Prison of Hope Read Free

you were looking for; now it takes minutes.”
    “Why would a sorcerer even need a grimoire?”
    It was a valid question. A sorcerer’s magic is part of us. We think what we want to do, and if we’re powerful enough, we do it. Only witches, or something else without an innate magic, use grimoires on anything close to a regular basis, by permanently tattooing their bodies with runes, and even then that’s only if they really want to blow themselves up. Grimoires aren’t really books on spells. They’re books of ideas that you can use with the magic at your disposal—and in some cases, knowledge on how to access that magic.
    A lot of grimoires show rune work and how someone with zero innate magical abilities can apply certain runes to their body to allow them access to some exceptionally powerful magic. It’s why they’re so dangerous; they can teach people who have no innate ability how to access magic, but not necessarily how to wield it safely.
    “Yes, well, I’m trying to figure out how to do something and I thought maybe this would help.”
    Tommy tapped a few more screens and his eyes widened. “Do you know who this book belongs to?”
    “Yes,” I whispered.
    “It’s fucking Zeus’s,” he whispered in return.
    “I just said I knew that.”
    “The last time someone took one of his grimoires, it started the Titan Wars. Prometheus chained to a rock, the creation of Pandora? You know all the really fucking bad stuff that happened.”
    “Right. First of all, you’re beginning to get high-pitched and sound like a girl,” I pointed out. “Second, Hades gave it to me. Zeus disappeared hundreds of years ago; I don’t think he’s going to miss it.”
    “What’s the problem?” he asked in an abnormally deep voice, which made me smile.
    “Look, you know how I can only use air and fire magic from the four elements that make up the first set of magic?”
    Tommy rolled his eyes. “Yes, it’s come up once or twice in the previous six hundred years we’ve been friends.”
    “Sarcasm’s the lowest form of wit.”
    “That’s puns. Get on with it.”
    I opened my mouth to argue and wisely closed it when I noticed the smile creep onto Tommy’s face. Bloody wind-up merchant. “Right. Well, once you’ve learned those two types, and before you can move onto the Omega magic stage, you can learn how to merge your elements. So, fire and earth can create magma—that sort of thing.”
    Omega magic is only available to the millennia-old sorcerers and consists of mind, matter, shadow, and light magic. For the time being, they were beyond what I was capable of, but being able to merge my two elements was a distinct possibility, and something I was very keen to master.
    “So, what about fire and air? What do they make?” Tommy asked, all sense of teasing now gone.
    “Lightning.”
    Tommy blew out a long breath. “Well, I understand why you’re reading Zeus’s personal grimoire. You can learn how to wield lightning?”
    I shrugged. “Not sure. Not all sorcerers can merge their elements.”
    Unfortunately, when Zeus wrote his grimoires, he believed only he would ever use them, and as he was already a powerful sorcerer, he had no need to explain control or patience. Besides, back in the day, Zeus didn’t have a lot of either of those to go around. So, actually mastering something that Zeus didn’t feel the need to explain in detail involved a lot of trial and error, but mostly a lot of throwing around dangerous levels of magic.
    “Is the book helping?” Tommy asked, passing my e-reader over to me.
    I put the device in my bag, which I made sure was shut tight. “I think so; it’s just a matter of practice. When I absorb a soul, I can access it easier. I blew up a toaster at home.”
    For most of my entire sixteen hundred years of life, I’d had six dark, constantly changing marks on my chest. A few years ago, someone I’d considered a friend had sacrificed her life to save my own. It had the side effect