Page 14 of All's Fair in Love and Magic

She made a sound of frustration, but the scent of her desire softened it. “Show me the wards. If I’m going to lose my mind to your fucking mating process, I need to get to work.”

“Alright, let’s go.”

four

SAGE

I foughtlike hell to ignore the slickness between my thighs as I followed Liam through the resort.

He gave the world’s least informative tour as we went. When we passed a monstrous pool connected to a lazy river that seemed to wind around the entire resort, he waved toward it with a grunt of, “pool”. When we passed a restaurant, he gestured toward it with another one-word label.

I wasn’t even sure where we were going, but as long as I wasn’t trapped in a bedroom with him while he whispered dirty words in my ear, I was in better shape than I had been.

And what was with him switching my laundry for me?

Yeah, I appreciated it, but that was weird. Wasn’t it?

Movies and TV shows were really letting me down as far as teaching me what to expect from a man.

Idefinitelyhadn’t expected anything he’d whispered in my ear.

Liam gestured toward the beach as we passed it, and I watched a group of supernaturals surfing just past it.

I’d never tried surfing before. I’d never even been to the beach before, and I was itching to take a shoeless walk on the sand just to see what it felt like.

Instead, I followed Liam down a paved trail that led through an overgrown jungle.

A few minutes down the trail, Liam stopped at a large wood and metal bench that faced directly into a cluster of a bushes. He waved me after him as he went around it and took a seat.

I was slightly suspicious, but followed anyway.

When I sat down, the tingle of magic washed over my skin, and I realized why he’d stopped there.

We had reached the wards’ anchor. The spot wouldn’t mean anything to anyone who wasn’t a witch, but an anchor was basically the physical location for the magic a witch created. A hearty plant was usually a good place to put an anchor, and it was safe to say one of them in the cluster in front of me was doing that job.

“I might not be able to repair the wards,” I warned Liam. “There’s a good chance I’ll need to rebuild them from scratch in my own way. It’ll depend on what the other witch did, how she did it, and whether or not I can repair her magic.”

“I don’t care how it’s done. The magic’s so weak at this point, I’m barely holding it together.”

I focused on the shimmering spot just in front of us that anchored the wards, and studied it.

Within the blazing fireball that was Liam’s magic, I could see an intricate web of glittering witch spells in the shape of a sphereabout the size of someone’s head. The scents of a dozen different plants melded with the power, and blood tangled with it.

He wasn’t kidding about having a blood witch in the past.

Most of the spells looked like very specific, altered forms of complicated magic.

“These are really complex. Who was your last blood witch?” My forehead was creased as I tried to visually separate the parts, to figure out where I should even start.

“My mother. She was well-known as one of the world’s best spell witches. No one realized she was using blood magic until I was born. By the time I came, she was hidden safely within these wards.”

My eyebrows lifted. “She made the resort to give you both a safe place to live?”

He nodded. “We lasted about a century here before her old coven managed to pay someone inside to kill her. I’ve been holding the wards together for the last century and a half myself, but they’ve been breaking down since she passed.”

No wonder they were failing.

That was an insanely long time for someone who wasn’t a witch to maintain magic. Especially magic as complicated as what I was looking at.

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