Page 72 of Taming His Vampire Mate

“Just you this time?” Thierry asked, eyeing the bowl in Poppy’s hands. He seemed oblivious to my shock, frowning at the witch as though everything were perfectly normal. “Last time, you had help.”

Poppy shrugged. “Now that we’ve forced the spell into existence, it should be easier to cast.”

I tore my gaze from Simone to Poppy. For the second time in under a minute, disbelief crashed through me. I must have misheard her.

Daniel, the warlock who’d joined my pack, once explained that you can’t just mash together random words and hope they turn into a spell. A true spell creates a pathway between the caster and the outcome. You get there either by rote casting—repeating it dozens or hundreds of times, pushing magic through until the universe relents—or with raw power. But the latter was almost impossible, because the universe is usually stronger than any one witch or warlock.

“How many times have you cast this spell?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“This version? Just once,” Poppy admitted grudgingly, as if it were nothing—even though she’d just confessed to being thewitch equivalent of a nuclear weapon. “This is round two. But it’ll be no problem.” She shot Thierry another glare. “The spell obviously works just fine.”

Which meant she’d bent the universe to her will in a single casting. Witches like that were rare. They were the sort who could rewrite the rules of reality itself.

Who the hell were these people?

“We’ll be over there,” Ethan said, pointing to the far corner. “I’ve been practicing how not to mess up a spell just by existing near it, but let’s not push our luck.” He took Nathaniel’s hand and led him away.

Poppy drew a deep breath. “Okay. Here goes nothing.”

She closed her eyes and began to chant in a language I didn’t know. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then a subtle glow began in her core, as if light were building inside her and radiating through her skin.

It grew brighter with every word. My eyes stung with sudden tears. The raw power of nature—beauty and terror entwined—flooded the room. The hairs on my neck rose as awe swept through me.

Wolves can sense magic. I’d seen spells cast before. Daniel was powerful, capable of turning the tide of battle when necessary.

But his power was nothing compared to hers. A dim flashlight beside the sun.

It felt as if the universe itself had stepped into Poppy. Silvery light filled the room as she spoke, her voice strong and growing louder, surer.

Then my brows knit. Another voice was chanting with hers. Then several. Then hundreds. Until the chorus of her spell echoed endlessly, as if an infinite number of unseen beings were casting alongside her.

My lips parted in stunned silence.

A golden-white light descended from the ceiling, blending with the silver moonbeam. From below, an angrier, atavistic force—blood-red—seeped upward. Poppy caught all three powers, weaving them into one—every color and no color at all. She walked in circles around Quinten, scattering flower petals that fell into a perfect ring.

The magic gathered above him. Then it descended through the crown of his head.

The young vampire froze, eyes widening and lips parting. His whole body went rigid, fingers splayed. He let out a strangled sound, halfway between a whimper and a gasp. When his eyes widened further, they’d turned the exact color of her spell.

Tension thrummed through the bond between Thierry and me.

I caught a fragment of his memory. This exact thing had happened to him.

He’d seen so many faces. His maker’s. Godric’s. And worst of all, his brother’s. A wound that had never healed, now ripped open and raw again.

The agony was so close to what I’d felt after Ian’s passing that I gasped aloud. I hadn’t realized until that moment how much pain he really carried.

Thierry shot me a miserable look.Please, stop it. I don’t want you in my head right now.

I swallowed hard, nodded, and tried to back away from him mentally.

He was right—it wasn’t fair that I could see into his mind, his memories. That he couldn’t hide anything from me.

I refocused on the scene.

Crisscrossing webs of light bloomed from a point in Quinten’s chest, radiating in all directions, vanishing through the concrete walls. Poppy blazed like a Roman candle. The light swelled, blinding.

It was like watching a supernova being born.