The Indigo Spell

What's inside (11 sections)

1. The missing witch and the aging spell
2. The wedding, the dance, and the man she keeps refusing
3. Marcus Finch and the people who left
4. The bed-and-breakfast, the hickey, and the wrong suspect
5. The St. Louis job and the proof nobody will like
6. Adrian, spirit, and the dragon named Hopper
7. The indigo tattoo and the choice to leave
8. The showdown and the break
9. What works and what drags
10. Key takeaways
11. FAQ

The Indigo Spell starts at three in the morning with a teacher asking her student a personal question about her virginity, which tells you right away that this is not going to be a normal semester at Amberwood Prep. I had read Bloodlines and The Golden Lily, so I knew Sydney Sage's world was already tilting, but this is the book where the tilt turns into a real fall. Richelle Mead published The Indigo Spell with Razorbill in February 2013. It is the third of six Bloodlines novels, a spinoff of Vampire Academy, and it runs 401 pages across 25 chapters in the first hardcover edition. Sydney narrates again, and by the end she is not the same person who started the series.

The reason Ms. Terwilliger needs that personal answer is that the scrying spell she wants to cast must be performed by someone who has not had sex. That is how Sydney ends up in the desert in the middle of the night, holding a mirror, staring at the moon, and slipping into a trance she did not ask for. She sees a dark red Victorian house somewhere near Los Angeles. For Ms. Terwilliger, the vision is bad news. It means her older sister is close.

The missing witch and the aging spell

Ms. Terwilliger finally explains the secret she has been carrying. Her sister Veronica is a witch who keeps herself young by stealing youth and power from younger women. The victims do not die. They slip into comas and wake, if they wake at all, looking decades older. Ms. Terwilliger cannot hunt Veronica herself without alerting her, so she needs Sydney. There is a cruel logic to the choice: Sydney is a young woman with unusual magical strength and almost no training, which makes her both the best tool and the most tempting target.

It would be easy to make this a simple monster hunt, but Sydney's problem is not just Veronica. Her problem is that helping means using the exact kind of magic the Alchemists raised her to fear. She agrees anyway. She wears a garnet necklace that masks her power, and she starts training in earnest, because being untrained is now a death sentence.

The wedding, the dance, and the man she keeps refusing

Before the hunt really gets going, Sydney has to fly to Pennsylvania for the wedding of Sonya Karp and Mikhail Tanner, which is meant to improve relations between the Alchemists and the Moroi. The Moroi are the living, non-Strigoi vampires, and the whole point of the wedding is a show of peace. Sydney is supposed to fly separately from Adrian Ivashkov so nobody notices they are in the same place. Then the airline overbooks her flight and seats her right next to him, which is the kind of coincidence that only happens in a book where the universe clearly has opinions.

Adrian had already told Sydney he loved her, at the end of The Golden Lily, and she had turned him down because Alchemist doctrine forbids relationships between humans and vampires. On the plane he is calm about it in a way that bothers her more than anger would. He says he is done sulking but not done loving her, and he is fairly sure she loves him too and just has not admitted it. Sydney tells him to stop. He does not.

At the reception, Adrian asks her to dance in front of everyone, a deliberate breach of etiquette between their races. She says yes because refusing would cause a scene, and then spends the whole dance aware of how they look together. Two drunk Moroi insult Adrian's late great-aunt Tatiana, and his mood starts to darken, the way spirit users can darken, and Sydney is the one who brings him back. Other guests comment that the two of them seem to belong together. She hates that they are right.

Then, in a snowy field that night, she casts the scrying spell again, this time trying to find Marcus Finch. Adrian is with her, and he is the one who recognizes the building in her vision as the Old Mission Santa Barbara. That gives them a location.

Marcus Finch and the people who left

Sydney drives to Santa Barbara, breaks into Marcus's apartment, and gets attacked by him before she can explain herself. She fights him off with self-defense training and a chemical irritant, which is a nice reminder that Sydney's strengths are not Rose Hathaway's strengths. She is not a fighter. She is a planner with a chemistry background and a willingness to bite back.

Once everyone calms down, Marcus tells her what he is. He was an Alchemist, and now he helps other Alchemists and Warriors who want out. The Warriors of Light are a human extremist group that hunts vampires, and Marcus has defectors from both sides working with him. He also makes a claim Sydney cannot ignore: the Alchemist tattoo, the golden lily on her cheek, does more than mark her. It carries a compulsion that keeps Alchemists obedient and anti-vampire. Marcus says he can break it.

This lands on Sydney differently than it would have in the first book. She has already noticed her tattoo itching when she questions orders, a detail from The Golden Lily that pays off here. She wants to believe the compulsion is a myth. She also cannot stop thinking about the fact that it might not be.

The bed-and-breakfast, the hickey, and the wrong suspect

A big chunk of the middle is Sydney and Adrian driving around Los Angeles warning young witches that Veronica might be coming for them. Disguises, wigs, hotel rooms. It is a strange and effective mix of detective work and two people failing to keep their hands off each other. Sydney is supposed to be the chaperone and the professional. She is neither.

At a college party meant to protect a potential victim named Lynne Titus, Adrian makes her a college t-shirt and they share a kiss that goes further than Sydney intended. The next day she discovers he left a mark on her neck and she is furious, mostly at herself. Later, at the bed-and-breakfast from her vision, the receptionist Alicia confirms Veronica stayed there and then checked out. While they are searching the room, Sydney and Adrian almost kiss, are interrupted by Alicia, and Sydney's protective cross necklace slips off and is left behind. That detail matters later.

They are too late to save Lynne Titus. She is found comatose and aged, and Sydney blames herself, partly because she and Adrian were kissing at the party instead of searching. I thought Mead was smart not to wave that guilt away. Sydney's self-control is her whole identity, and the book makes her pay a real price for losing it.

The St. Louis job and the proof nobody will like

Marcus needs something before he will help her. He has heard that Master Jameson, a high-ranking Warriors of Light official, visited the Alchemist facility in St. Louis, and he wants proof that the two organizations are quietly working together. He wants Sydney to get it, because she is still inside the system and nobody suspects her yet.

So Sydney travels to St. Louis under the cover of attending Alchemist holiday services. She runs into her father and her younger sister Zoe there, which is its own kind of tension, and she uses a fellow Alchemist named Ian Jansen and his obvious crush on her to get access to the secure levels of the facility. Once inside, she casts an invisibility spell, causes a small fire as a distraction, and copies surveillance footage onto a thumb drive. On the plane home she opens the file and sees Master Jameson at the checkpoint with a senior Alchemist director. The conspiracy is real.

I have seen complaints that this heist is too easy, and I get it. Sydney's cover is thin, Ian is a pushover, and the fire trick is barely a plan. But the point is not the difficulty. The point is that Sydney, who was raised to be a rule keeper, is now committing espionage against her own people.

Adrian, spirit, and the dragon named Hopper

Running alongside the plot is the thing most readers actually came for, which is Adrian Ivashkov. Adrian is a Moroi royal and a spirit user, and spirit in this series is the magic that touches minds and dreams and comes with a side of depression and recklessness. He is also the one who brought Jill back from the dead in the first book, which is why Jill is shadow kissed and psychically bonded to him. That bond is a problem in this novel, and not a small one. Jill feels what Adrian feels. Everyone keeps forgetting that, including Adrian.

Adrian helps Sydney with her magic training, and one lesson produces something neither of them expects: a small crystalline creature called a callistana that Ms. Terwilliger describes as a demon, though Sydney refuses to call it that. It bonds to the first people it sees, which happen to be Sydney and Adrian, so they end up sharing custody of a tiny dragon they name Hopper. It is a genuinely funny thread in a book that otherwise keeps tightening the screws.

Adrian also starts visiting Sydney at night through spirit dreams, which he does to protect her from Veronica, since he controls her dreams and Veronica's magic works through them. It is protective and romantic and also a little controlling, and the book lets all three of those be true at once.

The spirit bond creates the worst moment in the book. In one of the dream visits, Sydney and Adrian fall into a passionate encounter, and because of the bond, Jill sees and feels everything. Jill is fifteen. Sydney is mortified, and it drives her to do something drastic.

The indigo tattoo and the choice to leave

Marcus offers to break the compulsion in Sydney's tattoo by injecting charmed silver into it, and then invites her to come to Mexico with his group to seal their tattoos with a special indigo ink. Sydney goes partway with him. She lets the silver process start, and then refuses to finish it. She will not seal the tattoo and disappear into the life of a fugitive. Her argument is that Marcus and his people gather information and never act on it, and that she can do more good working from inside the Alchemists than hiding outside them. I think she is right, and the book does not pretend Marcus is a hero for running.

But the deeper reason she is ready to leave is Adrian. After the dream disaster with Jill, Sydney tells Adrian she is going to Mexico with Marcus, and he calls it what it is. She is running from her feelings, not from danger. They fight, and she walks out.

Then her car is destroyed, dissolved by a foam-like substance, and inside the wreckage she finds the gold cross she lost at the bed-and-breakfast, burning with magic residue. Someone used the cross to track her. She realizes the protective charm Ms. Terwilliger gave her matches the necklace Alicia was wearing, and the pieces click. Alicia is the real predator. She absorbed Veronica's power, and possibly the power of several other victims, and now she has come for Ms. Terwilliger.

The showdown and the break

Sydney and Adrian rush to Ms. Terwilliger's house and find Alicia inside. The fight is the most physical Sydney has ever had to be, and it leans on everything she has been learning. She turns the stairs to ice, throws fire, and in a moment that costs her something inside, casts a transmutation spell that hurls razor-sharp metal at Alicia's face. Alicia falls into the basement, which is now on fire. No body is found afterward, which means she likely survived.

Ms. Terwilliger turns up safe, having escaped earlier, and the immediate threat is over. Veronica is later found in a coma, the victim of her own colleague's ambition. It is a neat piece of symmetry. The witch who stole youth from others had her power stolen from her.

Then comes the part I had been waiting three books for. Sydney is packed and ready to leave for Mexico with Marcus, sitting in his car at the train station, when she finally admits she cannot go. Marcus has no real plan to take down the Alchemists, and she does not want a life of running. She also does not want a life without Adrian.

Adrian had left her a letter, which she was afraid to open. When she finally does, it is not a letter at all. It is a set of coordinates. She follows them to a museum of Roman and Greek antiquities, finds him by a reflecting pool, and tells him she loves him. They decide to date in secret. After all the denial, the confession lands, and the book earns it.

The last scene is the hook. Sydney gets back to Amberwood Prep and finds her younger sister Zoe waiting in her room, now wearing a golden lily tattoo of her own. Zoe has been recruited as a junior Alchemist and assigned to the school, and she is thrilled about it. Sydney is horrified. Everything Sydney has been hiding, her magic, her relationship with Adrian, her doubts about the organization, is now living in the same dorm room as a true believer.

What works and what drags

The best thing about The Indigo Spell is that Sydney finally becomes an active protagonist instead of a caretaker. In the first two books she mostly reacted, kept secrets, and ran schedules. Here she makes choices that could destroy her life, and she makes them with her eyes open. Mead also keeps the humor intact. Sydney's dry voice is the reason these books work, and the callistana and the St. Louis disguise scenes are funny in a way that relieves the tension without breaking it.

The romance is also the strongest it has been. Adrian is still a mess, but he is a mess who tries, and Sydney's fear of him is really a fear of herself. If you have been waiting for the payoff, this is where you get it.

Fair criticism: the pacing is uneven. The middle, with its bed-and-breakfast visits and warning trips, repeats a beat more than it needs to, and a reader can see the Alicia reveal coming well before Sydney does. The Angeline and Trey subplot, where Angeline cheats on Eddie, feels like it belongs to a different, soapier book, and it is resolved with a shrug. The series baggage is real too. This is book three of six, and it expects you to care about a large cast from Vampire Academy and the two books before it. A reader starting here would be lost.

There is no real love triangle here, despite what the cover and the marketing might suggest. Marcus is a temptation and a mirror, not a rival. The tension is entirely internal, between what Sydney was taught and what she wants.

The Indigo Spell is where Bloodlines stops being a spinoff and becomes its own story. The Alchemist tattoo, the symbol of everything Sydney was raised to trust, becomes the thing she questions, and the girl who once believed vampires were monsters is now secretly in love with one. It is a turning point, and it knows it.

FAQ

When was The Indigo Spell published?

It was published in February 2013 by Razorbill as the third Bloodlines novel. This post cites the first hardcover edition, which runs 401 pages, ISBN 9781595143198.

Who are the main characters in The Indigo Spell?

Sydney Sage narrates, with Adrian Ivashkov, Ms. Terwilliger, Marcus Finch, Eddie Castile, Jill Dragomir, Angeline Dawes, and Sydney's sister Zoe. Alicia and Veronica are the antagonists behind the aging attacks.

Do I need to read the earlier Bloodlines books first?

Yes. The Indigo Spell continues directly from The Golden Lily and leans on characters and events from Bloodlines and Vampire Academy, so starting here would leave a lot unexplained.