no idea why he was calling out of the blue like this, but I also knew it didn’t matter. It wasn’t going to help either one of us to give him any ideas that a relationship was even remotely possible.

The phone stopped ringing and I let out a sigh of relief.

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