There is a way to tell if a witch has been deceived by an incubus. Any time a witch comes into contact with a warded disguise her wards will be activated.

I thought of how my wards had flared when Duncan touched me. I continued reading, looking desperately for an explanation for how I felt, but finding no resolution of this conflict between desire and repulsion. What was wrong with me?

One of these times she’s going to notice, my father had said. And my mother had replied, She won’t notice anything because there’s nothing to notice. She’s been warded.

Was it possible that my parents were the ones who had warded my power in order to hide it from my grandmother?

I opened Wheelock again and went back to the section on disguise wards. I found what I was looking for in a footnote at the bottom of the last page:

Wards have also been used to disguise a witch’s power, most often when a witch is young and may not be able to defend herself until her powers are fully developed. If the wards are not removed at adolescence, the young witch may not even recognize her own power. Such a witch, rendered powerless by wards, is sometimes known as a Water Witch.

I stared at the footnote until the print grew blurry – at first, I thought, because of the tears in my eyes, but then I realized it was because the print was actually fading. Apparently there was a time limit to the magically produced text. As the words vanished I recalled that Duncan had told me there were three definitions of a “water witch” but he’d only told me two of them. Had he deliberately left out the third because he knew it applied to me – that I was a water witch?

I turned to the section on dissolving wards. There was a way that I could both undo the wards that had been placed on me and the ones Duncan was using to disguise himself. If I loved him, the minute the wards came off, he would become human.

But if I unmasked my incubus and I did not love him, he would be destroyed.

Chapter Twenty-Three

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

AS I SAT in the library sipping Scotch and waiting for Duncan’s arrival, watching the sky darken and the rain begin again, I concluded it came down to a choice between illusion and reality.