Lover’s Knot hadn’t been outlawed for the reason everyone thought. That had been a cover story to hide the truth. Because, yes, the spell allowed two magic users to share power, and yes, if one of those died, they both did. But that had rarely happened.
The Senate—the main users of the spell in their old wars—had guarded the witches they paired with their vampires carefully. A few were killed anyway, in surprise attacks, but it was damned few. They knew the risks, and they accounted for them.
So, what did happen? The truth was simpler: the spell worked a little too well. Like Mircea and I had discovered, it did more than allow people to simply share power. It started to blend it, to morph it, to grow it exponentially. In some pairings, that only resulted in the war machines the Senate had hoped for. But in others . . .
In others, they got way more than they bargained for. Because if there’s one thing vampires understand, it’s power. And some of them became inventive, adding not one witch into the spell, but two or three or more, each with different specialties. In doing so, they increased their risk, but also their reward, getting so powerful that they rivalled the consul in strength, despite being far younger.
One or the other of them would probably have replaced her, but she didn’t give them the chance. She acted swiftly and decisively, having their witches murdered in daytime while the vampires were asleep, and thus taking them out, too. And then she burned every copy of Lover’s Knot that she could find, and persuaded the Circle to do likewise, because they didn’t want hundreds of uber vampires walking around any more than she did. But they kept a carefully locked down version of the story in their library, nonetheless, just in case the vampires ever tried to use the spell to gain an advantage over them.
“But there’s more,” Rhea said, while I struggled to absorb all that. “We think that Jonathan—who rediscovered the spell first and thus had more time with it—asked himself a question. What would happen if, instead of a vampire and a witch or two, the spell combined the powers of others? Others who were even stronger?”
“Like a first level master, a demon prince, and a demi-goddess,” the librarian added breathlessly. “What would happen then?”
“What would happen then?” I asked, watching lightning arc between my fingers. And being pretty sure I already knew.
“You told me once that you and Mage Pritkin could, er, make a great deal of power between you,” Rhea said, blushing a little. “That it was how you defeated Ares.”
“Yes.”
“But you also said that you couldn’t hold onto it. That it was too much, all at once, for either of you to handle. But what if you didn’t have to? What if you were in a spell that shared power with a third party, one who himself was linked to hundreds, perhaps thousands of other powerful beings? Ones with the ability to store energy and feed it back to him when needed?”
I looked up at her, and realized that Pritkin and Mircea had joined us at some point. Pritkin was looking like a savage in nothing but a pair of bloody boxers and a tunic he must have stripped off a fey. Mircea, on the other hand, was pristine, in a dark suit without so much as a speck of blood anywhere, despite the fact that fey blood does not nourish a vampire.
But eating your enemies does.
I didn’t bother to ask if the fey were all dead. They wouldn’t be back here, otherwise. And that meant what? A hundred fey soldiers dead in a few minutes?
I looked up at the portal.
“Then why did we have no power before, when we first arrived?” I asked, staring at the battle. “I couldn’t do anything then.”
“I couldn’t, either,” Pritkin said. “I was completely drained. It all went to him, every drop of it, even my own damned power.”
He looked at Mircea, who nodded politely, as if they had conversations like this every day. They hated each other, but this this was no ordinary day, and the rules didn’t apply here. None of them did.
“I absorbed it,” Mircea agreed. “But did not realize it at the time. My mind was gone, overwrought by some power the dar
k mage possessed. I could not release anything back to you, or even use it myself.”
“How did you absorb it at all?” I asked. “You don’t have a family in this era; you told me so yourself—”
“This is not the fifteenth century, dulcea?a. It is the eighteenth. I know it is hard to tell,” he glanced around at the timeless landscape. “Things do not change in this part of the world as fast as in some others. But it is nonetheless true. I came back here for—but that can wait. The point is, your acolyte followed me—”
“Gertie was going to kill him,” Rhea broke in. “As she had promised she would if he time skipped again. But I persuaded her to let me come first, to see if I could talk sense to him. But I really wanted to see you. I knew you’d come looking for him, and if I took Eliza—this is Eliza, by the way—”
The librarian actually got up in order to curtsy.
I stared at her.
She blinked and slowly sank back down.
“—so that we could tell you about the spell. And the fact that Jonathan had realized that Lord Mircea was the missing component it needed. His extensive family provides a sort of . . . of battery, to store all the power that the other part of your trine creates.”
“There must be three,” I murmured. Jonathan had seen the danger, and had tried to keep me from being able to see it too. But he’d failed.
And now I knew.
Rhea nodded. “I think he thought that, together, the three of you, with the Pythian power magnified many times over and your gifts combined, well . . . I know it sounds crazy, but I think he may have believed—”