Read Online Treasures, Demons, and Other Black Magic by Meghan Ciana Doidge - Free Book Online

raised an eyebrow and inclined my head to indicate I was ready to move forward.
    Blackwell rubbed his thumb across his palm and looked at me thoughtfully. That little power play might have been a bad idea. I mean, he must already get that I wasn’t just a witch with an affinity for dowsing, but maybe it wasn’t a great idea to display unusual powers to a collector. I was already on Kett’s shelf. I didn’t need Blackwell’s rapt attention any more than I already had it.
    “Just here,” Blackwell said as he stepped by me to draw my attention to a long wooden table in the very middle of the gallery. A circle was carved into the stone floor all around it. A straight-backed chair — also made out of solid, chunky wood — stood at one end, but this wasn’t a dining table. It looked like a workstation. Or, rather, a place to collect bits and pieces of objects, jewels, and other knickknacks.
    My fingers immediately itched to surf the magic of the broken items, to pluck out the glimmers that called to me and make them into a new whole.
    Cool fingers brushed against the inner wrist of my left hand. Kett, cautioning me. I looked up from the table to find Blackwell watching me far too closely.
    “Your magic is very intriguing, Jade Godfrey,” the sorcerer said. “I do wish we were convening under better circumstances.”
    I opened my mouth to rip his head off over those ‘circumstances’ but Kett brushed his cold fingers against my wrist again.
    I clamped my mouth shut and clenched my hands. It was interesting that the sorcerer could see my magic, as I couldn’t. I often wondered if I tasted more like my mother’s witch magic or my father’s dragon magic, or if I was some unique taste altogether.
    I stepped over the carved circle that encircled the table. Within it, I caught a glimpse of inactive runes.
    The vampire followed me over the ward line, but Drake didn’t. I guessed that this inactive ward snapped into place if anything went wrong when Blackwell was inspecting the pieces he laid out on the table. By ‘wrong,’ I was thinking magical backlash that could potentially harm the collection. Or interact with it badly.
    Again, I itched to touch it all, wondering what he did with the bits he deemed useless. In my hands, they could be made whole again. To him, they were probably garbage.
    A wooden box, eight inches square, sat before the single chair at the end of the table. Blackwell circled to stand before it. He opened the lid and looked up at me expectantly.
    I circled in the opposite direction until I stood by Blackwell, with Kett practically glued to my side.
    A silver circle some six-and-half-inches across was nestled in the chest. A different rune — or so I guessed, as it wasn’t a language I could read — was carved every two inches or so into the silver band. What looked like rough-cut diamonds were embedded into the metal between these runes.
    “Silver doesn’t hold magic well,” I said, thinking out loud.
    “It’s platinum,” Blackwell said.
    Ah, silly me.
    “The diamonds are huge.” The gemstones looked as if they’d been chiseled out of the earth and simply crammed into the platinum band by raw, brutal alchemy. I wasn’t the only one who made magical objects, but there wasn’t a long list of people who could do so. Actually, according to the dragons, I might be the only one currently living. Yeah, that wasn’t overwhelming at all.
    “It’s a collar?”
    “A circlet, I believe,” Blackwell answered. There was something lurking in the smoothness of his tone that I didn’t want to identify or even know about.
    The circlet or headband didn’t emit any obvious magic, but still I hesitated to touch it. It was almost as if it repelled me … or more like it was a small, malignant void just sitting pretty in its wooden box. A tiny black hole in the guise of a jeweled coronet.
    “Will it harm me?”
    “You tell me.”
    Asshole sorcerer.
    “Have you touched it?”
    Blackwell