Page 1 of Destiny of the Dragons

Mia stared at the crumpled piece of paper, her heartbeat speeding up.

Calm down, she told herself.It’s probably another dead end.

She had the loopy cursive handwriting memorized: a simple, single sentence:C spellbook, blood reading, tarot, etc.

She’d found a box of written receipts for a private library at the Penderhurst estate sale. They were in a cardboard box, the sort her grandma used to store her recipe cards. She found the receipt mixed in with regular receipts for a used bookstore now gone out of business, grocery lists, and bits of common spell formulas.

It gave her pause, and Mia learned a long time ago to listen to her gut. Her parents dragged her to estate sales since before she was old enough to walk. She’d been trained to recognize items on sight, and been doing estate sales by herself since she was sixteen.

Her mother was ruthless.

Anything that didn’t have magical or resale value, she didn’t touch. Her father was the same way.

Mia loved going to estate sales, loved the sneak peek into other people’s lives. She pretended she would find her family’s lost spellbook. She fantasized about it so often, it was almost like a memory, a future that never was. She would wander around the dusty old books, idling, trailing her hands over the covers. The texture of book covers never failed to give her joy.

She would feel a tingle when touching a particularly old book. She’d pause, not knowing why, and pick it up.

When Mia opened the book, it would have the Caravaggio name on the title page, in old cursive writing. Her ancestor from hundreds of years ago started the spellbook that became her family’s relic.

At first she would be shocked, doubtful. But flipping through the pages would reveal the family spells she’d learned as a little girl, and then as she leafed further into the book, the bigger spells. The harder ones Mia hadn’t mastered to this day, like Second Sight.

And then, in the very back, was her House spell. The Telling of Blood. The blood magic they were so well known and feared for.

Mia would feel light headed with glee. Here was her leverage, finally.

When Mia was younger the fantasy ended with haggling the man down to a lower price for something in such poor repair, and then taking it to her parents. Mother would scowl at the interruption. Father wouldn’t even look up from his ledgers. But Mia would hold up their family’s spellbook, taken from them over a century ago, and they would smile at her.

Tell her she’d done a good job.

Tell her they were proud of her.

It wasn’t until Mia was a teenager that she realized the hard truth: her parents would never be proud of her. They would never actually love her, she was just a tool in their arsenal.

When that day came, her fantasy changed. She would walk into the study with cold purpose. She’d lift her chin, and tell them she was out.

Out of the family. Done with their dirty work. If they tried to blackmail her, she would tell everyone what dirty work they had been up to. It was one thing to use blood magic to further your House. It was another thing entirely to get caught.

In exchange for the spellbook Mia and her sister Charlotte would have their freedom.

Mia sighed, looking at the yellowed receipt again. She hadn’t fantasized about finding her family’s spellbook in years. Too many dead ends. Too much hope throttled at the end of the search.

But this receipt felt like a real lead, the most concrete one since one of her contacts tipped her off to a secret cache of spellbooks three years ago.

The capital letter C could be Caravaggio. It could have been Cupcake, too, but the description is what made her break out in a clammy sweat. The Caravaggios spent centuries making a name for themselves as seers. Crystals, runes, sigils, Tarot, the methods varied, but people came to them to consult.

As her mother liked to remind her, Caravaggio witches had been consultants for kings and queens for hundreds of years. When the monarchies fell, her family switched to powerful businessmen, leaders of state and countries.

But without their spellbook, they were unable to perform the most powerful spells. Their influence and power was dwindling, and her relatives scrambled to fill those gaps.

Blood magic had been part of their abilities, alongside the crystals and runes, but lately her parents relied on it.

And for more than just scrying the future.

Mia shivered, thinking about the latest blood magic her mother expected her to perform.

No, her family wouldn’t let her go. She was too valuable, too naturally talented with the forbidden manipulation of a person’s blood.

If she could find the spellbook, they wouldn’t need her anymore. They could do the damn spells themselves.

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