Evil Abounds: An Alpha Guardians Prequel Read Online Free Page B

into view, the hastily-built clapboard structure leaning against the next building. Back-to-backs, they were called. Whitechapel was crammed with tenements like these, row after row after row of houses for the poor. And the Thornes were certainly poor, despite Caroline’s recent marriage.
    No longer, though. A smile tipped Gabriel’s lips as he approached Caroline’s building, slowing to keep himself from plowing into a trundling oxcart. It had taken him twenty nine years of life, five years of painstaking magick practice, and several months of preparation for the enrichment spell he was about to cast.
    Gabriel fairly flew up the stairs to Caroline’s flat. Running along the wobbly outdoor walkway to her house, he almost slammed into Caroline’s husband Thomas, who was just stepping out the front door. The red-haired blacksmith was already scowling, which was not a bit unusual, but his expression darkened further when he looked up to find Gabriel in the doorway.
    Thomas’s lips lifted in a sneer, the threat of violence clear as he bared his teeth at Gabriel. Gabriel could sense that Thomas’s bear was close to the surface, no doubt stirred up by yet another argument with Caroline. Bear shifters were a hot-tempered lot to begin with, but Thomas and Caroline were exceptionally so. They’d been close to brawling every minute of the day since they’d tied the knot.
    Needless to say, Gabriel disliked Thomas every bit as much as he loved his sister.
    Gabriel stepped to the side to let Thomas pass, then hurried inside and closed the flimsy front door.
    “Carro!” he shouted for his sister. “I’ve brought it!”
    Caroline emerged from the further of the two rooms that made up her apartment, wiping at her eyes.
    “What ‘ave you brought, then?” she asked, her accent much thicker and rougher than Gabriel’s own. Given the choice between the two siblings, Gabriel’s parents had spent a portion of what little money they had sending Gabriel off to the parish seminary at a young age. There Gabriel had befriended Old Wilhem, who had taken in Gabriel when his parents died.
    It took Gabriel two years to find his sister after their abrupt separation, and by then Caroline, age thirteen and three years older than Gabriel, had already found rooms of her own and taken a job as a scullery maid in one of the great houses in London.
    “I told you. I saved up and send off for some ambergris through the post,” he said, politely ignoring his sister’s tear-reddened eyes and nose. Usually Gabriel was blunt to the point of offense, but he was sweeter with his sister than anyone else. She was all he had in the world, and he was determined to do right by her. She deserved so much more than breaking her back to clean rich people’s homes all day and then coming home to care for a mercurial, often cruel husband.
    Thus the spell, whose ingredients Gabriel began to pull from his satchel, naming them as he carefully laid them out on the table that dominated Caroline’s front room.
    “Here’s the ambergris,” he said, producing a small wax paper packet of the priceless whale secretion. “And mandrake, Shisandra and yarrow root, spotted owl feathers, and dragonsbloom…”
    Caroline watched him, her lips pressed into a near frown. She let him continue until he’d listed all the ingredients of the spell, eyes widening as he pulled out a dusty spell book, a golden wand, and a hand-sized, hollow bowl made of delicate crystal. All borrowed from Old Wilhem without the man’s knowledge, but that couldn’t be helped. When Gabriel introduced the last tool he needed for the spell, a small but wickedly-sharp ceremonial knife, Caroline’s brow furrowed with concern.
    “Wot ya think you’re doing with all that, eh?” she asked.
    Gabriel grabbed her wrist and pulled her over to the table.
    “Sit with me. The spell won’t take long. Once it’s done, we’ll be rich beyond our wildest dreams,” he said, a grin spreading across his