Trail of Dead by Melissa F. Olson

Author:Melissa F. Olson [Olson, Melissa F.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-06-03T23:00:00+00:00

During the seventeenth century, when witches were more or less hunted for sport, the vampires and werewolves had refused to help them. So the witches did the only thing they could: they started experimenting with their magic. And they discovered something very dangerous: the nightshades. Just as magic clung to the evolutionary lines of humans, it clung to a class of plants, as well, and those plants had a chemical reaction with magic. The whole subspecies was loaded with magic, which the witches began using in everyday spells, but there were three in particular that were treacherous: Atropa belladonna, Mandragora officinarum, and Lycium barbarum, which eventually became known as wolfberry. Belladonna, it turned out, was poisonous to vampires—you needed a lot to actually kill them, but a little bit worked as a paralytic. Mandragora, or mandrake root, was used by the witches in the really dangerous spells, the ones that toed the line between the living and the dead—a huge no-no in witch circles. And ingesting wolfberry caused the werewolves to completely lose control of their shifting, and often their minds.

When the witches discovered all this, there was a very quiet, very horrible war. Finally, in the twentieth century botanists tinkered with all three plants, and they’d all but eradicated the specific strains that had magical properties. You could now buy perfectly safe, nonmagical belladonna at a farmers’ market in Wisconsin, if you wanted to. But those original strains still existed, and it was illegal for anyone in the Old World to even possess them. I’d been to a lot of crime scenes in my five years working for the Old World, and I’d never even seen any of the nightshades. Even Dashiell, Will, and Kirsten supposedly didn’t keep any, though I could see how it might be valuable to, say, paralyze a nutty vampire. The Big Three, as they so cleverly were called, were just too dangerous. Which was exactly why I’d kept Jesse from even knowing about them.

The fact that Olivia now had all three strains…that made this a whole new ball game. It was pretty much the equivalent of that scene in Jurassic Park where they realize that in addition to all their other problems, the velociraptors have now escaped.

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