Page 41 of Bonds of Magic (Vesperwood Academy: Incubus #3)

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the tree trunks on the far side of the cairn shimmered. The air above the cairn began to flicker, then solidify. A shape appeared, gaining color and opacity. One second it was still swirling lights, and the next, a…spirit…hung in the air above the cairn.

I didn’t know what else to call the being that I saw.

They were about the size of a housecat, but stood erect on two legs.

They appeared to have wings growing out of their back.

There might have been the suggestion of a face, but the spirit was fluid, as if made from golden flame. No part held steady for long.

“Who has called me?” the spirit asked. Their voice was surprisingly deep for such a small creature.

“I have.” Hans stepped forward. He spoke portentously, like he was addressing an audience of thousands instead of one.

“And who are you, mortal?” asked the spirit. They flickered, and their wings disappeared, but a tail appeared instead, a long, coiled cable of flame.

“Hans Stahl,” Hans said, still attempting to sound older and wiser than he was. “Witch and Harvester. Invoker of the ancient magics. Caller of the Earth Spirit Loshenrill.”

“Ancient magics,” said the spirit, which I figured was probably Loshenrill.

If I didn’t know better, I would have said they sounded sarcastic. Did elemental spirits understand sarcasm?

“And which ancient magics do you control?” they asked Hans.

“The storm of the sea. The fires of the deep. The call of the void that holds you in its grasp. I have tapped the heart of the forest. I have set the stones of binding. I call on you to do my bidding.”

His voice was still pompous, but a thread of doubt had crept in.

The spirit, which had lost their tail and flickered into something vaguely fish-shaped, with fins and gills, seemed to notice too.

“And what would you bid me do?” they asked. Their voice was still too deep for such a small, ephemeral creature, and they didn’t sound the least bit concerned about being bound to the heart of the forest, or whatever Hans had done.

“Give me your power,” Hans said haughtily. “As a familiar to its master, you will aid me in all my endeavors, for I have bound you to my will and made you mine.”

“Yours?” the spirit said. They took the shape of a bird now, but with a mermaid’s tail. “You would make me yours , human?”

“I would,” Hans repeated, but his arrogance was slipping. “Would, and have. You are fettered to my body, your magic tethered to mine, for as long as the stones of binding remain.”

“These?” the spirit said. They were a sphinx now—a very small sphinx—and they reached down and nudged one of the stones at the top of the cairn with a careless paw. The stone rocked back and forth before going still.

“I built the stones of binding,” Hans repeated, but there was no doubt about it now, he was uneasy. “I tapped the heart of the forest. You must serve me.”

“Must I?” The spirit looked like a garden-variety rabbit now, but they still carried an air of menace. “For as long as the stones of binding remain? I see. Then you must hope nothing disorders them. Like this.”

They thumped a large foot on the cairn, and a smooth gray stone the size of my fist rolled off the top and down to the ground.

Hans stared at the stone in shock, then looked back up at the spirit, which was now a griffin.

“You can’t do that,” he said, appalled. “You’re not supposed to be able to touch those after I—”

“After you invoked the ancient magics?” the spirit said. “And yet I did. How curious, human. It would seem you did something wrong.”

“I’m not merely a human.” Hans stamped his foot on the forest floor. “I’m a witch. A Harvester, and I enacted the ritual properly. I know I did. I followed everything the book said and—”

“Some magics cannot be learned from books alone .”

The spirit’s voice boomed through the forest. It was so loud that I moved for the first time in minutes, clapping my hands to my ears. Not that it did much good. I heard the next words just as clearly.

“ Some magics are not meant for mortal hands. And even witches can burn. ”

As the voice reverberated, the spirit cycled through shapes more rapidly than I could make sense of. It grew and grew, and when it touched the band of colored lights encircling it, bright white light flared through the clearing. It seared my eyes, and I clamped them shut against the painful glare.

A rumble ran through the forest, and I struggled to keep my balance. I wrapped my arms around the tree I was hiding behind and held on as the world tipped on its axis. I felt violently seasick. Finally, the blinding white light disappeared, and the earth settled.

When I opened my eyes, I had to blink against the afterimage of the light.

The cairn of stones had fallen apart, and the colored lights were gone.

Only the first light that Hans had cast remained, but it was dimmer than before.

The spirit was nowhere to be seen, and Hans knelt before the broken stones, holding his head in his hands.

Hands that were charred, as though he had stuck them in a fire. He whimpered softly.

Goddammit. I wished I’d never followed him here. I didn’t consider Hans a friend, but I couldn’t leave him here in this state.

“Hans,” I said as I walked forward to meet him. “Hans, are you okay? What other parts of you got burned?”

He rocked back and forth, not answering.

“Hans,” I said, louder this time. “Where else were you hurt?”

Again, he didn’t answer. He didn’t seem to have even heard me. I knelt down next to him and took his hands—as gently as possible—away from his face. He looked up in confusion, like I’d come out of nowhere. I was relieved to see that his face was unscathed—except for one eye.

Shit. It looked bad. His right eye was…well, it wasn’t . It didn’t exist anymore. The eyebrow was there, the socket was intact, but his eyelid and eyeball were an oozing mass of blackened pus.

I was thankful I had a strong stomach. I did a quick search of the rest of his body, checking for obvious wounds, but aside from his hands and eye, he appeared perfectly healthy.

That was a big aside, though. Hans definitely needed medical attention.

“Come on,” I said, sliding my hands under his arms and tugging him to his feet. “We need to get you back to the manor.”

“I didn’t—were you—why are you here?” he stammered as I slid his arm over my shoulders and began walking him back through the forest. His legs were fine, but I didn’t trust him to walk very well with the pain he must be in.

“I thought I heard a bear,” I said, keeping my attention focused on walking. One of us had to.

Dammit, why had I followed him out here? I pressed my lips in a hard line. I wasn’t going to get anything useful out of him now.

Was it my imagination, or did I hear more noises in the woods? More cracking sticks and shuffling feet, but from farther back in the trees?

I shook my head. Maybe I was imagining it and maybe I wasn’t, but it didn’t change what I needed to do right now, which was to keep Hans from collapsing before we got inside. Our progress was slow, though.

After another minute of quiet whimpers, Hans mumbled, “It was supposed to work.”

“What was?” I asked, shooting a glance at him. Sticky black ooze was dripping down his cheek from his eye socket.

“The spell,” he moaned. “I’m sure I did it right. But how could it—what went wrong?”

“You did a spell to bind that spirit to you?” I couldn’t keep the contempt out of my voice. I wasn’t a fan of slavery, of any kind.

“It was supposed to work,” he repeated. “It took weeks to set up. I was so caref—ahh!” He broke off in pain as he stumbled over a tree root.

Weeks to set up . That could explain what Teresa meant, if Hans had been going out to the woods multiple times to prepare for this ritual. That cairn would have taken time to build.

“Why did you want to bind that spirit?” I asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Hans’s tone was scathing, but his words turned into a moan as he stumbled again. He braced his hand on a tree trunk, and I stopped walking, giving him a moment to catch his breath. I wondered how he wasn’t crying in pain from touching his raw and bleeding hands to that tree.

“Evidently not.”

He sighed. “Power. I did it for power.”

“You have power.” I pulled him away from the tree roughly. We didn’t have time to waste. He needed help, and quickly.

“Not enough,” he whispered. “Not enough for anyone here to take me seriously.”

I was concentrating on picking a clear path for our feet, and not jostling him too hard, but this made me look up in confusion.

“People take you seriously,” I told him. “You’re a wardkeeper for God’s sake.”

“Grunt work,” Hans whined. “No one else in Harvest wanted it.”

“Grunt work?” I repeated. “I don’t see Teresa doing grunt work, and she’s the wardkeeper from Hex.”

He winced. “Teresa’s a control-freak. And Hex set the spell up in the first place. Of course she wants to micromanage it.”

“Sheridan’s respected,” I said. We were almost to the edge of the trees now. I could see the lumpy shapes of cars in the parking lot.

“He’s new,” Hans said. “Harmony told him it was his job, and he didn’t have enough clout to say no. Autumn and I are even lower rank in our havens. We definitely didn’t get a choice.”

“Why is it grunt work, though? I thought it was fairly easy to maintain, once the spell was invoked.”

“Because it saps our power. It’s taking magic directly out of us to maintain the spell. Which means we have less power left for our own research. Try publishing and making a name for yourself when you have as much power as the average sophomore.”

He sounded bitter. I supposed he had a right to be. But that didn’t give him the right to enslave a spirit to make up the difference.

“You won’t tell Isaac, will you?” Hans asked as we made it to the parking lot. His steps were a little surer now that we were out of the trees, but he still wasn’t steady enough for me to let him go.