Page 36 of Until the End of Ever (To the Cruel Gods #2)
LUCIAN
K leos Valesco was turning me into a morning person, or at the very least, an upright-before-noon person.
I brought my arms around her shoulders and lowered my chin to the top of her head, content to inhale her intoxicating scent.
“‘Morning,” I grumbled. Perfectly content or no, being awake at eleven meant grumbling was all I had. “Coffee?”
Then I sniffed, my nose against her red waves. I didn’t think it possible, but she smelled better than before.
“Are you smelling me?” She turned to me, grinning. “Weirdo. Here I thought it was a shifter thing.”
“Yes, and I’m not sorry. You smell better than cupcakes. Have you been using my body wash?”
“And your deodorant.” She shrugged. “It’s not my fault your products are so much better than what’s available commercially.”
“They are available commercially,” I argued. “My bottles aren’t labelled because they’re product samples, but I own a business that handles the distribution.”
She glanced at me sideways. “You’re going to name another brand that costs the price of a month of rent for cosmetics, aren’t you?”
“I don’t set prices. That’s the job of my minions.” I made a point not to name the brand, because she wasn’t wrong, but I made a mental note to pick up some of the products for ladies she might enjoy the next time I showed my face at my headquarters.
I owned six businesses, and I wanted zero to do with the day-to-day running of the operation, so I made a point of keeping that out of the house. To be practical, I’d purchased a building on Magic Avenue large enough for my various enterprises.
Occasionally, I showed up to sit on the board or take meetings with my CEOs or creative teams. As I’d offered to take on some of Sessona’s kids, I needed to pop by anyway to ask what entry-level jobs we were currently looking for. Grabbing something for Kleos just made sense.
“Coffee, love,” I said, sliding her cup over the counter. “Are you ever going to learn how the machine works?”
I didn’t mind making it for her, but it was a shame she had to wait until I woke up every day.
“I bake, you make coffee. That’s the deal.”
I shook my head. “Trying to make deals with me again.” There wasn’t enough coffee in the world to handle this witch.
Then she got a batch of cupcakes out of the oven and I only whimpered a little.
Predictably, the front door came to life just as she finished getting that delicious frosting of hers in its piping bag.
I sneered. “Who dares disturb a Regis before twelve without an appointment?”
For some reason, that made Kleos laugh. “You only need a cape and a top hat to look like a supervillain.”
“I own several capes,” I countered. “And my hair’s way too pretty for hats.”
I reluctantly made my way to the entrance, inclined to maim or torture the uninvited interloper, but unfortunately, the short brat at the door had been expected. Days ago, in fact.
Lucky beamed, deep bruises under her eyes betraying the fact that she’d worked through the last few nights. Ronan waited at her heels.
She held up a foaming black amphora in one hand. “It’s ready!”
I had to let them in, but I warned, “Anything in the kitchen is reserved for those bearing the name Regis.”
“Oh, man. Has she made her French cream again?” Lucky groaned.
“And caramel!” Ronan identified after a deep sniff.
Completely ignoring my threats, the two heathens raced to beat me to the kitchen. Running wasn’t part of my repertoire before noon, so I let them barge in first.
“I have your potion for the ritual!” Lucky sang, beaming Kleos. “It needed to brew for two days straight—not to mention the ingredients I had to hunt down. Sorry it took a while. Is that your custard on the hob?”
“I brought her from the university,” Ronan eagerly added, in case anyone doubted his contribution. “She would have taken hours otherwise. And, erm—is there extra caramel?”
As well as my afternoon cupcakes, Kleos had tried éclairs today, indeed filled with her creme patissiere and covered in caramel. No matter how much I glared and muttered, those interlopers were served half a dozen of each treat with their tea. Shameless .
“So, how does it work?” Kleos asked once we all sat down with coffee and treats, eyeing the amphora at the center of the table.
I leaned in, equally interested.
Lucky was a talented brewer, hence why her liqueurs were the best in town.
Eight years younger than Ronan and I, she spent her youth trotting behind us and inserting herself where she could, so naturally, she’d taken after his precision and my creativity.
She took fewer risks than I did, staying closer to the original recipes, but was also more inventive than Ronan.
I trusted her abilities, objectively, but I’d never seen her handle magic as complicated as what would be required for the inheritance ritual.
I would have typically insisted on handling the potion myself, but she had firsthand experience about this specific ritual and I didn’t. Learning to let someone else be in charge wasn’t easy. Especially when that someone was a nineteen-year-old usually tripping over her own feet on a flat surface.
The amphora contained a dark liquid, which emanated greenish smoke, just as I’d read. And the potion wasn’t supposed to be particularly complex.
“This is Liquid Dream,” Lucky declared. “It’ll put us in a temporary trance while the Perthro Rootdoes its thing. While we can technically perform the ritual without it, it smooths the transition, allowing us to relax enough to meditate.”
She got a notebook filled with graphics, symbols, and notes out of the leather satchel around her shoulder, and turned it until she found a blank page. Next she twirled her fingers until a pen appeared, more chewed-up than Gideon’s.
Her skilled hand drew a perfect circle, adding five points and connecting them all at the center.
“We’re to draw a summoning circle—Lucian has one in his study, we can use that—and pour the potion around the circle.
Ideally, there would be four witnesses, one representing each element, plus the caster, facing the subject.
The subject, Kleos, needs to be at the heart of the circle.
” Lucky scribbled Kleos’s name in the middle.
“The caster starts the spell. All four witnesses will feel some sort of echo. I was water, for Pan’s kid, and I had a vivid daydream.
But the caster and subject will go on a journey, to discover the subject’s roots. ”
That was exactly what I’d read. I only had one question. “How dangerous is it? I saw a bunch of warnings about the dream being real, for the caster and subject.”
I realized I was a worrywart here: I used spells ten times as dangerous on a daily basis. But it made me uncomfortable that this one needed so many sources of power.
“I mean, yeah. Your bodies might remain here, but it’s not just going to be a daydream; your spirits will travel.
You die there, you die here.” Lucky reached for one of the few spare éclairs stacked between us, stuffing half in her mouth and chewing before saying, “But the kids at Sessona’s do it all the time.
I’ve cast them myself a few times. No one’s suffered more than the occasional migraine and bloody nose. ”
I didn’t like it, but the alternative was staying in the dark, which in this specific case was unacceptable. We needed answers.
“Has Silver heard from her foster mom?” I checked, just in case I’d missed a phone call while I was sleeping this morning.
I wasn’t surprised when Kleos shook her head. She would have told me.
I sighed, and made myself nod.
“The stronger the anchors, the better for something like this. I get the feeling poking around about Kleos’s ancestry might pack a bit more of a punch than looking into one of Pan’s kids,” Ronan said, wearing his concerned professor look, which should be forbidden in my house. “I’ll be your air, if you’d like.”
The offer made me smile at my friend gratefully. No one else in the underside had a stronger affinity to that element. The man could literally fly when he was feeling particularly dramatic. “You’ve earned that éclair,” I admitted.
“I’ll be water, if you cast?” Lucky asked me. “Unless you’d rather I cast, as I’ve done it before. In that case, you can be fire.”
“I’ll cast the spell.” I wasn’t going to let anyone else go on a potentially dangerous spirit journey with Kleos. “So we’ll still need two.”
“Gideon and Silver,” Kleos immediately replied.
Half of that made sense. Gideon, between his heritage and temperament, would represent fire.
Then there was Silver. Despite the strangeness about the woman, and her visible lack of power, I knew her strength.
“The pink-haired crazy chick?” Ronan asked. “Does she have a link to earth?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Kleos assured him. “Silver can find her way in the wild, hang out with any beasts, and she just knows what’s poisonous, what’s edible. I only know one person with a stronger Earth affinity—my cousin, Rhea, and she’s only fourteen. Silver’s perfect.”
“All right.” I didn’t question it. Technically, a person didn’t even need to be able to wield magic to be linked to a specific element. “Tonight, then?”
“If you’d like,” Lucky said hesitantly. “But the potion will be potent for about a fortnight, and sometimes, the journey takes hours—I’ve even heard it can take days. Maybe it isn’t the best idea to get started on a Monday evening?”
She had a point, even if I didn’t like the thought of waiting an entire week when we had everything we needed to finally get answers.
“Well,” I said slowly, “if some of your friends got nosebleeds and headaches from mind trots around a child of Pan’s, I wouldn’t mind looking into ways to protect all of us during that ritual. Friday?”
“Perfect,” Ronan said. “Next Monday’s a holiday, so it’ll give your gainfully employed friends time to recover.”
Technically, he was also gainfully employed, though the man took time off whenever he felt like it, so that hardly counted.
I could tell Kleos didn’t like it any more than I did, but she nodded.
I had a week to find a way to protect our spirits during a body-less trip. It was good I loved a challenge.