Page 37 of Adepts and Alchemists

“What happens if we can’t?” Marty asked.

“I blow up in the backseat.”

Chapter Eighteen

Indigo

“What do you mean, you can’t tell me?” I asked, fingers tightening around the edge of the table until the wood creaked.

GG glowered at the offending hand until I released her antique furniture. It was a struggle not to go full kelpie and upend the fish tank across the room. But giving in to the destructive impulse to drown undeserving gypsies would undermine my promise to my new high witch. I wasn’t sure Wanda and I would ever see eye-to-eye, but I owed her better than that.

And it would probably upset the boy and his mother too. Pity.

“I mean I can only tell you the things your mother entrusted tomycare,” GG continued. “If you want the tale, you’re going to have to uncover it for yourself in her projects and ciphers.”

“I’ve tried that already,” I grumbled. “Can you tell me what you do know about Mother’s association with Murrain?”

She cocked her head to the side. “I don’t know much about what happened in the years between her meeting Murrain and her return. And what I do know… well, your mother bound me not to tell you—with her witchcraft.”

“Why would she have done that?” I demanded.

“Because the information was too dangerous for everyone involved,” GG answered. Then she gave me a consolation prize smile. “You’ll have to work it out on your own, Indigo. I can’t spoon-feed you the answers.”

I leaned back in my chair, finally releasing my grip on the coffee table. The ritual that Maverick had finally worked out with the elder gypsy didn’t require the backing of the full coven. Imani, Betanya, and Olga were taking turns monitoring the defenses while the rest of us did the heavy lifting.

“Bound,” I repeated softly, more to myself than to her.

A binding of the sort GG was describing was rare and used only to guard the blackest of secrets. Wrapping dark magic and painful curses around the truth to obfuscate it wasn’t worth the effort otherwise. Mother had expanded the frontiers of bloody, violent, and illegal magic and had never once bound me from sharing word of it. That meant whatever she’d found worthy of guarding had to be something truly ugly.

“Why?” I asked at last. “Why bind you? You’re an alchemist. Murrain wouldn’t have killed you for whatever knowledge she was trying to hide.”

GG’s eyes were a similar shade to Poppy’s. The lines around them were far more pronounced, especially when she gave you a disapproving once-over. “I suspect that’s exactly the reason. Murrain wouldn’t kill me, he’dkeepme, and with me any woman in my line who showed any real talent. Your mother and I may have disagreed on a great deal, but family wasn’t one of them.” She shrugged then. “If I couldn’t speak the truth aloud, I couldn’t betray it to anyone.”

And GG would have remained an unimportant footnote in my mother’s life and journals if not for me. If I hadn’t taken up with the only man frightening enough to make Mother run, this woman would never have needed to fear the enigmatic monster named Murrain ever again.

I crossed my arms over my chest, glowering down at the bathing suit I’d been wrestled into a few minutes before. It was an older one-piece that GG said belonged to her daughter, Poppy’s mother. The modest navy number was a relief when I considered the alternative. I was sure GG’s swimwear was an old-school bathing costume, complete with a hat, and I couldn’t pull off a look that antiquated... again. I’d been a spritely seventy-something the last time something like that had been in vogue.

“I still don’t see why I have to be sitting in a kiddie pool to make this work,” I grumbled to no one in particular. “I’m beginning to think this is some kind of sick inter-species schadenfreude setup I’m walking into.”

It was the only explanation I could think of off the top of my head. Why else was I being put into a skintight outfit and dunked into suspicious substances if not for the entertainment of all involved? I understood there was some kind of alchemy involved, but surely things wouldn’t get so wet that I had to prepare by wearing the least sexy swimwear man had ever devised? In front of a blood warlock, a gypsy, and her son, no less?

“Because I don’t have enough time to fill anything larger,” GG said with a dry smile. “I did what I could with what I had on hand. I doubt anyone else could give you a supercharged lipid bath on short notice.”

“Lipid?” I echoed. “As in, fat?”

“In this case, the consistency is more like pudding, but yes. It’s the best medium I have for a fertility ritual. It will save that young man the necessary energy if he only has to do half the heavy lifting.”

“Fertility ritual?” I asked, frowning.

GG nodded. “Constructing a body is difficult work, even when you’re doing it the traditional way.”

“But why fertility?”

She shrugged. “We’re essentially rebirthing Lydia, aren’t we?”

“I guess so.”

GG continued. “The incubus can provide the spark of life. Poppy, Finn, and I will keep the energy from pouring outward. You have the most difficult portion to perform.”