I flipped the page and saw that the next several pages were blank. Then I flipped back to what Wheelock called the author indemnity icon. It was a tiny picture of a closed book surrounded by a spoked circle. Small print below it explained that by touching the icon I agreed to the terms stipulated below and that I would not hold the author responsible for any mishaps attached to the use of the following wards and spells. There was some even smaller print below that I would have had to get a magnifying glass to read, but I was impatient to find out about these wards of disguise. Pressing the icon was like checking the “Agree to Terms” box on the internet, I figured. Whoever read the full text of those?

I touched my finger to the icon. The spoked wheel turned, the book shimmered and opened. A stream of text flew out and spilled down the page. Pages flipped so that the text could continue filling up the empty sheets. When the blank section filled, the pages automatically flipped back to the beginning of the section.

Cool, I thought. Who needs a Kindle?

Twenty minutes later I understood why Wheelock had protected himself against the retributions of those deceived by these spells. The disguise wards he described could be used to alter a person’s face and body so thoroughly that husbands were unable to recognize wives and mothers didn’t know their own children. They could be used to impersonate another person – Merlin had given Uther Pendragon such a ward to make him assume the shape of Gorlois, Ygraine’s husband, so that he could lie with her and conceive Arthur – and induce emotional states of thralldom. Here Wheelock referred the reader to the section on sex, hinting that disguise wards were often used in sexual role-playing games.

Ew. In my dream Liam had shown me how to use wards to increase sexual pleasure, but the idea of using the wards to assume other shapes – objects of fantasy and desire – struck me as … well, icky. But I supposed if they were used between consenting adults there was nothing really wrong with it.

Wheelock was clear, though, that cases in which one witch deceived another into having sex while under the influence of disguise wards constituted rape.

“Most disturbing,” he wrote, “are the cases in which an otherworldly creature uses disguise wards to pretend to be human in order to seduce a human. Such stratagems have been used by nephilim, succubi, incubi …”

If Duncan were the incubus why would he be using wards to disguise himself? When the incubus had incarnated as Liam, he hadn’t needed wards.

Reading further, I came upon a possible answer:

Wards are often employed in order to fool a practiced witch.

Perhaps the wards were necessary now that I was coming into my power. But how then could I know if Duncan were the incubus?