The Unbound Witch (Unmarked, #2)

by Miranda Lyn

There was life and death and then there was somewhere fucked up in between, and that's where I was sitting.

Put some fire back into those veins. Ignite the world if you must, but stop cowering. You are not weak. You are not broken. You are not a victim. You’re the most powerful witch of our generation, and it’s time to start acting like it.”

“Raven,” he yelled from behind me. “There’s nowhere you can run that I will not find you. I will chase you all over this world if I have to.”

I left everything behind, left the world to burn to the fucking ground, just to be with you.

“I wonder if there is anything he would not do for you. Your Dark King might be fearful, but he is equally fearless. He sent you to the land with no magic, not to save himself, as he would let everyone believe, but to save you. He feared what the others would do to you should he die. He never planned on joining you. Hadn't even thought about it. He simply accepted his death and cast to protect you.” Her pause was infinite and nothing at all. “He is worthy, if not broken. Though the broken things we keep tend to be the most extraordinary, do they not?”

“I've never known you to do anything lightly. You wreck worlds with mere thoughts and call down goddesses with sheer intention. You're unlike anything this world has ever known.”

I was unmarked, but the second that death spell was cast, I was also unbound from whatever spell she’d wrapped around me. The question was, why was I still unmarked?

It wasn’t just the two of us against the world anymore. Our family was what we made it. Who we chose to let in and love and protect us. And that included the drunken captain who’d fought his way through a storm because he loved a woman enough to see it through. A golden witch who’d fallen in love with another and, though she’d changed, their hearts had not. A clan of three shifters who were fierce and loyal to a fault. And a witch who’d sacrificed her own freedom to try to make the world a better place. We were a broken, ramshackle, pieced together group, but we had each other and every day our bonds were tightening.

Of mind and body, spirit and sound, of heart and voice and power, the original Grimoire was always seven points of magic.

“I’ve never known anything to be so unbreakable and so fragile at the same time. I think I will need you every second of every minute for the rest of forever and then five minutes more.”

That statement whorled in my mind until I realized I had become someone’s villain. I’d wondered why Bastian had accepted the role so fully and now I understood. Like beauty, villainy was in the eye of the beholder.

Some people fear the fire, and some become it.

That which was meant to destroy, molded me. Death had cursed me, but the goddess had blessed me. The world had broken me, but my family had strengthened me, and somewhere along the way, I’d lost myself as a broken witch, and found myself whole and his.