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For those who love them villainous
Even when it seems like everything is working against you and the lies just keep building. I hope you fight.
My kind were not meant to be subservient to any, but the magic that kept us bound to the flesh of our Vessels made us reliant on the witches if we ever wanted to be freed from the bodies that trapped us.
The tile beneath my shoes was unnatural, the separation it caused keeping me from touching the one thing that made my soul feel whole. The dirt beneath my feet.
Magic had a way of burning through a witch’s surroundings if they didn’t satisfy it with use, and then eventually it would turn on the witch themself if ignored for too long. As it had with my mother.
Without my mother’s wards, the destiny my parents had chosen would come for me whether I wanted it or not.
Ash’s father wasn’t like my own. He was human, good and patient, loving and warm. He was everything a father should have been,
I was nothing but a means to an end to the man who had sired me for one purpose only.
But Ash’s father couldn’t protect me against what was coming, and worse yet, he couldn’t protect Ash from the danger of being at my side when it did.
“It could be. Just promise me. Promise me that no matter where we go, we’ll go together,” he said, burrowing further into my chest. I pulled him tighter, swallowing past the burn in my throat and resisting the urge to sniffle. I did the one thing I’d sworn never to do. “I promise, Bug,” I said, squeezing him tighter. I lied.
I didn’t pretend to care about such formalities, not when my soul was far older than they could dream to be. I’d existed since the dawn of time, since the creation of the earth itself. A few centuries was nothing but the blink of an eye.
“For the good of the Coven, the girl must return with you.”
Most of the witches of the Coven drew their power from nature. The Greens, like my mother, from the earth; the Whites from crystals; the Yellows from fire. But the Blacks had been different. We drew our power from the bones of our ancestors, from the magic that only existed within our line. Without those bones, we were nothing, and they were tucked safely within the boundary of Crystal Hollow somewhere. I felt them—knew that they existed. Any wise person would have burned them with salt when they killed off the last of us just to be safe, but someone had kept them instead. A perverse
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grown up knowing that one day, I would either have to kill my father or allow him to kill me.
He was beautiful and infuriating—a disaster waiting to happen.
his ethereal, unnatural beauty standing out like an angel fallen from grace. All my life I’d been too strange, not human enough, but suddenly I felt horribly human before the eternal creature in front of me.
It was the look of a cynical woman who had lived long enough to experience the ugliness the world had to offer. It made her seem ageless.
“I underestimated her,” I admitted, staring at the closed curtains on the back of the small green house. “I won’t make that mistake twice.”
It was always so dark underground, the lack of stars shining in the sky making this tunnel some of the truest darkness I’d ever known. Panic threatened to consume me, the reminder of the other true darkness lingering. I
That they were bodies crafted by the Hecate line, designed to live forever and house the things inside them. Without those Vessels, they burned through human bodies within a year.
I watched the first tree roots rise from the ground, grasping him by the ankles and wrapping around his arms. They pinned him to the earth as I turned back to the forest. And I ran.
Even with it already healed from the attack, the familiarity of the moment struck me in what would have been my heart if I’d had one.
The tree didn’t shudder, didn’t show any sign of the pain I knew it felt. Of the pain that struck me in the chest with every slice. It seemed to wrap me in an embrace, comforting me even as I hurt it. It couldn’t speak, couldn’t give me the soft assurances as my mother once had as I did whatever I needed to do to protect Ash. But it could hug me, wrapping its branches around my body.
A Vessel could only be destroyed by a necromancer, their magic sending the thing within back to the depths of Hell. A stake could do the job, technically, if a witch managed to slip their magic into the chasm where the heart might have been.
But it wasn’t just the element itself that needed to fill the hole in their existence, but the essence of magic it would take to unmake the Vessel. Only a Black could do it without great personal sacrifice. It wasn’t a sacrifice many witches were willing to make.
Not when it drained them of everything and left them powerless. A fate worse than death for a witch of the Coven. Humanity.
The gold gleam there seemed to flash at my question, and he studied the tears that pooled in my eyes. “No,” he said. “Vessels do not have hearts, Witchling. You’d do well to remember that in the coming years.” “Then I feel sorry for you,” I said, and the words had no malice. They weren’t intended to hurt, only to offer sympathy. “That you’ll never know that feeling.” “Even though it leads to this?” he asked, turning to glance at Ash for a moment. “Even though it weakens you?” “Yes,” I said, nodding in confirmation. His eyes flashed at my answer, studying the path of a tear on my cheek. “I
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“One day, you will owe me a favor for this. You will give me anything I ask of you,” he said softly.
“If it is order that you value, then I will bring you nothing but chaos.”
Somehow it felt like the perfect karma to me that the town was known for the people it had tried to rid itself of, the persecutors fading into history. It felt like something that would have brought me peace from beyond the grave.
The fact that I wasn’t loyal to the Coven any more than I was the Vessels wouldn’t save me. Not when he discovered I was the one who could Unmake him, reducing his Vessel to the mud it had been created from and sending his soul back to the pits of Hell.
The gold surrounding his pupils seemed to burn as he studied me, flaming with the warning he wanted me to heed.
“You’ll get no argument from me that the witches are selfish, greedy creatures. Do not forget, your ancestors came into their powers by selling their souls to the devil himself. The magic that flows through your veins may be Green, but your heart is black like all the others in the end.” I scoffed, laughing as I reached between us and poked him in the space where his heart should have been. “At least I have one,” I said.
Trees surrounded both sides of the road, curving over the gravel to form a canopy. Mist filled the woods around us, stretching toward the sky and casting an eerie presence over the forest that surrounded Crystal Hollow.
The trees seemed taller, more ominous, the farther we got from the main road. The mist seemed to spread, thickening and becoming more difficult to see through. The brush and dead leaves on the forest floor were lost to it, and I realized how startling the forest was without that. It was something I’d become so familiar with, something I needed to feel rooted. I didn’t like it when I couldn’t see the earth at my feet.
“I learned long ago that sometimes silence is louder than words.
“Creatures far worse than witches call these woods home. You’d do well to remember that should you get thoughts of running off,”
Stone. Earth. Nature. Those were my elements. Those were the things I had an affinity for.
If I had to face the Covenant, if I had to stare into the empty, hollow bones of the beings who had made my mother’s life such a misery that she fled the only home she’d ever known, I would do it with her magic coating my skin.
Susannah Madizza might have been the greatest witch of her age, but the power that had made her so was no longer hers to command. It was mine.
At the top of the throne, a single rose bloomed back to life as I watched. Whereas before, it had been nothing but a withered husk, the petals spread wide, and color returned. Red tipped in black, as if the edges were tainted by death itself.
there were no heroes at Hollow’s Grove. There were only witches doing whatever they needed to survive.
The Covenant had no flesh to cover their skeletons after centuries of life after death, and anything that had made them human was long gone.
My mother’s hair had been brown, the color of the earth. As had her mother’s before her. Mine was a distinct, deep auburn, like the darkest merlot. Or as my father liked to call it, hair the color of old blood—like what pulsed in our veins.
“Is she always this difficult?” Susannah asked the Headmaster. She pinched her nose bone between her fingers, sighing in dismay. “Given what I’ve seen since meeting her, she’s being fairly cooperative at the moment,” he said with a chuckle.
“You’re trouble,” he drawled, the deep baritone of his voice draping itself over my skin. I smiled up at him, showing all of my teeth in a rare moment of lightness. “You have no idea,” I said,
Only in that courtyard did the moon seem to shine, illuminating the dying ivy and rosebushes attempting to scale the building, even though they were nothing but withered husks of something that had once been beautiful.
My hands touched the dry, infertile earth, watching as it sifted through my fingers. New England soil was fertile; it was potent for growth and sustaining life. This was anything but natural.
The vines wrapped around my fingers, creaking as they extended to cover my hands. There was a caution within the movement that horrified me, as if the plant itself was struck in disbelief that anyone could want to give rather than take.
The moment the vines drew blood, the tang of magic filled the air. It was metallic and earthy, with the scent of flowers and pine needles lingering. The vines shuddered with each drink, with each pull as they fed what they had been denied. What was theirs to begin with.
