Bound by Magic Chapter 7

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CHAPTER 7

Theo

“THERE ISN’T ENOUGH TIME, PELLAN.” Theo slammed a hand against the large stone gathering table between him and the head of the council.

The rest of the council flinched in their chairs around the circular marble table. Their faces were cloaked in oblong shadows cast from the singular skylight in the ceiling.

“We don’t sacrifice one of our own.”

What choice did they have? They may have had the rest of the community convinced the ground floor was cordoned off for maintenance, but everyone in this room knew the truth.

“We have to, for the benefit of us all.”

Pellan swore, standing to his full height now.

Nine sets of eyes followed him to the inky blackness surrounding their circle. None of them wanted to admit the truth aloud, but he would.

“We’re running out of time.”

“I know that! But this is a girl’s life we’re talking about.”

“We’re never going to get this chance again,” he reasoned. “We’ve been waiting for centuries.”

Theo paused, waiting for someone in the room to agree. No one spoke. He looked to the council’s youngest member, his sister, for backup. Carissa tucked a strand of auburn hair behind her ear and stared at the pattern in the center of the table, unwilling to meet his gaze. After a moment, a chair on the far end shifted backward as Beatrice, a high order mage, stood with one hand tightening around the jeweled bobble on her cane and pointing an accusatory finger at him with the other.

“What you ask goes against everything we stand for. We are protectors of magic.”

“That is why we must do it,” he urged. “There will be nothing to protect if the Oath runs its course.”

“That’s months away, if not years,” Wester’s throaty voice interrupted from the half shadow. The older man leaned into the light, turning the gray hairs on his eyebrows white.

“What of the new threat at our doors? How long do you think it will take before they storm our sanctuary? Root us out one by one and then hand us over to the vampires?”

“We won’t be magicless.”

“No, but we will be overrun. They’ve been amassing an army above ground. Each day, their numbers grow. While ours…” He paused, not letting the pain penetrate. The Oath had taken so much from their kind… from him. “After a half-century, we’ve finally had one mage pregnancy and you know how that turned out.”

Every forehead in the room tilted toward the floor. They hadn’t been able to find the girl since she ran away.

“Have we found her?” Wester asked.

“Of course not! After what we did, she’s likely succumbed to her wounds. Without mages around—” Beatrice started, but Pellan cut her off.

“She’s alive.”

“And you know this for certain?” she shot back skeptically.

“Killian is her bonded pair. If she had died, he would have succumbed too.”

“Killian is different. He’s Syste.”

“Syphon,” Pellan corrected her firmly.

“Same difference.” Beatrice’s thin pink lips flattened into a line, but she didn’t apologize for regarding him with such a foul name.

“As I have said, she is very much alive.” Pellan had said it with such assurance, it made him falter.

“You know where she is?” Theo eyed the head of the council, looking for a crack in his façade when he nodded with the same assurance. “We’ve been tracking her for weeks and every lead has come up empty.”

“I’ve been keeping a close watch on Killian.”

“So have we. He hasn’t left the community at all. Not even tried to sneak out. Not once.”

“You’ve been studying Killian’s physical movements, yes. I’ve been tracking his magic.”

Before Theo could groan, Beatrice was back on her feet. “He’s a Sys—erm, Syphon. He has no magic. How can you trace something he doesn’t have?”

“No, he doesn’t have his own, but he pulls trace amounts of it from the community to deliver to his bonded pair.”

“You let him take from us?” Beatrice sputtered.

“His bonded pair is pregnant, so even with him being what he is, she needs a lot of magic to help her baby develop. Without the community, neither she or her child would survive. Are you suggesting we let her die?”

Beatrice hmphed, sitting back in her seat with a scowl.

“Where is he sending it?” Theo asked. As soon as they were done with this meeting, he’d send a team to her location to retrieve her. They couldn’t risk the life of her child. Not when he was so close.

“It has been tricky to get a hold on its exact path, but I have been able to track it to the northeast quadrant of the city.”

“Where the humans are?”

“Yes, I believe she is hiding in one of the safehouses there.”

“I will send a team.”

“No. We can’t spook her. She is afraid and needs time to calm down. After what we tried to do, how could she not be?”

“For foremages’ sake,” Beatrice huffed. “It’s not like we knew she was pregnant at the time. We wouldn’t dare make the attempt now.”

“No, but she is afraid. It’s better right now if we wait until she’s ready to come back into the fold.”

“So, we keep the syste instead?” Beatrice sneered. The others murmured their agreement.

“Syphon. One who has been nothing but loyal to us.”

“Loyal? It’s not in his nature.” Beatrice rolled her eyes.

“He has done nothing to us,” Pellan repeated more forcefully, but Beatrice didn’t back down.

“Nothing? You let him walk our halls while his pregnant bonded pair is out there alone?”

“I sincerely hate to admit this, but I agree with Beatrice.” Theo stared at Pellan’s contemplative profile. “It’s safter for her here.”

“She will come back, in time.”

“Something we have short supply of. We can’t jeopardize her or the child.”

“I understand.” Pellan’s voice softened. It was to appease Theo. Get him to calm down, but he couldn’t. Not when they’ve come so far. “In time, she will come back to us. We have to let this be her decision.”

“There wouldn’t need to be a decision if you hadn’t let them bond in the first place.” Beatrice tsked, then pointed her crooked finger at Theo.

“Me?”

“Yes, you, conjurer extraordinaire. Master of bonds. You! You let Azalea’s granddaughter bind herself to someone beneath her.”

Not this again. Anger rolled down his spine, but Beatrice was not finished.

“She hails from a strong family line and you encouraged an abomination!”

“That abomination has the potential to have one of the most powerful mage births in the history of mage births,” Theo blurted out before he could keep the words at bay.

The entire room focused on him now. Pellan’s piercing stare sent him back into his seat. He hadn’t meant to show his hand.

“Is that what this is about?” Pellan asked accusingly.

“What does he mean?” Beatrice leaned in. The light from the ceiling hit the jeweled bobble on her cane, sprinkling topaz light around the room.

“Pellan, now isn’t the time.”

“Seems the perfect time to me.” Beatrice gave him hard look, gearing up for another scolding. “It sounds like something the council needs to know.”

Pellan sighed, then placed his hands on the hard stone of the table.

“Theo believes there might be some good that can come from their union.”

Several in the room scoffed. His jaw tightened. For a Council of Elders, they were extremely shortsighted.

“Please enlighten us. What good comes from a syste binding with a mage?”

“In the old texts, in times of great upheaval, it’s been over one thing. A syphon and a mage becoming a bonded pair. In every instance, peace came because of a Prominent.”

“Yes, with the intervention of a Prominent.”

“In the ancient tongue, the word for introduction and intervention are the same. We’ve been thinking of it as intervention, but what if it isn’t?”

“So you think the foremages will form a new Prominent because the syste and Azalea’s granddaughter have formed a pair? You’re a master conjurer, Theo but not even you can conjure that.”

“You don’t understand, Bea.” Pellan cuffed his hands behind his back. “He means the bond between a syphon and a mage will birth one.”

Chaos descended around them. To even whisper such a thing was blasphemous. Prominents were the most powerful magical beings to ever walk the planet. They had twenty times the power of a mage. It is believed that they were formed by the foremages themselves and all of magekind spawns from them. They were of the divine order. To even suggest one of them could be born from a mortal womb was akin to denouncing the foremages themselves.

“You think that girl is carrying a Prominent in her stomach? This is why you let that abomination occur? For your own twisted experiment? It’s madness.”

“What if I’m right?”

“You’re not. Do you really think you can create a Prominent? You think yourself above our gods? Greater than our ancestors? Only the foremages can do such a thing.”

“What if it can be done? We would have access to one of the greatest power sources in the known world.”

“Do you hear yourself?”

“I am not without facts! Look at what’s happened. How else could her pregnancy have lasted as long as it has? And we’ve seen what happened when we tried to leverage their bond. We felt the power in it.”

The entire room fell into an uneasy and angry silence, but they listened. The Blood Oath bound vampires to darkness, but it was by the might of their power alone that allowed for their safehouses to remain impenetrable after centuries. With their power source dwindling, they were already beginning to experience the effects of it.

“How long do you think we can keep our protections up? What do you think will happen when the Blood Oath dissolves? With the power of a Prominent, a Blood Oath would mean nothing. We can get rid of our enemies once and for all.”

“Even if that were true, which it isn’t, her child, if it can be born, won’t be here for months. Then, years after that for the magic to present itself. You’re holding on to an impossibility.”

“Don’t placate me, Wester. I’ve been around long before you were in diapers,” Theo snapped.

“He makes a valid point, Theo,” Pellan said, siding against him, as usual when it came to this subject. “Our defenses won’t hold that long.”

“They will if we use what’s already at our disposal.” They’d finally circled back to their original conversation. What to do about Kayla and her vampire.

The room grew uncomfortable. More than one mage slid back in their chair, cloaking themselves in the shadows, unable to face what they were contemplating.

“I’ve been watching them since they arrived. Their bond is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Not even Killian and Asha’s come close. There’s a raw power behind it. If we can break it and tap into that power to harness it, we can fortify the community until well after the Blood Oath dissolves. It’ll buy us the time we need.”

“That’s certain death, Theo.” Carissa finally spoke in a voice softer than a whisper. Her gaze remained steady on the insignia inlaid in the center of their gathering table.

“That’s a risk worth taking.”

“We’ve offered them our protection. To go back on our word…” Her voice cracked.

“We have no other choice.”

“What if we did?” Pellan bit his thumbnail, his azure eyes flashing with inspiration. “What if we can siphon the power from it without breaking it?”

“We tried that with Killian. It didn’t work, remember?” Theo pointed out.

“No, Asha doesn’t have a tenth of the power we saw in that cathedral,” Pellan carried on thoughtfully. “If we can amplify it, like we did then, we might be able to draw it out.”

Theo openly groaned. “That’s if her magic will obey. If it will work. Who knows if it will? It’ll take months of testing to find out. Months we don’t have.”

“That’s our best path forward.”

“No, our best path is breaking that bond and harnessing its raw power to fortify our walls.”

“Unfortunately, Theo’s right, Pellan. We’ve already tampered with the bond between the girl and her vampire. It didn’t work,” Beatrice, ever the voice of cynicism, piped up.

“That was different.”

“Oh?”

“We didn’t realize they were a bonded pair. We thought she’d given him her magic to allow him access to our halls. If we’d known…” he trailed off, unable to finish.

“Do you believe we can intensify the bond’s magic enough to siphon it?”

“I do.” Pellan spoke first. “If we can train her magic to obey and harness it through our strongest mages, it should work. Not unlike what we did to stop her magic.”

“Theoretically, perhaps. But we can’t stake the safety of this community on that,” Wester said.

“It’s our best option.”

No, it wasn’t their best option. Again, the circle remained silent, so he said, “We have less than a week before they break through. We can’t strengthen their bond, amplify it, and get her magic to obey in a week.”

“I understand your doubts, but we must protect magic at all costs. Including hers.”

“We cannot save one life at the expense of thousands.”

“Two lives, Theo,” Carissa said in her deathly soft voice. “There are two lives at stake here.”

He lifted an eyebrow. He hardly considered the undead living, but it was best not to argue the point now. “Two lives in exchange for thousands of mages lives,” he amended.

Pellan stepped forward. The discussion was over. “We put this to a vote. You have two choices before you. I know we don’t make this choice lightly, but we must make it for the good of the community. All in favor of breaking the bond between the mage and her vampire?”

The room remained silent. Anger curled Theo’s fists into a ball. Pellan took a deep breath and looked around the room until his gaze landed on him.

“Aye from me. We don’t have time for anything else.”

“One in favor. Nine opposed by silence. All in favor for strengthening their bond, then siphoning from it. But if our attempt is unsuccessful, we must destroy it to protect the community even though that means she and her vampire perishes in the process.”

Theo fought an eye roll. Their stronghold would be breached in a matter of days, but if this was the story the council wanted to tell themselves to ease their guilt, then so be it.

Pellan turned with a somber expression toward the group.

One by one, they went around the circle, and each member gave their consent until they reached Carissa. Of all of them, his sister was the youngest and had never needed to make a decision like this before. She struggled with it. But she’d never seen the kind of carnage that awaited them if they didn’t secure their strongholds.

She knew, like he did, there wasn’t enough time. The bond would have to be broken. She timidly met his gaze with understanding and gave him a mournful nod.

“Aye,” she said. “If there’s no other way.”

Unfortunately, there wasn’t.