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“Our magic is about balance. You cannot take more than you give and still expect nature to answer your call. It’s a dance, a relationship like no other. If all we do is take and use, how are we any better than the humans who poison the earth?”
To exist without my magic felt like losing part of myself, like losing the most important part of what made me me. I didn’t know who I was without the whisper of the earth in my veins or the scent of the woods filling my lungs.
“Do you ever get tired of your own attitude?” “I do not have an attitude!” I protested, my eyes wide. If I hadn’t been too terrified to release him for fear he may drop me, I might have slapped him for the incredulous way he glanced at me from the corners of his eyes. I could feel the silent “really?” in that look.
The witches made me feel only a touch of gratitude for the fact that I did not possess a mass of beating flesh within my chest.
The rosebushes pulsed with life, fresh buds appearing from the vivid, green leaves and sharp, pointed thorns. Where before everything had been nothing but the ghost of a reminder of what had once been, now the courtyard thrummed with life. With vibrancy that had been missing from the Coven for a very, very long time.
The edge of her personality was gone in her rest, her sharp thorny words and scathing looks missing. It made her look younger somehow, less hardened by a life in hiding.
Even if my plan was to try to keep the violence to a minimum, I wasn’t known for my lack of impulsivity.
“You’re playing with fire,” he said with a grin, his teeth shining and perfectly straight. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, fighting back a smile of my own.
“Maybe then you’ll see me the way you seem inclined to pretend you do.” The smile drifted off my face slowly, leaving me to gape up at him as the meaning of the words struck me in the chest. That guilt resumed its grip on me, and it was only through a careful mask that I brightened my smile all over again even as I dreaded what his admission might mean of what I’d suspected to be interest. Correctly, it seemed. Iban leaned in, touching his lips to my cheek sweetly and lingering just a moment past what was appropriate. “Enjoy your games, Willow, but just know I play to win.”
All men enjoyed a challenge, but Willow was something different. She was something worse. She was impossible.
There was an element of justice within her. A desire to know the truth that couldn’t be denied. I had a feeling whatever her mother had raised her to believe, she’d also given her the gift of thinking for herself. It was a gift many were not afforded.
If Charlotte Hecate was death itself, Willow Madizza felt like life.
“Impossible,” he muttered. “I take that as a compliment,” I mumbled, looking away from him
The life of the necromancer was a lonely one. The pulse of death was far too much for most to tolerate being near.
“You’re not like them, Witchling. You are worth more than all of them combined.” The hint of care penetrated the walls I built around myself, nudging at me until I forced a mocking smile to my mouth to disguise the way those words threatened everything. Never in my life had I been worth anything more than a revenge plot that would lead to my death. Never before had someone even hinted that they saw me.
“It’s there to serve as a reminder,” Gray said, his words both sympathy and accusation all at once. “That no matter how pretty the shell may be, we are all capable of great and terrible things.”
Susannah explained, tossing the apple she held in her fingers into the air. She caught it, and I could just imagine the flesh bruising beneath her hard grip. Just as she’d done to what the Coven had been meant to be.
I didn’t know what I’d expected when the Covenant sent me to retrieve the sole remaining Madizza witch, but it definitely hadn’t been Willow with the earth in her bones but fire in her blood.
The Coven’s desperation to restore her blood had created the perfect weapon to bring about the downfall of everything they’d created—corrupted. She would either be their undoing or our salvation, and the most satisfying part of it all was that they wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop her when she took everything from them. She wouldn’t settle for anything less.
“It’s called the devil’s eye,” he explained, his voice solemn as he said the words. “It enables Him to watch you more closely.”
Whoever had decided putting witches in a building was the best way was a fucking moron, because I belonged to the woods—to the gardens and anywhere but here.
I closed my eyes and swore to find a way to make it right. I’d free her when I could. I glanced around the cemetery grounds, studying each grave marker with a new horror dawning on me. I’d free them all.
As much as I hated to cry when I was sad, the rage cries were the absolute worst. They hinted at what I assumed some perceived as weakness, when all I wanted was to commit murder.
“You will remember your place.” “I’ve never been very good at that,”
My skin felt strange, suddenly foreign, rather than the home that had housed my soul for the entirety of my existence. For a moment, I’d been weightless. Drifting and free, separated from the flesh and bone that tied me to this plane.
“I think it’s time you acknowledge that it is too late to save yourself from me, love.”
“You fight. Every moment of every day, you fight. Because that is who you are,” he whispered, dropping his forehead to mine. “What happens when I’m tired of fighting?” I asked, trying to ignore the pool of tears threatening to fall. Hoping the water from the shower would wash them away before he could notice. His face softened, his lips touching mine in a kiss that was so much more delicate than any other. “Then you let me do it for you.”
“You’re in love with me, Willow Hecate. Say it.” The name I’d never been allowed to use struck a chord within me, the rightness of it simmering in my blood.
Nature was constant. It ebbed and flowed, but the force of it always lingered in the earth, waiting for something to draw it to the surface. Waiting for someone to love it so it could meet its full potential.
“Your destiny is not to do what is right. Your destiny is to destroy us all.”
Creatures far worse than witches call these woods home.
According to my father, men preferred subservient, quiet women. Then there was me.
“Because you will be the last of the Hecate line and the magic in those bones will die with you, my love.”
Ash’s gaze held mine, the terror in his brown eyes hardening something inside me that I’d sworn I’d always keep soft. Killing the ember of life within me and turning it to rot and decay.
“Only the worst kind of man would harm his own daughter,” Charlotte said.
You will find that anything can be forgiven, if given the time for memory to fade.”
