Page 60 of The Water Witch (Fairwick Chronicles 2)

I flipped the page and saw that the next several pages were blank. Then I flipped back to what Wheelock called the author indemnity icon. It was a tiny picture of a closed book surrounded by a spoked circle. Small print below it explained that by touching the icon I agreed to the terms stipulated above and that I would not hold the author responsible for any mishaps attached to the use of the following wards and spells. There was some even smaller print below that I would have had to get a magnifying glass to read, but I was impatient to find out about these wards of disguise. Pressing the icon was like checking the “Agree to Terms” box on the internet, I figured. Whoever read the full text?

I touched my finger to the icon. The spoked wheel turned; the book shimmered and opened. A stream of text flew out and spilled down the page. Pages flipped so that the text could continue filling up the empty sheets. When the blank sectionfilled, the pages automatically flipped back to the beginning of the section.

Cool, I thought.Who needs a Kindle?

Twenty minutes later I understood why Wheelock had protected himself against the retribution of those deceived by these spells. The disguise wards he described could be used to alter a person’s face and body so thoroughly that husbands were unable to recognize wives and mothers didn’t know their own children. They could be used to impersonate another person—Merlin had given Uther Pendragon such a ward to make him assume the shape of Gorlois, Ygraine’s husband, so that he could lie with her and conceive Arthur—and induce emotional states of thralldom. Here Wheelock referred the reader to the section on sex, hinting that disguise wards were often used in sexual role-playing games.

Ew. In my dream Liam had shown me how to use wards to increase sexual pleasure, but the idea of using the wards to assume other shapes—objects of fantasy and desire—struck me as…well,icky. But I supposed if they were used between consenting adults there was nothing really wrong with it.

Wheelock was clear, though, that cases in which one witch deceived another into having sex while under the influence of disguise wards constituted rape.

Most disturbing, he wrote,are the cases in which an otherworldly creature uses disguise wards to pretend to be human in order to seduce a human. Such stratagems have been used by Nephilim, succubi, incubi…

If Duncan were the incubus, why would he be using wards to disguise himself? When the incubus had incarnated as Liam, he hadn’t needed wards.

Reading farther, I came upon a possible answer:

Wards are often employed in order to fool a practiced witch.

Perhaps the wards were necessary now that I was coming into my power. But how then could I determine if Duncan was the incubus?

There is a way to tell if a witch has been deceived by an incubus. Anytime a witch comes into contact with a warded disguise her own wards will be activated.

I thought of how my wards had flared when Duncan touched me. I continued reading, looking desperately for an explanation for how I felt but finding no resolution of this conflict between desire and repulsion. What was wrong with me?

One of these times Adelaide is going to notice, my father had said. And my mother had replied,There’s nothing to notice. She’s been warded.

Had my parents warded my power in order to hide it from my grandmother?

I opened Wheelock again and went back to the section on disguise wards. I found what I was looking for in a footnote at the bottom of the last page:

Wards have also been used to disguise a witch’s power, most often when a witch is young and may not be able to defend herself because her powers are not fully developed. If the wards are not removed at adolescence, the young witch may not even recognize her own power. Such a witch, rendered powerless by wards, is sometimes known as a Water Witch.

I stared at the footnote until the print grew blurry—at first, I thought, because of the tears in my eyes, but then I realized it was because the print was actually fading. Apparently there was a time limit to the magically produced text. As the words vanished I recalled that Duncan had said there were three definitions of a water witch, but he’d only told me two ofthem. Had he deliberately left out the third because he knew it applied to me—thatIwas a water witch?

I turned to the section on dissolving wards. There was a way that I could both undo the wards that had been placed on meandthe ones Duncan was using to disguise himself. If I loved him, the minute the wards came off, he would become human.

But if I unmasked my incubus and I did not love him, he would be destroyed.

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