Author: Alexandria Clarke
Date: 2017-09-04 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery; Suspense; Paranormal
Description: Best-selling Cozy Mystery author Alexandria Clarke brings you the complete collection of the highly-rated “Witch Myth” Series. These stories have accumulated over 500 five-star reviews and have been boxed together for the first time! That's TWO COMPLETE SERIES totaling 6 BOOKS! Witch A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery Morgan Summers hates talking to ghosts, but when the victim of a ghastly murder asks her for help from beyond the grave, Morgan can’t say no. Soon, Morgan herself is blamed for the murder, and the town is out for blood. Can Morgan clear her name, discover the real killer, and help her new

Witch Myth Super Boxset

Brendan

Copyright 2016 All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means without prior written permission, except for brief excerpts in reviews or analysis

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Contents

Witch Myth : A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery

Witch Myth Book 1

Witch Myth: A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery- Book 2

Witch Myth: Wild Fire- Book 0

Witch Myth Wildfire: A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery- Book 1

Witch Myth Wildfire: Book 2

About the Author

Witch Myth : A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery

1

In Which I Receive a Cold Welcome Home

The weekly town meeting was already in session, so I slipped through the back door of the town hall, hoping to go unnoticed, and dropped into an empty chair near the rear of the room. I slumped down, arms crossed, and glanced around. Nothing about my tiny hometown had changed in the several years since I’d left Yew Hollow and moved to New York City. It seemed exactly the same, from its festive autumn decorations to its overly polite inhabitants. The town hall itself could’ve done with a little retouching. Then again, the faded yellow paint seemed to gather the townspeople together in a sunny hug, encouraging them to voice any concerns they might have about their boring small-town lives.

A handsome middle-aged man stood at the podium, leading a discussion about the town’s yearly revenue. He called for a vote. “All in favor of increasing the admission prices for our fall festival this year?”

The majority of the room put a hand in the air.

“Good, that’s settled,” he said. “Thanks, everyone.”

The mayor took over the podium as the handsome man returned to his seat.

“Thank you, Roger,” the mayor said. “Next on the agenda, it’s time to discuss everyone’s favorite town event: the Legend of Yew Hollow reenactment.”

I closed my eyes, half-wishing that I had the power to make myself invisible. If the town was talking about the legend reenactment, it could only mean one thing. My mother was here.

“Ms. Summers,” the mayor said, gesturing to someone seated in the front row. “If you will.”

Sure enough, the familiar outline of my mother rose from the front row amidst whispers from the townspeople. My mother was a strange woman, willowy and soft spoken, swathed in several layers of flowy, colorful fabric that swished behind her as she took the podium. But there was another reason my mother’s presence elicited suspicious murmurs from the townspeople.

She was a witch.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t kidding. Even more unfortunately, every female born into a witch’s coven was gifted with “abilities” as a birthright, which meant that I was a witch too. It was one of the reasons I’d left Yew Hollow right after my eighteenth birthday. I’d never been comfortable with the strange history of my family. The Summerses were quite legendary in town. In fact, my ancestors were the founders of Yew Hollow.

My mother held up her hands, and silence fell in the town hall.

“As you all know, Yew Hollow’s busiest time of year is approaching,” she began. Though she spoke quietly, her voice resonated to the very back of the room. “Halloween is just around the corner, as is our reenactment. If you would like to volunteer to help us plan it, we’ll have a sign-up sheet for you at the end of the meeting. As for today, we would like to take the opportunity to remind you all of how our town came to be. The majority of our coven is here—”

More muttering arose from the crowd. The situation in Yew Hollow had always been odd. The townspeople, though aware of our coven’s presence, never fully trusted us. My family’s witchcraft wasn’t just a gimmick to attract tourists. It was real. As such, the townspeople had to deal with a myriad of strange happenings over the years. Our coven was home to over twenty witches, each with their own agenda. What with all the rituals and spells, the mortals of Yew Hollow were bound to notice the bizarre occurrences. Birds flew over the town in unnatural patterns, the weather shifted in the blink of an eye, and the witches themselves often acted impulsively. It was no wonder we made most people in town uncomfortable.

My mother’s voice rang out across the crowd again. “Let us begin with a retelling of our history. The town of Yew Hollow was settled in 1693, when our ancestors fled the injustice in Salem and sought a safe place to settle down—”

I was out of my seat and through the back door before she’d even finished her sentence. Leaning against the outside of the building, I heaved a sigh of exasperation. I’d only been in town for a few hours and already felt overwhelmed by my family’s weirdness. I couldn’t bear to hear the story of the stupid town again. It had been drilled into my head as a child.

I pushed myself away from the town hall’s exterior, finding the familiar path toward the center of town. The street, lined with trees in transition from summer to fall colors, was empty. Nearly everyone was at the town meeting. I longed for the bustle of New York. The city had been my haven in a way. For one, I knew my family would never leave Yew Hollow to seek me out in New York. The city almost made it easy for me to feel normal. There was only one problem with New York City. It had a lot of ghosts.

Each witch was gifted with a speciality. For example, my mother could see about thirty seconds into the future. Not very useful, if you asked me. I, on the other hand, had the lovely pleasure of communicating with the dead. It wasn’t something I could control. Dead people just sought me out. And New York? Lots of dead people.

At first, I had tried to capitalize on my talent. I’d opened a business in New York to offer my services to the public. I rented an office and everything, with Morgan Summers: Psychic Medium printed in professional font on the front door. Unsurprisingly, most people considered it a scam. Every once in a while, some senile old woman came in claiming that her late husband was trying to contact her from beyond the grave. More often than not, though, it was the dead who wanted my help, and regrettably, they never produced a corporeal form of payment. Broke and at a loss for what to do, I had no choice but to return to Yew Hollow.

I trudged onward, my feet unconsciously carrying me into the nearby town square. The large yew tree at the center of town, Yew Hollow’s namesake, came into view. It seemed even more massive than I remembered, its gangly branches reaching up and out like the gnarled fingers of an old man. The tree was one of the only things I liked about Yew Hollow. In our practice, yew trees often symbolized rebirth and protection from evil, among other things. I always felt a sense of peace and mindfulness in the town square that seemed to radiate from the tree itself.

As I neared the tree today, though, something felt off. The usual tranquil vibes were absent, replaced with a strange anxiety that seemed to settle in the pit of my stomach. At first, I wondered if it was simply because I hadn’t been near the yew tree in over ten years. Auras could change, especially those surrounding a force of nature.

Then I noticed something large and unmoving at the base of the tree and stepped forward for a closer look. As I realized what the object was, I backed away so quickly that I tripped over a wayward root and landed on my ass, breathing hard and trying not to panic. I couldn’t stop staring at the strange shape sprawled beneath the shadow of the yew tree.

It was a body.

2

In Which My Motives Are Questioned

The woman was clearly dead. Blood soaked her clothes and the ground around her. As I caught my breath, I automatically glanced around, hoping that no one was in the vicinity. Then I stood up, wiped the dirt from my hands, and forced myself to take another look. Another detail soon caught my attention. A crudely drawn pentagram had been etched into the dirt around the woman’s body, each of its points corresponding to one of her limp limbs. In addition, strange items littered the area. I noticed a silver chalice tipped on its side, several burnt black candles, and a bloody dagger all within a few feet of the woman’s body.

The knowledge of two things struck me at once. One, this was a ritual sacrifice, and two, the only people who were once known to perform sacrifices in Yew Hollow were my own.

Without warning, a scream split the still air. I jumped in surprise, instinctively stepping away from the body, but it was already too late. It turned out that at least one person wasn’t at the town meeting; a teenaged girl, one hand grasping the leash of a very startled golden retriever, stood at the edge of the town square, her eyes wide with shock as she took in the sight before her. Then her mouth dropped open, took in a great breath of air, and screamed again. This time, she used her words.

“HELP! MURDER! MURDER IN THE TOWN SQUARE!”

A third fact crossed my mind. I was in deep shit.

The doors of the town hall burst open, spilling the townspeople out in hordes. The commotion was unfathomable. Within seconds, I was surrounded. People pushed and pulled to get a closer look. Parents yelled at children to stay back or go home. Several women burst into tears, and someone even vomited into the shrubbery at the edge of the square. But nobody dared to step within five feet of me or the body.

“Morgan Summers!”

The square fell silent. Dread seeped into every pore of my body. I turned to face the voice and watched as the crowd parted to allow my mother through. As she stepped forward, her gray eyes lit with a fiery intensity, I raised my hands above my head and said the most cliché thing I could possibly think of.

“I didn’t do it.”

For a moment, she only stared at me. It figured that the first time my mother and I see each other in over ten years, she finds me standing over a dead body. Seriously, if I wasn’t considered the rebel of the family before, I sure as hell was now.

Then, she said, “I know.”

My shoulders sagged in relief, but it was short-lived. The crowd jostled again, this time to let several uniformed police officers make their way to the yew tree.

“Step aside, step aside,” one particularly corpulent cop grumbled as he and his comrades began to push the townspeople away from the area. Another officer laid a tarp over the body, while yet another began to string garish yellow crime-scene tape from one end of the square to the other.

The corpulent cop approached me. “Step aside, young lady.”

I did as asked. My three sisters, Malia, Karma, and Laurel, had found their way through the throng and now stood behind my mother. As I joined them at the edge of the square, each of them pulled me into a long embrace. I sank into each hug. I had missed them the most, and my first few hours back in town had already exhausted me.

“Where’s Wren?” I asked.

“Your brother’s at the house,” my mother responded in a tone that indicated she was less than pleased with Wren’s whereabouts. “He refuses to come to the town meetings.”

“Oh.”

“What are you doing home?” Malia, my eldest sister, asked.

“I—”

But before I could respond, someone else shoved their way to the front of the crowd. It was the handsome man who had spoken first at the town hall meeting. Up close, I could see that his good looks didn’t hold. His thin face and narrowed eyes conveyed only two emotions: rage and suspicion. He stepped over the caution tape and approached the corpulent cop.

“Chief Torres! This woman”—his finger shook as he pointed to me—“was discovered standing over the body. Why haven’t you arrested her yet?”

Chief Torres cast a lazy look in my direction, regarded me from head to toe, and said to the man, “Mr. Parris, does it look like that rather petite, relatively clean young lady is capable of committing a grisly crime like this?”

Parris sneered. “Don’t you see what family she comes from? She’s a damn witch. I’ve had enough of this shit. It’s aggravating enough to put up with all of their bizarre rituals and spells, but murder? Where do we draw the line, Torres?”

“I didn’t murder her,” I said, shaking off Malia’s hand on my arm to step between Parris and Chief Torres. I glared defiantly up at Parris. “I found her.”

“Oh, really? Can you prove it?”

I hesitated. He had a point. No one had been around to vouch for my innocence, except the girl with the golden retriever, who’d only seen me curiously inspect the body. For all she knew, I was the murderer. I looked around for her, but the majority of the crowd had dispersed, taking her along with it. Parris, apparently, took my lack of eye contact as a confession.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

“Everyone was at the town meeting!” I argued. “Of course no one saw me!”

“Exactly.”

My hand bunched up into a fist. Nothing would have pleased me more than to knock the satisfied smirk right off of Parris’s smug face, but Chief Torres came between us, his enormous belly forcing us apart. I felt Malia’s hand tug on my elbow, so I retreated to the empty space between her and Laurel. Flanked by my sisters, I felt their collective auras box me in, quelling the heat that had risen within me at Parris’s accusation.

“Enough,” Torres said. He clasped Parris on the shoulder. “The young lady—what’s your name?”

“Morgan Summers.”

“We’ll have Ms. Summers come in for questioning,” Torres continued, attempting to placate Parris. “You know as well as I do that we can’t go arresting people all willy-nilly.”

“But—”

“My daughter is innocent,” my mother interrupted. She’d been standing in silence behind my sisters and I, letting the situation unfold. That was how my mother operated. She liked to feel out the tone and direction of an argument before she involved herself. When she finally did, she tended to make an impact. “I saw her walking through the square a few minutes ago. She only found the body, like she said.”

Chief Torres raised an eyebrow, skeptical. “Ma’am, you were in the town meeting. How could you have seen your daughter?”

My mother only smiled and raised a delicate finger to tap herself on the temple.

Parris threw up his hands in disbelief. “She had a vision. Of course. Torres, are you buying this bullcrap?”

Chief Torres seemed unwilling to take sides, but he said, “Settle down, Parris. Yew Hollow operates differently than other towns. You know that.”

“Fine,” Parris said. He spun around to face my mother. “If your visions are so damn special, you should be able to tell us who the murderer is.”

“That wasn’t shown to me,” my mother responded.

“How convenient.”

“My daughter—”

“Has no alibi,” Parris finished for her. He strolled closer to the body. “Look at this! All this crap—candles, drawings in the dirt, daggers—it’s obviously witchcraft.”

“That’s dark-magic shit,” I snapped. “Black candles? An upside-down pentagram? No one in our coven is stupid enough to invoke the dark. It’s not even real witchcraft. It’s for assholes who don’t have their own powers.”

“And yet you seem to know an awful lot about it,” Parris said.

The urge to physically damage Parris’s pretty face rose in me again. My sisters must have sensed my agitation, because both Malia and Laurel tightened their grip on me.

Chief Torres, ever the white flag, intervened again. “I understand that we’re all a little shaken up,” he said. “It’s only natural after a tragedy like this. Parris, this is a matter for the police. As a key member on the city council, we’ll keep you updated on our findings. For now, it’s probably best you head home and cool off.”

Parris glared at him, standing his ground.

“Go on, then.” Chief Torres made a shooing motion at Parris, as if Parris were a clingy puppy.

Parris’s eyes narrowed, but he finally stepped away from the body. He stalked back over to where I stood, towering over me. My sisters drew back, but I remained in place, staring unblinkingly up into his face.

“I’m watching you,” he said in a low voice.

“You flatter me,” I deadpanned.

He stormed away then, across the square. As he passed Chief Torres, he said, “Don’t be an idiot, Torres.”

As Parris’s retreating figure disappeared, Chief Torres released a long sigh. “Sorry about that, ladies. Parris is a little hotheaded.”

“A little?” I repeated.

“You know how some people are,” Torres said. “They don’t trust things that they don’t understand. Unfortunately, though, he’s right. I’m going to have to ask you to come down to the station with me. Routine questioning, you know. After all, you were the first one on the scene.”

There was an undertone of doubt in his last sentence, as if maybe he wasn’t as convinced as it first seemed that I wasn’t involved with the crime. Still, I nodded.

Dusk was falling in Yew Hollow. As Chief Torres led the way to the police station, the sun sank beneath the tree line, dusty golden streaks refracting off of the red and orange leaves. I took a deep, steadying breath. I’d forgotten how naturally beautiful Yew Hollow was. New York was all exhaust and dirty rainwater, while Yew Hollow smelled fresh. Its scent, crisp and clean, was reminiscent of apple orchards and cinnamon. All I wanted to do was sit out on the old porch with a cup of tea and watch the fireflies dance around. Instead, I followed Chief Torres in resolute silence. My mother and sisters trailed along behind me. The townspeople still outside watched us pass, their facial expressions ranging from apprehensive to downright terrified, as though our procession were a freak-show parade. I supposed, in some ways, it was.

The police station itself was bustling with movement. Yew Hollow hadn’t seen a murder like this since its legendary early years. These days, it was a relatively sleepy town. As such, the small police force was already beside itself. The phones were ringing like persistent alarm clocks, and every officer seemed deeply ensconced in some element of crime solving.

Torres led me toward the back of the station, into the one and only interrogation room. It was empty, save for a desk, two chairs, and a spot lamp. I rolled my eyes. Yew Hollow was the epitome of a stereotypical small town.

At the door of the room, Torres held a hand up to prevent my mother and sisters from entering. “Sorry, ladies. We only need Ms. Summers.”

At once, my sisters began to protest. My mother, whose ethereal presence seemed wildly out of place within the station, only gazed around in what seemed like complete sciolism.

“It’s fine,” I said to my sisters, waving them off. “You all go home. I’ll be okay.”

“Are you sure?” Karma, the second eldest of our foursome, asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re coming home straight after, right?” Malia asked, reaching forward to squeeze one of my hands in her own.

“Where else would I go?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time you up and disappeared,” Laurel said.

I gave my youngest sister a light, playful smack. “Hush, you.”

Chief Torres cleared his throat in blatant impatience.

“Go,” I said firmly.

To my surprise, they listened. My mother, however, afforded me a long stern look before she followed them. I wrinkled my nose. The police interview would be nothing in comparison to the conversation I knew would occur between my mother and me later.

“Have a seat, Ms. Summers,” Chief Torres said, gesturing to one of the chairs in the interrogation room. “I’ll be right back.”

I did as told. Torres left the door to the room open. That was a good sign. If he really believed I was capable of murder, he probably would’ve locked me in.

A few minutes later, Torres returned, accompanied by a tall, thin man whose expression seemed to suggest he had just scraped something unpleasant off the bottom of his shoe. He peered at me through a pair of rimless glasses.

“This is Detective Johnson,” Torres said. “He’s just going to ask you a few routine questions about what you saw.”

“Ms. Summers,” Detective Johnson said, nodding at me. “I understand you were discovered at the crime scene.”

“Total coincidence,” I said. “I was just walking through the square.”

He pulled out the chair opposite me, placed a file on the desk, and sat down. Chief Torres stood near the door, his hands clasped behind his back. Detective Johnson scrutinized me from across the table.

“Are you new in Yew Hollow?” he asked.

“New? No, I was born here.”

“I don’t know you.”

“I moved away to go to college when I was eighteen,” I explained. “I haven’t been back since.”

“Summers…” he mused. “You belong to that family?”

“Obviously.”

“And are you a witch?”

“Unfortunately.”

“A yes or no answer will suffice, Ms. Summers.”

I resisted the impulse to roll my eyes again. Detective Johnson seemed to take his job a tad too seriously.

“I understand you found the body,” he continued. He shuffled a few papers around in the file before extracting a photograph and pushing it across the table. I glanced at it, felt bile rise in the back of my throat, and looked away.

“I can’t believe you already have photographs,” I said.

“The reputation of our force relies on our efficiency, Ms. Summers.”

“What reputation?”

Detective Johnson ignored the question and tapped the photograph impatiently. “Do you know this woman, Ms. Summers?”

“No.”

“You’ve never seen her before?”

“I just said I didn’t know her.”

“Just answer the questions, Ms. Summers.”

“No, I’d never seen her before.”

“You claim you found the body,” he said.

“Because I did.”

“There’s dirt on your hands.”

“I fell,” I said shortly.

Detective Johnson stared me down. I maintained eye contact. “When?” he asked.

“When I found her,” I answered, picking at the dirt beneath my fingernails. “I was scared. Finding a dead person tends to have that effect on a woman, you know?”

“And why didn’t you call for the police right away?”

I shrugged. “Shock? Besides, the whole town showed up about two minutes after I found her.”

“Did you see anyone else around?”

“There was a teenaged girl walking her dog. She was the one who screamed.”

Detective Johnson scribbled a note on his clipboard. “No one else?”

“Nope.”

“You said you haven’t been in Yew Hollow for several years,” Detective Johnson stated. “Why did you decide to return?”

“Is that relevant?” I huffed, less than eager to admit my appalling failure at adult life.

“It seems an unusual coincidence that you turn up in town the same day a local woman is murdered,” Detective Johnson said, pushing his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “Add in the fact that you were discovered at the scene of the crime, and you’ll understand why we have to consider you a very likely suspect.”

Annoyed, I snapped, “Look, am I being arrested? Because, honestly, I spent the majority of the day on an airplane, and I’d really like the time to wash my hair tonight.”

“Speaking of which, what time did you arrive in town today?” Johnson asked, ignoring my aggravation.

“Shortly before five.”

“And where did you go when you first arrived?”

“My mother’s house. I dropped off my bags.”

“Who welcomed you home?”

“Nobody. Everyone was already gone for the town meeting,” I said. Technically, Wren had been home, according to my mother. I’d knocked on the door, having no key of my own, but no one had answered. I’d left my luggage on the front porch and headed into the center of town, hoping to track down one of my sisters for the key. If only I’d waited on the front porch for someone to come home. Then, I wouldn’t be dealing with this mess.

“Then where did you go?” Johnson prompted.

“I went to the town hall.”

“You were at the meeting?” Johnson asked, an eyebrow raised in disbelief.

“Briefly. I walked in just as that Parris dipshit was wrapping up. I left when my mother started talking about the reenactment.”

“Why did you decide to leave?”

“Because I already know the legend. I didn’t care to hear about it again.”

“And where did you go when you left the meeting?”

“Walked to the town square,” I said. “That’s when I found the body.”

More scribbling in his notebook. I waited for a few moments and then asked, “All done?”

“Far from it,” Johnson said.

“Oh, super.”

Chief Torres, still observing from the door, finally spoke. “Johnson, I think that’s probably enough for the young lady today. We can’t hold her overnight.”

Johnson threw a disgusted look over his shoulder at Chief Torres. I was surprised by Johnson’s lack of respect for his superior. Detectives were lower on the food chain than the chief of police, so Johnson’s disregard for Torres’s suggestion implied the hierarchy in Yew Hollow’s police force was a little skewed.

Despite Johnson’s insubordination, Torres maintained his firm demeanor. “Wrap it up, Johnson.”

Johnson cleared his throat. “All right, Ms. Summers, I suppose you’re free to go.”

I stood up quickly and moved toward the door before he could change his mind.

“Ms. Summers? Just remember that you’re at the top of my list,” Detective Johnson said, twirling his pen between his index finger and thumb.

“Get in line,” I said and strolled away.

3

In Which Weird Crap Keeps Happening to Me

Once free of the police station, I took a deep breath. I’d managed to keep myself together in front of my family and the cops, but my emotional stability was only so strong. I’d never seen a body before. Dead-and-gone ghosts were one thing. Bloodied corpses were different. I leaned over, bracing my hands on my knees, and focused on maintaining a steady breath. When my racing heart slowed, I began the walk back to my mother’s house.

The Summers house was quite legendary in Yew Hollow. It was one of the first to be built in 1693, when our ancestors first moved here, so it was considered a historical property. It sat at the top of a hill, lording over the town’s mortal occupants. The house was quite large, three stories, and had a wraparound porch with a swinging bench. Red, orange, and yellow trees hugged the property. The stars began to emerge, twinkling above me. Fireflies illuminated the yard and the porch. Had I not grown up in this house, I would’ve considered the scene picture perfect.

The front door flew open before I’d even set foot on the porch steps. My mother emerged from the house’s depths, her arms extended out to me in a gesture that was probably meant to be welcoming. However, as I allowed my mother to fold around me, I only felt a deep sense of uneasiness and guilt. She drew back and held me at arm’s length, her inquisitive eyes inspecting every inch of me.

“You look thin,” she said. “Gaunt, almost.”

“Wow, thanks, Mom.”

“I brought your things inside,” she said, taking me by the arm to lead me up the steps and into the house. “They’re in your bedroom. Oh, I’m so pleased you decided to come home.”

“I wouldn’t have if I could’ve helped it,” I said. “I ran out of money.”

As I stepped over the threshold, a shiver ricocheted off my spine. The house, like the town, seemed to be frozen in time. Nothing had changed. The same coatrack stood gallantly by the front door. The same mahogany table, a noble piece of furniture that could easily seat twenty people, still graced the spacious dining room. The same grand staircase led to the upper levels of the house. Above all, the same claustrophobic press of ancient witchcraft made itself present in my very being.

“We had an early dinner today because of the meeting,” my mother said. “I can heat up the leftovers if you like.”

“Sure, I’m starving. Where is everyone?” I asked, hoping that my sisters would rescue me from the one-on-one conversation my mother was bound to engage me in.

“I’ve asked them to give us some alone time.”

Crap.

I resigned myself to my fate, sinking into one of the high-backed chairs at the dining-room table. My mother disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes. When she returned, she set down a steaming plate of steak, potatoes, and mixed vegetables in front of me. Then, she drew out the chair opposite me, sat down, and fixed me with a penetrating gaze that I remembered all too well from my youth.

“Just ask what you want to ask,” I said through a mouthful of potatoes and steak.

“Why did you leave?”

I glanced up from my knife and fork. It wasn’t the question I was expecting. In fact, it was the opposite. I thought everyone would want to know why I’d returned to Yew Hollow.

“I needed to,” I replied, at a loss for a better explanation. It was true. At eighteen, I felt suffocated in Yew Hollow, strangled by my family’s reputation. All I wanted was to experience a normal life, one that didn’t involve annual rituals and other peculiarities.

“You left us. No warning or anything.” Her tone bordered on accusatory.

“I told Karma I was going,” I said.

“Ah, yes, your partner in crime,” my mother said. As children, Karma and I had been the closest out of all our sisters, only a year and a half apart in age. We were best friends. “You knew Karma wouldn’t tell us until you were far enough away to consider your escape successful,” my mother continued. “You didn’t even bother to send me a postcard.”

“I kept in touch,” I said hotly.

“With your sisters,” she snapped.

Suddenly, the steak knife wrenched itself out of my grip and slid across the table toward my mother of its own accord. I looked at my mother in shock, breathing hard. Her aura had always been annoyingly serene, even in times of stress or chaos. Yet tonight it slammed into me like a truck, a rusty-red haze around her normally cool-blue presence.

“And Wren,” I said quietly.

My mother scoffed. “The boy, of course. You always adored him for his deficiencies. I never understood it.”

“He’s not deficient!”

“He’s not a witch.”

“He’s still your son,” I growled through clenched teeth. I envied Wren his normalcy but not his relationship with the rest of the family. As a boy, he wasn’t able to inherit any powers, making him obsolete in a coven of witches.

“What good did it do you to leave Yew Hollow, Morgan?” my mother pressed. “Have you found yourself? Do you feel fulfilled now?”

I remained silent, fuming. A few moments passed as I allowed the frustrating feeling of failure burn away in my stomach. I cleared my throat, attempting to level out my voice. “Please,” I said. “I just got home. Not to mention, I’m still getting over the terror of finding that woman.”

The atmosphere in the dining room shifted at once. The rage settled, and curiosity set in instead. My mother said nothing.

“Mom,” I said, venturing carefully. “Was it... was it one of us?”

Our glances met over the table. Often, my mother’s eyes betrayed her deepest of thoughts. At times like these, though, she exercised an uncanny control over her expression. It was a quality that contributed to her mysteriously powerful vibes. She seemed to collect the emotions of others to feed her own strength, without evincing a single snippet of her inner intentions.

Finally, she said, “No, I don’t think so.”

The uncertainty in her voice was obvious. She had to be wondering the same thing that I was. The murder, what with its location beneath the yew tree and the strange details of its execution, was clearly a sacrifice. Historically, witches and mortals alike had dabbled in dark magic—there was an innate obsession with the type of absolute power it was meant to afford you—but the consequences were dire, and no one in our coven seemed so negligent as to attempt it. Still, someone had sacramentally killed a woman, and her death was bound to awaken trouble.

Footsteps creaked down the stairs, interrupting my mother’s pensiveness. Karma wandered into the dining room, approached me from behind, and hugged my shoulders over the back of my chair. I closed my eyes, letting her celestial lilac aura wash over me. Karma had a way with peace. It was my favorite thing about her. That, and the eerily convenient connection that had been forged between us as soon as I’d been born. We understood each other in ways that didn’t make sense. Tonight, she’d come to my rescue, despite my mother’s request that my sisters remain upstairs.

As Karma settled into the chair next to me and stole a carrot from my plate, more footsteps descended. Malia and Laurel soon appeared. It seemed that all three of my sisters had been lying in wait. I imagined them sitting at the top of the stairs, listening to the conversation between my mother and I. My sisters were mature, but not beyond eavesdropping. Now, for the first time in over a decade, all five of the Summers women graced one room. If we were lucky, nothing would implode.

For several minutes, we sat in silence, acclimating to the feeling of so many auras in the same vicinity. I observed each of my sisters in turn. I’d scryed them over the years to keep an eye on them, since scrying was a simple spell that didn’t attract too much attention, but seeing them in person again was different.

Laurel, younger than me by a good eight years, was now twenty. She’d grown into a remarkably beautiful young woman, with long blond hair and my mother’s pale-gray eyes. Laurel’s ability was rare. She could commune with nature on an exceptional level. When she was younger, I often found her sitting outside in the dirt, speaking to the trees. She was a quiet, reserved creature, much better suited for Yew Hollow than I’d ever be.

Malia, who was nearing forty, was the practical sister. As the oldest, she’d always been the responsible one. When our mother was off performing difficult spells, Malia took it upon herself to care for her younger sisters. Her speciality was with objects. She could touch any inanimate thing and know everything about it: where it had been, who had used it, and what it had been used for. It made her incredibly difficult to lie to. She was honest and noble. Her personality, as well as her talent, often came in handy when controlling the rest of the coven.

Then there was Karma, of course. She was wild, though my mother never considered her as uncontrollable as me. Her gift was not only unique but also dangerous. She could create voodoo dolls for humans and animals. When we were young, we’d been careless, using her gift to play pranks on other schoolchildren, teachers, and even members of our coven. It had all been harmless fun, until one mischievous deed nearly landed an acquaintance in the hospital. After that, Karma became wary of her power and only used it if a situation absolutely demanded it.

Malia spoke first. “So, how do we address this?”

“Address what?” I asked.

“The kill,” she clarified. “Do we call in the coven for questioning?”

“It might not have been any of us,” Laurel piped in. “You don’t have to be a witch to use dark magic. It could’ve been one of the townspeople.”

“What’s the likeliness of that, though?” Karma asked. She pilfered another carrot from my plate. “You know the townspeople. Most of them are too scared of our witchcraft to attempt dark magic on their own.”

My mother spoke. “Are you all aware of who was murdered?”

The four of us shook our heads in unison.

“It was Leigh Lockwood.”

All three of my sisters gasped in shock. Malia put a hand to her heart, and Karma squeezed my arm so hard that I could’ve sworn she halted circulation.

“No!” Laurel said.

“She was always nice to us!” Karma added.

“Who’s Leigh Lockwood?” I asked, since none of them seemed to recall that I was no longer familiar with the inhabitants of Yew Hollow.

“She was a librarian,” Malia said. “Young. Maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine? She was also the head of the Historical Preservation Society. She always helped us plan the reenactments.”

“I liked her.” Laurel’s voice quivered, her long eyelashes wet with tears. I reached over to her, holding one of her hands in mine.

“Everyone liked her,” my mother said. “That’s why this doesn’t make any sense. Who would’ve killed her?”

“You said she was friendly with the coven?” I asked.

“Always,” Malia said. “She was one of the few townspeople who trusted us, enjoyed our company even. She was fascinated by our history.”

“How fascinated?” I asked wryly.

“It was an innocent interest,” Karma clarified. “There wasn’t a deceitful bone in her body.”

“Well, someone wanted her dead,” I said. “There has to be a reason for it. What’s the coven been up to lately? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Nothing that would involve murder,” my mother said.

“That you know of,” I muttered. All of a sudden, I couldn’t stand to continue the conversation. I wanted to be alone, so I pushed back my chair and stood. “I need a shower. Wash off this crappy day, you know?”

Surprisingly, no one protested. I left my sisters and my mother to resume speculating without me, taking the creaky stairs two at a time to the second floor. I knocked on the door at the end of the hall. When no one answered, I pushed it open.

Wren, the youngest Summers sibling, occupied the smallest bedroom of the house. He sat hunched over his desk in the corner of the room, oblivious to my presence. Massive studio headphones engulfed his ears. I could hear bass-heavy electronic music pumping out of them from the doorway. For a few moments, I simply watched him. He was tall now. I could tell from the way his lanky legs spread out underneath his desk. I felt a sharp pang of guilt hit me. When I’d left Yew Hollow, I hadn’t thought about how my absence would affect Wren. He video conferenced me often while I was away, keeping me updated on the coven’s antics and his own life, but I still felt guilty that I wasn’t around to help him grow up.

I walked over to his desk and gently removed his headphones, trying not to startle him. He jumped anyway, turning toward me. He only looked at me, eyes wide, as if he couldn’t believe that I was standing in front of him.

“I suppose you’re too manly for hugs now?” I asked, unable to stop a smile from spreading across my face. I’d missed Wren. I resisted the temptation to squeeze his cheeks, knowing that he probably wouldn’t appreciate it.

“Morgan,” he finally said. “Wh-What are you doing here?”

“I missed my favorite sibling.”

He stood up. I was right about his height. He towered over me now. The top of his head nearly brushed the sloped ceiling of his bedroom. “Yeah, but you’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

“You’re not happy to see me?” I joked, punching him lightly on one shoulder. “By the way, thanks for nothing. I could’ve avoided a whole lot of trouble if you’d just answered the door earlier.”

He seemed confused. “Earlier? When?”

“Around five. That’s when I got home.”

“Oh.” He reached forward to take his headphones back and held them up. “I’ve had these on pretty much all day. If I’d known you were coming home—”

“Hang on,” I said, holding up a hand to stop him. “So you don’t know what happened?”

“What happened?”

My eyelids felt suddenly heavy, as if the full weight of the day’s events had just settled in on them. The last thing I wanted to do was break a piece of disturbing information to my little brother. Nevertheless, he deserved to know what was going on, so I said, “A woman was murdered in town today.”

Immediately, Wren’s face distorted itself into an alarmed expression that sent acute twinges of shame through my chest. No eighteen-year-old should have to deal with the news of murder in his own town.

“Who?” he asked.

“Someone named Leigh Lockwood.”

He sank back into his desk chair, holding his head in his hands. I waited, not sure what to do. At a loss, I put what I hoped was a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

“I liked her,” he said, his voice just a mumble as he spoke into his palms. “She was so nice.”

The words echoed my sisters’ sentiments from downstairs. Whoever Leigh Lockwood was, she’d managed to impress my entire family, a rare and admirable feat.

“I’m sorry, Wren.”

“Is she—do they know who did it?” he asked, looking up at me. His eyes were bright, as if he was holding back tears.

I decided there was no point in hiding from Wren. He was bound to find out about the police’s suspicions anyway. Rumor spread through Yew Hollow like the plague, and I’d rather Wren heard the gossip from me than anyone else.

“They think I did it,” I admitted, feeling strangely culpable, as if I’d just confessed to the actual crime.

Wren shot out of his seat so quickly that I took a step back. “What?”

“It’s a long story,” I said, rubbing my tired eyes with the back of my hand. “Actually, no it’s not. I found the body. No one else was around, so when everyone came out, they automatically thought I did it.”

“But there’s no proof!”

I reached up to plant both hands on Wren’s shoulders, pushing gently to encourage him to sit down again. “Wren, relax. They’ll figure it out. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Like you said, there’s no proof.”

He ran his fingers through his hair, quiet. It struck me how similar Wren and I were. When things got complicated, we both withdrew to our private places, unwilling to deal with the situation head on. I decided to let him be. I figured he needed time to process the bad news.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m going to grab a shower. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to come upstairs and ask, okay?”

“Yeah.”

He put on his headphones again, clearly indicating that he was finished with our conversation. I patted his shoulder once more before leaving and shut the door behind me. Then I trudged up the next flight of stairs to the third floor.

The third floor of the Summers house used to belong solely to me. There were only three rooms up here: my old bedroom, a small study that I used as a library, and a tiny bathroom. When I was still living in the house, the third floor had been my sanctuary, especially the library. My sisters had rarely disturbed me up here. They used to say the third floor gave them weird vibes. It wasn’t unusual for a certain place to appeal strongly to one witch over others—for example, Karma had always had a strange attachment to the rickety swing set in the backyard—so my family accepted my preference for the third floor without question. It was this, I always thought, that made the third floor so appealing. It was peaceful, a guaranteed place of solitude in an otherwise chaotic household.

I showered first, grateful to finally scrub the dirt out from underneath my fingernails. The decrepit pipes gurgled with defeat as I wrapped one towel around my wet hair and another around myself. Then I pushed open the door to my bedroom, fully intending to collapse on my old twin bed and not move until morning. There was only one problem with my plan.

My bed was already occupied. Leigh Lockwood was sitting on it.

4

In Which I Make a Friend

It wasn’t exactly Leigh Lockwood. It was her spirit, or essence, or whatever you wanted to call it. She looked completely alive. That was a bad sign. The more corporeal a ghost was, the less likely she or he would move on to the afterlife. She glanced up as I swung the door wide, and I understood why my family was so infatuated with her. Leigh was the textbook definition of pretty: high cheekbones, soft blue eyes, and a sad, knowing smile. She had no aura—ghosts never did—but I imagined it as the pale-pink hues of sunset, washing across easy waves on a beach.

“I don’t know where I am,” she said solemnly.

Before I responded, I closed the bedroom door behind me. It was a habit of mine to keep my posthumous transactions private. “That’s because you aren’t supposed to be here,” I said. I hoped she couldn’t pick up the tone of regret in my voice. It wasn’t her fault she was haunting me. I was the only medium in the coven. Naturally, Leigh’s spirit had sought me out.

I sat down next to her on the bed, pulling the towel off my head and beginning to dry my hair with it. I waited for her to say something.

“You’re Morgan, right?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Karma showed me pictures of you. She talked about you a lot.”

“That sounds like Karma,” I said. “Did she tell you much about me?”

“She told me that you can speak to ghosts.”

I nodded again, anticipating her reaction as she made the connection. For me, the worst part about meeting someone’s ghost for the first time was telling them that they were dead. Some of them already knew and understood. Others didn’t take the news so well. When a single tear appeared on Leigh’s eyelashes, I expected her to fall into the latter category, but she determinedly swiped the moisture away with the back of her hand.

“I never tried the apple pie,” she said.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“The apple pie,” she said again. “At the Fall Festival. Everyone always said it was like tasting a little piece of heaven, but I never got to try it.”

This was new. Most spirits lamented greater regrets. Leigh, it seemed, was a much simpler woman. “Trust me,” I said, attempting to reassure her. “I’ve had the apple pie. You’re not missing much.”

She chuckled softly. Then she asked, “What am I doing here?”

I tossed the wet towel to the corner of the room, retrieved my duffel bag from near the door, and turned it upside down, dumping its contents onto the bed next to Leigh. “You have unfinished business,” I explained to her, picking out a pair of flannel pajama pants and an oversized T-shirt to sleep in.

She turned around, politely facing the wall as I got dressed. I wouldn’t have cared either way. My privacy had been invaded by the dead so many times in New York that I’d forfeited any remnant of modesty in front of them.

“You can’t move on to the next life until you resolve whatever it is that’s keeping you here,” I explained further as I pulled the T-shirt over my head. “I assume you’re still around because you don’t know who killed you.”

“I was killed?”

Great. It was normal for ghosts to have shoddy memories about the details surrounding their death. I guessed memories didn’t transfer as well to the space between life and death. Unfortunately, it made my job as a medium a bit challenging. How was I supposed to help ghosts pass on if I didn’t know why they were still here in the first place?

“In town, earlier today,” I said to Leigh. She was handling the news rather well. She seemed quite acquiescent of her fate, listening intently as I filled her in. “Someone murdered you under the yew tree in the town square,” I continued. “Sacrificed you, actually.”

“Someone sacrificed me?”

“They tried to,” I clarified. “Pentagram drawn around your body, black candles, daggers, the whole shebang. Dark-magic stuff. So far, nothing’s come out of it.”

“What was meant to come out of it?”

I shrugged, sitting cross-legged on the bed. “Depends on the intention. Dark magic isn’t really something to mess with. Whoever did it is probably going to face the consequences eventually.”

She lay back on the bed, crossing her arms behind her head. For someone who had just found out she’d been murdered, she appeared rather content. If anything, she was more interested in the details of her death than devastated over the loss of her life. I respected her sense of calm. If it was me in her shoes, I would have been beside myself.

“What’s going to happen to me?” she asked as she stared up at the ceiling of my bedroom. “I mean, I won’t morph into something demonic? Since I was sacrificed or whatever?”

I tried not to laugh. Matters of the afterlife were hard to grasp for those who weren’t already familiar with it. Honestly, I didn’t even know if there was a heaven or hell. I just hoped that the souls I helped moved on to a better place. “No, fortunately for you, that’s not how dark magic works,” I explained. “Usually, a sacrifice requires a pure soul. Someone decent. From what I hear, you fit the bill.”

“But will I move on? To whatever’s next?” For the first time during the conversation, I heard her voice waver. A breath caught in my throat. It was one thing to fear the afterlife as a living, breathing human, when death seemed far enough off to avoid thinking about it. As a spirit, trapped between worlds, facing the fate of your eternal soul was a whole new type of terrifying.

I decided not to mention that the likeliness of her passing on wasn’t high. If I didn’t know better, she seemed alive enough to reach out and touch her. If I tried, my hands would pass through her, as if she wasn’t there. She wasn’t, really, no matter how mortal she appeared. Some people simply got stuck in between. Usually, it was because they needed to tie up loose ends on earth, but every once in a while, I had to give up on a spirit. No matter how hard I tried, some ghosts just couldn’t pass on.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “You’ll find that out on your own. Like I said, it’s probably because you weren’t meant to die so soon. Your memories might come back, they might not. Try to remember what happened to you. Sometimes, spirits just need to know why they died in order to accept it and move on.”

“Will you help me?” she asked. She sat up. Then, heartbreakingly enough, she tried to take one of my hands. I felt the familiar sensation of a ghost’s touch. It was like dipping my fingers into a chilly pool of water. Leigh, bemused, stared at her fingers. Then she passed a hand across one of my cheekbones, sending a frigid blast through me. I shivered involuntarily.

“It’s weird, I know,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. She responded by thrusting a fist through my nose, giggling madly. My brain glaciated. “Do you mind?” I asked, leaning away from her. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you’re amused, but it’s kind of like getting a really intense case of brain freeze.”

“Oops.”

I wrinkled my nose then rubbed it with both hands, hoping to regain some sort of sensation in it. “Should I be worried about your lackadaisical attitude?” I asked. “Most people are a lot more upset when they figure out that they’re dead.”

Leigh sighed, her eyes softening. “I guess it hasn’t really sunk in yet. Besides, I lived a pretty nice life. Do I wish I had the option of continuing to live it? Of course. But it’s probably for the best that I don’t dwell on that, right?”

I nodded, floored by Leigh’s maturity. All my life, I’d been all too aware of how delicate life was. Speaking to dead people had that effect. Many ghosts lacked the emotional depth to accept their death, attempting to justify their leftover presence in the mortal world with any excuse they could think of. Every day I met a newly deceased spirit, I was reminded of my own fleeting mortality.

“And your family?” I asked. “Is there anyone you want me to call?”

Leigh shook her head. “My parents passed away a while ago, and I don’t have any other family.”

“Boyfriend? Husband?”

She gave another shake of her head. I was a little surprised at her lack of a support system, considering how polite and caring my family had made her out to be. People like Leigh usually attracted all types of people wanting to be involved in her life. At least I wouldn’t have to make any phone calls. Everyone always shot the messenger.

“Will you help me?” she asked again.

I couldn’t say no, despite the fact that I thought Yew Hollow would’ve afforded me a break from all of my ghostbusting. Leigh deserved to move on, and maybe she could help turn up a few more details about her death. It couldn’t hurt to look into it. After all, if I figured out who murdered Leigh, the police would have no choice but to cross my name off of their suspect list.

“I’ll do what I can,” I said.

She reached forward, as if to hug me, but I held my hands up to stop her.

“No offense,” I said, “but I’d rather not freeze to death.”

“Would that happen?” she asked, tucking her arms against her chest as if preventing herself from trying again.

I laughed. “No, it’s just really cold.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Listen, I’m exhausted. Can we start Nancy Drew-ing tomorrow?”

“Of course.” She hopped up from the bed, allowing me to pull back the duvet without reaching through her. She gazed around the room. “Um… what should I do?”

I slipped underneath the covers and plumped up my pillow, which had flattened out over the years. “You can stay here, if you like,” I said, “but it might do you some good to wander around town. Check out the yew tree and the town square. Sometimes, it helps to revisit the places you were right before you died. It might jog your memory.”

She nodded and vanished. If there was anything I envied about ghosts, it was their carefree method of transportation. I pulled the duvet over my head and, within seconds, fell asleep.

In the morning, I woke to find Leigh sitting at the end of my bed. Sunlight streamed in through the round window above the bed, dust dancing through its golden beams.

“Good morning!” Leigh said. She patted the bed impatiently. “Get up! We’ve got a crime to solve.”

“Easy there, Sherlock. Let me wake up first.”

She stood and started pacing around the room. “Fine, but tell me about the town legend.”

I threw off the duvet, lugged myself out of bed, and stretched. The old twin bed hadn’t done any wonders for my back. I felt sore and stiff. “I thought you knew all about the legend,” I said to Leigh, passing by her and into the bathroom. “My sisters said you helped out with the reenactment every year.”

“I did. That’s why I’m curious. Didn’t you use to sacrifice men under the yew tree every year?” She followed me into the bathroom, leaning against the doorway as I brushed my teeth.

“I didn’t sacrifice anyone,” I clarified, mumbling through a mouthful of toothpaste. “It wasn’t done out of spite or power either. The annual ritual was meant to provide the original coven with a foolproof type of protection.”

“I only know a little bit about it,” Leigh said. “Start at the beginning.”

I spat out the toothpaste, rinsed, and wiped my mouth on a hand towel. “Do you think your death has to do with the town legend?”

Leigh shrugged. “You have to admit, there are some striking similarities. I just want to know if one connects to the other.”

I leaned against the sink, trying to remember the most important details about the legend of Yew Hollow. “Okay. As you know, Yew Hollow was settled in 1693. At that time, colonial America had dissolved into mass hysteria over the whole witchcraft thing. Very rarely did mortals actually find a real witch. They mostly just killed each other. Some people were smarter, though. They started to catch on to the signs that gave away a true witch. Naturally, witch hunting evolved into a legitimate career. Most mortals are terrified of things that they can’t understand.”

I wandered back into my room, Leigh following close behind. As I rooted through my pile of clothing, looking for something to wear, I continued. “The original coven lived in Salem, far too close to the source of the issue to be comfortable. When the witch hunters started executing members of the coven, they decided to escape. They chose to settle in Yew Hollow because of the trees, especially the big one in the center of town. Yew trees have all sorts of magical properties. The witches mostly admired them for protection from evil spirits. They figured the yew trees would prevent them from being discovered.”

“But?” Leigh prompted, as I paused my history lesson to pull on a pair of jeans.

“One particularly nasty witch hunter found them anyway,” I explained, zipping up my pants. “He was apparently quite infamous. He’d killed nearly forty women in less than a year, claiming they were all guilty of witchcraft. He had sons too, all of which he trained in his craft. He marched into Yew Hollow with every intention of burning it to the ground. Unfortunately for him, he’d never taken on an entire coven of witches before. We’re stronger together. The original coven all but obliterated him.”

It was a mark of Leigh’s compassionate personality that she actually seemed distraught over the fate of a long-dead, notoriously brutal witch hunter. “What happened to him?” she asked.

“The coven decided to use him to beef up security in Yew Hollow,” I explained. “They devised a ritual that was meant to protect Yew Hollow from further discovery. It was barbaric, really. They strung up the witch hunter from the yew tree and stoned him. His blood sacrifice strengthened the spell. No mortal would be able to locate Yew Hollow. Every additional year, on the autumn equinox, the coven sacrificed a man from the same bloodline as the witch hunter in order to renew the protection spell.”

Leigh flinched, saying, “Well, that’s certainly different from the version we reenact every Halloween.”

I nodded, attempting to pull a black cashmere sweater over my head at the same time. “That’s one of the reasons I was never a huge fan of the reenactments,” I admitted. “I won’t deny that the original coven did what they needed to do to stay alive. I just would prefer not to relive the violence. Today’s version of the legend is watered down.”

“It always seemed so fun,” Leigh said. “The ritual, I mean.”

“Yes, but what did you expect?” I sat down on the bed, fishing my favorite pair of black boots out from under the bed, where I’d kicked them off the previous night. “Yew Hollow’s main source of revenue comes from tourism. We’ve become a parody of what we once were. The reenactment of the ritual is the town’s biggest draw. Naturally, it evolved. All of the music, the dancing, fireworks, whatever. That was never part of the original sacrifice.”

“When did the witches stop doing the real ritual?”

Shrugging, I said, “I don’t know. Sometime in the 1700s, I think. After the chaos at Salem died down, the colonists more or less forgot about witchcraft. We always assumed the ritual went by the wayside, but no one really knows when.”

“And you don’t suppose someone got paranoid and sacrificed me as part of a new ritual?” Leigh asked.

I shook my head. “After a while, human sacrifices were considered archaic and cruel,” I explained. “You’d have to be absolutely crazy to even think about doing it these days.”

I finished tying up my boots then led Leigh out of the bedroom and down to the second story.

“Wait here,” I said to her as I knocked on Wren’s door. As expected, he didn’t answer. When I attempted to push the door open, I discovered it was locked. “Wren?” I called. “You doing okay?”

No answer. He was probably still asleep. I motioned to Leigh to follow me downstairs, promising myself to check on Wren later.

“Are you going to tell everyone that you can see me?” Leigh asked as we descended. Every step of mine sent an echoing creak through the rest of the house. Leigh’s footfalls, naturally, were silent.

“I’d prefer not to,” I whispered, hyper aware of my sisters’ collective aptitude for eavesdropping. “They’ll just ask a ton of questions.”

“Oh. I was just hoping to say hello.”

I could sense the disappointment in her voice. I remembered that my family had enjoyed Leigh’s company and vice versa, but it never occurred to me that Leigh might’ve actually established an honest relationship with various members of the Summers coven.

“It’ll be easier for you to move on if you stay detached,” I said to her as we reached the landing of the first floor.

“Who’s detached?” my mother’s voice said from the dining room, startling me.

“No one,” I said hastily. “Just talking to myself.”

“Mm-hmm,” my mother said. She wore a purple satin robe and reading glasses, the daily paper levitating in midair in front of her nose. “Coffee?”

“No, thanks. Mom, can I ask a question?”

“Certainly.”

I paused, considering my phrasing. “Does anyone in the coven still believe in human sacrifices?”

“Your Aunt Alberta, but everyone knows she’s demented.”

“Mom, I’m serious.”

“As am I,” she said, stirring a sugar cube into a mug of black coffee before taking a sip. “I suppose you’re fishing for information?”

“Just curious,” I said.

Malia’s head appeared in the kitchen doorway. “No one’s performed a human sacrifice in Yew Hollow since the 1700s,” she said.

Leigh trailed behind me as I joined Malia in the kitchen. As I frosted a bagel with cream cheese, I said, “That much I knew. What about with dark magic, though? I mean, it’s not exactly moral, is it? Dark users wouldn’t balk at sacrificing humans, right?”

“These sound like questions for Karma,” Malia said.

“Karma? Why?”

Malia leaned against the countertop, sipping some sort of potent-smelling tea from a ceramic mug. “That guy she was with a few years ago. What was his name again, Mom?”

“Satan,” my mother called from the dining room.

Malia rolled her eyes. “Luke, I think it was. Anyway, when Karma told him that she was a witch, he decided to dabble in the dark arts.”

“Karma never told me that!”

“Really?” Leigh asked. “I knew.”

She’d been so quiet for the past few minutes, I had almost forgotten she was there. A bubble of jealousy rose in my throat. Karma had shared secrets with Leigh, secrets that she hadn’t even bothered to make me aware of. What else did Leigh know about my family?

“I think she was ashamed,” Malia said. “She didn’t want you to think ill of her. Anyway, she ended up doing a whole bunch of research on dark magic in order to stop Luke from doing anything stupid. You could ask her about it.”

“Where is she?”

“She and Laurel went out to the swing set this morning,” my mother said as she swished around the contents of her coffee mug.

I waved a hand in thanks, discreetly motioning for Leigh to follow me. We left the house through the rear screen door. I’d forgotten how vast the backyard was. It went on for several acres, bordered by a thick forest. In the distance, near the edge of the golden tree line, I spotted Karma and Laurel. Laurel sat in the mulch around the swing set, her palms flattened out on the ground behind her, head tipped back to allow the autumn sunlight as much access to her pores as possible. Karma occupied one of the swings, kicking her legs back and forth in a rhythmic, hypnotizing motion. When the swing reached its full height, Karma leapt off, soaring through the air before landing lightly on her feet near Laurel. I couldn’t help but smile. Yew Hollow had kept them young, whereas New York had robbed me of my childish appreciation for simplicity.

I jogged over to them, Leigh following close behind.

“Don’t you guys have jobs?” I joked, knowing full well that very few women of the coven entertained themselves with mortal careers. I commandeered the swing that Karma had recently vacated, dug my toes in the ground to push myself back, then let gravity do the rest of the work.

“My only obligation is to Mother Gaia,” Laurel said. Her eyes were closed. I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.

As Leigh sat cross-legged in the mulch next to Laurel, I saw Laurel shiver. Leigh’s presence must have been even stronger than I originally thought, especially if other witches could feel the chill she produced.

“Karma, why didn’t you tell me about Luke?” I asked as she sat in the vacant swing.

“Mom told you?”

“Malia.”

“Remind me to stick a pin in her doll,” she said, though there was no malice in her voice. “He was stupid. There’s no other reason for it. You know how men are. They want to prove their strength or whatever.”

“Malia said you did a lot of research on dark magic.”

“I did. I was trying to find a way to stop him,” she explained, as if justifying her reason for studying the dark arts. It was a sensitive subject. Dark magic was a grossly warped version of witchcraft. “It didn’t matter anyway. When we broke up, he moved away.”

I kicked my legs again, leaning way back in the swing to maximize the rush of wind past my ears on the way down. “Did you ever read anything about human sacrifices?”

“This is about Leigh, isn’t it?” Laurel asked.

I had to give it to my sisters. They certainly were perceptive. I kept an eye on Leigh as her name came up, but she only smiled sadly, crossed her arms behind her head, and lay back in the mulch. I nodded.

Karma swung past me. “It isn’t common,” she said. “Even dark users have to draw the line somewhere.”

I didn’t speak, swinging in silence, hoping that more information was forthcoming.

“But…” Karma continued, now rocking from side to side and causing her swing to careen forward in a chaotic arc. “If someone was really desperate, there are a couple of ancient rituals that require human sacrifice in order to harness a massive amount of power.”

“What kind of rituals?”

“The kind that needs more than one sacrifice,” Karma went on. “Rituals like that depend on a lot of blood. A series of three offerings, each body fulfilling a certain necessary element of the spell, sacrificed at three specific times of year.”

“How very detailed,” Laurel said airily.

“Then this could be the first in a series of sacrifices?” I asked.

“Morgan, you forget that this is Yew Hollow,” Karma said. “There’s no way someone would be able to pull off another bizarre murder without the town catching them. The entire police force is on high alert.”

“What, all five of them?” I said in a dry voice.

“I’m just saying—”

“They killed one person. They could do it again,” I cut in. I dragged my heels into the ground, gouging scars into the earth, and forced my swing to come to a stop. “Who would do this?” I asked. “Who in the coven?”

“Morgan, think about it,” Laurel said in a tranquil tone, as if she could sense the deepening frustration in my voice. “Most of the coven are like Mom. They’re old. Powerful, but passive. We’re at peace.”

“Then who in town?” I asked. I was already annoyed with the lack of information on the murder. Yew Hollow was famously tiny. Everyone knew everyone else. That meant that someone had to know something about Leigh’s death.

Laurel and Karma exchanged loaded glances with each other.

“What?” I demanded.

“It’s just—” Karma began. “Yew Hollow barely belongs to us anymore. Most of the townspeople tolerate us because we bring in revenue. If they could do away with us, they would.”

“So it could be anyone,” Laurel concluded.

I glanced at Leigh, still lying on her back beside Laurel. She had been the head of the Historical Preservation Society and a librarian at the local library. She would’ve interacted with the townspeople on a regular basis, and from what I’d gathered, she had been well liked. Maybe Leigh had more information about possible suspects in her death than I had originally assumed. We needed to have a private conversation.

I hopped off the swing.

“I need to think,” I said.

“Before you go,” Karma said, bringing her own swing to a stop. “Tell me, why do you care so much? You didn’t even know Leigh.”

I couldn’t stop myself from making eye contact with Leigh before ripping my gaze away from hers. I hoped that, to my sisters, it looked as if I were staring thoughtfully into space.

“I just know how much she meant to you guys,” I said. I had never been a particularly talented liar. “See you later.”

With a tiny jerk of my head, I beckoned Leigh to follow me. Left to her own devices, she might have stuck around with Karma and Laurel in an attempt to feel normal again. Spirits did that occasionally. But she rose from the mulch without arguing, wiped her palms against her pants, despite the fact that she was dead and no dirt could cling to them, and followed me back toward the house. Halfway across the yard, I heard Laurel and Karma’s voices carry out to us. They must have assumed I was already out of earshot.

“She must think we’re completely oblivious,” Laurel said.

“Leave it be, Laurel.”

I led Leigh into town. I wanted to visit the yew tree again. I didn’t care if it might be a bad idea to show up at the place where the cops thought I had murdered someone. I hadn’t killed Leigh. There was no blood on my hands, figuratively or literally. If the cops were too stupid to figure that out, the possibility of them discovering the real murderer was beyond unlikely.

Leigh chatted genially as we strolled toward the town square, filling me in on the details of her life. She was born and raised in the suburbs of Virginia. Her parents, it turned out, had died in a house fire, the cause of which had never been identified. Leigh had a theory about that, though.

“When I was a kid, I remember weird stuff happening in that house,” she said. “I’d hear voices when everyone was asleep, or a cat meowing even though we never owned a cat. I used to dream about a little girl, over and over again, but I never understood what it might’ve meant.”

“And your parents probably told you it was just a nightmare?” I guessed. History was littered with mortals’ stories of connecting with the dead. The dead were always more likely to reach out to children. At that age, society hadn’t beaten the thought of the impossible out of you yet.

“Naturally,” Leigh said. “And then the night of the fire, I dreamt of her again. She told me to follow her, and she led me out of the house to a playground a few blocks away. The police found me asleep under a slide, and by that time, the house had burned to the ground.”

The incident had provoked Leigh’s initial interest in the spirit world. She’d gone on to study history and a wide range of folklore at university, trying to get her hands on anything that could’ve been interpreted as paranormal. I had to give her credit. Most humans grew out of their obsession with the metaphysical, dismissing it as myth, but Leigh had been determined to prove her theories right.

“That’s why I moved to Yew Hollow,” she explained. “I’d read that the town was home to a real coven of witches. At first, I doubted it. But when I found your family, I could have exploded with joy. They listened to my story and understood. Your mother, and your sisters especially, gave me what I needed. A support system that didn’t balk at my preternatural past.”

My heart felt like an anvil in my chest. Leigh had managed to find everything in my family that I hadn’t, a sense of belonging and the ability to rely on your sorority when life cut you down.

“They’re good people,” Leigh murmured. I stared at the ground as we walked, focusing on the crunch of dead leaves beneath my feet. “Not just your family. Your whole coven.”

My coven. The concept felt alien to me. I hadn’t truly been a part of the coven in years.

“Karma told me you don’t like being a witch,” Leigh said.

“Karma’s got a big mouth.”

“A big heart, too.”

I ignored this, knowing full well that Leigh was right. Karma only wanted the best for me, but her good intentions weren’t enough to stop me from feeling out of place in my own family.

“I’m just trying to understand,” Leigh began slowly, as if choosing her words cautiously, “why you consider your gift a burden.”

We arrived in town. Thankfully, there weren’t many people about. It was a Monday, and most of Yew Hollow’s residents had gone off to work. It made it easier to speak to Leigh without looking like a crazy person. Nevertheless, I kept my voice quiet and my chin down. The last thing I needed was for some townsperson to assume I was talking to myself.

“How would you feel,” I said, “if dead people kept seeking you out? Wherever you are, whatever company you keep, they don’t care. They just want to suck you dry until they pass over.”

Leigh’s face crumpled, and I automatically regretted my words. I’d forgotten whom I was speaking to. Despite this, she said, “I don’t know. I just think that if it were me, I would do my best to help anyone I could. You’re their last hope to be at peace, you know? Mine, too.”

She spoke passionately and intelligently, laying out the advantages of being a medium, almost as if she were a professor giving a lecture on human decency and the supernatural. The more I listened, the more I lamented her death. The world needed more women like Leigh, compassionate, open-minded, and inquisitive as she was.

When we reached the yew tree, I glanced around to make sure no one was watching then took hold of the tree’s lowest branch and hoisted myself up. I climbed higher and higher, my arm muscles burning, until I found a forked branch to straddle. The thick foliage concealed me from prying eyes, though I could peer through the yellowing leaves and still see the town hall from here. With my back against the yew’s trunk, I could feel its liveliness pulsing through me. I closed my eyes and tipped my head back, savoring the smell of sap.

Leigh appeared on my branch, swinging her feet out into the open air.

“I used to climb this tree all the time,” I said, inhaling deeply. “It was one of my favorite places to go think. This tree, and an abandoned stable in the forest behind our house.”

For a few minutes, we sat in silence. From this height, ensconced in the yew’s protective embrace, I could almost forget that Leigh was dead and a murderer was at large. I imagined what it would’ve been like to grow up with Leigh as a friend, someone whose aura must have been too pure to exist in a world like this. I shook my head from side to side, as if the action would clear out the illusion of a wholly different Yew Hollow.

“Tell me about the preservation society,” I said to Leigh. “You had to interact with a lot of other townspeople as the head of the board, right? Did anyone ever have a problem with you being close to the coven?”

“If they did, they never mentioned it,” Leigh said. She leaned over to another branch, examining an abandoned bird’s nest. “I mostly worked with people who appreciated the town’s history, or at least knew that the coven was the main reason we could afford to keep the town running. We worked with your family in person to arrange the reenactment. No one on the board ever voiced any concerns over the witches’ involvement. Not everyone is so small minded.”

“What about that Parris jackass?” I asked, remembering how belligerent Parris had been at the crime scene the day before. “What does he do?”

“He’s a member of the town council,” Leigh said. “He teaches communications at the college in the next town over. As far as I know, everyone really respects him, despite the fact that he’s pretty high strung.”

“Well, he obviously doesn’t think very highly of the coven.”

“He had a run-in with one of your aunts a few years ago,” Leigh explained. “Ever since then, he’s been pretty adamant about keeping the coven under control.”

“What kind of run-in?”

“It was during the reenactment that year,” she said. “He was ruining the fun, saying how the reenactment shouldn’t be celebrated, that the coven shouldn’t subject the town to its oddities, so your aunt made him strip to his underwear and tap dance in front of everyone.”

I sniggered, imagining the scenario in my mind.

“Anyway,” Leigh continued, “he redoubled his efforts to squash the coven’s impact on the town. It’s a touchy subject for him.”

“Did he ever give you any trouble about being the head of the preservation society?” I asked, reaching out to pluck a leaf from the tree and relieving it of its needles.

“Just a few snide comments here and there. Nothing to indicate that he was plotting to murder me.”

“You never heard him talk about dark magic or anything like that?”

She shook her head.

Stretching my legs out along my branch, I sighed in resignation. Nothing seemed to add up. No one had a strong enough motive for killing Leigh. No one knew of anyone who dallied in human sacrifice. No one seemed to have any useful information at all.

“I wonder if the police have any leads,” I mused. I peered down to the base of the yew tree, where Leigh’s prone body had so recently lain. There were no signs of violence. The police had collected the evidence, and someone had scuffed out the pentagram. If Leigh’s spirit wasn’t sitting across from me, the whole incident would have seemed like a long-gone nightmare.

“I tried to go in the station last night,” Leigh said. “You know, while I was wandering around. But I couldn’t get in for some reason.”

“Had you ever been inside before?” I asked. “While you were alive?”

“No.”

“Not even for a traffic ticket?”

“Morgan, Yew Hollow only has one stoplight.”

I dipped my head in acknowledgement. “Touché. That’s probably why, though. Spirits usually can’t visit places they’ve never been to before. It’s unfortunate. A little eavesdropping could’ve gone a long way for us.”

“Next time,” Leigh joked. I actually chuckled. At least Leigh’s sense of humor hadn’t died with the rest of her.

“They’re bound to update the town at the next meeting,” I said. “I guess we’ll just have to wait.”

Leigh nodded in agreement. We lapsed back into silence. The air felt thick, heavy with uncertainty and anticipation, but I ignored it. I let my eyes close and my shoulders relax against the rough bark of the tree, listening to the light autumn wind peal through its leaves.

5

In Which Parris Is an Asshole

In the week following Leigh’s preternatural appearance in my bedroom, we made little headway on the mystery surrounding her death. The challenging part about playing detective was the fact that I couldn’t very well stroll around town asking random people if they had a perverse interest in human sacrifice and dark magic, especially since most of the townspeople still suspected me as the killer. People crossed the street when they saw me walking toward them, or clasped their children close as if I’d kidnap one and run. My head ached from the amount of eye rolling I’d done that week.

It didn’t help that the coven was growing more active. Halloween loomed, the coven’s favorite time of year despite its stereotypical implications. Tourists began to arrive in droves, and the witches were busying themselves with magical preparations for the reenactment. One afternoon, a thick menacing fog settled over the town square, only to be washed away by a sudden rainstorm. Not a day later, fireworks exploded above the yew tree in broad daylight. Once, when I was walking to the library with Leigh, the town’s signature piece of classical music, The March of Yew Hollow, began to blare from behind a rosebush, effectively scaring the shit out of me with its iconic, brass-heavy fanfare.

In the Summers household, things were even more chaotic. Members of the coven flitted in and out on a daily basis, often in need of an ingredient for a spell or to consult my mother on a reenactment matter. I’d spent the week running into witches that I hadn’t seen in years, feeling like a five-year-old getting her cheeks pinched every time one of them mentioned how much I’d grown. At least three different aunts made comments about my absence from Yew Hollow, often expressing how much my mother had missed me. Numerous cousins wanted to know how I’d fared in New York, questions that I dodged successfully if not tactfully. And every once in a while, a stray child—of which there were only four or five in our coven—shot amateur defense spells at my ankles. I had the welts to prove it, something that Leigh had laughed uproariously at for a solid ten minutes.

The only upside to the week was the amount of hours Leigh and I had logged at the local library. While she was alive, Leigh had spent the majority of her time as a librarian digging up as much information as she could about Yew Hollow’s unearthly history. We pored through stacks of old newspapers, reading about reenactments from years past. We hadn’t turned up anything particularly helpful, but I began to look forward to the hours we burned in between the shelves of the library. Leigh was not only hilarious company, but she also had a knack for listening without interrupting. Soon, it seemed as if she knew about every facet of my life, including the time I’d spent away from home. It was refreshing to talk to Leigh. She didn’t judge. She simply offered gentle opinions on my lifestyle choices. After a few library sessions, I informed her that she should’ve been a psychologist instead of a librarian.

On Sunday morning, the day of the next town meeting, we had a breakthrough. I’d been sitting cross-legged in a dark corner of the library, paging through a stack of old photocopies, when I came across something unusual.

“Leigh, look at this,” I said, waving her over.

“What?”

I brandished the pages at her. “They’re photocopies of instructions for a ritual. It’s handwritten.”

She sat down next to me, leaning over my shoulder to squint at the pages. “‘A righteous woman born on an autumn equinox. A boy of unfortunate birth.’ Blah, blah, blah. What is this?”

“It’s a power-snatching ritual,” I said. I thumbed through the rest of the papers on my lap, hoping to find more information. “But not one that I’m familiar with. It’s not from a spell book. It looks like someone created it specifically for their own use.”

“You can do that?”

“Not usually,” I said. “Or at least, you’re not supposed to. All sorts of things can go wrong if you perform a ritual incorrectly. When was your birthday?”

“September 25.”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“Well, I’d say you were a pretty good fit for ‘a righteous woman born on an autumn equinox,’” I said. I took the pages back from her and flipped through them again, hoping to find additional information on the ritual. When I looked up at Leigh again, her face had paled, an impressive feat for someone who was already dead.

“Is it dark magic?” she asked. “Who are they trying to steal power from? Does this mean that there will be two more deaths?”

“Leigh, relax,” I said, noticing the frantic tone of her voice. “It’s good that we’ve found this. It means we can guess what the murderer is planning next. And to answer your first question—” I flipped over one of the pages and held it up for Leigh to see. Someone had drawn an upside-down pentagram on it, with notated directions on where the sacrifice should be placed for the user’s benefit. “It’s definitely dark. This is exactly how I found you.”

We spent the rest of the day searching for other information on the power-snatching ritual. Unfortunately, nothing came up. Finding the photocopied pages almost seemed like a fluke. After hours of fruitlessly ransacking the library, we gave up and headed back to the house to get ready for the town meeting. It was the first meeting that I’d decided to attend with the rest of the coven. I needed to know what was going on with Leigh’s murder investigation, and it seemed the only way to do that was to subject myself to the one town activity that I despised the most.

After showering and getting dressed on the third floor of the house, I stopped by Wren’s room on the way down. Over the course of the week, I’d only gotten the chance to speak with him two or three times. He spent most of his time in school, plodding through his senior year. In the afternoons, he would hole up in his room with his noise-canceling headphones. Every time I looked in on him, he was hunched over AP Calculus homework or college applications. Were it not for the fact that he lived in a house full of witches, Wren could’ve passed for an ordinary human being any day of the week. Today, however, instead of his usual homework, I found him pulling a jacket on over a collared shirt.

“Where are you off to?” I asked in surprise.

“I thought I’d tag along with you to the town meeting,” he said. He leaned over his desk and shut down his laptop.

“You hate town meetings,” I said.

“Yeah, but they might talk about Leigh.”

Leigh, who had been waiting in the hallway, poked her head into Wren’s room at the mention of her name.

I punched Wren’s arm playfully. “I’m starting to think you had a little crush on her.”

“Shut up,” he said as his face flushed a bright red.

I let it go. I’d once again forgotten that the rest of Yew Hollow had been mourning Leigh’s death, while I shared laughs with her ghost in the depths of the library. Wren was clearly hurting. It seemed he had been more attached to Leigh than the rest of my family, even though that attachment stemmed from an unrequited crush.

“Ready?” I asked him. He nodded. “Off we go, then.”

Downstairs, the rest of the coven dallied, waiting for everyone to arrive. Wren tensed at my side, so I slipped my hand into the crook of his elbow as a show of solidarity. As we joined the others, I noticed a few disapproving glances directed at Wren’s presence. For the most part, though, the coven ignored him, as if he were nothing more than a piece of abstract art hanging on the wall. It was no wonder the men of the Summers family had never stuck around. The witches, content in their subtle misandry, had driven them all away.

Leigh disappeared momentarily, though I soon spotted her in the yard through a window. It was hard for her to be around a lot of people, as they tended to walk through her. I assumed she would meet me at the town meeting.

Once the entire coven had gathered, we began to make our way to the town hall. Wren and I lingered near the back of the procession. It must’ve been an unusual scene, all twenty or so members of the Summers coven marching into the center of town. As we filed into the town hall, taking up nearly two rows of seats near the front of the room, several townspeople watched uneasily. Fortunately, some of the townspeople were familiar and friendly with my mother, members of the same Historical Preservation Society as Leigh. Those few people waved cheerily at the coven, exchanged pleasantries, and sat among us.

I took a seat next to Wren near the outer aisle and located Leigh, who was leaning casually in one corner near the front of the hall. When we caught each other’s eye, I resisted the urge to wave and nodded instead. She smiled back. When everyone was seated, the mayor took the podium and asked everyone to settle down.

“First on our agenda,” he said, his bushy moustache bristling, “is an unsavory subject. At the town’s request, we have Chief Torres and Detective Johnson here to update you all on the matter of Leigh Lockwood’s untimely death.”

He turned the podium and the microphone over to Chief Torres and Detective Johnson. They were a strangely mismatched pair—the tall, lanky detective and the short, rotund officer—and their presence did nothing to ease the feeling of anxiety that seemed to be brewing in the pit of my stomach. Chief Torres spoke first.

“Ahem! As you all know, it’s been quite busy at the station since the tragedy last Sunday,” he began, lowering the microphone to account for his lack of height. “We’ve been working day and night to identify the culprit. There were several pieces of evidence left at the scene, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to lift any fingerprints from them.”

As Chief Torres continued his monologue, Leigh appeared beside me.

“Is it wise of the police to share this information with the town?” she asked me. “I mean, what if the person who did it is in this room?”

She knew I couldn’t answer out loud, so I left her to her speculation. In truth, with Torres’s every word, it became more and more evident that the police hadn’t uncovered any more information on Leigh’s death. Torres talked around the subject, emphasizing the effort of the police force rather than focusing on the case itself. Detective Johnson stood stoically by. Although more than once, I caught him glaring in my direction. When Torres finished up, Detective Johnson stepped up to the microphone.

“I want everyone to know,” he began, “that we’re working on this case as quickly as possible. It won’t be long before we’ll have a suspect in custody.”

He stared right at me as he said it. In my periphery, I saw Wren turn his head toward me, his lips parted as if he was about to say something. I put a hand on his knee to stop him. Detective Johnson didn’t have anything on me, despite how desperately he wanted to. To be honest, I didn’t understand why he was so dead set on apprehending me.

Then I spotted Roger Parris. He was seated to the mayor’s left-hand side, one leg crossed neatly over the other. As Detective Johnson spoke, Parris kept his beady eyes on me as if gauging my reaction to Johnson’s words. I’d managed to avoid Parris since he’d confronted me at the crime scene, but he clearly hadn’t changed his opinion of me.

Detective Johnson wrapped up his diatribe. As he and Chief Torres took their seats again, the hall filled with murmurs of speculation. I took a deep breath, trying to appear at ease, but half of the town now stared at me and the rest of the coven with no small amount of apprehension. Karma had been right. Yew Hollow really didn’t belong to the Summerses anymore.

The mayor ascended the podium again. I wondered if his only job was to mediate the town meetings. It certainly seemed that way.

“And now,” he said, “the Yew Hollow Historical Preservation Society has been hard at work preparing this year’s reenactment. The Summers family is here to inform us of its details. Cassandra?”

But before my mother even had the chance to stand, Roger Parris spoke.

“Tell me, why,” he drawled, “do we bother to entertain a group of people who engage in barbaric activity and only cause Yew Hollow trouble?”

For a moment, the entire hall sat in stunned silence. Though the inhabitants of Yew Hollow had always been wary of the coven, no one had ever had the audacity to question our presence in town.

Parris stood, usurping my mother’s place at the podium. I had to admit, he was an impressive sight, with his broad shoulders and square jaw. He drew himself up to his full height and planted his hands on either side of the microphone.

“Yew Hollow,” he said, gazing out at the townspeople as if he were running for some sort of political campaign. “Have you not had enough? We have put up with these oddities for years. We have allowed these people to diminish our quality of life. We have remained silent when we should have raised our voices. And now look! We’ve come full circle. One of them has murdered one of us.”

The town hall was eerily quiet. I stole a glance at my mother. She remained seated, her hands folded neatly in her lap, as though respectfully waiting out Parris’s speech. Beside her, I saw Karma, Malia, and Laurel. All three were perched at the very edge of their chairs, as if ready to spring from their seats, looking more like sisters than I’d ever noticed before. The rest of the coven was similarly afflicted, but following my mother’s lead, they remained seated and silent.

“Leigh Lockwood,” Parris continued, “was a respected member of this community. She was a beautiful young woman, not only physically but mentally as well. She gave back to the town in every way.”

“Funny,” Leigh whispered in my ear. “He never spoke so kindly of me when I was still alive.”

“Halloween was Leigh’s favorite time of year,” Parris said. “She dedicated her time to helping the Historical Preservation Society prepare for the Fall Festival. She also volunteered to help the Summerses organize this outdated, sexist ritual that we’ve been tolerating for far too long. And look what it got her!”

The audience began to stir as Parris’s voice echoed through the hall.

“Detective Johnson has kept me up to date on the investigation,” Parris said. Behind him, Detective Johnson raised a hand in acknowledgement. “There is an astounding lack of evidence. No fingerprints, no footprints, nothing except the objects that were discovered at the scene. Now, tell me, how can you not understand that this murder, this sacrifice even, was orchestrated by one of them?”

He swept an arm out in the direction of the coven. All at once, the town hall exploded with noise. The coven and its small band of supporters protested loudly, while the other townspeople talked behind their hands and stared at us. Chief Torres attempted to restore order, but his efforts were overthrown as Parris continued his rant.

“They are the only ones,” Parris roared over the cacophony, “with the ability to compromise evidence in such an effective way. And one of them was even discovered at the scene of the crime!”

I closed my eyes, bracing myself for his next words.

“Morgan Summers,” he said in a surprisingly level voice. “How dare you sit there as if you have every right to be here?”

I looked up, aware of the overwhelming amount of faces turned in my direction. “I do have every right to be here.”

“You murdered Leigh Lockwood.”

As the town gave a collective gasp, I stood up. “Are you delusional?” I asked Parris. “First of all, I didn’t even know Leigh. I have no motive. All you have on me is the fact that I found the body. Were my hands covered in blood? Was I holding the dagger? Was I chanting Latin over her corpse? It’s no wonder the police haven’t found anything else. Your incompetence is astounding.”

Parris waved a hand in a sweeping gesture, as if dismissing my rebuttal. “Can you prove your innocence?”

“It’s supposed to be the other way around!” I said, outraged. “Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”

He ignored me. “I propose we rid Yew Hollow of its problematic witch population,” he announced.

“What are you going to do, kill us all?” I asked as the hall once again broke out in conversation. “We’re not ants. You can’t just spray us with pesticide and hope we go away.”

Before Parris could respond, my mother stood. Her aura washed out over the crowd, and though the townspeople may have not understood it, they could certainly feel it. The hall fell silent at once as the one and only Cassandra Summers took the floor.

“You forget, Parris,” my mother said calmly. “My family, this coven, is the root of Yew Hollow. Do not think you have the ability to oust the very family that founded this place. You will regret it.”

“Are you threatening me?” Parris asked, abandoning the podium to take several large strides toward my mother. As a whole, the coven stood, chairs scraping, and gathered behind my mother. Parris, faced with twenty witches, halted his approach.

“I am merely reminding you that this place was once impermissible to mortals,” my mother said, “and I will not hesitate to restore Yew Hollow to its former role as a sanctuary.”

For a moment, my mother and Parris engaged in the fiercest staring contest I’d ever witnessed. Parris retreated to the podium.

“Citizens of Yew Hollow,” he said. “You have heard firsthand the plans for which this coven holds for us. They intend to eradicate us, one by one.”

I rolled my eyes. He sure did know how to warp the truth.

“I propose we give the entire Summers coven three days to leave Yew Hollow and never return,” Parris continued. “Otherwise, we allow them to get away with murder. In three days’ time, if the coven has not wised up and left Yew Hollow, we will take matters into our own hands. All in favor?”

“You can’t be serious,” I said loudly.

“All in favor?” Parris called again.

I turned around to face the crowd, watching incredulously as hands went up one by one. Leigh, who had been shocked into silence, seemed dumbfounded. No one dared make eye contact with me as they kept their hands in the air like a tyrannical salute.

Parris, a satisfied smirk visible beneath his narrowed eyes, leaned over the podium and addressed the coven.

“Three days.”

6

In Which My Family Is Actually Useful

The walls of the Summers house seemed to pulse with the anger of its occupants. The entire coven had squeezed into the dining room, crowded around the mahogany table as they expressed their outrage at Parris’s request. The place was overwhelmed by a rainbow of auras, which pushed and pulled at my brain. I leaned against the staircase, watching from a distance. Wren and Leigh flanked either side of me. We were a trio of confusion, unable to compute the disaster before us.

My mother, seated at the head of the table, called for silence.

“I understand why you are all so worried,” she said, “but we will figure this out. This is our town. We will not let the mortals take it away from us.”

As the discussion continued, Karma made her way over to me. She gave Wren a curt nod then propped herself against the banister next to me. Leigh scooched out of the way before Karma could step through her.

“What do you think?” Karma whispered to me.

“I think I need your help,” I said back in a low voice. “Tonight, after dark. Laurel and Malia, too. It’s time we took this into our own hands.”

At midnight, Leigh and I snuck out through the back door. In the silver moonlight, I could make out Karma, Laurel, and Malia across the yard, silhouetted against the swing set. I ran toward them.

“Hi,” I said a little breathlessly. Karma and Laurel sat on the swings, while Malia lounged against one of its metal support structures. “Thanks for meeting me.”

“What’s going on, Morgan?” Malia asked. “Do you know something?”

“I do, in fact.” I glanced at Leigh, who nodded in encouragement, then said to my sisters, “Leigh came to me. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to her all week.”

Not one of them looked the least bit surprised. Laurel even rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, we know,” Karma said.

“You knew?”

“You’re not exactly subtle, Mo,” Laurel said as she leaned back in her swing to stare at the stars. “We knew as soon as you started poking your nose around.”

“Malia?” I said, turning to her.

She shrugged. “It was pretty obvious, Morgan.”

Laurel waved a hand in a random direction. “Hi, Leigh!” she said in a chipper voice.

“She’s over here,” I said grumpily, gesturing to where Leigh stood a pace behind me.

“Tell them I said hi,” Leigh said, a wide grin spreading across her ghostly features.

“She says hi,” I grumbled.

“We miss you,” Karma said, addressing Leigh’s general vicinity.

“Tell them I miss them too!”

“She says she misses you too,” I said.

“The reenactment planning has gone to shit, Leigh,” Malia said. “You were the only one who had any level of organizational skills in that entire society.”

“Tell them—”

“Wait!” I said, holding up a hand. “I am not a damn courier for the dead. We need to talk about Leigh’s death, not the ass backwards reenactment.”

“What are you thinking?” Karma asked.

“I have a plan,” I said, “but I have a feeling that none of you are going to like it.”

Despite a number of protests from each of my siblings, I convinced them to go along with my idea. I needed each of them in turn. I was hoping their collective abilities might reveal enough to jog Leigh’s memory. Then we’d be able to clear my name and prevent the townspeople from going all torches and pitchforks on the rest of the coven. Together, the four of us and Leigh made our way to the town square and the yew tree. I needed Laurel first. She could speak to the trees.

We sat in a circle at the base of the yew, leaving a space for Leigh. I glanced at Laurel, who was already sifting handfuls of dirt through her fingers, eyes closed, and humming a soft tune that seemed to float around us on the gentle wind. She grasped my hand in hers, and I reached across Leigh to take Karma’s hand. Karma held Malia’s hand, who completed the circle by grabbing Laurel’s other hand. I felt their auras pulse through me, like the combination of different songs being played over top of one another.

Without warning, Laurel’s hum was taken on by the trees. They seemed to harmonize with her, the song stirring the leaves as if a firm breeze were blowing through them. It grew and grew, until I could feel it purring through my bones. Laurel sang louder, her long hair whipping around her delicate face as the trees warbled to her.

Then, all at once, it stopped.

Laurel opened her eyes.

“Well?” I demanded, squeezing her hand.

“It was a man,” she said, her eyes oddly vacant, as though her mind still belonged to the nature around her. “Young, they said. Statuesque. Petty. Rainy eyes.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Tall in physical form,” she expanded, “but his intentions were skewed. He was crying. That’s all they told me. They’ve been trying to heal, to forget.”

I turned to Leigh. “Does that help at all?”

Her eyebrows furrowed together, as if she was imploring her brain to remember. “I remember walking to the town meeting. I was late, so there was no one around. Someone grabbed me from behind. Someone strong.”

“And then?” Karma prompted.

Leigh shook her head. “That’s it.”

I sighed. “It’s okay. We haven’t exhausted all our options yet. Karma? You’re up.”

Karma had been the most reluctant to participate in my plan. I understood why. She feared her own power. Fortunately, we weren’t using it for anything particularly devious. From her pocket, Karma produced a small doll, made of cloth and cotton, and a handful of colored pins. Cautiously, she selected a pin with a purple head. She moved into the center of our circle. The rest of us linked hands again.

“For manipulation,” she murmured.

She pressed the pin into the heart of the doll. Eyes closed, her fingers deftly maneuvered the pin this way and that. It was an exact art, one that required steady hands. In our general vicinity, nothing magical seemed to be happening, but I knew it would soon.

“There!” Malia said, letting go of Laurel’s hand to point down the street.

The night guard from the police station was walking toward us. His eyes were blank, unseeing. He halted beneath the yew tree, close enough for me to make out the name “Smithson” embroidered on his collared uniform shirt. Karma tweaked the movement of the pin, and he knelt down, drew an item from his back pocket, and placed it before us. Then he turned and faded into the darkness back toward the station.

I leaned forward, picking up the object. It was wrapped neatly in a Yew Hollow Police Force T-shirt. I slowly unfolded the shirt, exposing the bloodstained, bone-handled dagger that had so recently pierced Leigh’s skin. Leigh eyed it warily as I passed it to Malia.

Malia grasped the handle, her hand shaking. As soon as she touched it, her whole body tensed, and she drew in a sharp breath. Out of all our gifts, Malia’s always seemed the most alien to me. She couldn’t describe in words her connection with objects or how she gained information from them. Inanimate things didn’t have auras, so I never understood how her ability worked.

“Someone’s tainted this knife,” she said and dropped it into the dirt as if she could no longer bear to hold it. “It won’t show me anything useful.”

“Nothing?” I asked in disbelief. “You didn’t see anything at all?”

“Two men handled it, not just one,” she said. “And it showed me exactly where Leigh had been cut by it, which by the way was traumatic. But whoever used it must have known we would try to scry with it. Everything’s blurry around it.”

“How is that possible?” Karma asked. “I didn’t know you could conceal objects like that.”

“You can’t,” Malia said shortly. “It’s more evidence that someone’s been meddling with dark magic. They’re breaking all kinds of rules.”

I swore colorfully, at the end of my rope. I was sure that the combination of all my sisters’ powers would shed some light on the situation. Leigh tried to put a reassuring hand on my shoulder, but of course it sank right through.

“I don’t know what else to do,” I said to her. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s so like you to not ask for my help,” a voice said from behind the yew tree.

All five us, Leigh included, jerked in surprise. My mother, Cassandra, emerged from her hiding place beyond the tree. How she knew we were there, I could’ve never guessed. A mother’s instinct, I supposed.

“Karma, Malia, Laurel,” she said, “go home.”

At once, the three began to protest, but my mother held up a hand. “This will be easier without the extra auras. I need Morgan and Leigh, of course, but the three of you should go.”

Reluctantly, my three sisters stood, brushing dirt and grass from the seat of their jeans. Only Leigh and I remained, watching as they headed back in the direction of the Summers house. Once they’d disappeared from view, my mother leaned against the yew tree.

“Over here, Morgan,” she said, motioning for me to stand.

I obeyed, joining her at the tree. I took her outstretched hand. “How did you know?” I asked.

“Please, Morgan, I birthed you,” she said dismissively. “I know everything about you. How’s Leigh?”

“Still dead.”

“And so shall she remain, unfortunately,” Cassandra said. Then she spoke to Leigh herself, somehow managing to look her straight in the eye. “Leigh, I’m going to help you see what happened to you. It will be quite strange. You’ll be forced to relive the event, this time fully aware of your surroundings. Do you agree to this?”

Leigh nodded, though I could see the anxiety in her expression. “She says yes,” I said to my mother. “What are you going to do?”

“The third eye has many uses,” she said. “It often shows me the future, but if I argue with it, it will also show me the past. Keep an eye on me, will you? I may faint.”

Then she took Leigh’s hand as if she were alive.

My eyes widened. “How did you do that?”

“Years of practice.”

Without warning, the scene changed. I squinted, eyes adjusting, as the town square was suddenly illuminated by the lazy sunset of last Sunday. Leigh, very much alive, strolled down the sidewalk. She walked with purpose, her gaze set on the town hall at the end of the road. Then her body convulsed, as if someone invisible had tackled her from behind. She struggled, letting out a yell, before something struck her head. She passed out.

Next to my mother, Leigh’s spirit remained, transfixed by her own history. Leigh’s body was then lifted into the air, carried to the yew tree, and deposited in front of us. The invisible entity began to adjust Leigh’s arms and legs until she lay spread-eagle on the ground. Then, starting at Leigh’s head, Leigh’s murderer began to draw in the dirt. I watched in horror as the pentagram appeared. As the black candles materialized, lit and placed at every point of the pentagram, I suppressed the need to shut my eyes. I didn’t want to see what happened next.

A jagged tear opened in Leigh’s left arm, spilling her blood out into the trough of the pentagram. An identical tear appeared in her right arm.

“I can’t, Mom,” I said, ripping my eyes from Leigh’s body. “I can’t watch.”

Beside her, Leigh’s spirit was trembling. Unlike me, she seemed unable to stop watching the tragedy unfolding before her. I suddenly understood. Since it wasn’t my memory, I wasn’t able to see Leigh’s murderer. Leigh, on the other hand, could see everything.

The dagger drew another line.

“Mom, enough,” I said firmly. Leigh’s spirit had faded. Her fingers slipped through my mother’s.

My mother staggered. As I steadied her, the scene vanished, once again encasing us in the dark of the night. Only the silver light of the moon illuminated the town square. I breathed heavily, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Leigh’s spirit sank to the ground, curling up into a ball at the base of the yew tree. I knelt next to her.

“Did you see?” I asked.

A nod.

“Who?”

“I can’t tell her.” Leigh’s voice was barely a whisper. “Cassandra.”

Without further prompting, my mother brushed her hands off on her long skirts, turned, and left. She melted into the night, leaving Leigh and I to our own devices.

I wanted to shake Leigh, to pry the information from her lips. Instead, I allowed her to sit with her head resting in her arms, hoping that once she’d gathered her emotions, she would let me in on whatever she’d seen in my mother’s vision. I sat next to her, so close that she brushed against me, sending a blast of cold air through my rib cage.

“I’m so sorry,” Leigh mumbled into the fabric of her sweater.

“For what?”

“For what I’m about to tell you.”

“Leigh, who was it?”

She turned her face up to look at me.

“It was your brother, Morgan,” she said. “It was Wren.”

7

In Which I Find Myself Devastated

I only stared at Leigh in shock, unable to process the words that had come out of her mouth. The name worked its way through the synapses in my brain, and when it finally seemed to reach the point at which I had to decide whether to accept the information or reject it, I had no hesitation in denying it.

“No.”

Leigh nodded, her eyelashes laden with tears. “He was crying, like Laurel said,” she explained. “I don’t think he wanted to do it.”

I sat back, scraping my elbows against the trunk of the yew tree. I hardly felt it. “That can’t be right.”

“I saw him, Morgan, before I passed out.”

A rushing noise filled my head, blocking out Leigh’s voice. Wren’s face swam before me, innocent and simple. He’d always been a quiet kid, his thoughts impermeable, but I thought I knew him. He wasn’t capable of this. My mind took me back to the night I told him about Leigh. He was devastated. He had been shocked at Leigh’s death. He’d—been in his room all night?

“He told me he was in the house the whole day,” I said to Leigh. My voice sounded choked and thick, but I pushed the words out anyway.

“He didn’t answer the door when you got home,” she pointed out.

“Noise-cancelling headphones.”

Leigh raised an eyebrow. “It’s perfect, if you think about it,” she said. “He’s a loner. He’s usually in his room. No one would suspect him.”

“It can’t have been him!” I said.

“Shh.”

I glanced around, hoping the inhabitants of Yew Hollow hadn’t been disturbed by my outburst. I stood up, bracing myself against the yew tree for support.

“I have to go home.” I sniffed and wiped a bead of sweat from my forehead. It was a stuffy night for the end of October. Either that, or the witchcraft had lingered.

“I’ll go with you,” Leigh said.

“No,” I said in a sharper tone than I intended. I attempted to rein in my emotions. “You stay here. I want to talk to Wren alone.”

Back at the house, all was silent. My sisters and mother had gone to sleep. After such a display of their talents, it was normal for them to be exhausted. I, too, wished I could return to the third floor and fall into bed. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that option.

I trudged up the stairs to the second floor, lingering in the hallway outside Wren’s bedroom. Desperately hoping to find him asleep, I pushed the door open.

He sat at his desk, laptop open, very much awake. A small table lamp scattered shadows across the far wall near the window. At the sound of the creaking hinges, Wren spun his desk chair around to face me. My mouth opened. I had intended on handling the situation gently, with at least an iota of finesse. Instead, only one croaked word fell out.

“Why?”

In an instant, Wren’s eyes narrowed and his mouth turned downward. Then, before I even had a chance to react, he threw open the window next to his desk and jumped out.

“Wren!”

I flew across the room, leaning out over the windowsill. In complete stupefaction, I watched as Wren professionally shimmied down the drainpipe on the side of the house and took off at a sprint, heading toward the forest at the edge of the property.

“Oh, no, you don’t.”

My shock quickly morphed into rage. Wren’s escape was a confession, and now I couldn’t believe that I’d been so stupid as to simply accept his act of naiveté. Blood boiling, I burst from Wren’s room, descended the stairs two at a time, and blasted out of the back door. Once outside, I saw Wren’s figure disappear into the trees. Exploding off the porch steps, I dashed across the backyard toward the black abyss of the forest.

Wren didn’t bother to hide his tracks. He’d crashed through the trees, leaving a trail of broken branches and trampled brush in his wake. Laurel would have cringed at the damage. I, on the other hand, felt oddly grateful. It was easy to follow his path of destruction. I ran as fast as I could, chest heaving, until the forest thinned out again. I lingered at its edge, unfamiliar with the territory.

In the clearing before me stood a decrepit house. Paint peeled from its walls, shingles were missing from its roof, and the front door looked as though it had been kicked in several times. Concealed in the darkness of the trees, I surveyed the area, looking for Wren. He appeared suddenly, panting. He approached the broken door and knocked.

Roger Parris answered.

I should have punched him in the face when I had the chance.

Without exchanging a greeting, Parris stepped back to let Wren inside. My heart felt as though it were going to beat right out of my chest. What the hell kind of business did Wren have with Roger Parris?

I waited for a minute or so to make sure they wouldn’t emerge again. Then, as quietly as possible, I made a dash toward the house and pressed myself against the wall. Already, I could hear soft voices emanating from an open window. I dropped to my hands and knees, crawling around to the side yard. I flattened myself out beneath the window, trying not to breathe, and listened.

“She knows it was me,” Wren was saying, his words punctuated by short gasps as he tried to catch his breath.

“How? We shielded the dagger.”

“I don’t know,” Wren wheezed. “She just came into my room.”

“No matter,” Parris said. “She was bound to find out anyway. She’s on my list.”

“What?” Wren sounded panicked. “You said she was safe!”

Parris’s responding chuckle was a dark, ominous sound. “Oh, my boy. Sometimes, I wish you could hold onto your ignorance. It makes you invaluable.”

“I won’t let you use her,” Wren said, his voice wavering.

Parris laughed outright. “Don’t you understand, Wren? Here, read the last line of the ritual requirements.”

The sound of something being pushed across the surface of a table met my ears. I wished that I could peek up over the windowsill, but I couldn’t run the risk of being discovered.

“One with the blood of those whose power he covets,’” Wren read obediently. A shiver ran down the length of my spine. I knew those words. Leigh and I had discovered them that very morning, in the photocopies of the power-snatching ritual. The ritual required three sacrifices: a righteous woman born on the autumn equinox, a boy of unfortunate birth, and the blood of those whose power he covets.

“Remember how they’ve treated you,” Parris growled. “You are nothing but a speck of disgrace in their eyes. They can’t wait to be rid of you. Your absentee sister is no exception. She’s a witch, just like the rest of them.”

“She’s different.”

“You listen to me, Summers,” Parris said.

There was the sound of a chair scraping against the floor. Then Wren said, “Let go!”

“I did not move to this godforsaken town, play nice with the sorry excuses for human beings here, and spend half my life setting up this damn ritual, only to have a weakling like you derail it,” Parris snarled. “Your sister will be the last sacrifice, and you will have no input on that decision.”

My spine went rigid as Parris declared his intentions so nonchalantly. I should’ve known that Parris’s vehement attacks on me were simply part of his plan, an attempt to cast the blame on someone else.

Wren’s next words were garbled, as if Parris had a hand around his throat. “You lied to me,” he croaked.

“Lies are the basis of my business,” Parris said in a low, dangerous voice. “But one thing remains true. Your family is a scourge. I’ve known it since I was born.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Wren said. His tone was low and soothing, but it seemed to have no effect on Parris. I heard Wren stumble toward the window I lurked under. Parris must’ve released him. I flattened myself against the house, terrified that one of them might catch a glimpse of me through the window.

“I don’t have to do this?” Parris hissed. Slow, heavy footsteps made their way to the window, signaling Parris’s approach. “How mistaken you are. Your family slaughtered mine. My fathers before me suffered and died at the hands of the Summers coven. Now, they’ve turned that suffering into a revelry, a triumph to be celebrated every year.”

My mouth dropped open in sudden understanding. No wonder Parris was so hostile toward the coven. He was a descendant of the witch hunter who had so infamously attempted to slay the original Summers coven. Parris was fighting a war long over. In fact, he was reigniting a battle that had been dormant for over two hundred years.

“Has your confidence abandoned you, Summers?” Parris said lethally. “When you first came to me, I admired your determination. I thought that you and I were cut from the same cloth, both outsiders with a desire to put things right.”

“Morgan wasn’t meant to be involved,” Wren said, the amount of venom in his voice startling me. “The rest of the coven treated me like dirt, but she was the only one who ever cared about me.”

“Yes, I realized your unfortunate attachment to her as soon as she returned to town,” Parris said. “I thought it would throw quite a wrench in my plans, but it turns out that she represents everything I care to eliminate. It makes her a perfect sacrifice for the ritual. With her blood, I can take out the entire coven, including that righteous bitch you call your mother. When their powers transfer to me, I’ll burn Yew Hollow to the ground. The Summerses will cease to exist, and I intend to make their deaths as painful and as humiliating as my forefathers’.”

“And what about me?” Wren asked. He had backed himself against the open window, so close that I could see where his pale fingers clung to the sill. “You promised to make me your partner.”

Parris’s answering laughter was bone chilling. “The fact that you ever believed me proves your absolute lack of worth to me,” he said. “It was so easy to convince you to kill Leigh, despite your fatuous attachment to her. Would you like to know why?”

Wren remained silent, though I saw his grip on the windowsill tighten.

“Because,” Parris continued, taking Wren’s silence as acquiescence, “I wanted the same thing as you. Do you not agree that the whole concept of witchcraft is inequitable? Only passed on through females? The entire system rests on the backs of the men who are unlucky enough to allow themselves to be drawn into a witch’s web.”

Forgetting for a moment that my life was in mortal peril, I rolled my eyes. Parris’s chauvinistic bullshit was nauseating.

“I intend to right that concept,” Parris continued. “I will gain the power that the Summers women coveted, and I will use it to avenge my family. But don’t worry, Wren, you’ll serve your purpose.”

“As what?” Wren bit back. Despite his betrayal, I felt a swelling of pride in my chest at his sarcastic tone.

“A boy of unfortunate birth,” Parris said, and once again, his footfalls seemed to be nearing the window. “The second ritual requirement. It pertains to you, born into a family that cared nothing for you, that found no value in your life. Unfortunate birth, indeed.”

Wren’s breath whooshed out of his body. “You’ve been planning this the whole time,” he said to Parris. “Ever since I came to you. Before, even.”

“It does seem rather convenient, doesn’t it?” Parris said. “Unfortunately, due to your incompetence, I’ll be forced to move your ritual up. How does tonight sound?”

I heard the explosive crash of a table being knocked aside. Wren’s body rocked backward as Parris careened into him, obviously with the intention of taking Wren down. As they scuffled, I edged away from the window, at a loss for what to do. Horrified, I watched as Wren’s elbow pulled back. I heard the smack of his fist meeting Parris’s face, a grunt, and several choice swear words from Parris’s mouth. Wren wrenched himself free, and in the same fashion as his escape from his bedroom earlier, he vaulted out of the decrepit house through the window.

He landed catlike beside me. His eyes widened to an impossible amount at my presence, but I stood, grabbing the collar of his shirt, before he could say anything.

“Run,” I ordered.

We took off at a pace that Olympians would’ve marveled at, stumbling over the uneven ground surrounding Parris’s house. As I dragged Wren along behind me, I refused to look back to see if Parris was following us. There was no need. His voice thundered out.

“Run!” he roared, echoing my own advice in a bizarrely motivational way. “Tell your sisters I send my regards, Ms. Summers!”

We plunged into the shadows of the forest, the dilapidated house disappearing behind us. Parris’s threats faded, swallowed by the trees, but I didn’t slow my pace. Breathing raggedly, I hurdled a fallen log. Wren, his long legs much more suitable for flight than my own, drew ahead of me. As we neared our own backyard, I snagged the back of his shirt.

“Not that way,” I gasped.

Without arguing, Wren followed me as I shot past the house, delving deeper into the woods. In a few minutes, we reached an old, abandoned stable. When I was growing up in Yew Hollow, the stable had been one of my favorite places to escape to. Unlike the yew tree, it was far away from any prying eyes or personalities. As far as I knew, my family was unaware of its location, which made it an ideal hideaway for a desperate teenager.

The sliding door had all but rusted shut. Wren and I struggled with it for several long minutes before wrenching it open.

“Get in,” I said, slipping inside. I slammed the door shut behind him then slumped down to the dirt floor. My lungs felt tight, and I couldn’t seem to draw in a full breath. Wren, hands on his knees and chest pulsing, watched me cautiously.

“You... asshole,” I huffed, letting my head rest against the barn door. “How... could... you...”

“Why did you save me?” Wren asked, his voice much steadier than mine. “You could’ve left me for Parris.”

I leaned forward, putting my head between my knees to keep it from spinning. It had been a while since I’d sprinted full-out like that. Now that the adrenaline rush was gone, all I wanted to do was to take a nap. Steadily, my breathing evened out.

“We’re family,” I finally said. “That’s what you do for family. What you don’t do is help jackasses like Parris take out your entire bloodline.”

He at least had the decency to hang his head. “You don’t understand,” he mumbled, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans.

“I don’t understand?” I repeated incredulously. “Wren, you’re talking to the black sheep of the Summers coven. I never wanted to be involved with this crap. It wasn’t a choice. But did I go off and try to get my family murdered?”

“They treat me like shit, Morgan!”

“THEN LEAVE!” I bellowed. My rage over Wren’s betrayal, which had been building ever since he leapt out of his bedroom window, suddenly overflowed. I was beyond livid. I’d defended Wren in every possible way to our family, and he’d thanked me with the orchestration of my own death. “You’re eighteen!” I continued, my voice bouncing off the walls of the barn. “You could’ve left whenever you wanted. Where is your mind, Wren? What part of you thought it was okay to sell out your family for your own sick ends? It’s vile, immature, and—”

“I get it,” he said in a thick voice. “I’m an awful person.”

“Yeah, you are. And I don’t think you do get it,” I responded, “but don’t give me that self-pitying bullshit. I won’t buy it, and it doesn’t give you an excuse for murder.”

He sat down in a pile of hay and ran a hand through his thick hair. When he spoke again, it sounded much more remorseful. “I didn’t mean for you to get involved. You showed up here out of the blue. You were supposed to be in New York.”

“It sounds like if I hadn’t shown up, the Summerses would’ve been barbequed by now,” I retorted.

Wren shook his head. “Each phase of the ritual is meant to take place in time with the full and new moon phases. Last week was the full moon, the first sacrifice. Parris has to wait at least another week before he attempts the second one.”

“Then why did he threaten to sacrifice you tonight?” I asked, skeptical.

Wren shrugged.

“What else do you know about the ritual?” I demanded. “Who created it?”

“Parris’s father.”

“Why?”

Wren observed me, as if deciding whether or not to trust me with this forthcoming piece of information. “Parris’s mother was a witch. His father didn’t know at first. When he figured it out, he got involved with dark magic. The ritual was meant to sap her power and add it to his own.”

Another puzzle piece clicked into place. “That’s why he hates witches so much,” I said. “Not only is Parris’s family descended from the Yew Hollow witch hunter, but he was jealous of his mother’s powers and resented her for them. What happened?”

Another shrug. “Parris wouldn’t tell me,” Wren said, wrapping his arms around his legs and resting his chin on one knee. “But I think his father died during the final stages of the ritual. Couldn’t handle the power or something.”

“And you thought it’d be a good idea to get in on it?” I asked, wondering about Wren’s sanity.

“All I did was set up the sacrifice,” Wren admitted. “He’s the one controlling the ritual.”

“You killed Leigh.”

His chin wobbled, and for a moment, I saw him as his five-year-old self, asking his favorite sister to make everything better. I nearly gave in. Part of me wanted to shuffle over to him and tell him that everything was going to be okay. The bigger part of me was too pissed off to do so.

“Get up,” I ordered, pushing myself to my feet. My legs felt like jelly. I made the resolution to start jogging on a regular basis if I survived Parris’s wrath.

Wren obeyed, brushing hay from his hands. “Where are we going?”

“Back to the house,” I said, forcing the stable door open once again. Wren and I stepped outside. “We have to warn the coven.”

“Oh, I’m afraid you won’t be able to do that,” said a satisfied voice.

Roger Parris emerged from the darkness, a slim gun pointed directly at my chest. Before I could react, he pulled the trigger twice, once at me and once at Wren. Glancing downward, my vision blurring, I caught a bleary glimpse of a tranquilizer dart.

Then everything went black.

8

In Which Parris Is Still an Asshole

When I came to, I found Leigh snapping her fingers in front of my face. Still dazed, I stared up at her. Stars winked at me from behind her head as I resisted the urge to drift back into unconsciousness. My mouth felt fuzzy and dry.

“Oh my god,” I groaned, shaking my head from side to side in an attempt to clear it. “How much tequila did I drink?”

“Snap out of it, Morgan,” Leigh said urgently. “He’ll be back soon.”

It was only then that I remembered Parris’s tranq gun. Frantically, I looked around. I was sitting at the base of the yew tree, my hands bound in rope behind my back. My feet were tied together at the ankles.

“Where’s Wren?” I demanded.

“Over here,” his voice said. It seemed to be coming from the opposite side of the yew tree.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“Just peachy, thanks. I actually really enjoy being tied up. It’s kinky.”

I growled, a noise of pure frustration. Wren’s attempt at making light wasn’t helping. “Where’s that bastard gone, Leigh?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She knelt beside me, regarding the rope cutting into the skin of my ankles. I kicked my feet out, hoping to loosen the bindings, but Parris’s knots were foolproof.

“Bastard must’ve been in the Navy,” I muttered.

“Boy Scouts, actually.”

It seemed Parris had a way of appearing out of nowhere. I wondered how much of his soul he had allowed to deteriorate in order to placate the needs of his dark magic.

“Oh, goody, you’re back,” I said, my voice dripping with poison. “I missed you.”

Parris smiled wryly. “I can’t wait to kill you, Ms. Summers.”

I groaned, rolling my eyes as overdramatically as possible. “Ugh, this is like a bad horror movie. Can’t you come up with a more original one-liner?”

Suddenly, a knife met my throat. Parris’s face was inches from mine. I swallowed, feeling the cold blade of Parris’s new dagger press against my skin.

“Not so mouthy now, are you, Ms. Summers?”

“You can call me Morgan,” I quipped, though my voice wavered. I hated every bit of Parris’s stupid, handsome face. My whole body trembled, though I couldn’t tell if it was out of fear or anger. In my periphery, I could see Leigh pacing back and forth beside the yew tree. She looked as though she wanted to clobber Parris upside his inflated head. If only she could.

Parris drew back, wiping the blade on his shirt. I realized he’d nicked the skin at my neck as I felt a dribble of blood trail down to the base of my throat.

“Not yet, Morgan,” he said. He knelt down, depositing a black duffel bag on the ground. When he upended it, several black candles and a new silver chalice fell out, along with a dusty, worn-out journal. This, he set down beside me, opening it to reveal the original source of the photocopies Leigh and I had found in the library.

“May I inquire,” I began, “as to why you bothered to make copies of your insane ritual and leave them in the town library? Didn’t you think that I would find them?”

“I made those copies years ago,” Parris said, consulting the pages before him. “Just in case the originals were ever lost or damaged. I’d hidden them well, or so I thought. I didn’t account for your nosiness. You must have torn the library apart to find them.”

“I had help.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“You may have murdered Leigh Lockwood,” I said, “but that won’t stop her from putting you into your own grave.”

Leigh looked at me in consternation. I couldn’t explain to her that my words were only a last-ditch attempt to scare Parris off. I was hoping his knowledge of ghosts was scarce. Most mortals were terrified of the dead, especially dead with a vengeance. Parris, who only reacted with a cold grin, did not seem to be one of those people.

“I forgot you make friends with the dead,” he said, clearly unconcerned. He plunged the tip of his dagger into the dirt near my feet and began to trace out the familiar lines of a pentagram.

“How did you know that?”

“Wren told me.”

From the opposite side of the tree, I heard Wren call out, “Sorry, Morgan!”

“Too little, too late, Wren,” I said back. I returned my attention to Parris. “What the hell are you doing? It’s not like you can do the ritual now. You have to wait until the new moon.”

Parris chuckled, finishing the initial circle of the pentagram and moving on to its inner star. “I’ve decided to alter the timeline of the ritual.”

“You can’t do that,” Wren said.

“He’s right,” I said matter-of-factly. “It’s not witchcraft, but the same rules apply. The power you’re drawing on stems from all of the different energies involved. The candles, the pentagram, the moon. It’ll swallow you whole if you ignore the rules.”

The pentagram complete, Parris moved over, a few feet closer to Wren, dagger still in hand, and began to dig a second pentagram in the dirt.

“You’re going to sacrifice us both on the same night?” I said, horrified. As far as I knew, it had never been done before. For good reason, too. The kind of power that would surface with a dual sacrifice was immeasurable. It would destroy Yew Hollow on premise. “You can’t—”

“I suggest, Ms. Summers, that you stop telling me what I can and can’t do,” Parris interrupted me. He completed the second pentagram. “You have no idea what I’m capable of. I have done things that no dark user before me has ever accomplished. This dagger, for instance, is shielded from your clever sister just as the first one was. She’ll only see the pain it caused, but not whose hand caused it. I can’t wait.”

My throat closed up at the thought of Malia scrying my death with Parris’s dagger. Parris, satisfied with my disheartened expression, returned to his work. He began to plant the candles in the dirt so that they stood upright and lit them one by one.

Leigh knelt beside me. I turned my head to face her.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. Parris, busy with his candles, didn’t seem to notice that I was speaking to thin air.

“Don’t be,” Leigh said. She leaned her forehead against mine. For once, I appreciated the glacial effect of her touch. It soothed my brewing feeling of hopelessness. “I have to do something.”

“Who’s first?” Parris said, standing. He’d completed his work. All that was left was the sacrifice itself. “Any volunteers?”

Leigh looked sickened as he laughed cruelly.

“Wren?” Parris said, walking around the tree to where Wren was. “How about you?”

Wren did not object as Parris seized the ropes at his feet and began to drag him into the nearest pentagram. Then, as Parris turned away from Wren to consult his drawings, I saw Wren draw in a deep breath.

“HELP!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “HELP, HELP, HE—”

Parris’s boot made contact with Wren’s temple, dropping him instantly to the ground. Leigh gasped in surprise, and I flinched. I could already see a bruise blossoming on the side of Wren’s head.

“Shut up,” said Parris, though Wren was unconscious. Parris glared at me. “Don’t you dare try that,” he added.

With the dagger, he cut Wren’s ropes. He began to rearrange each of Wren’s arms and legs, spreading my brother’s body out along the pentagram just as Wren had done to Leigh. Once finished, Parris dusted his hands off and stood.

“I don’t suppose you’ll lay down quietly, will you?” he asked, approaching me.

“Go fuck yourself.”

“No, I didn’t think so,” Parris said. He seemed amused by my antics. “I’ll let you sit in the middle of yours, then. I want you to watch.”

Without further ado, he heaved me up by my armpits and maneuvered me into the center of the other pentagram. I thrashed wildly, hoping that my violent spasms would somehow free me from Parris’s grasp. Leigh looked on, clearly in despair. As Parris dropped me in the dirt at the center of the pentagram, I avoided eye contact with Leigh. I had failed her. Her spirit would be stuck in Yew Hollow forever.

“Have you ever seen a dark ritual performed?” Parris asked, now fondling the silver chalice between his large hands. “It’s quite beautiful. The whole world seems to catch fire. Wren would agree, but it seems he’s lost his voice.”

He laughed, turning his back on me to nudge Wren’s decumbent body with his foot. I tried to take advantage of his distraction, swinging my feet around and rocking forward in an attempt to stand. It was a mistake. I swayed, nearly losing my balance. Then I felt a boot connect with my rib cage, and I collapsed.

“Tsk, tsk,” Parris scolded as I gasped for breath beneath him. “You know better. But since you’re so eager, we should probably begin.”

Still curled up in a ball, I lifted my head to watch Parris raise his hands to the sky, as if presenting the silver chalice and his dagger to some great demon or corrupt god. He began to chant, slowly at first, in a guttural language that seemed to take Latin and twist it into something repugnant and dirty. The world darkened around us. Stars blinked out, streetlights disappeared, and Leigh, a once-shimmering beacon, dimmed to a diaphanous presence.

Then the fire started.

The pentagrams ignited. Great, billowing flames erupted around me. I shrieked, pulling my legs in close to my body. Terrified, I glanced over at Wren. Though immense heat seemed to radiate off the pyre of my confinement, the same flames did not seem to have any immediate effect on Wren’s body, which was lying in direct contact with them.

This was not the method in which Leigh had been sacrificed. Parris had concocted a whole new process to feed his ritual, one that mimicked the power he hoped to procure. His voice rose, a rhythmic requiem that may have been dangerously beautiful had I not known its true purpose. The fires roared, as deafening as the engines of a fighter jet.

As the cacophony continued, Parris stepped through the inferno, unscathed, to kneel next to me. His eyes were red, either reflecting the flames or transformed by the power he had invoked. Though the chant continued, his mouth shaped new words.

“The whole town has come out,” he said. “They couldn’t stay away. You should see the look in their eyes. They’re... what’s the word? Transfixed, I’d say. Hypnotized. It’s beautiful, really. Look—”

He seized my chin, forcing me to look out toward the town hall. Sure enough, as I squinted through the conflagration, I could see the shadowy figures of Yew Hollow’s inhabitants, drawn out of their homes in the middle of the night by the strange influence of Parris’s ritual. With vacant expressions, they gazed at Parris, mortals mesmerized by an otherworldly force.

Parris raised his dagger, circling around me. “Shall we?”

In a flash, he dug the blade into my shoulder, tearing through the fabric of my shirt. It felt as though the fire had taken hold of my bones. As I howled in pain, he swiped outward, carving an elegant curl into his live canvas. Then, without hesitation, he engraved a matching swirl on my opposite shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he said, a cruel smile decorating his face as I quivered beneath him. I felt the cold metal of the chalice press against the bare skin of my back. “I’ll give you angel wings.”

The blade flashed again, this time slicing a delicate curve along the outer right edge of my back. Leigh cried out at my distress, barely visible as she paced beyond the fire. It seemed she could not cross over the flame. Then, as Parris etched the left side of my back, Leigh vanished entirely.

“No!” I burst out, my voice breaking.

Her disappearance was unbearable. Evidently, Parris’s ritual was also feeding off of Leigh’s essence. It was the only explanation for her sudden eclipse. A sob escaped from my mouth. As I felt the cold chalice against my back again, something seemed to snap inside me. My insides burned, as if my suffering had suddenly transformed into hate. With a strength that I hadn’t recognized before, I turned and exploded, planting my tied hands beneath Parris’s breastbone and ejecting him from the inner star of the pentagram. He landed with a grunt a few feet away, his hands splayed out to catch his fall. The chalice, which he’d slowly been filling with my blood, rolled off across the dirt, spilling its contents.

Parris breathed heavily as I glared at him.

“That was a mistake, Morgan,” he said, pushing himself up and retrieving the chalice. The silver cup was now coated with a layer of dirt and blood. Parris wiped it off on his shirt, leaving an alarming stain. “You’re only putting off the inevitable. Stop fighting it.”

“No,” I hissed. The skin of my back felt raw, but the loops of rope restraining my wrists had somehow loosened during the fray.

Parris sighed. It was almost mocking, as if he was disappointed in my lack of enthusiasm to end my own life. “I guess I’ll start with your brother, then. Enjoy the show.”

He stepped into Wren’s pentagram, the blaze intensifying in response to Parris’s presence. As he bent over Wren’s body, I desperately tried to wriggle free of my bondage. With an eye on Parris’s blade, now poised over Wren’s throat, I took the rope around my wrists between my teeth, pulling this way and that to slacken its hold on me.

Suddenly, Leigh blazed into existence, burning more brightly than ever as she circled my fiery prison.

“Help is coming,” she said and then vanished again.

I had no idea what kind of help Leigh was referring to. I only knew that it wouldn’t arrive in time to save Wren. Parris looked up, watching my expression as he lowered his dagger to Wren’s neck. He didn’t expect me to react, didn’t expect I had any strength left in me to prevent him from casually murdering my brother.

Except I did. I leapt, hands and feet still bound, hurdling through the flames of both pentagrams. I tackled Parris, wrapping my arms around his neck and wrenching him away from Wren. He gagged, taken aback by my impulsive attack. There wasn’t much I could do other than hold on. I tightened my grip on Parris as he stood, trying to shake me off. He pried at my arms, but I held him fast. Then he backed up and body-slammed me into the trunk of the yew tree.

My head thunked against the tree, dazing me. Parris threw me off, and I slumped down to the base of the yew, trying to see straight again. My hands groped the ground in the effort to steady the world around me. I grasped the exposed roots of the yew tree. Help me.

As if in answer to my silent prayer, the yew tree’s aura unexpectedly flowed through me, filling me with pure, white light. It radiated from my fingers, through my core, illuminating the space around my heart, and all the way down to my toes. My head cleared, and the burning pain of the cuts in my back seemed to lessen. Then the ropes around my wrists and ankles disintegrated, turning to dust.

“Thank you,” I gasped.

Parris had returned to Wren, his dagger digging into the flesh of Wren’s right arm. I staggered upright, determined to separate Parris’s head from the rest of his body. However, before I could even take a step toward Parris, a resounding boom echoed through the town square.

I froze, my heart stopping. Surely, Parris hadn’t completed Wren’s sacrifice. He’d only begun to spill Wren’s blood. Then I realized that Parris had looked up in confusion. The thunderous explosion was not an intended product of Parris’s ritual.

That’s when I saw them.

The witches of Yew Hollow charged through the town square, surrounding the yew tree in a wave of auras and power. My mother and sisters led the brigade, hands ablaze with the sapphirine colors of protection spells, weaving witchcraft into the air like passionate conductors of a grand symphony. It enveloped Parris’s fires. The hues wound together, Parris’s devious reds and the Summerses’ indomitable blues, dancing into the sky. The sound of it was unfathomable, like fireworks magnified by the thousands. Beyond the battle, I caught sight of Leigh, her expression triumphant.

Parris, having overcome his shock at the coven’s appearance, stood. He had managed to fill the dirtied chalice halfway with Wren’s blood. Not to be outdone, he took a stance between the two pillars of feuding colors, in the middle of the two pentagrams. His eyes wide, teeth set in the grimace of a shark, he gave himself over to derangement. In a move I hadn’t anticipated, Parris sliced open his own arm, catching drops of his blood in the chalice. He turned to face me.

“You foolish girl,” he said, his voice crackling with overuse. He had been chanting his warped Latin all along. His hand shook, threatening to drop the chalice. “Your mother can’t save you now. I have enough of your blood left in this cup. As soon as it touches my lips, the ritual will be complete, and you’ll regret having ever been born.”

Before I even had the chance to react, he raised the chalice to his lips and tipped it back. Immediately, the flames roared higher than ever. The coven’s craft dimmed, engulfed by Parris’s power. Parris drained the chalice, tossed the cup to the side, and grinned madly at me. He spread his arms wide in triumph, advancing toward me as I backed against the trunk of the yew tree.

It was like standing at the gates to hell. Fire raged behind Parris, his face now distorted into something that was not entirely human. The witchcraft had all but evaporated, despite the coven’s laborious efforts. Parris took agonizingly slow steps toward me. I was frozen with terror, watching the devil take his last stand. Then he lunged.

Instinctively, I raised my hands. Cerulean craft exploded from my palms, the physical form of a defense spell that I had learned as a child. I had no idea that the ability to perform that spell still lingered within me, but with the aura of the yew tree boldly pulsing through my soul, there was no doubting its effectiveness. It slammed into Parris, halting his attack. It seemed to pull at his features, stretching his infernal face from the mouth outward. My craft grew and grew, fed by the unyielding power of the yew tree. It saturated the town square, illuminating the citizens of Yew Hollow, eyes widened in awe, and the coven, still wielding their own protective spells to add to mine.

Parris’s flames raged once more. Abandoning the pentagrams, the fire funneled around Parris instead, encasing him within its blaze. With a terrible scream, Parris began to burn away, his very being perishing before my eyes. Then, as the last of Parris’s body fell prey to the flames, the inferno burned like the sun for one more moment before extinguishing completely.

My arms fell back down to my sides. I swayed, steadying myself against the yew tree. Light returned to Yew Hollow, the pink hues of sunrise peeking up over the horizon. My mother and sisters stood with the coven, reeling in the leftover craft racing through the air. Wren was still unconscious but seemed unharmed except for the gash in his arm and the bruise on his temple. The townspeople stood about in shock, mesmerized by the entire event. Across the square, I caught Leigh’s eye. She smiled at me. I nodded back. And then I fainted.

9

In Which Yew Hollow Becomes Home

For the second time in a matter of hours, I awoke to find Leigh hovering over me. I lay in my own twin bed, staring up at the ceiling of my attic bedroom on the third floor of the Summers house. Midmorning light streamed in from the window, passing through Leigh’s ethereal face.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I said to Leigh. My voice was hoarse. The events of the previous evening had taken its toll on my body.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m dead,” I groaned, attempting to roll over to one side. To be honest, I felt kind of dead. I was sore all over. Someone had dressed the deep gouges on my back, but that didn’t stop the wounds from stretching and cracking as I tried to sit up. Someone had also been kind enough to replace the shredded remains of my own shirt with a clean, white V-neck. “What happened?”

“You passed out,” Leigh said, keeping a watchful eye on me as I propped myself up against the pillows. “We brought you back here to take care of you.”

“No, what happened at the square?” I clarified. “The townspeople?”

“Everyone’s fine,” she said. She smoothed out a few lumps in the duvet. “A little shaken up, maybe. They’re all waiting to thank you for saving the town. The police, too. You should have seen them groveling in front of Cassandra. I don’t think the coven has to worry about getting kicked out of Yew Hollow anytime soon.”

“Where is everyone?” I asked, aware of how quiet and peaceful the house was. The Summers house was never quiet.

“Banishing Wren.”

“What?”

I kicked the duvet off, ignoring the pain in my back as I pulled on a pair of boots. I hobbled out of the room, determined to reach Wren before the coven had its way with him. Leigh called out after me.

“Morgan, wait!”

“Why?” I asked, thundering down the staircase.

“You’re not even wearing pants!”

After I donned pair of jeans and a jacket, Leigh allowed me to leave the house. As I swung open the screen door and surveyed the situation from the back porch, I could see that the coven had gathered in its entirety in the backyard. They formed a wide circle around Wren, who stood alone, his arm and head bandaged, with a bloated backpack slung over his uninjured shoulder. My mother occupied the space nearest to Wren, my sisters close behind. My mother’s voice drifted out toward me.

“You shall not return,” Cassandra was saying. “You shall not contact any member of the Summers coven. You shall not claim the Summers name...”

She was reading Wren the parameters of his banishment. I abandoned the porch, shoving my way through the throng of witches until I reached Wren. I stepped in front of him.

My mother sighed dramatically. “Morgan, you couldn’t have stayed asleep for another five minutes or so?”

“This is wrong,” I said. “Parris used Wren.”

Karma stepped forward from her place beside our mother. “Morgan, he killed Leigh,” she said. “He was in his right mind. He had a choice, and he chose to betray our family.”

“But—”

“Morgan,” Wren said from behind me, placing a hand on my shoulder. I turned to face him. “I can accept the consequences of my actions. After all, they could’ve decided on a worse fate for me.”

This was true. For a witch, banishment from your own coven meant a lifetime alone, but for Wren, it was only the natural process of things. He would’ve left Yew Hollow eventually anyway. The thought didn’t stop my eyes from burning, threatening tears.

“But I’ll never get to see you again,” I said to Wren, my lower lip trembling.

He reached down to hug me. “Don’t worry,” he mumbled. “I won’t forget my favorite sister.”

It was an impossible, dichotomous feeling that washed over me then. I knew Wren had done atrocious things. I knew that he had to leave, but I didn’t want to let go of the littlest Summers sibling. Nevertheless, I detached myself from Wren and stepped back into the frame of my sisters. My mother cleared her throat.

“As I was saying,” she continued, “you shall not claim the Summers name. You are no longer a member of this family. This is not the place for you, and so you shall take your leave.”

It was an archaic speech, one that had been nearly unaltered throughout the passage of time. The banishment ritual, itself, was outdated as well. I watched as Laurel presented my mother with a small ramekin of black salt. A blend of sea salt and yew ash, the mineral was meant to ward off those who were unwelcome. Cassandra scattered it in the space between Wren and the rest of the coven. It was more symbolic than ritualistic, but I still felt a wave of energy disappear from the Summers side of the line as Wren’s aura was rejected from the property.

“May you live the life you deserve,” my mother finished, dusting the rest of the salt from her palms.

“Preferably one that doesn’t involve murder,” Laurel chimed in. Malia elbowed her in the ribs, shushing her.

Wren ducked his head, an acknowledgement of the completion of his emancipation. Then, without any kind of parting words, he turned on his heel and set off across the yard. We watched until his silhouette faded and disappeared over the crest of the hill.

With Wren gone, the coven returned their attention to me. I was caught in a swarm of gratitude as each witch of the Summers coven grasped my hands tightly or pulled me into a hug. The magnitude of my actions at the yew tree hadn’t sunk into my brain yet. I allowed the coven to dote on me, but in the back of my mind, I felt oddly guilty. I had drawn on the yew tree’s powers accidentally. My defense against Parris had been intuitive, not proactive, yet the coven heralded me as some kind of savior. I couldn’t stand it for more than a few minutes, so I politely excused myself and gestured for Leigh to follow me. As the group of witches thinned, filtering back to their own homes, Leigh and I strolled off toward the swing set.

I plopped down in one of the swings, wrapping a hand around its rusted chain. Leigh leaned against the set next to me.

“You handled that rather well,” she said, nodding toward the dispersing witches. “I’m starting to think you might not actually mind being a member of the Summers coven.”

“I don’t deserve the praise,” I admitted, squinting through the sunlight to look up at her. “I didn’t do that spell because I was trying to save Yew Hollow. I did it because I was afraid to die.”

Leigh only smiled knowingly.

“What?” I demanded.

“I don’t believe that,” she said and gazed off toward the house. “Whether you’re aware of it or not, you performed that spell instinctively to protect what’s most important to you. It wasn’t selfish. It was selfless.”

“But—”

“You aren’t Parris, Morgan,” Leigh said before I could protest. “I know you’re scared you’ll end up like him, or like Wren, but I promise you won’t be bitter and alone your whole life.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. What, you don’t believe the dead woman?” she added jokingly. “I have a whole new perspective on this kind of thing.”

I scuffed my boots into the ground then trapped a wayward leaf beneath one foot. “Why are you still here, anyway?” I asked. “Parris is gone. You should’ve moved on.”

“I’ve been fighting it,” she said, and sure enough, when I looked back at her, she seemed to flicker like a fluorescent light bulb.

“Why?”

“I wanted to say good-bye.”

Without warning, my eyes overflowed. “Damn,” I said, wiping them with the back of my hand. “Sorry, I have a leaf or a tree in my eye.”

Her knowing smile returned. “Thank you, Morgan, for everything that you’ve done,” she said. “Thank you for coming back to Yew Hollow and for taking the time to figure out what happened to me. I feel like I’ve known you my whole life.”

I let out a garbled laugh, no longer bothering to hide the fact that I was crying. “It’s only been a week.”

“I know.”

I stood up from the swing to face Leigh at eye level. “I wish I’d known you sooner,” I said. “Yew Hollow feels different than it used to. Not quite so… provisional. That’s your doing.”

She shook her head. “Yew Hollow feels that way because it’s your home,” she said. Then, to my great surprise, she reached out and pulled me into a warm hug. I settled into a wholly corporeal form of her, somehow solidified in her last moments on earth. I had been right about her aura. It was all pale pinks and oranges, that inexplicable blend of sunset hues unable to be captured on camera. You could only appreciate it in real life before it faded to darkness. In that moment, Leigh was utterly mortal, so I squeezed her tightly and pretended that this was only a temporary good-bye.

Too soon, she began to pale. She turned cold, and her figure sank through mine for a moment before she separated herself from me. With a mischievous smile and a wave of her fingers, she began to ebb away, deliquescing into the hazy sunlight until she disappeared entirely.

I allowed myself a few minutes to come to terms with Leigh’s final departure, staring at the place in the damp grass that she had so recently occupied. Then I looked back toward the house.

Cassandra, Malia, Karma, and Laurel stood on the porch steps. It was clear they had watched my last interaction with Leigh. I suddenly understood how Leigh had been able to hug me. My family had made it happen, combining their powers to lend strength to Leigh. I raised a hand to them in thanks.

A swift breeze blew through the yard, rustling the orange and red leaves of the surrounding trees. I tipped my head back, taking a great breath of the crisp autumn air. The sky was clear, its azure expanse stretching out beyond the Summers property. I stepped away from the swing set, across the whispering grass, toward the house.

Toward home.

Many thanks to everyone who read my story!

Writing is the best way I know to express myself, and I’m so glad that you all have rewarded me with the opportunity to share my imagination with you. As an author, I learn and evolve from the input of others, so if you have a spare moment and you enjoyed the story, please leave a short, spoiler-free review of the book. As readers, your personal opinions are often the best references for a writer. Your commentary allows me to further provide you all with fun, engaging material.

I would love if you could leave a review: Click Here to Review!

Again, thank you all for diving into mine and Morgan’s world. May we meet again!

All the best,

Alexandria Clarke

Witch Myth Book 1

1

In Which the Story Begins

In Which the Story Begins

Teagan Riley woke out of a dead sleep. A bead of sweat trickled down her temple. She lay in bed, frozen, the horrific face of her nightmare lingering on the insides of her eyelids. It was a face Teagan had loved once, strong and stoic, but life had rained down hard on them, and Teagan had tired of it. Now he was gone, only present in dreams, and Teagan thanked whatever god above had made the decision to separate them.

She counted her breaths. It was a meditation technique she’d learned from her therapist, the one Teagan had sought out after her husband’s death. Four counts to inhale, four counts to exhale. Clear your mind. Focus on breathing. Focus on breathing. Focus on—his face—breathing.

After another set of breaths, Teagan gave up. It was crap advice, she thought. A joke, even. Meditation was for yogis and the Dalai Lama, not an elementary school teacher who’d been widowed at the ripe old age of twenty-seven. She sat up in bed, unsticking herself from the sweat-soaked sheets. The nightmare had been particularly violent tonight, and Teagan had to stop herself from reimagining the familiar pair of fists beating down on her, catching a glimpse of her bruised face in the reflection of his wedding band. She pressed her face into the cold side of a pillow and waited for her pulse to slow. Over, she thought. It’s all over.

A loud creak interrupted her thought process. She peered around the room, squinting through the hazy moonlight that filtered in through the gaps in the curtains, but all was still. It was an old house. Floorboards buckled, doors swayed open and shut of their own accord, and occasionally things creaked for no reason at all. Nothing to be paranoid about.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, Teagan saw the floor-to-ceiling bookcase next to the bed teeter forward, ejecting novels and old education textbooks from its shelves. Frantic, she tried to move out of its path, but her legs were tangled up in the twisted sheets. She kicked herself free, heaving herself off the far edge of the bed and rolling to the floor. The bookcase crashed down, right where Teagan had so recently lain, splintering into several pieces. The sharp corner of a wayward dictionary caught Teagan’s scalp, digging a gash into her hairline. She ducked her head, curling up into a ball, and shielded herself with her hands until the bookcase settled.

When she dared to look up again, it was with the expression of a defeated soul. Nothing could go right. The bookcase was irreparable. The luxurious satin sheets Teagan had found on sale were torn and dirty. Dust and debris littered the entire bedroom. Teagan’s head pounded. She lightly prodded her temple then held her fingers close to her face. Even in the dim light, she could see that an alarming amount of blood poured from the results of the dictionary’s escape attempt. With a resigned sigh, she stood, picked her way carefully through the disaster area, and switched the light on in the adjoining bathroom.

She avoided looking herself in the eye as she leaned in to the mirror to inspect the cut. It was deep and possibly worthy of stitches, so Teagan pressed a wad of toilet paper to it to stem the bleeding while waiting for the tap water to warm up. Then she rinsed the laceration out over the sink, splashed her face to rid herself of any leftover sweat, and looked up.

Until death do us part.

The message, dabbed on the mirror with her own blood, caused Teagan to take a hasty step back. She tripped over the lip of the tub and fell backward, pulling the curtain and its rod down with her. She squeezed her eyes shut. It had to be a nightmare. She was still trapped in her dreams. She opened her eyes. The vow was still there.

Until death do us part.

Without warning, the mirror lifted off the wall and crashed to the floor near Teagan’s feet, showering Teagan with broken glass. With a shriek, she jumped to her feet, hurdled the majority of the glass, and raced back through the bedroom. Behind her, the house seemed hell-bent on self-destructing. Windows shattered as Teagan blew by them, furniture upended itself, doors slammed shut, and as she took the stairs two at a time to the first floor, the banister exploded as if someone had planted an IED in the old wood.

“Wake up, wake up!” Teagan pleaded with herself, tearing into the kitchen toward the back door of the house. She ducked as a vase of flowers levitated from its place on the kitchen table and threw itself at her. It smashed against the wall behind her, splattering water and lily petals across the floor. Teagan slid across the slippery tile, grasped the handle of the back door, and tried to wrench it open.

It wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard Teagan yanked at it. Then every burner on the stove roared to life, sending a wave of heat across Teagan’s body. The door to the oven banged open and spilled a mouthful of flame and smoke out as if the oven had been on the entire night. In seconds, the kitchen had become an inferno, trapping Teagan against the unmoving door. Sweat soaked her flannel pajamas. Her body frozen with fear, her mind raced, rifling through her limited options for escape.

In one swift movement, Teagan seized a nearby frying pan. The metal handle nearly seared her skin off, but she chucked it through the small window at the top of the back door, pulverizing the glass. Then, planting a knee on the nearby counter, she hoisted herself up and out. She felt her palms slice open as she heaved herself through the window headfirst. The broken glass caught at her hips and legs, ripping through her pajama pants, but she wriggled forward, almost free of the raging fire in the kitchen. Then someone or something grabbed her ankle and pulled.

She screamed, kicking wildly as whatever invisible entity tried to drag her back through the window. Teagan’s foot connected with something that felt suspiciously like a jawline. A jolt of pain raced through her ankle, but whoever held Teagan captive let go. She launched herself through the window, a shard of glass ripping open her thigh, and with a grunt, landed heavily on one shoulder. She ignored the pain, stumbling to her feet. Her shoulder felt dislocated. Her ankle was swelling, but it could hold her weight. As the house behind her was devoured by flames, igniting the night sky, Teagan sprinted off across the backyard, toward the small town of Yew Hollow, and never looked back.

2

In Which My New Job Takes Off

The Yew Hollow Police Force mailed my new detective badge to me, despite the fact that the station was only about ten minutes from my house. The spring morning it arrived was a beautiful one in Yew Hollow. Dusty sunlight illuminated my new loft, and the soft chatter of awakening wildlife filtered in through the open windows. I extracted the shiny badge from its envelope, running my fingers across its smooth surface. In six short months, I had gone from Morgan Summers: Psychic Medium to Morgan Summers: Legitimate Detective. Well, not so legitimate, but my employment was pretty reputable for a twenty-nine-year-old who’d barely finished college. Yew Hollow’s police force had made an exception to the rule in my case, only because I had a unique skill that the other detectives didn’t possess. I could see and speak to ghosts.

Yew Hollow, my hometown, was a strange and magical place. My family, a coven of eclectic witches, had settled the area in the late 1600s, and we still had a significant impact on the way the town was run. The townspeople had learned to leave us to it, ignoring or accepting the fact that Yew Hollow often experienced all sorts of odd occurrences. The only thing was, ever since I’d channeled an unstoppable power through the yew tree at the center of town last October, these odd events mostly consisted of several townspeople dying in sporadic accidents.

They came in threes, these deaths. Earlier in the year, we lost twelve members of Yew Hollow, always to some peculiar accident. One guy slipped in the shower and banged the back of his head on the bathtub tap. A middle-aged woman had somehow managed to garrote herself with a clothesline as she hung her laundry out to dry. Someone had even mishandled a can opener to the point of a messy, unintentional suicide. It was silly but tragic, and at every scene, the familiar feel of witchcraft lingered in the air. At the police station, we’d decided to keep that detail hush-hush.

A loud ring punctuated my thoughts as my cell phone demanded my attention. I glanced at the screen. It was a text message from my boss, the chief of police, asking for my presence at the station. I’d been helping the force out with yet another death. About two weeks ago, an elementary school gym teacher—a man named Ronan Riley whom I’d never met before—had been found strangled in the woods behind his own house. When I’d originally examined the crime scene, I’d expected to find more traces of witchcraft, but there was no hint of magic around the body or the area. Later his wife had found a suicide note. We were in the process of clarifying the details, but it seemed that this death was, quite simply, a run-of-the-mill tragedy.

Before leaving the loft, I checked my reflection in the full-length mirror by the front door. Apple-green eyes, just like my father’s, gazed back. I’d dressed in jeans, a casual top, and a pair of slip-on boat shoes. Out of time to do anything with my shoulder-length golden-brown hair, I pulled it up into a casual bun at the top of my head. The chief of police always nagged me on my lack of business attire, but in such a small town, I couldn’t be bothered to go shopping for a blazer just to fulfill the illusion of professionalism. Besides, spring in Yew Hollow was far too pleasant to waste the breeze by wearing slacks and panty hose. Shoot me.

I pinned my detective badge to my belt loop, left the loft, and strolled off along the bumpy dirt path that I had worn through the soft grass and new blooms of the woods. My new home was a renovated barn, buried in the forest behind the original Summers house. I liked my privacy, but it was comforting to know that my family was always within walking distance if I ever needed them. As the ground evened out and the trees thinned, I found my three sisters, Malia, Karma, and Laurel, decorating the old swing set in the backyard of the Summers house. As I headed in their direction, it occurred to me how different the four of us were. Malia and Laurel had inherited my mother’s trademark grey eyes, blond hair, and slender figures. Karma and I were both more petite, with olive complexions and darker shades of hair.

“Morning, all,” I said, pivoting around one of the metal supports of the swing set like Gene Kelly with an umbrella. “What are you guys talking about?”

Karma, installed on one of the swings, flew past me, reaching out her bare foot to nudge my shoulder. “The end-of-spring, start-of-summer festival.”

I groaned, rolling my eyes. “Not another festival. Didn’t we just celebrate the beginning of spring?”

Malia, the eldest of the Summers sisters, smiled serenely at my lack of town spirit. My sisters were members of the Yew Hollow Preservation Society, so it fell upon them to plan the town’s various events. Thankfully, I had yet to be recruited.

“I like the festivals,” said my youngest sibling, Laurel. She caressed the petals of a nearby daisy.

“Glad to hear it,” I said. I leaned down to pluck the daisy from the grass and then pushed it into Laurel’s wild hair behind her ear. “Gotta run. I was supposed to be at the station about ten minutes ago.”

“Anything good?” Karma asked. A gust of air whipped a wayward strand of my hair into my mouth as she swung past me again.

“Not sure yet,” I said, blowing the offending hair out from between my lips. I turned away from my sisters, waggling my fingers in a temporary farewell. As I headed toward the center of town, I called over my shoulder, “I’ll swing by later and let you know.”

They waved me off, and I started toward the road at the end of the Summerses’ driveway. As I passed the main house, I caught a glimpse of my mother and the leader of our coven, Cassandra, through the big kitchen window and waved. She responded with a lazy wink and a hand motion that I’d learned was her way of saying she needed to speak with me at some point. I nodded, pointed down the road toward the police station, then gestured back at her. She gave me the thumbs-up.

On my way through town, I stopped at the local bakery to pick up two dozen assorted donuts and a large container of coffee. When I’d first started working for the police force, some of the officers were skeptical of my employment. I guess I couldn’t blame them. I’d never had any experience as a detective before the force hired me. So every Monday, I’d wormed my way into their hearts and minds with a bribery of confectionary goods. Now everyone at the force loved me. Balancing the boxes of donuts in one hand and the coffee in the other, I kicked open the door of the station. A few startled desk officers glanced up, disrupted from their early-morning office duties by my unsubtle entrance.

“Who wants donuts?” I asked, raising the boxes above my head. At once, I was surrounded by officers, all fighting for their favorites. I set the boxes down on a nearby desk, opening each one for easy access. “There’s coffee too, everyone.”

The chief of police, a portly man named Marco Torres, emerged from his office and took a jelly-filled donut from one of the boxes.

“You know, Summers,” he said, balancing the donut in one hand and filling a Styrofoam cup to the brim with black coffee with the other, “I’m trying to watch my weight.”

“Sorry, I just love catering to stereotypes,” I replied and reached into a box to claim a chocolate-sprinkled donut before they were all gone. “No one’s forcing you to eat them.”

“If I’m presented with an opportunity, I have to take it,” Torres said. He bit down into his donut, and jelly burst out from its opposite side. “That’s one of the first things they teach you at the police academy.”

“What about the opportunity to watch your weight?” I asked, feeling slightly nauseated as Torres rotated the pastry and captured the escaping jelly.

“What about your opportunity to wear an outfit that actually makes you look like a detective?” he retorted.

I waved this away and poured myself a cup of coffee. “You’re just jealous because I don’t have to wear a hokey-ass uniform. Now, do you actually need me today, or did you just know I was going to bring in donuts?”

He grunted in acknowledgement, set down his coffee, and gestured with his pastry-free hand for me to follow him. As he led me to the back of the station, toward the one and only interrogation room, he filled me in on the situation.

“Remember Ronan Riley? The gym teacher we found? Well, his wife showed up today. She looks like shit, kinda like she got run over by a truck. Lacerations everywhere, dislocated shoulder, fractured ankle, the whole shebang.”

“What’s the twist?” I asked. I popped open a tiny container of creamer and stirred it into my coffee. If there was any perk to living in a small town, it was that the coffee was always freshly made, rather than burnt away to bitterness as it would be in a chain coffee shop.

“She says her husband did it,” Torres explained, shoving the last bite of his donut into his wide, mustachioed mouth. “Considering we picked up his body over two weeks ago, I figured this was right up your alley.”

I frowned, confused. “Even if it is her husband’s ghost, he wouldn’t be able to affect her physically,” I said. “Ghosts can’t interact with the physical realm, no matter how strong their presence is.”

Torres shrugged, halting outside the door of the interrogation room, his hand on the handle. “She said she was being haunted. I called you. That’s about all I care to know on this one. Now, if someone alive is kicking the shit out of her, I’m all ears. By the way, she also says he burned their house down. The inn is full of spring flingers, but you should be able to find her a room.”

With that, he handed me a thick file with the label “Riley” stamped on it in red, flung open the door to the room, and gestured me inside. Behind the desk sat a young woman in her midtwenties. Torres was right. She looked as if she’d narrowly escaped a reckless car accident. There was a large cut on her forehead, sewn together with four or five stitches. Her face was bruised, a sling supported her left shoulder, her hands and arms were bandaged nearly the whole way up, and a single crutch leaned against the far wall. Behind the bruising, her eyes were set deeply in her skull, and anger and exhaustion seemed to wrinkle the skin around her mouth.

“Mrs. Riley, this is—” Torres began.

“Miss.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s Miss Riley,” she corrected, her voice hoarse with exhaustion. “Actually, call me Teagan. The only people who call me Miss Riley are under the age of eight.”

“All right, then, Teagan,” Torres said, dipping his head politely. “This is Morgan Summers. She’s got a way with, uh, your particular complaint.”

I extended a hand to gently shake one of Teagan’s bandaged limbs and asked, “Would you feel comfortable answering a few questions for me, Teagan?”

She nodded, so I pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down. Teagan stared at Torres as though she were challenging him to a silent contest. I ping-ponged between them for a few seconds before saying, “I got this, Chief.”

I could’ve sworn I heard him let out a sigh of relief as he exited the room and closed the door behind him. Teagan must have had quite a story to have already exhausted the chief of police. There was only so much talk about ghosts that one person could take. I cleared my throat.

“So, Teagan, Chief Torres told me that you think your husband is haunting you?” I asked. I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs, knowing that if I appeared relaxed, it would ease the other party’s nerves.

“And you think I’m insane,” she stated bluntly, crossing her arms. “Who are you, the psychologist?”

“No, ma’am. I’m a psychic medium and Yew Hollow’s one and only paranormal detective.”

“Sorry?”

“I speak to dead people,” I clarified. I flicked open her file, perusing the report of Teagan’s attack from the previous evening and examining a few photos of her ruined house. “You’re a resident of Yew Hollow, right? Usually, everyone here already knows about the Summerses.”

“I’ve heard about your family, of course,” she said, adjusting a piece of gauze stretched across the palm of her left hand. “But we lived at the very edge of town. My husband wasn’t a people person. He liked his privacy. We only worked and ran errands in town then went straight home. I’ve never even been to one of those crazy festivals.”

“Lucky you.”

Teagan regarded me from beneath long eyelashes. Hesitantly, she asked, “So you don’t think I’m insane?”

“No, I don’t, Teagan, because if you’re insane, then I’m absolutely crazy,” I admitted. “Walk me through what happened.”

I listened intently as she recapped her night, taking notes on a spare sheet of scrap paper that had been buried in her file. Teagan’s terrifying evening had started with a bookcase unexpectedly toppling over and escalated from there. Apparently, the whole house had been possessed in its mission to kill Teagan. She’d dodged flying furniture, vases, pots and pans, and even walked through fire before she finally managed to escape through a window and run to town. The story matched her wounds. Her bruised, gashed head was a result of the falling bookcase. She’d fallen on her shoulder during her escape through the window. She explained all but one injury.

“What about your ankle?” I asked, gesturing to where she had elevated it on the cross leg of the table. It was so swollen that it looked like a softball wrapped in sports tape.

“This is where I sound even crazier,” she warned. She drummed her fingers on the table in front of her, as though exorcising some of her nerves through the movement of her hands. “I swear someone grabbed my foot with both hands and yanked. I was halfway through the window, and they tried to pull me back in, but when I looked back, there was no one there.”

It really did sound crazy, even to me. I knew for a fact that ghosts didn’t have the ability to touch or harm humans, except under a few bizarre circumstances. Not long ago, my mother and sisters had lent strength to a friend of mine before she passed over, just so we could say a proper goodbye. Teagan’s story, on the other hand, wasn’t as easy to check out. According to the report, there was nothing much left of Teagan’s house. By the time the Yew Hollow Fire Department had reached the scene, it had already burnt to the ground. Someone clearly had to have doused the house with some kind of accelerant.

“Teagan, can you think of anyone who might’ve wanted to harm you or your husband?” I asked, flipping through a few more Polaroids of the wrecked property that had been included in Teagan’s file.

She shook her head.

Tentatively, I asked, “And did you seek any kind of therapy after your husband’s death?”

“See, you do think I’m crazy.”

I winced. I was hoping to avoid a negative reaction, so I chose my next words carefully.

“The only reason I ask is because, to my knowledge, spirits can’t manipulate the physical world. Occasionally, they appear to humans, mostly children. They have an effect on the physical world to a certain extent, playing with the temperatures of rooms and the like, but the odds of your husband’s ghost wrapping his hands around your ankle are pretty slim.”

“I’m telling you,” she insisted. She shifted in her chair, jostling her ankle. With a grimace, she continued. “Something grabbed my foot, and when I kicked out, I connected with somebody’s face. No one was there. I’m not crazy. That’s just what happened.”

I sighed, unwilling to argue any further. It didn’t make any sense. Either Teagan was lying, or I didn’t know as much about the otherworld as I thought I did. I strongly suspected that Teagan just didn’t want to admit to something.

“Teagan, sometimes after we experience something traumatic, such as an unexpected death, the stress can cause all sorts of things to happen,” I said, trying to reassure her.

She made a motion as if to slam her fist on the table, then seemed to remember just how injured all of her extremities were. She settled for pointing a bandaged finger at my face. “Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not trying to patronize you,” I assured her. “I’m trying to figure out what happened. You could be suffering from PTSD. Paranoia, flashbacks, nightmares. Any of that sound familiar?”

When she remained quiet, I realized that I had hit a nerve. She twisted her fingers together, picking at a hangnail until it began to bleed. I reached across the desk, separating her hands.

“When your husband was alive,” I began softly, “did the two of you get along? I know this is a difficult subject. I worked the case when it first came into the office. Do you know any reason as to why he would’ve wanted to kill himself?”

She shook her head, but a quivering tear wavered on her eyelashes.

“Teagan.”

She pulled her hand away from mine, tucking it close to her side. Staring up at the ceiling as if to control the moisture in her eyes, she finally said in a detached voice, “I can’t imagine why he would kill himself over this, since he never seemed to care while he was alive, but he used to hit me.”

“He was abusive?”

“Quite often,” she admitted. “It was awful. He threatened to kill me if I ever told anyone, but he’s dead now, so what’s the harm, right?”

Her nonchalance alarmed me, but I let it slide, hoping that it was only a coping mechanism. The abuse had not been documented in the Riley file, so this was obviously the first time Teagan had mentioned it to anyone within the force.

“You never told anyone at all?” I asked.

“No, but the other teachers at school more or less knew. Even some of the kids noticed.” She hugged herself tightly. “Makeup only covers so much.”

I made a note in her file. “Do you think he committed suicide out of guilt?”

Teagan scoffed and rolled her eyes. “I doubt it. Why are we talking about this? I thought you were Linda Blair.”

I tried not to chuckle, collecting the photos and other notes and putting them back in the file. “Not quite. I’m just trying to get all the information.”

“Well, you have it, so can you focus more on whatever demon tried to burn me alive, or shall I go hire a priest?”

“No, don’t worry. I’ll look into it,” I said, standing up. “I need to do some research, but first, we need to find you a place to stay. I’ll walk you down to the inn in a few minutes. I just need to talk to the chief first.”

I waited patiently as she stood and balanced herself on the one crutch. Then I held the door open as she hobbled through.

“Wait for me outside,” I said to her as I flagged down Chief Torres. She made no indication that she had heard me, but I let her hop through the station anyway. For a woman who claimed to be continually abused by her husband, she came across as mightily independent. I had to admire her escape from the burning house. She was a fighter. That was certain.

“Summers?” Chief Torres prompted.

I handed him Teagan’s file. “I’m not convinced,” I said, keeping an eye on Teagan through the front windows of the station. “She says he used to abuse her, so I’d look into that. Question the other teachers at her school. See if she’s telling the truth.”

“And the haunting?”

“From what she’s described, it doesn’t seem likely,” I said with a shrug. “It doesn’t really sound like a ghost is hanging around. Besides, I didn’t see anything when I went out to the property.”

“So she’s lying?”

“Or confused,” I said, unwilling to put Teagan in such a small box. Terrible things had happened to her. If she was lying, she probably had a good reason. “Someone burnt down that house. We just have to figure out who.”

“What are the odds she just left the oven on?” Torres said, eyeing Teagan through the window. She was testing her balance without the crutch, one hand pressed against the window of the station to steady herself.

“Then how would you explain all the other crazy shit she said happened?” I asked. “Something weird is going on.”

“Weird is your area, Summers.”

“I know,” I said. “Give me some time to figure it out.”

“Get to it.”

3

In Which I’m Considered Inept

I spent the majority of the afternoon helping Teagan settle into a temporary life at the local inn. I had no idea how Teagan had ended up falling into my hands—she certainly didn’t seem to want or welcome my help—but I argued with the lobby assistant on her behalf anyway, flashing my Yew Hollow Police Force badge to boot a family of tourists from their suite so that Teagan could at least have a kitchenette at her disposal. Teagan had lost everything in the fire, so I asked for her sizes and swung by a few boutiques, picking out a few outfits that I hoped she wouldn’t hate. Then I passed by the market to grab some essentials—toothbrush, deodorant, shampoo—before making my way back to her motel room.

When I knocked on the door to her suite, I got no answer. I dropped my haul in the hallway, knocked again, and called, “Teagan?”

Silence. Hesitantly, I pushed the door open. Teagan lay on the bed, splayed out as if someone had shot her. Her eyes were wide open, staring blankly at the ceiling. I waved a hand in front of her face, and when she still made no reaction, I prodded her good shoulder.

“Teagan!”

She blinked, then her eyes focused on me. “God, what?”

“You sleep with your eyes open?”

She sat up, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hands. “Apparently. It used to really freak Ronan out.”

“It’s pretty disturbing,” I agreed, wondering what other oddities Teagan was hiding. “I got you some stuff. It’s out in the hallway.”

I retreated to bring the bags in and dumped them on the bed. As I tossed the toiletries into the drawers of the bathroom cabinet, Teagan rifled through the pastel-colored bags of clothes.

“Everything okay?” I asked, watching Teagan in the mirror of the bathroom. She held up a pair of dark-wash jeans as if to inspect them.

She relinquished the pants and examined a three-pack of solid-color underwear. “What’s with the grandma panties?”

“Give me a break,” I said, going back into the bedroom. “I’ve never shopped for another woman before.”

“Would you wear these?”

“No.”

“Then why would I?”

I thought about it. “Touché.”

Satisfied, she tossed the pack of panties across the room. Her expression darkened suddenly, as if a shadow had passed over the room.

“What if he comes back?” she asked in a low voice.

“Who?”

“Ronan.”

“Your husband?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “Do you really think that he’s the one who’s after you?”

“Who else would it be?”

“I don’t know. Someone alive.”

She threw another set of underwear at me. She had good aim. They smacked me in the face and fell to the floor before I had a chance to react. “For someone who talks to dead people, you sure are a skeptical bitch,” she scolded.

“I’m not—” I started but then thought better of it. I sighed. “Let’s put it this way, Teagan. If Ronan really is the one causing all this mayhem, it means a lot more trouble for me. Can you blame me for trying to figure out a different reason for all this?”

“Why would it cause trouble for you?”

“Because a ghost affecting the physical world is something I’ve never seen or heard of before,” I said. I picked up a few blouses from where Teagan had strewn them across the bed and began to hang them up in the room’s tiny closet. “It means something big is happening in Yew Hollow, something that I have no clue what to do about.”

She seemed to think on this for a second, cocking her head to the side like a puppy hearing a strange noise for the first time. Then she said, “You know, you’re not a very good detective.”

The observation sounded more like a challenge than anything else. With my back to Teagan, I gritted my teeth, pretending to be absorbed in the process of organizing her closet.

By the time I’d finished getting Teagan settled in at the inn, the sun was already on its way back down to the horizon. As I strolled leisurely through town, enjoying the new pink-and-white blooms on the cherry blossoms that lined the sidewalks, I thought about Teagan’s case. In all honesty, I didn’t have much to go on. The only evidence of Teagan’s mistreatment was the state of her injuries, and that wasn’t enough to prove that one of Yew Hollow’s ghosts had up and grown corporeal hands. I would have to go back out to the ruins of Teagan’s house to investigate further.

When I reached the Summers house, I caught sight of two figures lounging in the swinging bench on the front porch. One was clearly my mother—it was impossible to mistake her cerulean aura—but the other figure was a stranger with a dark aura of shadowy forest green. As I neared the porch, the figure defined itself. She was a tall, broad-shouldered teenaged girl with long dark hair, shadows under her eyes as if she hadn’t slept in several days, and an apathetic glare to complete a face that seemed too mature for her. Though I couldn’t place her—I’d never seen her in Yew Hollow before—she was vaguely familiar to me, as if maybe we’d known each other in a past life. My mother flagged me down, so I hopped up the stairs onto the porch.

“Hi,” I said, approaching them somewhat warily.

My mother had supplied the teenager with a glass of lemonade, which she sipped through a pink straw with a judgmentally raised brow and an air of condescension. She was also wearing a faded grey T-shirt of mine, poked through with several ratty holes and a black-and-white picture of Dexys Midnight Runners on its front. As my mother stood, the teenager only eyed me over the lip of her cup. Oh boy.

“Morgan, I want you to meet someone,” Cassandra said. She waved the teenager to her feet. With a great sigh, as if the movement expended her every effort, the teenager stood. Cassandra clasped an arm around the teenager’s shoulders and thrust her toward me. “This is Gwenlyn Bennett. She’s going to be staying with us for a while.”

I extended a hand to shake the teenager’s. At first, it seemed as though she had no intention of meeting me halfway. Then she uncertainly reached out.

“Nice to meet you, Gwenlyn,” I said, squeezing her hand briefly before allowing her to reclaim the limb that she was so possessive of. “I’m Morgan.”

“I know,” Gwenlyn said shortly. “You’re a medium, right? Apparently, I am too. I was just wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

I exchanged a loaded look with my mother. A new medium in town, especially one from another coven, was a complete surprise. I had never met anyone else with my ability before. The gift wasn’t necessarily rare. I just never made a habit of reaching out to unfamiliar covens in order to connect with other mediums. I wasn’t really a people person. Even so, Gwenlyn’s sudden, inexplicable appearance at the Summers house seemed questionable.

“Uh, sure… just one second,” I said to Gwenlyn. I took my mother’s arm and led her around to the side of the house. Then I asked, “Who is she? And why is she wearing my favorite T-shirt?”

“If that’s your favorite T-shirt, why did you leave it here when you moved out to the barn?”

“It’s not about the T-shirt, Mom.”

“Morgan, relax,” Cassandra said, reaching up to smooth my hair. I resisted the temptation to bat her hand away. My mother had never grown out of the habit of babying her children. “You know how Yew Hollow made all kinds of headlines last year. She read about you. She just wants to get to know you.”

“Why me? Where’s her coven?”

“She doesn’t have one,” my mother said solemnly. “She’s been in foster care for years. She had no idea that she was a witch. What if you were forced to grow up with no knowledge of your heritage?”

“She didn’t know she was a witch?”

“No,” Cassandra said, glancing over her shoulder to check that Gwenlyn was still solidly entertained by her glass of lemonade. “The poor girl has been seeing ghosts her whole life without understanding why. How would you feel if you thought you were clinically insane?”

“Pretty shitty,” I admitted and peered around my mother.

Gwenlyn had abandoned her lemonade. With the pink straw between her teeth, she clambered up onto the porch rail, sat down, and swung her feet out over the holly bushes in the front yard. As if she could feel my gaze on her, she turned her head to observe me with a curious eye. It was the first moment since I’d seen her in which she didn’t appear totally hostile. In fact, a sense of fragility radiated from her shadowy eyes. She hopped down from the porch rail, hurdling the holly bushes with her long legs, and walked out toward the swing set. As Gwenlyn’s rounded shoulders slumped farther forward, I threw up my hands in defeat.

“Fine,” I said, stepping down from the porch. “I’ll talk to her, but I’m not Yoda, okay?”

“You don’t have to be.”

I ignored Cassandra and strolled out across the backyard toward the swing set. The lightning bugs had started to come out, flickering in the tall grass like faulty matches. After such a long day, all I wanted was to go back to the loft and collapse into bed, but if it was my job to bond with Gwenlyn, I figured I might as well get the first attempt over with.

“You don’t have to do this,” Gwenlyn said before I even had the chance to speak.

“Do what?” I asked and claimed the swing next to hers.

“I heard you talking to Cassandra,” she said. Her voice was heavy, as though it took her an inordinate amount of exertion to make conversation with me. “I’m not deaf. I’m also not a charity case. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave.”

“I don’t think my mother would let that happen,” I said, kicking my feet back and forth to get the swing moving. Gwenlyn didn’t bother to swing, which to me seemed sad. It meant she’d already had the majority of her happiness beaten out of her and didn’t have enough left to enjoy the simple things anymore. “And I don’t think you’re a charity case.”

She stared at the ground, digging into the dirt beneath the mulch with her bare toes. “I’ll give you back your T-shirt, if you want.”

“Nah, keep it. I can’t fault you for your good taste.”

A ghost of a smile crossed her features. I wondered how long it had been since she had last exercised those facial muscles. She didn’t strike me as a particularly cheerful or humorous human being.

“Do your foster parents know where you are?” I asked. My mother hadn’t offered up any specifics on Gwenlyn’s past. For all I knew, she could be some kind of juvenile delinquent, devising a clever con to take advantage of the Summers coven. Or maybe I was just paranoid.

She shook her head. “I’m pretty good at making a quick, unnoticed exit,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“Won’t they be worried?”

Gwenlyn shrugged. “They’re probably relieved.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.” If Gwenlyn didn’t want to open up about her situation, I wasn’t going to make her. My mother had good instincts, so even if Gwenlyn was a troubled delinquent, I didn’t doubt my mother’s ability to turn her around. “So you never knew that you were a witch?”

She laughed outright. It wasn’t an amused laugh though. It was a cynical one, and it didn’t reach her eyes. “Witches aren’t real.”

“Except we are.”

“Yeah, well, how the hell was I supposed to know that?”

“I guess I figured the whole seeing-ghosts thing would clue you in,” I said. I dragged my heels against the ground, stopping my swing to look at Gwenlyn. She avoided making eye contact with me, instead finding great interest in scratching a bit of rust off the chain of her swing.

“I thought I was crazy,” she finally said.

“I know the feeling.”

“No, you don’t. Not really.”

We fell silent. Gwenlyn wasn’t forthcoming with any further details about her life, and I really wasn’t all that dedicated to removing the chip from her shoulder. Teenagers would be teenagers. They always thought they had it harder than everyone else. It was the “anywhere but here” feeling. I knew it well. Hell, I had only just abandoned my own wanderlust the previous fall. Gwenlyn could have her angst. I’d learned that human beings grew through things, not out of them.

The stars started to glimmer as the last of the sun disappeared beneath the tree line. The air had cooled off with its absence, and as a breeze drifted through the backyard, Gwenlyn shivered in my holey T-shirt.

“You should head inside,” I said, pushing myself up from the swing. “I’m sure my mother has dinner waiting for you.”

Surprisingly, she didn’t argue. She simply hopped down from her unmoving swing and set off toward the house. I walked in the opposite direction, toward the woods, before turning around once more.

“Gwenlyn?”

“Yeah.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

I considered that for a second, remembering my own feelings of isolation and confusion when I was that age, and said, “Everything sucks at sixteen. Push through it.”

She straightened, raised her hand to her head in a mock salute, then executed an abrupt about-face and goose-stepped back to the house. I shook my head, laughing, and headed home.

The next day, as per usual, I met my sisters at the swing set for what seemed to be evolving into a regular morning meeting. A light drizzle coated my skin with misty raindrops and settled on the grass in shiny jewels of dew.

“You didn’t come by last night,” Karma accused. She and Laurel were busy weaving flower wreaths with the daisies that grew around the swing set. Laurel stood, placed a finished daisy crown on my head, and smiled at her handiwork.

“Sorry,” I said, squinting into the pale sun that peeked through the gauzy clouds. “Mom distracted me. Have you guys met Gwenlyn yet?”

“Yes,” Laurel said. She sat down again in the grass beyond the mulch, kneading a pinecone between her palms as if contemplating ways to incorporate the cone in her artwork.

“What do you think of her?” I asked. The stem of a daisy poked at my scalp, so I adjusted the crown until it sat comfortably.

“She reminds me of you when you were her age,” Malia said.

“Well, she was wearing my T-shirt.”

“It’s not the T-shirt,” said Malia with a light chuckle. “She’s all sharp edges and attitude.”

I took that with a grain of salt. In my opinion, the only thing Gwenlyn and I had in common was the whole sixth-sense thing. Just because I had also been a moody teenager didn’t mean that we were kindred spirits.

“What happened at the station yesterday?” Karma asked.

“I have a client who thinks her dead husband is still abusing her,” I said. Talking about it made me eager to head in to work. I needed to get started on debunking Teagan’s theory. The longer I waited, the longer the matter went unattended, and the idea of ghosts with hands festered in my head.

“Are you buying that?” Laurel asked, handing me a partially completed wreath.

“I wasn’t at first,” I admitted, accepting the wreath and clumsily attempting to continue weaving another flower into its steady pattern. “But I have this weird feeling about it.”

“What kind of weird feeling?”

“I can’t explain it,” I said. Laurel confiscated the wreath from me, frowning at the messy knots I’d tied into it. “I know something is strange about this case, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

Malia ruffled my hair. “You’ll figure it out. Besides, you have us. If you need anything, let us know.”

“I might take you up on that,” I said, combing my fingers through my hair to combat Malia’s windy touch. “I’m going to take a look around my client’s house again today, or what’s left of it anyway. It burned down. Maybe I’ll pick up something I missed the last time I was there.”

“Good luck,” said Laurel. A passing butterfly landed in her hair, pulsing its periwinkle wings like a living barrette.

“Thanks. I’ll see you all later.”

They chorused a farewell as I headed into town. There was no time for donuts or jokes today. As soon as I got to the station, I headed straight for my office. It was hilarious, really, that I even had an office, rather than a desk and a cubicle like all of the other officers. When I had been hired at the force, I had essentially replaced the town’s previous detective, who was a complete asshat, so I didn’t feel too terrible about throwing all of his shit into a box and leaving it out on the curb for the weekly trash truck to collect. Now my new office was rather barren. I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for personalizing a detective’s desk, so I’d settled for a tiny potted succulent, an antique globe, and as a joke, a large, ornate magnifying glass that I’d picked up at a thrift store.

“Summers!”

I backtracked, peeking into the adjacent office.

“You bellowed?” I said to Chief Torres. He beckoned me inside.

“Shut the door.”

I did so then sank into one of the leather chairs opposite Torres’s desk. “Are you firing me?” I joked. “Because you should probably reconsider. I mean, who else is going to help you keep all these creepy deaths and rebellious ghost stories under the radar?”

Torres rested his meaty hands on the wide expanse of his stomach. His chair strained and popped as he reclined. “I’ve got some good news for you, Summers.”

“I’m getting a pay raise?”

“You wish. No, I’ve hired another detective.”

For a second, I only stared at him, wondering if he was joking. As far as I knew, Yew Hollow had only ever had one detective in its small police force. Clearly, though, Torres wasn’t kidding.

“You what?”

“Now, don’t go and get yourself all worked up,” he said. He began to straighten a stack of business cards on his desk, as if to avoid making direct eye contact with me. “We got lucky with this guy. He practically fell into my lap. He comes highly recommended, and he’s not afraid of the Hollow’s quirks. You give him a chance, you hear me?”

“But I’m Yew Hollow’s detective.”

“You’re the paranormal detective,” Torres corrected, now very concerned with the dust between the keys of his computer keyboard. He blew at what appeared to be a donut crumb. “But let’s face it, Summers. You don’t have a whole lot of experience when it comes to actual detective work. You aren’t even a real cop.”

“Then teach me how to be a real cop,” I urged. “I’ll do whatever you need me to. You want me to get certified? To complete a training course? Come on, Torres. Cut me some slack.”

“I don’t have time to teach you,” said Torres wearily. “That’s why I hired this guy. You’ll work together on the Riley case. The faster we get this mess cleaned up, the better. Afterward, if you still want official training, we can have it arranged.”

I slumped down in the chair, crossing my arms like a petulant child in the principal’s office. “I can’t believe you don’t think I can do this on my own.”

“Summers, I have complete confidence in you.”

“Then why’d you hire someone else?” I demanded.

“Look, just meet the guy before you bite my head off, okay?”

“Where is he?”

Torres checked his watch, which looked as though it was cutting off the circulation in his sausage of a wrist. “He should be here any minute.”

“So he’s late? Great way to make a solid first impression.”

“Summers…”

“I know, I know. Don’t bite your head off.”

“I appreciate it,” Torres said, his shoulders sagging in relief at my reluctant cooperation. “By the way, I should warn you. Detective Dobbes doesn’t know about your, uh, speciality.”

“I thought you said he knew about Yew Hollow’s quirks.”

“The town’s, yes. Your quirks, on the other hand, I left for you to explain.” He leaned over his beefy arm, staring me down from across the desk. “Listen here, Summers. You better go easy on him. I don’t think he’s quite convinced that our town’s a little different from the beats he’s worked before.”

I pushed myself out of the chair and, taking a leaf out of Gwenlyn’s book, gave Chief Torres a little fake salute. “Don’t worry, Chief. I’ll break it to him gently.”

“Get rid of that evil grin before you do, Summers.”

“Yes, sir.”

I left his office, hoping to hide away in my own before the new detective showed up. Maybe, if I got lucky, I could avoid him long enough to prove that I could work the Riley case on my own. Yew Hollow didn’t need another detective, and I was determined to eliminate the competition before Chief Torres got any other ideas.

But when I swung through the door of my office, I found that someone was already sitting in my rolling chair, his feet propped up on my desk near the potted succulent. He was tall, lean, and offensively good-looking, and had a royal-purple aura that would have romanced even the most misandrist of witches. His jawline was so square and his hair so coiffed, he could have been a comic book superhero. Like me, he didn’t seem to adhere to the standard detective dress code. He wore a pair of fitted jeans, a white Oxford shirt, and a skinny black tie. When he looked up to see who was in the doorway, I couldn’t help but notice his eyes. They were the clearest blue I’d ever seen, but that didn’t stop me from marching in, shoving his feet off my desk, and demanding:

“Who the hell are you?”

I already knew, of course, and I didn’t care if it seemed as though I was pissing on my territory. This guy sure as hell didn’t belong behind my desk. Despite this, I still felt a twinge of professional jealousy as he stood—and my goodness, was he tall—reached out a large, calloused hand and said, “Detective Dominic Dobbes. You must be Morgan.”

4

In Which Ghosts Have Hands

“It’s Detective Summers,” I said shortly, though no one had ever addressed me as Detective Summers in my entire time at the force. For a moment, I considered not shaking his hand, but I was trying to prove to Chief Torres that I was a professional. I grudgingly placed my hand in his, which he squeezed tightly. That was a good sign. I hated when men gave women a dainty little handshake, as if we weren’t solid enough to withstand the strength of their fingers.

He dipped his head in apology. “Detective Summers. It’s really nice to meet you. I’m looking forward to working on this case with you. It definitely seems… interesting.”

“Uh-huh. Listen, how much did Chief Torres tell you, Detective Dobbes?” I asked. My office seemed to have shrunk in size to accommodate Dobbes’s ridiculous height. I waved him into the spare chair opposite my desk, eager for him to reduce his presence in the room. As we switched places and sat down across from each other, Dobbes spoke in a languid voice tinged with the tiniest hint of a Brooklyn accent.

“You can call me Dominic,” he said. “Chief Torres filled me in on a few things. I have to admit that I’m a little confused.”

“That’s the general reaction,” I said, moving the succulent back into place from where Dobbes’s foot had shifted it. “Yew Hollow is pretty unusual.”

“I hear you have a ghost problem?”

There was no hint of laughter in his voice, which was impressive. Most people were skeptical of Yew Hollow’s paranormal history, and when you mixed police work with things that weren’t supposed to exist, the lines got a little blurred.

“Yes, we’ve been dealing with a number of deaths lately, all of which are somehow involved with witchcraft,” I said, watching his face for a reaction.

“Witchcraft.”

“Yes, witchcraft,” I repeated. “I thought you said that Chief Torres filled you in.”

“Sorry, I’m still wondering if this is all just a funny prank that you guys play on the new guy,” Dobbes said, leaning forward in his chair and resting his elbows on his knees.

“Brace yourself, because Chief Torres left out a couple of things.”

“Such as?”

I looked him up and down, wondering how best to deliver my next piece of news. To his credit, he maintained steady eye contact with a confidence that I couldn’t help but admire. Then again, when you looked like an underwear model, confidence wasn’t something you needed to bolster.

“I’m Yew Hollow’s paranormal detective,” I said. “I’m a psychic medium, so it’s my job to deal with the cases that go over the other officers’ heads.”

It was clear that Detective Dobbes was not expecting this. He hid it well, though. His blue eyes narrowed only slightly before he asked, “A psychic medium?”

“Yeah, yeah. ‘I see dead people’ and all that.”

“How does that—?”

I heaved a sigh. Obviously, Torres had not done a bang-up job of explaining Yew Hollow’s inner workings. “Look, all you need to know is that my family, the Summerses, are a coven of witches. I’m a witch too. I can see ghosts, which may or may not be relevant to the case that you and I have been assigned to.”

“Teagan Riley.”

“Yes,” I said, relieved that he’d finally caught on to the fact that he was going to have to accept my odd occupation in order to work on the case. “She was attacked at home. She says her husband did it, but he committed suicide two weeks ago. We have to figure out if she’s being haunted or not.”

He ran a hand through his hair, which stood up for a moment before settling back into its original position. “And how exactly am I supposed to help with that? I don’t know anything about ghosts. Or witches, for that matter.”

“Since my expertise is focused on the paranormal aspect of things, I’ll handle that. What I need from you is to back me up with the actual detective work.” I extracted Teagan’s file from my desk drawer and handed it to Dobbes. As he shuffled through it, his brow furrowed in concentration, I explained, “Ghosts aren’t able to physically interact with mortals. In any case, I haven’t seen Teagan’s husband hanging around, so I can’t help but wonder if she’s using the ghost story as a cover for something else.”

“Like what?”

I shrugged. I only had theories, not facts. “Teagan says her husband was abusive. Maybe there’s more to his suicide than we originally thought.”

“Do you think she orchestrated his death?”

“She doesn’t seem capable of murder, but I have a feeling that she isn’t telling us the whole story,” I said, thinking back to my meeting with Teagan. Though obviously upset about her home-life situation, I couldn’t see her taking it out on her husband. Not to mention, Teagan was a rather small woman. It was unlikely that she could have overpowered Ronan. From the pictures I’d seen of him, he was too bulky of a man for Teagan to take out on her own.

Dobbes flipped through the photos of Teagan’s house, destroyed by the fire. He held one up and asked, “What happened here?”

“The house burned down the same night Teagan was attacked,” I explained, clicking through an electronic version of Teagan’s file on my computer screen to see if there was any other essential information I had neglected to inform Dobbes of. “Again, she says that Ronan was responsible for it. I want to visit the property today, just to see if we missed anything the first time around. Witchcraft leaves traces, and ghosts tend to linger in the areas they frequented while they were still alive. If Ronan’s out there, I should be able to find him.”

Dominic gave me a quizzical look. “If you don’t mind me asking, what exactly is the process for that?”

There was no describing what it felt like to interact with a ghost. It was instinctive for mediums, like breathing or blinking. Spirits were drawn to our witchcraft, usually because their souls were desperate to pass over. As a medium, it fell to me to help them do so. Unfortunately, some ghosts denied themselves the opportunity to move on to the next life, out of fear or anger or some other unfinished business. Those spirits were always tricky to handle, and I’d experienced my fair share of frustration over their reluctance to pass over.

“It’s not so much a process,” I began, searching for a way to explain my abilities in layman’s terms. “It’s more of a feeling. Vibes, almost. I’ve spent my whole life locating and interacting with the dead. They know when I’m around and vice versa. Does that make any sense?”

“Not really.”

I made a face. “I don’t know how else to explain it. Do you want to go out to the Riley property with me or not?”

“Absolutely,” Dobbes said. Though he didn’t understand it, he seemed to have accepted the eccentricity of my employment. “I’d also like to speak with Teagan today if we can manage that.”

“It shouldn’t be an issue. I’ll ask Torres to arrange it for when we get back. You ready?”

He glanced up from the file. “Right now?”

“Yup.”

I may have been throwing Dobbes into the deep end, but if Torres thought that he was the right man to help me with this case, Dobbes needed to get used to the idea of rooting around in the afterlife. To his credit, he made no objections. Dobbes closed the file, tucked it under his arm, and stood. Then he pulled the office door open and gestured me through it.

I dropped by Chief Torres’s office, knocking on the doorframe to announce myself. “Chief? Dobbes and I are heading out to the Riley property.”

Chief Torres glanced up from his computer monitor. He seemed taken aback to see me standing amiably next to Dobbes, as though he’d expected to break up a fistfight between us instead. “All right, then.”

“Could you have someone call Teagan and set up a meeting with her after lunch?” I asked, tapping my fingers impatiently against the doorframe. “Detective Dobbes wants a one-on-one.”

“Will do.”

I turned swiftly, beckoning Dobbes to follow me.

He looked down at me from his great height. “I was serious before. You can call me Dominic.”

“Fine. Tell me, Dominic,” I said as we made our way through the station, “have you ever been to a haunted house?”

Since I didn’t have a car and wouldn’t be caught dead in a police cruiser, Dominic drove us out to the Riley property, his sleek black SUV making the trip in a fairly short amount of time. As we drove, I experimented with the various buttons on the passenger’s side, nearly singeing my ass off when I accidentally turned on the seat heater. As Dominic tried not to laugh, I recovered my dignity, turning on the air conditioning to soothe my burning skin. We drove past the last neighborhood of Yew Hollow. The houses out here were spaced farther apart, and soon there were miles between each one. As Dominic’s SUV wound its way through dirt roads carved into fields of dandelions, Dominic filled me in on his life story. Honestly, I wouldn’t have cared too much about his background had his voice been less velvety, but as it was, his subtle Brooklyn accent drew me in, and I couldn’t help but engage Dominic in further conversation.

“I was born in Brooklyn,” he explained when I asked about his accent. “I relocated to the Washington, DC, area when I was about thirteen. Eventually, the accent faded a bit.”

“Why did you move to DC?”

His hand tightened ever so slightly on the steering wheel. “I’d been living with my mother and sister in Brooklyn. When they passed away in a car crash, I had to move in with my dad’s parents in DC.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t mention it.”

It made him more human, somehow, to know that he had dealt with such a horrible tragedy so early in life. I socialized with a lot of people who had dark backstories. It was a side effect of being a medium. When death was always the first thing on your mind, mortals who had personal brushes with the grim reaper found you comforting.

“There,” I said, pointing through the windshield at the heap of destruction that was all that remained of Teagan’s house. Dominic parked the car along the curb. As I unbuckled my seatbelt, he stepped out, walked to the other side of the car, and opened the door for me.

“I’m capable of opening a door, believe it or not,” I said, unfolding myself from the SUV. Dominic’s car was so large that I had to hop down to the dusty dirt road of Teagan’s street.

“Sorry,” he said, but he kept his hands at the ready just in case the height of the SUV presented another challenge for me. As if to prove my point, I heaved the door closed on my own.

I planted my hands on my hips, taking in the charred leftovers of Teagan’s house. The main reason for my visit was to see if I had missed any traces of witchcraft. If Ronan’s suicide was linked to the other mysterious deaths in Yew Hollow, it would at least give me something to work with. A glimpse of Ronan’s ghost wouldn’t hurt either. Neither craft nor spirit presented itself to me right away, but that didn’t mean our visit was a bust. I started toward the rubble, wanting a closer look.

“I’m not sure if that’s a good idea,” Dominic said, but he followed me anyway. He cleared a particularly large piece of debris, part of a counter or a cabinet, from my path, his eyes sharp for other potential hazards.

I picked my way through what was left of the kitchen, steering clear of the remaining parts of the roof. The scorched supports didn’t look capable of holding much weight. The only evidence left of Teagan’s struggle was the blackened oven and several shards of glass covered in dried blood. There were no signs of witchcraft, no ritual remains, no leftover auras. The house was as normal as a house could be, other than its unexpected demise.

“Smells like gas,” Dominic said as he inspected the oven.

Sure enough, the smell of gasoline was too strong to ignore. I was correct in assuming that someone had doused the house with an accelerant. There was no way one forgotten oven had the power to burn down the entire structure, rather than just the kitchen. It meant that Teagan was right about one thing. Someone was definitely trying to kill her, or at the very least, drive her out of Yew Hollow.

“There’s nothing here for me,” I said, kicking aside a pile of debris. “See anything?”

Dominic shook his head.

“Let’s head out to the woods where we found the body,” I suggested. “Maybe we missed something the first time.”

As I stepped over the outer wall of the foundation, my foot got tangled up in the mangled remains of red brick. I tripped, reaching my arms out to catch my fall, but Dominic appeared out of nowhere. He caught my forearms, and I bounced gently off his chest rather than hitting the ground and eating a lot of dirt. Blushing furiously, I righted myself and pushed him off. Maybe chivalry wasn’t dead after all, but I didn’t need Dominic to think that I was incapable of taking care of myself.

“Thanks. Damn house.”

“Maybe it was a ghost,” he said, a smile playing at the corners of his lips.

“Not funny.”

Together, we abandoned the house, heading out to the trees in the backyard. I led Dominic toward the spot where we’d found the body. It wasn’t far from the house, just a quarter mile or so, where the foliage thickened and the sky was barely visible through the impenetrable leaves of the trees. There was nothing left of the incident other than a forgotten string of crime-scene tape. I tore it down from the trees, balling it up in my hand.

“We found him here,” I said, pointing to the space beneath a large oak tree, “with a handmade noose around his neck. We think he hung himself from that branch.”

I pointed upward, to a thick, sturdy branch protruding from the oak tree. Dominic stared up at it then did a circuit around the tree. He studied the tree and the ground around it, his eyebrows drawn together in concentration. I, on the other hand, focused on what wasn’t visible.

Witchcraft was fickle. It presented itself in ways that mortals weren’t familiar with, a strange metallic scent on your tongue or just a feeling, like the tickle of a spider’s web across the hair on your arms. I shivered. Only the leftover musk of death found its way to my senses. There was no indication that Ronan’s spirit had lingered, or if he was still around, he certainly wasn’t making his presence known to me.

“It’s no use,” Dominic said, kneeling down to get a closer look at the space beneath the oak tree. “There’s nothing left here. Footsteps would’ve been washed away, and I assume your officers picked apart the rest of the crime scene already. This was a waste of time.”

I nodded in agreement. It was frustrating but true. We needed to work with what we had, and the crime scene wasn’t giving up any new secrets.

Then, from deeper in the woods, a branch snapped. Dominic and I both whipped around to face the noise. My heart pounded in my throat. These woods were unsettling enough without the addition of bodiless sounds.

“Probably just an animal,” Dominic said in a whisper.

“Then why are you whispering?” I whispered back.

He shrugged then stepped forward toward the source of the noise. I grabbed his arm, halting him in his tracks. I felt the pulse at his wrist beat steadily beneath my fingers. Unlike my own nervous heartbeat, his was strong and slow.

“What are you doing?” I hissed.

“I’m going to go see what it was.”

I shook my head, my grip tightening on his arm. “Don’t. If Teagan’s right and her husband is terrorizing the town, I won’t be responsible for the new guy getting offed. Chief Torres already thinks he’s taking a risk on me. We should just go.”

“Morgan, do you want to solve this case or not?”

He had a point. Besides, with his impressive physique and resounding voice, he could scare off a number of creatures that made their home in the woods. Ghosts, however, were a different story. You couldn’t scare what was already dead.

Despite my protests, he gently removed my hand from his arm and trekked deeper into the forest. Reluctantly, I followed along behind him. The rational part of me knew that whatever had made the noise probably wasn’t a huge threat to us—it could’ve been a particularly fat raccoon—but the whole Riley property gave me the chills. If something sinister lingered in the woods, I really didn’t want to know what it was.

Suddenly, Dominic kneeled in the dirt.

“Check this out.”

I hesitantly leaned over his shoulder, trying to see what he was looking at. Something shiny glinted in the dirt, and as Dominic prodded a few leaves aside, I saw what it was.

A wedding ring.

“It has to be Teagan’s,” I said as Dominic parked the car in front of the station. Once again, he insisted on opening and closing my door for me. I’d given up trying to stop him, wondering how he’d grown up in Brooklyn with such good manners. I had also spent time in New York, and the city had relieved me of all faith in humanity, as nearly everyone there had been the epitome of rude. But Yew Hollow was all small-town charm, and Detective Dominic Dobbes fit right in.

We’d captured the ring in a clear evidence bag. It was too small to be a man’s ring, and now that I thought about it, I didn’t remember seeing a wedding band on Teagan’s left hand. The real question was how it had ended up in the woods behind Teagan’s house. As soon as we entered the station, I corralled Chief Torres in his office.

“Chief!”

He nearly jumped out of his office chair. The wireless mouse of his desktop computer crashed to the floor, splintering into several pieces. “Jesus, Summers. Give me a heart attack, why don’t you?”

“Is Teagan here?” I asked.

“Interrogation room. Did you find anything?”

I held up the evidence bag. The wedding band, despite its layer of dirt, shimmered beneath the fluorescent lights.

“Is that hers?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” I said, pocketing the bag.

“We’ll try to lift some prints off of it after we speak to Teagan,” Dominic added, nodding respectfully to Chief Torres. “Maybe it’ll give us some insight as to who else was in those woods on the night of Ronan’s death.”

Chief Torres’s desk phone rang, so he gave us the thumbs up as he picked up the receiver. I tapped Dominic on the back, indicating that we should leave Torres to his business. Together, Dominic and I pushed open the door to the interrogation room.

Teagan looked no better than she had the day before. The nasty cut on her forehead was starting to scab beneath its stitches, and the accompanying bruise had darkened to a deep purple, trailing down along her temple. She looked dead tired, as though she’d been up all night worrying about Ronan’s next attempt on her life instead of sleeping.

“How are you, Teagan?” I asked, sitting down across from her. Dominic leaned against the wall.

“I’m exceptional,” she deadpanned. She jerked her head in Dominic’s direction and asked, “Who’s he?”

“This is my, uh, partner, I guess,” I said. “Detective Dobbes, meet Teagan Riley. Detective Dobbes is helping me out with your case, Teagan.”

Dobbes inclined his head politely. “It’s nice to meet you, Teagan. Hopefully Detective Summers and I can shed some light on your situation.”

“I hope so too,” Teagan said, looking Dominic up and down. It took me a few seconds to realize that she was admiring Dominic’s stylish stature. I twitched, suddenly aware of my strange desire to kick Teagan under the table. Instead, I clicked my fingers at her, recapturing her wandering attention. Her eyes snapped back to me.

“We took a ride out to your house earlier today to see if we could pick up any other details at the scene,” I said to her. Without ceremony, I extracted the evidence bag from my pocket and tossed it onto the table in front of Teagan. “Does that look familiar?”

Her eyes widened as she leaned forward to grab the bag, inspecting the ring through the clear plastic. “My wedding ring! Where was it?”

“In the woods behind your house. Any reason you can think of as to how it ended up there?”

Teagan shook her head vigorously. “I took it off the night of his funeral. When I went to bed, I took it off and put it in the drawer of the bedside table. I figured it got lost in the fire.”

“Hard to believe it somehow walked out to the woods, then,” I said, unable to keep the sharp edge out of my voice.

Teagan’s eyes narrowed. “I told you. I told you it was him. How else would it have ended up back there?”

Dominic stepped away from the wall and approached Teagan. Despite his intimidating height, he seemed to radiate a sense of calm, a useful talent that I had never fully grasped the concept of.

“Ms. Riley,” he began, the Brooklyn accent intensifying as he put on his good-cop persona. “Is there any reason why you might’ve gone into the woods behind the house following your husband’s death?”

“No,” she said shortly. “The nightmares are enough. I don’t ever need to go back to that place again.”

“Nightmares?”

“Yes, I have dreams about Ronan. I had one the night he attacked me.”

“Allegedly attacked you,” Dominic corrected. He rested one hand on the table, leaning next to Teagan. “We don’t know that the culprit is your husband’s ghost. Did you know that someone covered your house in gasoline before they burned it down?”

“No.”

“Did you hear anything outside? Or notice anything odd, such as a strange smell or anything like that?”

“Everything was odd,” Teagan responded. She fiddled with a bandage wrapped around the palm of her hand, and I caught a glimpse of the long, jagged gash beneath it. “He wrote on the mirror in my own blood. Things moved on their own. The door wouldn’t open when I tried to leave the house. It locks from the inside, Detective Dobbes. How would you explain that?”

“What did he write on the mirror?”

“Until death do us part. Ironic, isn’t it?”

Dominic made eye contact with me, as if asking what I thought about this information. I’d already known about the message on the mirror. It was in Teagan’s report from the night she had been attacked. The problem was that there was no proof of paranormal activity in Teagan’s house. We had Teagan’s word and no witnesses, and it was this fact that raised eyebrows at the force. Dominic had caught on. I could tell that he was asking himself the same question that I had. Was Teagan telling the truth?

“Detective Summers, can I speak with you outside?” Dominic asked. I nodded, the legs of my chair scraping against the floor as I pushed myself away from the table and stood. Dominic held the door open for me and said to Teagan, “We’ll be right back.”

Outside the interrogation room, I squinted through the blinds to keep an eye on Teagan. She didn’t shy away from staring right back at me.

“It’s weird, right?” I said to Dominic.

He nodded, running a hand through his hair. He did that often, as if it cleared his mind. “It sure is. She’s either delusional, hallucinating, or a really good liar.”

“Or all three,” I said. “I suggested PTSD the first time I spoke to her.”

“What’d she say?”

“Not much of anything. It’s a possibility, right?”

Dominic peered through the blinds. Teagan had folded forward, resting her head on her hands, looking very much as if she’d fallen asleep. “Has she seen a psychiatrist? Is she taking any medications?” he asked.

“She sought therapy after Ronan died,” I said. After my meeting with Teagan yesterday, I’d spent the evening studying her case file, trying to glean whatever information I could from its contents. “No medication that I know of, though.”

“She seems lucid enough,” Dominic said, still observing Teagan through the window.

“Fool me once,” I muttered. Teagan could appear to be lucid all she wanted, but there was still no proof to her story.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move in the interrogation room. I peeked through the blinds, at first only aware of Teagan dozing on the table. Then, when I realized what the true trouble was, I panicked.

Ronan Riley had finally appeared—I recognized his hulking figure from the photos in Teagan’s file—and he was in the process of trying to tip over the large filing cabinet in the interrogation room onto Teagan’s head.

I ripped open the door to the room, shouting, “Teagan, move!”

As the filing cabinet swayed, Dominic sprinted past me and threw himself at Teagan. In one swift movement, he swept Teagan up in his arms and darted to the opposite side of the room. The filing cabinet ricocheted off the desk and onto the floor with an earsplitting bang. The drawers of the cabinet fell open, strewing papers and folders throughout the interrogation room.

“Get her out of here,” I ordered Dominic. Ronan looked pissed, and I didn’t want him to get any other ideas. I spread my arms wide, forming a barrier between Ronan and Teagan. Dominic shouldered the door open, carrying Teagan from the room.

The ruckus had drawn attention. Chief Torres and several other officers gathered at the door to the room, fighting to peek inside. It wasn’t much of a show for them; all they were able to see was Yew Hollow’s paranormal detective talking to what appeared to be thin air.

“What do you want, Ronan?” I asked, trying to keep the ghost’s attention so that he wouldn’t go after Teagan a second time. He glanced over my head as if trying to gauge where Dominic was taking his wife.

Ronan had been a beefy guy with short, dark hair cropped close to his head. He was stocky, built well from head to toe, and hardly taller than me, but his width made up for it. I knew that he was an elementary school gym teacher, but I wasn’t expecting the bulk of the man in front of me. He looked more like a prizefighter than a gym teacher. His square jaw and deep-set eyes were far too intimidating, and it didn’t seem likely that he was capable of interacting with any child who still thought monsters lived under beds. In any case, Ronan seemed surprised that I was staring right at him, so I assumed he wasn’t aware of my particular gift.

“You can see me?” he thundered, confirming my hunch.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I’m a witch. A psychic medium.”

“You’re one of those Summers girls.”

“Yes, I am,” I said, relieved that Ronan seemed more interested in my ability to communicate with him than his mission to kill his wife. My gut twisted with a sad realization. Teagan had been telling the truth, and all I had done was attempt to explain away Teagan’s strange story. How could I have been so closed-minded? This was Yew Hollow, after all, where the paranormal conducted every concert. I just wasn’t used to giving up my director’s baton and podium to a ghost.

“Summers?” Torres said from the doorway. “What’s going on?”

“Teagan wasn’t lying,” I said, keeping a sharp eye on Ronan. He paced from one end of the interrogation room to the other. “He’s here.”

“Ronan Riley?” Torres asked. At the mention of his name, Ronan’s beady eyes homed in on Chief Torres. “He really burned down the house?”

“Did you burn down your house?” I asked Ronan. “Did you try to kill your wife?”

Ronan stopped pacing and faced me. His whole body seemed to bunch up, the muscles in his shoulders evident beneath his Yew Hollow Elementary School T-shirt.

“Yeah, I lit the whole damn place up.”

My stomach clenched. With Ronan’s confession came the confirmation of what I had hoped wasn’t true. Ronan, for whatever reason, could hurt Teagan. He had all the qualities of a normal ghost—he had materialized in the interrogation room out of nowhere, his body was slightly translucent, he walked through the filing cabinet with every pass across the room—but somehow, he had managed to hone his strength and focus it on manipulating the physical world. He wanted to kill his wife, for whatever reason, and I had absolutely no idea how to stop him.

“It was him,” I told Torres.

In an incredulous voice, Torres only responded with an emphatic, “Shit.”

“Ronan,” I said in a soft voice, trying not to rile him up any further. “Why are you trying to kill your wife?”

He planted one foot on the filing cabinet and looked me straight in the eye.

“Because that bitch murdered me.”

5

In Which I’m Reluctantly Wooed

“Excuse me?”

I stood in shock for a moment, waiting for some kind of further explanation from Ronan. I’d considered the possibility of Teagan’s involvement with Ronan’s death but dismissed it on the account of Teagan’s instability. It seemed more likely that she was simply suffering from the aftermath of a tragedy. If it was all an act, it sure was a good one.

“She. Murdered. Me.” Ronan enunciated each word as if to drill them into my brain. “She waited until I fell asleep and then dragged me out to the woods and strangled me.”

I rolled my eyes. Already, Ronan’s story sounded fabricated. “How on earth would she be able to do that?” I asked Ronan. “Teagan’s a toothpick, and you must weigh at least two hundred pounds. Besides, don’t you think you probably would’ve woken up during the whole dragging process?”

He kicked the filing cabinet so hard that it rotated and fell to its other side. “I don’t know! She must have drugged me first! You’re the cop. You figure it out.”

“It’d be a whole lot easier if you weren’t continuously trying to kill your wife!” I argued, wondering how I had ended up in a conversation about ethics with a dead guy. “What was your plan there, Ronan? To terrify her to death?”

“It seemed only fair.”

“Fair?” I burst out, incredulous. Dominic had reappeared in the doorway, having pushed his way through the crowd of officers outside the interrogation room. “Revenge isn’t fair. It’s barbaric. And from what I hear, you beat the crap out of Teagan while she was still alive. Why the hell should I believe that she killed you?”

“Because it’s true,” Ronan said with a nonchalant shrug of his massive shoulders. “I never hurt her. She was accident prone and bruised easily, but I guess she needed a convincing reason to trick the police into thinking she was innocent.”

Something in Ronan’s casual tone of voice made me doubt his side of the story. At this point, though, I wasn’t sure whom to believe. We only had Teagan’s word against Ronan’s, and I didn’t know either of them well enough to formulate a theory about the case.

“Look, Ronan, I understand why you’re upset,” I began, waving Dominic off as he crept up behind me.

“You don’t understand anything,” the ghost said. His eyes tracked Dominic’s every movement.

“Morgan, we should get you out of here,” Dominic muttered in my ear. “There’s nothing stopping him from injuring you next. We should figure out a way to detain him and regroup.”

“Listen to your boyfriend, Summers,” Ronan said with a cold laugh. “Mind your own business, and you won’t get hurt. Good luck with my detainment, though. I doubt there’s a pair of handcuffs that would work on me.”

“Teagan is my business,” I declared. I pushed Dominic toward the door, hoping he would get the hint. I had the advantage of being able to see Ronan should he make a move, but Dominic was basically blind in this situation. If anything, I was the least likely out of everyone to get injured in this situation.

Ronan hurdled the table to stand inches from my face. I took a step back, bumping into Dominic, who held his ground. With my back against Dominic’s chest and Ronan’s face so close to my own, I felt a claustrophobic surge of panic. Dominic’s hands settled on my shoulders, as if he planned to pick me up, just as he had with Teagan, and evacuate me from the room as soon as the situation called for it.

“Teagan’s my wife, not yours,” Ronan said. He jabbed a finger into my chest, hard enough to leave a bruise, as if to prove that he could touch me as well. The contact sent a jolt of fear and anger through me, and I shook Dominic off to confront Ronan.

“Until death do you part,” I said back, refusing to let my expression betray the tumble of emotions inside me. I balled my hands into fists to keep them from trembling. “I hate to break it to you, Ronan, but you’re dead. You’re parted. Get over it, and move on.”

In a flash, Ronan swept one muscled arm across the surface of the interrogation table, sending the spot lamp crashing to the floor. As the light bulb shattered against the upset file cabinet, Ronan disappeared. Behind me, the officers broke out in babbling conversation. Most of them had never seen a ghost in action before. I wondered how strange it must be to watch file cabinets overturn themselves and light bulbs explode for no reason. Even more, I wondered how demented I had appeared to my coworkers whilst furiously arguing with someone invisible to them. I turned to Dominic, who had remained stalwart and steady throughout the incident despite his inability to predict Ronan’s next move.

“Where’s Teagan?” I asked him, trying to slow my breathing.

“I took her to the holding cell,” Dominic said. “She’s not pleased. What now?”

I thought about it for a second. Teagan’s safety was my first priority, at least until we could figure out if Ronan’s accusation had any merit to it or not.

“I need to call my mother,” I said.

Dominic looked confused. “I’m sorry. What?”

Twenty minutes later, I met my mother and sisters outside Teagan’s room at the inn. Dominic stood at the door with his arms crossed, looking more like a bodyguard than a detective. As my family approached, he watched them warily. They were an eclectic foursome, so I could understand his trepidation, but I was more worried about Ronan’s next attempt on Teagan’s life than what Detective Dobbes thought of my strange family. However, I was a little surprised to see Gwenlyn emerge from behind Laurel’s tall figure. Why my mother had decided to bring her along wasn’t exactly a mystery. She was a medium in need of practice, and I had a rebellious ghost on my hands. Still, I disapproved of putting an unknowing teenager in the path of a vindictive spirit.

“Why did you bring her?” I demanded of my mother. Gwenlyn’s face fell as the words left my mouth. “It’s not you, Gwenlyn,” I added hastily. “But this is dangerous stuff. My mother shouldn’t have involved you.”

“She can handle it,” my mother said, reaching up to pat Gwenlyn’s shoulder. “I thought this could be a learning experience.”

“Mom, this isn’t some kind of elementary school field trip,” I said in a low voice, trying hard to not offend Gwenlyn. “This guy is not joking around. He wants to kill Teagan, and he won’t let anyone stop him.”

Gwenlyn stepped in front of Cassandra. “I can handle myself.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “It’s just that—”

Dominic cleared his throat. “Excuse me, ladies, I don’t mean to interrupt,” he said as he leaned over my shoulder. I felt his breath tickle my ear. “But we should probably get started. We wouldn’t want Ronan to get another chance at Teagan before we can pull this off.”

I’d enlisted my mother and sisters to spell Teagan’s room. The Summerses were now experts at protection wards, having had to use them more often since I returned to town the previous autumn. Unfortunately, we couldn’t protect Teagan twenty-four, seven, so she would be under a quasi house arrest until we managed to figure out how to get Ronan to move on.

“And you are?” Cassandra asked Dominic.

“Detective Dominic Dobbes, ma’am.” He shook my mother’s hand with a little bow. “I’m working with Morgan on this case.”

My mother, her hand still in Dominic’s, shifted her gaze toward me, one eyebrow inclined. I could practically see the gears turning in her head. She already thought well of Dominic. It was hard not to, what with his handsome cordiality, but my mother’s approval was the last thing on my mind.

“Dom’s right,” I said, strategically stepping between my mother and Dominic so that she was forced to drop his hand. “We need to do this now.”

I opened the door to Teagan’s room. She sat at the desk, her gaze trained on the television screen. It was playing a series of infomercials, advertising some kind of shoe organizer for the closet, but Teagan’s eyes had glazed over as though she wasn’t really watching. She glanced up as we all filed into her room.

“Teagan, this is Cassandra, Laurel, Malia, Karma, and Gwenlyn,” I said, pointing to each corresponding head in turn. “Everyone, this is Teagan.”

“Nice to meet you all,” Teagan said as she rose from the desk. “Am I in the way?”

I shook my head. “No, it’s a pretty simple spell. It just takes a while to get it set up.”

Cassandra waved a hand, instructing my three sisters to each corner of the room. She passed by Teagan on the way to the fourth corner and took the young woman’s hand in her own.

“I’m so sorry for your loss, dear,” my mother said. Teagan’s breath hitched, and it occurred to me that I had never said anything similar to Teagan. She and her husband may not have been on the best of terms, but she had still lost someone close to her. Apparently, I needed to work on my bedside manner.

As my mother and sisters began setting up the protection ward, I felt the familiar tickle of working witchcraft at the back of my neck. It must’ve translated to the mortals in the room, because Teagan retreated to sit in the kitchenette and Dominic returned to his guard post outside the door. Gwenlyn, however, looked on in earnest interest. My mother sprinkled a black grainy substance around the perimeter of the room.

“What’s she doing?” Gwenlyn asked me.

“It’s black salt,” I said, pulling Gwenlyn away from the wall as my mother continued her path around the room. “A mixture of yew ash and sea salt. It helps set the ward.”

“Oh.”

As soon as the black-salt border was complete, the room fell suddenly quiet, as if it had sealed itself off from the outside world. I couldn’t hear the cars passing by outside anymore, or Dominic’s pacing footsteps beyond the door. It was a good sign. It meant that the protection ward would hold well in Teagan’s room. In tandem, my mother and sisters began to draw symbols in the air. Craft appeared at the end of their fingers, like miniature fireworks, a different color to match each witch’s independent aura. Teagan watched in awe, following the movement of Laurel’s golden craft, which was closest to her.

“Why aren’t you helping?” Gwenlyn asked me. She leaned against the wall, careful not to step in the line of black salt.

“I’m out of practice,” I admitted, watching as Laurel’s craft joined with Karma’s lilac essence. For several years, the only kinds of witchcraft I had used were related to my abilities as a medium. Other than that, I had abandoned the practice of rituals and spells. It occurred to me that I should probably brush up on the other aspects of my magic. It seemed that, more and more often, a comprehensive knowledge of my family’s power would come in handy during my time with Yew Hollow’s police force. “Protection wards aren’t really my thing anyway. I can work wonders with a Ouija board, though.”

“Cassandra told me you conjured a protection ward so big that you saved the entire town last fall,” she said. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that she had turned to face me, rather than observing the magic around her.

“That was a fluke,” I said, crossing my arms. “I channeled that ward through the yew tree. That huge one in the town square? I wouldn’t have been able to do that without the yew tree’s help.”

“How can a tree channel power?”

I shrugged. Explaining how witchcraft worked had never been my forte. I hardly understood it myself. It was far from an exact science. So much of it depended on the witch’s own personality, interpretation of symbols, the objects a witch chose to channel her craft through, and a myriad of other things.

“Nature is one of the strongest powers out there,” I said. “Yew trees especially have a lot of impact on our craft, particularly in this town. They’re said to afford us protection and everlasting life.”

“Do you believe in that?”

“Well, I’ve only been back here for about six months, and I’ve already seen enough death to last me a lifetime,” I said. A whirlwind of purple, blue, and gold craft breezed by my face, sweeping my hair away from my neck. Beside me, Gwenlyn swayed and took a deep breath, as if she could inhale the soothing effects of the protection ward.

With everyone distracted, I glanced over at Teagan. She too seemed enthralled by the magic in the room, watching wide eyed as my family’s craft spread through the room like a spider’s web. I nudged Gwenlyn. An idea had popped into my head.

“Would you be willing to do something for me?” I asked her.

“What kind of something?”

I nodded toward Teagan. “Could you keep an eye on her? I know we’re spelling the room, but if she needs to go out anywhere, would you go with her? You’re the only other medium in town, so you’d be the only person who could warn me if Ronan tries again.”

She pondered the task for a few seconds, tapping her fingers restlessly against the wall behind her. “Yeah, I guess. I thought you said Ronan was dangerous, though?”

“He only attacked Teagan when he thought she was alone,” I said, remembering that Ronan had waited until Dominic and I had left the interrogation room before attempting to upend the filing cabinet. “It would be a good way for you to practice the whole medium thing. Plus, if you’re there, it might stop Ronan from doing something stupid.”

Gwenlyn nodded. “Okay.”

“I appreciate it. Just—be careful, okay? Call me if you see him anywhere at all.”

Another nod. Then Laurel joined us, taking Gwenlyn’s hands and positioning them in the basic stance for a protection ward. A glimmer of forest-green craft appeared at the tips of Gwenlyn’s fingers. As Laurel instructed Gwenlyn on how to add her own power to the ward, I slipped out of Teagan’s room and into the hallway.

“You all right?” Dominic asked, watching as I leaned against the wall and took a deep breath.

“Yeah, just tired. Do you ever feel like you can never catch a break?”

“All the time,” he said. He set a reassuring hand on my shoulder, smiling. “Don’t worry, though. You have backup. How’s it going in there?”

“They’re almost done,” I said. My first instinct was to shake Dominic’s hand from my shoulder, but I held back. Strangely, I found it comforting, as if my stress dissipated through the point of contact. In the short amount of time that I’d known him, Dominic had already proved his worth, from finding the wedding ring to getting Teagan out of harm’s way at the police station. His quick thinking and initiative was admirable. As I looked up at him, he smiled again.

“What would you say to relaxing a little bit tonight?” he asked, giving my shoulder a gentle squeeze before releasing it. “Would you like to have dinner?”

“I don’t know, Dom,” I said. “We should really be working on the case.”

“How about if we talk about the case over dinner?” he proposed. He propped a hand against the wall behind my head, towering over me like a human shield. “It’ll give me a chance to get to know you better. The town, too. You can show me around, if you like.”

It couldn’t hurt to spend a few more hours with Dominic, especially if he wanted to learn more about Yew Hollow. Plus, I had to admit that he was growing on me.

“Around seven?” I asked.

Yet another smile blossomed across his face. “Sounds good. And Morgan?”

“Hm?”

“I like when you call me Dom.”

Later that evening, Dominic showed up at the barn ten minutes early. Thankfully, I’d always been too punctual for my own good. I had already showered and dressed, but when I heard the knock at the barn’s sliding door, my stomach turned over in unexpected anxiety. I hurried down the loft steps to let Dominic in, wondering why my nerves had kicked in all of a sudden. It was a work date, nothing more.

As I pulled open the door, I was glad to see that Dominic had kept it casual. He wore tan tailored shorts and a blue fitted T-shirt that brought out the color of his eyes.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi. You look nice.”

I’d picked out a flowy white top and a pair of light-blue jeans. It seemed fitting for a spring evening in Yew Hollow.

“Thanks. Let me just grab my things.”

I stepped back so that Dominic could come in. As I gathered my keys and a sweater, Dom looked around the loft.

“Great place. Who did the redesign?”

“The coven, actually,” I said. “It’s amazing how fast you can renovate a place when your carpenters are all magicians.”

He shook his head in amused disbelief. “That’s amazing. I wish I had the same perks.”

“Why, do you have an apartment that needs renovating?” I asked then added jokingly, “Feel free to hire the Summers Construction Company.”

“I think the Summerses have quite enough on their hands at the moment,” he said. His eyes twinkled as he smiled. “All set?”

I nodded, letting Dominic usher me through the door. Outside, a large picnic basket rested in the grass, which Dominic shouldered as we headed through the woods toward town.

“What’s in the basket?” I asked, focusing on my feet. The path from my loft was rough and uneven, and I was determined not to trip over any tree roots.

“Dinner,” he said, using his free hand to guide me across the bumpy ground. “I hope you like chicken. You’re not a vegetarian, are you? I forgot to ask.”

“No, I’m a carnivore. You cooked?”

He grinned down at me. “You seem surprised.”

“I am, actually.”

“I figured we could picnic under the yew tree,” he said. “You keep mentioning it, and I haven’t had the chance to check it out yet. That okay with you?”

I decided not to tell him that the space beneath the yew tree held some pretty terrifying memories for me. I hadn’t really been around the tree since the events of last fall. It was time to confront that, and Dom had presented me with the opportunity. I nodded.

Our walk out to the yew tree was rather quiet. Dominic kept most of the conversation going, asking about what it was like to grow up in Yew Hollow and what it was like to be a part of the Summers coven. It was hard to fill him in on my life, considering so much of it had happened outside the Hollow. When we reached the yew tree, he extracted a large blanket from the picnic basket and spread it out beneath the tree.

“Your table, ma’am,” he said. I laughed, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the blanket. The tree shaded us from the sun, its beams stretching horizontally across the town as it moved toward the horizon. As a breeze drifted through, ruffling Dominic’s hair, he began to set up the meal he had made. Then he poured me a glass of white wine.

“Should we toast?” he asked.

I tapped my glass against his. “To solving this damn case.”

Dominic nodded in appreciation and took a sip of his wine.

As we dug into the meal, I found the conversation veering away from the Riley case. Though I knew that we should be focusing on what to do about Teagan and Ronan, it was refreshing to talk about normal things. Dominic had a great sense of humor. As he imitated the gruff voice of his old police chief in Brooklyn during one hilarious anecdote, I nearly forgot that we were there to work on a case. We polished off the wine, getting sillier with every sip.

“So, tell me about this tree,” Dominic said, affectionately patting the trunk of the yew tree as though it were a friendly dog.

The sun had gone down, and the stars had emerged, visible even through the thick branches of the yew tree. Dominic lay back, resting his head on his hands, and stared up at the sky. He patted the blanket beside him, inviting me to join him. I set my wine glass aside and lay down next to him. For the first time in a while, I felt the yew tree’s comforting aura pulse through me, as if encouraging me to trust it again. I gazed up into its branches, watching the breeze play through the leaves.

“It’s Yew Hollow’s central point,” I explained. The sky was clear, and the stars were bright. I reached up, tracing imaginary outlines of the constellations with the tip of my finger. “The town was built around it.”

“I know that already,” Dominic said, taking my raised hand in his and playing with my fingers. “I want to know what the tree means to you. Something tells me that you have a special relationship with it.”

“In a way, I suppose,” I admitted, wondering exactly how much Dominic had heard about the tree in reference to me. “It’s a long story. Would you like the Reader’s Digest version?”

“Sure.”

I sighed, wondering how to best phrase my most recent interaction with the tree. “Last October, one of the townspeople tried to steal my family’s power. The only reason I was able to stop him was because the yew tree supported me. Ever since then, I’ve been a little hesitant to go near it.”

“Why?”

“Because it used me as a vessel,” I said. “I had no control over it. Do you know how terrifying that is?”

“But you saved your family, right?”

“The tree did.”

“Yes, but it dubbed you worthy enough to use the power inside it,” said Dominic matter-of-factly.

I sat up, turning toward him. “You know, mortals are usually more uncomfortable with this toic of conversation.”

He sat up too, propping himself up on the palms of his hands. “I find it interesting. When I first got this assignment, I thought it was a joke, but working with you has gotten the best of me. I’m invested now.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Dominic rested a hand on the yew tree. “Glad to be here.”

When I turned to look at him, he was much closer than I expected. I could see flecks of gold within his blue eyes. He leaned in, kissing me lightly, but I pulled away.

“I barely know you,” I said, my cheeks burning. “Besides, it’s a bad idea. We’re partners.”

He rested his forehead against mine, sighing. “I know, but I like you. I knew it as soon as you shoved my feet off your desk.”

I laughed softly, and he took the opportunity to kiss me again. He wrapped an arm around my waist, dipping me toward the ground. My back grazed against the trunk of the yew tree and, all of a sudden, my vision blacked out.

Dominic had disappeared. In fact, everything had disappeared. The food and wine was gone, as was the picnic blanket. I stood at the base of the yew tree, completely nonplussed. The town was quiet. Even the stars had faded.

Then Ronan Riley appeared, his ghostly pallor glimmering in the dark. He strolled across the town square, his shoulders squared off at a determined angle. As he passed right by me, oblivious to my presence, I realized what was happening. The tree was showing me a vision of what had happened here, of what was still happening.

Ronan pressed a palm against the trunk of the yew tree. At first, nothing seemed to change. Then Ronan’s figure, transparent at first, solidified. He plucked a leaf from one of the yew tree’s low-hanging branches, crushing it in his meaty fist, and let out a satisfied laugh.

The vision vanished as quickly as it had come. I was suddenly back with Dominic, who worriedly shook my shoulders.

“Morgan? Morgan, are you okay?”

I brushed him off, ignoring the look of hurt on his face. There were more important things to address.

“What happened?” I asked him. “Just now. What happened to me?”

“You passed out,” said Dominic, the corners of his lips turned down in a worried expression. “It was only a moment or two, but maybe we should get you checked out—”

“I’m fine,” I interrupted him, standing up and brushing off my hands.

He stood too, knocking over a glass in the process. Wine spilled across the remains of our meal, staining the blanket. “Morgan, what just happened?”

“It’s the tree,” I said. I ran my hand over the spot that Ronan had pressed his hand to, wondering how it was even possible. “The tree is helping Ronan.”

6

In Which My Judgement of Character Is Questioned

In the morning, I met Dominic at Yew Hollow’s local library. I had been too distracted by the tree’s vision to continue our date the night before. Like a gentleman, Dominic had walked me home without argument. Thankfully, he was just as invested in our newly discovered information as I was. We’d discussed the possibilities all the way back to the barn, but I simply had no idea as to why the yew tree would lend power to a ghost. The library had stacks and stacks of old books and newspapers pertaining to the town’s history, including its origin story, so I figured it was the best place to start our research project.

“Do you spend a lot of time here?” Dominic asked as I headed straight toward the back corner of the library, where I knew the majority of texts about Yew Hollow were stored.

“Not much,” I said, peering at the spines of the books on the shelves. “I had a similar need for information last fall, so I’m particularly familiar with this section of the library.”

Dominic pulled a large, dusty book entitled The Role of Death in Eternal Life from one of the shelves and flipped through the first few pages.

“This is the strangest town I’ve ever been to,” he murmured.

“You haven’t seen the half of it.”

We settled in, each of us with a stack of books that might give us any sort of hint into the yew tree’s history. It seemed that Yew Hollow always had something to hide. Every time I thought I knew everything about my hometown, some strange event came along to completely derail it. I absentmindedly paged through a history of Yew Hollow, barely comprehending the words. My mind wandered off, and I wondered if things were ever simple in this town.

“Morgan.”

“Hm?”

“Have you ever seen this before?”

Dominic leaned across the aisle to hand me a leather-bound journal. The covering was worn smooth, and the pages had yellowed. I opened it to discover a name and a date scrawled in calligraphy on the first page: Mary Summers, 1695.

“Where did you find this?” I demanded.

“Wedged behind the books on that bottom shelf,” he said, pointing to the rack directly across from him.

Carefully, I thumbed through the first few pages of the journal.

“It’s her diary,” I said, in awe of the discovery. Pages upon pages of cursive, all from the hand of Mary Summers.

“Who was she?” Dominic asked, resting his chin on my shoulder to get a better look at the journal.

“One of the original witches of Yew Hollow,” I said. “We settled here in 1693. Don’t you know the story?”

“Vaguely,” he admitted with an apologetic smile. “I can’t say I spend a whole lot of time reading up on the history of Yew Hollow. Although, now that I think about it, I probably should. Are you related to her?”

“Yes. We’re descendants of the original Summers coven.”

“Wow,” said Dominic, looking impressed. “Does she mention the yew tree?”

“Give me a minute.”

Respectfully, he withdrew, immersing himself in another book. I slowly leafed through Mary Summers’s diary, still in disbelief over the fact that Dominic had managed to find it. I didn’t know that there were any personal accounts of Yew Hollow’s origin story—my mother surely would’ve been aware of them—but here was a firsthand narrative of my familial history, buried behind a plethora of useless information.

My heart stopped when I flipped to a new page and found a hand-drawn picture of the yew tree, distinguishable by the large gnarled knot on the yew’s trunk, which Mary Summers had captured perfectly in her artwork. That, however, wasn’t the most interesting part of the drawing. Around the tree, Mary Summers had stenciled in five miniature portraits, one of herself and four others. Ann Summers, Elizabeth Summers, Bridget Summers, and Dorothy Summers.

I grazed a fingertip across the faces of the portraits. Mary had captured them well. Our family’s genetics were unmistakable. I saw the shape of my nose in Bridget and the crooked set of my mouth in Dorothy. Malia and Laurel both bore a remarkable resemblance to Elizabeth, and even the inquisitive angle of Ann’s eyes reminded me of Karma. It was almost as if the current Summers coven was a reincarnation of the original one.

The page opposite the drawing was filled top to bottom with cramped, messy cursive. As I began to decipher it, reading through the passage with increasing urgency, my hands began to shake. It turned out that Mary Summers’s diary was the only resource I’d ever needed.

Dominic eyed my trembling hands. “What’s the matter?”

I found it difficult to wrench my gaze away from the information in front of me, so it was with the strange pull of a plug from a drain that I refocused my attention on Dominic.

“They buried themselves,” I said, indicating the passage. “The original witches of Yew Hollow buried themselves beneath the yew tree to strengthen its ability to protect the town.”

“Is that what it says?”

I passed him the journal, pointing to the relevant scribbles. “Right there. They combined their powers to create the ultimate defense mechanism for the town.”

“Okay, but what does that have to do with the situation now?” Dominic asked, his brow furrowed as he inspected the miniature portraits of my long-dead ancestors. “I mean, if they meant to reinforce the tree’s protective powers, why would the tree allow Ronan to wreak havoc in Yew Hollow?”

I considered that for a moment. Dominic had a point. It didn’t make any sense that the yew tree would help Ronan try to kill Teagan. Objects of nature didn’t often support violence, and the tree itself had only ever been used as a means for protection. Besides, the tree hadn’t channeled any power at all until I’d reconnected with it last October. I snapped my fingers in realization.

“That’s it,” I said, startling Dominic out of his reverie. “Last year, when I channeled that ward to save the town? The only reason I could do that was because the tree helped me. It wasn’t my power. It was the original Summers coven’s. The tree had been dormant for years. I must’ve woken it up somehow.”

Dominic looked skeptical. “That still doesn’t explain why it’s been lending power to Ronan if your family’s original goal was to protect Yew Hollow.”

“If there’s one thing I know about witchcraft, it’s that it’s completely unpredictable,” I said. I took the journal back from Dominic, reading through the passage again in case there was some other detail I had missed. “It’s nature, you know? Uncontrollable. Ronan figured out a way to channel the original coven’s power through the tree to give him physical abilities.”

“What if someone else is helping Ronan?” Dominic asked worriedly. “It seems unlikely that Ronan would’ve figured out how to do it on his own, you know? It’s not like he had any kind of power. You said only women are able to inherit witchcraft, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“You have to consider the possibility of it, Morgan,” he interrupted, giving me a stern stare. “If Ronan somehow has access to magic, then he’s probably getting help from someone alive.”

“Dominic, I didn’t even know about this,” I protested, holding the diary up at eye level. “I’ve never seen this journal in my entire life. My mother probably didn’t even know it existed, and the coven isn’t in the habit of helping ghosts kill their wives. I’m the only one in the coven able to see Ronan anyway.”

He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right. I’m just making sure.”

I stood up, brushing dust from the front of my jeans. I tucked the journal beneath my arm and said, “I need to go. My mother should know about this. Teagan, too.”

“Should I come with you?” he asked, peering up at me from his seat on the floor.

“No, this is a matter for the coven to discuss,” I said. I swept my free hand through his hair, surprised with how comfortable I’d become with him in such a short amount of time. “I’ll call you later. We need to figure out a way to stop Ronan from drawing any more power from the tree.”

Dominic captured my hand in his and squeezed it. “I’m starting to think that I’m not as qualified as you to work on this case.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “Don’t worry. You’ll catch on.”

Back at the main house, I caught up with my mother. Cassandra, as the head of the coven, needed to know that our family’s power was being used for something other than its intended purpose. We sat down in the dining room together to discuss the possibilities of controlling the situation. My mother had steeped an enormous cup of steaming tea for me. It was a worrying shade of bright orange, and as I stirred a spoonful of honey into its depths, I wondered what spices or herbs my mother had used to concoct it.

“Well, we’ve always known that the original coven was a little overdramatic to say the least,” my mother commented as I filled her in on the information I had gathered at the library. She perused the pages of Mary Summers’s diary. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. They sacrificed witch hunters annually. It was only a matter of time before they turned to martyrdom.”

“Now the question is how to stop Ronan from using their power through the yew tree,” I said, blowing cool air across the surface of my tea. It smelled suspiciously like cayenne pepper, and I couldn’t seem to build up the courage to take a sip.

“Spells like that are usually done in tandem,” said Cassandra, swirling around the contents of her own mug. “If the original coven created a ritual to bind themselves to the tree, then it would take a similar number of witches to reverse the ritual.”

“Perfect,” I said. “You round up Malia, Karma, and Laurel. We can meet up later to establish a plan. Any ideas as to how we deal with this?”

She closed the journal, patting its cover. “Leave this with me. I’ll read through it. Maybe Mary Summers had more than one secret up her sleeve.”

I nodded, braved a sip of tea, and immediately regretted my decision. It was spicy enough to clear my sinuses. I pushed the mug away from me and asked, “Where’s Gwenlyn?”

“Taking your assignment a little too seriously,” said Cassandra, raising an eyebrow at me. “She’s been practically stalking Teagan to make sure Ronan doesn’t go near her. I don’t even think she came home last night.”

I laughed, glad to hear that Gwenlyn was channeling her extra energy into a constructive outlet. It was helpful to have another medium around, even if Gwenlyn was only sixteen. At least I didn’t have to stand guard for Teagan around the clock. In additional good news, Gwenlyn hadn’t reported any sightings of Ronan.

“Good for Gwenlyn,” I said. “I’m on my way to Teagan next. She should know what’s going on.”

“Tell Gwen to come home and eat at some point,” my mother said. “She’s just like you. Gets herself all worked up and forgets to take care of herself.”

I waved this observation away, abandoning the fiery tea to push my chair away from the table and stand up. “I take care of myself just fine.”

“Morgan?”

I paused, halfway to the door. “Yeah?”

“The yew tree already trusts you,” my mother said. She took one last swig from her own mug then reached across the table to claim my tea for herself. “If we’re going to do this, you need to accept the fact that the tree will most likely choose you again as its vessel.”

“I don’t know if I’m okay with that.”

Cassandra fixed me with a knowing smile.

I sighed. “Fine. I’ll try to be okay with it.”

“That’s my girl.”

On my way to see Teagan, I found Gwenlyn in the courtyard of the inn with her jeans rolled up past her ankles so that she could swirl her bare feet in the koi pond. The late-afternoon sun shone down on the back of her neck and shoulders, casting a pinkish hue across her skin. Storm clouds gathered in the distance, threatening to burst over Yew Hollow.

“You put any sunscreen on, kid?” I asked, tapping her on one reddish shoulder.

She glanced up at me. “I forgot. What are you doing here? Did something happen?”

“We found out that the yew tree is feeding Ronan strength,” I said. “It’s nothing for you to be worried about at the moment. How’s the guard watch going?”

“Fine. Teagan’s in her room.”

“No signs of Ronan, right?” I asked, just to be sure.

“Nope.”

“Mom says you haven’t eaten.”

One of the koi fish inspected Gwenlyn’s toes. She splashed it away, saying, “Teagan took me to lunch.”

“Well, it’s almost dinnertime,” I said, squinting across the courtyard in the direction of Teagan’s room. “Why don’t you head home? I’ve got Teagan covered.”

“You sure? I can stay.”

“Take a break, kid.”

With that, she extracted her feet from the pond, shaking the excess water off. Slipping back into her pair of worn-out sneakers, she stood up. “Can I ask you a question? It might be kind of personal.”

“Sure, but I reserve the right not to answer.”

“How’d you get those scars on your back?”

My whole body stiffened. Gwenlyn was talking about the gruesome angel wings that had been carved into my skin during the events of last fall. I wasn’t sure how she’d noticed them. Usually, I made sure to wear clothing that kept them covered. They weren’t exactly my pride and joy, and so far, I hadn’t found any kind of spell that would help to diminish their appearance.

“Why?” I asked warily.

She shrugged, avoiding eye contact with me, as though she knew that the question she had asked was a hard one to answer. “Just wondering. I have some too.”

Gwenlyn held out her arms to me. Tentatively, I leaned forward to examine them, feeling my heart sink at the sight of the series of jagged scars that ran from her wrists to her elbows. Without thinking, I reached out and pulled Gwenlyn into a tight hug. For a moment, she remained stiff and unresponsive. Then, as I rested my chin on top of her head, she relaxed.

Gwenlyn had always seemed so stoic. It was hard to think of her as vulnerable. I’d all but forgotten that she’d grown up without a single person to reassure her of her sanity. No wonder she was so hesitant to warm up to anyone. I was suddenly grateful that Cassandra had taken her in, and I promised myself to spend more time with her as soon as we took care of the Riley case.

“Go home,” I said, sniffling a tiny bit. I playfully ruffled her hair. “My mom wants to feed you. We’ll talk later. I’ll tell you my scar story if you tell me yours.”

She seemed to think about it and said, “Okay.”

I watched as she left the courtyard, making sure that she headed out in the direction of home. Hopefully, she could make it back to the house before it started pouring. The clouds had closed in, boxing the sun in. As a heavy raindrop plopped into the koi pond, I turned on my heel and headed for Teagan’s room. The door was propped open with an empty beer bottle. I picked it up and walked inside. I found Teagan at the table in the kitchenette, snacking on a cold bagel.

“I hope you weren’t drinking these with Gwenlyn,” I said, setting the bottle on the table next to her. “We don’t need a burgeoning alcoholic on our hands. Your dead husband is trouble enough.”

Teagan rolled her eyes. “It was left over from last night. And no, I wasn’t sharing with Gwenlyn. Thanks for assigning me a babysitter who’s young enough to be one of my students, by the way.”

“You teach elementary school.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “I don’t need to be watched all the time.”

“Once you hear what I have to say, you might reconsider that,” I said. I went over to the mini-fridge, grabbed a beer for myself, and popped the lid off on the edge of the counter. Outside, the rain was picking up. I could hear its pitter-patter on the roof of Teagan’s room.

“Why, what happened?”

I pulled out the chair opposite Teagan and sat down. She batted my hand away when I tried to steal a nibble of her bagel. “Ronan’s been using the power inside the yew tree. That’s why he can touch things, hurt you, burn your house down, all of that.”

“What power?”

“We figured out that the original Summers coven buried themselves beneath the yew tree in order to protect the Hollow from danger,” I explained for what felt like the twentieth time that day. “Don’t worry about the details. My sisters and I are going to try and figure out a way to reverse the spell. That way, the yew tree won’t be able to use the original coven’s power anymore.”

“Cutting Ronan off.”

“Essentially, yes.”

“And then he’ll move on?” Teagan asked, brushing poppy seeds off the table and onto the floor.

“One can only hope,” I said. I took a sip of beer. “Even if he doesn’t, though, he still won’t be able to hurt you anymore.”

She sighed. “Don’t you have any spells to banish ghosts?”

“Nope,” I said. “When you mess with the dead, you risk crossing over into necromancy, which is a huge infraction in our world.”

The door to Teagan’s room suddenly burst open, slamming against the wall behind it. Gwenlyn rushed in, dripping rainwater on the carpet and panting hard.

“Morgan—” She gasped, bending over to rest her hands on her knees.

I shot up from the table and hurried over to her. “Shit, Gwenlyn. What happened?”

She could barely catch her breath. “Ghosts. In the town square. Not just Ronan. They’re wrecking the square. The tree—”

Without further prompting, I rushed out of Teagan’s room, with Gwenlyn hot on my heels. The clouds had finally broken, drenching me in seconds. Together, we sprinted through the courtyard, across the surrounding neighborhood, and toward the town square. My mind was spinning. I needed to see the square for myself. If what Gwenlyn said was true, we were in deeper than I had imagined, with no guaranteed solution to the issue. When we rounded the corner and the town square came into view, I stopped short, stunned by the spectacle before me.

The square was alive with spirits. Ghosts danced recklessly through the raindrops, spinning around the square so quickly that I could barely see their faces. I recognized some of them. They were victims of the mysterious deaths that Chief Torres had had me investigating all winter long, but there were more spirits than I could have possibly imagined occupying one space. They wreaked more havoc than a storm ever could—they yanked bushes and shrubs from the dirt, crashed through windows of nearby houses, overturned parked cars—but most horrifying of all, they surrounded the yew tree, pulling at its branches and stripping it of its leaves. It was mass hysteria, and there, standing on a stone bench near the yew tree and admiring the pandemonium around him, was Dominic.

7

In Which I Almost Feel Sorry For a Stupid Person

Without thinking, I ran at Dominic, splashing through deep puddles of rainwater. My chest felt like it was on fire, burning with the familiar feeling of betrayal. For the second time in my life, I’d put my faith in the wrong person. My heart tightened with the realization, but it wasn’t strong enough to temper the indignation I felt at, once again, getting the short end of the stick.

As I neared the bench that Dominic was standing on, he must’ve heard my shoes sloshing through the puddles, because he turned to face me. My breath caught in my throat. It was still Dominic, with his alluring smile and noble eyes. He stepped off the bench just in time to catch me in his arms, but I shoved at his chest and tried to push him away. He held me fast.

“I can’t believe you,” I huffed, forcing my palms against his rib cage in an effort to create space between us. Nearby, a spirit crashed through the windshield of a sedan parked on the curb. “Make them stop!”

Dominic laughed and hugged me even tighter. He was so tall that my head barely reached his chin, and his embrace, once comforting, now seemed to strangle me.

“Get off!”

“Morgan, relax,” he said, stroking my wet hair away from my face. I hated that, even in the rain, he looked as though he’d just stepped out of a designer cologne advertisement. Raindrops lengthened his eyelashes and darkened his hair, accentuating the briny blue of his eyes.

“Make it stop,” I said again, this time in a low growl.

All at once, the square fell silent. The spirits still circled, slower now, revolving around the yew tree like a strange fog. Behind me, I heard slow footsteps, and I remembered that I hadn’t come to the town square alone.

“Gwen,” I said firmly. I wrapped my arms around Dominic’s waist, if anything to prevent him from doing anything that could hurt Gwenlyn. “Go home.”

I heard the footsteps pause, and then Gwen’s defiant tone. “No.”

“No need to worry, Gwenlyn,” Dominic said over my shoulder. “She’s in good hands.”

“Like hell she is.”

“Gwenlyn, I swear, if you don’t go back to the house this second, I’m going to kick your ass from here to Christmas,” I said, tightening my grip around Dominic’s waist as I watched him peer at Gwen over the top of my head.

There were a few moments of silence as Gwenlyn contemplated her options before she said, “Fine.”

The tightness in my chest lessened slightly as I heard her footsteps fade away. Dominic returned his attention to me.

“That was very noble of you,” he said, smiling.

“Some of us actually care about the people around us,” I snapped back. Now that Gwenlyn was safely absent from the scene, I tried to separate myself from Dominic again. This time, he let me go.

“I care about you, Morgan,” said Dominic. The worst part of this declaration was that he was so convincing. There was nothing malicious in his expression or the tone of his voice.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, gesturing to the ghosts pivoting around the yew tree. “How are you doing this?”

He shrugged. “I’m a witch. Or a warlock, I suppose. That’s the masculine, right?”

“There are no male witches,” I growled. “Magic only travels through the female line.”

As if to prove me wrong, he twirled a hand through the air. A ghost broke free of the fog surrounding the tree, settling behind Dominic. It was Ronan. He bared his teeth at me.

“Bet you wish you’d just stayed out of it now, Summers,” Ronan said. He threw back his head and laughed, the muscles of his shoulders bunching under his shirt. “Where are you hiding Teagan?”

“Where you can’t get to her,” I said. I returned my attention to Dominic, poking him in the chest with my index finger. “You. Explain. Now.”

“Not here,” Dominic said, eyeing the destruction around us. None of the townspeople had bothered to come out of their homes to check out the source of the noise. Clearly, Dominic had somehow prevented them from doing so. “Let’s go.”

He took my hand, trying to lead me away from the square, but I pulled him back. “Not until you send them away,” I said.

Dominic sighed heavily, hanging his head as if he were placating the petty demands of an upset child. He clapped his hands together. At once, the ghosts stopped swirling around the yew tree to give Dominic their full attention.

“Hang out,” Dominic said in a voice that was far too casual for the amount of wreckage in the square. “I’ll be back.”

With that one little command, the spirits vanished, leaving the town square looking as if a category-four hurricane had just breezed through Yew Hollow. Dominic lifted an eyebrow at me. “Satisfied?”

“Hardly.”

He grinned as though I were there for his entertainment. “Follow me.”

Reluctantly, I trailed after Dominic. He led me into the nearby park, following the path meant for bikers and joggers. We trekked in silence for a while, until the thickness of the trees overhead prevented the worst of the rain from coming down on us. As I shook water from my eyes, we neared a small pond, its surface rippling as the drizzle above connected with it.

“How?” I asked. “The last man who tried to take my family’s power ended up getting sucked into the pits of hell. How’d you manage it?”

He chipped a piece of bark from the tree behind him and tossed it into the pond. We watched it float for a second before it got sucked under the surface of the water. “I told you,” he said. “I’m a witch.”

“Bullshit.”

“Remember when I said that my mother and sister were killed in a car crash?”

“Yes. Was that a lie too?”

“No,” he said firmly. “They were witches. They were also their own coven. Just the two of them. Our family’s magic would have died out with them. In order to prevent that from happening, their combined witchcraft transferred to me, the last living person with the coven’s blood.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Improbable,” he corrected, bending down to collect a few flat stones from the water’s edge. “I spent my life researching it. It’s rare, sure, but it happens. My mother was a medium, like you, and my sister had the convenient skill of manipulating those around her. These talents transferred to me as well.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? And what are you planning with those spirits?”

“I was going to tell you eventually,” he said. He tossed the first stone across the water. It skipped a few times before sinking. “As for the spirits, it was a test of my abilities.”

“Which abilities?”

A second stone went skittering across the pond. “I’ll take this opportunity to tell you that I arrived in town several months ago, Morgan. I knew about the yew tree. I knew that I could channel your family’s power through it. Ronan was my first experiment.”

“Months ago?” I said, incredulous. “I thought Chief Torres recruited you. Besides, how could you have known about the yew tree?”

“I convinced Torres to hire me in order to get close to you. Ever since my mother and sister died, I’ve been searching for a way to rectify the situation,” he said.

“Rectify—?”

“Let me finish,” he said. He abandoned his handful of stones in favor of making eye contact with me. “I found Mary Summers’s diary years ago. It wasn’t easy tracking it down. The original Summers coven took their craft very seriously. Do you even know how impactful your family was in the witching community? They pushed boundaries you couldn’t even dream of. When I met you, you seemed so incredibly insignificant compared to the originals. But you have such potential, Morgan, if only you saw the need to unlock it.”

“What have you done?”

“Hardly anything, yet,” said Dominic. I watched him warily as he approached me. “I’ve only been working with the tree to strengthen my hold on the spirits. You see, my real goal, the main reason I’m so interested in Yew Hollow, is this: I’m going to bring my sister and mother back to life.”

I stepped away, feeling my heel press into the trunk of the tree behind me. “I’m sorry. Run that by me again?”

Dominic smiled. “I know it sounds crazy, but with the yew tree’s help, it’s entirely possible.”

“Dom, you can’t raise the dead.”

“Don’t you see, Morgan?” he said, and with a snap of his fingers, a host of spirits surrounded us in an instant. “I already have.”

“It’s not the same,” I argued. I nervously watched as the ghosts neared me. The amount of control Dominic had over them scared me. Spirits, just like living people, had free will, but Dominic had managed to find a way to rob them of it. “Even if you do get your mother and sister back, it will only be the shadows of them. An idea. Not the real thing.”

Dominic pressed an arm to the tree behind me, pinning me against it. “That may usually be the case,” he said. “But with your help, we can channel enough of the original coven’s power to make it happen. I’ve already done the research. I know the ritual. It’s organic, Morgan, as if it were always meant to happen.”

“No.”

“Morgan, think about it. Wouldn’t you love to see the people you’ve lost again?”

My thoughts drifted away. The faces of past clients hovered in my memory, faded and blurry. When I lived in New York, I’d had a bad habit of forming emotional attachments with the spirits I’d helped. Many of them had not deserved to die. The possibilities…

“No,” I said again, before my mind could entertain any other ideas about reanimating dead friends. “It’s necromancy, Dom. It’s playing God.”

“It’s a loophole, Morgan.”

Determination shone in his eyes. It was sad, almost. Dominic’s only motive for wreaking havoc with the spirits was his desire to reunite with his family. I understood this. It was a terrible thing to be alone in the world, but it didn’t give anyone an excuse to toy with the laws of nature.

“Dominic,” I said gently. “It won’t work.”

His expression hardened, and he pushed himself away from me. “You won’t help me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“There is no spell or power that can raise the dead, Dom.”

“And yet, I’m telling you that there is.”

I shook my head. “You’re talking about reversing the process of life. I know you’re hurting. I get it. But that doesn’t mean that you can put everyone in this town at risk just to make yourself feel better.”

“It’s not to make myself feel better, Morgan,” he insisted. “It’s to put things right. My mother and sister deserved to live. One day here, one day gone, at the hands of some idiot who wasn’t paying attention. They deserve to come back.”

“They deserve to stay at peace,” I shot back.

“They weren’t even meant to be at peace!” he argued, his voice rising.

“You can’t bring them back, Dominic.”

He took my hand again, surprising me with the tenderness of the touch. “Morgan,” he said. “I can do this on my own, but it would be far more effective if you helped me.”

“I already said no.”

“I’m hoping you’ll change your mind.”

“I won’t.”

He frowned, dropping my hand. “I thought you liked me.”

“I thought I did too, until you started coming up with harebrained schemes to reanimate the dead,” I said. “The whole reason Teagan’s in danger is because of you. The Riley case is your fault.”

“Not all of it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

“Ask Teagan. All I did was give Ronan the ability to seek justice.”

“Ronan was an abusive piece of shit,” I spat, disgusted with the direction in which this conversation was moving. “If Teagan really did kill him, he deserved it.”

Dominic tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. I shuddered but didn’t move away, frightened of what he might do if I made any attempt to flee.

“Morgan, you’ve just contradicted yourself,” he said with a silly smile. “You told me that I didn’t have the right to play God. Yet, here you are, giving Teagan a free pass to decide who lives and who dies.”

The ghosts had moved closer to us, illuminating the dark, damp clearing with their silvery light. Familiar faces floated by, leering at me. They were no longer the friendly citizens of Yew Hollow that had fallen to accidental deaths. They were Dominic’s sycophants, yielding to his every delight in the hopes that they would be returned to corporeal form. It was an impossible feat, despite Dominic’s dedication to the task.

“It’s not the same,” I whispered, closing my eyes as Dominic cradled my face in his hand and leaned his forehead against mine. His fingers brushed lightly across the base of my throat, almost like a lover’s touch, but the contact made me want to retch.

“I’m so sorry, Morgan,” he said, whispering too.

In one savage moment that I didn’t see coming, he clapped both palms to either side of my head. A burst of light flashed through my head, and then I blacked out.

8

In Which the Yew Tree Falls

“Morgan.”

I blearily opened my eyes, feeling the light tap of someone’s fingers against my cheek. The world swam above me, rain scuttling through the leaves of the trees. Gwenlyn’s concerned face came into view. A soft raindrop dripped off of her nose and onto my forehead.

“Why does this keep happening to me?” I asked no one in particular, noticing that my tongue felt cumbersome in my mouth. I tried to sit up, but a flash of pain struck the side of my head, and I groaned heavily.

“Careful,” Gwenlyn said, cradling my head in her lap so that I wasn’t lying in the mud. “He got you pretty good. I saw you go down.”

“You saw? Didn’t I tell you to go home?”

She gave me a look similar to the one Cassandra often afforded me when I had done something I wasn’t supposed to. “Did you really think that I was going to leave you out here all alone with that psycho? I followed you into the woods.”

“He’s not a psycho.”

“You’re defending that creep?”

I made another attempt at sitting up. This time, I managed to at least prop myself up on my elbows. I squinted at Gwen. “He’s stupid, I’ll give you that. But he genuinely thinks he has a right to do this. He’s trying to bring his mother and sister back from the dead.”

“Can he do that?”

“No,” I said firmly. “Unfortunately, that won’t stop him from trying. I need your help.”

“Anything.”

Determinedly, I pushed myself up to a full sitting position. I dropped my throbbing head into my palms, willing the pain to go away. “We need to find Dom,” I mumbled.

“He disappeared after he knocked you out,” Gwenlyn said. She held out a hand to help me to my feet. I staggered upright, leaning weightily on her.

“We have to get back to the house,” I said, my arm wrapped tightly around Gwenlyn’s shoulders. “Dominic’s going to try and connect himself with the yew tree. The coven is our best chance at preventing that from happening.”

Gwenlyn hoisted me higher, helping me trudge across the muddy ground. “Let’s focus on getting you home first. Then we can figure out how to stop your lunatic boyfriend.”

“He’s definitely not my boyfriend.”

Gwenlyn had apparently given the Summers coven a heads-up to our arrival, because when we reached the house, the coven had already assembled in the dining room. As usual, when the entire coven got together, it was mayhem. Voices overlapped, as did auras, filling the house with a comforting chaos. As Gwen heaved me across the doorstep, Karma and Laurel took me off of her hands and helped me into a chair at the head of the dining room table.

“What happened?” Cassandra said, pulling out the chair next to me and sitting down. Malia emerged from the kitchen, ice pack in hand, and tended to the bruises on each of my temples. The other witches hovered, aunts and cousins, ready to take action against whomever was at fault for my injury. It was this dedication to each other that made the Summers coven so strong. We were a single entity, and at times of need, we were unstoppable. Dominic’s asinine attempt at necromancy wouldn’t stand a chance against the true power of Yew Hollow.

“Dominic,” said Gwenlyn tersely. “He’s going to use the yew tree to unleash the original witches’ power in order to bring his mother and sister back from the dead.”

“He’s controlling the ghosts of everyone who died recently in the Hollow,” I added, wincing as Malia pressed the ice pack to the side of my face. “That’s why those deaths earlier in the year were covered in witchcraft. Dominic was behind all of it. Ronan, too.”

“How is that possible?” Karma asked.

“It’s a long story,” Gwenlyn said, saving me from the hassle of answering the question. Undoubtedly, she’d heard Dominic’s version of the story when she had followed us into the forest. “He’s a bona fide witch, though.”

I raised a hand in protest. “That has yet to be established.”

Gwenlyn rolled her eyes. “The point is, Morgan needs the coven’s help to stop him. Right, Morgan?”

“Right,” I said, still fighting off the haze of being smacked over the head. I was starting to wonder if I had a mild concussion. “Can someone do a quick healing spell or something? Still feels like I’m underwater.”

“I got it,” Laurel said, disappearing into the kitchen to gather the needed ingredients. When she returned, it was with a small bowl full of thick orange paste, which she proceeded to smear across the bruises on either side of the head. The smell of turmeric invaded my nostrils, but as Laurel began to sing softly in Latin, my head finally began to clear. I sighed, relieved.

“Thanks,” I said. I propped myself up in the chair, determined to come up with a plan to stop Dominic from turning Yew Hollow into a living hell. “First order of business. I want a round-the-clock watch on the yew tree. If we’re there to stop him, Dominic won’t be able to pull off his ritual. Get down there and detain him.”

Cassandra pointed to a handful of witches, directing them to head out toward the town square right away.

“And then what?” Karma asked.

“Once we have Dominic in custody, it shouldn’t be too hard to put the ghosts down,” I said. I massaged the orange paste into my temples with the tips of my fingers. “Mom said that we need five witches to channel the originals’ power through the tree, but I’m thinking if we get the whole coven down there, we’ll have an even better chance of handling it. Who knows what’s going to happen when we disconnect from the tree. I’d rather we have more witches there to take it on.”

The coven murmured in agreement. Wiping the excess paste off my fingers and onto my pants, I stood up.

“Mom, did you find anything else about the ritual in Mary Summers’s diary?” I asked.

Cassandra snapped her fingers, and the small journal popped into existence from out of nowhere. “Indeed, I did.”

“Good. You can brief the coven at the town square,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Chairs scraped across the floor as the coven collectively moved out. Gwenlyn made to follow them, but I took her by the arm.

“Not you, Gwen,” I said, pulling her back. “I’ve put you in enough danger as it is.”

“There is no way in hell I’m staying here while the rest of you risk your necks trying to contain Dominic,” she argued and yanked her arm out of my grip. “I don’t care if you think I’m too young or whatever. I’m doing this.”

And without further discussion, Gwenlyn turned and followed the rest of the coven through the doorway. I sighed, hanging my head. Behind me, I heard my mother chuckle.

“What?” I asked.

Cassandra shook her head, still laughing. “When you were growing up, I constantly wished that you’d have kids who would challenge you the way you challenged me. Looks like I got what I wanted.”

I glared at her. “You know, Grandma used to say the same thing about you.”

“I guess mischievousness is genetic,” she said. She clapped me on the back as we left the house together, trailing behind the coven. “In all sincerity, though, you should know that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the state of the coven.”

I kept an eye on Gwenlyn, who was deep in discussion with Laurel. “What’s wrong with the state of the coven?”

“Nothing, actually. That’s why I’m bringing it up.” She clasped our hands together. “Morgan, ever since you arrived back in town, the coven has come together in a way that hasn’t been possible before. The thing is… I think that you should take over as the head of the Summerses.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, stunned by this sudden proposal. “Are you sick?” I demanded. “Are you leaving?”

“Neither,” said Cassandra firmly, squeezing my hand tighter. “But eventually, my time here will pass, and someone will need to take care of the others.”

“Make Malia do it,” I said, as though taking over the coven was just another household chore that sisters were meant to fight over. I couldn’t fathom being the head of the Summers coven. I had barely begun to get a handle on my own life. “She can do it.”

“The coven trusts Malia, sure, but they listen to you,” Cassandra said. “You have the audacity to make hard decisions and the ability to get the coven behind you. Look at the way they followed your directions just now.”

“Well, it was either that or let Dominic take over the whole damn town,” I replied grumpily, kicking at a rock in the road.

“Even so,” said Cassandra. “You should consider it.”

I didn’t answer right away, but the thought of Cassandra stepping down to make room for me as the new head of the coven pervaded my mind throughout our entire walk to the town square.

As we rounded the town hall and the square came into view, a sense of foreboding came over me. Something had gone wrong. The yew tree was surrounded by spirits once again, but Dominic was nowhere in sight. The ghosts circled around the tree, like moths to a lantern, and the yew tree itself was barely visible through the spirits’ moon-like light. The majority of the coven had already reached the yew tree—I could see the various colors of witchcraft working itself into the air—but the witches looked worn down already. The craft was weak, sparks instead of fireworks, and it didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the ghosts at all. It probably didn’t help that the witches were working blindly, unable to see the spirits.

I let go of my mother’s hand to sprint into the square. Gwenlyn, having arrived several minutes before I did, lingered near the outer edge of the throng of witches and shouted instructions to the coven on where to place their spells.

“What’s going on?” I asked her as Cassandra caught up to us.

“It’s sapping our strength,” she said. In demonstration, she attempted to add her own power to the craft in there but only succeeded in producing a tiny flicker of dark green at the tips of her fingers before it flamed out.

Out of curiosity, I tried my own hand at a protection spell. As soon as the navy blue of my craft appeared, I felt a pull at the center of my chest, toward the yew tree. It weakened me immediately—my headache returned as if I were fighting a hangover—and I cut off the witchcraft out of pure fright.

“Shit,” I muttered, examining my fingertips.

Cassandra conjured her own spell, sending it toward the ghosts around the yew tree. She had better luck than Gwenlyn and I, producing a strong-enough spark to create a space between the spirits. A gap appeared, and a tiny part of the yew tree became visible. The rest of the coven focused on widening the rift, but a hollow laugh echoed from the edge of the woods. Distracted, the witches lost hold of their craft, allowing the spirits to close around the tree again.

“Having difficulty?” Dominic said, strolling out toward the square from out of the woods. He seemed to have no fear of the coven’s powers. In fact, he looked downright amused by our antics.

At his appearance, a few of the witches attempted to send attack spells at him, but with a flourish of Dominic’s fingers, several spirits broke away from the yew tree to hover around him. They absorbed each attack spell, preventing any harm from coming to him. Smiling, his soft eyes still deceivingly kind, Dominic walked out to the yew tree and sat on the bench beneath it. He patted the space beside him. “Take a seat, Morgan.”

When I stepped forward to join him, Gwenlyn seized my hand. “Morgan, no way. It’s probably a trick.”

“He won’t hurt me.”

“He already has.”

“Gwenlyn.” I took her firmly by the shoulders, trying to impart some sort of reassurance through what I hoped was a confident facial expression. “Keep an eye on the spirits. The coven can’t see them. If any of the ghosts break away from the tree, let someone know. I have no idea what Dominic has planned next.”

“Don’t die,” Gwenlyn ordered.

“I don’t plan on it,” I replied. With a nod at Cassandra, I broke away from the rest of the coven in order to meet Dominic at the bench beneath the yew tree. Hesitantly, I sat beside him.

“You’ve got a little something…” He reached out to brush the dried turmeric paste from my hair, but I smacked his hand away.

“Don’t,” I said.

He held up his hands in acceptance. “No touching. Got it.”

“Call them off, Dom.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

In a rush of emotion, I found my hands around Dominic’s throat, pouncing on top of him and bending him backward over the bench. It was only the sheer surprise of my attack that prevented Dominic from defending himself.

“Call them off.”

“Okay, I’d officially like the ‘no touching’ thing to go both ways, please,” Dominic choked out.

I tightened my grip, watching as Dominic’s face turned purple. Bizarrely, he seemed unconcerned with my hold on him.

“You don’t want to kill me, Morgan,” he huffed. He didn’t look quite so handsome when he was the same color as a ripe plum.

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll haunt you for the rest of your life.”

Dominic snapped his fingers together and, in a flash, a horde of spirits yanked me off of him with no effort at all. Ronan, one of Dominic’s chosen cronies, snapped his teeth at my ear. He held me securely around the waist, preventing me from attacking Dominic again, while the other ghosts stood between Dominic and me like a spiritual shield.

Dominic rose from the bench, massaging his throat. I felt oddly pleased at the sight of his reddening neck, though I wished I had thought my actions through. As I glanced around, I noticed that several members of the coven had dropped, drained completely of their craft. The ghosts, on the other hand, only seemed to grow stronger, as if feeding off of the coven’s power. I suddenly understood. Because Dominic was using the originals’ power to strengthen his spirits, the present Summers coven wasn’t able to defend themselves. They could only add their witchcraft to that which stemmed from the yew tree.

“Everyone, stop!” I ordered.

The coven needed no other persuasion. With a collective sigh of relief, the remaining witches withdrew their magic, each witch catching her breath. The ghosts dimmed, proving my theory correct.

“Caught on, have you?” Dominic said, smiling.

“How are you doing that?” I asked. “It’s my family’s power, not yours.”

“You’re not wrong there,” he said. He ran a hand over the new finger-shaped bruises on his neck. “Fortunately for me, your family chose to channel their power through a natural entity. Any witch is able to connect with the yew tree, as long as they have the proper ritual.”

“And I assume you discovered this ritual in Mary Summers’s diary?” I prompted. I resisted the urge to pull away from Ronan’s grasp, knowing that he would only take the opportunity to restrain me through an alternate method. “Why did you even give it to me?”

“You forget that I still hope you’ll help me with raising my mother and sister,” Dominic said as he approached Ronan and me. “Connecting with the yew tree is only the first step. I’ll need all the assistance I can get to pull my family back to this earth.”

“You can’t do it, Dom,” I gasped, exasperated. “It won’t work.”

Gently, he caressed my cheek. “Oh, Morgan, of little faith.”

“I thought you weren’t playing God,” I said, wanting more than anything to separate myself from his touch.

“No, you thought that. I, on the other hand, have complete faith in myself.”

And with that, he turned from me and stepped up onto the bench beneath the yew tree. It had begun to rain again, transforming Dominic into a silhouette against the streetlights behind him. He stood loosely upon the bench, his hands relaxed by his sides, his eyes closed, and his head tilted up toward the upper branches of the yew tree. Then he took a great breath and began to sing.

Dominic’s singing voice was just as polished and tranquil as his regular tone. He crooned a strange hymn in Latin, which echoed throughout the square as though it lived in every raindrop. The tree, as if in response to Dominic’s song, began to glow with a steady white light. It grew from the roots upward, illuminating the town square with a fair, crystalline magic. The sight of the yew tree, alive with a power that seemed brighter than the sun, was breathtaking. I was stunned by the beauty of Dominic’s ritual, taken aback by the way my heart seemed to lift toward the yew tree, as though my soul were offering itself up in return for a spare bit of the tree’s purity.

And then the light shifted. As Dominic’s song grew louder, resonating within my very being, the light drained from the yew tree. It was then I realized that Dominic had pressed his hands to the trunk of the tree, and the light was transferring from the tree to Dominic. As the light filled him, Dominic began to glow as well. Transfixed, I forgot that Ronan had a hold on me. I forgot that Dominic was planning to raise the dead. I forgot that this entire incantation was a sign that things, yet again, would undoubtedly change within Yew Hollow.

There was only Dominic, whose beautiful blue eyes now shone with the light of the tree, whose skin seemed to radiate with sunlight, and who looked more like a god than ever before.

9

In Which My Best Efforts Fail

As the light subsided, leaving the town square illuminated only by a few streetlights and the stars, Dominic removed his hands from the trunk of the yew tree. For a few moments, I only watched his shoulders rise and fall with the action of his breathing. The square had gone quiet, all of us entranced by the organic beauty of the spell. It was nothing like my previous experience with power transference. Despite Dominic’s skewed intentions, the ritual itself was too sublime to discount. Now Dominic embodied that elegance. It seemed to emanate from his very pores.

My brain caught up with my common sense. Dominic was distracted, staring at his hands as though he couldn’t believe the ritual had worked. If there was one last chance at detaining Dominic before he could raise the dead, this was it.

“Gwenlyn,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth. Her head tipped toward me ever so slightly to indicate that she was listening. I nodded toward Dominic, whose back was to us, hoping she understood the subtle gesture.

She nodded back then nudged Laurel, who was standing next to her. My silent idea spread through the coven. One by one, their eyes turned to me. I waited until I had everyone’s attention then nodded once.

All together, the witches directed attack spells at Dominic’s back. He froze as the rainbow of auras rained down on him, and a tiny bit of hope sprang from my heart. Dominic fell to his knees, seemingly overwhelmed by the coven’s collective offense. But then Dominic’s shoulders shook as if we were laughing, and he stood again to face the coven.

“No more of that,” he said nonchalantly.

And to my great surprise, the coven immediately withdrew their attack spells. They stood casually with their hands by their sides.

“What are you doing?” I demanded of the witches. “We had a shot!”

It was then I realized that Laurel and Gwenlyn, who were standing closest to me, made no attempt to indicate that they had heard me. I waved a hand in front of Laurel’s face. Her eyes had glazed over, and her gaze remained focused on Dominic. Gwenlyn stood in a similar fashion, and as I looked around, openmouthed, at the other witches, I realized that each and every one of them was waiting for Dominic’s next command.

“It’s quite marvelous, isn’t it?” Dominic asked as he finally moved away from the yew tree to approach me.

“What have you done to them?”

“Nothing at all,” he replied, still walking slowly toward me. “They’re simply following the requests of the holder of the original coven’s power.”

“You.”

“Correct,” Dominic said. “I’m going to send the coven home. They don’t need to be involved with this next bit. All I need is you.”

“I told you I wouldn’t help you raise the dead,” I said firmly, holding my ground as Dominic reached me.

“Morgan, I’m trying to be reasonable here,” he said. “Look, if I was really some kind of malicious magician, I would have put your family in mortal peril and hung it over your head.”

“You robbed them of their free will,” I said, indicating the zombie-like state of the witches around me. “How is that reasonable?”

Dominic snapped his fingers. At once, several ghosts separated themselves from the yew tree to join him.

“Take this motley assemblage back to their house,” Dominic ordered them. “Remain there unless I send any further instruction.”

The ghosts rounded up the witches and herded them away from the town square. To my absolute horror, none of my family members tried to resist the pull of the ghosts. Even Gwenlyn, who was able to see the strings manipulating the coven, turned from me and followed the coven up the hill, away from the square. I let them go. Despite Dominic’s hold on them, I felt utterly relieved that they wouldn’t have to be involved in the next part of Dominic’s scheme.

As the procession of witches and spirits faded into the darkness, I turned back to Dominic. “Why haven’t I been affected in the same way?”

“You’re a medium,” Dominic answered simply. “I work through the spirits. Since you and I have similar abilities, you aren’t affected by the ghosts as others are.”

“What about Gwenlyn? She’s a medium, too.”

He gave a shrug of his shoulders and a smile. “I suppose she’s too weak minded to resist.”

I looked up at the remaining ghosts. They now sat in the branches of the yew tree like strange, glowing cats, waiting for Dominic to give them further orders. I spotted Ronan near the top of the yew, balancing precariously on a springy bough of the tree.

“What now?” I demanded of Dominic. “Ready to raise the dead?”

Dominic chuckled. “No, the ritual for that takes a little more preparation. Nothing savage, of course, but I do need a few things.”

“What sort of things?”

Dominic ticked off a list on each of his fingers. “Wine, honey, candles, bay leaves, dittany of Crete—what am I missing—oh, and some kind of musical instrument. Bells would be best, but anything will do. I don’t suppose you play guitar, do you?”

“No, and before you ask, I gave up piano when I was five.”

“Damn,” he said.

“Besides, I think the town apothecary is out of dittany of Crete.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, the shipment only comes in once a month.”

Dominic’s eyes narrowed. “You’re messing with me.”

“What town still has an apothecary, Dom?”

He laughed. It was an odd moment, the two of us standing there, discussing ingredients for a spell to raise the dead in such a blasé fashion. Perhaps my attempt at nonchalance was a coping mechanism, my sarcasm being the only line of defense I ever knew how to fall back on. If anything, I could only hope to distract Dominic long enough to get the upper hand over him.

Dominic wrapped an arm around my shoulders as if we were best friends. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

I shrugged him off. “What part of ‘I won’t help you’ didn’t you understand? There are only so many times I can say it.”

“Exactly! I’ll wear you down eventually.”

“No, you won’t, Dominic.”

His expression hardened, his eyes solidifying like sapphires. “Morgan, I’ve given you the option of doing this the easy way. Please don’t make me up the stakes.”

“You’ve already pod-peopled my family,” I reminded him. “That better be reversible, by the way. What else could you possibly want from me?”

“I need you for this ritual, whether you involve yourself willingly or not,” he said. Behind him, the ghosts in the yew tree seemed to be getting restless.

“Why me?”

“One, because you’re a medium, and two, because you’re the strongest of the Summers coven,” Dominic said. “I need someone with Summers blood for part of the ritual.”

“Not the first time I’ve heard that,” I muttered then said more clearly, “I still won’t do it.”

Dominic grimaced. “I was afraid you might say that. Ronan?”

Ronan detached himself from the yew tree to float behind Dominic. Dominic’s ritual seemed to have strengthened Ronan’s physical appearance even more. His muscles rippled beneath his T-shirt like a bodybuilder’s during an extreme workout.

“You rang?” Ronan said to Dominic, leering at me.

Dominic refused to break eye contact with me as his next order left his mouth. “Unless Morgan consents to help me, I want you to find Teagan and kill her. She’s in Room 12 at the local inn.”

My mouth dropped open in horror. Ronan, alternatively, buzzed with joy over this new assignment. He pumped a fist in the air like a frat boy at a beer bash.

“You can’t do that!” I said to Dominic.

He shrugged. “You can stop it. Just help me with the ritual.”

“No,” I growled.

“Last chance.”

“NO.”

Dominic waved to Ronan. “Sounds like she’s made her decision, Ronan. Off you go.”

As Ronan soared off in the direction of Teagan’s hotel room, I said to Dominic, “We spelled Teagan’s hotel room, remember? Ronan won’t be able to get in.”

Dominic walked around the base of the yew tree, gazing up into its leaves and admiring the remaining ghosts. “Unfortunately, the protection spell won’t work.”

I crossed my arms. “Why not?”

“First of all, because I smudged the line of black salt on my way out of Teagan’s room. Furthermore, that spell was created by the Summers women,” he said. He picked a twig from the tree and began to twirl it between his fingers. “As such, anyone with the same power can dismantle the protection spell, just like that.”

He snapped the twig in half to illustrate his point.

“I don’t believe you,” I said, though my hands trembled at the thought of Ronan finally enacting revenge on his wife.

Before Dominic could respond, a shrill scream ripped through the air. My heart stopped. The scream had come from the direction of the inn. It had to be Teagan. I turned from Dominic and sprinted away, not bothering to glance over my shoulder to see if he was following.

When I arrived at the inn, panting, I kicked open the door to Teagan’s room to find more than one surprise waiting for me.

“Gwenlyn?” I breathed in disbelief.

Sure enough, Gwenlyn stood between Ronan and Teagan, her hands barely visible beneath the dark green of her witchcraft. Ronan, a look of pure frustration etched across his beefy face, attempted to force through the pulsating glow of Gwenlyn’s shield but didn’t seem to be making much headway. Teagan cowered behind Gwenlyn in the corner of the kitchenette, covering her head with her hands as Gwen’s shield sparked and sputtered.

“Morgan!” Gwenlyn squeaked with relief. Her face had drained of color, and a sheen of sweat was visible on her forehead. She wasn’t strong enough to battle with Ronan’s new powers. It was evident in the tremor of her hands.

With Gwenlyn distracted by my entrance, Ronan took a step back and body-slammed her shield with renewed vigor. This time, Gwenlyn couldn’t hold him off. The forest-green buffer vanished, and Gwenlyn fell back into Teagan. Ronan, his face stretched into a satisfied smile, reached out for Teagan.

Without thinking, I flung myself across the room and tackled Ronan. We connected with a loud smack, his absurdly large muscles just as solid as they would be had he still been alive. It was like running into a brick wall. The crashing together of our bodies knocked the wind out of me, but I still managed to wrap my arm around his neck, preventing him from reaching Teagan.

As I struggled with Ronan, Gwen surged to her feet. She looked wildly around the kitchenette, caught sight of the knife block, and flung herself across the room to reach it. Ronan pitched me forward, over the top of his head, and slammed me down onto the kitchen table. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gwenlyn raise a butcher’s knife above her head. She swung it downward, thrusting it into the middle of Ronan’s back. He roared in frustration, releasing me to reach around and yank the knife out of his ribs. I took the opportunity to roll off of the table and help Teagan to her feet. Together, we staggered toward the door of the room in the hopes of escaping Ronan’s rampage.

Suddenly, the butcher’s knife embedded itself in the doorframe, perilously close to taking a chunk out of Teagan’s nose.

I spun around to see Ronan take Gwenlyn by the throat and lift her into the air. My lungs felt devoid of air as Gwenlyn’s face reddened above Ronan’s meaty fist.

“Hand her over, Morgan,” Ronan growled, ignoring Gwenlyn’s fingers scrabbling against his hands.

I edged in front of Teagan, reaching slowly for the knife sticking out of the wall. “Put her down, Ronan.”

“I’ll trade you,” he said with an abhorrently pleased grin. “One bitch for another.”

Behind my back, I wiggled the knife back and forth, hoping to free it from the plaster. “You’re a better guy than this, Ronan,” I said, feeling the lie on my tongue as it left my mouth. “No one has to get hurt.”

Gwenlyn coughed, kicking her feet out as Ronan tightened his grip once more around her neck. She wouldn’t be able to stand it much longer. At my side, I felt Teagan shift nervously from one foot to the other.

“My wife murdered me in cold blood,” he said in a dangerous whisper. “So, Morgan Summers, you’re very wrong. Teagan will die in this room today, but you get to decide if your little friend here survives or not.”

He wrapped his other hand around Gwenlyn’s throat and squeezed.

“No!” I yelled. I wrenched the knife free of the doorframe and hurled it at Ronan. At the same time, Teagan stepped out from behind me and launched herself across the room.

The handle of the blade clocked Ronan in the forehead, stunning him enough to make him drop Gwenlyn. She crumpled at his feet, gasping for air, as Teagan put herself between Ronan and Gwenlyn.

“Fine, fine!” she shouted. “I murdered you, I admit it! You were a bastard and a terrible husband, and I couldn’t take it anymore. Just don’t hurt them. They’re only trying to do what’s right.”

In a flash, Ronan took Teagan by the hair and pulled her into a violent embrace. Gwenlyn scrambled away from the unhappy couple, backing up against the far wall of the small hotel room. I, on the other hand, stepped forward once again. Teagan’s confession was a shock, but it wasn’t up to Ronan to decide whether she lived or died.

But then Ronan stooped to scoop up the abandoned butcher’s knife. He whirled Teagan around, her back to his chest, and pressed the knife to her throat. I stopped dead in my tracks. Time seemed to halt. For the longest second of my life, I stared at Ronan, and Ronan stared back, and Teagan shivered and wept, and the uneven gasp of Gwenlyn’s hoarse, damaged breathing was the only sound in the room.

And then the knife flashed.

Blood spurted, coating Gwenlyn. There was a dull thud as Teagan slipped from Ronan’s grasp and thunked to the floor. She convulsed, grabbing at the large gash across her throat, but it was too late. Ronan vanished without another word, and I rushed to Teagan’s side, the shock of the brutal attack pulsing through me. Gwenlyn remained frozen, the muscles in her arms taut as she pressed herself against the wall, away from Teagan. She’d been splattered with Teagan’s blood, and there was so much of it that I knew Ronan had gotten what he’d wanted.

Teagan, her eyes wide and unblinking, was dead.

10

In Which the Dead Wake

Paralyzed, all I could do was stare at Teagan’s ruined body. It wasn’t until Gwenlyn choked out a sob that I remembered she was there. I needed to grow up, to take responsibility for the things that I had done. Cassandra had been wrong. There was no way I could ever run the Summers coven. Ever since I’d returned to Yew Hollow, a dangerous cloud seemed to linger over the town, threatening to burst. There were only so many times I could handle a shit storm like this.

I reached out to Gwenlyn without intention. I had no idea how to comfort her, drenched as she was in Teagan’s blood, so I let my hand drop, useless. My vision blurred, a fog taking over my mind. The room fell away, and I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the tacky feeling of blood between my fingers.

“Morgan.”

Gwenlyn’s soft voice only did so much to pull me out of my sea of remorse. I didn’t want to listen or return to the world, but I owed it to the teenager to at least indicate that I had heard her. “Mm?”

“You can’t fall apart,” she said, her voice, still gravelly, a little stronger now. “I know you want to, but you can’t. You have to keep fighting. You have to go stop Dominic.”

I covered my ears, leaning forward to rest my forehead on my knees. Gwenlyn’s hand closed around my wrist. She’d finally moved away from the wall, simply to pull me up from the floor. She was a walking nightmare at that moment, painted in red, but she was also the only level head in the room. I let her tug me upward and forced my knees and then my feet to carry my weight again. When she let go of me, a bloody handprint remained on my arm, a macabre indication of what had happened there. The image of it wrenched me back to reality, and I realized that, no matter my mistakes, I was still the only person in town who would be able to prevent Dominic from making things worse.

“I need you to go back to the coven,” I said to Gwenlyn. She opened her mouth to protest, but I shook my head. “Keep them safe. Dominic still has a hold on them, and I won’t be able to take it if anyone else gets hurt.”

Gwenlyn still looked as though she wanted to argue with me. I marveled at her unwavering determination, evident in her expression despite the coating of blood.

“Please,” I said in a small voice. “Please.”

She conceded with a graceful nod then led me to the door of the room. I glanced behind me for one last look at Teagan’s wasted potential. Her ghost had not appeared, which I was eternally grateful for. She was at peace, and Dominic would only have employed her spirit to join his ranks.

Gwenlyn and I parted in the courtyard of the inn. We hugged briefly, exchanging no words. I couldn’t find anything appropriate to say, and Gwenlyn seemed to face the same issue, but as she left the courtyard in the direction of the house with her shoulders squared off, she seemed to transfer some of her fortitude to me. With a great breath, I left the courtyard, letting my feet carry me back to the town square.

Dominic was waiting for me, leaning casually against the yew tree and chatting amiably with Ronan. Most of the other ghosts had vanished to who knew where. A select few lingered beside Dominic, as though waiting for further instruction. Ronan, whose wide, satisfied grin made me want to send him to a second death, saw me first. He nodded to Dominic, who glanced over his shoulder. To his credit, he looked appropriately concerned at the amount of blood on the knees of my jeans.

“That’s not your blood, is it?” he asked, stepping away from Ronan to meet me at the edge of the town square. “I told Ronan not to hurt you.”

“It’s Teagan’s,” I said, too emotionally exhausted to summon any more rage over Dominic’s complete lack of moral fiber. “And you don’t get to ask me if I’m hurt. Not after that. I’m hurt, you asshole.”

He tried to sweep me into a hug, but I stepped away from his embrace. “You can bring her back, you know,” Dominic said.

I scoffed, unable to wrap my head around his warped rationale.

“You’re unbelievable,” I said. “You can’t pick and choose who lives and who dies. Don’t you get that, Dominic? Don’t you understand how screwed up it is?”

“Morgan,” he said gently. “I’m only bringing two people back. That’s it. The only other people I’ll resurrect are those you ask me to.”

“I won’t be responsible for wrenching people out of their eternal resting places,” I said. As I spoke, several spirits reappeared. Dominic had apparently sent them off to gather the ingredients he needed for his ritual, as the ghosts began to lay several items on the ground by the yew tree.

“Helpful, aren’t they?” Dominic said, regarding the ghosts with an approving nod. “No dittany, though. Did you know it’s remarkably similar to oregano? We’re using that instead.”

His conversational tone made it sound as if we were discussing a lasagna recipe.

“Dominic.”

He refocused on me, saw the look on my face, and said, “Listen, Morgan. I’m sorry about Teagan, okay? I was just trying to make a point. I need you for this ritual, and I want you to be willing to help me.”

Get it through your thick head,” I said, poking Dominic in the chest. “I will never help you with this.”

“At this point, I expected that response,” he said, sighing heavily. He legitimately seemed disappointed with my refusal to cooperate. I wished I had brought the butcher’s knife from Teagan’s room along with me. My unpracticed witchcraft wouldn’t put Dominic down, and there was no other humane way to dispatch him.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any more time to brainstorm. Dominic gestured to his spirit army, which immediately surrounded me. I saw what was coming about a second before it happened and tried to dart away, but the spirits boxed me in. They took hold of my arms and legs, lifting me and carrying me to the base of the yew tree. I kicked out hard, my foot connecting with the very solid jaw of one ghost, but to no avail. No matter how much I flailed, I couldn’t free myself from their mutual grasp. They went to work, binding my hands behind my back with a length of rope.

My back scraped against the yew tree as the spirits forced me to sit against it. The last time I’d been forced to participate in a ritual, the yew tree had filled me with the power of the original Summers coven. Regrettably, that transference had only been temporary, as I hadn’t realized what was happening. I wished that I had figured it out sooner. The tree was empty now. Its remaining power lay only in its existence as a natural protection, which wasn’t something that would work like witchcraft and fuel my defense against Dominic. I could only sit there, restrained as I was, and hope that, by some miracle, Dominic’s ritual would fall through.

Several yards away, Dominic began setting up his spell. He mixed the ingredients together in a small olive-wood bowl. A sweet and sharp scent swept over me, the result of his honey-and-oregano blend. He dabbed the mixture on at his pulse points. Then, with a bottle of red wine in one hand, he approached me. I watched dolefully, waiting for an opportunity to knock his ritual off balance.

“Excuse me,” he said politely. He picked me up by the armpits and dragged me away from the yew tree, the wine bottle bouncing against my rib cage. He allowed me to lean against the nearby bench, facing the tree. Then he extracted a tiny switchblade from his pocket.

I leaned away as he neared my throat.

“Don’t worry,” Dominic said, tipping my chin back. “Just a prick.”

Sure enough, I felt the sharp sting of the blade at my neck but nothing more. Dominic held the bottle of wine to my throat, and I heard the hollow plinking sound of my blood dripping into the wine. He swished the bottle around to mix it then took a swig. My stomach turned.

Dominic plugged the mouth of the bottle with his thumb, restricting the flow of wine, and began to pour it delicately out onto the dirt near my feet. The ground did not absorb the liquid as it should have. Instead, the wine remained on the surface, glistening in the moonlight. Part of me couldn’t help but admire the artistry of Dominic’s hand. With every tip of the bottle, he created the large, detailed outline of a phoenix.

A large part of our magic relied on the interpretation of symbols. This, Dominic clearly knew. The phoenix symbolized resurrection, what with the mythical bird’s ability to remake itself out of the ashes of its previous body. In combination with the yew tree, which was also known for rebirth, there was no doubt to Dominic’s intentions. A strange thought crossed my mind.

“Quick question, Dom,” I said, feeling the cut on my throat dribble. “Where do you intend on housing your mother and sister’s spirits once you’ve raised them? Because I assume their bodies aren’t exactly in great shape after all these years.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Dominic said, now lighting candles and placing them at strategic points within the phoenix. “The ritual will allow them to create new bodies in their original image.”

“That sounds too good to be true,” I muttered, wondering how Dominic managed to find such a convenient and organic spell to raise the dead. From what I understood, when the same thing had been attempted in the past, the rituals used had been infinitely more gruesome than some spilled wine in the dirt. “Did you know that people used to consume corpses in order to raise the dead? You aren’t planning to do that, are you? Because I don’t think I’d be able to keep my dinner down.”

“Do you ever shut up?” Dominic snapped. A small smirk tugged at the corners of my mouth. Though he was skilled at hiding it, Dominic was stressed out. The enormity of his task must have finally hit him as he faced it head-on. That was good. I could work with stressed.

“It’s true,” I pushed. “Necromancers believed that by consuming the flesh of the dead, their spirits would rise again. Crazy, right? Although, I hear cannibalism goes well with Chianti, so you’re halfway there.”

“Shut. Up.”

He crumbled the bay leaves, pulverizing them between the palms of his hands, and began to sprinkle the pieces along the outer edges of the phoenix.

“Oh, and necromancers also believed that bodies had an expiration date,” I added, watching as Dominic’s back muscles scrunched in aggravation beneath the fabric of his cotton T-shirt. “One year after the death of the physical body. Kinda puts a dent in your ritual, doesn’t it? Your mother and sister are going to be fu—”

“SHUT UP.”

This time, the words were punctuated with a crisp slap across my face. My eyes watered at the sting of it, but inwardly I felt strangely pleased with myself. Dominic was nervous; that much was clear in his lack of emotional control and the shaking of his hands. The ghosts seemed to sense it too. They gave him a wide berth, as though afraid he would lash out at them should they float any closer. Dominic, however, seemed to have plans for his spirits to participate in the ritual.

It turned out that Dominic had indeed gotten a hold of a set of handbells, which I assumed he’d thieved from the nearby church. He assigned each one to a spirit, instructing them to bridge the gap between the yew tree and the phoenix. They fell into two lines, forming a glowing, ethereal hallway from me to the tree.

He began to direct them, pointing at each ghost when it was their turn to ring their bells. As they caught on to the rhythm, the music swelled, filling the night air with a surprisingly sweet melody. Dominic added his voice to the mix, singing passionately in Latin as he had during his earlier transference ritual. He knelt to the ground, tipped a candle on its side, and ignited the outline of bay leaves.

The phoenix erupted in green flames, corralling Dominic within it. The blaze was so bright that I could only make out Dominic’s silhouette. He faced the yew tree, his arms outstretched as if to welcome someone into his hallway of spirits. The yew tree stretched and morphed before my eyes. Its trunk widened, splitting open to reveal a peculiar portal, from which spilled a great deal of bright white light.

As Dominic continued to warble, summoning forth the souls of his lost ones, two figures appeared in the strange doorway of the yew tree. They seemed to struggle against an unknown force within the light, pushing and pulling at one another in the attempt to step out of the tree. With a great crescendo, Dominic called to them, his lips shaping the names of his mother and sister. The fire of the phoenix waved and surged around him, egging him on, and then, all at once, the two figures stepped from the tree and onto the earth in front of them.

As soon as they emerged from the trunk, their physical features swam into focus. The tall, slender figure solidified first, evolving into an elegant young woman with the same piercing blue eyes as Dominic. The smaller figure coalesced slowly, but gradually became recognizable as one half of Dominic’s genetics. She was a petite woman, perhaps in her forties at the time of her death, but there was no mistaking the similarities between her and her children.

Though the bells chimed on, Dominic had stopped singing. Either he had lost his voice, or the emergence of his family had overwhelmed him to the point of incoherence. With his back to me, I couldn’t tell which it was, though I assumed it was the latter. His shoulders slumped with something like relief, as though he couldn’t fathom the fact that his ritual had actually worked. I was similarly afflicted. In all of time, there were no success stories about raising the dead, and yet here was Dominic, reunited with the two people he claimed to love most.

He stepped forward, abandoning the fire of the phoenix, moving quietly along the hallway of spirits. His mother and sister, both sporting expressions of both joy and great sorrow, walked from the yew tree toward Dominic. The family met in the middle. For a second, they only stared at each other. Then Dominic fell into the arms of his mother.

Suddenly, I was yanked forward by an invisible force. Something seemed to have a hold of my ankles, dragging me through the harmless green fire of Dominic’s phoenix and down the ghostly corridor. I yelled as my shirt rode up and my back scraped over roots and rocks embedded in the dirt. With alarming speed, the strange force swept me right past Dominic and his family. Dominic, wide eyed, reached down in an attempt to stop me, but he only caught a handful of my T-shirt before I was ripped away and rushed toward the open portal in the yew tree.

“No!” cried Dominic, separating himself from his mother and sister to chase after me.

The friction had freed my hands of the rope, and I flipped over in an attempt to grab something to hold onto before I was sucked into the depths of the portal. My legs slid into the abyss of blinding white light, but I managed to hook my elbow around one of the yew tree’s thick roots. The force pulled at me, my tendons stretching and popping. Dominic fell to his knees before me, trying and failing to yank me back into the real world. My arm slipped around the root, and my elbow hyperextended. I couldn’t hold on much longer. Pure panic, like a ship in a storm, blew through the high seas of Dominic’s eyes.

With my lungs burning, I gasped to him, “You dumb bastard.”

And then I let go.

One moment, I was falling through nothing, and the next, I was lying on a dark, pebbled shore, listening to the sounds of water gently lapping at my jeans. I scrambled away from the inky water, which had already soaked through my clothing. Shivering, I looked around. The strange beach went on for miles in either direction, beneath a starless and utterly dark sky. Where was I?

A light patter of footsteps approached me from behind, and I whirled around to meet the gaze of a very tall, very familiar figure.

“Dad?” I asked breathlessly.

“Hey, ace.”

I remembered the nickname from his brief involvement in my childhood. He extended a hand, and I took it, letting him pull me to my feet. He brushed a few pebbles from the back of my damp shirt.

“I’ll admit it,” he said as I pondered his inexplicable appearance. “I’m not thrilled to see you here so soon.”

“Here?” I asked, my voice cracking. “Where are we?”

“Oh, honey,” my father said. His eyes crinkled with the weight of the information he was about to bestow upon me. “We’re in the otherworld.”

I backed away from him, yanking my hand from his grasp. “No.”

He was stoic and solemn with his next words.

“Yes. I’m afraid you’re dead, ace.”

Many thanks to everyone who read my story!

Writing is the best way I know to express myself, and I’m so glad that you all have rewarded me with the opportunity to share my imagination with you. As an author, I learn and evolve from the input of others, so if you have a spare moment and you enjoyed the story, please leave a short, spoiler-free review of the book. As readers, your personal opinions are often the best references for a writer. Your commentary allows me to further provide you all with fun, engaging material.

I would love if you could leave a review: Click Here to Review!

Again, thank you all for diving into mine and Morgan’s world. May we meet again!

All the best,

Alexandria Clarke

Witch Myth: A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery- Book 2

1

In Which I Challenge the Definition of Dead

The pebbled beach of the otherworld was not something I had expected to see for a very long time. The dark water tickled my toes, almost as if to welcome me to this new world, but I stepped away from the black tide, rejecting its salutation. My father, a man I had not seen since I was a child, stood silently next to me, waiting patiently for me to come to terms with my new state of being. As I gazed off into the distance, disturbed by the fact that death seemed to have no horizon, a terrifying thought finally crossed my mind.

I, Morgan Summers, had died.

The real shit ticket was that my death was purely accidental. At least I hoped it was. If I understood the laws of life and death correctly, my soul had basically been offered up in return for two others. The catch? I’d never agreed to go forth and become a sacrifice. My frustration, which I’d been trying to temper ever since I’d woken up in the otherworld, seethed and bubbled over.

“Mother fu—”

“Language, Morgan!” my father scolded before I had a chance to complete my epithet of irritation.

I flashed him the middle finger and stormed away from him down the beach. He had all of eternity to forgive my rudeness, and I was allowed to be upset over my own untimely quietus. Unfortunately, the never-ending beach wasn’t helping me cope with my current status. It would have been one thing if the otherworld had a little bit of sunshine, but this depressive gray riverbank was so far from paradise. It was miles and miles of stupid dusty pebbles and no end to the dim beach in sight. At some point, I realized that no matter how far I seemed to walk, my father, who hadn’t moved his feet, was still only a few paces away from me. I spun around to face him.

“Ace,” he said gently, employing a nickname that I hadn’t heard since I was nine years old. “Tell me what happened.”

I didn’t even know where to begin. All of my problems, including that of being trapped in the otherworld, stemmed from the fact that I lived in a small town called Yew Hollow. The town seemed like any other in the New England area, quaint and charismatic, but that wasn’t the whole story. Yew Hollow was home to one of the largest known covens of witches. My coven: the Summers. It shouldn’t have been any surprise that Yew Hollow experienced a myriad of unnatural occurrences. I thought I had seen it all. As a psychic medium, you eventually get used to the idea of the impossible, what with all the ghosts and spirits contacting you from the beyond and requesting your services. My current dilemma, though, was a whole new ball game.

“There was this guy,” I began, now pacing from the water’s edge to my father and back again. “A real dumbass. He stole our coven’s power, Dad. And then he went and brought back his mother and sister from the dead. So—”

“Wait a second,” my father said, forcing me to halt my retelling. “What do you mean someone stole your power? If I recall, one of the most important facts of witchery is that only women have the privilege.”

“Witchcraft,” I corrected. “Normally, you’d be right. It’s a long story, but this guy, Dominic Dobbes, is a real witch.”

My father squinted at me as if trying to understand a complicated mathematical equation. “Okay, I’ll just let that one go. Now, you say, he raised the dead?’

“Yes. And apparently it was one hell of a trade.”

“Meaning?”

I huffed out a big breath. Truthfully, I didn’t even understand what had really happened that night in Yew Hollow, so explaining it to my father was an even greater challenge.

“I think I’m stuck here because of Dominic’s ritual,” I finally said. It was the only thing that made sense. If witchcraft was temperamental, then necromancy was downright manic. Dominic had succeeded in his mission to bring back his mother and sister from this gloomy, eternal bank, but magic always had to balance itself out. Their return to earth required payment, and since Dominic had used my blood in his ritual, I was the first one to get dragged through the passageway into the otherworld. The mere thought of Dominic’s ill-prepared plan was enough to reignite my already turbulent emotions.

“Where are we anyway?” I demanded, kicking the ground furiously and showering my father’s sensible work boots with the tiny, colorless stones. “What is this place, purgatory? Because it sure as hell isn’t heaven. And what are you doing here? I had no idea you were dead.”

His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “You didn’t? Where did you think I was?”

I glared up at him. For all of our similarities—the apple-green of our eyes, the disheveled brown hair, and the olive skin—I certainly had not inherited my father’s height. He loomed above me, his handsome face no older than the last time I had seen him.

“You left us,” I accused my father.

If it was possible, his eyebrows would’ve disappeared into his hairline. “Morgan, I would never leave you or your sisters. You know how the Summerses are. They tried to run me out.”

He had a point there. My family was unorthodox, to say the least. Then again, when your family was a coven of witches, things were bound to get a little dicey. Witches were notoriously cynical toward men, and the Summers coven was no exception to the rule. The women in my family were infamous for luring good men in, only to drop the poor suckers like hotcakes as soon as their warranties expired.

My mother, in a sense, had thwarted this stereotype for an unusual number of years. My father had stuck around for a while, long enough to bring four daughters and a son into the world. Still, for the better part of my life, my dad had never been around.

“You should’ve tried harder to stay,” I told my father. “You didn’t even stick around for the birth of your youngest daughter. Laurel’s never even met you! And then you went and had a one-night stand with Mom and knocked her up with Wren. What a major screw-up that was, by the way.”

My father’s expression of confusion only deepened. I wanted to smack it off of his face. All of my pent-up feelings were flowing to the surface, threatening to overflow and drown my father in them. Everything I felt about him, every bit of insecurity over his lack of involvement with my life, poured out. I guess being overemotional was a side effect of death. At that moment, I couldn’t understand why I was so focused on my father’s reappearance when I had other much more substantial issues on my plate.

“Wren?” said my father, a look of consternation still etched across his features. “You mean your mother never told you?”

“Told me what?” I demanded.

He rubbed his forehead between his first finger and his thumb, a habit of his that I remembered from way back when. “Morgan, I died shortly after Laurel was conceived. I didn’t leave you. Wren was never my son. I only know about him because I’ve kept an eye on you throughout the years. Though I admit I’ve been a little lax with that lately.”

My lips parted with the impact of this new information. “Run that by me again?”

My father sighed, looking out across the black water. “Your mother and I were happy, but the coven wasn’t. I… I died in the woods behind the house. You know where that big barn was?”

“I live there now,” I said unhappily, less than eager to hear the rest of my father’s story. Then I remembered how un-alive I was. “Lived, I guess.”

“I was out there chopping wood one night,” my father continued. “All of a sudden, one of the trees fell out of nowhere, crushing me beneath it. Your mother was beside herself when she found me, and I’m still convinced that the coven had everything to do with my death. Your mother thought so too. I guess that’s why she never told you the whole story.”

I waved my hands in front of me to defend myself against his recollections. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“I just need you to know that I wouldn’t have left you alone, Morgan,” he said softly. “I loved your mother and your sisters. And you, of course.”

My eyes were burning with the familiar presage of tears, but I swallowed the lump in my throat to steady my voice. I needed to get the facts straight. “So…Wren is only my half brother?”

“Yes. His father was a stranger that your mother only met with a few times.”

“And you think that the coven arranged to kill you?” I asked, having trouble making eye contact with him as I did so.

His eyes were solemn as he nodded. I sank down to the pebbled shore, hugging my knees into my chest. This was not the way I wanted to pass over into the next life, premature and with the aching knowledge of my father’s fate. I rested my head on my arms, listening to my father’s boots disturb the rocks beside me. Then he sat next to me, his long legs stretching out nearly to the water line, and wrapped a comforting arm around my shoulders. I leaned into him. He smelled the same as he always had, like mint leaves and smoking firewood.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” I said. The otherworld ate sound up. My voice didn’t carry or echo. I wanted to yell into the abyss, to hear something resonate back to me.

My dad patted the top of my head. I guess it had been a while since he’d ever had to comfort anyone. “That’s what we all say, kid.”

I pondered that for a moment. I was no stranger to death. Every spirit I’d ever made contact with lamented their passing. There was almost always denial at first. After all, how could you be dead if your soul was still lingering on earth? But eventually, the facts filtered through, and the ghosts grasped the concept of death with varying amounts of grace. Not me, though. I refused to be dead.

I pushed myself up from the ground. “How do we get out of here?” I asked, planting my hands on my hips and looking down at my dad.

“How…? Ace, there’s no getting out of here.”

“No, I mean, this”—I indicated the vast emptiness around me—“can’t possibly be all of the otherworld, right? There are other people here? Other places?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, get up, then,” I said, waving him to stand. “I need to find someone who can send me back to Yew Hollow.”

My father studied me for a moment, peering up at me from his seat on the pebbled shore. “Morgan, I’m sorry, but you’re dead. There is no going back.”

“No,” I said firmly, my index finger pointing at him for emphasis. “I refuse to accept that. I was not a willing party of Dominic’s garbage ritual, and I don’t belong down here. Not yet, anyway.”

My father sighed heavily and hung his head between his knees. I felt like I was five again, asking him to explain why the sky was blue. This time, however, I didn’t need a rational or scientific explanation; I needed hope and a solid plan to reunite my soul with my material body. I’d be damned if my life was over so soon. Literally.

“Morgan—”

“Dad,” I interrupted before he could say anything else. “I need you to understand this. It is not my time. I have to go back to Yew Hollow. My family is still in trouble, and there’s no way I’m going to let Dominic use them as his creepy puppets. Besides, I promised Mom I’d look after someone.”

“Who?”

“She picked up a stray. Another psychic medium,” I said, running a hand through my loose hair and wishing I had a hair band. The otherworld was uncomfortably tepid, and despite the lazy wash of the tide, there was no hint of a breeze. “Her name is Gwenlyn. She’s only sixteen, and she doesn’t deserve to deal with Dominic’s crap on her own. She’s been through enough as it is.”

My father finally decided to rise to his feet, scattering pebbles as he elongated and stretched upward from the ground. “This Gwenlyn. Does she know you were taken to the otherworld?”

“Probably not,” I sighed. That was another qualm to add to my already extensive list of issues. Gwenlyn was a teenaged runaway and had never had another human being around that she could truly rely on. I hated that my unexplained disappearance would most likely only contribute further to Gwenlyn’s troubles. “She wasn’t around during the ritual, so I don’t know how else she would have found out.”

“Shame,” my father said. “A medium in the otherworld already puts you at an advantage in this place, but a link with another medium in the real world? You might have actually had a shot at fixing things up there.”

“Wait. How so?”

“I’ve only heard stories,” my father said. “But apparently your ability to communicate with the dead is an asset down here. There should be a way that your friend—Gwenlyn, was it?—would be able to contact you. Like a very long-distance telephone call.”

“Why didn’t you say so before?” I asked, my voice pitching with the sudden prospect of possibility. If I could reach Gwenlyn and figure out what the situation was in Yew Hollow, she could straighten out Dominic’s backward ritual to bring me back. “How do I do it?”

But my father looked forlorn at my eagerness. “I don’t know, Ace. It’s all legend down here. Half the time, I don’t know what’s true or false.”

“I’m going to take this opportunity to believe that all the legends are true,” I said. If my dad, without a drop of witchcraft in his veins, had heard about a way to contact the living, there had to be some kind of merit to it.

“You might not want to jump to that conclusion so quickly,” my father warned. “There are things in the otherworld you don’t want to know about.”

“Oh, I want to know,” I insisted. I didn’t have time to ponder what horrors lay waiting. At the moment, it didn’t seem likely that the colorless stretch of beach held anything other than more pebbles, but I trusted my father to know what he was talking about.

My father arched an eyebrow. Clearly, he was skeptical of my show of confidence, but I wasn’t about to let his distrust of the unknown parts of the otherworld stop me from making an attempt to reach Gwenlyn. It was the only sliver of a plan that I had to latch on to.

“Ever heard of Cerberus?” he asked, one eyebrow still quizzically raised.

“The three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell in Greek mythology?” I clarified. He nodded. “Sure, I’ve heard of him.”

My father fixed me with a meaningful stare.

“What, he’s real?” I asked with a scoff. “Well, good thing I have no intention of popping into Hades’s realm. I was never really a fan of hot tubs. Now, tell me, where’s the local pub around here?”

“Sorry?

Apparently, the otherworld had also robbed my father of his sense of humor. “I want to get off this damn beach,” I said, picking up a handful of stones and throwing them into the water just to disturb its annoyingly peaceful ebb. “Where do all of the other inbetweeners hang out?”

“You have to find your own way off the beach, Morgan,” my father said. “I was only sent to welcome you.”

“Not a great welcome wagon, Dad,” I commented. “And what do you mean, I have to find my own way off the beach? In case you haven’t noticed, there isn’t exactly a handy dandy map around. You got a special trapdoor that I don’t know about?”

“All you have to do is walk into the water,” another voice said from behind us.

I whirled around, almost expecting one of the dangerous legends my father had just promised to me, but I was met with the face of a different legend, one that hit a lot closer to my home of Yew Hollow.

The woman who had spoken had a familiar face, a face that I had seen every morning in the mirror. Like me, she was small and thin with honey-colored hair and a crooked set to her lips. There was only one difference. She had the trademark gray eyes of the Summers coven. Were it not for this subtle distinction, I would have patted the otherworld on the back for conjuring such a convincing twin of myself. There was nothing more terrifying than confronting yourself and owning up to your personal insecurities.

“Who are you?” I asked, glancing nervously at my father. He did not appeared to be worried by this ethereal woman’s presence. If anything, the wrinkle of his nose and curl of his upper lip indicated an evident distaste for her.

The woman extended a dainty hand out toward me, which I hesitantly reached forward to shake.

“Dorothy Summers,” she said. “A pleasure to meet you.”

My jaw dropped open. “Dorothy Summers. As in, one of the original witches of Yew Hollow?”

She dipped her head in acknowledgement. “At your service.”

2

In Which I Make a Possibly Regrettable Deal

In my world, Dorothy Summers was essentially a goddess. From day one, every child born into the Summers coven was thoroughly educated on our illustrious history. My elementary studies of arithmetic and language arts were supplemented with the biographies of the five women who created and shaped Yew Hollow for what it was today. Mary Summers, the coven’s earliest leader, and her four daughters—Ann, Elizabeth, Bridget, and Dorothy—were the roots of my heritage, and though I had once tried to reject the sorority I had been born into, I never lost the immense amount of respect for the original Summers women that had been fostered in me since birth. To come face to face with any one of them was beyond surreal. Yet here I was, my hand clasped tightly between both of Dorothy’s as if we had known each other personally all along.

My father, on the other hand, did not seem to hold Dorothy in such high regard. As I blathered on to Dorothy about what an immense pleasure it was to meet her, my father shifted from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable with the interaction before him. Dorothy seemed to recognize this, because she withdrew her hand from my grasp and turned to face my father.

“Calvin,” she greeted him, smiling cordially.

“Dorothy.”

“Wait a second,” I said, stepping between the opposite sides of my genealogy. “The two of you know each other?”

“Lamentably,” my father said as he eyed Dorothy’s serene expression. He reached out and pulled me closer to his side, as though he expected Dorothy to inexplicably combust and shower me with burning sparks.

“Now, Calvin,” Dorothy said, her palms turned upward in a gesture of innocence. “I thought we’d put all of our disagreements behind us.”

“Disagreements?” I echoed. I detached myself from my father, unwilling to align with either party until I understood the specifics of their argument. “What kind of disagreements?”

My father’s chin lifted upward, though his eyes remained locked on Dorothy. “Don’t,” he warned her.

Dorothy’s tranquility was unaffected by my father’s command. “Oh, Calvin,” she said. “She’ll find out eventually.”

“Find what out?” I demanded, my glare bouncing between the two of them.

Dorothy sighed, as if resigning herself to answer my question. “Morgan, my dear—”

Dorothy, I swear…” Calvin cut in.

“Hush, you,” Dorothy commanded, pointing a finger at my father.

His voice cut off immediately, silenced by whatever spell Dorothy had so neatly employed. He gestured angrily at her, mouthing unintelligible commands. A surge of relief coursed through me as I realized that witchcraft was still viable in the otherworld. It would undoubtedly come in handy what with all of the supposed monsters down here. I mentally reviewed the process for creating a protection ward. Generally, I preferred offense over defense, but I wasn’t about to risk strutting about the otherworld without a basic level of security. For now, though, secrets were at hand.

“Tell me,” I urged Dorothy before my father could protest further.

“It’s nothing, really,” she said with a breezy wave of her hand. “We’ve simply toiled in shaping the curvature of your life.”

“Shaping the… what?”

“As your father mentioned earlier—pardon my eavesdropping, by the way. I’m afraid it’s a habit I never was able to kick—we in the otherworld are often able to observe our earthly equivalents,” she said, her fingers twirling sparkles of deep blue witchcraft, similarly colored to my own, through the still air.

I peered around Dorothy to look at my father. “Does she always speak like this? All vague and such?”

He rolled his eyes. I took that as a yes.

“I see that you take after your father verbally,” said Dorothy drily. “How unfortunate. Anyway, my point is that we have the tiniest bit of effect on the way your life plays out. Your father and I are the most active members of your team, despite our numerous, er, disputes.”

“Back up a second,” I ordered. “Did you just say that you were controlling my life?”

Calvin, at the end of his rope, reached down to tug at one of Dorothy’s earlobes as if she were a child in need of disciplinary action. Momentarily abandoning her balletic appearance, Dorothy shot a small attack spell at my father’s fingers. He yelped silently and retreated, shaking out his injured hand. As he glared at her, Dorothy conceded and returned his voice to him.

“We weren’t controlling you, Morgan,” Calvin said, massaging his throat.

“Funny. That’s what Dorothy seems to have just implied.”

“It’s not like that,” my father said. He attempted to place a consoling arm around my shoulder. “We only have the ability to prod you in the right direction. Think of us more as guardian angels than puppet masters.”

“Well, you’re doing a shit job!” I said, shaking off his embrace. “What are these disputes about anyway? Are you fighting over me?”

Dorothy lifted a hand to examine her nails, unconcerned with the conversation at hand. “Your father seems to think he has superior knowledge when it comes to you. Never mind the fact that I’ve been lazing about in the otherworld for a greater number of eons. Anyone rational would accept my guidance without question.”

“Your guidance is what got her in this mess in the first place,” my father argued back. At his great height, he should have lorded over Dorothy, but she seemed to possess an ability to micrify anyone who challenged her.

“If I recall correctly, Calvin,” she said, “she wasn’t exactly thriving when you sent her to that infernal hellhole you call New York.”

My father opened his mouth to form a retort, but I stepped between them to halt their argument.

“Whoa, hold up!” I said. “What do you mean, you sent me to New York?”

“I didn’t send you there,” said Calvin. He seemed exasperated by the knowledge barriers between him and me. “I simply wanted to get you out of Yew Hollow, which I did. It was upon Dorothy’s request that we send you back.”

“Because the coven’s welfare was at stake,” Dorothy interjected.

“Yes, because God forbid the coven’s welfare be challenged,” my father bit back. “She would’ve been safer in New York.”

“And the Summers coven would have perished without her,” snapped Dorothy. “Do you care not for your wife or other daughters?”

That shut my father up. As for me, the fact that two dead people had been puppeteering certain aspects of my life didn’t seem as bizarre as it should have been. In fact, it almost made more sense this way. At the very least, I wasn’t entirely accountable for all of the terrible crap that had happened in Yew Hollow since my return there.

“Can we just, I don’t know, relax?” I requested. I was beginning to think that we really were in purgatory, and the bickering match between my father and great-to-whatever-degree grandmother was the boulder to my Sisyphus. “Because if we’re going to be any help to the coven at all, I’m going to need the two of you to draw up a peace treaty.”

But Dorothy and Calvin seemed content to stare obstinately in opposite directions. I heaved a sigh.

“Seriously, people, work with me here,” I said, snapping my fingers at them impatiently. “Dorothy, what did you say about walking into the water?”

Dorothy, her arms crossed stubbornly, cast a stern look at my father before responding. “This part of the otherworld is rather simple,” she explained. “You merely have to accept death and greet it willingly. The river is your passage through this level and into the next.”

“So all I have to do is walk into the river?” I clarified. “Will I be able to come back? I can’t just waltz into the rest of the otherworld if there’s no way back.”

“I’m not sure I understand the question,” Dorothy said with a puzzled expression. “Back to where?”

“Life,” I said confidently.

Calvin and Dorothy exchanged loaded looks with one another. I could practically hear their unspoken conversation. It seemed that, on this one subject, they agreed with each other.

“Morgan, I’ve already told you,” my father began, his tone grim.

I raised a hand to stop him. “I understand what you’ve told me. I’ve chosen to reject it. Moving on. I need the two of you to think outside the box. At the very least, I need to know if what Dad told me earlier is true. Can I talk to another medium who is still on earth?”

Dorothy contemplated the question. “Well, I suppose it could be possible. After all, that is how I’ve managed to have such a profound effect on you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Dorothy twirled her fingers once more, purposely displaying the deep, royal-blue color of her witchcraft. Again, I recognized the similarities between her witchcraft and my own. “Well, Morgan, you see, I am essentially the original you.”

Calvin scoffed at Dorothy’s theatrics. “What she means is that, when she was alive, she was also a medium and the third of four daughters. Those coincidences make the bond between the two of you stronger, much to my dismay.”

“You were a medium?” I asked Dorothy.

“Still am, darling.”

“How did you watch over me?” I asked eagerly. “How did you manipulate my life or whatever? How can I do the same for Gwenlyn?”

Dorothy’s eyes widened at my enthusiasm. “So many questions! You have to earn the right to those answers, I’m afraid.”

I wrinkled my nose. “What kind of bullshit afterlife rule is that?”

“One for the ages,” she responded. “I’m afraid a courtship with the otherworld doesn’t come quite so easily as you seem to hope.”

“I don’t want to romance the otherworld,” I said, already annoyed with Dorothy’s metaphorical way of speaking. “I just want to get back to Gwenlyn and Mom and the rest of the coven.”

“One step at a time, Ace,” my father said. “First, we have to figure out if it’s even possible to get a two-way conversation going with Gwenlyn.”

“Indeed,” said Dorothy. “Although I do have an alternate idea should our attempt at communication fall through.”

“What kind of alternate idea?” I asked, trying to quell the balloon of hope inside my chest. If Dorothy was thinking of other ways to help me, it meant that she was actively considering the possibility of my request to return to Yew Hollow, but I didn’t want to get too attached to any plan that might fall through. As it was, Dorothy already seemed hesitant to reveal additional information about her other idea.

“In all likeliness, what I’m thinking of won’t work out,” she said. She glanced quickly at me before looking away. It was the jittery implication of this action that made me think she wasn’t being entirely truthful.

“Why bring it up, then?” I questioned, peering at her through narrowed eyes. Calvin looked on curiously. My best guess was that he wasn’t familiar with whatever concept Dorothy intended to propose.

“Morgan, you must understand,” she said, her voice low with the significance of her intention. “If we go after this… thing I have in mind, there’s no guarantee that we would even be able to use it properly, or even get it back to Yew Hollow for Gwenlyn to use. Besides, I shudder to think of what would happen if it fell into the undoubtedly inexperienced hands of your young apprentice.”

“What is this thing you’re even talking about?” I pressed, eager for more information.

“There’s a weapon,” she said. She spoke barely above a whisper as if frightened some other soul in the empty wasteland of the river’s beach would overhear our conversation. My father and I leaned in to catch her faint words. “A very old, very powerful weapon,” she continued. “It’s housed in the depths of the otherworld, in a place that will challenge the very nature of your sanity.”

“What else is new?” I muttered darkly.

“If we were to procure it,” Dorothy continued, her pupils dilating with the mere thought, “it would certainly be of use against your problematic boyfriend and his ghostly sycophants in Yew Hollow.”

“He’s not my boyfriend!” I said hotly. “And how do you even know about Dominic? Or his ghosts?”

“You forget I take great interest in your well-being, Morgan,” Dorothy said. “I know all about the goings-on in that blasted small town.”

“Right, of course. It’s all just some hilarious reality show to you guys,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “Tell me more about this weapon.”

“Well, if you manage to find a way to get it back to Yew Hollow,” Dorothy began, “whomever wields it would be able to put down Dominic’s ghosts. It would send them to the otherworld for good.”

“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” my father said. There were wrinkles of worry at the corners of his eyes. “Morgan, you have no idea the trouble a weapon like that could cause.”

“Dad, to be honest, I’m more worried about my family surviving Yew Hollow’s apocalypse than anything else right now,” I said, looking up into my father’s face. There was an infinite amount of warmth and a genuine worry for my fate there. I wasn’t quite used to having a father figure to care for me, but I couldn’t let emotions get in the way of saving the coven. Dad was going to have to deal with my course of action whether he liked it or not. After all, he couldn’t save me. Plus, according to Dad and Dorothy, I was already dead.

I faced Dorothy again. “I’m in. Let’s do it.”

“Whoa, there, little one,” Dorothy said, taking me by the shoulders. “This is no minute adventure we would be embarking on here. I’d be risking my eternal fate for you. That’s not something a woman like me can take lightly.”

“What’s your point?”

She fixed me with a penetrating stare. “If I help you do this, if we succeed in appropriating this weapon, I’m going to need something in return.”

I dropped out of her grasp, stepping away from her. “Of course you do. I should’ve known.”

“My dear, my intentions here are nothing but honorable.”

“Spit it out, then,” I said, unable to keep the note of disappointment out of my tone. “What do you want?”

She seemed to grow taller as she considered the weight of her impending request. “I want you to ensure the destruction of the yew tree in the town square.”

My ability to verbally express a reaction to this condition fell short. My mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water, waiting for my brain to catch up.

“Are you crazy?” I finally said. “That tree is one of the only lines of defense that we have in Yew Hollow. It’s saved us countless times.”

“That may be so,” Dorothy said, her expression stern. “But the coven must also protect the yew tree, and as of late, your dedication to this task has been less than ideal.”

“Whose damn fault is that?” I asked, annoyed by the fact that Dorothy seemed to be blaming me for Yew Hollow’s recent problems. If anyone was at fault for the disaster at home, it was Dominic freaking Dobbes.

My father gently took my elbow, hoping to calm me down. “Dorothy,” he said, “I think Morgan and I would both like to know why you want the yew tree destroyed.”

“Yeah,” I said unhelpfully.

“The tree, as you know, housed the root of our power,” said Dorothy. “When we first arrived in Yew Hollow, we poured everything we had into that tree. That’s why you felt so at home around it, Morgan.”

I sifted through the memories of my childhood, remembering just how much I had loved the yew tree. Even when my odd family made me feel like a complete outcast, I had always relied on the yew tree for a little love and protection. The rough bark of its trunk, the shadow of its twisting branches and leaves, and the strange and wonderful aura that pulsed through the tree itself were comforting to me at any time of day or night. Suddenly, I felt guilty for not providing the yew tree with the same kind of love. The tree had been taken advantage of, and I had done nothing to try and stop it.

“In any case,” Dorothy continued, snapping her fingers in front of my face to recapture my wandering attention. “It’s quite clear you’ve shirked your treely duties—”

“I don’t think ‘treely’ is a word.”

“—and the only way to spare Yew Hollow any more strife is by destroying the yew tree entirely,” she finished, ignoring my interruption.

“See, I’m not really sure I understand why that is,” I said.

Dorothy sighed. Obviously, I had missed a few crucial lessons about the history of the yew tree.

“The yew tree represents everything that the coven is,” Dorothy explained. “Even if it doesn’t currently house our coven’s magic, it is still symbolically the vessel for our craft. If the tree is destroyed, the original power will be distributed amongst the members of the existing coven and only those members.”

Dorothy’s intent was slowly clarifying itself. “So if we destroy the tree, we destroy Dominic,” I said. “He won’t have access to the original power anymore?”

“Not one lick of it.”

“What’s the catch?” I asked, wary of this plan. On one hand, it sounded like the perfect way to get rid of Dominic, but perfect plans never came without a price.

Dorothy side-eyed Calvin, as if reluctant to reveal further information in front of him. My father, human as he was, wasn’t privy to certain conversations. This he understood, so with a groan of acceptance, he turned his back to us and trotted away toward the water line. Once Dorothy was satisfied with the distance between my father and me, she grasped my hands in hers.

“There is a chance, my dear,” she said, keeping her voice low so that my father had no hope of overhearing, “that I can return you to your home.”

My heart, or whatever was left of it in this forsaken bit of the world, felt as though it stumbled through its next few beats.

“Are you serious?” I asked. “Or are you just trying to get what you want?”

“Morgan, the coven must go on,” Dorothy said, her fingers tightening around my wrists. “You may not accept this, but you were always destined for more than your sisters. You are the savior of the Summers, but to be our savior, you have to go back.”

“Look, I’m not some kind of chosen one,” I argued, blanching as the word “savior” echoed through my head.

“Perhaps not,” agreed Dorothy to my surprise. “Yet you are the only Summers witch with the wherewithal to do what is necessary for the coven. Your love, your devotion, your pigheadedness—”

“Wow, thanks.”

“—will help you to fight for what is right,” she finished. “The survival of the coven depends on your return to earth, and so I shall do my damnedest to make that happen.”

“You still haven’t told me the catch,” I pointed out. It all sounded too easy so far. An all-powerful weapon, a way to defeat Dominic, and the return of my soul to my body were the only things I needed. It seemed impossible that Dorothy could offer me all three.

“The catch, my dear, is that you must become the head of the Summers coven.”

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been jarred by this fact. My mother, Cassandra, was the current head of the coven, and she had already told me that she felt I was the best candidate to take over. I, on the other hand, didn’t want any of the responsibility. It was trouble enough to be a witch in the first place, but to govern an entire coven? Forget about it. I could barely handle myself. I figured I had years to talk my mother into choosing another one of my sisters to replace her, but as always, nothing ever seemed to go as I expected it to.

“If I agree to this,” I said, “you have to swear to watch over Yew Hollow for the rest of your eternal life. I’m going to need a whole hell of a lot of help to manage the coven.”

Dorothy held up a pinky finger. “I promise.”

I closed my eyes, composing myself. This pact wasn’t one that I could make lightly. Everything would change from here on out. I wrapped my pinky finger around Dorothy’s, a childish gesture that still seemed to hold some kind of steadfast validity.

“Deal,” I said.

Dorothy nodded, a look of triumph in her gray eyes. “Let’s get you across the river,” she said, using our linked fingers to guide me toward the dark water. “We can’t accomplish anything from this worthless stretch of no man’s land.”

“Wait,” I said, planting my feet. “Why don’t you want my father to know about this?”

Calvin still waited near the river, tossing pebbles into its murky depth. He was the picture of blissful ignorance, a man who had left his life behind too soon but still managed to make the most of all that remained.

“Your father, with all of his mortal shortcomings, will have a hard time accepting your return to earth,” Dorothy explained, watching as Calvin cast another handful of stones into the river. “He may agree to help us find the weapon, but I imagine he believes your soul will be compromised should you find your way back to Yew Hollow.”

“Will it?” I asked.

“That, my dear, is entirely up to you.”

I had already decided to take my chances. My family was at risk, and if the deterioration of my soul was the price I had to pay for saving the coven, so be it. I nodded to Dorothy, and together, we joined my father at the river’s edge.

“So?” Calvin prompted, taking my hand in his.

Dorothy held my other hand. The thought of my father and Dorothy flanking me as I passed into the next level of the otherworld was mildly comforting. At least I didn’t have to go it alone.

“We’re in agreement,” Dorothy said. “My help locating the weapon for the purity of the original coven’s magic.”

Calvin looked down at me. “Morgan?”

I glanced up at my father, squaring my shoulders off. He was asking for more than just my consent to Dorothy’s plan. He was ensuring that Dorothy, for whatever reason, wasn’t taking advantage of me.

“We’re in agreement,” I echoed.

“All right, then,” my father said, accepting my decision without argument or clarification.

The declaration of our unified goal had a slight lifting effect on the weighty feeling in my chest. I gazed out across the river, wondering how I could possibly cross its eternal breadth. And if I did, would I ever be able to return? I took a deep breath. How many souls had remained on this side of the river, never able to face death or return to life? The thought stuck in my throat. I swallowed hard. There was only one way forward, and it was through the dark water before me. If I had any shot at helping the coven, it lay ahead of me. Not behind me.

“You’ll be waiting for me on the other side, right?” I asked Calvin and Dorothy, squeezing their hands even tighter.

“Absolutely,” said Dorothy, reaching across to hold onto my arm with her free hand.

My father’s warm, calloused fingers seemed to lend their heat to my own pale, frigid ones. “You know it, Ace,” he said with a reassuring smile.

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath in. “Here we go, then.”

Together, the three of us stepped forward, wading into the shallows of death.

3

In Which My Sanity Wavers

As soon as my shoes disappeared beneath the river, the water seeping in between my toes like icy tentacles, the air clouded with a misty fog. It closed around us slowly, thick and menacing, squashing any ability to see what might lay in front of us. When I glanced to either side, my father and Dorothy were all but invisible, their faces obscured by the unrelenting fog. At first, I still felt the pull of their hands in mine, so I calmed my mind and focused on sloshing through the river. The water rose to my shins, then to my knees, and before I knew it, I was submerged up to my hips. The current had strengthened too, and I leaned forward to push against it. It was only when my feet lifted from the pebbled river floor and I began to swim that I realized Dorothy and Calvin had disappeared.

Panic pulsed through me, and I spun myself around, splashing water in every direction in an attempt to locate Dorothy and Calvin. The fog was no help. I could barely see past the length of my own arm. Then my vision blacked out entirely.

I stopped moving, floating in the water, and gave in to the current. It seemed to be washing me in one direction, so I simply allowed myself to flow along with it. I closed my eyes, embracing the darkness and trusting the otherworld to guide me across the river to the next level.

“Morgan?”

My eyes flew open at the familiar sound of that voice, because it wasn’t Calvin’s or Dorothy’s as I had expected. It was Gwenlyn’s.

All was dark around me. The pitch blackness seemed to press at the space between my eyes. I shook my head, hoping to dispel the pressure building there, but to no avail.

“Gwenlyn?” I called out, hoping against hope that Gwenlyn hadn’t somehow ended up in the endless river of the otherworld.

Gwenlyn’s voice sounded again, but this time it was disjointed and hoarse. “Morgan, come back,” she sobbed. “Please come back.”

The sound of Gwenlyn’s crying tugged at the corners of my soul. As the river rushed me further into the otherworld, Gwenlyn’s voice seemed to follow me, echoing from all directions. I plugged my ears with my fingers, but it was to no avail. Her voice was clearer than ever. All I could do was listen to Gwenlyn’s disembodied pleas and drift aimlessly along, praying that I’d come out at the other end of the river physically unscathed. Emotionally, I was already screwed.

But Gwenlyn’s voice intensified in volume, making it impossible to ignore. She sang laments and eulogies directly into my mind, and I shouted out into the darkness, desperate to hear anything other than Gwenlyn’s doleful cries. I yelled and yelled, until finally, the river swept right over my head. I swallowed a lungful of black water, choking and sputtering. It wasn’t fair. I had already died once. I really didn’t need to repeat the experience.

And yet, somehow, I found myself, completely dry, at the front door of a large building. To either side of me stood Calvin and Dorothy, as if they had been with me for my entire trip down the river. I ran a hand through my hair, which had been soaked through with the river water only moments before.

“Are you okay?” my father asked. He reached out a hand, as if to pull me into a hug, then seemed to think better of it. I was oddly relieved that he had reined himself in. For some reason, I didn’t think I would be able to take the compassion. I didn’t answer the question, though, still reeling from the entire experience.

“It can be tough the first time,” said Calvin in a soft voice.

“The first time?” I asked, the words cracking in the back of my throat.

Dorothy cleared her throat. “When you spend a lot of time in the otherworld, you learn to travel between some of the levels. I can’t even count how many times I’ve taken a trip down that river.”

“Do you… hear things?” I asked in a small voice.

“What kinds of things?” my father asked, puzzled.

“Voices,” I said. “Of people you knew. Before.”

Dorothy and Calvin looked at one another. Clearly, neither one of them had experienced anything of the sort.

“It’s fine,” I said, shaking it off. “It’s probably just me freaking out. Don’t worry about it. Where are we?”

I gestured to the door in front of me. It belonged to a long, low building made of old red brick. Like the river, the building seemed to extend perpetually in either direction. As I glanced down its length, I noticed other doors and other people emerging from the river behind us. Without hesitation, these folks reached for the handle of whatever door was closest and disappeared inside the building.

“Don’t worry,” said Calvin, clapping a hand on my back. “This part of the otherworld actually isn’t so bad.”

He pushed open the door in front of us and held it open. I followed Dorothy inside, glanced around, and immediately relaxed.

We were in a bar.

In fact, the place looked strangely similar to one of my old college haunts in New York City. The light was low, the air was smoky, and music pulsed from unseen speakers. The bar’s patrons looked human enough, bobbing their heads along to the beat and sipping beer. Some of them peered up at television screens that showcased a football game. Others played billiards or loitered by an old juke box. A number of bartenders, dressed in all black, mixed cocktails and refilled beer at the taps. All in all, the whole place just seemed… normal.

“This is more like it,” I said, stepping toward an empty section of the bar.

“Well, you did ask for it,” my father said as the three of us claimed adjacent bar stools. “The otherworld often manifests to match your perception of it. Dorothy and I have been here before, so it’s mostly your subconscious that’s influencing what you see right now.”

“I’m totally okay with that.” I leaned past Dorothy to flag down the bartender.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” warned Dorothy. “Many souls get caught in this level. It’s comforting, I know, but you must resist its pull.”

Before I could even order, the bartender poured my favorite beer, a light ale, from the tap and set it down in front of me. I took a deep swig, letting its familiar flavor wash across my tongue. Somehow, the beer tasted colder and more refreshing than it had in the real world. I sighed contently, sinking down to rest my elbows on the counter. I nodded along to the music playing in the background. For the first time since I’d returned to Yew Hollow, I felt like I could sit back and unwind. My eyes found the nearest television, and I settled in to watch the game.

“Morgan!” My father snapped his fingers in front of my face. I had already zoned out, though, and the sharp click of his gesture only disturbed my blissful peace of mind.

“Hm?”

Dorothy confiscated my glass of beer before I could raise it to my mouth for another drink. She slid it to the other end of the bar, where another patron caught it and nodded his thanks.

“Hey!” I protested and attempted to get the bartender’s attention for a replacement.

“Look around you, Morgan,” my father hissed. “You aren’t meant to stay here.”

“Remember your purpose,” added Dorothy. “Find the weapon. Contact Gwenlyn. Save Yew Hollow.”

It was all sounding a bit too complicated now. If I was being honest with myself, all I wanted to do was enjoy the atmosphere around me. It had been far too long since I’d been carefree in a college bar. Thoughts of Yew Hollow drifted from my mind, carried away by the lazy smoke of a nearby cigar. I breathed in deeply, savoring the earthy, oaky scent of the smoke, and allowed my eyes to close.

For a moment, I only saw the dark inside of my eyelids. Then, out of nowhere, Gwenlyn’s face appeared, her eyebrows furrowed together and her lips pursed in an expression of extreme determination. She sat cross-legged with a familiar, leather-bound journal in her lap. It was Mary Summers’s diary, a firsthand account of all that had occurred during Yew Hollow’s conception. Gwenlyn flicked impatiently through its pages, as though she had already read its contents several times but still hadn’t found the information she sought. The clarity of the vision made me feel as though I was standing above Gwenlyn, looking down on her as she haphazardly searched through the diary. I could even see Gwenlyn’s tears of frustration leaking from her eyes. They dropped onto the pages of the journal, smudging the age-old cursive. Suddenly, Gwenlyn looked up as though something had caught her attention. She stared directly at me, her green eyes flashing with recognition, and mouthed my name.

In the otherworld’s bar, I nearly fell off my stool. My father steadied me, his strong hand at the small of my back.

“Whoa,” I breathed, planting my palms on the bar top in order to feel balanced again. I glanced around the room, noticing new, bizarre things. The bartenders, it turned out, were all the same person, cloned over and over to serve his many customers. The football players cast on the television screens had no defined faces, just blank, blurry features where their expressions should have been. Even more unsettling, though, was the fact that the majority of the bar patrons were not as lively as I had originally thought. Many of them stared off into space or into the depths of their glasses with vacant expressions, apparently unaware that eternity stretched out before them.

“Done playing pretend?” Dorothy asked wryly.

My eyes snapped back to her face, and I remembered why the hell we were here in the first place. I stood, kicking my bar stool back with such force that it toppled over and fell into the path of a passing soul, and said, “Yup, I’m finished with this place. Where to next? Which level is the weapon on?”

“A few down,” said Dorothy. She nodded at Calvin, who waved at the bartender. “I’m afraid you’ll have to solidify your willpower, Morgan. It only gets harder from here, and the temptations of this bar are the least of your worries.”

“Three shots of your best,” Calvin said to the bartender, who nodded, turned his back to us, and busied himself with some kind of liquor bottle.

“I get it now,” I insisted, still shaking off the strange paralysis that the bar seemed to inflict on its customers. “I’ll be more aware of that kind of thing.”

The bartender dropped three shot glasses off in front of us, all filled with some kind of ominous, black substance.

“What the hell is that?” I asked, wrinkling my nose.

“Our passage to the next level,” said Calvin, handing one of the shots to Dorothy and one to me.

I held the glass up to my eye, examining its swirling contents. “I’m supposed to drink this?”

“It tastes atrocious as well,” Dorothy said, her lips pursed in distaste. “I did warn you things would get harder.”

“I didn’t realize you meant in a Fear Factor kind of way,” I retorted. I took a whiff of the drink, nearly retching as the smell of tar reached my nose.

Calvin clinked his shot glass against mine and Dorothy’s.

“No point in putting it off,” he said. “Bottoms up.”

I steeled myself, plugged my nose, and threw back the shot. Before I could even register the acrid flavor of the alcohol, my brain seemed to flood with its immediate effect. My vision blurred, my head swam, and the bar disappeared around us, morphing into another setting entirely.

I fell to my knees in the middle of a damp, grassy clearing. My head felt heavy, weighed down by whatever foreign liquor had just flushed out my system. I gagged but nothing came up, and once again, I realized that the otherworld did not ease its new occupants into its aberrant existence.

Calvin kneeled next to me, brushing my hair away from my face. “How you doing there, champ?” he asked, chuckling. “Stings a bit, doesn’t it?”

“Worst hangover ever,” I choked out. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping to stop the world from swirling around me. When the worst of the nausea had passed, I gathered the courage to look around.

The three of us had materialized in a dark forest. The trees stretched perpetually upward, obscuring any sign of the stars, and a ceaseless, wintry rain beat down from the invisible sky. It soaked through my clothes quickly, chilling me to the bone.

“This ought to be fun,” I grumbled, pushing myself to my feet.

Dorothy’s eyes perused the perimeter of the clearing. There were no hints of other creatures, no crackling of branches or footprints in the wet grass, but I had the feeling that Dorothy wasn’t exactly on the lookout for bunnies or raccoons.

“We should move quickly through this level,” she said, ushering my father and me to the edge of the clearing and into the inky darkness of the trees. “I’ve seen too many souls fall to the feelers of this forest.”

I moved away from the closest tree. Dorothy’s words did not instill any sort of confidence within me, and the thought of those branches reaching out to close around my wrists gave me the willies.

“How do we get out of here?” I asked, hoping that Dorothy and Calvin knew enough about this level of the otherworld in order for us to pass through it posthaste.

“That’s the thing,” Dorothy said as she led us deeper into the forest. “This level is fickle. The exit is hard to find. People wander through these trees forever, unable to locate the portal to the next level.”

“Great,” I muttered. The rain seemed to be coming down harder now, and I was more than eager to find a respite from it. On the upside, if the only terrible thing on this level of the otherworld was the crappy weather, I couldn’t complain too much.

As if to prove me wrong, a great roar echoed through the forest around us, shaking the leaves from the trees. There was no mistaking the deafening sound for thunder. It surely came from the throat of some unknown beast. One look at my father’s widening eyes told me that my guess was pretty accurate.

“Run,” Dorothy whispered, and then she sprinted away into the night.

My father took hold of my elbow, tugging me along as we took off after Dorothy. We crashed through the forest, trampling underbrush and hurdling moss-covered logs. Whatever demon chased after us was unrelenting. The steady rhythm of four giant limbs tearing through the woods beat along behind our trio, as though an oversized lion was hunting us down. I blinked rainwater out of my eyes, desperate to see the ground in front of me. Ahead, at the top of a small hill, a dark shape loomed and, as it came into focus, I veered toward it.

“Morgan, no!” I heard Dorothy shout as I ripped my hand from my father’s grasp and sprinted flat out toward the mouth of a monstrous, welcoming cave.

“Do you have any better ideas?” I called over my shoulder, refusing to ease my pace. “We can at least hide from whatever that thing is!”

Dorothy and Calvin had no choice but to follow me. We struggled to run up the hillside, weaving in and out of the trees like drunkards. Behind us, the creature roared again, but its call was slightly muted. We had managed to put at least a little distance between us and it. The thought spurred me forward, and I crested the hill with the last bit of my energy. I skidded into the cave, slipping on the smooth surface of its stone floor. My father and Dorothy appeared over the hill only moments later, and I waved them into the depths of the cave.

As they joined me, I finally caught sight of our predator. It was massive, easily the size of a semi-truck, and covered in dark-green scales. It was too big to see its entirety through the maze of trees, but one glimpse of the foot-long fangs protruding from its mouth was enough to send me fleeing farther into the cave. Thankfully, it hadn’t seen us take cover, and as the three of us delved deeper into the mouth of the cave, the monster’s roars became harder and harder to hear.

“This was a mistake,” Dorothy said, panting.

“Our other option was to let that thing devour us,” I said, annoyed by Dorothy’s disparaging tone. “Aren’t you supposed to be the decision maker down here?”

“Morgan,” my father chided.

“It’s fine, Calvin,” said Dorothy.

The cave system was more complex than I had expected. Tunnels branched out in several directions, and I stopped short of the first fork in our path.

“Should we keep going?” I asked them, peering down each of the tunnels in turn. The cave itself glowed with a peculiar, greenish light, bright enough for us not to trip over the roughly hewn stone.

As if in answer to my question, the walls of the tunnel straight ahead of us blossomed with white flowers. They grew from the stone itself in quick succession, blooming in front of our eyes.

“Lilies,” Calvin muttered, reaching out to pluck one from the rock.

“The flower of death,” Dorothy added, her voice tinged with uncertainty.

“Sounds promising,” I said, but when I took a step down the tunnel of lilies, Dorothy reached out to stop me.

“Morgan, you have no idea what could be waiting at the end of that tunnel,” she said.

“Did you know that lilies are also symbolic of purity?” I asked her. I took her hand in mine, squeezing gently. “You said the otherworld shapes itself according to my thoughts. I’ve decided that this is the way we should go. Just trust me.”

No further arguments were made. Calvin and Dorothy allowed me to lead the way down the corridor of lilies. The green light of the cave seemed to refract off of their petals, illuminating our path. I walked lightly, keeping a cautious eye out, but the soothing sight of the flowers hid any sign of danger. Then we rounded a corner, and my confidence in my choice of tunnels died suddenly.

The scaled green monster sat before us, lounging upon a bed of lilies with its colossal front paws crossed over one another. I froze at the sight of it, but it merely gazed at us from tire-sized emerald eyes and yawned lazily, exposing its massive fangs.

“Do you wish to pass?” it asked in a surprisingly docile voice. I couldn’t figure out how it shaped words past its gargantuan teeth.

“Y—yes,” I stuttered, unable to look away from its immense girth.

“Then you must answer a question,” the beast said.

“And if we answer incorrectly?” my father asked, his voice stronger and more confident than my own.

The beast seemed to smile. “Not we,” it said. “She.”

I swallowed hard in response. The monster had dipped its head to indicate that I should be the one to respond to its question. “And if I answer incorrectly?”

“Then you remain with me until I see fit to ask you another question,” the beast replied, examining its claws with one giant eye.

“I suppose that’s better than getting eaten,” muttered Dorothy from behind me. I motioned for her to be quiet.

“Ask the question,” I said.

The beast shook itself out like a dog waking from a nap, its scales glimmering in the strange light of the cave, and stood. I tried not to back away as it approached me, its girth casting a shadow over Dorothy, Calvin, and myself.

“Morgan Summers,” it boomed. “To pass into the next realm, answer me this. What is your innermost desire, the one that eats away at your soul?”

My first thought nearly worked its way out of my mouth before I had the chance to think about it. I wanted to go back to Yew Hollow, of course. Alive. But the more I pondered the beast’s question, the more I realized that it didn’t want the easy answer from me. It wanted something more, a response that would not only hurt me to admit but would also hurt the others around me.

“My innermost desire,” I said, wishing that Calvin and Dorothy weren’t visible in my peripheral vision, “is to have never been a part of the Summers coven in the first place.”

Dorothy dropped her face into her hands, either so affected by my response or convinced I had answered the question poorly. My father simply looked dumbfounded.

The beast blinked, peering down at me. “You challenge your very existence?”

“I thought I only had to answer one question,” I replied wearily.

“Not so often does a mortal surprise me,” the beast admitted. It leaned down on its front paws, one of its emerald eyes now level with mine. “You may pass, Morgan Summers, and you may pass well.”

The beast’s jeweled eye grew in size, enlarging steadily until its pupil stretched and reached the stone ground. It dilated into a dark, round passageway that we were obviously meant to step through.

“Thank you,” I said to the creature, its massive face now oddly distorted by its transformation. Then I took Dorothy’s hand in mine, held my father’s arm with the other, and stepped into the deep blackness of the beast’s eyeball.

To my great relief, the passage from the beast’s realm into the next was pleasantly short and painless. The cave walls simply melted away like paint over a canvas, revealing the subsequent level of the otherworld.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, letting go of my companions to gaze around. The three of us had arrived at the food court of the largest and most exquisite shopping mall I had ever had the pleasure of visiting. Like the bar, this level was busy. People milled around from one store to the next, lugging shopping bags along behind them. Glass elevators, unsupported by any kind of shaft, transported shoppers up and down the various levels of the mall, and a massive marble fountain sprayed jets of water into the air in time to a lively tune.

A kiosk nearby showcased a number of doodads, all with various magical purposes. As I reached out to inspect a silver pocket watch—Never lose track of time again! Plato’s Pocket Watch keeps track of your eternal life in real-world time!—my father smacked my hand away.

“Don’t touch anything,” he ordered. “This level responds to greed for material possessions. If you want something, you can never leave.”

“No wonder it’s so busy,” I mused. Mortals in particular couldn’t help but be influenced by materialism. They had to be entertained at all times, and the otherworld’s mall was certainly entertaining.

Dorothy peered through the windows of an electronics store, apparently amazed by its contents. Several flat-screen televisions sat on display, showing various game shows, sports events, and soap operas.

“You know,” said Dorothy, “I’m glad I was never alive to be wooed by the wonders of modern technology. It all seems so overwhelming to me.”

All at once, every television in the electronics store switched to the black and white grain of static, as though the otherworld’s cable had suddenly gone out.

“See?” Dorothy said to me and Calvin. “Faulty, to say the least. Read a book. Sheesh.”

I ignored Dorothy’s comments, instead watching the televisions. The volume on each TV was loud enough to permeate the windows of the store, and the whooshing noise of the static steadily morphed into a recognizable voice. Then a face appeared on every screen, staring straight at me.

“Morgan?” the face asked, its familiar green eyes squinting at me through the various television sets. “Can you hear me?”

I took a step back in shock, short of breath. It couldn’t be.

“Gwenlyn?”

4

In Which I Acquire a New Toy

Gwenlyn’s face broke into a huge grin, then she breathed a giant sigh, and then she burst into tears. Alarmed, I reached out to plant my hands against the glass window separating me from the televisions inside the store, wishing that I could hug Gwenlyn and tell her that everything was going to be all right.

“Gwen,” I said, my voice firm to recapture her attention. “Is that really you?”

She nodded, her eyes still streaming with tears, and my shoulders sagged at the utter happiness that came with knowing that Gwenlyn was alive and well. Furthermore, she had found her own way of contacting the otherworld, tearing down the wall between the living and the dead. I had no idea how she had done it, but I thanked whatever gods or goddesses that might exist for Gwenlyn’s dedication. It all made sense now. Ever since I had passed into the otherworld, Gwenlyn had been trying to reach me. It was why I kept hearing her voice, why I had had strange visions as she attempted to breach the barrier between worlds.

“I could smother you in a hug right now, kid,” I said, the words getting caught in the back of my throat.

Gwenlyn barked out a choked laugh, then glanced nervously behind her at something I couldn’t see. “I have to be quiet,” she whispered to me. “I’m the only one in the town who isn’t under Dominic’s trance.”

Dominic’s trance. Of course. Before I had passed into the otherworld, Dominic, in possession of the Summers coven’s original witchcraft, had managed to spell all of Yew Hollow’s inhabitants, including the witches, into submission. My own mother and sisters, along with the rest of our coven, had ignored me, turning away from the battle before them as if it were no more than a particularly dry game of golf. The fact that they were still similarly afflicted was no surprise. Dominic would not have rewarded them with free will. The witches were easier to control this way. The only reason Gwenlyn had managed to escape Dominic’s trance was because she, like Dominic and me, was also a medium. This coincidence somehow prevented Dominic’s ghostly army from controlling Gwenlyn. It was a blessing. Without a connection to the real world, there was no telling if I could’ve helped Yew Hollow at all.

“Where are you?” I asked Gwenlyn, immediately concerned for her safety. I glanced behind me, where the other shoppers were oblivious to my otherworldly conversation. Calvin stood observing them, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked more like a security guard than my father, but I appreciated his instinct to protect me at all times. Dorothy, on the other hand, gaped at Gwenlyn. Clearly, despite her knowledge of the otherworld, she had never actually seen anyone make contact with the real world. The thought caused a powerful surge of confidence to pulse through me. If I could speak with Gwenlyn, then maybe my return to earth wasn’t such an absurd concept after all.

“I’m at your loft,” Gwenlyn said, and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “It’s the only place I could think of that Dominic wouldn’t check, since you’re gone anyway.”

“Does he know that you’re not under his trance?” I asked, leaning my forehead against the window as though I could push through it and fall through the TV into Gwenlyn’s world.

She shook her head. “No, thank goodness. I’ve been really careful to make it look like I’m just as oblivious as everyone else. He has no idea I’ve been trying to make contact with you.”

“How is everyone?” I said. “My mother. Malia, Karma, Laurel. Are they all right? What about the rest of the coven?”

“Slow your roll, Morgan,” Gwen said, once again throwing an anxious glance over her shoulder as if to check for one of Dominic’s minions. “Everyone’s fine. They all just go about their regular business, almost as if they’ve forgotten about everything that’s happened. The townspeople, too. They’re complete robots. But to be honest, I have worse news.”

A heaviness settled in my chest. What could be worse than Dominic’s hold over the entire town? Hadn’t he caused enough strife already? “What is it?” I asked, steeling myself for the news.

“Dominic’s practically gone insane,” Gwenlyn said, leaning closer into whatever source she was using to scry the otherworld. Her face filled up the entire television screen. “His mother and sister aren’t… human exactly.”

I hung my head. “I told him that it wouldn’t work.”

Gwen nodded grimly. “I don’t think he realized that bringing them back would require some kind of payment in return, you know? That’s why you got sucked into the otherworld to begin with.”

This much I had already figured out for myself. Witchcraft relied heavily on balance, and Dominic’s insane ritual to reawaken his mother and sister from the dead had taken its toll. Since I had been the only living soul around at the time, the otherworld had taken me in order to establish equality.

“They’re awful, Morgan,” Gwenlyn said. She tucked a strand of her dark hair behind her ear. “His mother and sister. They don’t even look like ghosts. They just look like vacant shells. Their eyes don’t focus on anything. They can’t speak. It’s utterly terrifying, and Dominic is in pieces over it.”

“I wasn’t enough,” I said, realizing at least one of the things that had gone wrong with Dominic’s ritual. “He brought back two souls and only sacrificed one in return. My death wasn’t enough to fuel both his mother’s and his sister’s return to life. That’s probably why they’re barely there.”

“Yeah, well, that hasn’t stopped Dominic from trying to figure out a different way to solidify their presence here,” said Gwenlyn. She rubbed absently at the back of her neck, as if to massage a knot out of the muscles there. “I thought his mother and sister were bad enough, but you wouldn’t believe what he’s done to try and fix them.”

“What could possibly be worse than sticking me down here in this eternal hell hole?” I asked, hoping that Gwenlyn was exaggerating.

“Zombies,” said Gwenlyn with a nonchalant shrug.

My jaw went slack. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“I don’t know if they’re zombies precisely,” she went on, “but after you got sucked into the yew tree and Dominic realized that his mom and sister were all kinds of screwed up, he started experimenting with other ways to bring back the dead.”

“Nooooo,” I moaned, banging my forehead against the window in frustration. Dominic was even more ignorant of witchcraft than I’d originally thought.

Gwenlyn smirked. “Be glad you’re not here, Morgan. I haven’t slept a wink since you’ve disappeared. Nightmares, you know. But the dreams are nothing compared to waking life.”

“What has he done?” I growled.

“You really want to know?”

No, I didn’t want to know. Unfortunately, it was my job to know. I nodded.

Gwenlyn swept her long hair away from her face and swirled it up into a knot at the top of her head. “He’s been messing with the bodies in the cemetery,” she said. “Possessing them or something. They dig themselves out of the ground, and let me tell you, it isn’t pretty.”

Yew Hollow really had become something out of a tacky horror film. Dominic had crossed the one line that, as a witch, you were never meant to cross. Necromancy, the art of raising the dead, was dark magic. When you played with it, it consumed your soul, and Dominic’s had surely blackened already.

“And the smell,” continued Gwenlyn. Her throat bobbed at the distasteful thought. “You can only imagine. Rotting flesh isn’t my preferred scent of air freshener—I’m quite partial to clean linens—but the whole damn town smells like death and decay.”

“That dumb bastard,” I muttered, wanting nothing more than to wring Dominic’s neck between my fingers.

“Yeah, he’s a real d-bag,” said Gwen. She looked around once more, and when she spoke again, it was in a nearly silent whisper. “Listen, Morgan. I have an idea to get you back, but it might be completely insane.”

I exchanged a glance with Dorothy, then looked over my shoulder to make sure Calvin was still out of earshot. “What kind of insane idea?” I asked.

“Okay, you know how you were sacrificed to get Dominic’s family back? I’ve found a ritual in Mary Summers’s diary, and all I need to reverse Dominic’s plan are two strands of hair. One from his mother, and one from his sister.”

I looked at Dorothy. “Is this the same plan you were thinking of?” I asked her, raising an eyebrow. “Why didn’t you tell me that Mary had written it in her diary?”

“I hadn’t the faintest idea that she had,” Dorothy said.

“Who are you talking to?” asked Gwenlyn, peering at me through the television screen.

I dragged Dorothy closer to me. “Dorothy, Gwen. Gwen, Dorothy,” I said by way of introduction. “Dorothy is one of the original witches of Yew Hollow, and also one of Mary’s daughters.”

Gwenlyn’s eyes widened as she took the pair of us in. “No way! The two of you look exactly alike. Except for the eyes. Wow!”

“Focus, Gwen,” I ordered, shoving Dorothy away so that Gwenlyn wouldn’t be distracted by our similarities. “Do you think you could get the strands of hair safely?”

“I’d have to sneak into Dominic’s place,” she admitted. “He’s living in the mayor’s house now, with his mother and his sister, but he’s hardly ever there. He spends most of the time in the graveyard with the ghosts and his creepy corpses, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find his mother and sister during the daytime.”

“Whatever you do, don’t get caught,” I warned. “I can’t lose you, Gwen. If it turns out to be too dangerous, just forget about it. We’ll find another way.”

Gwenlyn nodded, a confident smirk playing about her mouth. “Don’t worry, Morgan. I’m an expert at sneaking around.”

“Good,” I said. “You work on that. Meanwhile, we’re looking for a weapon down here that could get rid of Dominic’s ghosts, and zombies, I hope, for good. Is there a way for me to contact you again once we find it?”

“I think I have to contact you,” said Gwenlyn, “but I’ve pretty much got the hang of it now, so it shouldn’t be a problem to find you in the future. I’ll keep you posted. What’s this about a weapon?”

“Don’t worry about it right now. You just focus on getting me back to earth.”

She raised two fingers to her temple in a little salute, then she whipped around so quickly that her wild hair escaped from its topknot. “I have to go,” she whispered. “Someone’s coming. I’ll find you again when I can.”

And just like that, Gwenlyn disappeared from the television screens, leaving only static in her place. Worry clouded my mind at the thought of Dominic discovering Gwen, but I had to have faith in her ability to take care of things on her end. I allowed myself a few more seconds to gather my thoughts then turned to Dorothy and Calvin.

“Everyone ready?” I asked.

“For what precisely?” my father asked.

“This.”

I charged toward the nearest kiosk and pushed it over. Merchandise spilled in every direction across the floor of the mall, shattering. I aimed for the next kiosk and sent it flying. For good measure, I picked up a few items that hadn’t broken on their own and hurled them into the giant water fountain, watching them crack and splinter against the marble.

“Next level, here we come,” I muttered, marching into the electronics store. With all of my strength, I directed a mighty kick through the nearest television, feeling an intense satisfaction when it fell into the next one and started a chain reaction of falling electronics like dominos. Behind me, Dorothy and Calvin had joined in on the fun, rampaging through the mall to cause any kind of destruction they could. With a mad grin, I swept expensive speakers from shelves, ripped wiring from the walls, and smashed giant computer screens on the floor. When the noise of the demolition roared through my ears, taking over my senses, everything faded to black.

And stayed that way. No matter what direction I looked, darkness pressed in.

“Dorothy?” I whispered, frightened of what might be lurking in the shadows. “Dad?”

“Right here,” said my father’s voice to my left. I reached out, surprised to find his arm just inches from my own. I couldn’t even make out the whites of his eyeballs.

“Me, too,” said Dorothy, from my right. I felt her fingers search for mine, so I took her hand and drew the pair of them in closer.

My father’s voice was just as shadowy as the rest of this level, tinged with anxiety. “This is my least favorite level,” he said, his arm tightening around my shoulder.

“Mine, as well,” added Dorothy.

“I can’t see why,” I said dryly. “See what I did there?”

“It’s not the absence of light,” Calvin said. “It’s the voices.”

“I thought you two said you didn’t hear voices down here,” I griped.

“Not on the other levels,” said Dorothy.

We waited in silence for a few moments. I listened so hard that the quiet around us pressed on my eardrums, but as soon as I opened my mouth to scold Dorothy and Calvin for scaring me, I heard the first whisper.

Look at me. Look at me.

But there was nowhere to look, no creature to claim the disembodied voice. Or was it lurking in the darkness, waiting for the opportune moment to attack us?

Liar! Coward! Fool!

Another voice joined the first, a cool, slippery whisper. Then another, a low, hair-raising rasp. And another, a deceivingly dulcet hum. The voices built and built, infiltrating the space in between my ears. To either side of me, I could hear Calvin’s and Dorothy’s moans of distress through the cacophony. I focused on their pain, shoving the other voices away.

You’ll never return home. Rot here! Rot!

It’s all your fault, another voice said in my mind. You’re worthless.

Worthless.

“SHUT UP!” I shouted into the void, determined to block the voices out. I listened harder, trying to pick out Calvin’s ragged breathing and Dorothy’s defeated whimpers. Dorothy’s hand slipped from my grasp and slid down the length of my leg, as if she had dropped to her knees. They hadn’t been exaggerating before. This level affected them more than it affected me. I sank down to Dorothy’s level, pulling my father down with me.

They don’t want you. You can’t help them.

I ignored the voices, wrapping my arms around Dorothy and Calvin and pulling them as close to me as possible.

“I’m here,” I said loudly, hoping to break through Calvin and Dorothy’s auditory hallucinations, if that’s what the voices even were. “I’m here. We’re going to be okay. Don’t listen to them.”

Listen! Listen!

“Think of sunshine,” I told them, conjuring my own pleasant image in my head. I imagined Yew Hollow in the fall, my favorite time of year, when the sun streamed through the red and orange leaves, illuminating the entire town with a dusty, golden glow.

There is only darkness here!

I hugged Dorothy and my father even tighter. “Think of the way sunlight filters through the leaves of the trees,” I continued. “Birds flying by, singing, the whisper of a cool breeze through the trees. Think of fireflies and bonfires and festivals.”

The voices had quieted in my own mind, forced out by my positive thoughts. I hoped that Dorothy and Calvin were holding their own. Their breathing had slowed, at the very least, and Dorothy wasn’t trembling anymore. Furthermore, wherever we were had lightened up a little bit. I could now see the outline of my father’s hand clasped over mine. Without thinking, I began to hum the first tune that came to mind. “Que Sera, Sera.”

Pure, white light spilled from a long, tall line, almost as though someone had opened a door to a world made of solid sunshine. I surged to my feet, still singing, and dragged Calvin and Dorothy up with me. As the shaft of light widened, I tugged my companions toward it, then shoved my shoulder against what I hoped was an invisible door.

We fell through the passageway, spilling out into the blinding light of the next level. My eyes watered and stung at the sudden change, but I sobbed with relief as the last remaining whispers cut off suddenly. Calvin and Dorothy took longer to recover, both of them spread out on a bed of soft, bright-green grass. When my eyes had adjusted, I saw that we lay on the side of a grassy knoll covered in every hue of wildflower. A bluebird flitted by, singing merrily, and bumblebees hummed amongst the petals around us. So far, it was the most pleasant welcome we had had to an otherworld level, which immediately set my teeth on edge. It was too easy, too pretty and peaceful. Something had to challenge us.

“Indeed, it does,” said a familiar voice, responding to my unspoken worry. The colossal green beast from the forest level had reappeared, ambling over the knoll in no great haste. I was less afraid of it this time, even though I had no idea as to how it had traveled between levels with such ease. The creature obviously had deeper knowledge of the otherworld than Calvin or Dorothy, and its presence no longer alarmed me.

“Do you have another question for me?” I asked the beast, gazing up into its giant emerald eyes.

“I believe,” the beast rumbled, sunlight refracting off of its green scales, “that you have a question for me.”

I leaned down to help Dorothy to her feet. Calvin had managed on his own, brushing damp grass from the knees of his corduroy pants.

“Do I?” I asked, unsure of the beast’s intention.

“Do you?” it responded, somehow managing to paste an inquiring expression upon its massive, scaled face.

Bewildered, I looked to Calvin and Dorothy, wondering if they had any insight on the beast’s new game. My father shrugged with an apologetic grimace, but Dorothy stepped forward, toward the beast, one hand extended in what appeared to be a welcoming gesture.

“I know you,” she said, reaching out and setting her hand on one of the beast’s massive paws. “I didn’t recognize you in this form. When I saw you last, you were a man.”

The beast smiled, and despite its deadly fangs, the expression seemed genuine. “Indeed, I know all of the wanderers. I am a lord of the otherworld.”

“Lord?” I repeated. I had no idea that the otherworld was ruled by any sort of authority, let alone a herculean, shamrock-colored monster. What had we gotten ourselves into now?

The beast inclined its head in assent. “One of the kinder ones.”

“Then why did you chase after us in the forest level?” my father asked.

“To challenge your bravery,” replied the beast. It lowered itself to the grassy ground, neatly settling onto its paws like an oversized house cat, and winked lazily at me. “Needless to say, you’ve overcome several of my challenges in this world. A spectacular human, indeed.”

Pride swelled in my chest at the beast’s compliment, despite the fact that it had more or less admitted to putting the three of us through hell. The beast gazed at me, almost as if admiring my less-than-impressive appearance. I knew I had to look like crap. My muscles ached, my hair dripped with sweat, and my eyes needed a good, long rest. If the beast wanted a question from me, I was tempted to ask for a safe place to nap, but the thought of Gwenlyn alone in Yew Hollow forced different words from my tongue.

“We seek a weapon,” I informed the beast.

“Ah, your question,” it said, resting its chin between its paws. “Proceed.”

“Do you know where it is?” I asked, clenching my fists in anticipation of the beast’s response. “Or how to get it?”

“I do.”

It proffered no more information, much to my dismay. Beside me, my father shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, and I wondered what about the beast unnerved him so. Dorothy, on the other hand, now stroked the side of the beast’s neck, looking positively romanced by the polished texture of its glassy scales.

“Well?” I prompted the beast.

“You only asked if I knew, not to divulge,” the beast said. “Shall I?”

I sighed, rolling my eyes. “Please.”

The beast flipped over onto its back, nearly knocking Dorothy over with a benign swipe of its front paw, and observed me upside down. “It should delight you to know that I am, in fact, in possession of said weapon. Would you like it?”

“Is it that easy?” I asked warily.

“No, of course not.”

My father let out an audible groan, throwing his hands into the air. Unlike Dorothy, he did not seem to possess the patience to deal with the quixotic creature before us. I was just grateful that the beast had not exercised the use of its fangs in our presence yet.

“What do you want for it?” I asked the beast.

“Only one thing.”

“Which is?”

Its great eyes flickered toward my father, who still stood as far away from the beast as possible. “You must leave with me that which you will miss most. Then the weapon is yours.”

“What I’ll miss most?” I questioned. I hadn’t come into the otherworld with any of my own possessions and so had nothing to offer the so-called lord in front of me.

“It means me,” my father said suddenly, crossing his arms over his chest and eyeing the beast grumpily. “You resented me for never being a good father to you, Morgan. Here, we have a second chance at a relationship, and the beast means to strip that from you.”

I faced the beast, glaring up into its large face. “Is that true?”

The beast gave a monstrous equivalent of a shrug, once again disturbing Dorothy at its side. I stepped forward to pull Dorothy away from the beast, just in case it forgot how massive it was. “It does not seem so disastrous a price to pay,” said the beast. “I would treat him well. No harm would befall him. He would remain on this level, which, as you may have noticed, is quite serene.”

I couldn’t argue with the beast on that detail. This level was no more than a pleasant meadow during the height of springtime. The soft grass carried on for miles, and in the distance, I could even see the sparkle of a large, beautiful lake. I glanced at my father, considering my options.

A knowing look emerged on Calvin’s face, and he finally uncrossed his arms to approach me and grasp me by the shoulders. “Morgan,” he said. “You have grown into an incredible young woman. I would expect nothing less of a Summers witch. I’m so proud of you.”

I couldn’t stop tears from springing to my eyes. I already knew what my father was preparing to do.

“You need that weapon,” he said, sweeping me into a hug. “I’ll be fine here. We’ll see each other again, I’m sure.”

I wiped my eyes, pulling away to look my father in the face. “I’m going back,” I told him, unable to let him go without saying so. “Dorothy and Gwenlyn are going to figure out a way to get me back to Yew Hollow.”

He smiled, the warmth of his expression stretching to his eyes. “Of course you’re going back. You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.”

And with that, my father gave my shoulder one last comforting squeeze before facing the beast. “All right, you gargantuan gecko,” said Calvin, spreading his arms wide. “Here I am. I agree to stay with you. Now, give my daughter the weapon.”

The beast rolled over again, arched its neck, and gagged.

“Ugh,” said Dorothy, looking repulsed by the beast for the first time since it had presented itself to us. She backed away from the great green creature as it retched again, a gurgle brewing from beyond its long tongue.

With one last convulsion, the beast coughed a small, shiny object into the grass at my feet. Dorothy, Calvin, and I all leaned forward to examine it.

“A pistol?” I asked, crouching down to collect the matte-black handgun from its place amongst the wildflowers. “You expect me to defeat an army of the undead with one little pistol?”

5

In Which I Am Reborn

The pistol felt comically light in my hand. There was no denying that it was a beautiful weapon. Its smooth, black exterior was stealthy and handsome, but it seemed far too modern an object to consider it lethal to ghosts. It looked more like the standard piece the cops back in Yew Hollow would carry on their hips, not an ancient, all-powerful destroyer of souls.

I straightened up out of my crouch and brandished the small weapon at the beast. “Really, though? I was hoping for a grenade launcher or something, I don’t know, a little bit more substantial.”

The beast chuckled, a low hum in the back of its throat. “Do not underestimate what you do not know, Morgan Summers,” it said. “That weapon has known several shapes over an interminable period of time. I believe you humans once knew it as the sword in the stone.”

Dorothy nodded knowingly, as if she had already been privy to this bit of information. My father, on the other hand, looked as though he was trying very hard not to seem impressed.

“This was one of King Arthur’s swords?” I repeated doubtfully, turning over the gun in my hand. It was hard to believe that something with such an ordinary appearance had also graced the palms of such legendary heroes. The thought made me want to drop the gun back on the ground, run off over the rolling hills, and dive headfirst into the distant lake, never to surface again. Instead, I tightened my grip on the weapon, resting my index finger on the trigger. I held it up, aiming off into the distance, and peered over the sight.

The matte-black exterior of the gun was interrupted by the sudden appearance of bright blue lettering. It swirled around the barrel of the gun and down the grip until it flowed right over the skin of my hands like a tattoo the color of a neon sign. As the ancient words snaked their way up my arms, I examined my now-glowing skin in awe.

“It has marked you as a worthy bearer,” said the beast with a nod of approval.

“Is this witchcraft?” I asked. There was no denying that the power of the weapon had somehow seeped its way into my own being. I could feel it, pulsing beneath the surface of my skin.

“It manifests as witchcraft because you are a great witch,” the beast explained.

I pushed the sleeves of my shirt up to see that the lettering had extended up and over my shoulders. For good measure, I checked down the front of my shirt, breathing a sigh of relief at the sight of an un-tattooed torso. “Will this go away?” I said, brandishing the new decorations on both arms.

“Perhaps,” the beast said. “It may fade over time. It may remain. I suppose that depends on the clarity of your intention.”

“The clarity—more riddles? I can’t go back to Yew Hollow looking like a glow stick, man,” I said to the beast. “It’s not exactly conducive to stealth missions, you know.”

The beast bowed low to the ground—Calvin jumped aside to allow the massive creature more room—and blew a cool, breezy breath toward me. I felt it wash over me, rustling my hair and raising goose bumps on my skin. The bright tattoos faded a little, still visible but less conspicuous with the beast’s magical effect.

“That’s better, I guess,” I grumbled, pulling down my shirt sleeves to cover as much of the markings as I could.

“Your graciousness humbles me,” the beast said, an air of sarcasm embedded in the words.

There was no telling what the ancient lettering said, and if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t care to know. Once Dominic was gone, I didn’t plan on embarking on any other harebrained adventures with an invincible weapon. In my book, that kind of thing only led to more trouble. With any luck, the handgun would get the job done, and then I could chuck it right back into the otherworld where it belonged.

“What about ammo?” I ejected the magazine from the gun, examining the rounds inside. The bullets seemed normal enough, but like the pistol and now my own skin, they too glowed with neon-blue witchcraft.

“You’ll find it never needs reloading,” said the beast.

I clicked the magazine back into place. “Convenient.”

“Indeed,” agreed the beast. It prodded my father with one large paw, claiming Calvin for its own. “Be on your way now, if you don’t mind. I’m afraid all of this mortal excitement has quite drained my energy, and I find myself in need of a lengthy nap.”

“Wait!” I called as the beast encouraged my father over the first hill. “Won’t you help send me back to the real world?”

The beast paused, turning over its shoulder to behold Dorothy and me once more. “It is not in my nature to return lost souls to their bodies.”

“What was the point of giving her the gun then?” my father asked, halting his ascent over the hill. “If she can’t return home, she won’t be able to use the weapon. That’s a sorry deal.”

The beast sighed, understanding that Calvin wouldn’t proceed any farther until I was satisfied with the beast’s side of our agreement. The beast turned to me and said, “I cannot send you back to your home, but I can help you and your delightful escort here”—a polite inclination of its massive head toward Dorothy—“pass through to the last level of the otherworld. It’s closely attached to your mortal world, as your escort is aware, and so it will be easier for you to return to the place you consider your true home.”

“Is that true, Dorothy?” I asked. Even though the beast had provided me with the weapon that I needed to defeat Dominic, I was still wary of its intentions. It seemed to consider humans to be mere playthings, and I wasn’t quite willing to offer myself up as a life-sized Barbie doll.

Dorothy nodded. “Yes, and we could certainly use the help to get there. It would exhaust me to get both of us to the last level. Not to mention, it would be even easier for Gwenlyn to contact us once we were there.”

“Alrighty, then,” I said, stepping up the hill toward the beast and motioning for Dorothy to follow me. “Send us through to the last level, oh lord of the otherworld. Through your eyeball again, is it?”

“Through the lake,” the beast replied.

Without explanation, our party had suddenly shifted to stand at the edge of the placid body of water. I leaned over and gazed into its rippling depths. Unlike the river on the first level of the otherworld, the water of the lake was a clear, welcoming blue. Sunlight blinked off of the lake’s surface, and I had to squint upward to see the beast properly now.

“What do—?” I began, but before I could get the entire question out, the beast pushed Dorothy and me into the lake with one gentle nudge of its nose. I felt its cool scales press against my back, saw the water rush up to meet my face, and then splashed down into the depths of the lake. It was almost refreshing, no different than diving into a pool on a hot summer’s day, but I knew that this submersion meant the loss of something else.

Before the next level could claim me, I spun myself around, opening my eyes beneath the water. The image of the great green lord rippled above me, but it was my father that I focused on. Though he was obscured by the movement of the lake, I tried to fix his features in my mind. I would not see him again for a long time. Then I exhaled, watching my breath bubble to the surface, and let the lake take me.

I awoke in a comfortable, queen-sized bed, swathed in a downy duvet. The sheets were cool against my skin, and as I stretched to the far corners of the mattress, I forgot for a moment where I was. I felt clean and rejuvenated, as if I had finally had the chance to take a hot bath and sleep a full, uninterrupted eight hours.

“Up you get, my dear,” said Dorothy.

Reluctantly, I opened one eye to see Dorothy leaning over me. “Five more minutes, Mom,” I joked, but I propped myself up on my elbows to take in our new surroundings.

The final level of the otherworld was even more pleasant than the previous one. Dorothy and I now inhabited a spacious but cozy cabin, decorated simply and tastefully with my favorite autumn hues. The scent of freshly baked cookies wafted into the bedroom loft, as though someone was busy in the kitchen downstairs. As I kicked the covers off of my legs and walked over to one large window, I marveled at the level of detail in the otherworld. Outside, lazy snowflakes drifted down and settled among the branches of the trees. It was picture perfect, and were it not for the fact that Yew Hollow needed saving, I would’ve been content to spend my eternal life within the otherworld’s last level.

“Wow,” I said, my breath fogging the window.

“Don’t get too excited,” said Dorothy, joining me at the window. She draped a wool blanket across my shoulders, hugging me to her side. Then she rapped on the glass before us.

In an instant, the image outside shifted. The snowy trees vanished, replaced by the familiar sight of Yew Hollow’s town square. As the yew tree came into view, I rested my forehead against the window. I never thought that I would miss Yew Hollow, having had such a turbulent relationship with it, but I longed to stroll through the square again. Though, admittedly, I hoped my next jaunt through town would be free of the undead.

“This is how we keep an eye on the people that we love,” explained Dorothy. She swiped a palm across the window, and we were suddenly watching my mother, looking down at her from above. Cassandra busied herself at the stove in the kitchen of our house in Yew Hollow, in the process of adding potatoes to a large pot of stew. To my relief, she appeared unharmed except for the strange, vacant gaze of her gray eyes.

Dorothy swiped again. This time, the window showed my sister Karma, curled up in a nest of blankets in her bedroom and reading a book. Swipe. My youngest sister, Laurel, was outside in the backyard, gazing up at the stars. Swipe. Malia, the eldest of the Summers sisters, sat at the dining room table, mixing herbs for a spell.

“And the people we don’t love,” Dorothy added.

Swipe.

The graveyard. It was in shambles, the earth upturned. Many of the headstones were cracked and broken. Dominic’s army of ghosts cast an eerie, silver light across the devastation. They seemed to be standing guard over whatever occupied the rest of the graveyard, and I realized what Gwenlyn had meant when she said that waking life in Yew Hollow was now worse than her nightmares. Animated corpses, in various states of decay, wandered listlessly about the remaining headstones. It was a wonder how the bodies even managed to perform a function so simple as walking, considering the despicable state of them. I made to turn away from the window, unable to watch the dead amble amongst the living, but Dorothy held me fast.

“Look,” she ordered, pointing to the central area of the cemetery, where a large mausoleum stood.

As I watched, Dominic emerged from the tomb. Yet another of his undead cronies followed behind him, its empty eyes glowing with an unearthly, sickly green shade of witchcraft. Clearly, this was a newly summoned corpse.

“Dominic’s craft was purple,” I said, watching as the zombie joined its cohorts in the cemetery.

“Necromancy distorts witchcraft,” explained Dorothy. “He’s possessing the bodies. They aren’t simply reanimated corpses. They’re demons.”

“Demons?”

“Lesser ones,” said Dorothy, “but demons nonetheless.”

As we watched, Dominic crouched in the graveyard. For a moment or two, he only rested his forehead in his hands. Then he stood, kicked the nearest demon in what appeared to be a fit or tantrum, and yelled obscenities up into the sky.

“Not going so well for him, I see,” I said. I should have felt relief at Dominic’s frustration but it only made me even more uneasy. “Will the gun work on the demons?” I asked Dorothy.

Dorothy’s eyes narrowed as she watched Dominic stomp through the cemetery and disappear into the trees of the forest. “Yes. Fortunately, that weapon is strong enough to rid the mortal world of any negative influence as you see fit. Just be careful. Demons are no laughing matter, even if they are housed in poorly restored bodies.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, trying to sound sure of myself.

“It’s not you I’m worried about.” Dorothy released me to wrap her arms around herself as if she was struck by a sudden chill. “You’ll have to protect the others, Morgan. Your gun will be the only effective weapon against the ghosts and demons. Witchcraft and attack spells will slow them down, but ultimately, you’re the only witch in the coven that will be able to send Dominic’s creations back to the otherworld for good.”

I removed the wool blanket from my shoulders and cloaked Dorothy in it instead. “That’s if I’m even able to free the coven of Dominic’s trance.”

“Fortunately, I may have a solution to that particular dilemma,” said Dorothy. “Have you ever heard of a blood bond?”

I glanced sharply at her. Blood bonds had once been quite prevalent within our community. When one witch shared blood with another, it provided each witch with the abilities of the other. Covens often linked themselves together in order to strengthen their overall power, but sharing your life essence was no trivial decision. A blood bond was permanent. “I hope you aren’t serious.”

Dorothy continued to observe Dominic’s thralls as they paced about the cemetery. “You’ll need the coven’s help to truly vanquish Dominic. Even if they don’t have the power to kill the ghosts themselves, they can still assist you in doing so yourself. Since you arrived in the otherworld, I’ve been thinking of ways for you to thwart Dominic’s trance.”

“And the only thing you came up with was a blood bond?” I asked. “That’s walking a fine line, Dorothy. I know the coven is family, but a blood bond means sharing everything that makes me, well, me.”

She gripped the corners of her wool blanket, drawing it tighter around her. “I’m well aware of these consequences.”

“Yet you still suggest them?”

“To my knowledge, there is no other way to free the coven of Dominic’s grasp,” she said. “Unless you think you can take him on all by yourself, what with his cavalry of demons and ghosts. Do you have that much faith in your own abilities? Or is there something about your young apprentice that you haven’t shared with me?”

I sucked in a breath. Dorothy had a point. There was no way that Gwenlyn and I would be able to defeat Dominic on our own. He had too much fire power. We would need the rest of the coven’s help, even if it meant binding all of us together for the rest of eternity.

“What about Gwenlyn?” I asked Dorothy, pushing thoughts of the blood bond away for the moment. “Can you show her to me? We’re basically just waiting on her to contact us, right?”

Dorothy remained silent, her lips pursed.

“What?” I asked her. I had spent enough time with Dorothy to know that a keen comment often lay behind her impassive expression.

She pivoted from the window to face me. “I won’t show you Gwenlyn.”

I stepped away from her, back toward the bed. “Excuse me? You promised—”

“You made a promise too, Morgan,” Dorothy said, advancing toward me. She shook off the blanket, and it fell to the floor in a heap.

“To destroy the yew tree, I know,” I said, wondering why Dorothy’s faith in me had inexplicably faltered. Dominic had wreaked havoc on Yew Hollow, but there was no way I’d let him take over my own family’s legacy.

“You will waver,” Dorothy said. She took me by the shoulders, her fingers digging into my skin. “When the time comes to burn the tree, you will hesitate. But you must complete the ritual. It’s the only way. Promise me.”

“I already did,” I said and attempted to shrug out of her grasp.

She held me fast. “Promise me again.”

When I looked into Dorothy’s eyes, they were not the familiar gray of my mother’s. They burned with the intense royal blue of her craft, an odd and archaic display of power in our world. I gripped her wrists and said, “I promise.”

Thankfully, my sincere tone seemed to convince her of my dedication to the task at hand, since she released me and spun back to the window.

“Chances are, as soon as I show you Gwenlyn, she’ll be able to contact you,” Dorothy said, taking one last look at Dominic’s demonic camp. She swiped once more at the window, and finally, Gwenlyn came into view. This time, though, we did not peer down at the scene from above.

It was almost as if I were at home in my loft, sitting cross-legged across from Gwenlyn. She looked directly at me and smiled, but the expression did nothing to soothe my worry. In fact, judging by the bags beneath her eyes and her pale complexion, Gwenlyn had not slept since we spoke last.

“Gwen?” I said as Dorothy moved away from the window to allow Gwen and me to talk in private.

“Hey, Morgan,” she said, her voice hoarse with exhaustion. “You ready for this?”

“You actually got the hair?” I asked, a little incredulous. When she held two nearly invisible strands of hair up so that I could see them, relief flooded through me. Half of me was so proud that Gwen had managed on her own. The other half of me wondered what kind of hell Gwen had gone through to procure such a trivial piece of the human body.

“It wasn’t easy,” she rasped. She cleared her throat. “Dominic had some crazy protection wards around the house.”

“How did you get through them?”

“Magic,” she said, coughing out an unconvincing laugh.

“Are you okay?” I asked. She looked far from well. Her hair was tied back haphazardly, her eyes were bloodshot, and tear tracks stained her cheeks, as if she had been crying just before our call. “What happened?”

She lay the two strands of hair side by side on the floor in front of her. An empty olive-wood bowl stood nearby. “I’m fine. Just worn out. Are you ready?”

My heart leapt. I was more than ready to go back to Yew Hollow, but Gwenlyn looked like she could barely stand up straight, let alone bring my soul back from the otherworld.

“Dorothy,” I said, beckoning the older witch to my side. “Can you help Gwenlyn with this?”

Dorothy peered through the window at Gwenlyn. “Of course. I push, Gwenlyn pulls. My goodness, she does not look well, does she?”

“I can hear you,” Gwenlyn said, wiping a leaking tear from the corner of her eye. “I told you, I’m just tired. Can we just do this already?”

The edge to Gwenlyn’s voice cut through me. Something was wrong. Gwenlyn was one of the strongest people I had ever met, even for a sixteen-year-old. If something was bothering her—

“I’m ready,” said Dorothy. She raised her hands, royal-blue witchcraft glowing at the tips of her fingers.

“Wait,” I said, reaching out to push Dorothy’s hands back down to her sides. I looked at Gwenlyn. “Gwen, I know when you’re trying to hide something. What are you not telling me?”

For a moment, I thought that Gwen would only stare back at me, a look that was born out of both defeat and defiance etched on her face. Then she reached behind her and produced a simple paring knife. My breath hitched.

“I’m scared,” she said, her voice breaking. She ran a finger down the length of the paring knife.

“What’s the knife for, Gwenlyn?” I asked, willing my voice not to shake.

She refused to meet my eye. “The second part of the ritual.”

“What’s the second part?”

The knife made a daring path across the breadth of Gwenlyn’s right wrist, the skin there already marred by a collection of scars from past traumas. She’d been through hell and back before I had even met her, but somehow she had managed to muddle through all of her issues and find her place amongst the Summerses. She was family, and seeing that knife so close to her lifeline made my soul ache.

“The ritual to bring you back requires a sacrifice,” she said. Her fingers trembled as she adjusted the olive-wood bowl in front of her. “Balance. Equality. Equilibrium.”

“Gwenlyn,” I said firmly, tapping on the window in the hopes that it would get her to make eye contact with me. She glanced up.

“Once I do this,” she began, her voice now solid and steady, “you have to come back right away. You have to be the one to find me—to save me.”

“Save you from what?” I thundered, pounding on the glass. “Dorothy, help me here!”

Dorothy raised an eyebrow, watching as the knife hovered above Gwenlyn’s pale skin. “The girl is aware of her actions,” she said. “She’s doing what is necessary in order to return you to Yew Hollow. We have no other option.”

A realization clicked into place in my brain. I rounded on Dorothy without taking my eyes off of Gwenlyn’s trembling hands. “You knew?” I demanded of my ancestor. “You knew that she would have to kill herself for me? What the hell is wrong with you?”

Dorothy bristled with agitation. “She doesn’t have to die. Have you been listening to her at all?” she asked. “Once you return to the mortal world, you’ll have to find Gwenlyn and perform a healing spell. This ritual, her sacrifice for you, will establish the initial blood bond between the two of you. She won’t be able to heal herself. The ritual will only be complete when you save her life. She saves you, you save her. Equilibrium.”

“Equilibrium,” Gwenlyn repeated. Her eyes fluttered shut, as though Dorothy’s thorough explanation of the ritual had relieved some of the pressure to perform the spell correctly.

“Gwen, it doesn’t have to be like this,” I said. “I’ll find another way.”

“There is no other way,” Dorothy said.

“Shut up,” I shot back. I was pissed at Dorothy. She had known all along what Gwenlyn would have to do to get me back to Yew Hollow. In hindsight, I realized that my father’s dislike for Dorothy was justified. She cared solely about the survival of the coven. Since Gwenlyn wasn’t born into the Summers family, Dorothy considered her expendable. I wasn’t like that. I couldn’t just write someone off because they weren’t related to me. Gwenlyn had saved my life back in Yew Hollow, and here she was, planning to do it again.

“Morgan,” said Gwenlyn. My eyes snapped back to hers. “Promise me you’ll come find me as soon as you get back.”

“Don’t you dare do it, Gwenlyn—”

“Promise me, Morgan.”

The words echoed through my head. I had made so many promises already. More and more, it felt like I wouldn’t be able to keep them. The paring knife quivered over Gwenlyn’s wrist, and when I saw the tendons there tighten with intent, I broke.

“I promise, Gwenlyn.”

I closed my eyes as steel met skin, but not soon enough to avoid seeing the rush of blood that welled up at the long gash Gwenlyn had made along her arm. When I gathered the courage to glance up again, the olive-wood bowl overflowed with Gwenlyn’s blood, and she lay on her side, her entire body illuminated with the forest-green hue of her witchcraft.

I felt a pull at my core, as if someone had tied a cable around my waist and was yanking me along behind a truck. Beside me, Dorothy chanted in Latin, and the glow of her craft filled the room and pushed at my back. The magic smashed me against the window as if trying to force me through it. I released a strangled yell as an unyielding force tightened around me, strangling me from head to toe. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear.

And then I took a great, gasping breath of putrid, earthly air.

6

In Which I Reunite With My Sisters

The unmistakable smell of rot attacked my nostrils. I lay flat on my back, cold mud seeping through my clothing, and stared up through the thick trees at a navy night sky that indisputably belonged to the real world. The stars blinked down at me, a serene sight that clashed with the abrasive scent of decay invading my nose. Gwenlyn’s ritual, her sacrifice, had worked.

Gwenlyn. She was my first priority. How long had my return to the mortal world taken? Was Gwenlyn still alive? I pushed myself up from the earth, my hands squishing through the soft, overturned dirt. It would have been too easy for Gwen’s ritual to dump me right at her side. No, I had been yanked back to some dark corner of the forest with no knowledge of how many miles it might be back to my loft. It didn’t help that my head felt so light that it might float away like a balloon in high winds. Traveling between spirit realms was no walk in the park. I rested my forehead in my muddy palms, willing my body to get it together. The longer I lingered, the less likely it was that Gwen would survive. If she didn’t pull through, I’d never get the chance to shoot Dominic in the face.

A sudden shot of panic pulsed through me. Had the beast’s pistol made it back to the mortal world with me? I didn’t remember having it in the last level of the otherworld. I patted myself down, finding nothing, then combed through the dirt and dead leaves in the hopes of unearthing it. Finally, my fingers made contact with smooth, cool metal. A moan of relief found its way out of my mouth as the pistol’s neon-blue lettering flared beneath my touch, and I tucked the gun into the back of my jeans for easy access. Then, with the help of a sturdy tree trunk, I heaved myself to my feet and lifted my eyes to take in the world around me. Immediately, my ribs tightened around my lungs.

I was standing at the edge of the cemetery, in full view of every ghost and demon that Dominic had managed to enthrall.

The only good thing was that none of Dominic’s minions had noticed my presence yet. The demons seemed incapable of much movement without Dominic’s immediate influence. Most of them sat near the graves they had so recently vacated, staring longingly into the gaping holes of the earth as if wishing they could return there. The ghosts, on the other hand, lingered near the outer edges of the graveyard, chatting with each other or herding wayward demons back to the center of the cemetery.

I swallowed hard, trying to get rid of the lump in my throat. If any one of the ghosts noticed me, they would certainly alert Dominic to my presence in the mortal world. The only upper hand I had at the moment was Dominic’s ignorance of my return. I had to get out of the cemetery unnoticed. With a steadying breath, I took one tentative step backward, away from the hellish scene of the graveyard. None of the ghosts noticed my agonizingly slow retreat. So far, so good. I took another step, then another, feeling each footfall out to avoid tripping over any tree roots or rocks. When my view of the graveyard was obscured by the trees, I pivoted on my heel and took off at a dead sprint toward the direction of my loft, where Gwenlyn lay dying. As I vaulted a large boulder, I pleaded with my shaky legs to support me long enough to reach her.

“Going somewhere?”

I plunged through the silvery light of a ghost, emerging on the other side feeling as though I’d just taken a dip in a frozen lake. Stumbling, my foot caught the underside of a tree root, and I tumbled forward, reaching out to break my fall. I spun around, frantically crab-walking away from the ghost as I tried to regain my footing. The ghost chuckled darkly at my feeble escape attempt then reached down to grab the front of my T-shirt and hauled me to my feet.

“Ronan,” I gasped as the ghost drew me closer to his face. He had been a mountain of muscles when he was alive and possessed the kind of bulk that wasn’t possible without the help of a cocktail of steroids. Unfortunately, death hadn’t diluted the effect. Ronan was Dominic’s right-hand man, and before my jaunt into the otherworld, I’d managed to piss him off a fair number of times. Of all of Dominic’s ghosts, Ronan was the worst one to welcome me back to earth.

“Hello, Morgan,” said Ronan, baring his teeth. I pushed at his hands, which were still wrapped tightly around the neck of my T-shirt. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“Yeah, I was just out for a stroll,” I snapped. He lifted me up, and my feet struggled to find purchase with the forest floor.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” he snarled.

“The otherworld wasn’t really my scene,” I said, shrugging.

Ronan narrowed his beady eyes. His knuckles pressed against my throat, but I held back the cough that threatened to escape. “Your boyfriend misses you.”

“Ugh, how many times do I have to say it?” I said, my voice crackling past the force of Ronan’s tightening fingers. “That repugnant asshole is not my boyfriend.”

“In any case, I’m sure he’ll be over the moon about your sudden reappearance.” Ronan smirked as my mask of indifference fell. He knew that I’d be screwed if Dominic found out about me. “How’d you manage it anyway?”

“Manage what?” I choked out.

He shook me, and my feet abandoned the ground entirely. The breath whooshed out of my lungs with the punch of Ronan’s movement, and I scrabbled at his wrists, desperate for air. “You’re alive,” he hissed. “Dominic’s tried every damn ritual in the book to make his mother and sister human again. Nothing’s worked. Yet here you are. I saw you vanish into the otherworld. For all intents and purposes, you should be as dead as my late wife.”

My voice was barely a croak. “It didn’t take.”

“This will.”

He set me down to grasp either side of my head with both hands, as if he intended to twist it off like a bottle cap. “Say goodbye, Morgan Summers.”

But before he could so much as twitch my neck in either direction, I reached swiftly for the back of my jeans to free the pistol, pressed the barrel to the underside of Ronan’s jaw—“Goodbye,” I said—and pulled the trigger.

A blinding bullet of blue light ripped through Ronan’s face, exploding out of the top of his head. For a second, I saw his eyes widen, then the swirl of tattoos on my arms flared as if in reaction to my use of the pistol. Ronan stumbled backward, releasing me to cradle his own head between his palms. The blue light of his bullet wound flashed again, brightening, and began to devour him whole. With an inhuman scream, Ronan folded in on himself, shrinking into the dark dirt of the forest floor.

And then he was gone. No trace of the ghost remained, and I stood stock still, my hand still frozen in position around the grip of the gun and my lungs working furiously to return blood to my brain.

The tattoos on my arms faded as I gathered myself. Then, with renewed vigor, I ripped through the rest of the forest at a breakneck pace. There was no time to stand around in awe of the pistol’s power. Gwenlyn needed me.

I burst through the unlocked door of the loft, practically kicking it down, then raced up the stairs to the bedroom. Gwenlyn lay slumped over, the bloodstained paring knife still between her limp fingers. The olive-wood bowl had tipped over, spilling her blood across the oakwood floorboards. It had pooled around her, soaking through the fabric of her clothing and matting her hair. I fell to my knees at her side, taking her ruined wrist in my hands. She had drawn a long gash parallel to her forearm, tearing into the artery there. Thankfully, the blood had already begun to clot. Gwenlyn’s unconsciousness was most likely a product of the ritual, then, rather than blood loss.

As gently as I could, I drew Gwenlyn into my lap, straightening her limbs into a more comfortable position. Then I pried the paring knife from her hand.

“Please let this work,” I whispered, my eyes turning skyward. I thought of Dorothy, watching from that warm, safe cabin in the otherworld as I attempted to save Gwenlyn’s life.

I drew a long, shallow scrape on my forearm, a mirror of Gwen’s own wound, wincing at the bite of the blade as blood welled on my skin. I flung the knife away—it skittered across the floorboards like a frightened mouse—and lifted Gwen’s arm again. Pressing my arm to the deep gouge in her wrist, I drew my witchcraft from the deep place in my core where it resided and breathed two words in Latin. Heal her.

For one soul-sucking moment, nothing happened. Gwenlyn remained unconscious, her pulse beating feebly against my own wrist. Soon enough, though, my royal-blue witchcraft snaked its way around our entwined arms. As my blood mingled with Gwen’s, my chest tightened. The tattoos on my arms shimmered again, illuminating the loft with a soft beryl glow. A sudden pain shot through the laceration on my wrist as the witchcraft began knitting my skin back together. In my lap, Gwenlyn stirred, her heavily lidded eyes opening.

“Nice tats,” she mumbled.

“Oh, thank goodness,” I said, folding over Gwen to give her a hug.

She patted my forearm, which was still splattered with blood and mud, then pushed herself up from the floor. Her hair was a mess, matted through with dried blood. She looked me up and down. “For a dead woman, you seem just fine,” she observed.

“Speak for yourself,” I said, smacking her lightly upside the head. “I can’t believe you put me through that.”

She examined her wrist. A long, raised scar was the only reminder of her sacrifice, though it gleamed with the same neon-blue light of my tattoos. “It was the only way to get you back,” she said, running a finger over the scar. “Plus, I knew you wouldn’t let me die. I guess we’re officially blood sisters now.”

“As creepy as that is, I thought I’d feel different,” I said. It was true. Other than relief at Gwenlyn’s survival, I didn’t feel anything that might indicate a deeper connection between us. “I mean, a blood bond is meant to share a witch’s power, right?”

“You and I have the same ability, remember?” Gwenlyn pointed out. She reached out to take one of my arms, scrutinizing my tattoos. “We’re both psychic mediums, so why would we feel any different?”

“I guess we’ll find out when we try to link everyone else.”

“Wait, what? Who are we linking?”

I stood up, taking in the mess that we had made on the floor of the loft. I had tracked in mud all the way up the stairs, and I’d probably never be able to get the bloodstains out of the oakwood floorboards. I bent down, collected the paring knife, and stuck it in my back pocket.

“That’s how we can free the rest of the coven from Dominic’s trance,” I said, wiping my hands on the seat of my jeans before realizing how fruitless the action was. My jeans were just as saturated with mud as the rest of me. “If we bind the witches together, they’ll also become mediums, and Dominic won’t be able to control them anymore.”

“That’s genius,” said Gwenlyn. “Why didn’t we think of that before?”

“Because it’s not exactly an option that we can take lightly,” I said. I opened the door to my closet, unearthed two bath towels, and threw one to Gwenlyn. “We can’t do anything looking like a pair of corpses. Take a shower. Wash the blood out of your hair. It’s freaking me out.”

When we had both rinsed off and redressed, we sat at the small breakfast table on the first floor of the loft to regroup. I filled Gwenlyn in on some of my adventures in the otherworld, including the details of how I had acquired my new handgun. Then we tried to come up with a plan. Somehow, we had to link ourselves to every other witch in the coven, but with Dominic’s trance, it was sure to be a challenge.

“We’ll just take it one witch at a time,” suggested Gwenlyn as she chowed down on a package of stale mini donuts that I had unearthed from my long-abandoned pantry. I opted for an overripened apple. Apparently, nearly dying had quite an overwhelming effect on the appetite.

“You don’t think Dominic will know when the trance has been lifted?” I asked, peeling the sticker from the apple and pressing it to the tabletop.

“Not sure. But we don’t really have any other choice, do we?”

I sighed and picked at a dark spot on my apple before taking a bite. “Nope. We’ll start at the main house to track down my mother and sisters. If we get Cassandra first, that will definitely make things easier. The head of the coven is bound to have a huge impact on the bond.”

Crumbs fell from Gwenlyn’s mouth as she devoured another donut. “What do you think is going to happen when we get all of the witches connected?”

“I’m hoping we evolve into an all-powerful superunit that can take down Dominic’s army of living dead without a hitch,” I admitted, though I knew the chances of that were pretty slim. As much power as the blood bond would give the coven, it still remained that my new pistol was the only way to get rid of Dominic’s thralls for good. Even so, I wanted my backup to be as prepared for the upcoming onslaught as possible. At the very least, the witches had a much better chance of survival if we all shared each other’s abilities. I took one last bite of my apple, tossed the rest of it into the nearby garbage bin, and confiscated the donuts from Gwen.

“Hey!” she protested, licking powdered sugar off of her fingers.

“You’re going to crash from the sugar high,” I explained, throwing the package into the trash. “I need you on high alert. Are you ready to go?”

Gwenlyn blinked at me. “Right now? I nearly just died.”

“I was dead,” I countered. I fetched her bloodstained tennis shoes from near the door and deposited them at her feet. “We can’t waste any more time. Let’s go, kid.”

Once Gwenlyn had wiped the majority of the donut evidence from her face and put on her shoes, we turned out the lights at the loft and headed out into the dark forest. I had walked the path between my loft and the main house a hundred times, but now there was something ominous about the way the trees loomed above us. Even the light of the moon, pale and soft, was disturbing, much too reminiscent of the silvery pallor of a ghost’s presence.

As we neared the main house, the trees thinning out ever so slightly to reveal the backyard, Gwenlyn grabbed my hand and wrenched me back into the shadows.

“What?” I hissed at her, peering through the leaves.

“I heard something.”

I stopped breathing to listen. Sure enough, the faint murmur of a silky voice met my ears. Pushing aside a particularly bushy branch, I peeked into the backyard of the Summers house.

“It’s Laurel,” I whispered.

My lungs expanded at the sight of my youngest sister. She lay on her back, near the edge of our thicket of trees. Her long blond hair fanned out in the grass around her as she gazed up into the stars and cooed absentmindedly to the trees. Laurel had the ability to communicate with nature, so it was no surprise to find her out in the yard. If anything, it was a stroke of luck. One more witch to help us reach the rest of the coven.

“How do we go about this?” Gwenlyn asked, her voice just a breath of sound in the breezy night. “Should we just surprise her and pin her down?”

“Laurel doesn’t do well with violence,” I said. I leaned against a tree, contemplating our options as I watched Laurel swish her fingers through the grass at her sides. “Besides, I want to know what the coven thinks happened to me. What fantasy did Dominic plant in their minds, you know?”

“What are you going to do?”

Before I could lose my nerve or before I could think better of my stupidity, I stepped out from the shadows of the trees and into the moonlight. Behind me, I felt Gwenlyn’s fingers grapple for my arm, trying to pull me back, but I shook her off. I needed to know if my own sister still recognized me.

“Laurel?” I said in the gentlest tone I could manage with my wavering voice.

Laurel stopped singing to the trees long enough to glance up. Her vacant eyes drifted over me, almost as if I weren’t even there. Then she said, “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

I approached her warily. “Am I?”

“Yes,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows. “Are you a ghost?”

I knelt down in the grass beside her. “No. Laurel, it’s me. It’s Morgan.”

She tapped my nose playfully with her index finger, making me rock backward in surprise. “You can’t trick me, Dorothy. Why have you appeared to me?”

I stood up again, looking back at Gwenlyn. “She doesn’t even know who I am,” I said as Laurel gazed up at me in oblivious indifference. “She thinks I’m Dorothy.”

Gwenlyn stepped out from the darkness of the tree line, braver now that Laurel’s reaction was so subdued. “It could be worse,” said Gwen. “Dominic could’ve made them hate you or something.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said. I took a knee beside Laurel again, extracting the paring knife from the back pocket of my jeans. Thankfully, not every blood bond had to be as drastic as the one I shared with Gwenlyn. A prick of the finger would do it. I forced the point of the knife through the skin at the tip of my thumb, squeezing the blood out, then took up Laurel’s hand to do the same.

In an instant, Laurel’s long, delicate fingers—fingers that, in any other case, would never dare to hurt any creature of the earth—wrapped around my neck, her thumbs pressed to my windpipe. For the second time that evening, I fought for my own breath, except this time, I couldn’t simply pull the trigger of a ghost-killing gun to escape. Laurel’s expression was still serene and impassive, as though unaware of her violent attempt to murder her own sister.

My vision popped and spasmed with bursts of colorful light, but I could still make out the movement of Gwenlyn rugby-tackling Laurel, effectively dislodging her hands from my throat. Wheezing, I watched as Laurel managed to land a solid right hook to Gwenlyn’s cheek. Thankfully, Gwenlyn was much taller and broader than Laurel. She pinned Laurel’s hands to her sides and then straddled her, immobilizing my sister in a matter of seconds. Where Gwenlyn had learned her scrappy fighting skills I didn’t want to know.

“Get the knife,” Gwen said in a rather docile voice for someone who was sitting on the chest of another person. I plucked the paring knife from the grass and neared my sister, still massaging my damaged throat. Between Ronan’s and Laurel’s attacks, I was bound to have some gnarly bruising there tomorrow. If we lived through tonight, of course.

Gwenlyn dug her knee into the crook of Laurel’s right arm to prevent her from fighting back, then spread the fingers of Laurel’s hand. With some trouble, I managed to dig the paring knife into the skin of Laurel’s palm then pressed the small puncture wound in my thumb to the blood welling in Laurel’s hand.

As soon as our blood mixed, Laurel’s entire body relaxed. She stopped fighting the pressure that was Gwenlyn, and the vacant look in her eyes cleared away. In my head, a sudden awareness of the world around us flooded my senses. I could smell the crisp, dewy scent of each blade of grass. I could sense the maze of tree roots that extended in every direction beneath us. I could hear the breeze singing to me, humming lullabies into the night. The blood bond had taken hold. Laurel’s affinity with nature was now my own, and if the hazy look on Gwenlyn’s face was any indication, she had also been bonded with Laurel. I nudged Gwenlyn, encouraging her to roll off of Laurel, and looked down at my sister.

“Morgan…” For a moment, Laurel only looked horrified, tracing the angry red marks at my neck with her fingers. Then she threw her arms around me, drawing me into a tight hug.

“It’s okay,” I mumbled into her hair.

Laurel pulled away, her gray eyes shining with tears. “What happened? What’s going on? Did Dominic—”

“It’s a long story,” Gwen interrupted her. “Here’s the SparkNotes version: Dominic is an ass, Morgan has been to the otherworld and back, and now we have to bond the entire coven together by blood in order to put Dominic in an early grave. Got it?”

Laurel’s mouth dropped open. “You’ve been to the otherworld?” she asked me. “How? And we’re blood-bonded now? Morgan—”

“Laurel, I’d love to fill you in on all of the particulars, but we’re kind of in a rush,” I said. My voice was raspy, and I wondered if it was permanently damaged by all of the abuse. There was only so much a healing spell could do.

Together, Gwen and I hauled Laurel to her feet. She squeezed my hand. “All right, then. Who do we link next?”

“Mom, preferably,” I said. The three of us started across the backyard toward the main house, moving quietly through the tall grass. “She has the biggest pull on the rest of the coven.”

We crept up the steps to the back porch, wincing every time the old wood creaked with the pressure of our footsteps. I motioned for Gwenlyn and Laurel to stay back, tiptoed to the kitchen window, and spied inside. At first, the kitchen appeared empty, but then a familiar figure passed through the dining room doorway and laid a small, faceless doll on the kitchen counter. I ducked beneath the windowsill.

“Why is Karma still awake?” I hissed at Laurel. “And why the hell does she have one of those damn dolls in her hands?”

Karma, our second eldest sister, had the ability to manipulate people with, for lack of a better term, voodoo dolls. But Karma, in any other circumstance, was so aware of the ramifications of her power that she hardly dared to ever use it. The fact that she was carrying one around was unsettling to say the least.

“It’s only eleven o’clock,” Gwenlyn pointed out. I glanced up at the placement of the moon. For some reason, it felt like the middle of the night.

“And Karma hasn’t slept through the night since you disappeared,” added Laurel. “Dominic may have altered our memories, but we can still feel that something is inherently wrong. Karma’s probably worried about you and doesn’t understand why.”

“Because she’s worried about someone who, to her, doesn’t exist,” I said, cursing Dominic’s trance once again. Not only had he turned my own family against me, but he had also drawn a dark curtain over each witch’s existence. For however long I had been trapped in the otherworld, my family had been suffering.

Laurel joined me at the windowsill and chanced a peek into the kitchen. “What’s the plan?” she asked. “How do we link Karma?”

“Well, we sure as hell don’t send Morgan in,” Gwenlyn whispered fiercely. “You nearly killed her.”

“Excuse me for not being a fancy medium and immune to Dominic’s power, Gwen,” Laurel shot back in a low voice. “I’m usually quite the pacifist.”

“Pacifist, my ass—”

I held up a hand to stop them from bickering. “Are you two seriously duking it out right now? You can fight over who’s the best youngest sister later. For right now, Karma’s in there with a very sharp pin and a doll with my name on it, which isn’t exactly an ideal situation.”

“Laurel should go in and lure Karma outside,” Gwenlyn suggested, still glaring at my youngest sister.

“What? Why me?”

“Because Karma trusts you more than she trusts me,” said Gwenlyn with a shrug. “Once she’s out of the house, Morgan and I can take her down and do the blood bond. Bada bing, bada boom.”

“She has a point, Laurel,” I agreed. “It’s easy and efficient.”

But before we could come to a consensus on the plan, the screen door banged open and Karma emerged from the house, the doll in one hand and a sewing needle in the other.

“I heard you through the window,” she said in a flat voice, and plunged the needle into the heart of the doll.

7

In Which Dominic Deteriorates

A hot, searing pain pierced my heart before I plunged into darkness, losing consciousness the second after Karma’s sewing needle punctured the canvas fabric of the doll. I remained aware of the state of my heart, still beating but tricked by Karma’s craft into thinking it had been pierced by the sharpest of knives. It struggled to keep my body working, but my mind had already relinquished all of my willpower to Karma. Never in my life had Karma used her ability on me, not even during our petty sister-versus-sister fights when we were younger. I had always been aware of Karma’s power, but this was a whole new level of understanding; the prospect of unendurable torture always lingered at the tips of Karma’s fingers.

After what felt like hours, though it was probably only seconds, the agony faded just as rapidly as it had come on. I wrenched myself back to alertness, pulling short, labored breaths in through my nose. When I opened my eyes, I found myself lying face up on the firm, splintered wood of the porch with three worried faces peering at me from above.

“Morgan?” Gwenlyn leaned over me and smacked my cheek a few times. I focused on her face, wondering just how zoned out I must have looked in that moment.

I opened my mouth and croaked, “Where’s Karma?”

“I’m right here.” From the sharp edge in her voice and the steely look of her green eyes, I could tell that my sister had been returned to her right mind. I could also tell that she was furious with herself for not being able to resist Dominic’s trance. “Gwenlyn socked me in the jaw, and Laurel added me to the blood bond. Are you okay?”

Sure enough, I saw the red swell of a massive bruise spreading its way across the left side of Karma’s face. That was twice Gwenlyn had stopped one of my sisters from trying to kill me. Hopefully, she wouldn’t have to do it again. “Just give me a second,” I said, closing my eyes again. “I need a second.”

Someone’s hand closed gently around my wrist, and soon I heard Gwenlyn’s coarse voice hum a healing spell. Her aura, as well as Karma’s and Laurel’s, pumped its way through my veins, rushing to the places in my body that needed help. My damaged vocal cords knitted themselves back together, and the lingering feeling of tightness dissipated from its place around my heart. Now that the four of us were linked, the healing spell worked faster than it would’ve from the hands of just one witch. Unfortunately, it didn’t work to re-energize me. Between Karma’s and Laurel’s attacks, I had had all of the stamina beaten out of me. Still, there was no option to head back to the loft for a nap. We had to bind the rest of the coven.

When I was ready, I pushed myself up from the porch and into a seated position. Gwenlyn, Karma, and Laurel stood back to allow me some breathing room. Then I reached out, took hold of Gwenlyn’s hand, and let her pull me to standing. Karma looked on, her eyebrows still knit together in fury.

“Karma,” I said, bridging the distance between us to wrap my arms around her. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I shouldn’t have—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I repeated. I drew away from her and spun around to show her that I was unharmed. “Look. Good as new. And now that you’re included in the blood bond, it will be way easier to add the rest of the coven. Where’s that doll?”

In whatever scuffle had followed my blackout, the doll had been pitched into the yard. Laurel hurried off the porch to fetch it and brought it back to us. I tried to give the now grass-stained doll to Karma, but she shook her head, refusing to lay a hand on it.

“We need to link Mom,” I explained. “And from the looks of how things are going so far, she’s going to put up a massive fight when we try to do it. Unless you control her.”

“Did you not see what just happened?” Karma asked, still pushing the doll away. “Nothing good comes from my abilities.”

“You were acting under Dominic’s trance,” said Laurel. “I was too. I tried to strangle Morgan. Come on, Kar, we need you.”

“No,” Karma said, shaking her head. “Besides, we all share that power now. One of you can do it.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Gwenlyn. She snatched the doll from my hands and thrust it into Karma’s arms. “Get over yourself. None of us know how to work that ability yet, so if you don’t do this, Cassandra is probably going to try to kill all of us, and we don’t want that, do we? Ever heard of using your power for good? Suck it up, Karma, and bring your mother downstairs.”

Once again, I sent a silent thank you up to the heavens for Gwenlyn’s presence on earth. Her brusque take on encouragement somehow managed to get through to Karma. My sister took a deep breath as her fingers closed around the doll.

“Let’s go inside,” I suggested. Laurel pulled open the screen door so that we could file into the kitchen and then into the dining room. From there, we could see the front hallway and the bottom of the staircase. “All right, Karma. All you need to do is get her downstairs. I can do the blood bond. Gwenlyn and Laurel, you keep watch in case Malia wakes up. We’ll bond her next.”

“You keep watch,” ordered Gwenlyn. “I think you’ve lost enough blood tonight.”

“Look who’s talking,” I said shortly. “But fine. You do it. Karma, you ready?”

Karma nodded, the doll cradled in the crook of her arm. Though Karma had several dolls, this particular canvas one was versatile enough so that she could control whoever she wanted with it. She only had to set an intention. She inhaled, and the doll began to glow with Karma’s lilac witchcraft. The sewing needle appeared in Karma’s hand, but this time she wasn’t using it to inflict pain. She pressed the needle into the head of the doll, manipulating it with a few simple twitches of her fingertips.

The old steps creaked as a set of footsteps clambered down them. My mother appeared, pale and ghostly in the night, her long nightgown flowing behind her as she descended the stairs. Like Laurel’s had been, her face was devoid of any kind of emotion. She stepped down to the landing and joined her daughters in the dining room, all without any indication that she recognized us.

“Go, Gwen,” I whispered, nudging Gwenlyn forward.

“I’m going,” she said back, taking a tentative step toward Cassandra. “She’s just kind of creepy like this.”

I couldn’t disagree. I had never seen my mother so passive. As Gwenlyn reached for Cassandra’s hand, I held my breath, waiting for my mother to respond in defense of Dominic’s hold on her. But Karma kept Cassandra subdued, and Gwenlyn had no trouble using the paring knife to prick Cassandra’s finger. Then Gwenlyn dug the tip of the knife into her thumb and pressed the two minor wounds together.

Cassandra’s eyes cleared instantly, and Karma pulled the pin from the doll. My mind once again expanded to add Cassandra’s ability of foresight to its growing repertoire. My mother could see briefly into the future, which would come in handy when we marched off to face Dominic.

Cassandra glanced down at the blood on her finger, then back up to her daughters. “Malia?” she prompted, asking about our eldest sister. She needed no other explanation of the blood bond, immediately understanding our intention. Dominic’s trance needed to be broken, and if this was the only way, Cassandra could accept that.

“Still asleep,” said Laurel.

Cassandra nodded. “Bring her downstairs then.”

In a matter of moments, Karma had manipulated the doll to convince our eldest sister, Malia, to join the rest of the Summers women in the dining room. Gwenlyn performed the blood bond, and once again, I watched warily as free will was returned to one of my family members. It was a relief, as we all came together for a group hug, to realize that this was the start of fighting back. From here on out, it would be simple to link the rest of the coven, as long as everything went according to plan.

“We should split up,” Malia suggested right away, massaging her temples as if Dominic’s influence still lingered there. “That way, we can get the rest of the coven linked together much faster.”

“I agree,” I said, “but I also think that we need to get moving on a plan to get our power back from Dominic.”

“I assume you have an idea?” my mother asked, her shrewd gaze lingering upon the subtle glow of my new tattoos. “Witches aren’t usually marked with ancient runes for nothing.”

I crossed my arms, too aware of how every witch in the room now seemed intent on examining the markings. “I met Dorothy Summers in the otherworld,” I admitted. A collective gasp went around the room, which I ignored to plunge deeper into my story. “She told me that the root of our power is housed in the yew tree, which we kind of already knew. But she also told me that in order to reclaim our power from Dominic, we need to destroy the yew tree. The destruction of the tree—”

“Will strip Dominic of the power and distribute it amongst the coven,” Cassandra finished for me.

“You knew that already?” I asked in disbelief.

“It’s a piece of knowledge that is passed down from coven leader to coven leader,” she explained. “Other than that, it’s not often shared. How do you plan on distracting Dominic long enough to destroy the tree?”

“We need intel,” said Gwenlyn before I could answer. “Dominic’s gone down the rabbit hole, guys. He’s lost it. From what I saw last time at the mayor’s house, he’s planning something big, and you know it won’t be easy on the coven. I vote that Morgan and I spy on Dominic while you three link the rest of the coven. Two birds, one stone.”

“Why do you get to go with Morgan?” Laurel asked.

“Because I’ve been to the mayor’s house once already,” said Gwenlyn. “I know how to get in. Once we find out what Dominic’s planning and the coven is free, we can move on to getting the original power back.”

“Then we can kick Dominic to the curb,” I added.

“And how are we supposed to get rid of his army of ghosts?” asked Karma, exchanging a worried look with Cassandra and Malia. “They’re already dead. We can’t exorcise a whole battalion, not to mention these demons you’ve told us about.”

“I have a way to put them down,” I said, and I pulled the pistol from its place in my waistband to present it to my sister and mother. The barrel lit up again at my touch, as did the ancient runes on my arms. The witches, except Gwenlyn, all took hasty steps away from me, staring in awe at the weapon. “I got it from a lord of the otherworld,” I explained. “It’s the only thing that will send the ghosts and demons back for good.”

“Is it safe?” asked Malia.

I shrugged. “No idea, but it seems to work. I shot Ronan with it earlier. He basically evaporated.”

Cassandra extended a hand as if to take the gun from me, but she withdrew at the last second. “It’s settled then,” she said. “We’ll link the coven. You two scout out Dominic. We’ll meet back here.”

Karma, Malia, and Laurel headed for the front door—the rest of the coven lived nearby, in various houses in the neighborhood—but as Cassandra made to follow them, I held her back.

“Mom,” I said, keeping my voice low so that my sisters wouldn’t overhear. “There’s something else.”

“Yes?”

“Dorothy said that once we destroyed the tree, a new coven leader would need to be elected.”

My mother raised an eyebrow. There was no beating around the bush with her. “And that leader is to be you, I presume?”

I nodded.

Cassandra inclined her head in recognition. “I’m aware of this part of the ritual as well. Don’t worry about the transference of power now, Morgan. We’ll address it when the time comes. But remember, I always intended for you to become the leader of this coven.”

I opened my mouth to argue, to say that there had to be some other way to complete the ritual, but Cassandra whisked herself away, chaperoning my sisters into the night. I looked at Gwenlyn then gestured to the door. “Lead the way, boss.”

I had never been to the mayor’s house before. It wasn’t a mansion by any definition, but it was easily one of the grandest homes in Yew Hollow. Large columns flanked either side of its oakwood double doors, and a beautiful terra cotta terrace circled the second floor. This, according to Gwenlyn, was our way in.

“Dominic only placed protection wards on the first floor,” she explained as we crept through the shrubbery in the backyard. “I guess he didn’t think anyone would be able to get up to the second level, but there’s a giant oak tree right by the edge of the balcony. Idiot.”

The tree itself soon came into view. Sure enough, it soared right up to the balcony, its lower branches easily reachable. Gwen glanced up at the windows of the house to make sure no one was looking out of them and then darted across the yard, sliding into the shadows beneath the large tree. I followed suit. The tree was the perfect cover. I could barely make Gwenlyn out in the darkness as she pulled herself up to the first branch and started climbing.

Small twigs and broken leaves pattered down as Gwenlyn made her way up, so I kept my head ducked as I scaled the tree. It was a long way up, and my shoulders burned with the effort, but soon enough, the railing of the terrace was only a hand's breadth away. Gwenlyn had already made it onto the balcony, so she reached out a hand to steady me as I swung one leg over the railing.

“Nice,” she whispered, when both of my feet were on solid ground again. “Over here.”

The terrace was being renovated, and towering stacks of new terra cotta tiles had been piled up along the side of the house. We edged around these, taking care not to trip over the crumbling, cracked tiles that poked up from the balcony, and inched toward the first window. Gwenlyn peered inside, gave me the thumbs up, and we rushed past it together. The second window yielded a similar reaction. The view at the third window, however, in the center of the terrace, caused Gwenlyn to shrink away from it. She pressed a finger to her lips and pointed inside. My heart thundering, I switched places with her and glanced through the window.

I looked into a capacious, well-decorated bedroom adorned with an elegant canopied bed and an old-fashioned writing desk. Dominic sat at the desk, facing away from the window, his forehead cradled in his hands. On the bed, his mother and his sister lingered in stark contrast to the opulent linens. The state of them shocked me. Somehow, the inhuman pallor of their bilious green skin was even more disturbing to behold than that of the reanimated corpses in the cemetery. Their eyes were so deeply sunken in that they appeared black, and I could practically hear the chilling rattle of breath across their prominent rib cages and protuberant collar bones.

I swallowed back bile and glanced at Gwen. She nodded solemnly, confirming what was already evident. Dominic’s mother and sister were in no condition to be considered alive, and yet they were also far from dead. I thought back to when Dominic had first freed them from the otherworld. They had looked healthy enough, despite having been dead for several years, but in the time since then, to say that both women had taken a turn for the worse was a massive understatement.

“They look even more terrible than the last time I saw them,” Gwenlyn whispered in a voice so quiet that it was almost swept away by the light breeze. “Must be because you’ve returned to earth.”

“Too bad they won’t just wither away on their own then,” I muttered back.

As a silvery ghost entered the room, I retreated slightly from the window, scared to draw attention to our position on the terrace. Muted conversation met my ears as Dominic and the ghost—a slender, middle-aged man that I didn’t recognize—spoke to one another. Suppressing the blue light of my witchcraft, I spoke the Latin for an eavesdropping spell, and the ghost’s gruff baritone echoed out to the terrace as if the window was wide open.

“...haven’t seen hide nor hair of him ever since,” the ghost was saying.

Dominic slammed his fist down on the writing desk. “What’s the point of having you idiots around if you can’t even keep track of one another? Find Ronan, you halfwit. He can’t have gone far, and he’s the only one of you morons who wants to shed the coven’s blood as much as I do. I need him.”

“Yes, sir.”

The ghost made to leave the room, but Dominic called out again. “Wait,” he said, standing up from the writing desk. “Have you checked on the coven recently?”

“No, sir,” said the ghost. “We were under the impression that there was no need to do so. Your trance is still in effect, is it not?”

When Dominic turned to his mother and sister, I saw his face for the first time since he had unwittingly sent me to the otherworld. It was a travesty of his previous pulchritude. Not long ago, Dominic’s piercing blue eyes and confident smile could’ve entranced a whole room of women with just one look. Now, he looked more like a demon in disguise as a human. His cheekbones had hollowed out, and dark shadows encircled his eyes. He seemed thinner, less muscled, as if he had lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time. I wrenched my gaze away from Dominic—his haggard appearance was sure to haunt my nightmares—and focused on the ghost instead.

“As far as I know, it is,” Dominic replied. He lightly caressed his sister’s hair, and several long strands of it came away in his hand. He balled it up in his fist. “They shouldn’t be like this, damn it!” He spun around to address the ghost again. “Something’s happened, I know it has. They were still walking just hours ago. Now they won’t even blink.”

The ghost watched silently as Dominic snapped his fingers in front of his mother’s face. She made no indication that he even stood before her.

“God damn it!” Dominic roared. He crossed the room swiftly to confront his cohort. “I want every Summers woman dead, do you hear me? Round them up in the town square, Carter. Sacrificing all of them at the yew tree is sure to be enough to return my mother and sister to their natural states.”

“Are you sure you want to do that, sir?” Carter asked in a mild tone. “The townspeople are sure to notice if their beloved witches suddenly disappear.”

“The townspeople are under my control,” said Dominic lethally. “Do you dare question my orders?”

“No, sir.”

“Then do as you’re damn well told, Carter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now.”

Carter turned to leave the room, his silvery light disappearing around the corner.

“And find Ronan!” Dominic bellowed after him, his hollowed chest heaving with the force of his shout.

I moved away from the window, gesturing for Gwenlyn to follow me. We needed to get back to the rest of the coven before Dominic could send his ghosts in, and we had to find a way to complete the ritual destruction of the yew tree. There was no time to waste. We hurried across the length of the terrace, aiming for our natural ladder that was the old oak tree, but I slipped on a cracked terra cotta tile and landed with a loud thud. For one moment, Gwen and I stayed frozen, hoping that Dominic hadn’t heard my clumsy misstep, but the sound of the balcony door swinging open stopped my heart.

“Run,” I said to Gwenlyn, pushing myself up.

She took off at an impressive sprint, hurdling the railing of the terrace and landing amongst the thick branches of the oak tree. I ran after her as she disappeared from view, but my knee had taken the brunt of the fall and could barely hold any weight. I limped toward the railing, glancing behind me. Then I wished I hadn’t.

Dominic stood at the balcony doors, his lips curled into a dangerous smile. He was the devil incarnate. As I raced for the edge of the terrace, he made no movement to follow me, but just as I planted my hands on the railing to climb over it, a ray of pale-green witchcraft swept over me. I was wrenched away from the railing, dragged back toward Dominic by whatever spell he had employed. Horrified, I tried to summon a defense spell to free myself, but I was too distracted by Dominic’s wicked grin to actually work my witchcraft. I slid to a stop at Dominic’s feet, and his spell held me frozen in place.

“Morgan Summers,” he drawled, gazing down at me. “No wonder my mother and sister have deteriorated so quickly. When did you return from the otherworld?”

“None of your damn business,” I said. I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. Whatever Dominic had done to me had numbed my entire body except for my head. I turned away from Dominic as he knelt down to my level and lifted a hand to run his fingers through my hair.

“I missed you,” he said, “but I wished you had stayed dead.”

My snarky reply died in my throat as he gripped my chin and forced me to look at him.

“Do you know what I’m going to do tonight?” asked Dominic, and his blue eyes flashed with an intensity that I had once found handsome. The thought now made my stomach heave. “I’m going to kill your entire family, and I’m going to make you watch.”

And before I could respond, he pressed his dry, wasted lips to mine.

A loud crack echoed across the terrace, and Dominic disconnected himself from me to cradle the back of his head. As he turned away, he revealed Gwenlyn, standing above him and holding a broken piece of terra cotta tile between her hands. She had hit Dominic over the head with it. His attention to me wavered, and his spell released me. Dominic grappled for Gwenlyn’s knees, sending her tumbling across the terrace as she attempted to beat him away with the tile. I seized the back of Dominic’s shirt, wrenching him away from Gwenlyn. On one of Gwenlyn’s swings, the edge of the terra cotta tile had sliced a deep gash above his right eye. Blood poured from the wound, and Dominic wiped at it with the back of his sleeve, trying to clear his field of vision. I took the opportunity to aim a healthy kick between his legs. He grunted, keeling over. Then I grasped Gwenlyn around the waist—she had twisted her ankle in her effort to ward off Dominic—and half carried her to the railing. I heaved her over, listening closely for any signs of Dominic’s recovery, then vaulted the railing myself. As I shinnied down the oak tree, I caught one last glimpse of Dominic Dobbes. He was slumped up against the wall of the house, his palm pressed to the gash in his forehead, but his unobstructed eye remained fixed on me as I followed Gwenlyn to the ground.

8

In Which There Is Only One Way

Gwenlyn and I didn’t pause to rest until we were well away from the mayor’s house. We stumbled into a small clearing of the surrounding woods, both of us panting heavily. Gwenlyn leaned against a tree, rotating her ankle to feel out her injury. As she generated an easy healing spell, the strand of her witchcraft that now resided in me quivered like a single guitar string being plucked. I wondered if the rest of the witches were able to feel it as well or if it was just my close proximity to Gwenlyn that allowed me to ride shotgun on her spell.

Without the distraction of Dominic’s immediate presence, I could focus again on my own mind. There were several new things to explore, new abilities contributed by the other witches as my mother and sisters added them to the bond. I now had access to a whole host of powers, including weather manipulation, animal translation, the capacity to move and control shadows, and an innate sense as to where every other witch in the coven was currently located. I rifled through the coven’s collective potential, organizing the information into separate compartments of my brain to avoid being overwhelmed by it. A sense of unmitigated joy radiated through me. If every witch felt the same phenomenal cohesiveness that I did, the coven actually stood a chance against Dominic and his minions. I looked at Gwenlyn.

“Do you feel that too?” she asked, still out of breath.

I nodded, unable to keep a grin off my face. “We should’ve done this before Dominic even had a chance to get his army out of the ground.”

“If you hadn’t been dead, that might have been an option,” joked Gwenlyn. She tested her freshly healed ankle. “How’s your knee?”

Thankfully, the pain in my knee had subsided, but a dark bruise made the situation look worse than it was. Following Gwenlyn’s lead, I did a healing spell and watched as the bruise easily vanished in a few seconds. I gave a low whistle. It was the fastest healing spell I’d ever performed. I leaned experimentally on that leg, gleefully noting the complete absence of any pain.

“Good as new,” I told Gwenlyn. She shook her head in stunned disbelief.

Suddenly, a tug of power seemed to pull my eyelids shut. I went with it, recognizing my mother’s aura behind it. Cassandra had once described to all of her daughters what one of her visions felt like, so I didn’t panic when my view of the clearing was replaced with the dining room of the Summers house. My mother and sisters were due to soon return there with all twenty or so members of the coven in tow. Every seat of the dining room table was occupied as Cassandra filled the witches in on what Dominic had done to them. Then the vision vanished, and I returned to the clearing. From her absent expression, Gwenlyn had also been included in Cassandra’s vision.

“Let’s hurry back,” I said, crossing the clearing to wave a hand in front of Gwenlyn’s perplexed face. “We have to get to the yew tree and perform the ritual before Dominic has a chance to stop us.”

We hurried back to the house. Sure enough, the rest of the coven sat waiting for us, and when Gwenlyn and I stumbled into the dining room, a resounding round of applause burst forth from the witches. Heat rushed to my face as Gwenlyn stepped away from me and joined in on the applause.

“Enough,” I said, waving my hands to silence the coven. The clapping died down, thank goodness. I thought I would explode from embarrassment. “Listen up, everyone. By now, I’m sure that Cassandra has filled you in on my return and Dominic’s intent, but we have bad news.”

“More?” said someone from the back of the room.

“Unfortunately,” I said. “As you know, Dominic’s mother and sister have all but wasted away. Dominic knows that I’m back from the otherworld, and he thinks that all of you are still under his trance. He intends to sacrifice the entire coven beneath the yew tree tonight in the hopes that it will revivify his mother and sister.”

It was a mark of the severity of the situation that the coven did not erupt in angered conversation as they usually did at any mention of trouble. Instead, each witch gave me her undivided attention, waiting for further information and instruction.

“We all share each other’s abilities now,” I said, too aware that my words now were more of a motivational, directional speech than anything else. The coven would take whatever I said and run with it. “You’ll all be able to see Dominic’s ghosts now, and obviously, you are no longer susceptible to Dominic’s hold over the town. We have to take advantage of our connection with one another. The next few hours hold an uncertain future. Take this time to embrace each other’s gifts, to become one with your sisters, because it is our bond and our dedication to our family’s survival that will ultimately be our greatest defense. Forget your quarrels, your daily afflictions, and yourself. We are a single entity, and we will not allow Dominic Dobbes to soil the Summers name.”

The intensity of the witches’ spirits in the dining room was nearly palpable. They listened to my declamation with rapt attention, and when I paused for a breath, they remained silent and alert, as if expecting more.

“I’m proposing a plan,” I continued, “and I encourage every witch in this room to speak up with any improvements or revisions to this plan. Our goal is to regain the power of the original Summers coven. To do so, we must ritually burn the yew tree. The only problem here is Dominic’s presence. If he catches wind of what we’re doing, he’ll send his army to the town square faster than we can say ‘demon.’ As such, I believe we need to create a diversion to distract Dominic and lure him as far away from the town square as possible. Any suggestions?”

One of my eldest aunts, Alberta, raised a hand.

“Yes?” I called to her.

“It sounds like Dominic has already planned to come and collect the coven for his sacrifice, has he not?” Alberta asked.

“From what Gwenlyn and I gathered, that is correct,” I said with a nod.

“In that case, why not go along with his plan?” suggested Alberta. “He’s unaware of the fact that we’ve broken free of the trance. Half of the coven can wait in our homes and allow him to gather us together. That way, we can devise a sneak attack and detain him, while the other half of the coven performs the ritual at the yew tree. With any luck, Dominic won’t know we’ve stripped him of the original power until it’s too late.”

I tipped my head in pleasant awe. Alberta had always seemed like one of the crazier entities in the coven, but here she was with a perfectly workable plan. Had I communicated more effectively with the rest of the coven in the past, we might not have ended up neck-deep in Dominic’s emotional trash.

“Any qualms with that?” I asked the rest of the coven. No one objected. “Good. Before we start splitting up, though, I have one more thing to run by all of you.” I drew in a deep, steadying breath, planting my hands on the dining room table for support. “During the ritual at the yew tree, a new coven leader must be elected. The forces of the universe”—I gestured airily around me, implying that said forces weren’t exactly reliable—“have elected me to take over this responsibility for my mother. Despite this, I feel the need to ask every witch of this coven her option. Do you feel that this privilege and duty should fall to me? Or shall we vote on another course of action?”

As the question left my tongue, lingering in the tense atmosphere of the dining room, I found my mother’s gray eyes. A glint of pride flashed within them as she gazed upon me, and when she gave me a tiny nod of approval, my lower lip trembled in anticipation of tears. I bit down on it, determined to retain a stalwart demeanor before the rest of the coven, but when no one member of the coven raised any grievance at my question, I let slip a disjointed inhalation.

“Thank you,” I said in a quiet, rough voice. “Now, please decide which of you are going to lead off Dominic and which of you will follow me to the town square. Gwenlyn? A word, if you don’t mind.”

As the witches began to discuss the plan amongst themselves, Gwenlyn followed me into the entry hall. I sat down on the bottom step of the staircase, letting loose an exaggerated sigh. Gwenlyn sat on the step above me, then leaned forward to rest her chin on my shoulder.

“You okay?” she asked. “I know the whole ‘leader of the coven’ thing is kind of a huge deal for you.”

“I’ll figure it out,” I said, reaching back to take hold of Gwenlyn’s hand. The scar along her forearm still glowed with the same neon light of my new tattoos. “See this?” I said to her. “I think we’re more deeply connected to each other than the rest of the coven. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because we were both already mediums, but I have a feeling it’s because you were the one to bring me back from the otherworld.”

“Cool,” said Gwenlyn simply.

“Yes,” I agreed, “but here’s the thing. If I die—”

Gwenlyn abruptly drew away from me, yanking her arm from my grip. “Don’t, Morgan.”

“Shut up,” I ordered and rotated around to face her. “I have to say this while I still have the chance. This damn gun”—I gestured at the grip of the pistol protruding from the waistline of my jeans—“apparently only fires for me, but something tells me that if I die before I get the chance to shoot Dominic, that power is going to transfer to you.”

Gwenlyn sat in stony silence, avoiding my gaze by staring at the luminescent scar on her wrist.

“Gwenlyn, if I die, promise me that you’ll take the gun and put Dominic down.”

“You won’t die,” she said stubbornly.

“I know,” I said for her benefit more than mine. I had no plans to die again. I wasn’t quite ready to return to the otherworld just yet. Realistically, though, the possibility was too close at hand to consider ignoring. “This is just a backup plan, in the event that Dominic somehow gains an advantage. If I can’t kill Dominic, you have to. Capisce?”

“Capisce,” she mumbled.

“Good,” I said, patting her hand. “Now I want you to go with the half of the coven that’s going to lead off Dominic.” As she began to protest, as I knew she would, I clapped a hand over her mouth. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” I continued, “but one of the witches is telepathic. We can speak to each other’s minds at will, but distance is usually a hindrance. Since you and I are closely bonded, you should be able to contact me no matter what. I need you to keep your sights on Dominic, keep me updated, and let me know if anything goes off kilter.”

She licked my hand to get it away from her mouth. I obliged, wiping her spit off on the leg of her jeans. “Fine,” she said, “but I’m sprinting to the town square as soon as we take care of Dominic.”

“Fine,” I echoed. It was as good as I was going to get. Gwenlyn did as she pleased, and so far, she had never let me down. “You ready for this?”

“Let’s kick some ass.”

The coven’s new level of cooperation was astounding. We split evenly. Gwenlyn, Malia, and about ten other witches headed out to convince Dominic of their obliviousness. Cassandra, Karma, Laurel, and I led the remaining members of the coven to the town square. I had chosen my companions carefully. We needed Cassandra in order to complete the transference of the coven leadership to me. I’d brought Karma along in case Dominic should discover our plan. She had passed out her collection of voodoo dolls to some of the more willing members of the coven. If Dominic sent his army to the town square, Karma could direct the witches into manipulating Dominic’s demons. Laurel was also essential to our success. We did not expect the yew tree, in all its glory, to burn away without a fight. Since Laurel was the most familiar with the yew tree’s natural essence, it fell to her to ease the agony that was sure to accompany its destruction.

We’re in position, said Gwenlyn’s voice in my mind. It had been blissfully simple to work out our telepathic communication. It felt completely natural, like a cell phone call that took place entirely within our brains.

Keep me posted.

Roger that.

I disconnected with Gwenlyn as the town square came into view. I half expected Dominic to have stationed ghosts or demons to protect the yew tree, but then I remembered Dominic’s ignorance of our plan. The town square was quiet and still, and the yew tree loomed peacefully. Its branches rustled as the witches approached, almost as if in greeting, and a pang of guilt drummed on my conscience as I considered the crime of nature that we were about to commit.

I rested a hand on the trunk of the tree, allowing its harmonious aura to flow through me. With Laurel’s gift, the tree felt almost human, so when I revealed my intention to it, the swift stream of sorrow that the tree released in response brought me to my knees. I rested my forehead against its rough bark, trying to impart the necessity of our actions. The sorrow did not fade, but a sense of understanding grew from within the yew tree, and as I kneeled in the dirt beneath it, tendrils of the tree’s aura seemed to stretch out and wrap around me, pulling me into an invisible hug.

The witches had spread out, equally spaced in a loose circle around the yew tree. As I stood up again, Cassandra joined me in the center of the circle. Since the power transference was to occur between the two of us, we would be the ones to initiate the fire that would burn down the yew tree. Around us, the witches joined hands. One by one, a prism of auras merged, arcing from each witch to the yew tree like a bizarre, multibranched rainbow. The colors danced above my mother and me, a dome of vibrant colors. I tipped my head back, taking it all in. When I inhaled, the yew tree seemed to inflate with me, filling me with a wondrous vivacity.

Dominic’s here, said Gwenlyn’s voice. My chest tightened momentarily with the update. Carter, that other ghost, is with him, but no one else. No sign that he suspects anything of us. He’s rounding us up a few at a time, telling us to go to the town square. Kinda perfect, right? We’re going to rendezvous at the main house and catch him off guard when he follows. How’s it going with the tree?

It’s going, I replied. Stall Dominic as long as you can, but be careful. I can’t believe that he’d march into our homes without some kind of defense mechanism in place. He’s not that stupid.

I beg to differ. Even telepathically, I could hear the sass in Gwenlyn’s tone.

Seriously, Gwenlyn.

I got it, Morgan. Stop worrying.

She disconnected, but that certainly didn’t stop me from ruminating on all the ways things could go wrong in the next few minutes. Hopefully, Gwenlyn was smart enough to stay out of Dominic’s warpath. I refocused my attention on the task at hand. The yew tree deserved my full awareness.

Laurel began to sing, her voice lilting as it wrapped around the Latin words of the spell. One by one, the other witches joined in, stacking harmonies and intertwining new melodies with Laurel’s original song. The yew tree stretched upward, as though it were trying to touch the cupola of colors that haloed around us. Cassandra added her melodious soprano to the mix, her hands folded neatly in front of her as she crooned to the yew tree. Finally, I opened my own mouth to sing. It had never been one of my talents—I could barely carry a tune—but my addition to the tree’s song, no matter how rough, was imperative.

As the song continued its crescendo, my mother and I drew upon our craft. Then, at the exact same time, we directed our joint spell at the yew tree. A spark ignited amongst its lower leaves, jumping from branch to branch at an alarming rate. The fire burned a fluorescent blue, a color that seemed derived from the combined colors of mine and my mother’s witchcraft. It grew steadily, consuming the yew tree in a cerulean blaze. The fire snaked down the trunk of the tree and spread out to the tree’s roots, where Cassandra and I stood. It hovered near Cassandra’s feet, as if waiting for some sort of final command.

Confused, I paused in my singing to ask Cassandra, “What’s going on?”

My mother raised her voice to be heard over the chorus of voices. “Dorothy hid more than one secret from you, Morgan.”

“What do you mean?”

My mother lifted my chin with one finger. “This ritual requires more than just the transference of leadership. Five Summers women gave themselves to the yew tree in order to seal its protection of our power. To regain that power, we must also give something to the yew tree.”

“Give what?” I asked, my voice quivering.

There was a beat in which the fire crackled and the coven sang, but I was deaf to all of it as my mother responded to my question: “Ourselves.”

“I don’t understand.”

Cassandra took me by the shoulders, her gray eyes shining with reckless determination. “A coven leader accepts responsibility for every witch in her family. A coven leader represents every single soul that is a member of her family. A coven leader is symbolic. I am one person, but as the coven leader, Morgan, I am the coven.”

The fire at my mother’s feet snaked upward, encircling Cassandra’s ankles like some kind of ethereal jewelry. As I finally comprehended the meaning behind my mother’s words, I lost myself in the deja vu of the situation.

“Are you kidding me?” I shouted skyward. I had no idea who I was addressing. Maybe the heavens, maybe Dorothy, maybe whoever else might be responsible for playing with the emotions of mere earthlings.

“Morgan,” my mother chided. She might as well have been scolding me for spilling grape juice on the carpet.

“No, it’s not right!” I argued. I kicked out at the fire that made its way steadily up my mother’s body, but it only flared at my touch and continued on its way. “Every single person that I love has to give themselves up for me. Dad, Gwenlyn, and now you? You have to become one with the tree in order for us to complete this ritual? It’s not fair! Who will I have left?”

“Gwenlyn is still alive,” my mother pointed out, “and you will have your sisters, as well as the rest of the coven. Besides, Morgan, I’m not going to die. I’m going to become a part of the yew tree.”

I crossed my arms. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Mom, but we’re burning the damn tree to the ground!”

She took in the sight of the yew tree, engulfed in blue flames, then glanced down to where the fire licked at her waist. “You must understand, Morgan. In a few short minutes, you will be the coven leader. You will lead them well. I have the utmost faith in you. And when you defeat Dominic, I have no doubt that you will free Yew Hollow from every form of strife. ”

“Mom—”

“Listen to me, Morgan,” Cassandra continued urgently as the flames rose higher. She took a step toward the yew tree so that her back was flush against its fiery trunk. “Do not waver. Do not question your own instincts. You will go down in history as the woman who saved one of the strongest lines of witchcraft in the world. Do not forget that.”

And before I could respond, nothing but a sob making its way out of my throat, my mother was consumed by the blue flames. Her body seemed to fuse with the trunk of the tree, and above us, the fire blazed brighter in answer to Cassandra’s sacrifice. As the song of the coven swelled to an impossible volume, the dome of auras pulsed. Green leaves burned away to gray ash as the topmost branches of the yew tree succumbed to the witchcraft. Then the fire of the tree reached up and connected with the roof of witchcraft, flowed down to the witches, and the entire town square was bathed in a blinding white light.

9

In Which Dominic Makes His Last Stand

As the light faded, the fire settled, now a natural orange color rather than the peculiar blue. The tree still burned furiously—it would likely take hours for it to wither away entirely—but ash began to drift down like a snow flurry, settling in the hair and on the shoulders of the witches. Five new auras added themselves to the already expansive repertoire within me, and I recognized the familiar vibe of Dorothy Summers making itself at home in my bones. I also knew the other four auras by instinct alone; they belonged to the rest of the original Summers coven. Mary, Ann, Elizabeth, and Bridget had returned to Yew Hollow in the bodies of the present coven, and the power of the originals now coursed through our veins. I trembled with the sheer presence of such renowned individuals. My cheeks were wet, but I didn’t remember when I had started crying. I looked toward the yew tree, at the place near its trunk where my mother had vanished. It was a staggering contradiction that the complete annihilation of the tree was also such a beautiful sight. The bonfire crackled, immersing the town square in warm, golden light. I stood much too close to the conflagration for comfort or safety, but the heat that radiated from the tree dried the moisture running down my face. I stepped closer, closing my eyes against the glare and reaching toward the tree, when a coil of flame stretched out from the tree and licked my outstretched palms.

There was no pain, at least not any kind of pain that I had experienced before. It was as if my soul had ruptured within me, pressing into every hidden crevice inside my body. I was suddenly aware of every rush of blood through my brain, every pulse of my heart, and every cell itself. My mother’s aura flooded through me, accompanied by countless others, and I understood what was happening. The transference of the coven leader’s powers had taken. Not only was I aware of the personalities of the present coven but also of those of every witch that had ever been born into the Summers clan. My mother had not prepared me for the onslaught of information that I was now bombarded with, downloaded to my brain as if I were nothing more than a supercomputer’s hard drive for the entire coven’s existence. I sank to the ground without being consciously aware of my movement. Hands squeezed my shoulders, and someone’s fingers grazed my cheeks, but I had shut down. I opened my mind, allowing the unrelenting flow of identities to take over.

Morgan?

Gwenlyn’s voice broke through the cacophony of the transference process. It took all of my concentration to focus on her, but when I finally did, the chaos in my brain subsided just enough for me to take a breath. I opened my eyes. Karma and Laurel kneeled in the dirt on either side of me, waiting for me to regain my composure. I nodded to them, and together, they helped me to my feet.

Gwen?

Dominic’s gone, Morgan, said Gwenlyn as I brushed the dirt from my hands. He took off as soon as the original power shifted hands. That’s what that was, right? I feel like I just powered through a truckload of energy drinks.

Yes. What do you mean Dominic’s gone, Gwen? Where did he go?

No idea, said Gwenlyn. He went as white as a sheet, and the ghost that he had with him dimmed like a flashlight out of battery. They ran off, but when we tried to follow them, they’d already disappeared into the woods.

“Shit,” I said out loud. Instinctively, I knew that Dominic had no plans of backing down. This was his one and only opportunity to stamp out the Summers coven for good, and there was no way he would pass up on it.

“What is it?” Karma asked, still steadying me with one hand.

“Dominic’s not happy,” I told them, raising my voice so that the other witches in the square could here me. “Gwenlyn and the others have lost track of him. I highly doubt that he’s gone off to lick his wounds. It’s way more likely that he’s gathering his army together right now. Keep a sharp eye on the trees, people. We’ve got a fight on our hands, one that I intend on winning.” I turned to my sisters. “Karma, get ready to control those demons. Laurel, let’s see what we can do with the trees. Can they let us know when Dominic is close by?”

“Absolutely.”

My sisters strolled off, gathering the other witches together to begin building our defense strategy. I wandered away from the yew tree, turning my back on its steadily burning bonfire.

Gwen?

Yeah.

Where are you all?

On our way to the town square, answered Gwen. There was a hardened determination in her tone, the same kind of determination that now seemed to motivate my every decision. How are you, oh great coven leader?

I scoffed, but Gwenlyn’s sarcasm was just enough to ease some of the tension between my shoulders that intensified with every passing second. Overwhelmed, I answered truthfully, but I’m hanging in there. You got an ETA for me?

Five minutes.

“Morgan!”

Laurel hurried over to me, distracting me momentarily from my conversation with Gwenlyn. She took my hand, and her natural line of witchcraft jumped between us. The trees of the forest were alert, their roots vibrating with the drumming of footsteps.

“Do you feel that?” asked Laurel.

I nodded and withdrew the pistol from its place in my waistband. The ancient runes on my arms brightened again, surely reacting to the ghosts’ advance. “Dominic’s on his way, isn’t he?”

“He sure is,” Laurel said, her mouth set in a grim, straight line. “And he has every single demon and ghost with him. You were right. This is going to be one hell of a battle.”

“No pun intended,” I muttered. I stepped up onto the bench beneath the yew tree and raised my voice, addressing the witches as a whole. “Listen up, everyone!”

With only half of the coven in the town square, our meager number did not exactly inspire confidence. In fact, as I observed each pale face among us, I had to beat down the feeling that we were going to lose this fight. Dominic had a whole host of the undead at his service. I had fifteen witches who’d never really experienced this level of combat before.

“The rest of the coven is on their way to us,” I began. I took a deep breath, hoping to steady my wavering voice. “But it looks like Dominic might beat them here. We’re going to have to hold our own for a few minutes. Remember how many different talents you now have in your arsenal. Use them to your advantage. I’ll do my best to put down as many ghosts as I can, but until I can get to Dominic, you’re going to have to be relentless.”

The witches—some doe eyed and frightful, others glaring determinedly toward the forest—latched on to every word. Even so, my ability to make a coherent speech was beginning to fall flat. Dominic’s incoming army weighed on my mind, the anxiety of it all egged on by the trees’ updates.

“Protect one another,” I said. “Defend each other. I love you all.”

A clamorous crash echoed through the town square from the forest, and the coven drew in a collective gasp as we felt the trees nearest to the square dissolve into mourning. Dominic was powering through the woods with no regard for the nature around him. The glimmer of his ghosts was now visible through the shadows, growing brighter and brighter as Dominic’s army advanced on the square. Moans of his demons met my ears, and the disturbing drag of their decaying feet across the dirt was more than enough to set my teeth on edge.

They’re here, I said to Gwenlyn, hoping that the rest of the coven would arrive soon. We were outnumbered, plain and simple.

Gwenlyn’s response was terse. Nearly there.

The first ghost stepped out from the tree line. It was Carter, Dominic’s replacement for Ronan, and his shimmery face stretched into a wide grin at the sight of such a small number of witches lined up to greet him.

“Oh, you have to be joking,” he called out gleefully across the square. “Just look at you! How many of you are there? Fifteen? If that! Dear God, what a laugh.”

“Joke’s on you, bitch,” I said. I raised the pistol, took aim, and fired. The blue bullet shot across the square, smacking Carter right between the eyes. It seemed impeccable aim was another happy benefit of being the pistol’s master. Just as Ronan had, Carter disintegrated with a surge of blue light, leaving no sign that a ghost had ever occupied the space.

There was a beat of silence, and then Dominic’s army erupted from the trees. Ghosts and demons alike hurtled across the stretch of grass between the forest and the yew tree, a tidal wave of hate and dark magic. I fired shot after shot, taking out nine or ten ghosts in the front line. Beside me, Karma and a few other witches worked furiously with the voodoo dolls. Demons stumbled over one another, tripped up by Karma’s witchcraft, or halted in their progression to seize one another by the throats. Tree roots shot up from the ground in a firework show of sod and dirt, wrapping around the decomposing ankles of another group of demons and holding them fast. Dark clouds gathered as another witch summoned a lightning storm. Great bolts struck the ground, frying a few more members of the undead. Unfortunately, there was no way to stall the oncoming swarm of ghosts.

There was no sign of Dominic yet. As the ghosts closed in on us, encircling the yew tree, I kept an eye out for him. I didn’t expect to see him, not until he thought his ghosts and demons had control of the situation, but if he did decide to show his face, I wanted to be the first person aware of his presence.

The witches and the ghosts clashed together in a spectacle of auras and attack spells. The spirit of a young woman, her shadowy eyes set with malicious intent, and another of a lean, muscled teenaged boy leapt up to my bench on either side of me. I flung out a force field—another ability that I had gained from one of my coven—blasting them away, then shot each of them with the handgun. A wild feeling of pleasure rushed through me as the ghosts vanished, and I whirled around to pistol whip another attacker.

Below me, a gaggle of ghosts had overwhelmed Karma. She had dropped her voodoo doll in an attempt to subdue them, but despite a number of vicious attack spells, the ghosts were closing in on her. One of them had managed to lace an arm around Karma’s neck, dragging her away from my position. As Karma’s face reddened, I took a flying leap from the bench, surging through the spirits, and pushed the barrel of the gun to the forehead of Karma’s captor.

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you to play nicely?” I asked, and pulled the trigger before the ghost had the opportunity to answer.

Karma, now free, drew in a deep gasp but wasted no time in conjuring another aggressive attack spell. As the hex expelled the spirits from Karma’s personal space, I gifted each of them with a bullet to the face, my mouth twisting upward in a satisfied smirk.

“You’re enjoying this too much!” Karma called over her shoulder as she danced off to defend another witch.

She was only half right. I relished every single shot of the handgun, knowing that each recoil represented one more ghost that had been sent back to the otherworld where it belonged. On the other hand, no matter how many times I fired the pistol, it seemed that more spirits appeared to take the place of the ones that had fallen. The coven was doing better than I expected, but as I fought through the throng of ghosts and demons, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the witches already looked exhausted. I shoved a demon into the trunk of the yew tree, not bothering to watch as the fire devoured the corpse, and shot one of the spirits that was harassing Laurel in the back of the head. I spared a glimpse for Laurel’s relieved expression, then rushed to the other side of the yew tree to break up another mob. Despite how quickly I moved, I couldn’t be everywhere. Sweat dripped into my eyes as I jammed my elbow into a demon’s neck. Its head detached and rolled off, and I held back a surge of nausea as the decapitated body ambled off. I raised the gun and put the corpse out of its misery.

“Morgan!”

I spun around at the sound of Gwenlyn’s voice, relieved that it had reached me through my ears rather than my mind. The remainder of the coven charged toward the yew tree from the top of the high street, with Gwenlyn and Malia in the lead. Gwenlyn whooped with perverse delight as she joined the fray. Somewhere along her route to the town square, she had acquired a baseball bat, which she now swung heavily through the first demon that dared approached her. The metal bat made quick work of the demon’s rib cage, effectively dismantling it. The demon crumpled, and Gwenlyn leapt over it to aim another swing at the head of her next victim. At Gwenlyn’s side, Malia fought with slightly more finesse. It appeared that she had enchanted a number of throwing knives to damage ghosts and demons alike. With every toss, her daggers either tore through the tendons of a demon or ripped a black hole through the silvery glow of a ghost, only to boomerang back to Malia’s hand to be thrown again.

The two halves of the coven met near the inferno of the yew tree, and as Gwenlyn cleaved a demon in two with her baseball bat, saving another witch from its clammy grasp, a wave of confidence in my family rushed over me.

“Nice of you to join us!” I shouted to Gwenlyn, firing a shot over her shoulder to dispatch one particularly overweight ghost.

“I got here as fast as I could,” she called back and swung the bat upward, between the legs of another demon. It collapsed on top of her, and she shoved it off with a disgusted groan. “Take me to dinner first. Sheesh.”

I laughed, dancing around Gwenlyn to fire at will. My hand was already sore from the kick of the gun, but I pulled the trigger over and over, ignoring my cramping muscles. Nearby, Malia and Laurel fought back to back, nearly invisible within their swirl of witchcraft. Karma had retrieved one of her voodoo dolls. She now stood on the bench beneath the yew tree, protected by a three hundred sixty-degree force field, calmly manipulating the demons closest to her into disassembling each other.

“Morgan!” she called out to me. She pointed across the way, toward the tree line. “Your boyfriend’s here.”

I craned my neck to take a look. Sure enough, Dominic had finally appeared from the shadowy depths of the woods, and he was not alone. A fresh group of demons accompanied him, but they formed a strange barrier around something that I couldn’t see.

“Karma, what are they protecting?” I shouted over the din, taking aim at yet another advancing ghost.

Karma peered off into the distance. “Oh, you’ll never believe this.”

“What?”

“It’s his mother and sister.”

A demon’s head snapped back as I fired a bullet through its gaping nasal cavity. “Seriously? Dominic must still think he can sacrifice us to help them. Let them get as close to the yew tree as possible, then take out the demons. Leave Dominic to me.”

Karma nodded, keeping a keen eye on Dominic’s advancing battalion. The demons surrounding Dominic’s family steadily marched forward, but the coven followed my lead in pretending not to notice them. Dominic himself lingered behind his fresh soldiers. Was it fear that inspired him to stay away from the battle, or did he have something even more malevolent up his sleeve? Whatever the case, I kept Dominic in my peripheral vision, waiting for the best possible moment to catch him by surprise.

As the demons approached the brawl, another witch stepped up to the bench to join Karma. Together, voodoo dolls in hand, they began to trim down the number of demons protecting Dominic and his family. I body slammed another demon into the yew tree, and another swell of satisfaction ripped through me at the sight of the fire consuming its corpse. When I glanced back at Dominic’s shield, I caught a glimpse of his mother and sister through the wall of bodies. Karma had taken down enough of Dominic’s puppets for a gap to appear in his defense. They were close now, only five or so yards from the base of the burning yew tree. I leapt up to Karma’s bench in the hopes of a better angle and raised the pistol. I closed one eye, peered over the front sight of the handgun, and, with an ease that almost shocked me, fired two shots.

As each bullet found its mark, an alarming amount of things happened at once. My ancient runes grew to an intensity that nearly blinded me, Dominic let out an anguished howl of disbelief, and the yew tree’s fiery trunk split open to reveal the same portal to the otherworld that had once transported me to the gloomy bank of that gray river. It seemed so long ago that Dominic had made the mistake of trading me for his family, like another era entirely, so when his mother and sister, whose names I had never learned, embraced the portal with no hesitation, it felt as though a cycle had been completed. In the last moment before the two women vanished, I saw their gaunt, drawn faces revert to their original selves. They had been beautiful women, but the reversal of death was more of a curse than a blessing, and the look of divine relief upon their newly angelic faces was enough for me to know that I had done them a favor. They stepped forward, allowing the yew tree to swallow them, and the portal closed, once again leaving Dominic Dobbes alone in the mortal world.

Distracted by the drama, I didn’t notice that another spirit had set its sights on me until it had wrapped its arms around my legs and pulled. My feet swept out from under me, and Karma made a wild grab to rescue me, but there was no stopping gravity. My torso landed heavily on the stone bench, and I heard the unmistakable crunch of cracking ribs. I gasped, which only exacerbated the paralyzing pain in my midsection, but managed to jam the pistol up beneath the offending ghost’s throat and pull the trigger. As the spirit dematerialized, I let my head fall back onto the burnt brown grass near the yew tree, holding my damaged ribs with my free hand.

Karma jumped down from the bench, warding off another ghost with a fresh attack spell. She kneeled next to me as I tried to sit up. I drew in shallow, ragged breaths since the pain in my chest was too intense to consider doing anything else. Karma conjured a healing spell of her own making, and her lilac-colored aura began to swirl around me.

“Punctured lung,” she said, as I feebly angled the handgun to shoot a demon that had risen behind her.

“Super.” I gasped with the effort of forcing words out. “You can fix it in the next ten seconds, right?”

“Sure.”

Severe injuries took longer to heal. Not only did Karma have to focus on the punctured lung but my various broken ribs as well. She drew on the coven’s collective power, both of her hands pressed to either side of my torso. I winced as the witchcraft worked, arranging bones and repairing the tissue of my lungs, but tried to stay alert and aware of the battle around us. More than once, I fired the pistol, but I was not prepared for the moment of violence that accosted us next.

Gwenlyn’s baseball bat swung through the air, connecting with Karma’s skull. The light left her eyes in under a second, and she slumped over before the healing spell had a chance to finish its work. I could breathe properly now, but my ribs still throbbed with a dull ache. Trapped under Karma’s weight, I tipped my head back to see who had wielded Gwenlyn’s bat so mercilessly, but something told me I already knew the culprit.

Dominic stood above me, grinning maniacally, the blood-covered baseball bat swinging from his hand. He looked no more alive than his walking corpses, drained by the power he had expended in keeping his army intact. I raised the gun, aiming at him upside down, but Dominic was too quick this time. He swung the bat like a golf club, knocking the pistol from my hands. I heard it land with a thump in the grass.

Unarmed, my only chance at survival was to get as far away from Dominic as possible. In one swift movement, I wrenched my legs out from beneath Karma’s limp body, forbidding myself from wondering if she was dead or not, and swung around to face Dominic. I expected him to attack again, but he only watched with a distantly amused expression as I used the nearby bench to pull myself up to standing.

“What did you do to Gwenlyn?” I asked, one hand hugging my tender midsection. The battle still raged around us, but no one paid us any mind. Ghosts, demons, and witches blew by in a blur of action, and yet it was the bloodied bat in Dominic’s grasp that worried me the most.

“That pathetic brat?” Dominic flipped the bat up in the air and caught it again. “I dispatched her with her own weapon of choice.” He brandished the bat with a wicked smirk. “With any luck, she’ll never be able to stand again.”

Forgetting that I was still injured, I launched myself at Dominic with an attack spell at the tips of my fingers. Dodging his last-second swing of the bat, I landed a witchcraft-infused punch to the base of his throat. He made a savage gagging sound, and the spell left a red burn on the skin of his neck, but that didn’t stop him from tossing the bat aside. I barely got my other hand up in time to block his incoming blow, and when his fist connected with my forearm, I realized just how out of my league I was. A close-range hand-to-hand fight wasn't exactly ideal for a woman of my size.

I ducked under Dominic’s next punch, aiming a jab to his solar plexus. As he doubled over, breathless, I bent down to grab a handful of dirt and tossed it into his face. He roared in frustration, wiping at his eyes, but when I tried to dart away, his hand shot out faster than I could imagine. His fingers closed around my wrist, and he drew me closer until my body was locked against his. No matter how I twisted or turned, I couldn’t free myself from Dominic’s vise grip. Then, in a movement so abrupt that I didn’t see it coming, he slammed his forehead against mine. I sagged in his grip, my vision doubling.

“No more,” he hissed, and his arms tightened around my waist to support my weight. I blinked rapidly, trying to free myself of the daze of Dominic’s headbutt. “You’re dead to me, Morgan Summers,” Dominic went on. “And soon, you’ll be dead to the world.”

His stale breath washed over me. This was not the way I wanted to go, trapped in the arms of a sociopathic warlock with mommy issues, but the end seemed dangerously close, and I prayed that the coven was strong enough to make it out of this alive on their own. As for me, I knew my chances of survival were slim to none, especially now that I had stripped Dominic of everything he had worked so hard for. His hands made their way up to my throat, and a rotten pleasure gleamed in his blue eyes as his fingers began to contract around my neck. I refused to close my eyes, staring defiantly into Dominic’s face as my airway sealed off.

“Hey, dumbass,” a tenacious voice said to our right.

Dominic’s fingers loosened ever so slightly, his attention wandering away from me, and when I glanced over to see who had managed to distract him, I sucked in a tiny, restricted gasp of absolute relief.

Gwenlyn stood atop the stone bench, a glorious heroine framed against the backdrop of the fiery rage of the yew tree. In her outstretched hand, she held the beast’s pistol in line with Dominic’s head, and the scar on her forearm seared with the incandescence of ancient witchcraft.

“Lights out,” she said.

And fired the gun.

10

In Which Yew Hollow Finds Peace

“I am not wearing a flower crown, Laurel,” I said, pushing away the wreath of pink roses and baby’s breath that Laurel was trying to bestow upon my head.

“Please? I made them for everyone.”

“Yes, but everyone else’s is white. Why is mine pink?”

“Because we’re honoring you, of course.”

“Mm-hmm.”

In the week following the battle beneath the yew tree, the coven had been too busy cleaning up the wreckage in the town square to put together the official ceremony of inducting a new coven leader. There had been too much to do. With Dominic’s death, the ghosts had vanished and the demons abandoned their borrowed bodies, leaving the coven with the distasteful responsibility of reburying the corpses. It took a few days to figure out who belonged in which grave, even with the help of our witchcraft, and we cast a protection ward over the cemetery just in case there were any residual effects of Dominic’s curse. In the end, I was glad that we had gone to the trouble of returning those poor souls to their resting places. It seemed only fair after Dominic had interrupted their eternal slumber.

Dominic, on the other hand, did not receive such a respectful sendoff. Gwenlyn’s bullet had torn a path of destruction clear through his brain, killing him instantly, but unlike the ghosts, he didn’t disappear into the otherworld. We cremated his body, but the coven agreed as a whole that no one wanted his ashes anywhere near Yew Hollow. A few of the witches volunteered to drive out to the coast, where they unceremoniously discarded his remains in the ocean. No one offered him peace in the afterlife. Personally, I hoped that Dominic would spend the rest of forever on that darkest level of the otherworld with those manic voices repeating his sins to him over and over again.

None of the coven suffered any lasting injuries, including Karma. Though Dominic had managed to inflict some serious damage with the baseball bat—she had a serious concussion and an even more serious brain bleed—the coven had pooled their abilities once more to revive her. She’d spent the majority of the last week in bed, recuperating, but that morning, she’d joined the rest of us for coffee and breakfast with an exhausted smile.

Gwenlyn had become the coven’s golden child. The witches doted on her any chance they got, often fighting over whose turn it was to spend time with her. At first, Gwenlyn had reveled in the glory, but her introversion soon got the best of her. The few children in the coven had taken to reenacting the last moments of the battle, and when they pleaded with Gwenlyn to watch, yet again, as they theatrically mimicked Dominic’s final gasping breaths, Gwenlyn cast a spell that rooted the children in place and silently walked away. I couldn’t help but laugh as the children pleaded with her to free them, and in return, Gwenlyn also relieved them of their voices for the afternoon. Since then, I often found Gwenlyn sitting alone, either out on the swing set or in my old bedroom on the third floor of the main house, staring absently out of the bay window. I understood Gwenlyn’s taciturn attitude and need for solitude. After all, she had killed someone, and even if that someone was the scum of the earth, snuffing out another human’s life took a toll on your conscience.

I had spent the week explaining away the wreckage in the town square to the mortals of Yew Hollow. They had been under Dominic’s trance for so long that nearly everyone I spoke to had a lingering sense of exhaustion about them. I came up with the easiest excuse possible for the disaster area: that a monster of a nor’easter had raged through town and a bolt of lightning made quick work of the yew tree. Thankfully, Dominic’s trance had left the townspeople rather pliable, and no one questioned my patchy story.

The yew tree itself was a sorrowful sight. All that remained of it was a blackened trunk, splintered and warped, protruding from the earth like an old headstone. I had only been to the town square once since the battle to help the coven tidy up as much of the mess as we could, but I had kept my eyes averted from the yew tree. Yew Hollow felt vacant and unbalanced without the presence of the tree’s aura, and since its destruction was essentially my fault, the burnt remains were an awful reminder of all that had changed.

Now that the dust had settled, the only order of business left was for the coven to officially instate me as the head of the Summerses. It was more of a formality than anything else. After all, the power of the previous leaders had already been transferred to me during the yew tree’s sacrifice. Though I had protested, the coven insisted on carrying out the ceremony. Admittedly, I didn’t put up much of a fight. If the witches needed a silly tradition in order to feel normal again, I was more than happy to oblige. I’d never been to a leader ceremony—my own mother had gained control of the coven before I was born—but I’d heard that they were meant to be beautiful parties, a celebration of our powers, and from the preparations, I could tell that the coven had gone all out.

“Laurel!” I batted away another sneak attack of the flower wreath.

“Come on, Morgan,” she whined, brandishing the crown.

Gwenlyn bounced down the stairs and into the dining room, her own head adorned with a similar ring of white roses. “For Pete’s sake, Morgan, just wear the damn crown.”

“Ha!” said Laurel and plunked the crown on my head.

I harrumphed, reaching up to adjust my new headwear, but finally conceded. I glanced at Gwenlyn, who wore a cream-colored dress that flowed all the way down to the floor. “You look nice,” I said. I’d never seen Gwenlyn in anything but jeans and ratty, hand-me-down T-shirts, so it was almost jarring to see her hair done up in an intricate braid and a hint of makeup on her face.

She shrugged, picking at the skirt of the dress. “Karma dressed me. I see she got to you too.”

This was true. Karma had unearthed a dress for me as well, though mine was the pale hue of periwinkles. Malia had done my hair, then disappeared to assist the coven with setting up the ceremony.

“It’s almost time,” said Laurel. She reached out, tucking a wisp of my hair behind my ear. “Let’s go outside.”

Together, the three of us headed out to the backyard. The sun was on its way down, and the sky was a collage of pink, orange, and blue. Despite my initial reluctance at taking part in the ceremony, I couldn’t help but take in a little gasp when I saw what the witches had been working on all day. The coven had constructed a beautiful trellis out of pale wood and decorated it with a collection of different-colored roses. The witches themselves had gathered in a loose circle around the trellis, awaiting my approach, all dressed in various shades of springtime.

“Here we go,” I muttered, more to myself than to Gwenlyn or Laurel. I stepped off the porch, holding my chin level as I made my way to the trellis.

The ceremony itself was blissfully short. I stood alone beneath the trellis while the coven joined hands and sang in Latin. At some point, the aura of each witch reached out to embrace me, and I closed my eyes as I was swept away into a disembodied state of mind. When all was said and done, the witches erupted into cheers, and despite myself, I couldn’t stop a smile from spreading across my face.

A firelit feast followed the ceremony. Several aunts of mine had spent the day cooking. We all sat down to dinner in the backyard at one long picnic table that another one of the witches had conjured. I sipped sparkling wine, enjoying the smiles of the coven. After so much strife, they deserved a little bit of happiness together. It wasn’t long after dessert, though, that Gwenlyn sought me out. She beckoned me away from the coven, and after a hesitant glance down the table to make sure the rest of the witches were still occupied with each other, I sidled out of my seat and joined Gwenlyn.

We followed the fireflies into town in silence, the breeze ruffling the fabric of our dresses. Yew Hollow was quiet. All of its mortal inhabitants had returned home for the evening. I inhaled deeply, savoring the fresh scent of the air. Thankfully, after a few spring showers, the smell of rot had finally been evacuated from the town. I didn’t think I’d ever be so grateful to inhale a breath full of pollen.

As we neared the stump of the yew tree, a sense of familiarity washed over me. I took a deep breath.

“Do you feel that?” Gwenlyn asked, stopping short of the stump.

I nodded. My mother’s aura was still present, housed in what was left of the yew tree. I hadn’t lost her entirely after all. Approaching the stump, I lifted the pink roses from the crown of my head and placed them on the burned remains of the yew tree. When I stepped back, Gwenlyn leaned her head on my shoulder.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s just… going to take some getting used to.”

“You’ll figure it out,” said Gwenlyn. “You have your sisters to help you. And me.”

I sighed. I knew that Gwenlyn was probably right. Eventually, being the leader of the Summers coven would feel normal, but the important thing was that my family was in Yew Hollow to support me. Even my mother, in whatever form, was still around.

“Look at that.” Gwenlyn pointed toward the opposite side of the stump.

“What?”

“There.”

I detached myself from Gwenlyn, circling the stump to see what she was pointing at. There, nestled between the blackened roots, was the tiniest bud of bright green. It had pushed its way through the ash and dust, reaching up toward the sun, and around it pulsed a rainbow of witchcraft. I smiled and lightly touched the new bud in recognition of its meaning.

The yew tree would go on, and so would the Summers coven.

Many thanks to everyone who read my story!

Writing is the best way I know to express myself, and I’m so glad that you all have rewarded me with the opportunity to share my imagination with you. As an author, I learn and evolve from the input of others, so if you have a spare moment and you enjoyed the story, please leave a short, spoiler-free review of the book. As readers, your personal opinions are often the best references for a writer. Your commentary allows me to further provide you all with fun, engaging material.

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Again, thank you all for diving into mine and Morgan’s world. May we meet again!

All the best,

Alexandria Clarke

Witch Myth: Wild Fire- Book 0

1

Rain pattered on the top of my umbrella as I walked into town. It was the end of September, late in the year for a storm, and though mud splattered my Wellington boots, I took pleasure in the soft rolls of thunder and misty rain. For someone else, the weather might have been depressing, but I had a soft spot for dreary days. The world was loud and boisterous, and sometimes the noise was too much for me to process. Rain muted everything. People hurried from doorway to doorway, ducking beneath the hoods of their slickers, desperate to get inside. Cars slowed to navigate the sharp angles of the wet road around the town square, the tires churning up waves that washed over the curbs. Yew Hollow was a painting, and its autumn hues ran like a beautiful mess over the edges of the canvas.

Suspended between two trees at the front of the town square was a garish orange banner displaying the words “Yew Hollow Fall Festival” in bright yellow font. It sagged in the middle, and a pool of water had collected in the heavy-duty plastic, tugging the branches of each tree inward like a sad hug. Soaked streamers lay limp in the trees, mushy and deteriorating. I set down my umbrella, planted my boot in the fork of the first tree, and hoisted myself up to untie the first side of the banner. As it fell free, the trapped rainwater deluged down the plastic like a cheap slip-n-slide. I jumped to the ground, hopped over the resulting puddle, and scaled the other tree. The second knot held fast.

“Come on,” I grumbled. The hood of my coat fell back and rain danced on my face as I pried at the slick rope. I blinked to clear my vision. My boot lost traction against the slippery tree trunk. I lurched, scraping my palm on the rough bark as I grabbed for the nearest branch. Drenched, I tried the knot again, but it stubbornly refused to let go. “Really?”

I looked around. The square was empty except for a few stragglers in the distance. It was safe. I shot a single dart of dark green light from my fingertips, which entwined itself around the knot. The banner loosened and fell. I leapt to the ground, and with a snap of my fingers, the banner rolled itself up into a neat cylinder. I tucked it under my arm, picked up the now obsolete umbrella, and set my path toward the hill at the top of the street.

A car ambled up behind me, slowing as it approached. I recognized the driver. It was Mrs. Raleigh, the polite woman who ran the local pharmacy. She rolled down her window.

“Gwenlyn!” she called. “Need a ride?”

I shook my head. “No, thanks. I like the rain.”

Mrs. Raleigh smiled. “All right, suit yourself.”

Thunder crashed as she drove off. The storm was getting closer. I picked up my pace. It wasn’t too long of a walk to my destination, but I didn’t want to get caught beneath an angry sky. I liked rain, but I preferred to watch lightning from indoors. The hill rounded out, and I caught sight of the house. My house, my home. It had been ten years since I’d first moved in, but sometimes it felt like a dream. My boots squelched against the warped wood of the wraparound porch, and the front door creaked noisily on its hinges when I pushed it open.

This was another reason I loved gloomy weather. When everything was cold and damp outside, it made inside all the more warm and comfortable. A fire crackled in the living room, breaking up the dull gray light from the windows. Someone was baking in the kitchen. It smelled like cinnamon and cloves. Paul Anka crooned softly from an old radio even though its batteries had died years ago. I set down the banner, kicked off my muddy boots, and shook off my slicker. The hooks in the entryway were bogged down by a collection of coats, scarves, and hats. I balanced mine on top and sidled away, pretending not to notice when it fell right off.

“Hey! What have I told you about water on the hardwood floors?”

Morgan Summers leaned against the doorway of the kitchen, one eyebrow raised at my delinquent behavior. She was nowhere near old enough to be my mother, but that was the role she had taken on when I showed up at her house when I was sixteen. Then again, she was mother to an entire collection of women, whether they surpassed her in age or not.

“Like the floor hasn’t seen worse,” I retorted with a grin.

Morgan pointed to my fallen coat. It leapt up to settle on top of the other clothes. The puddle of rainwater on the floor evaporated and an arrow of blue magic pinched my arm.

“Ow!”

“That’ll teach you to talk back.” Morgan smirked, crossing her arms. “How’s the square look?”

I examined the pink welt on my arm. “It’s kind of a disaster. I got the banner down, but we’ll have to wait until the rain stops to clean up the rest. The streamers are practically inert matter.”

Morgan sighed. “I suppose that’s what we get for not checking the weather report before scheduling the Fall Festival. The locals are going to riot.”

“They’ll be fine,” I assured her. “It’s just the festival anyway. What are they missing out on really? The pumpkin pie eating contest? Honestly, it makes me nauseous. At least we didn’t have to postpone the reenactment. That would inspire a level of disappointment that I’m not prepared to deal with, so look on the bright side!”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“I’m always right.” I nudged her aside to enter the kitchen and peered through the oven window. “Ooh, spice cake.”

Morgan lightly smacked the back of my head. “It’s not for you.”

“What? But you know it’s my favorite!”

Morgan grinned. She was screwing with me. It was one of her favorite pastimes. “It’ll be ready in a few minutes. You’re going to have to wait until after dinner though.”

“I could die during dinner,” I countered, faking a dramatic faint as though I had a case of the vapors. “And I’ll have never tasted the world’s best spice cake.”

“Nice try, slick.” Morgan twisted a damp dish towel into a whip and snapped it in my direction. I dodged the attack, waltzing out of reach. “Malia planned a family dinner for tonight.”

“The whole family?”

“Yes, ma’am. They’ll be here any minute, so go change. You look like a drowned rat.”

“You flatter me.”

I left her to finish the baking and took the rickety stairs up to the second story. In a normal household, it might’ve worried me that Morgan was anticipating guests so soon and hadn’t visibly lifted a finger to prepare a meal. This wasn’t a normal household though, and Yew Hollow wasn’t a normal town.

In my bedroom, I stripped off my damp shirt. As usual, the faded scars on the underside of my forearms caught my attention, undeniable reminders of a troubled childhood. Before Morgan, I struggled through sixteen years of abandonment, foster homes, and psychiatric wards, but she kept me, loved me, and taught me to trust again. Now the scars were just scars. The only one that mattered stretched from my wrist to the inside of my elbow and subtly glowed electric blue. Unless someone inspected it too closely, they would think it was just a prominent vein. In actuality, it was the mark that linked me to the Summers family even though I never bore the surname.

Ten years ago, Morgan Summers made the national news. It was a small story, one that didn’t get a lot of attention. It was a passing comment on a late night news show, the same news show that I’d used to tune out the yells of that month’s foster parents. Morgan Summers of Yew Hollow, accused of murder and proven innocent. To this day, I didn’t know why or how I’d known that there was more to the story. Maybe it was the dead look in Morgan’s eyes in her old mug shot from the time she’d shoplifted at a gas station in New York City. Maybe it was an inexplicable kick from the universe in the right direction. All I knew was that I had to find Morgan Summers, because I couldn’t be the only person on the planet plagued by a secret no one else understood.

In short, Morgan Summers was a witch, and so was I. Yew Hollow belonged to the Summers coven. The town was a legend and a history lesson that began with Morgan’s ancestors two hundred years prior to my existence. Every Summers woman bore the gift of witchcraft. Long ago, we openly practiced in Yew Hollow, but times had changed and grown more dangerous. Disaster befell the coven, and the witches learned from their mistakes. They cast a memory enchantment so that the townspeople drifted off into blissful ignorance of our influence. The mortals loved the stories and the lore—Yew Hollow’s tourism relied on it—but that was all it was. Nothing more. Or so they thought.

Downstairs, the murmur of voices grew as the family arrived in sets of threes and fours. A low hum resonated through the walls as though the house itself were alive. Auras waxed and waned, pulsing through me like invisible waves. Each one told me a little bit about the witch it belonged to. Aunt Alberta was grumpy as always. Cousin Elena needed a glass of wine. The littlest witch, seven-year-old Amelia, was positively starving. The spicy scent of pot roast wafted up to my room. My stomach rumbled. Amelia wasn’t the only one jonesing for dinner.

I pulled on a fresh shirt and toweled my hair dry. At the top of the stairs, I saw a small group of children down below, so I balanced on the polished wood banister and slid down to the first floor. It wobbled beneath my weight as the children of the coven whooped and hollered at my entrance. Unfortunately, I didn’t stick the landing. There were too many witches in the foyer, greeting each other as they wiped their boots, and I ricocheted off of Aunt Alberta’s wide berth.

“Oops. Sorry, Al.”

“Who are you?”

“It’s me, Gwenlyn.”

“I don’t know a Guinevere. Ah, my love!”

I rolled my eyes as Aunt Alberta squeezed little Amelia so tightly that her face turned purple. The old woman was senile, and she was known to slip tricky potions into the drinks of those sitting closest to her.

Upwards of forty witches made up the Summers coven, and all of them had arrived at the house for dinner. There were no men, save for the youngest of the children. Witchcraft belonged to the women of earth. The Summerses kept the opposite sex around long enough to continue the bloodline before sending them on their way. They formed lifelong bonds with each other, and the platonic love between witches was far superior to the fleeting romance of spontaneous trysts.

“Out of the way!” a voice shouted. Morgan’s sister, Karma, followed me down the stairs. “I can’t stand being packed like sardines in here. Everyone, back up!”

A path cleared at her request. She twirled her hands like the director of an orchestra, and her lilac aura blossomed around her. It expanded through the dining room, pushing the walls outward. The room grew, the dining table lengthened, and extra chairs popped into existence from out of nowhere. Karma dusted her hands off.

“There!” she said. “That’s better, isn’t it? Not so claustrophobic.” She slung an arm around my shoulders. “Gwen, I tried a new cocktail recipe. What say you act as my guinea pig?”

Knowing Karma, the drinks were beyond potent. “How could I say no?”

We weaved through the sea of witches. When the entire family gathered, I remembered how much I stood out. The Summerses’ genetics took two routes. Half of the coven looked like Morgan and Karma, with golden brown hair and any variation of hazel or green eyes. The other half resembled Morgan’s other sisters, Malia and Laurel. They sported pale blonde locks and light gray eyes. In comparison, I was the only member of the coven with hair the black color of night and golden green eyes like a forest at sunrise. There was one other witch—Morgan’s Aunt Alana—who differed from the masses with red hair and bright blue eyes, but she was prone to skip family dinners so my single hope for solidarity was lost. In the beginning, I was hyper aware of the differences. Now I ignored the creeping feeling of self-consciousness during times like these. This was my family, whether we shared blood or not.

In the kitchen, Morgan and Malia argued over the temperature of the roast, which sat steaming on the counter, while Laurel filled water glasses and lazily levitated them out to the dining room table.

“Medium!” Malia insisted. “No one likes their cow still kicking!”

“It’s roast,” Morgan countered, guarding the slab of meat with her arms out to the side like a hockey goalie. “It’s meant to be pink in the center.”

“Pink, not breathing!”

“I am the leader of this coven—”

“And I am your oldest sister!” Malia interrupted. “I don’t recall you helping Mom cook dinner for all those years—”

Karma powered between her siblings to reach the refrigerator. “Excuse me! We just want the booze.”

“Have Gwenlyn decide,” Laurel suggested airily as another water glass floated away. “She’s an objective entity.”

I waved my hands in defense. “Oh, no. Don’t drag me into this.”

“Actually, that’s a great idea,” Morgan said. She stepped aside to give me an unimpeded view of the roast. “What’s the verdict, Gwen? But before you answer, you should know that if you make me put this thing back in the oven, I will intentionally burn it.”

Malia cuffed Morgan over the head. The meat looked perfect to me. It was crispy on the outside but pink and juicy on the inside.

“I’m partial to the pink,” I admitted.

“Ha!” Morgan exclaimed.

“Traitor!” Malia accused. “You always take her side!”

Glass clinked as Karma unearthed a pitcher full of frothy purple liquid garnished with rosemary from the fridge. She took me by the arm with her free hand. “Run away,” she instructed. “Run away.”

It took a solid half hour to seat everyone around the extended dining room table. Morgan won the roast battle. It served itself, making the rounds. Dishes of mashed potatoes, sautéed vegetables, and other side items soared from one witch to the next. I snatched a bread roll from a basket in mid-flight and snapped my fingers for the butter dish. Morgan sat at the head of the table to my right. Karma seated herself on my left. The pitcher rested between us, half-empty. Thanks to its contents, my head was already fuzzy. The room babbled with conversation like a rushing river, ebbing and flowing over the rocks. Malia and Laurel discussed the best spells for combatting a case of indigestion. Morgan argued with one of her cousins across the table. Karma chatted my ear off about a new reality show she’d started watching. Everyone talked over everyone else. My ears rang from the dull roar. Auras connected and overlapped until one witch was no longer distinguishable from the next. We were a single entity, blurred together in a rainbow of hues.

It turned out that it wasn’t Aunt Alberta’s potions I should’ve been worried about. Karma refilled my glass at any chance she got, and before we made it to the spice cake I’d been looking forward to for the entire evening, I swayed and almost toppled out of my chair.

Morgan caught me by the shoulder to balance me. “Why don’t you call it a night?”

“But spice cake—”

“I’ll save you Karma’s slice,” Morgan promised.

“Hey!” Karma protested.

I laughed, leaning over the back of Karma’s chair to kiss her cheek. “You know what they say about karma, Karma.” I waved to the coven. “Good night, all!”

The witches chorused a farewell. Somehow, I made it down the length of the immense table, into the foyer, and up the stairs without breaking an ankle. My vision blurred as I collapsed in bed. In the morning, I would kill Karma for pumping me so full of whatever she’d mixed into that cocktail. Tonight, I would sleep.

I woke with a start in the middle of the night, staring up into the dark at the angled ceiling and wondering what had rustled me out of unconsciousness. A face swam into view. My face. I looked at myself. She looked back. I covered my eyes with a pillow.

“No,” I said. “No, no, no.”

I looked again. She was still there. A ghost. Of myself.

“Oh my God,” I moaned. “Am I dead?”

2

There was a reason for my childhood insanity, and this was it. Every witch was born with a specific ability through which she channeled her craft. Aunt Alberta had a knack for potions. Malia was psychometric, which meant she could read the history of objects just by touching them. Laurel communed with nature. Karma made voodoo dolls. Morgan spoke to the dead, as did I. Of all the abilities available to witches, this one was the worst. First of all, it was rare. Morgan and I were the only two psychic mediums in the United States. Second, it was exhausting. I’d met ghosts who died in all sorts of ways, from common old age to suicide to murder. Ghosts wanted one thing and one thing only—to pass over—and they didn’t have any moral qualms about haunting you until they figured out how to do it.

“I’m not even thirty!” I protested, staring up at my own face. “I can’t be dead!”

“You’re not dead,” the ghost said. “I’m dead.”

My head pounded. Between my oncoming hangover and the literal out-of-body experience, I was completely bewildered. “But you’re me.”

“Decidedly not,” she replied. “It would appear we’re twins.”

I had to be dreaming. I didn’t have a twin. I was practically born into the foster system. I didn’t know anything about my family. My mother and father’s identities were a mystery to me. To be honest, I didn’t care who they were or what happened to them. They had left me in the lurch. I was kicked out into an unfriendly world of temporary mortal guardians, none of whom had the capacity to fill me in on the details of my preternatural powers. When I was a kid, I told anyone who would listen that dead people followed me wherever I went. No one believed me. I was labeled an attention seeker early on. I ran away from foster homes, frequently practiced truancy, and spent more time in a social worker’s office that I cared to remember. All the while, I tried to convince myself that ghosts weren’t real, but it was difficult to ignore the dead when they followed you around like lost puppies. As a medium, it was my duty to help them cross over to the next life, but I never knew that until I arrived in Yew Hollow. As far as family went, I didn’t owe my absentee parents anything. A sister, on the other hand, was another matter entirely.

She stuck out a hand for me to shake. Ghosts weren’t corporeal enough to physically interact with the living, but old habits died hard. “I’m Winnie. Winnifred, actually, but everyone calls me Winnie.”

I stared at her hand. It was vaguely translucent. If I concentrated hard enough, I could see the writing desk on the opposite side of the room through her body. That was good. It meant she wasn’t supposed to be here for very long. The more solid a ghost appeared, the less likely they were to move on. I felt relieved. I didn’t have the headspace to process a long lost twin sister, let alone one that was already dead.

I waved her off. “I’m not touching you. Ghosts are freezing, and I run cold.”

Her face—my face—fell at my reaction. No matter how many ghosts made contact with me, my level of tact in receiving them remained supremely low.

“Sorry.” I rubbed my eyes and looked up at her. “Could you float down? My neck hurts.”

Winnie alighted on the bedspread. Though we were theoretically identical, I noticed immediate differences between us. Winnie kept her hair long and wavy, whereas mine was cut short to my chin. She was thin and graceful while I moved with all the subtlety of a tank. She was also much more relaxed in death than I knew I would ever be. If I ended up trapped between worlds, I would be pissed.

“Who are you again?” I asked.

“Winnie Bennett. And you?”

“Gwenlyn,” I answered. “Gwenlyn Bennett.”

She lit up, as though having the same last name confirmed our connection more than sharing the same face. “I didn’t know about you.”

“Me either.” I had no idea what to say. I didn’t know how to feel either. I took stock of my thoughts. Subdued shock hit me first. I did have family. Someone else had been walking around with my face for twenty-six years, and I had no idea. I shared a womb with a person meant to be my built-in best friend, only for the world to force us in different directions. We were identical strangers, robbed of the chance to get to know each other. I had a sister who was already dead. That alone was more tragic than our lifetime apart.

Winnie cleared her throat. “So you’re not a hugger, I presume. Should I get some party poppers to celebrate our unexpected reunion?”

“I hate confetti.”

“Okay. How about that cake downstairs?”

I folded my pillow in half and stuck it behind my shoulders so that I could sit comfortably against the headboard. “You can’t touch anything. You’re dead, which by the way, I commend you for handling extremely well.”

“I saw it coming,” she replied. “Metastatic melanoma.”

“You had cancer?”

“Yup. I was diagnosed four years ago. At some point, you come to terms with the fact that it’s all ending soon. It was easier to let go than suffer in pain.”

“So you were ready to die?” I asked. “You accepted it?”

“I did.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why not?” She reclined across the foot of my bed, her essence dipping through the covers and chilling my feet. I drew them in toward my chest. “There’s no point in being bitter about it. It’s just life, and then it’s death. I wasn’t afraid.”

“No, not like it doesn’t metaphysically make sense,” I tried to explain. The concept of getting trapped between worlds was wishy-washy at best. “I meant that you shouldn’t be here. People stay behind because something is preventing them from crossing over, like they didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to their dog, or in worse cases, they have to avenge their own murder.”

Winnie lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “That happens?”

“More than you know,” I grumbled, recalling past events. “My point is: if you weren’t afraid to die and you don’t have unfinished business on earth, then there’s no reason for you to be stuck in between. There has to be something you haven’t thought of.”

She pursed her lips, thinking hard. “Nope. I made peace with the hand I was dealt, hugged my parents, kissed my boyfriend, and nuzzled my cat. I’m all squared away.”

When she mentioned her parents, a chill rocked my spine that had nothing to do with her ghostly presence. “Your parents?”

“Yeah, they were heartbroken but—are you okay?” She interrupted herself when she caught sight of my lips twisted into a scowl. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just… you had parents.”

“You didn’t?”

I overflowed with animosity at Winnie’s naiveté. She’d grown up with a family and assumed that I had too, but not everyone was so fortunate. I answered diplomatically, trying to keep my voice level. “No, I was a foster kid.”

As someone who was well-practiced at keeping my darker emotions bottled up, it was an experience to see Winnie’s dimples mirror my own as her expression turned to concern. “We were babies though. Most adopting couples want a baby.”

“Well, no one wanted me.” I gathered the duvet out from under her and swung it over my shoulders like a quilted cape. “Makes sense though, doesn’t it? Mortals might not be able to see auras, but they can feel them. Why would someone adopt a baby that felt like death?”

Winnie finally looked away from me. There was a patchy hole in the fitted sheet. She fiddled with the threads, plucking them out of place. “I’m sorry.”

The apology sounded so sincere that I automatically felt like a jerk for bringing it up. “It’s not your fault. Anyway, aren’t you a witch too? How did your adoptive parents deal with that?”

She looked unsure, as though she knew the answer might upset or annoy me. “I got lucky. My adoptive mom is a witch too. She saw my aura and knew that so many things could go wrong if I grew up with a mortal family.”

I swallowed another mouthful of jealousy. I knew about those things firsthand. “Are you a medium too?”

“No, I’m an anodyne.”

“A what?”

She chuckled lightly. “That’s what my mom calls me. It means that I can relieve stress or pain. My ability functions like meditation. I soothe people’s minds, feelings, illnesses, so on and so forth.”

“Let me guess,” I said sardonically. “You went to med school.”

Winnie stuck out her tongue. “Are you kidding? I’m a daydreamer. I barely graduated from high school. No, I teach yoga.”

I laughed, covering my mouth so that my amusement would not wake up Morgan or her sisters. “Oh, man, you’re a yogi? Can you align my chakras for me? Are you into energy crystals?”

“Excuse me, but witchcraft literally works off a woman’s personal energy, so you of all people should understand that there is legitimacy in using yoga to increase awareness and flow,” Winnie chided. “It’s so effective that even mortals can feel it when they practice.”

“I never thought about it that way,” I admitted.

“You should try it sometime,” she suggested. “It might help with that tension in your back.”

I rolled my arms so that my shoulder blades relaxed. “How did you know that?”

“Part of the package.”

“You really did get lucky,” I muttered. Winnie’s soothing presence was faint but palpable. It was the leftover remnants of her aura. The fact that I could feel it was remarkable. She was a powerful witch when she was alive, totally in tune with her ability. Comparably, I had a bad habit of running from mine. “So no regrets? We kind of need a place to start if we’re going to get you to the next life.”

“Just one,” she replied.

“Good! What is it?”

“That I never knew you.”

In the morning, I padded down the stairs in flannel pajama pants and borrowed bunny slippers, massaging my temples. My hangover could’ve been worse, but the bright sunlight of the first floor made me wince all the same. Morgan sat at the head of the table, her feet perched next to a half-eaten stack of pancakes. She sipped coffee from a handmade mug across which the artist had jokingly painted “World’s Best Coven Leader,” reading today’s issue of Yew Hollow’s local paper. She glanced up as I slouched though the doorway, and her eyes widened with apprehension.

“Uh, Gwenlyn?”

“Huh?”

“There’s a dead girl following you,” she informed me. “Normally, this wouldn’t be cause for alarm, but said dead girl has your face. I have questions, comments, and concerns.”

I’d almost forgotten about Winnie, chalking the whole incident up to a booze-induced dream. She stood in the foyer, gazing around the house to take it all in. The sunlight poked pin-sized holes in her appearance, shining through her as though she was made of poorly woven fabric. I wondered where she grew up. I guessed it wasn’t a place like Yew Hollow. The Summers coven was one of a kind, and the interior of the house highlighted our eccentricities.

“That’s Winnie,” I told Morgan. “She’s my dead twin. Winnie, this is Morgan. She’s our coven leader.”

Winnie waved cheerily. “Hi there!”

Morgan caught me by the arm as I passed by, squinting at Winnie’s shimmering figure. “Should I be concerned?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” I replied.

“Ah.” Morgan raised her mug to Winnie. “In that case, it’s nice to meet you, Winnie.”

Winnie beamed. “Thank you. I hope you don’t mind if I stay for a while. Gwenlyn and I are bonding.”

“What’s mine is yours, darling.”

As Winnie floated off to explore the rest of the house, Morgan stared after her. “Wow. It’s weird to see your face smile like that.”

I sat down, picked up Morgan’s fork, and started in on her leftover pancakes. “I know, right? I forgot I had dimples. She’s going to completely wreck my reputation as a snarky jerk.”

“I think your hair this morning has already dismantled any hope you harbored of being viewed as intimidating, my love.”

I stretched out of the chair to glimpse my reflection in the mirror of the china cabinet. Half of my hair was flattened to the side of my head. The other half stuck up like a ruffled peacock’s plumage. I groaned, forcing it down with my fingers, but the attempt was fruitless.

“Come here,” Morgan said, beckoning me toward her. She combed through my erratic hair, and I felt the fizzle of witchcraft against my scalp. When I checked again, my hair was perfectly presentable.

“Thanks.”

“Mm-hmm. In all seriousness, are you okay?” Morgan’s eyes crinkled as she studied me for signs of distress. If that look came from anyone else, I would scold them for pitying me. With Morgan, I knew it came from a place of love and concern.

“I think so,” I said, returning to the pancakes. They were perfect post-hangover breakfast. “I don’t know. It’s weird, you know? I had no idea she existed. Plus she’s dead, which is kind of a downer.”

“That and she shouldn’t be here.”

“We already discussed that.” I swirled my breakfast through a puddle of maple syrup. “She doesn’t know why she hasn’t moved on.”

“No, not that,” Morgan said. “You know the rules. Ghosts are physically restricted from visiting places that they’ve never been before. I don’t recall your sister ever stopping in for a cup of tea, so how is it that she’s in Yew Hollow at all?”

“Maybe it’s different with twins,” I suggested. “Even mortal twins claim they share an inexplicable telepathic bond.”

“Maybe,” Morgan mused. “It’s the only reason I can think of.”

“I need to get my mind off it,” I said, wiping syrup off my fingers. “What’s on the schedule for today?”

A legal pad appeared in front of Morgan with a faint pop! and she flipped to the second page of her to-do list. “Let’s see. Malia and Laurel are meeting with the community volunteers to work out a new date for the Fall Festival. Karma is due at the police station in ten minutes to talk to Chief Torres about some of the safety concerns we had. I doubt she’ll make it—neither one of you can hold your liquor—so I’ll probably go instead. Do you want to tag along? It’s a slow day. I don’t have much for you to do other than help clean up the mess in the town square.”

I deliberated. A slow day in Yew Hollow was exactly what I needed to recuperate from last night’s festivities. “I’ll go to the square.”

“All right, but the kids are going too,” Morgan said.

“Teaching them the value of hard work?”

“You bet. That okay with you?”

“You know I love the kids.”

Morgan looked up from the legal pad in time to catch Winnie passing through the hallway on her way to the back porch. She patted my hand. “You can’t ignore your sister forever, Gwen. She wants something from you, no matter what she says, and the longer she stays, the harder it gets.”

Winnie’s figure refracted sunlight on the antique wallpaper like water did in a swimming pool. I sighed heavily. “I know. Believe me, I know.”

3

Morgan was right. Ignoring Winnie wasn’t an option. It wouldn’t help her move on to the next life or banish my lingering jealousy of the difference in our upbringings. Everything had turned out all right, and it was petty of me to be envious of a dead girl, especially one that had thoroughly suffered for the past four years.

We strolled along the sidewalk, heading into town. Yesterday’s storm was gone. The blue sky stretched on for miles as the breeze coaxed brown leaves from the trees. The coven children bounced alongside us, hopping over puddles of rainwater and singing gleeful songs absent of musical prowess. I counted heads. All seven children were my responsibility for the day. Keeping track of them wasn’t usually the problem. The bigger challenge was ensuring that they didn’t use any witchcraft in front of the locals.

One of the kids tripped, sprawling in front of Winnie. She gasped, kneeling down to help the little witch to her feet, but Winnie’s hands passed right through her. The girl, Sandra, shuddered, popped upright like a jack-in-the-box, and sped off to rejoin her friends.

“They can’t see you,” I reminded Winnie when I spotted her dejected expression. “She didn’t mean anything by it. When a ghost touches you, it’s like being doused in ice water.”

She gazed longingly after the kids. “I don’t mind spending time here, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the supposed perks of ghostdom.”

“I know it’s tough,” I agreed. “Neither here, nor there. The worst part is being disconnected from the world. You can see it, but you can’t touch it.”

“Why does it sound like you know from firsthand experience?”

I shuffled through a pile of damp leaves, kicking them up to expose their colorful undersides. “I don’t. I’ve met hundreds of ghosts though. They all tell me the same things.”

“How long does it usually take to pass over?”

“It depends,” I answered. “Sometimes it’s short and sweet. I once met a single mother who died in a car crash, and all she wanted was to check on her kid to make sure he was okay. It only took two hours to track him down, and she disappeared right after.”

“That’s so sad.”

Up ahead, Amelia and Sandra fenced with fallen tree branches resembling sabers. I sent a surreptitious jet of magic to race between them. The makeshift weapons morphed into rubber snakes. The girls groaned then promptly resumed their battle by whacking each other with the new toys.

“Circumstances like that are the worst,” I said to Winnie. “But in my experience, selfish people are the ones who stick around the longest.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. They don’t want to die. They care too much about all of the things they never got to have. Once, this old business tycoon haunted me for three months because he wanted to be buried in his Maserati, but his brother took it instead.”

Winnie laughed. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish I was,” I said. “Some people hang around for the most ridiculous reasons. Others don’t know why they’re here at all.”

“Like me.”

I glanced her way. “We’ll figure it out. I’m well practiced.”

The town hall marked the top of the high street, which bustled with activity. The mortals were out in full swing, taking advantage of the beautiful day.

“Look alive!” I called up to my brood of kids before they charged into town. “Don’t use your craft until we get back to the house.”

The eldest witch, thirteen-year-old Ariana, gave me the thumb’s up. “Don’t worry, Gwen. I got this.”

As Ariana collected the rest of the crew and herded them toward the town square, I returned my attention to Winnie. “Why don’t we start with the cancer? It might have something to do with all of this. Do you mind telling me about it or is it kind of a sore spot?”

A cool wind rustled my hair, but Winnie’s remained untouched. “It’s fine. Basically, my love for the sun caught up with me. I was outside constantly. I taught sunrise yoga classes, and I loved to hike nature trails. My skin always tanned but never burned, so I didn’t put a lot of thought into protection. The sun made me feel alive.”

She took a deep breath and tipped her chin up to the sky. I knew that she couldn’t feel the warmth of the sun without a living body, but the memory remained. I was thankful that ghosts could assume whatever appearance they liked best rather than what they looked like at the time of their death. Winnie wore a summery dress patterned with sunflowers. She had freckles on her cheeks, across her nose, and on her shoulders. Though the air was chilly, she made me feel like it was the height of summer.

“One day, my boyfriend found a mole on my back,” she continued. “I’d had it since I was a kid, but it started to change shape. We caught it early, and I figured that would be the end of it. I started using wards to protect myself from the sun. It wasn’t enough.”

“So what happened?” I asked her. I had never met a witch with cancer before. “Did you go to a mortal doctor?”

“Of course not,” Winnie replied. “My mother and aunt treated me, much to my father’s dismay. I outright refused chemotherapy. It was the one time he ever got upset over the fact that we were witches, but I figured if magic couldn’t fix me, how could science? We used the most intense healing spells out there. It went back and forth for a while. Sometimes, we thought we had finally beat it down, but it kept coming back. When it spread everywhere, no spell in the world could’ve stopped it from killing me.”

We passed the local pharmacy, where I waved to Mrs. Raleigh. It was harder to talk to Winnie now that we were in the thick of things. More than once, I’d made the mistake of holding an audible conversation with a ghost within earshot of a non-witch. Word spread quickly in Yew Hollow, and as a result, I was considered a polite but peculiar girl. To me, that was far more agreeable than being classified as insane. The town excused the Summerses’ oddball behavior on principle, but the occasional whispered comment reminded me of the therapy reports from my youth. I was grateful when we reached the square, where the shadow of the trees protected us from prying eyes and listening ears.

“Wow.” Winnie stopped short, staring up at the large tree in the direct center of the humble park. “Is that a yew tree?”

“It’s the yew tree,” I confirmed. The kids had already climbed the trunk, perching in the branches like weird birds as they picked desiccated streamers out of its needle-like leaves. “Yew Hollow was named for it.”

“I heard yews have all sorts of magical protection properties,” Winnie said, circling the trunk to examine it from all sides.

“They do.”

I ducked beneath the lowest layer of branches, where the tree sheltered me from the view of onlooking mortals. The air was frigid and damp. Trash rained down as the children reverently combed through the needles above. I vanished the debris before it tangled in the grass. No one would notice the subtle green flashes of witchcraft through the thick needles. I grew warm as we worked and rolled up the sleeves of my sweater to my elbows. The long scar on my forearm flared, and the yew tree responded with a quick pulse. The leaves shook, the children shrieked, and Winnie looked around in alarm.

“It’s just me,” I called up to the kids. “Sorry about that.”

As they settled down again, Winnie tracked the jagged blue line on my arm. “That’s ancient magic, isn’t it? You’re connected to the tree.”

“So is the entire coven,” I said, warding off questions. “It’s a long story.”

“What about the other scars?”

I ignored her, ripping streamers from where they were wrapped tightly around the yew’s trunk.

Winnie pressed on. “You were upset earlier, when I asked you about your family. What really happened with your foster parents?”

“Which ones?” I asked in a biting tone. “I went through about thirty different homes.”

“Thirty?” she repeated in disbelief. “Why so many?”

I balled up the streamers in my fist. “Because I was the little kid from the Sixth Sense, except way worse. Ghosts followed me everywhere, and I had no idea why. They diagnosed me with schizophrenia when I was five years old, and it went downhill from there.”

“But you weren’t schizophrenic!”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “When every adult tells you that the spirits haunting you are just the voices in your head, you start to believe them. It drove me nuts.”

“When did you start cutting yourself?”

I looked into the tree to make sure the kids weren’t listening in on the conversation before I answered. “When I was thirteen, I was assigned to a particularly nasty set of foster parents. There was an incident. I won’t go into the details, but it ended with the police finding me standing over their unconscious bodies. I was committed to a children’s psychiatric ward.”

“And then?”

“As it turns out, psychiatric wards have more ghost stories than actual patients,” I told her. Memories arose, but I pushed them down. I straightened my shoulders and stood tall. The past was in the past. “That’s when I started cutting. Then I realized if I was going to survive, I needed to get out of there.”

“What did you do?”

“Jumped out of a third-floor window in the middle of the night.” I grinned, recalling the rush of wind through my hair as I hurtled toward the ground. “Didn’t break a single bone. I figured it was dumb luck since I didn’t know what witchcraft was at the time. Looking back, I know I conjured a ward at the last second before I hit the ground. I outran the night guard, jumped clean over a fifteen-foot fence, and got the hell out of there. That was the first time I realized that I wasn’t crazy. Something else was at play.”

Winnie took a deep breath and blew it out. “When did you find out you were a witch?”

“Not until I met Morgan,” I answered. “I was on the streets for a year or so before I got picked up and placed in another foster home. When I was sixteen, I saw a news story about Yew Hollow, ran away, and never looked back. This has been my home every since.”

“So you finally found your place.”

Peals of laughter echoed from above, resonating in the secret space beneath the yew tree. I smiled and counted heads again, just to be sure none of the kids had run off while I wasn’t looking. “I did. Morgan officially adopted me before I turned eighteen. It was the first time the Summers coven ever accepted a witch outside of their bloodline.”

“That must’ve been a big deal,” Winnie said.

“It was. Some of the witches still don’t accept me as one of their own.”

A fat raindrop navigated the needles of the tree and splashed against my cheek. I ducked out from underneath the yew. The blue sky was gone, replaced by a blanket layer of gray clouds.

Winnie turned her hands up and watched the drops fall through her palms. “That’s weird. I wasn’t expecting rain today.”

Neither had I. Something was off. The weather had changed too quickly. In Yew Hollow, that wasn’t always a bad sign, but the wind accompanying this storm had an acrid scent to it. A bolt of lightning scattered across the sky.

I clapped my hands together to get the attention of the kids. “Arianna! Get everyone down here. I don’t need any of you up high when this storm breaks.”

We ended up haphazardly sprinting back to the house through a torrential downpour. This was not one of the storms I cherished. It was scary and violent. Thunder boomed so loudly, I half-expected Zeus to drop out of the sky to smite us all. I toted one kid on my back and dragged another two by each hand. Arianna handled the others, but I could tell that she was stressed too. They were all frightened half to death and soaked from head to toe as I ushered them up the hill. Winnie ran alongside us, looking upset that she couldn’t assist.

“Go, go, go!” I shepherded the kids up the front porch and into the safety of the house. Winnie followed them inside, and I shoved the door shut to drown out the mayhem of the skies. As the kids shivered in the living room, I heard the screen door of the back porch slam. Morgan and Karma appeared, just as drenched as we were. “What’s going on?” I asked them. “I tried to conjure a weather ward, but it wouldn’t work.”

“Neither did ours,” Morgan said.

Karma’s lilac essence bloomed as she conjured hot tea and towels for everyone. A plate of warm cookies appeared on the coffee table as she helped the children dry off and get warm.

I pulled Morgan out of earshot of the kids. “Something’s wrong, Morgan. This storm came out of nowhere, and now you’re telling me it repels wards?”

“I know,” she replied grimly. “It’s not natural, and it stinks of dark magic.”

“I smell it too,” I said. “Who would do this?”

Morgan glared through the windows at the raging storm. “I’m more worried about what’s coming next.”

Lightning struck a telephone pole down the street. It splintered in half and fell over, taking the power line with it. The lights in the house went out, and the kids howled in protest. Karma cast another spell, and purple glowing orbs appeared to illuminate the house.

“Great,” Morgan muttered, watching as the power line sparked. “Let’s go deal with that before the fire department shows up and makes a complete mess of things.”

“This isn’t messy?” Winnie murmured in my ear.

“Stay here,” I told her, forgetting that falling trees or power lines wouldn’t affect her anyway, and followed Morgan out into the insanity.

I leaned steeply into the wind as it buffeted me about, guarding my head with my hands against flying debris. Morgan attempted another weather ward, but her blue craft flickered and died as the rain battered against it. She gave up, focusing instead on the fallen power line. It sparked with live electricity.

“You take that side,” Morgan yelled over the noise, pointing to the far end of the splintered telephone pole.

I jogged over. Morgan was barely visible through the gray sheet of rain, but I saw her witchcraft gleam as she began the spell to repair the power line. I joined in, muttering Latin phrases under my breath to strengthen the enchantment. In this storm, we would need all the help we could get.

My green craft collided with Morgan’s blue. Together, we raised the telephone pole and fixed the splintered pieces together again. I gasped for breath as we planted it firmly in the ground. My energy was already petering off, a sure sign that the supernatural storm was weakening our abilities. Morgan called out to me, but the rain carried her voice away, and my hands trembled as I aimed at the live power line.

A jolt of power ripped through me without my consent. The power line rose into the air, connected to me by a thin electrified line of my own energy. My feet remained rooted to the ground, no matter how much the wind pushed and pulled at me.

“Gwenlyn!”

Morgan’s anguished warning cry was the last thing I heard. The live end of the power line punched me in the chest. At the same time, a bolt of lightning flashed overhead, making contact with the live wire. Thousands of volts surged through me. I convulsed, rocketed away from the power line by the force of the blast, and blacked out before my body hit the ground again.

4

Miraculously, I woke up. Dawn fought through the clouds, but the storm raged on, thundering against the windows of my bedroom. Someone had layered pillows on either side of my body to keep me from falling out of bed. I ached all over, and the smell of burnt hair didn’t soothe my anxious thoughts. My legs were full of pins and needles, and a ringing sound filled my head.

“You’re awake.”

Winnie sat at the desk in the corner. My throat felt like sandpaper. “What happened?”

“Morgan got you back to the house.” She pointed to a glass of water on the table next to my bed. I gratefully drained the contents. “All four sisters worked on you. It was bad, Gwenlyn. You were covered in burns. I almost thought you’d be joining me in the afterlife.”

“Not a chance,” I rasped. “Too much to do here. Is everyone else okay?”

“As far as I know.”

I swung my feet over the edge of the bed, kicking aside the pillow barrier. “Morgan’s going to need help.”

Winnie blocked the doorway. “Whoa! Right now? She told me to keep an eye on you, and I don’t think you should be getting out of bed for a while.”

I limped toward her. “I appreciate the concern. Really, I do. But this is my coven, not yours. If someone’s using dark magic, it’s my responsibility to help Morgan figure out who.”

Winnie pouted but stepped aside. “Fine, but if she asks, I’m telling her that you bullied me. Honestly, Morgan kind of scares me.”

I coughed out a chuckle as I walked across the hall to the bathroom. I balked at my reflection. My neck, chest, and arms all sported evidence of magically healed burns. The skin looked new and shiny, but sparkled with the residual energy of Morgan and her sisters.

“My hair,” I whined, fingering the burnt ends of the black strands. I’d have to cut it shorter to get rid of the ruined bits.

“Yeah, that’s not a good look,” Winnie quipped from the hallway.

I turned the tap on, letting the cool water rush over my heated skin. My head pounded as I splashed my face, so I moved carefully. Even reaching for the hand towel made me feel like I was over-exerting myself, but at least I was alive.

I leaned heavily on the banister as I made my way downstairs with Winnie’s supervision. Morgan, Karma, Malia, and Laurel sat at the dining room table, discussing the storm outside. It was early in the morning. Abandoned scones and scrambled eggs littered the table, and each of the witches nursed a cup of coffee or tea. Laurel noticed my struggle first and surged to her feet to help me the rest of the way down and into a chair at the table.

“Well?” I prompted the sisters. “What are we dealing with here? Is this storm going to stop anytime soon?”

Morgan waved my questions aside. “We’ll get to that in a minute. How are you feeling?”

“I tried to get her to stay in bed,” Winnie said.

“Don’t worry, honey,” Morgan replied. “I never expected her to stay in bed. Gwen?”

Though Morgan’s sisters could not see Winnie, they had enough experience with ghosts over the years that it did not alarm them to watch Morgan speak to thin air. Personally, I always got a kick out of watching them try to figure out where a ghost was standing in the room. They took cues from us, but only Laurel’s gaze came close to Winnie’s actual position.

“I feel like I’m full of bees,” I admitted. There was no other way to explain the buzzing feeling that lingered in my limbs due to the electric surge. “Other than a raging headache, I’m intact. That was a freak accident, right?”

Morgan rubbed her eyelids. She looked exhausted. “We’re not sure yet. You got unlucky, kid. This storm is something else.”

As if in reply, the rain intensified, drumming on the windows of the house. I grimaced at the racket. Laurel conjured another mug. It was full of cloudy yellow tea. Normally, I wouldn’t have touched a drink that looked like algae-infested swamp water, but knowing the positive effects of Laurel’s turmeric healing recipe, I took a long sip and let the peculiar flavor wash over my tongue.

“Thanks, Laurel. What’s the plan?”

Malia rapped her fingertips on the table. “I think our best bet is to wait it out. Keep everyone indoors. We don’t know what kind of power this thing has behind it.”

“Agreed,” Karma said. “What happened to Gwen might not have been an accident. I checked the weather report. The storm targeted Yew Hollow specifically.”

Laurel’s tea was a lifesaver. My headache began to subside, but I massaged my temples to further release the tension. “It’s been relatively quiet for ten years. Who has the gall to start something now?”

All at once, the storm stopped. The pounding rain ceased so abruptly that the sudden absence of sound made the dining room feel like a vortex. I looked to each sister, but none of them, not even Morgan, appeared confident that our worries would vanish with the rain.

“So,” Laurel whispered, as though afraid to break the seal of quiet. “When will the real storm break?”

On cue, the front door burst open, and Yvette, one of Morgan’s many aunts, appeared in the dining room. She was soaked through, her pale blonde hair pasted to her forehead and the hood of her raincoat limp against her back as though it had fallen off in her haste to reach us.

“Morgan!” she gasped, dripping water across the wood floors. “I think you need to see this.”

Morgan stood up from her seat at the table, in full coven leader mode. “What is it, Yvette?”

“The whole town is gone.”

Morgan assigned her sisters to check on the rest of the coven while she inspected the square. Though Winnie begged me to stay behind and rest, I chugged the rest of my tea, donned my raincoat, and followed Morgan and Yvette into town. Morgan didn’t argue. Over the years, an unspoken agreement was forged between us. In any given situation, I went where she went. The coven was as much my responsibility as it was hers, and we worked better as a team than as individuals. As we hurried down the road after Yvette, she linked her arm in mine. Whether it was for her own peace of mind or to help me stay upright, I didn’t know. Laurel’s tea usually worked within minutes to heal any plight, but recovering from a heavy voltage shock was a different type of injury. I wobbled along, willing my legs to work properly, but I had yet to regain full feeling in all of my extremities.

The storm left utter destruction in its wake. The power line outside the Summers house wasn’t the only victim. Others hung like limp laundry lines from askew telephone poles. Thankfully, none of them were live. The power was out to the entire town. Debris littered the ground. The wind had ripped shingles from roofs, uprooted entire trees from the ground, and scattered trash everywhere. Clouds lingered overhead. They weren’t normal storm clouds, but rather an unbroken sheet of solid gray. In the distance, a distinct curved line separated the gloom from an exquisite blue sky, a sign that the weather outside Yew Hollow was as fine as it should’ve been on a day like this. The ominous acidity of the air had not dissipated either. The wind tasted bitter and smelled faintly of vinegar.

When we reached the town square, Yvette’s words became reality. Not one of the locals had ventured out to assess the damage. There was no one left to do so. The streets were empty except for evidence of the disaster. Cars lay abandoned in the middle of the road. Doors to houses and businesses were left wide open. The police station was quiet, despite the fact that the chief should’ve arranged a clean-up party to help the residents by now. There were no residents to help. Yew Hollow was deserted.

“What the hell is going on?” I muttered, gazing around at the empty town.

Morgan dropped my arm to check the police station. She disappeared inside for a minute or so before emerging again. “It’s empty,” she reported. “Chief Torres is gone. The place is a wreck, like everyone panicked and left as quickly as possible.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

Once, Morgan had worked as a paranormal detective for Yew Hollow’s police force. She planted her feet, spreading her shoulders as she transferred into command mode. “Spread out. Check the nearby houses and businesses for anyone who might’ve stayed behind. Meet me at the yew tree.”

Yvette and I hustled to obey. I took the lefthand side of the square, sweeping through the daycare, Dover’s Fresh Market, and Ms. Winning’s Antique store. Every building was hauntingly desolate and showed signs of hurried evacuation. Winnie floated along as I stumbled through a row of vacated houses, looking on in concern every time I paused to catch my breath or stomp feeling into my toes again. I was grateful for her presence, however ironic it was that I found a ghost’s companionship less eerie than our desolate township.

As I checked under the bed of a child’s room in one of the houses near the yew tree, Winnie scoped the closet. I jumped when a pair of glowing eyes peered back at me from beneath the bed, but it was just a gray tabby cat. It tore out of the room, its paws windmilling to find purchase on the smooth wood floor and down the stairs before I could react. I glanced out of the window in time to see the cat shoot across the square toward the woods.

“Even the animals are spooked,” I murmured as Winnie joined me at the window. “Have you noticed they’re all gone too? No birds, no squirrels. I haven’t seen so much as a housefly this morning.”

“Have you ever witnessed something like this before?” Winnie asked, her eyebrows knitting together worriedly.

I shook my head. “No, but this isn’t worst thing we’ve been through. Morgan will figure it out.”

Winnie peered at me sideways. “What was the worst thing?”

I unconsciously scratched the blue scar on my forearm. “When I first got to Yew Hollow, a warlock commanded an army of demons to rise from the dead. That was bad. This is just weird.”

Winnie looked astonished at my nonchalance. “Warlocks? Demons? What is this place, the setting of a Charmed reboot?”

“Dibs on Piper,” I quipped. Outside, Morgan stepped out from a house down the street and headed to the next. “Let’s get moving. Morgan will be finished soon. Didn’t your coven ever have to deal with an uprising?”

Winnie glided out of the bedroom and followed me out to the front porch. “We lived in a tiny town in New Mexico. My coven included me, my mother, my aunt, and my dad, if you count mortal men as honorary members.”

“We don’t,” I replied shortly.

“I’ve never seen anything like the Summerses before,” Winnie said. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen a place like Yew Hollow before. An entire town run by witches?”

“It’s more common than you think. Ever been to New Orleans?” I tripped off the curb. Without thinking, I reached out to Winnie to steady myself. My hand sank through hers with a wintry chill, and I sprawled across the grass. Groaning, I picked asphalt out of my palms.

Winnie grimaced in solidarity. “I still think you should’ve stayed at the house. You shouldn’t take electrocution so lightly.”

My head swam as I pushed myself to my feet. “I told you. I won’t lie around while the coven might be in trouble. We pull our weight here. We don’t have a choice. This isn’t New Mexico.”

When Winnie pursed her lips and looked away, I realized that the statement had come across with a bitter tone behind it.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I added hurriedly. “You said it yourself. You’ve never seen a coven like this, and it’s true. We’re one of the biggest in the nation. Your family flew under the radar because of how small you are, but the Summerses are allied with a lot of the larger covens throughout the country. We operate differently. That’s all I meant.”

“I get it, Gwen.”

She drifted off, leaving me to meet with Morgan and Yvette under the yew tree alone. I sighed, watching Winnie as she scouted the square. We would never find out why she was lingering on earth if my pride kept getting in the way.

I beat the other witches to the tree, settling on one of the white stone benches that bordered the area with a relieved moan. It was good to sit. The sole of my right foot prickled uncomfortably. I kicked off my tennis shoe to dig my thumbs into the arch but froze at the sight of my skin. A black Lichtenberg figure snaked up my ankle and the back of my calf. I rolled up the leg of my jeans for a better look. The marks didn’t extend past my knee, but I worried all the same. It wasn’t the tree-like pattern that concerned me though. If I were mortal, that kind of scar would be a common after-effect of a lightning strike, but the color should’ve been pink or red, not jet black.

“That is an aura.”

Yvette’s voice caused me to jump. She was what we called a wind warrior, able to manipulate the air around her. As a result, she was stealthier than a falcon. I hadn’t heard her approach. “How could it be?”

She knelt down to examine the scar. Now that she mentioned it, I noticed it sparkled just like a witch’s aura. She traced the peculiar pattern with her finger. “It’s a witch’s mark. Dark magic. They’re unintentional, but if a witch casts a curse too big to handle, it leaves leftovers.”

“I’ve never met a witch with a black aura,” I said.

“That’s because they don’t exist,” Yvette replied. “If a witch consistently uses dark magic, her aura darkens over time. Whoever created this storm is too far gone to save.”

“On the upside, at least this means that no one in the coven betrayed us.” I rolled my pant leg down to cover the marking. “None of the Summerses have black auras.”

“You need to tell Morgan,” Yvette said.

Before I could reply, Morgan herself appeared from the opposite side of the yew tree, one hand perched on her hip.

“Tell me what?”

5

“That’s a witch’s mark, all right,” Morgan declared, examining my calf. The mark flared beneath her touch and turned bright blue, the same color as the scar on my arm. “Whoa. Never seen that happen before though.”

“How many times have you seen this?” I asked. Morgan, like myself, had a haunted past, but I knew she had never used dark magic herself.

Her lips tightened in a grim expression. “This would be the third.”

“So what does it mean?” My leg tingled as the mark faded back to black. “Did someone intentionally target me?”

To my relief, Morgan shook her head. “Haven’t you seen the clouds? They stop at the county line. If that storm was any indication, whoever cast this enchantment included all of Yew Hollow. That can only mean one thing.”

“They’re targeting the coven,” Yvette supplied. She paced back and forth in front of the yew tree. “Gwen, you just happened to get caught in the crossfire. If you weren’t pumped full of ancient magic, that attack would’ve killed you.”

One look at Morgan’s troubled face told me that Yvette was right.

“Yvette, I need you to go back to the house,” she ordered. “Send a message to the heads of the covens in the alliance. Tell them to check for dark magic users in and around their areas. We need to kill this thing off before it gets out of hand.”

“Will do.”

Yvette hurried off. Halfway across the square, her wispy gray aura carried her away into the wind. Within seconds, she was out of sight.

Morgan made to stand, but I caught her wrists and pulled her toward me. “Morgan, be honest with me. How bad is this?”

She tucked the burnt ends of my hair behind my ear. “It’s not good,” she admitted. “Let’s put it this way. If the yew tree couldn’t protect us from this attack, then nothing could have. Whoever did this means business. The sooner we catch the culprit, the better. Can you stand?”

I held on to Morgan’s forearms as she helped me to my feet. My marked leg felt heavier than the other, but I wasn’t sure if that was a product of my paranoid imagination. “What do we do?”

“You don’t do anything,” Morgan answered. “I need you to rest. Get your strength back up, Gwen. Talk to your sister. Maybe the two of you can work out why she’s stuck here while you’re recovering.”

I rotated my leg to get another glimpse of the witch’s mark. “And what about this?”

Morgan frowned. “I don’t want to alarm you, but Yvette wasn’t exaggerating. It would’ve killed you. I imagine it will take several rounds of healing spells to get rid of it.”

“Should I be worried?”

She swallowed hard. “Let’s not think about that yet. We need to get home. I have work to do.”

She looped my arm around her neck, but before I could protest that I didn’t need her help, a curious movement at the base of the yew tree caught my eye. “Wait! Look, Morgan.”

I pointed to the grass below the tree. Yesterday, it had been bright green, lush and full from the summer rainstorms. Today, it was dry and dead, as though winter had come early. Then, right before our eyes, another inch of grass withered and died right before our eyes.

“What the—?” Morgan muttered.

I inched forward to get a closer look, but Morgan tugged me away. The destruction spread further, increasing in power every time it claimed a bit of the earth as its own. Flowers wilted, shedding petals like tears, and the leaves on the trees bypassed orange and red and went straight to brown. They dried and shriveled, shaking and sad.

Morgan took my hand. “We need to go. Now.”

Yew Hollow died faster than we could return to the Summers house. By the time we arrived home, the world was slate-gray from the ground to the sky. Not a single blade of grass remained untouched by the pernicious spell. Thankfully, its effects did not seem to extend to humans. I half-expected the deadening gray to crawl up my legs and consume me, dragging me into the ashy ground.

A number of witches were already gathered at the house, awaiting Morgan’s instructions. I took in their worried expressions. Some of them remembered the last time Yew Hollow had been the target of a dark magic attack. None of us wanted to go through that again. We were bombarded with a flurry of questions as Morgan helped me up the porch steps and into the house.

“What’s going on, Morgan?”

“Is it Dominic? I thought he was dead!”

“Why isn’t the yew tree protecting the town?”

“Listen up!” Morgan bellowed over the clamor. Immediately, the modest crowd in the living room fell quiet. Morgan lowered her voice. “This is not the time to panic. It will do us no good. That being said, stay vigilant. We cannot take this lightly. I want everyone here in ten minutes so that we can come up with a plan. Where’s Yvette?”

Yvette’s hand rose over the heads of the witches. “Here.”

“Did you make contact with the other coven heads?”

“No one in the greater New England area has reported any dark magic activity,” Yvette replied. “I’m waiting to hear from those farther out.”

“Keep me posted,” Morgan requested. “Everyone else—”

A shriek interrupted Morgan’s instructions, and a commotion erupted amongst the witches near the fireplace. Voices broke out again, this time in panicked confusion.

“Quiet!” Morgan barked. “Everyone quiet! What’s going on over there?”

“It’s Alana,” someone replied. “She’s seizing.”

Morgan shoved through the throng. “Move. I said move!”

I followed behind Morgan as the crowd parted. The witches nearest Alana knelt on the floor next to her, keeping her convulsions contained as she writhed uncontrollably. I averted my gaze as bile rose in my throat. Alana’s blue eyes had dilated; her pupils were so large that her irises looked black. The strands of her bright red hair tangled together as her body contorted itself into inhuman shapes.

Morgan dove to her knees at Alana’s side. “I need a healer!”

At once, two witches pushed forward, both of whom possessed healing abilities of separate varieties. They joined Morgan on the floor, clasping hands with the coven leader. The familiar buzz of witchcraft grew. Morgan’s bright blue aura combined with the healers’ cobalt and violet colors. As the hues wrapped around Alana, swathing her in a cocoon of whirling lights, her tremors lessened in intensity. The room calmed, the craft faded, and Alana lay still before the fireplace.

“Is she… dead?” Yvette ventured in a small voice.

Morgan pressed two fingers to Alana’s neck. “No,” she announced to the great relief of the witnesses. “Just unconscious. Yvette? Yvonne? Take her home.”

Morgan surreptitiously wiped tears from her cheeks as Yvette and her sister levitated Alana from the floor and out of the living room. When she approached me, I slipped my hand into hers.

“Coincidence?”

“No, indeed,” she muttered, squeezing my fingers. She raised her voice to address the remaining witches. “Everyone else, please come into the dining room. We need to discuss a course of action.”

The women sprang into action to obey Morgan’s request, shuffling into the dining room, which once again expanded to accommodate the growing number of bodies. More of the coven arrived in groups, responding to the unspoken call of their sisters, aunts, and cousins. Morgan stood at the head of the table. Some witches took a seat while others paced or fidgeted, unable to contain their nerves long enough to stay still. Usually, I would have been one of them, but the mark crawling up my calf felt as though as it had taken hold of my muscles. My leg cramped, and I drew out a chair just in time to catch myself before my injured limb betrayed me.

Winnie cast a chill over my shoulder. In the recent events, I forgot that Yew Hollow’s sudden devastation wasn’t the only thing on my plate. Winnie deserved attention too, and I had never been good at prioritizing.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. If it were possible, I would’ve held her hand. “What I said earlier was out of line. I didn’t mean to insinuate that your coven was any less than ours.”

“I appreciate the apology, but it’s not necessary,” Winnie replied. “If anything, I owe you one. I was insensitive earlier. I automatically assumed that our lives would reflect each other’s. That wasn’t realistic.”

I could see how Winnie and I might have interacted with each other throughout the course of our lives if hers hadn’t been cut short. We were opposite in interests and personality, but we both possessed immense respect for those around us. I sensed that we would disagree during a lot of our discussions, but the important thing was that we could talk everything out.

“How about we agree to not make assumptions about each other?” I suggested. “Deal?”

“Deal.” Winnie smiled softly. “Now tell me what happened to your leg, because my assumptions are actually kind of worrying me.”

Morgan clapped her hands together, commanding the room’s attention.

“Later,” I murmured to Winnie.

“Everyone here?” Morgan asked the room. There was a general mumble of consent, and Morgan nodded. “All right then. Settle down. Here’s what we know.”

The witches fell quiet. All eyes were on Morgan, including mine. It was times like these I remembered why she had become coven leader. There was something about Morgan that the other witches didn’t have, a type of unwavering determination that could not be derailed by a bump—or a gaping canyon—in the road.

“Yesterday’s storm was not one of natural development,” Morgan announced. “If that was not obvious already, it appears that the entire population of Yew Hollow has fled the area.”

This was news to the witches who had not accompanied us to the town square. Murmurs broke out as the women discussed what the impromptu evacuation could mean.

“While this is not an ideal situation,” Morgan went on, “it does give us the freedom to tend to matters without alerting the townspeople to our true nature again.”

“What matters are those exactly?” someone voiced from the back of the room.

“Don’t you sense it?” Morgan questioned, gazing at each witch in turn. “The uncertainty in the air? The scent on the wind? Something has shifted, ladies, and that shift bears all the signs of dark magic.”

Anxious conversation swelled, drowning out the rest of Morgan’s words. I resisted the urge to stick my fingers in my ears. The low drone of worrying buzzed like an annoying kitchen timer in my brain. I pinched the bridge of my nose, willing my headache to subside. My head pounded with each beat of my heart. It was time for another round of healing spells, but the coven was otherwise occupied.

“Quiet!” Morgan boomed. She was a small woman, but her voice echoed throughout the house, bouncing off the walls until she had the coven’s attention again. “What did I say ten minutes ago? This is not the time to panic. If you cannot control yourselves, I must ask you to leave. Anyone?”

No one moved. Everyone knew that this was the first big challenge the coven was to face in recent years. All of the witches needed to be informed.

“Good,” Morgan said. “First things first—”

“Can you blame them?”

I leaned forward to see who had interrupted Morgan. Camryn Summers stood up at the opposite end of the table. She was one of Morgan’s distant cousins, a few members removed from the central bloodline. Subtle differences separated her from the rest of the coven. Her golden hair was curled in perfectly messy ringlets, and she had hazel eyes instead of gray or green ones. Her curvaceous figure was the envy of the coven, many of whom were too thin to be considered sensual. Camryn was known to use her appeal to get what she wanted. Morgan told me stories from when they were kids in the coven together, and I’d seen enough of Camryn’s antics to know that her interjection meant trouble. My hackles rose as soon as she spoke up. To interrupt the coven leader was to declare an immediate sign of disrespect.

Morgan made no indication to give Camryn the floor. She remained standing, cocked one eyebrow in her cousin’s direction, and waited for the bomb to drop.

“Our coven is frightened,” Camryn said. Her voice grated on me. It was low and raspy like a chain smoker’s. “You cannot dismiss the severity of this situation. We won’t stand for it. The town has fallen, Morgan, and you have done nothing to prevent it from happening.”

I tensed in my seat at Camryn’s accusation, but a throb in my calf reminded me that I was in no condition to defend Morgan’s honor at the moment. It was a good thing Morgan’s patience was not so limited as mine. She merely appeared bored.

“Yew Hollow is far from ‘fallen,’” Morgan said, “but by all means, continue your diatribe.”

Camryn took the bait. “Ten years ago, you promised us protection under any and all circumstances. We had no choice but to accept your word as true and to go along with your harebrained schemes. When the time came to elect a new coven leader, you robbed us of that opportunity too.”

“It wasn’t your decision,” I snapped at Camryn. “Cassandra—”

“Yes, baby Morgan,” Camryn interrupted. Anger coursed through my veins, but a look from Morgan prevented me from retaliating prematurely. “It is indeed tradition for the current leader to select her successor, but it is also tradition for her to request the opinions of her coven. Do I need to remind you that Morgan abandoned this coven at eighteen and did not return for a decade?”

Malia spoke up from her seat across from me. “Are we really arguing about a leadership switch that occurred over ten years ago when there is a more trying situation at hand? Camryn, sit down—”

“Doesn’t it bother you, Malia?” Camryn asked, honing in on the eldest Summers sister. “If I recall correctly, you were being groomed as the next coven leader before the prodigal daughter fell back on her family. Did it sting when your mother decided that you were no longer her favorite for the position?”

“Morgan was better suited for the role,” Malia replied calmly. I admired her composure. If Camryn had said something like that to me, I would’ve hit her with the first curse that came to mind. “In case you’ve forgotten, Camryn, Yew Hollow has been at peace. We have not faced a challenge like this since Morgan’s inception, and you would do well to thank her for that rather than berate her leadership skills.”

“Morgan instated laws that changed the very core of our existence,” Camryn countered. She began to stroll leisurely around the room, trailing her fingers across the shoulders of the witches sitting at the table. “Hiding from the mortals, playing games with covens weaker than our own—”

“Cooperation is not a game,” Morgan said. “No one coven is omnipotent. It is essential for us to work together if we intend to keep our kind from dying out.”

“And what have those covens ever done for us?” Camryn challenged. I sneered as she brushed by me, but she didn’t dare to touch me. “The alliance was supposedly built on a foundation of sisterhood, but where are they now? Where’s the help that was promised to us in times like these?”

“I have already sent word to the other covens,” Morgan replied. Camryn made to stroll past her, but Morgan stepped in her path. “Any other questions?”

Camryn’s answering smile was wily at best. “My question is how you’ll decide to solve our newest problem, Morgan.”

Morgan leveled a stare at Camryn. “If you sit down,” she said in a calm, collected voice, “I would be happy to address that as I planned to do five minutes ago.”

The witches glared at each other, their noses only inches apart. Finally, Camryn blinked. She gave Morgan one more knowing smile before sauntering back to her seat. Subtly, so that only I could see it, Morgan rolled her eyes.

“As I was saying,” Morgan continued. “This spell has already affected the majority of Yew Hollow. We cannot allow it to permeate any further. Since the townspeople are gone, there’s no reason for us to forego a good defense. I want to build a ward large enough to encompass the entire town. Who will volunteer their efforts to do so?”

A number of hands went up, including mine. Morgan counted heads, assigning tasks to each witch. When she reached me, she paused.

“Not you, Gwen.”

“Why not?” I challenged. “I’m fine, Morgan. I swear.”

“You’re not fine,” Morgan replied. “And until I figure out whose mark that is on your calf, you won’t do anything other than rest. Understood?”

There was no room to argue. Morgan’s mind was made up.

“Fine,” I grumbled.

Morgan addressed the room again. “That’s it then. Those of you who are working on the ward, let’s get started right away. The rest of you should research the nature of yesterday’s storm.”

The witches surged to their feet, but Camryn wasn’t through with causing trouble for the day. “And what about Alana?” she questioned, raising her voice to be heard over the bustle.

“What about her?” Morgan asked wearily.

“Are we supposed to believe that her collapse was pure coincidence?” Camryn asked. The witches paused to hear her out. “A storm comes through Yew Hollow, and all of a sudden one of our own kind falls ill without explanation. Who’s to say this ailment won’t spread?”

Morgan snapped her fingers. In an instant, time slowed. The coven was frozen in place, unaware of the sudden change. Only Morgan, Camryn, and I remained in full possession of our faculties. The spell to expand and slow time was not a simple or easy one. Morgan rarely employed it, and I had a feeling that she only did it now to remind Camryn of her power.

“Do you mean to incite a riot?” Morgan asked the other witch. “Is that what you want? To instill fear and mistrust in this coven? Because I can assure you that it will not further your agenda, whatever that may be. It will only make this situation all the more dangerous.”

Camryn gazed around the room at her frozen sisters, but she looked more amused than impressed. “You haven’t changed, Morgan. You can pretend all you like, but I remember what you were like back then.”

“You mean when we were children,” Morgan retorted. “I never understood the competition between us, Cam. You made it what it was.”

“You were handed opportunities that most of us could never dream of, and you squandered them,” Camryn replied. “Then, after years of neglecting us, you picked up right where you left off. You do things your way, Morgan, with no regard to what the rest of the coven needs.”

“My way has kept this coven safe for ten years,” Morgan declared. She checked her watch, the hands of which had slowed too. It was not safe to slow time for longer than a minute or so. “And no one else has complained thus far.”

“Why would they when you so obviously have already picked your favorites?” Camryn pointed at me. “Exhibit A. Why include Gwenlyn in this conversation? She isn’t even a true Summers witch, yet you make a point to shove her presence in everyone’s faces. You favor an outsider over your own family.”

“I am not an outsider,” I said indignantly.

Morgan silenced me with a quick look. “Gwenlyn is an essential member of this coven,” she said to Camryn. “She saved my life and yours by extension. I suggest you treat her with the utmost respect.” She checked her watch again. This conversation was nearing a dangerous length. “Camryn, I have one last thing to say to you before we wrap this us.”

“What’s that?” Camryn snapped.

In a flash, Morgan disappeared from my end of the table and reappeared near Camryn. Camryn stumbled backward, tripping over her chair. For the first time since she had stood up to challenge Morgan, she looked unsure of her decision to do so. Morgan loomed over her, her eyes and expression dark with the severity of her next sentence.

“Do not interfere,” Morgan began, her voice quiet but authoritative, “with any aspect of today’s work. If I hear so much as a whisper that you’re stirring up trouble, I will mix the batch of black salt myself. Understood?”

I contained a wicked grin. Black salt was a mixture of sea salt and yew ash. The combination was meant to ward off those who were unwelcome. If a witch betrayed her coven, black salt was used to banish the perpetrator from returning to her sisters. It was a depressing and lonely fate. I doubted Morgan would ever go through with the threat, but the shocked look on Camryn’s face satisfied me to no end.

“Understood,” Camryn replied through clenched teeth.

“Good.”

Morgan snapped again. Time resumed at its normal pace. The coven looked between the feuding witches, awaiting Morgan’s answer to Camryn’s question.

“We are not yet aware if Alana’s illness is linked to the storm or not,” Morgan announced. “Her collapse might simply be a reaction to the stressful scenario at hand. We’ll monitor her closely and keep you updated. In the meantime, I expect your full attention to be trained on defending Yew Hollow. That goes for everyone in this room.”

6

On Morgan’s orders, I spent the rest of the day in my room with Winnie. For the first hour of my prescribed relaxation time, I stared out of the window at the gray town, watching the witches gather the necessary items for the massive defensive spell Morgan had asked them to build. It was the biggest ward the coven had ever attempted, and if my calculations were correct, it would take approximately three days to complete it. Afterward, no one would be able to enter or exit Yew Hollow. The thought didn’t sit well with me. Yes, Yew Hollow was home, but in the event of an emergency, the ward would not allow us a ready escape route. Unfortunately, it was our best option to defend against whatever enchantment had been cast over the town.

I flopped down on my bed. The coven was so wrapped up in their preparations that no one was free to help me perform a healing spell. I needed it badly. It felt as though someone had tightened a rubber band around my head. The pressure built up behind my eyes until I couldn’t keep them open anymore, while my calf grew more and more agitated. I’d made the mistake of inspecting the witch’s mark again and discovered that it had grown. The lightning-like patterns inched toward the back of my knee. Instinct told me it would continue to spread if we didn’t find some way to contain it, but I was too exhausted to bother with dark magic research.

A drop in temperature near my feet indicated that Winnie had sat at the foot of the bed. She stared blankly at the floor. Without me around, there was nothing for her to do, and I was down for the count. Temporarily, anyway.

“Hey,” I mumbled.

Winnie glanced up. “Yeah?”

I propped myself against the pillows, doing my best to give Winnie my full attention. “This has all been incredibly inconvenient. I swear I’m not as callous as I seem. I want to get to know you. I really do. I want to help you move on.”

Winnie sighed and stretched out across the duvet. “I don’t think you’re callous.”

“I’ve pretty much been ignoring you since the moment you got here,” I admitted. “That’s my fault. I don’t expect you to understand, but it takes a lot for me to open up to someone new, even my own twin.”

“I thought it was just me.”

“It’s definitely not you.” I tucked my feet under the bedspread, snuggling against the pillows. I may have fought against Morgan’s orders to stay in bed for the day, but sleep was overtaking me quickly. “I’m so tired though. I’m desperate for a nap.”

Winnie smiled, and I didn’t think I was ever going to get used to watching someone else’s expressions on my own face.

“You should rest,” she said. “But before you do, could you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Do you mind turning on the TV?”

I chuckled and reached for the remote. Winnie lay next to me, leaving enough space between us to offset her chilly presence. I flicked through the channel list. “Any requests?”

“A cooking show.”

I found a rerun of a bizarre food truck competition show and left Winnie to it. I curled up beneath the sheets, trying to ignore the all-over ache in my muscles and my pounding head. Unintentionally, I rested my forehead near Winnie’s arm. She acted like an ice pack, soothing my nagging headache. In such close quarters, I swore I could sense her aura. It was impossible, but the thought of it helped me forget about the raw mark on my calf. Whether it was in my imagination or not, Winnie’s anesthetic effect relaxed my tender muscles and lulled me to sleep.

Later that night, after several hours of on-and-off napping and binge watching cooking shows with Winnie, I hobbled downstairs in search of relief for my leg. I limped along to keep the weight off my foot, but with every step, the witch’s mark burned and throbbed.

The house was quiet. Everyone had gone to bed after a long day of preparing the ward. I staggered into the kitchen, balancing on one leg as I hopped around and gathered the ingredients for a healing salve. While I was at it, I scoured the fridge for leftovers. I hadn’t eaten all day, so while a bowl of soup warmed in the microwave, I mixed turmeric, olive oil, and star anise. However, when I tried to infuse the ingredients with the spell that would turn ordinary spices into a healing salve, my aura fizzled and faded. I was burned out. Frustrated, I threw the mixture across the room, where the ceramic bowl clanged loudly against the aluminum sink and shattered. Yellow paste spattered the kitchen floor.

Morgan ambled in from the dining room, dressed in flannel pajamas and a satin robe. She blearily rubbed her eyes. “Gwenlyn? What are you doing up? It’s late.”

The soup bubbled over in the microwave. I wrenched the appliance open as it beeped feebly. “I was hungry. Go back to sleep, Morgan. It’s been a long day. I’m fine.”

Morgan’s gaze wandered to the shattered ceramic and the wasted turmeric paste. Then she noticed my one-footed flamingo stance. She summoned a chair from the dining room. “You’re not fine. Sit down, Gwen.”

I collapsed gratefully, cradling the steaming bowl of soup in my lap. Morgan knelt down and took my leg between her hands, examining the dark mark on my calf with a worried look.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was getting worse?” she asked.

The soup was too hot to eat. The broth rippled as I blew across the surface to cool it. “You have enough things on your plate already.”

“One of those things is you,” she reminded me. She picked up a shard of ceramic. “What happened with the healing salve?”

“I couldn’t complete it.”

“Oh, honey.”

Morgan’s aura glowed as she swept a hand lazily across the kitchen. The broken shards collected themselves from the floor and landed in the trash can. Then Morgan took up the ingredients I had abandoned, mixing a new salve and effortlessly infusing it with her craft. She sat on the floor next to my chair, propped my leg up, and smeared a thick coat of paste from my ankle to the back of my knee. Immediately, the healing spelled dulled the burning ache of the witch’s mark, and I sighed into my soup.

“Better?” Morgan asked.

“Much.”

“It’s spreading,” she noted matter-of-factly. “We’ll have to figure out a way to contain it.”

“And if we don’t?”

Morgan finished painting my calf and wiped the excess salve off of her fingers. She patted my knee. “Don’t worry. We will. In the meantime, I have a favor to ask of you if you’re up for it.”

I straightened in my chair, setting the bowl of broth on the counter. “Always.”

“Camryn is vying for coven leader.”

A sneer tilted my lips. “Officially?”

“Yup.” Morgan stood to rinse the leftover paste from the bowl. “She officially announced it this afternoon, claiming that I’m ‘no longer fit’ to lead.”

“On what grounds?”

“You heard her earlier,” Morgan said. The dish clanged in the sink. “I abandoned the coven when I was young, I was never meant to be the head, her intuition makes her a better choice. Blah, blah, blah.”

I scoffed as I inspected Morgan’s handiwork. The yellow healing salve obscured the worst of the witch’s mark. “Her intuition?”

“Yeah, she’s claiming that her intuitive ability would be more of an asset to the coven than my, as she so delicately put it, ‘necrophilic tendencies.’”

“I’m going to kill her.”

Morgan’s craft pinched my arm. “No, you won’t,” she ordered. “I can handle Camryn. She’s been pulling crap like this since we were in grade school.”

“Why does she hate you so much anyway?” I asked.

Morgan shrugged and rolled her eyes. “I don’t really know. We were always in competition when we were kids. She made it that way. I didn’t care who the coven favored. Back then, all I wanted was to be a normal mortal. Camryn was the complete opposite. She loved being a witch, but because I was the daughter of the coven leader, I always got more attention than her. Not that I wanted it. According to Karma, Camryn was over the moon when I left town after graduation. I guess she figured she’d finally proved to the coven that she was right about me.”

“I’m sure she was pleased when you showed up again,” I guessed.

“Actually, there was so much going on that I never spoke to Camryn,” Morgan explained. She leaned against the kitchen counter, where the moonlight stained her skin silver. “What with all the murders and demons and dark magic, I didn’t have time to waste on a petty childhood battle that I never wanted anything to do with in the first place. Camryn’s been pretty quiet until now.”

The healing spell from the salve spread up my thigh, relieving the ache in my lower back and the leftover buzz from the electrocution. I rested my chin in my hands. “What changed then? Why is Camryn making trouble now? Doesn’t she understand it’s the worst time for something like this?”

“I think that’s exactly why she’s doing it,” Morgan answered. “She sensed an opportunity. The coven is already scared. They don’t want a repeat of the last time. It’s no secret that the yew tree, even with my mother’s influence, isn’t as strong as it used to be. It needs time to grow, which we don’t have. Camryn knows that, and she’s using it to her advantage. The witches need something to believe in, and Camryn's trying to make damn sure it’s her instead of me.”

“If Camryn wanted to be coven leader in your stead, why didn’t she try for the position while you were gone?” I asked. “That would’ve been easier for her, right? One Summers sister down, three to go.”

Morgan laughed without humor. “Camryn never would have dared to challenge my mother. Cassandra was the strongest leader this coven ever had, and she also held the position for an unusually long time.”

“Some would argue that you’re stronger than Cassandra was,” I reminded her, gesturing to the faded ancient marks that snaked up her forearms. “She didn’t survive a trip to the otherworld.”

Morgan involuntarily rubbed her shoulders. “Gwen, when you find yourself in charge of more than forty witches, you have to find the balance between humble and confident. Do I think that I could hold my own against Camryn if it came down to it? Without a doubt. But do I consider myself the most powerful witch to ever lead the Summers coven? Not even close. Power is a fickle thing, Gwen. You don’t play with it. You simply manage it.”

“Yeah, but just once I’d like to see you kick some butt,” I told her. “Like the old days.”

Morgan laughed, but her lighthearted chuckled morphed into a dry cough, and she leaned over the sink, heaving for breath. I stood up, hopped over to her, and patted her on the back.

“Are you all right?” I asked as the fit subsided.

Morgan cleared her throat. “Mm-hmm. Must be a cold coming on.”

I filled a glass of water from the tap and handed it to her. “You said you had to ask me a favor.”

She sipped gratefully. “Yes, of course. Thank you for reminding me. As I was saying, I can handle Camryn, but I’m going to need your help to figure out who’s casting this spell over Yew Hollow. I know you have a lot going on right now with your sister in town, but you’re my best bet, Gwenlyn.”

“You really don’t want my help with the ward?”

“I think it’s better if you sit this one out,” Morgan replied. “Research will be less strenuous on you while you’re healing.”

“I can tell when you’re lying, Morgan. You make an unreasonable amount of eye contact when you do.”

Her eyes flickered away from mine. “I just want you to get better.”

“Or you think this witch’s mark is worse than you’re letting on.” I confiscated the water glass as she tried to swallow her response. “Come on, Morgan. It’s me. Tell me the truth.”

“Fine,” she conceded, swiping the glass from me. “I’m worried about the mark. It’s no coincidence that the only witch in the coven completely outside of the Summers bloodline is the one that gets marked. It makes me uneasy.”

“Why?”

“The spell targeted Yew Hollow,” Morgan reminded me. She pressed a hand to her chest and drew in a deep breath. The air rattled through her lungs. “That means whoever’s behind it cast it with the intention of challenging the coven. I keep waiting for the rest of this curse to drop. One thunderstorm, an empty town, and a bunch of dead grass can’t be the end of it. When it comes—and it will come—it will affect the entire coven. Except you. That’s what makes me uneasy, Gwenlyn. That mark may not be coincidence at all. They’ve been watching us. They know that you were adopted, and they ensured that you would be weakened too. They’ve been planning this for a long time.”

As the weight of this settled between us, I drew Morgan into a hug and rested my chin on top of her head. “Everything’s going to be okay. I have faith in you.”

Morgan bottled up another round of coughs. “I sure hope you’re right.”

In the morning, Winnie stood by the window, looking down at the front yard. I kicked the sheets off my legs. The turmeric paste had stained the linens bright yellow. They would need a healthy cleaning spell to recover their original cream color. I picked dried bits of salve from my calf. The witch’s mark hadn’t faded, but it also hadn’t grown any more. I felt much stronger than yesterday, and the strange buzzing feeling had finally ceased. A knot of hope grew in my mind. Maybe Morgan didn’t need to worry so much about the mark after all.

I joined Winnie at the window. “Morgan wants us to figure out who cast the spell over Yew Hollow. You up for a little magical reconnaissance?”

“Sure, sure,” she muttered.

I followed her gaze out to the front yard. The clouds obscured the angle of the sun, but I could tell it was nearing mid-morning. The witches should have been working on the ward by now, but the yard was empty and quiet.

“Something’s wrong,” Winnie said, surveying the gray landscape. “I can feel it.”

I took her word for it and didn’t waste any time, tugging on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt before rushing downstairs. This time around, my leg supported all of my weight. I hurdled the last four steps and landed in the foyer.

Morgan sat at the kitchen table, her head bowed. A collection of what looked like blueprints littered the table, calculating the size and angle of the ward. As I approached, Morgan remained hauntingly still, immersed in her papers.

“Morgan?”

Very slowly, she looked up. I halted, taken aback by the sight of her face. The skin around her eyes was dark, and her cheeks were sunken in. I tried to hide my horror, but Morgan knew me too well.

“I know,” she rasped. “It’s bad.”

“What happened?” I gasped, sitting down next to her. I couldn’t look away from her mummified appearance.

“I told you I was waiting for something else,” Morgan said, her voice so hoarse that I worried for her vocal chords. “This is it. It’s not just me.”

“What do you mean?”

Malia, Karma, and Laurel appeared from the kitchen, each holding a large mixing bowl full of healing salve. Like Morgan, they all bore the signs of some kind of intense illness.

“Camryn was right,” Morgan whispered. “Everyone’s sick. Alana was just the first.”

7

The mysterious illness swept through the coven overnight. It spared no one. Every witch bore some symptom or another. Alana was the worst off. She had not awoken since her collapse the day before. Yvette and Yvonne—the twin sisters who lived with Alana—watched her round the clock. When she stopped breathing on her own, the twins implemented spells to keep her alive. Alana was officially in a coma, a fact that terrified the rest of the coven. If Alana had succumbed so quickly to the illness, the other witches assumed they were not far behind.

There was no rhyme or reason as to why the illness affected some witches worse than others. Morgan and her sisters looked like hell, but they were comparatively healthy to some of the other women in the coven. Morgan bore only the symptoms of a common cold—coughing, runny nose, sore throat—while others developed an itchy red rash or agonizing muscles aches. I spent the morning lugging buckets of healing salve from one house to the next, distributing enchanted compresses to those who needed them, and feeling guilty that I appeared to be the only witch on the mend in the entire neighborhood.

The work was far from over though. Tasks were redistributed amongst the healthiest witches. Morgan and her crew began building the ward from the ground up, patrolling the perimeter of Yew Hollow in order to lay down the first layer of our defense. I helped where I could, despite Morgan’s protests. Even with the witch’s mark, I was the strongest witch of the coven at the moment, and Morgan couldn’t deny that for long. As the hours wore on, she gave up on trying to get me to go home and rest. The ward was too important, and it was taking longer than usual to construct. I led a group of witches around town to reinforce our base layer. In the evening, as the gray day faded into a gray night, I sent my workers home with a sad farewell. They were exhausted and sick, and they deserved to rest.

When I returned to the house, I went up to my room with Winnie, where we watched television in silence. I stared vacantly as images of Korean barbecue and speciality tacos graced the screen. Winnie deserved so much more from me, but our daily pattern of not having enough time for each other continued. At this point, pure guilt prevented me from speaking to her, but I used my exhaustion from the day’s work as an excuse to avoid conversation.

In time, Morgan wandered upstairs and peeked into my room. “Did you eat?”

Winnie and I reacted at the same time, turning our heads to acknowledge our visitor. Morgan’s gaze ping-ponged between us, as though she’d forgotten which one of us was alive or dead.

“No,” I replied. “Not hungry.”

“Karma made lobster bisque. Your favorite.”

“I’ll get some later.”

Morgan sat at the edge of the bed and smoothed the wrinkles in the duvet. “I wanted to say thank you for your help today. It meant the world to me. And Winnie? I wanted to apologize to you.”

Winnie looked away from the television, surprised. “What for?”

“Were it not for all of this, Gwenlyn would have more time to focus on you,” Morgan answered. “I’m sorry we haven’t had the opportunity to help you cross over. I know it must be frustrating.”

Winnie tucked her chin to her chest sheepishly, her hair swinging forward to cover her face. “Morgan, I can’t begin to fathom how challenging the situation is for you right now. Please don’t worry about me.”

Morgan surprised Winnie again, reaching out to cup the younger woman’s translucent cheek in her palm. Winnie’s eyes widened, and I smiled. Ever since Morgan’s return from the otherworld, she had honed powers that no other psychic medium had the hope of acquiring. I wished that the ability to interact physically with ghosts was more commonplace. Morgan’s touch was comforting to lost spirits. It reminded them of true compassion, and oftentimes, it helped ease them into the world beyond this one.

“I need the two of you now more than ever,” Morgan said. “Tomorrow, I would like you to go to the library and look through the archives.”

“But the ward—”

Morgan shook her head to silence me. “I’ll take care of the ward. The hardest part is through. All we have to do now is work on reinforcing it and complete the spell. I need you to research this illness, Gwenlyn. You’re the only witch in this coven as familiar with the archives as I am. We need a cure and a plan to combat the curse. Otherwise, this ward acts as nothing but a quarantine. Find me the cure. Find me the culprit. Anything that will help us get Yew Hollow back on its feet.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m going to keep Camryn off my back,” Morgan replied. “She’s been using this ailment as fuel for her fire. I found her preaching to a few of the sicker witches today, trying to convince them that if she was coven leader, she would’ve never let this happen.”

“They can’t possibly believe her,” Winnie piped in. “I know I haven’t been here long, but I can see that the coven trusts you, Morgan. They should understand this isn’t your fault.”

Morgan patted Winnie’s knee and stood up. “Thank you, Winnie. Unfortunately, it isn’t always about trust. Camryn’s building a following based on fear, and I need to focus on containing it before it morphs into a mutiny.”

“That wouldn’t happen,” I said.

“Thinking like that will guarantee that it does,” Morgan rebutted. She leaned over the bed and tugged at the burnt ends of my hair, which I had yet to trim off. “Please, Gwen. Do the research.”

“First thing tomorrow.”

The Summers coven archives were stored in the local library, hidden away from prying mortal eyes by a few simple illusionary spells. With the town vacant, we didn’t have to worry about being discreet. Winnie and I walked to the library together. The sky was gray, as it had been for the past three days, and an annoyingly cold drizzle numbed my ears and the tip of my nose. I started questioning my love of dreary weather. This was definitely a “be careful what you wish for” scenario. The monochrome setting dampened the entire coven’s energy, bringing the already morose mood down further, and I couldn’t wait to see the sun again.

The witches worked in small clumps to strengthen the ward. Their auras entwined to feed the defensive spell, stretching up toward the sky and arcing out toward the horizon. I worried that the scale of the ward might negatively impact its effectiveness, but with Morgan’s craft at the epicenter of its architecture, the witches had a decent shot at constructing a fully-fledged fortress. Morgan herself was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Camryn. I wondered if they were hidden in the woods somewhere, duking it out with an old-school style witch’s duel, then laughed at the thought. Morgan had long since abandoned her hotheaded tendencies, and she no doubt had a better plan to taper off Camryn’s backlash.

The library was deserted, save for thirteen-year-old Arianna hunched over a desk in the corner. Since the town’s teachers had left too, the coven children were on a hiatus from public school. Most of them ran rampant like they did on summer vacation, but Arianna dutifully kept up with the curriculum, reading ahead in the textbooks to further her education. I waved to her.

“Anything good?” I asked.

She held up a workbook and made a face. “Geometry proofs.”

“Ew. Shout if you need help. I’ll be in the archives.”

Winnie and I made our way to the back of the library, where the shelves grew taller and the book titles more incomprehensible with every step. Yew Hollow’s literary collection was small and sacred, but the hidden stacks of witch history put the mortal volumes to shame.

“Here we are,” I announced, stopping in front of the self-help section.

Winnie turned her head sideways to read some of the titles. “Gwen, no offense, but I don’t think The Power of Positive Thinking is going to help Morgan get rid of this curse.”

I chuckled and rubbed my hands together. My aura sparked between my palms. Green flecks of energy reflected off the spines of the books. With the tip of my glowing index finger, I traced a delicate pattern through the self-help section. When I was finished, I stepped back to admire my handiwork. My craft outlined a set of two-dimensional stairs that were, at first glance, no more accessible than the bookshelf itself.

“Ready?” I asked Winnie.

“You bet.”

I completed the spell with a small push to the top step. The books fell forward, as though the wall behind the shelf didn’t exist, flattening on their sides to construct a staircase of hardbacks that wasn’t there before. The whirl of pages settled, revealing a passageway into the nonexistent basement of the library. A cozy glow beckoned us downward.

“Shall we?”

I led the way down. The books beneath my feet were protected by another spell, but I always felt bad about stepping on them. They led us into a small circular room. Two leather armchairs rested on a collection of handwoven rugs. A desk sat across from them, in case a witch needed a better surface to study at. The glow came from several lit candles and a burning fireplace, all of which warmed the underground room. Curved shelves lined the walls, but these books were not for self-help. They were full of stories that mortals considered old wives’ tales or moral lessons to read to children at night. In actuality, everything we knew about our kind was stored in these pages, including the entire history of the Summers coven.

“Nice digs,” Winnie commented, impressed. She sat down in one of the cushioned chairs and bounced up and down. “Has this always been here?”

I shucked off my raincoat and dropped it by the staircase. “Nope. We used to keep the archives at the house, but we kept acquiring new volumes. Witches from other covens would drop things off, our coven updated the history of the town, et cetera. When a hurricane came through and nearly ruined the entire collection, Morgan decided we needed a better place to store everything.”

“Ever think about going digital?”

I snorted. “The Summerses don’t do digital.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Winnie joked. “How am I supposed to help you look for information when I can’t touch the books?”

“Morgan thought of that already.”

I took a vial from my pocket. Inside, a little will-o-the-wisp glimmered with Morgan’s blue craft. When I uncorked the vial, it levitated in front of Winnie for a moment before floating straight into her heart space. Her diaphanous skin glowed blue and became opaque.

“Voilá,” I said as Winnie examined her alien appearance. “Technically, you still aren’t able to touch anything, but it will at least let you help me search the stacks. Try it out.”

Winnie wandered over to a shelf and reached for a book. The volume responded to Morgan’s craft rather than Winnie’s touch, floating out to meet her fingertips. She grinned as she guided the book through the air to rest on the desk.

“I feel like a real magician,” she remarked. She waved her hands around another hovering book. “Look! No strings!”

I rolled my eyes in amusement. “It won’t last very long, so don’t waste it. Let’s get to work.”

Unlike the library above, the archives were poorly organized. The Dewey Decimal System didn’t exist down here. Witch literature was difficult to keep track of. Most of it was written in the form of personal diaries and never edited. The pages preserved the essence of the authors, but when it came to research, search and find was the only method available.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Winnie asked, skimming the titles on the shelf nearest the fireplace. “101 Uses for Toadstools? Come Hell or High Water? Is this a romance novel?”

She held up the book. Sure enough, a cheesy picture of a witch and her human lover set against a background of hellfire graced the front cover.

“Don’t judge me,” I said, “but I’ve read that.”

Winnie whacked my shoulder lightly with the novel. “Got a thing for forbidden romances, huh?”

“Yew Hollow gets pretty boring when there aren’t any demons or dark witches to vanquish,” I explained. I snatched the book from her grasp. “I’m starting to think letting you borrow Morgan’s craft for a little while was a mistake.”

“Fine,” she laughed. “Point me in the right direction, would you?”

“We’re looking for accounts of dark magic.” I drifted toward a shelf full of hand-bound notebooks and chose a random stack to skim through. “Personal diaries or history textbooks are our best bets. If a witch has seen something like this before, she would’ve written it down.” I sat down at the desk with my haul. “Look for anything that seems similar to our situation, like crafted thunderstorms or widespread disease.”

Winnie collected her own handful of notebooks and settled in one of the armchairs. “Morgan said that this was some kind of curse. Is that different from another type of enchantment?”

“Curses are inherently malevolent,” I answered, gingerly turning the front cover of the first journal. It was dated 1878, and the yellowing pages were fragile. “Witches balance power just like any other supernatural entity. Light and dark, so to speak. Everyone starts off neutral. Usually, we’re taught to follow the general rules of morality, but some witches, just like mortals, want something more. It’s the arrogant or the petty ones that usually turn to curses, personalities that need attention and power. They start out small, a pox curse here or a trip hex there. If they continue, it gets worse. Famine, plague, war. Half of this world’s historic disasters were due to some kind of witch’s curse.”

Winnie forgot to skim the books for information. Instead, she stared at me with rapt attention. “So what happens to the witches who continue to cast curses?”

“They go dark,” I answered simply. “Curses morph into dark magic. You start to access something that isn’t of this earth anymore. It’s created by your own faults, stemming from guilt or rage or vengeance. Then every spell you cast, every enchantment you create, is dark. You aura blackens and you lose yourself.”

Winnie rested her chin in her hands. “Why would anyone want that?”

“Power,” I replied. “That’s the biggest reason, but not all witches intentionally turn to black magic. Some of them are merely overwhelmed by their own internal darkness.” I faltered, staring at a page in the journal without reading the words. “I should know. When I was a kid, I did a lot of questionable things to stay alive. I pushed myself to the brink.”

“But you came back,” Winnie reminded me.

“Yeah,” I said, returning my attention to the journal. “I came back.”

8

Day after day, Winnie and I descended into the archives to comb through the coven’s collection of literature. We scoured crumbling textbooks, read moth-eaten journals cover to cover, and even decoded a few scrolls written in French and Latin. I extinguished the fireplace most days, wiping sweat from my brow. The temperature was regulated by witchcraft to accommodate the weather outside, but the room seemed to grow smaller and warmer with the passing time. I grew weary of the alcove beneath the library. As the weeks passed, it began to feel like Morgan had banished me to the sub basement as some kind of punishment.

The ward was finished. It was invisible to the naked eye, but everyone knew it was there. The air in Yew Hollow didn’t move. There was no wind or sun, just the gray gloom that coated the entire town like a thick layer of ash. Our self-imposed quarantine was complete, but it did nothing to ease my mind. On the contrary, I felt trapped in the desolate prison of small town charm. The upside was that the witches’ illness had plateaued. No one’s condition had improved or deteriorated. We kept everyone except Alana—who was still unconscious—semi-healthy and functioning by sharing energy with each other. Morgan and the strongest witches cast high-level healing spells across the coven, but I knew time was running out. No matter how effortlessly Morgan disguised her stress, she and the others were growing weaker.

So I held my pride and my tongue and returned to the library every morning with Winnie. Most days, we were there until late in the evening. Every so often, we came across a tidbit of information that appeared helpful but had no luck in discovering an actual solution to the coven’s problem.

“A witch in 1918 fought off the flu pandemic in her coven with an enchantment she created with healing crystals. I guess that doesn’t apply here though, since the pandemic didn’t stem from a curse. Or did it?”

“Here’s something. A witch cursed her own coven because they elected her subordinate coven leader over her. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Oh, wow. The coven killed the witch to get rid of the curse. I guess that’s one way to solve the problem.”

During yet another fruitless session of hunting through the archives for any hint of a similar curse, I groaned in frustration and pushed away from the desk. My eyes watered from squinting at the tiny lines of text, trying to decipher the cramped handwriting of some eighteenth century witch doctor’s journal. I rubbed them furiously. “This is useless. It’s been weeks and we’ve only made it through an eighth of the books in here. We need a better system.”

Winnie tossed a textbook to a pile of volumes on the floor that she had already read. “Like what? Got a spell to read faster?”

“I wish,” I grumbled. “I don’t know what Morgan was thinking. I’d be of better use elsewhere. I could help with the healing spells or maintaining the ward.”

“She assigned this task to you for a reason,” Winnie reminded me. “Morgan respects you. She wouldn’t make you do something without good reason.”

“Really?” I reorganized a stack of journals according to date and returned them to the proper shelf. “Because it feels like she just wants me out of the way.”

“She’s worried about you.”

“I get that, but I’m fine.” I scratched the bag of my leg. My jeans hid the dark spiderwebs of black craft on my skin, but I felt its unwanted presence at every second. “The mark isn’t spreading anymore. I’m the only witch that isn’t sick. I should be doing something that actually matters.”

Winnie blew a sigh through her nose. “Maybe our search is too broad. We’ve been looking for a way to beat this curse, but what if we just find something to subdue it first? To stop it from getting any worse? Something that would take place of all those healing spells Morgan’s been casting. That can’t be healthy for her.”

I flicked a speck of dust off the desk and watched it float lazily to the rug below. “How are we supposed to do that? I’m not a healer.”

“I am,” Winnie countered. “Or at least I was. I might not have practiced traditional healing witchcraft, but my family took a specific interest in holistic measures. There might not be a magical cure for cancer, but I bet we can find something that at least slows down the symptoms of the coven’s illness that doesn’t nuke Morgan. That might buy us some time until we figure out how to shut this curse down for good. Why are you looking at me like that?”

I glanced away, unaware that I was staring until she called it out. “Nothing. It’s just—you keep saying ‘we’ and ‘us.’ I’ve never had that before. Not with a blood relative anyway.”

Winnie grinned. “You getting soft on me, Gwenlyn?”

I scoffed. “Don’t push it.”

Winnie raised her hands in defeat. “Whatever. We’re in this together, and nothing you do or say is going to change that.”

“Good to know.”

She made to put her books away, but they fell through her hands, landing on the floor in an uneven heap. The textbook on top fell open, displaying a side-by-side comparison of two different family trees and several confusing graphs.

“Looks like Morgan’s spell is wearing off for the day,” I said, kneeling to collect the fallen volumes. “I guess we’re done.”

“Wait!” Winnie tried to grab my wrist, her fingers sinking through my skin. She ignored my resulting shudder and pointed to the textbook. “That’s it.”

I checked the title. “This is a study on genealogy. We already know everything about the Summers’ bloodline. I don’t think this is going to help us much.”

Winnie motioned frantically with her hands. “I’m not talking about the Summerses. Open it back to that page!”

I flipped through the book until I caught side of the family trees again. “Here. What are you going on about?”

Winnie leaned over the desk to examine the diagrams. “Look. The one on the left shows general power levels for witches who had only one magical parent. The one on the right makes the argument that witches with two magical parents have significantly higher ability levels.”

I squinted at the page, trying to make sense of the scribbled figures. “I don’t understand. How can a witch have two magical parents?”

“Men may not be able to wield witchcraft, but some are still born into covens,” Winnie said. She gestured impatiently for me to flip the page. I obliged. “Genetically, boys born into a witch family are classified as magical mortals. Kind of an oxymoron, I know, but when a coven-born man has a daughter with a witch, the child’s ability has the potential to be ten times stronger than that of a normal witch. Gwen, this is it!”

I lifted an eyebrow at Winnie’s enthusiasm, leaned over the textbook, and read a line of the next paragraph out loud. “Witches born of two magical parents are incredibly rare. Studies reveal that coven-born men are less willing to procreate with witches, and if they do, the resulting child is almost always male.”

“So?”

“So this doesn’t sound like ‘it’ to me, Winnie,” I said, closing the textbook and carrying it back to the shelves. “It sounds like we would have to leave Yew Hollow in search of a witch with incredible healing powers. There are two problems with that. Number one: the ward is complete. It would take an arm and a leg to open a portal through it. And number two: who’s to say we could even find one super-powered witch, let alone one with the healing ability that we need? It’s impossible.”

“But that’s the thing.” Winnie jumped into my path to catch my attention, and I dodged quickly to avoid walking straight through her. “I already know one.”

“One what?”

“A witch born of two magical parents with a healing ability.”

I stared at Winnie. “You’re kidding. It can’t be that easy.”

Winnie caved, wringing her hands as she paced in a circle around the room’s circumference. “Okay, fine. I don’t exactly know her, but I know of her.”

“How?” I demanded. “Who is she? And why didn’t you tell me all of this before we spent weeks down here with our noses an inch from these smelly old books?”

“I just remembered,” Winnie replied. She cradled her head in her hands, as if wracking her memory for more information. “I’d totally forgotten about it until now.”

“That’s normal.” I finished putting away the books and collapsed in one of the armchairs. “Ghosts have shoddy memories. Is anything else coming back to you?”

Winnie took the chair across from mine. “While I was dying, my mother and aunt did everything in their power to try and save me.”

I swallowed hard. This wasn’t the direction I thought this conversation was going to go.

“Don’t look so morose,” Winnie ordered, playfully kicking my shin. For a ghost, she often forgot that her touch did nothing but chill me to the bone. If she were anyone other than my twin sister, I would’ve long since given her a firm lecture about it. “I don’t want you to pity me. This is informational. The point is that my mother looked far and wide for a cure. She figured there had to be something out there to stave off the cancer cells. She found out about super-powered witches and set her mind to locating one with a healing ability.”

“And she actually found one?”

“My aunt did,” Winnie replied. “She searched from here to California for two years. Then, right before we realized that the cancer had spread pretty much everywhere, she found her in some place called Windsor Falls.”

“Windsor Falls? Hold on a second.” I conjured a state map of Massachusetts, tracing the tiny titles of the neighboring towns with my finger. “That’s what I thought. Windsor Falls is only two hundred miles from here. We could find this witch today!”

“Uh, I don’t know about that,” Winnie said skeptically.

“Why not?”

“We never made contact with her,” she answered. “There was no point. I was beyond help. No spell in the world could’ve saved me.”

My heart sank. I didn’t want to think about how much Winnie had suffered in the end. It didn’t mesh with the image of the light-hearted woman who had spent the better half of her day looking for a solution to a problem that wasn’t hers. I couldn’t imagine Winnie sick and dying. I couldn’t imagine her without her infallible energy or sweet disposition. If I was being honest, I didn’t want to.

“If we asked, do you think she would help us?”

Winnie grit her teeth. “That’s the thing, Gwen. I hate to disappoint you, but the only thing I know is that this woman exists. Near the end, I was in and out of consciousness. My mother and aunt didn’t bother to keep me informed. I don’t know her name or where she lives or if she would even be willing to talk to you.”

“But she’s out there,” I insisted, leaning forward in my chair. “She’s a two-hour’s drive from here. That’s better than the absolute lack of leads we had a few hours ago.”

“What are you going to do?” Winnie asked. “How are you supposed to find her? Drive out to some town you don’t know and start asking around for the local super-powered healer?”

I stood up, grabbed my raincoat, and pushed my arms through the sleeves. “It’s easier than that. Morgan has a scrying mirror. Let’s go.”

Winnie followed me up the set of book stairs. “Morgan has a scrying mirror? How? They’re supposed to be really hard to get your hands on.”

“It’s an heirloom,” I explained. “It was passed down from a previous coven leader. It’s a bit of a mystery as to who acquired it. The general consensus is not to ask, so I imagine the story isn’t pleasant.”

I sealed the entryway to the archives room with a lazy wave of my hand. Arianna—who spent most of her free time studying in the library—was gone for the day. Outside, it was hard to tell what time it was. The overcast sky tampered with my internal time clock, but I guessed it was late afternoon. Usually, Morgan spent the evenings fortifying the ward with a few other witches, but there was a distinct lack of auras in the sky today. Winnie side-eyed me when I broke into a light jog.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“Let’s go find out.”

The closer we got to the Summers house, the more I felt like something had gone wrong. The witch’s mark on my leg pulsed as we crested the hill, but I ignored it, favoring my other foot. In the front yard, I located the source of my anxiety. Morgan tended to a group of witches that had been helping with the ward. From the looks of things, the witches had collapsed simultaneously. They lay in the grass at odd angles in various states of consciousness. I sprinted over.

“What happened?” I asked, kneeling next to Morgan as she worked a healing spell on one of the motionless witches. I joined hands and auras with her. The combined colors flowed over the witch’s skin, and her eyes fluttered open as the spell took effect.

“They all dropped,” Morgan said, her voice hard and bitter. “All at once. I felt it too. My knees went completely weak for a second, but I didn’t pass out. It’s getting worse, Gwen. We can’t keep this up for long. Did you find anything in the library today?”

I helped the witch to sit up. “Yes, we have a lead, but I need your scrying mirror. Winnie knows of a healer—”

The crunch of footsteps through the dry grass interrupted me. I moved my fingers just in time to prevent a pair of fashionable leather boots from crushing them. I followed the furry leg warmers and designer coat upwards and found myself staring at Camryn’s voluptuous figure.

“Well, well,” she said, sneering down at me and Morgan. “What do we have here? Morgan and Morgan Junior wreaking havoc as usual.”

I stood up. At my full height, I towered over Camryn. “Morgan and I have been working nonstop to fight off this disease. What have you been doing for the past few weeks?”

“Educating the masses,” Camryn replied smoothly.

It was then I noticed that eight or so witches accompanied her. They waited patiently behind Camryn with varying expressions. Some looked anxious. Others looked determined. One thing united them all. These women were outside of the immediate Summers’ lineage, distant aunts and cousins whose blood had been watered down by other genetic factors. Their ties to Morgan were weaker than that of Karma, Malia, or Laurel’s.

“What the hell is this?” I growled.

Camryn smirked. “It’s a learning experience.”

Morgan shuffled through the grass to tend to the next witch. She didn’t spare Camryn a passing glance. “Gwenlyn, get them out of here. Unless they’re helping, I don’t want them around.”

Before I had the chance to herd Camryn’s flock away from Morgan and her patients, Camryn constructed a personal ward. Her aura was a dark blue-gray, like slate, and it blended so well with the color of the sky that she almost disappeared behind it. The defense was just a demonstration. It vanished as soon as I took a step back to avoid its reach.

“See?” Camryn said, but she was not addressing me or Morgan. She spoke to the uncertain gaggle of witches behind her. “You wanted proof of Morgan’s betrayal? Here it is.”

“I don’t have time for whatever games you’re playing, Camryn,” Morgan said wearily. She checked the pulse of another drowsy witch.

“It’s no game,” Camryn hissed. “We all see the signs, Morgan. You’ve grown complacent over the years, and who’s always there to finish the work for you?” She threw me a disgusted look. “Your mini-me.”

“You’re upset because I’m helping the coven?” I asked incredulously. “Just a friendly reminder. I’m the only one of you that isn’t sick with a fever right now. If you’re the next one to drop into a coma, you’re going to have to rely on me to save you. You sure you want to go on with your little diatribe?”

“This isn’t about the curse,” Camryn spat. “This is about straying from the fundamental traditions of the Summers coven.”

Morgan finished healing the last of the immobile witches and finally stood to face Camryn. I slipped my arm through hers as she swayed, keeping her upright. She didn’t have the strength to heal six women on her own, and now she was paying for it.

“What traditions are those?” Morgan asked in the strongest voice she could muster.

Camryn’s eyes drifted down to where Morgan and I were connected at the hip. “It’s been ten years, Morgan. You aren’t Cassandra. It’s about time the coven found another leader, but we refuse to instate one that isn’t really even a Summers.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, glancing between Morgan’s enraged face and Camryn’s disgusted expression.

“Don’t play dumb,” Camryn ordered. “We all know Morgan’s grooming you to become the next coven leader.”

9

The world fell away. I forgot about Camryn, Morgan, and the other witches. Winnie’s shimmering presence was a mere distraction. The gray grass blurred into the gray trees and the gray sky as I lost myself in the simple statement.

I could not be the coven leader.

To even think of the possibility was blasphemy. In this sense, Camryn was absolutely correct. There were rules, conditions, and traditions that governed the way a new coven leader was chosen. The Summerses upheld those traditions to the highest standard, or they did until Morgan came along.

I could not be the coven leader.

First of all, I was far too young. I didn’t have enough life experience to know what to do in a position of such power. Morgan’s mother, Cassandra, was elected in her early forties. Then again, Morgan succeeded her at twenty-nine. She was the youngest coven leader the Summerses had ever had, but extraordinary circumstances called for an extraordinary solution. This was not the same. Morgan was an exception to the rule, whereas I was the rule itself. No one in their right mind would put me in charge of an entire coven.

My age wasn’t the only point of contention. There was a much larger issue at hand, the one that Camryn had already caught on to. I wasn’t really a Summers. No matter how much of my life I dedicated to this family, I would never share their blood. That was simply fact, and it automatically excluded me from the running. At least, I thought it did.

“Did you think we wouldn’t notice?” Camryn asked. “Ever since that girl showed up in Yew Hollow ten years ago, you’ve been playing favorites.”

Morgan stood stock still. Her fingers tightened on my forearm. I contained a wince as her nails dug into my skin. One thought kept me from internally combusting. Morgan had never discussed the possibility of leadership with me. Not once. This wasn’t happening. My leadership was never Morgan’s intention, no matter where Camryn’s accusations took the conversation. And yet—

“You will not rob me of this decision, Camryn,” Morgan replied. Her voice was low and rough, lit with a deadly menace. “If I conclude that Gwenlyn is best fit to run this coven following my retirement, then so be it.”

My stomach heaved. Morgan’s skin felt like fire against mine, but I couldn’t let go. Camryn’s flock broke out in disapproving mutters. Their eyes bore into me, lingering in certain places. My calf, where the witch’s mark lay in wait beneath my jeans. My forearm, where the bright blue scar reminded everyone of the ancient magic that flowed through my veins. My face, which bore no resemblance to their own features.

“She’s not one of us,” Camryn declared, voicing my own thoughts aloud.

“As you so recently reminded us, Gwenlyn has been a member of this coven for over ten years,” Morgan countered.

“She was adopted,” Camryn fired back. “She does not truly belong in this coven. Summers’ blood does not run in her veins, and no amount of mortal paperwork will ever change that.” Camryn turned her back on Morgan to pontificate to her supporters. “My sisters! For too long, we have waited in the shadows. Too long we’ve allowed our current leader to trifle with our customs. Too long we’ve held our tongues about the mistreatment and favoritism that runs rampant in this coven.”

I rolled my eyes as Camryn stepped up to an old tree trunk in order to peer over the heads of the wide-eyed witches who’d agreed to confront Morgan. Apparently, she needed a soapbox.

“I urge you to consider your options,” Camryn went on. “The girl is not one of us. If Morgan instates her as our leader, it will truly mean the end of the Summers coven. Who are we if our blood bond means nothing? Join me instead, sisters. Not only will I lead this coven to safety, but I will ensure that every witch is promised a fair and bright future in Yew Hollow.”

“How?” Morgan asked dryly.

The simple rebuttal derailed Camryn’s righteous speech. She lost her footing on the tree stump and tripped to the ground. Morgan stepped up to meet her before she could recover, dragging me along with her. We were uncomfortably close to the opposing group of witches. Instinct screamed at me to pull Morgan away. Simultaneously, I wished for Morgan to slam Camryn into the ground with an attack spell. The coven had never questioned my presence in Yew Hollow before, and I had never felt unsafe in the company of the Summers witches until now. In a matter of weeks, Camryn managed to alter their opinion of me.

“You have no chance,” Morgan said. Her words were hushed, but not because she wanted to keep them private. On the contrary, we caught every whispered syllable. Morgan’s power as coven leader did not lie in a show of bravado or arrogance—unlike Camryn’s attempted coup—but rather in her quiet rage. The witches knew she was livid. We could feel her aura pushing against us, even if she wasn’t actively employing her craft. “You have no earthly idea what it means to manage this coven. You have no experience to judge what’s best in any given situation. You have no sense to lead these women. You have no courage to do what it is right. You have no humility to put others before your own selfish needs. You have no potential at all to do what I do.”

Morgan moved even closer to her cousin. Camryn hardly dared to breathe.

“Do not challenge me, Camryn,” Morgan warned. “Look around you. Look at the women who have spent today ensuring that this coven does not meet an early end. They wore themselves out to protect their sisters and aunts and cousins, and I will not allow you to insult them with your misdirected stand for justice. As for the rest of you—” Morgan looked over Camryn’s head to address the witches behind her. “—I am ashamed of and disappointed in you.”

Immediately, the witches bowed their heads in remorse or guilt. It was easy to stand behind a loud mouthpiece like Camryn, but when Morgan extinguished the bluster of Camryn’s arrogance, they could not deny that Morgan was their leader. They were a lesser brand of Summers witch, whereas Morgan was the true heir of the coven. The Summerses had never seen a leader like Morgan before, and no matter how much she denied it, I knew the truth. Morgan was, without a doubt, an indestructible force. She was the most powerful witch in the coven, if not the greater New England area. If not the entire nation.

“While your sisters fight for your survival, you belittle their bravery with petty acts of rebellion,” Morgan continued. She leveled a stare at Camryn, who glowered back. “Perhaps your time would be better spent aiding our cause rather than hanging onto the empty promises of a jealous adversary. Be gone now, and if you wish to regain my respect, I suggest you make yourselves scarce for the next several days. Perhaps then I will be able to meet your gazes without being repulsed by your actions today.”

The witches dispersed, murmuring to one another in defeat. My muscles relaxed as they went their separate ways. The gray world swallowed their remorseful figures one by one as they retreated from the front yard of the Summers house. Camryn too turned on her heel to make an exit, but a bright blue force field stopped her in her tracks. She glared at Morgan.

Morgan gazed back, and though she said nothing aloud, the set of her lips communicated a specific message. If Camryn had the audacity to impinge on Morgan’s authority again, she would not escape the confrontation so easily.

Morgan released the force field, allowing Camryn to saunter off after the other women. As soon as she was out of sight, Morgan slackened. Her hands shook as she leaned against me. For once, I couldn’t support her.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her. I detached myself from Morgan’s side and jogged toward the house. There was too much going on in my brain, and the one person I always counted on to talk to about these kinds of things was the same person causing some of the mayhem.

Winnie appeared in my peripheral. “What are you doing? She shouldn’t be alone!”

“She’s not,” I said, vaulting up the porch steps. At the front door, I looked over my shoulder just long enough to see Morgan sink down to sit on the ground at the base of the tree trunk. The witches she had so recently healed came to her aid. Theirs was a bond I could not hope to emulate. I tore my gaze away and punched through the front door. “But I am.”

Morgan’s scrying bowl was hidden away in her room on the third floor of the house. The third floor rippled with Morgan’s essence. Not many people visited her here. There were three rooms: a small study, Morgan’s bedroom, and the connected bathroom. It seemed modest for the leader of such a powerful coven, but all Morgan wanted was the privacy of the sloped ceilings and porthole windows. The attic rooms felt like a chapel, hushed and divine, so it was with care and grace that I rifled through Morgan’s closet in search of the scrying mirror.

The mirror was hidden in the bottommost drawer of Morgan’s dresser. I shifted aside piles of clothes, shoes, and coats to reach it. Morgan wasn’t the neatest person. She spent her time organizing the coven rather than organizing her closet. I was one of very few people that she trusted to be alone in her room. Usually, the thought filled me with pride, but today it sank into the pit of my stomach and stewed there like a bad case of food poisoning.

When I found the mirror, I sat amongst Morgan’s dirty laundry and turned it over in my hands. At first glance, there was nothing special about it. It was a simple piece of reflective glass. It had no frame or handle, and the surface was marred by age spots and tiny spiderweb cracks. It gave no clues as to when or how it had been made. I turned it to face me. The glass reflected my face but not the rest of the room. It showed a mirrored void around me, nothing and everything in the universe all at once. I looked at the scowl on my lips and my furrowed brow and the wisps of hair on my head that would never lie flat. My reflection scowled back. Then she looked over her shoulder, as if someone or something in the abyss behind her had shouted her name.

I placed the mirror face down. There was a reason scrying mirrors were hard to come by. They were dangerous pieces of equipment. Scrying itself was an imperfect art. To look at a life that was not your own was an intrusion of privacy. To use a scrying mirror was to open a portal between space and time. It was a little one, unnoticeable by mortals, but any dip in the plane of our dimension rippled outward like a rock skipping across the surface of a pond. There were rules for using a scrying mirror. Only use it at night. Never allow anyone else to consult the mirror at the same time as you. Do not get lost in an image that doesn’t belong to you. Always close the portal before you look away from the mirror.

“Is that it?”

I jumped at the sound of Winnie’s voice and pressed a hand to my racing heart. “You scared me.”

“Sorry.”

I held up the mirror for her to inspect, making sure to avoid eye contact with my reflection.

“Doesn’t look like much.”

“The important things never do.” I jumped onto Morgan’s bed to look through the porthole window above her headboard. Dusk was upon us. We would be able to use the mirror soon. I gestured for Winnie to follow me. “Let’s go.”

I kept the scrying mirror tucked against my shirt as we quietly tiptoed down to the first floor. The less it saw, the better. Morgan was nowhere to be seen, nor were any of her sisters. This was a relief. I wasn’t in the right mindset to speak with any of the Summerses. All I wanted was to take the scrying mirror out under the stars and look for answers. If I was the one to bring a super-powered healing witch into Yew Hollow to save the coven, maybe it would convince the Summerses that I had the same right to be here as they did.

“Where are we going?” Winnie whispered into the night as I led her out the back door and across the expanse of the backyard.

As we disappeared into the forest, I replied, “Into the dark.”

The trees closed in around us. The woods were so thick that the sky was lost overhead. The moon, which should have been close to full, was nowhere in sight. The stars were just as absent. The curse stole the night from Yew Hollow. No longer could I lay among the leaves of grass in the backyard and question the constellations about my future. Artemis could not answer me when she was too busy hunting for her moon in the empty sky.

I paused in a small clearing, where there was just enough space to sit cross-legged in the dirt. Winnie watched over my shoulder as I unwrapped the mirror from the front of my shirt and balanced it face-up in my palms. I kept my gaze perpendicular to the horizon, readying myself to consult the mirror.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Winnie asked. She gazed around the hushed clearing. “Have you done this by yourself before? I’ve heard all sorts of horrible stories about witches who’ve gotten stuck in scrying mirrors. Maybe we should ask Morgan for help.”

“No.”

I missed the lightning bugs. They had vanished with the rest of Yew Hollow’s residents. I took them for granted before. Their little specks of twinkling lights were comforting in an otherwise black night. Now it was all dark.

I took a deep breath.

“Gwenlyn,” Winnie warned. “I think we should wait—”

I lowered my gaze to the mirror. The surface was as bottomless as the world around me. My reflection winked at me. And then I plunged headfirst into a world that wasn’t mine.

10

Morgan had taught me how to scry. We started off easy, using small bodies of water as our visual mediums. This was the safest way to learn, since any disruption of the water would break the connection between the witch and her subject. Morgan claimed scrying was an important lesson for all witches, especially psychics. It served many purposes: reflection, information, meditation. The trick was to clear your mind and focus solely on the thing you wanted to see. The concept was simple. The execution was nothing of the sort. It took years for me to learn how to empty my thoughts, to stop worrying about the world around me and dive into another one that didn’t technically exist. That was the problem with scrying. If you stayed too long or if you strayed off course, you were stuck in the nothingness between one space and the next.

Winnie’s doubts echoed in my mind as I hurtled through the mirror. No, I had never used it without supervision before. Morgan was always with me. Now it was time to learn to get along without her, so I let the void swallow me. I lost track of what I was meant to be looking for, a dangerous mistake. I refocused my intention. Windsor Falls. I needed Windsor Falls. Two hours northwest of Yew Hollow.

The town popped into existence all at once. The first thing I noticed was the moon. I could actually see it here, dancing among the stars. I lost myself for a brief moment, appreciating the cosmos. As for the town, I’d never been there before, but I could tell right away that this was the wealthier end of Massachusetts. The houses mimicked estates with sweeping lawns and towering pillars. The cars whizzing along the roads were illustrious foreign models with shiny emblems. The people were impeccably dressed in designer threads. Whoever this witch was, she had money.

I ignored the busy high street, concentrating on the image in my mind. I didn’t have much to go on in order to find our healer. Winnie’s well of information was dry. Scrying was much like performing a web search without being able to use the ten most relevant keywords. You knew what you were looking for, you just didn’t know how to find it on the first try.

The mirror showed me a petite brunette shopping in a small boutique. She chatted amiably with another customer as they compared dress styles. Her sunshine yellow aura sat atop her head like a halo, but the mortals in the store were completely oblivious to the fact that she was different from them. Instinct prodded me along. She was not the healer.

Along the high street, sitting at the outdoor table of an expensive French restaurant, a leggy blonde hooked her high heel around the calf of the well-dressed man sitting across from her. Her aura was siren red, and she was hunting. Definitely not who I was looking for.

Nearby, an unusually tall redhead manned the hostess stand at the restaurant’s front door. I bypassed her completely. Her aura was so faint that I could barely make out the orange glow of it around her hands as she penciled in a reservation. A super-powered witch would not suppress her magic for the sake of the mortals around her.

I broadened my search. Private roads let outward from the high street, up into green rolling hills decorated with mansions, equestrian yards, and extravagant swimming pools. One witch swam lazy laps under the stars. A trio of young sisters lured a woodland nymph from the trees to sing them songs beneath a string of fairy lights. An older woman with a teal aura reclined in bed, levitating a book at eye level so that she didn’t have to hold it.

A bout of nausea overwhelmed me. Time was running short. I’d have to pull out of the mirror soon or risk imprisonment in the illusionary world of Windsor Falls, where I would observe everyday life without ever being a part of it. I squeezed my eyes shut.

Focus, Gwenlyn. Focus.

A new image appeared: a girl on a white mare racing bareback through a meadow of wildflowers. Her rosy pink aura was a cloud of happiness and freedom. She laughed as she bent low over the horse’s neck, entwining her fingers in its mane. Together, the pair vaulted over a small stream. The girl slipped on the mare’s silky coat, and my heart skipped a beat thinking she’d fall, but they landed neatly on the other side without breaking stride. The horse gave a satisfied whinny, looking over its shoulder to check on the rider. The girl whooped and grinned, adjusting her precarious seat as she tugged on the mare’s mane to slow her down.

“Atta girl,” she panted, patting the horse’s neck affectionately. “Nice job.”

As they slowed to a languorous walk, I got a better look at girl. At first glance, she reminded me of a younger version of Morgan’s mother, Cassandra. Her fair hair was white-gold, contained by a neat plait that rested along her spine. She had almond-shaped green eyes, high cheekbones, and a delicate jawline cut from glass. She was small but strong, her lean muscles standing out against the fabric of her clothes as she guided the mare toward a massive estate house.

“No,” I whispered. “It can’t be her.”

Because she was no more than sixteen years old. I had not been looking for a child—which was why the scrying mirror had most likely led me to so many dead ends—but there was no doubt in my mind that this skinny teenager was the witch I needed. She projected her aura at an impossible level of luminance. It touched everything within a twenty-foot circumference. Wildflowers stretched their petals toward her essence, the horse nickered happily beneath her touch, and the moon itself seemed to kiss the girl’s skin like a blissed-out lover. I had never seen anything like it.

I retched suddenly. My body was rejecting the fake world around me, begging to go back to the real one. The girl looked up, catching my eye as I floated in the nonexistent ether of her dimension, almost as if she could hear my struggle. Her lips moved.

“Gwenlyn.”

I swallowed hard. Something wasn’t right. The warped voice didn’t match the girl’s crystalline features, but it sounded familiar.

“Gwenlyn.”

With a feeling like the plug being pulled out of an overflowing bathtub, I was ripped away from Windsor Falls. The stars and moon vanished, the green grass faded to gray, and the rosy pink glow of the girl’s aura dimmed to nothing. I slammed back into my body in the clearing of the woods and immediately toppled over. As my cheek pressed to the cool dirt of the forest floor, a tear trickled out of the corner of my eye and soaked into the ground.

Morgan knelt next to me, rubbing my back in slow, comforting circles. I saw a flash of light as she stored the scrying mirror in an inner pocket of her long overcoat. Winnie hovered behind her, peering down at me with worried eyes. I turned my head to the other side, avoiding their lingering gazes.

“What happened?” I croaked.

“You started disappearing,” Winnie reported. “It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen, like the mirror was sucking you in piece by piece.”

“That’s what happens when you aren’t cautious,” Morgan said. I couldn’t ignore the scolding tone to her voice. “You stayed too long, Gwenlyn. Why didn’t you wait for me? I can’t believe you would do something so irresponsible.”

I groaned and rolled over on my back. Yew Hollow’s vacant sky haunted me from above. It was no wonder why Windsor Falls was so tantalizing. At least I could actually see the stars there.

“Gwenlyn—”

“Can you just give me a minute?” My head spun as I sat up. I couldn’t admit to Morgan that I didn’t want her help, so I put my head between my knees and focused on breathing evenly.

Morgan, of course, was not so easy to dissuade. She combed her fingers through my hair, brushing away leaves and twigs. She was the one person I could never be mad at, even if she had kept me in the dark about the coven leader elections.

“Well?” Winnie prompted, oblivious to the loaded silence between me and Morgan. “Did you find her? You were in there forever.”

I wiped dirt and tears from my cheekbones, but the mud on my hands only smeared what was left on my face. “Yeah, I found her.”

“And?”

I looked up at Winnie and Morgan’s expectant expressions, unwilling to instill false hope. “She’s just a kid. Fifteen or sixteen. There’s no way she has complete control over her ability already.”

Morgan sat back on her heels. She looked better than she had when I’d left her earlier. Her cheeks weren’t so hollow and her eyes not so dark. Her sisters must have helped her recover from her outlay of power. She didn’t seem as put out by my information as I thought she’d be.

“We don’t necessarily need her to be in complete control,” Morgan said thoughtfully. “There are enough of us to lend a hand if she needs it. No, I sense a bigger problem with her age.”

“What?” Winnie asked.

“Her coven,” Morgan replied. She picked up a small twig and began tracing Latin words into the dirt in loopy, flawless cursive. “A girl like that is bound to have a lot of witches watching over her, especially if they know how valuable she is. Did you see anything else, Gwenlyn?”

“No, she was alone.”

“Hmm. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean much. Scrying only allows you to see what’s happening at that exact moment. Unless she was with her family at the time, you wouldn’t have noticed them.”

I brushed off my palms, trying to dislodge most of the dirt. “Should I go back? Maybe another glimpse would help us—”

“No,” Morgan and Winnie chorused.

I glared at Winnie, who balked.

“I’m sorry, Gwen,” she said, wringing her hands. “But you didn’t see it. You didn’t even look human anymore. I don’t want you to go back in there.”

“She’s right,” Morgan added. “You’ve had enough for the day. Let’s get you back to the house. I think a hot bath would do us all some good.”

“I wish,” Winnie muttered.

I suppressed a laugh at Winnie’s downtrodden tone as Morgan offered me her hand. I clasped our fingers together, and she pulled me up out of the dirt. As we began our walk through the woods, she didn’t let go of me. Instead, she tugged me closer, wrapping one arm around my shoulders. She planted a kiss on my temple.

“Don’t do things like that,” she murmured, hugging me tighter. “Do you know how much I worry about you? You’re too important to me.”

I stooped to rest my head on her shoulder. “Why? Because you want me to take over the coven? That’s one way to piss off your cousins.”

Morgan stopped short, jostling me from her grasp. “Is that what you think? That the only reason I care about you is because I’m trying to prove a point to the rest of the coven?”

I dropped into sullen silence, plodding determinedly through the woods no matter if Morgan was following or not. She quickly caught up and looped her hand through the crook of my elbow.

“Hey,” she said, pulling me to a stop. She cradled my face in her hands, forcing me to look at her. “Gwenlyn, you are not some sort of political ploy to me. I can’t believe that you would even think that.”

To my utter humiliation, my chin wobbled in her grasp. “Then why would you spring something like that on me? You never asked me if I wanted to be coven leader, Morgan. You just let Camryn sucker punch me with that information.”

“I never meant for that to happen,” Morgan insisted. “Camryn got lucky. She guessed correctly. But I do owe you an apology, Gwen. I should’ve told you as soon as I started considering the possibility.”

“Why me?” I asked her, lifting away from her touch. “You heard Camryn. I’m not even a Summers.”

“You,” Morgan began, “are my daughter.”

My composure broke. My waiting tears spilled over, tracing clean lines down my dirty cheeks. Morgan pulled me into a hug, and I rested my chin over her shoulder, trying not to completely lose myself.

“It doesn’t matter that we don’t share blood,” Morgan murmured as she gently collected me in her arms. “It doesn’t matter that your last name is Bennett or that we didn’t meet until you were sixteen or that the rest of the coven might not understand how deeply I care about you.” She drew away to look at me, and I saw that her eyes shone with emotion too. “What matters is that I love you to the moon and back. You matter, Gwenlyn, and I don’t think enough people in your life have told you that.”

“Honestly, I only ever needed to hear it from you.” I wiped snot from my nose with the sleeve of my shirt. Classy.

Morgan laughed and conjured a handkerchief out of thin air, which I used to mop up the rest of my face. “You’re a mess. Come on.”

Winnie lit the way as we continued out of the dark woods. Morgan and I walked arm in arm. Were it not for the missing moon, stagnant air, and general lack of good fortune as of late, it would’ve been a nice evening.

“Is it true?” I asked Morgan as we emerged from the tree line. The lights in the windows of the Summers house beckoned us home to its cozy interior.

“Is what true?”

“That you’re planning on stepping down as coven leader soon,” I clarified. “Because, to be honest, it doesn’t make any sense to me. The Summerses would be lost without you, Morgan. You’ve done this for ten years without any trouble, and I know that most coven leaders only last for five or six years, but do I need to remind you about your mother’s two-decade reign? Just because one challenging circumstance pops up doesn’t mean you should give up—”

Morgan held up a hand to cut me off. “While I appreciate your rousing pep talk, it isn’t necessary. I have no plans to abdicate my position anytime soon.”

“Then why did Camryn make such a huge stink about it?” I asked. “Isn’t it up to you to decide when the next leader ascends?”

“Yes and no,” Morgan answered. “Traditionally, the coven leader chooses her successor. However, in the event that a majority of the witches consider the current leader unfit to make that decision, they can hold an official vote to determine the next leader on their own.”

“Do you think Camryn would try something like that?”

Morgan’s expression hardened as we stepped up to the back porch. “I’m going to make damn sure she doesn’t.”

11

The atmosphere in the Summers household grew tense and taut in the days following Camryn’s coup. There was a palpable difference in the way some of the witches behaved around Morgan. The coven divided into two mindsets: those who believed Morgan was and would always be the best leader in recent history, and those who were easily swayed by Camryn’s negative influence. Each group was plainly recognizable. Morgan’s supporters worked tirelessly to combat the effects of the curse. Malia, Karma, and Laurel headed this charge, parsing out duties and tasks for each witch to complete. They fortified the ward, distributed healing spells, and held energy renewal rituals to invigorate each other. In addition, they picked up extra responsibilities to keep daily life running as smoothly as possible. With no mortals to run the fresh market and no supplies going in or out of Yew Hollow, we were running low on food and other necessities. The age old ideas of hunting and gathering weren’t going to help either. The curse had killed all of the vegetation and driven the animals away.

Laurel was the one who came up with a solution. As an elemental witch, her ability was connected to the earth. She spoke with nature in a profound way that the rest of us could not understand. In less than a day, she constructed a greenhouse as close to the edge of the ward as possible, where the sunlight almost permeated the invisible force field to brighten Yew Hollow. Everything inside was fed and fertilized by Laurel’s witchcraft, from budding lettuce bibs to flowering soybean plants. Soon, the Summers coven would embrace a plant-based diet, a thought that made my stomach rumble for a cheeseburger. Of all the things I expected out of this curse, reluctantly becoming vegan wasn’t one of them.

Other witches followed Laurel’s example in order to keep daily life as normal as possible. Our resident water witches constructed a well and a mill to ensure the coven always had something clean to drink and bathe with. The mothers of the coven’s children banded together to create a bizarre home school that encompassed everything from arithmetic and mortal literature to useful potions and witch history. Clean-up crews cleansed the town. It had been over a month since the locals had inexplicably abandoned their homes, which resulted in a lot of moldy laundry and rank refrigerators. The witches swept through like a professional maid service, leaving each home pristine and ready for its family’s uncertain return.

In contrast, the lesser known witches made themselves scarce. They stayed in their homes, tending to the sick on their own. They grudgingly contributed to the coven’s survival efforts, doing the least amount of work possible to guarantee food and fresh water for themselves. Otherwise, Camryn’s followers kept to themselves. Morgan and her sisters hardly noticed their absence, but I kept a wary eye open for trouble. The way they looked at their coven leader had changed. A month ago—before this dreaded curse derailed our peaceful small town lives—every witch in the coven viewed Morgan with respect and admiration. Nowadays, they whispered behind their hands when Morgan walked by, throwing looks of dissatisfaction in her direction.

Camryn herself seemed to have taken Morgan’s warning seriously. She did not make another misjudged public attempt to preach injustice, though I had the feeling she was feeding her followers plenty of misinformation under the table. The shift in perspective had happened too quickly, and I wondered if Camryn was somehow using her supposed “intuition” ability to convince the lesser witches of her leadership qualities. Morgan repeatedly requested that I ignore Camryn. She wasn’t the biggest threat to the coven right now, and we needed to focus on more important things.

My main goal was to find out more about the girl on the horse in Windsor Falls. It wasn’t as simple as it sounded. I was no longer permitted to use the scrying mirror without direct supervision, so I had to make do with a bowl of water, the fickle and commonly mocked crystal ball, or the small pond in the woods behind the Summers house. No matter what visual medium I used, the images were muddled. The most important aspects of the girl’s history remained a puzzle to me. There were no hints that she belonged to one of the three covens in her hometown, which left me wondering who had trained her to hone her aura at such a radiant level. She lived in one of the biggest estate houses in Windsor Falls, which indicated a radically different upbringing than the children of Yew Hollow.

Not for the first time, I realized how selfishly ensconced the Summerses were in their own history. They believed that their rules of witchcraft and way of life were the only rules, but Winnie and the mysterious teenaged healer had taught me otherwise. This was not Morgan’s fault. She was simply raised by women who upheld archaic ideas and traditions. While this was admirable in preserving the Summerses’ rich history, it hindered my research of our super-powered witch. Without an idea of how other covens operated, I had little to no hope of discovering additional information about her abilities. As time passed and I made infinitesimal progress, it became apparent that our plan would not move forward while I was trapped within the ward that encompassed Yew Hollow.

“Let me build a door,” I insisted to Morgan one morning over a breakfast of homemade wheat toast and fresh peanut butter. “It doesn’t even have to be a door! It could be a window or a tunnel or whatever, something just wide enough for me to pass through.”

Morgan wearily sipped black coffee. She was in need of another dose of healing energy. I was beginning to think that the dark circles under her eyes were permanent fixtures on her face. “Out of the question. The ward is the only thing keeping us safe right now. I can’t have you poking holes in it.”

“The coven isn’t getting any better, Morgan,” I reminded her hotly. “You’re getting weaker every day. Your sisters too. And has anyone checked on Alana lately? Is she even still alive? How much longer can we survive in this perpetual quarantine?”

“Yvette and Yvonne have assured me that Alana’s condition is severe but stable,” Morgan replied, kneading the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “They’ve seen no distressing changes in her.”

“They haven’t seen any good ones either.” My toast lay cold and abandoned as I tried to get through to the older witch. “Come on, Morgan. You’ve always said that you trust my judgement, and my judgement is telling me that what we’re doing isn’t working. Not well enough, anyway. I need to find this girl, and I can’t do that if I’m stuck in Yew Hollow.”

Morgan set down her mug. It left a tired ring of coffee on the mahogany tabletop. “I do trust you, Gwenlyn, but you’re also young. This ward keeps us safe. If we open a rift, we open ourselves up too. The ward doesn’t just keep the curse from progressing. It prevents the culprit from locating us. I can’t risk that. We’ll find another way without the healer.”

“What if there is no other way?” I asked. “What if we waste away under this glorified circus tent because we decided that it was too dangerous to venture outside? I’m not asking anyone to go with me, Morgan. No one else has to risk their health, but I’m not really a Summers, remember? I’ll be safe outside the ward.”

“No,” Morgan growled.

“You’re being stubborn—”

“I said no, Gwenlyn!”

Her voice boomed through the dining room, echoing to the far corners of the house as she magically amplified the sound waves to get her point across. Her aura slammed me against my chair, stunning me into silence. As her power settled, Morgan rested her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands, staring straight down into her coffee to avoid my gaze.

“Fine,” I said quietly. “Let me know when your pride cools down and you realize that I’m right about this. I’ll be in my room.”

I left her to stew in the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Winnie was waiting for me, lounging on my bed as she watched some famous chef whip up a pot roast.

“Wow,” she said as I collapsed face down into the pillows next to her.

“You heard?”

“Who didn’t?”

I flipped over, giving the pillows a frustrated thwack as I maneuvered them to sit against the headboard. “She’s being ridiculous. Ignoring this won’t make it go away. We can’t manage a curse. It’s like living in purgatory. Eventually, it’s going to escalate and catch up to us, and when it does, we won’t have a damn clue what to do.”

Winnie stretched and rested against the pillows with her arm behind her head. “I think Morgan is doing what she thinks is best for the coven.”

“Oh, so you’re taking her side? Great. So much for support. What kind of twin are you anyway?”

“I didn’t say I agreed with her,” Winnie retorted, swiping her hand through my head and causing my brain to momentarily freeze over. “Actually, I think her anxiety is affecting her judgment. Even the best leaders fall prey to self-doubt sometimes, and when they do, it’s often up to their second-in-command to step up to the plate.”

I wrenched my eyes from the chef’s hypnotic onion dicing to study my sister. “What are you suggesting?”

A line appeared between Winnie’s eyebrows, the same line that appeared on my own face whenever I was deep in thought. “You can open a portal in the ward on your own, right?”

“It wouldn’t be easy,” I answered. “But I could do it. Yes.”

“Far be it from me to encourage you to disobey your coven leader,” Winnie said, shifting into a more active pose as her ideas took over. “But I agree with you. I think the only hope of saving this coven is to find the healer. Morgan may not approve now, but she might change her mind when she sees how much a super-powered witch can flip the advantage.”

I chewed anxiously on my lip, considering the possibility. “She would kill me.”

“Probably,” Winnie agreed nonchalantly, “but then she’d most likely thank you for doing what she couldn’t.”

I groaned and tossed the TV remote across the room out of frustration. It collided with the image of the steaming pot roast, and the batteries toppled out. “I don’t feel comfortable with sneaking out. It would be blatantly betraying Morgan’s trust.”

“You know what they say,” Winnie said with a shrug. “Better to beg for forgiveness than—”

“To ask for permission,” I finished. I already felt queasy at the thought of directly disobeying Morgan’s orders, but something needed to be done. “I’ll go tonight. Will you come with me?”

Winnie answered with a warm smile. “Of course.”

As she returned her attention to the television screen, I subtly studied her from the side. It had been well over a month since she’d first appeared in my bedroom. It was one of the longest hauntings I’d ever experienced. Part of me felt guilty for not doing more to convince her to cross over. Ghosts who lingered on earth for too long eventually found themselves unable to venture into the otherworld at all. I didn’t want to condemn her to such a fate. She had suffered enough in life, and she deserved a peaceful one after death. On the other hand, I cherished the time we spent together. Somehow, between the research and the coven’s feud and the hunt for the healer, Winnie and I managed to laugh, share stories, and connect with one another. She told me about growing up in a small coven in the southwest and I filled her in on all the quaint chaos of Yew Hollow. I grew accustomed to her presence, and in the long run, I realized one selfish fact about myself: I didn’t want Winnie to go.

“Stop staring at me,” she instructed without straying from the television.

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right. What’s on your mind?”

I sighed wistfully. “You.”

Winnie glanced over at me, saw my distressed expression, and stretched out to face me instead of the TV. “What about me?”

“I feel like I’m letting you down,” I mumbled, picking at the pattern of the purple quilt. “I’ve been so focused on the coven that I haven’t spared even a minute to think about getting you to the otherworld.”

Winnie chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“You,” she replied. “And Morgan, by extension. See, you keep going on about how you’re supposed to help me, but I told you already, Gwen. I have no debts to settle or goodbyes to give. You don’t have to help me do anything.”

“There has to be something,” I insisted. “Otherwise, why are you here?”

She tapped my nose with the tip of her finger. “To help you, silly.”

“What?”

Winnie rolled her eyes, as if my bewilderment was endearing. “Here’s the problem with you and Morgan being so alone in your psychic medium education. In your experience, every single ghost you’ve encountered has come to you for assistance. That’s understandable. Most people are inherently selfish, especially in death. But did it ever once occur to you that maybe—just maybe—each ghost that appeared to you taught you a valuable lesson?”

“Every single one of them?” I asked skeptically. “Because I’d really like to know what I learned from the eighty-year-old grandpa that tried to hit on me before I could throw him into the next dimension.”

“All I’m saying is that you should stop worrying about me,” Winnie said, smirking at my anecdote. “It’s no coincidence that I showed up here on the exact same day Yew Hollow experiences its biggest disaster in ten years. You want to help me cross over? Focus on saving the coven. That’s why I’m here—to help my sister.”

Before I could agree or disagree, a rumble of thunder shook the house. I scrambled to my feet and looked out of the window.

“Crap,” I said, squinting up at the gathering black clouds.

“What is it?”

“There’s a big storm rolling in.”

These days, the only weather Yew Hollow got was rain. It pelted the town regardless of news reports or radar readings. I was not naïve. Each bout of rain stank of the same acrid smell as that of the first. The storms were part of the curse, and every time another one swept through the area, it left the witches weaker and sicker than they had been before.

Morgan’s voice echoed up the staircase and into my bedroom. “Gwenlyn?”

I momentarily forgot about our tiff from earlier. Any moment now, the skies would open up, showering the town with more bad luck. Morgan needed my help. I abandoned the sickening sight at the window and hurried into the hallway.

“On my way.”

12

An hour later, the Summers house was full to bursting with nearly every member of the coven. The storm raged on, the worst one we had witnessed since the initial downpour that had left me with a witch’s mark and the lingering effects of electrocution. Water poured off the roof in buckets, constant thunder made a deafening racket, and lightning flashed so close to the windows that the children were hiding under the dining room table out of fright.

The witches were panicking. Their health deteriorated by the minute. All of the work we did to hold the effects of the curse at bay was meaningless. The house now resembled a makeshift hospital ward in the middle of a war zone rather than actual living space. I had vanished all of the furniture on the first floor and replaced it with a number of twin-sized beds. Each one was occupied. Auras flickered and trembled like dying embers, a sight that ate away at my heart. It seemed impossible that one dark hex could reduce a once-ferocious coven of witches to the quivering helpless collection of women before me.

I did my best to tend to everyone, but even though the curse didn’t affect me, I didn’t have enough energy to go around. I rationed myself off to the best of my abilities. The witches were in pain, and it hurt me to see my family so afflicted. I gave as much as I could—soothing muscles aches, clearing clogged airways, and guiding witches into unconsciousness—until I felt woozy and unsteady on my feet. As I mixed an anti-itch healing salve in the kitchen to combat the nasty red rash on some of the witches, vertigo overtook me. I dropped the bowl of salve and gripped the edge of the counter, trying my best to make sense of the world around me.

Just as I went spiraling toward the floor, someone caught me from behind and lowered me gently to the cool tile. I recognized Morgan’s gentle aura through my haze. She propped my head in her lap, and I closed my eyes until the room stopped spinning.

“You know, wearing yourself out isn’t going to counter this curse,” she murmured, wiping sweat off my forehead with a damp dishtowel.

“They need help.”

“I know.”

She fell silent, rhythmically combing her fingers through my hair. I’d finally trimmed off the burnt ends, which left the style shorter than ever.

“Gwen?”

“Hmm.”

“My pride has cooled down.”

I wearily opened one eye, catching an upside down glimpse of Morgan. All night, I’d only seen her from across the room as we triaged the witches and did our best to treat them. Now that she was so close, I could see how badly the curse was affecting her too. Morgan had died once. She’d been to the otherworld and back, and she had looked better then than she did now. Morgan was a living corpse, the stuff of nightmares, with sunken cheeks, haunted eyes, and pallid skin. No one could fight a curse looking like the living dead.

“We have to go to Windsor Falls,” I said, closing my eyes again to ward off additional images of Morgan’s frightening features.

I felt her nod in agreement. “We need to wait for this storm to pass, and you need to get your energy back up. I want you to go upstairs and sleep. You’re done helping for now. We can hold on through the night. Tomorrow, we’ll figure out a way to open a door in the ward. Laurel?”

“Yes?”

I peeked through my eyelids as Laurel came into the kitchen. She fared slightly better than Morgan, but the curse took its toll on her as well.

“Help Gwen up to her room,” Morgan said. “Make sure she gets to bed.”

With Laurel’s help, Morgan and I stumbled up from the floor. Laurel and I leaned on each other as we made our way through the dining room. At the bottom of the stairs, I turned to look at Morgan, who had already returned to aiding the other witches despite her wearied state.

“Are you sure?” I asked her. “I can stay.”

Morgan shook her head firmly, pointing up the stairs. “Go. I need you at your best.”

So Laurel took me upstairs, lay me down in bed, and tucked the duvet around me. As she left, I noticed Winnie glimmering like a night light in the corner of the room. She was hiding. I knew why. There were people in pain downstairs. If she were alive, she would be able to help them. Instead, her death rendered her useless. At some point, she couldn’t take it anymore. Neither could I.

“Tomorrow,” I muttered to her, my face mashed against the pillows. “Tomorrow, we fix this.”

I slept soundly through the night, and by the time morning broke, my craft had restored itself to full strength. I slid out of bed in last night’s clothes and looked out the window. The storm had wreaked havoc on Yew Hollow. Dead branches, leaves, and debris were scattered throughout the yard. In the distance, a fallen tree rested on the roof of Laurel’s greenhouse. It would need repairs. The water mill had most likely taken damage too. I sighed heavily. The witches were in no state to clean up the town after this storm.

I showered, got dressed, and trod downstairs. Most of the witches were asleep, recovering from yesterday’s fallout. They were united in unconsciousness. No one argued about coven leaders or Yew Hollow’s fate. Even Camryn was quiet, sitting on a cot in the corner of the living room and gazing out at the side yard in contemplation. I tiptoed through the slumbering witches, following leftover wisps of Morgan’s aura to locate her. She was sitting on the back porch with Laurel, rocking in one of the wooden chairs as she sipped a potent-smelling concoction from a coffee mug. Laurel sat on the porch steps, her bare feet resting in the dead grass of the backyard. She looked solemn. Yew Hollow’s lack of greenery was wearing thin on her.

“Morning,” I said, careful not to let the screen door slam and wake the others as I joined them. “How are you feeling?”

“Slightly better,” Morgan replied. She tipped her mug at the empty chair, gesturing for me to sit down. “And you?”

I ignored the chair and propped my ankle up on the railing of the porch to stretch out the back of my leg. “Fully rejuvenated. I think we should get going as soon as possible. I just need your help to get through the ward. Then I’ll be there and back by the end of the day, hopefully with this healer in tow.”

Morgan shook her head. “No way.”

My sneaker thunked to the wood planks of the porch. “Seriously? You changed your mind already?”

“I mean you won’t be going alone,” Morgan said. “Laurel and I are coming with you.”

“Oh.” I looked between them in consternation. “Is that a good idea? You said yourself that the ward might be the only thing preventing this illness from getting worse.”

Laurel trailed her fingers through the dirt at her feet. “Morgan and I are the healthiest out of the coven. If we keep our venture short, we should be fine.”

“Why risk it?” I asked. “Stay here. Save your strength.”

“Gwen, we don’t know anything about this girl,” Morgan pointed out. She wiped a droplet of spilled potion from the side of her mug. “I can’t send you to find her on your own.”

“I won’t be on my own,” I countered. “I’ll have Winnie with me.”

“While Winnie gives excellent direction and advice, she won’t be able to help you should you find yourself in a sticky situation.” Morgan beckoned me over to her, so I finally sat down in the chair opposite her. “We’ll go together. We’re stronger that way.”

I had not been to the edge of the ward since it was constructed, so when we reached the line between Yew Hollow and the rest of Massachusetts, I was alarmed to see that the curse had somewhat bled out beyond the borders of the town. It was nothing in comparison to the gray world in which we lived, but the trees that lined the road leading to the interstate showed unnaturally early signs of frostbite. Even so, I relished the color outside of the ward. I forgot how beautiful the world looked in the fall. The red, orange, and yellow hues warmed me from the inside out, and I bounced up and down on the balls of my feet in anticipation. Today’s excursion would be a welcome respite from the monotony of the last month.

It was no easy task to open a trapdoor in the ward. Layers and layers of witchcraft made up the magical force field, and it was so well fortified that it took two hours for me, Morgan, and Laurel to punch a tiny hole in the surface of it. We widened it just enough to scramble through to the other side. I went first, flattening myself out and crawling military style through the narrow opening. It was like navigating a clear glass tunnel. I could feel the ward, but I couldn’t see it, which made moving through it all the more peculiar. Winnie followed behind me, her icy presence biting at my heels, and we waited on the other wide for Morgan and Laurel to worm their way through.

I inhaled through my nose, savoring the scent and feeling of fresh air through my lungs. It was a brisk cool morning, and the chill already permeated the fluffy liner of my green bomber jacket. I cherished it anyway, knowing that the feeling of freedom would vanish when we returned to Yew Hollow later that day.

I lent Morgan and Laurel a hand as they emerged from the ward. They took great gulps of the refreshing autumn morning. As a bit of color flushed their cheeks, I wondered if creating the ward hadn’t been the best decision after all. Morgan and Laurel looked healthier outside the barrier than they had in the past several weeks. Maybe we should’ve followed the locals’ lead and evacuated Yew Hollow instead.

Since there was no way to get a car through the ward, we walked to the highway, lured a friendly man driving a passenger van to the side of the road, and lightly spelled him to pass out. I took over the steering wheel as Laurel and Morgan belted him into the backseat, and just like that, we were on our way to Windsor Falls. We reviewed what little information I had gathered about the super-powered healer and formulated a rough plan as I piloted the van through upstate Massachusetts.

“We’re just looking,” Morgan said from the backseat. “All I want to do is check this girl out. We don’t even know if she’s the one we’re looking for.”

“It’s her,” Winnie confirmed, riding shotgun. “I can feel it.”

“We have to be cautious,” Morgan replied, as if she hadn’t heard Winnie. “Gwen, you’ve spent a lot of time scrying the town. What’s the least conspicuous way for us to go about this?”

I caught a glimpse of Morgan’s drawn features in the rearview mirror and steered the van around a snail-paced sedan. “From what I could tell, she lives in one of the big estate houses. I would recognize it if I saw it. There’s a lot of land around, including a pretty dense forest. She rides her horse through the nearby meadow almost every day. I think that’s our best bet. If we snuck through the woods and waited for her to ride out, we could get a pretty good idea of what kind of power she’s wielding.”

“And what about her family?” Laurel asked. “Which coven does she belong to?”

“From what I can tell, none of them,” I answered. “I guess that’s why we needed this trip. She doesn’t operate like a normal witch, and I couldn’t scry the people around her. I tried multiple times. All I got was a tiny hint of a yellow or orange aura, which could simply be residual energy from someone else—”

“Or it could be her coven leader disguising herself as someone of lesser importance,” Morgan finished. “Whoever she is, we can’t risk her or anyone else discovering us. None of the covens in Windsor Falls are part of the alliance. We overlooked them because they were smaller in number, but that doesn’t mean we should underestimate them. I want you all to treat every single witch we may come across as a suspect. Understood?”

Though I nodded, I couldn’t help but question Morgan’s paranoia. I caught Winnie’s eye and quickly looked away, but I could tell she was thinking along a similar train of thought. If we couldn’t speak to any of the covens in town, how were we going to figure out which one the super-powered hero belonged to?

We dumped the van and its driver on the shoulder near the exit sign for Windsor Falls. We would go the rest of the way on foot to avoid attention. Together, the three of us cast a silencing spell. I pushed my craft past Morgan and Laurel’s, saving them from expending more energy than necessary, until the space around us was eerily quiet.

Morgan naturally took point as we slithered into the woods and disappeared amongst the trees. I directed her from behind, allowing instinct and memory to guide me toward the girl I’d spent hours upon hours scrying. Laurel spoke to the trees in soft Latin as we walked, trailing her fingers over the bark in reverent awe, and the trees whispered back in breezes and rustles. I caught every few words of Laurel’s side of the conversation. What I heard was unsettling. The trees deeply mourned their lost sisters in Yew Hollow. They did not expect the nature in our hometown to recover. I pursed my lips at the daunting thought but stayed quiet.

Golden light filtered through the trees as we neared the edge of the forest. In the distance, the outline of a massive house loomed on the horizon. I almost stepped beyond the shadows of the woods for a better look, but Laurel caught my shoulder and drew me back, shaking her head a fraction of an inch. The whispers of the trees grew louder, and I wondered why Laurel had stopped me. Then a slender rider on a golden mare galloped right past our hiding place.

13

The girl’s rosy pink aura washed over us like a tidal wave of good fortune, leaving a feeling of ease and a sweet taste in its wake. As she cantered away, I leaned out of the woods, desperate to follow. Even Winnie seemed affected by the teenager’s charming essence. She smiled and sighed as the girl rode out of sight, staring blissfully after her.

Morgan emerged from the forest, gazing at the vanishing girl. “That was her, wasn’t it?”

It was a rhetorical question. No other witch could have that kind of effect. The girl’s presence alone was enough to support a second wind for Morgan and Laurel’s flagging energy.

“She’s so young,” Laurel said. “I wouldn’t have expected it for—”

“For someone so powerful,” I finished, still reeling from the girl’s effect. “She’s dripping with energy, isn’t she? Have the two of you ever felt anything like that before?”

Morgan shook her head. The girl’s aura seemed to have affected her most. Her eyes were brighter than they had been a moment ago, and though she looked more alert, she also appeared to be subduing her emotions under a mask of nonchalance. “Let’s go,” she ordered.

We followed the trail of the girl’s pink aura, keeping to the edge of the forest. I hurried to catch up to Morgan’s long strides. “I was right, wasn’t I? She really is as powerful as I thought.”

“You were right.”

Her rough tone worried me. “So what’s the problem them?”

Morgan tripped over a tree root. I caught her by the elbow before she could fall. She brushed herself off. “The problem is that we have to kidnap a teenager from her home.”

I stopped short. Winnie, not anticipating my sudden halt, walked right through me. For once, her freezing presence had no effect on me because Morgan’s words had already made my blood run cold. “Who said anything about kidnapping?”

Morgan trekked on, climbing over a viney bush. “It’s the only way.”

I looked at Laurel to see what she thought of this development, but she was too deeply immersed in the surrounding nature to reply. I hurtled the bush to catch up with Morgan. “I’m lost. At what point did we decide that abducting a child was the best way to cure the coven?”

“What did you think we were going to do?”

“Ask nicely?”

Morgan huffed, glancing behind her to make sure that Laurel was keeping up. “Gwenlyn, I love you, but this is not a game of chess. There are lives at stake here—our lives—and we cannot afford to make a mistake this late in the game. We need that girl.”

“So why not just talk to her coven?” I insisted.

“What did I say on the way here? The covens here aren’t a part of our alliance.” She slid down a small embankment, nearly falling into a small pond at the bottom. “I don’t have any pull with them. I can’t negotiate a deal for this girl.”

I plucked Morgan away from the dingy pond water. “Why not? Maybe they’re amiable.”

“Or maybe one of these witches is the woman that cursed us in the first place,” Morgan replied. “Did you consider that possibility?”

“Why would some random witch in Windsor Falls curse us?” I asked. “We’ve kept to ourselves. No one had a reason to attack us.”

“And yet here we are.”

“May I interject?” Laurel had finally pulled her focus out of the trees in order to join the conversation.

Morgan gestured for her to continue. “By all means.”

Morgan’s grumpy mood was offset by Laurel’s soft calm. The younger Summers sister looped her arm around my shoulders and drew me close. She allowed Morgan to forge ahead, leaving us to follow along in our coven leader’s agitated wake.

“Do you remember what Morgan was like ten years ago?” Laurel murmured. She spoke to me in the same dulcet tones she used to speak to the trees. I felt like a furry woodland creature, manipulated by Laurel’s earthy vibes. “She’s changed so much since then. She learned to control her emotions so well that half the time I don’t know what she’s thinking anymore. I forget how wild she used to be. Untamable. The epitome of a lone wolf. And then I remember the reason why she changed.”

I thought back to when I first met Morgan. She was disagreeable, cynical, and spoke in a series of sarcastic comebacks. Over time, her temper cooled, and she dealt with trivial coven matters with an air of nonchalance, even if an argument between witches was more heated than usual. I looked ahead to make sure Morgan wasn’t listening in. “What was the reason?”

“She wasn’t a lone wolf anymore,” Laurel replied. She swooped down to rescue a toad from where it was stuck in a boggy puddle. “She came back to us. She remembered who she was. It’s only when something truly threatens this coven—her family—that the old Morgan resurfaces, and she is a force to be reckoned with.”

“That doesn’t mean she should abandon her morals,” I said.

Laurel released the toad with a long face. “There are no morals in war.”

There was no further discussion. It was decided that, at the first opportunity, the girl would accompany us back to Yew Hollow. Her family would not be notified. We would make her as comfortable as possible, but there was no denying that what we planned on doing went against humanity’s laws of decency. Time was running short. The situation worsened the longer we were away from the coven. We needed to return with the girl as quickly as possible, but Morgan wanted one more thing before we did.

“We need to test her,” she declared.

As the sun fell, we set up camp in the bordering woods. I did most of the work, constructing tents, summoning sleeping bags and other gear, and starting a fire to keep us warm. Winnie acted as an LED lamp, illuminating the clearing so that I could see what I was doing. Laurel did her best to collect food and water, but her energy was waning, as was Morgan’s. I finished up for her, making a salad out of the various greens she had managed to find in the surrounding area. As we ate, I kept a mental journal of Morgan and Laurel’s flagging health. As Morgan’s breath came in short gasps and she struggled to get through an entire sentence without coughing, I realized that the curse wasn’t central to Yew Hollow. Evacuating would’ve done the witches no good.

I offered Morgan a canteen of fresh water from a nearby spring. “What do you mean? What kind of test?”

“There’s no point in bringing her in if she doesn’t have the capacity to heal us,” Morgan replied in a hoarse voice. She cleared her throat and sipped the water, but it did little to alleviate the issue. “We don’t know anything about these super-powered witches.”

“They’re rumored to be ten times more powerful—” Winnie began, quoting our research.

“Rumored to be,” Morgan said. “As in, it’s not necessarily fact. She’s still a witch. She still has to hone her skill over time.”

I picked greens out of my teeth, wishing for a toothbrush. “How are we supposed to figure out if she’s as powerful as we need her to be?”

“We force her to use the full extent of her power,” Morgan answered.

I gestured for her to continue. “And to do that, we…”

Morgan remained stoically quiet, and Laurel answered for her. “A healer’s greatest gift lies in being able to mend herself first.”

Morgan’s intention dawned on me slowly. I dropped my canteen to the ground, where it rolled over and collected a layer of dirt. “You want to hurt her, don’t you?”

“No,” Morgan said. “Of course I don’t want to.”

“That wasn’t the point of the question,” I argued. “Is this what it’s come to, Morgan? We’re going to harm an innocent teenager, force her to heal herself, and then abduct her for our own selfish needs?”

“I don’t like the idea any more than you do, Gwen—”

“Then find a different way!”

I pushed myself up from my seat around the fire and stormed off. I didn’t know what had gotten into Morgan. We were pressed for time and we needed the girl, but why was it necessary to test her beforehand? There was no solid reason for harming the girl other than to serve us peace of mind. The woods grew darker as I wandered away from the fire, but Winnie’s luminescent glow soon caught up with me.

“I can’t do this,” I admitted to her, plopping down to sit in the fork of a tree. “I can’t force a kid to save the coven.”

Winnie floated upward, hovering in the overhead branches and glowing like a second moon. “Look at it from Morgan’s point of view. She can’t afford for this not to work. She doesn’t have a backup plan.”

I shivered in the damp, cold night. “It’s not right.”

Winnie settled next to me, keeping a few inches between us to save me from her chill. For the hundredth time, I wished she was alive, if only so she could give me a warm hug.

“Listen,” she murmured gently. “Toward the end of my life, my mother almost went insane. She panicked because she knew she couldn’t save me, but that didn’t stop her from trying. If things had progressed—if my aunt had found this girl in time—I don’t doubt that my mother would have gone to the same lengths as Morgan. It wouldn’t have mattered to her that she was putting another woman’s child at risk. I was the only thing on her mind. That’s how Morgan’s thinking now. Her only responsibility is to save the coven, and this is how she’s decided to do it.”

“So you think there’s no stopping her,” I said defeatedly.

“I think that the world needs balance.” An owl hooted overhead and Winnie looked up to see if she could spot it. “You and Morgan are on opposite sides of this argument right now. Come to the middle. Find common ground. How can you test the girl without hurting her and appease Morgan’s demands at the same time?”

I wracked my mind for alternate ideas. “A false hex maybe? It would give the girl the illusion that she’s hurt, convince her to use her powers to heal herself, and reveal the extent of her craft.”

Winnie nodded, satisfied. “There you go. See? Wasn’t that easy?”

“Sure, if Morgan will go for it.”

“I’m sure you can persuade her.”

I wasn’t in any hurry to return to Morgan and Laurel. The night was cold but beautiful. I tipped my head back to stare up at the stars. It had been so long since I’d seen them properly. The owl hooted again, this time closer, and I spotted its yellow eyes in a neighboring tree. The longer we sat, the more we blended in with nature. Animals emerged from their hiding places to inspect Winnie’s inexplicable presence. Unlike mortals and most witches, animals could sense when a ghost was present. A family of raccoons, a skunk, and even a curious coyote passed by us. The moon drifted overhead, indicating the passing time.

“Hey, Winnie,” I whispered after a while. “Do you think your mom is okay?”

Winnie looked down at her hands, tracing the lines in her palms. “I hope so, or I hope she will be. I imagine she’ll need time to grieve. My father too. Do you think parents can ever recover from the death of a child?”

“I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask,” I replied. “I didn’t grow up with a standard version of parents.”

“Sometimes I think this would’ve been easier if I didn’t have a good relationship with them,” Winnie said wistfully.

“Hey.” I moved as close to her as possible without sinking into her incorporeal form. “Don’t ever wish for that. You lived a beautiful life surrounded by beautiful people. A premature death doesn’t change that. Your family will look back on their time with you and remember love and happiness rather than regret.”

Winnie rested her head on my shoulder, and I suppressed a shiver. All I felt was her cold absence against my own skin. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t supposed be like this. We should’ve found each other sooner. Unlike the rest of her family, I wouldn’t remember Winnie alive. She would always be a ghost to me.

“Something’s wrong,” she murmured, lifting her head. “The trees are talking.”

Sure enough, a soft whisper rode on the breeze, urgent and worried. The trunk beneath us shuddered. I leapt to the ground. Though I couldn’t understand the conversation, the trees’ urgency was adamant.

“Gwenlyn!”

Morgan’s voice sounded far off. I’d wandered farther from the camp than I’d thought. At her panicked call, I broke into a run. What could have gone wrong now? Winnie and I rushed through the forest until I skidded into the clearing. Morgan and Laurel no longer relaxed along the ground. Morgan paced alongside the fire while Laurel flitted from tree to tree, flower to flower, listening to messages that the rest of couldn’t understand.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the coven,” Morgan replied, her tone colored with worry. “Malia and Karma can’t hold the curse off on their own. Two more witches passed out.”

I combed through my windswept hair with my fingers. “Like Alana? They’re in a coma?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Morgan took Laurel’s hand as the younger witch rushed by her to reach another tree. Without missing a beat, Laurel spun Morgan into a cocoon of a hug, all while maintaining contact with some leaf or stem. “They’re weak though. Dauntingly so. We need to return to Yew Hollow immediately.”

“We can’t go!” I protested. “We need this girl.”

“Let me rephrase,” Morgan said. “Laurel and I are returning to Yew Hollow. You will stay here and fetch the girl.”

“But—”

Morgan withdrew from Laurel’s embrace to grasp me by the shoulders. “You wanted to do this on your own, remember? Test the girl and bring her back to us as quickly as possible.”

“Morgan—”

Morgan took my chin between her fingers, forcing me to look at her. Her green eyes met mine, but where mine were wild and panicked, hers were calm and steady. “I believe in you, Gwen. You can do this.” She looked to Winnie. “Take care of her, won’t you?”

Winnie nodded. “Of course.”

Morgan shouldered her backpack, coughing, and tapped Laurel on the shoulder. “It’s time. Let’s move out.”

Laurel planted a kiss on my cheek. “See you soon.”

They snaked away through the shadows of the woods, and just like that, the sisters were gone. I sat cross-legged near the dying fire, watching the embers glow with a blank expression. This was what I wanted—to help the coven on my own and prove myself worthy of their bloodline—so why did I feel so alone?

14

The forest woke me at daybreak. Birds whistled and chirped, animals rustled in the underbrush, a breeze crept through the threads of my sweater, and the pinkish sunlight crawled across the meadow to tickle the beds of wildflowers. I curled up in my sleeping bag, listening to the world around me wake up. For a moment, I forgot why I was there. In my mind, I was fourteen again, living on the outskirts of society without a family or a purpose. This was what it had been like all those years ago—sleeping on the ground, waking to the sun instead of an alarm clock—except if I had noticed a ghost hovering in the trees above me then, I would’ve taken extreme measures to prevent myself from seeing her. Instead, I stretched, reveling in the morning breeze, and smiled up at Winnie, who perched like a cat in the highest branches of an oak tree.

“See anything good?” I called up, startling a flock of sparrows into the air.

Winnie glanced down, swinging her legs over the edge of her sturdy branch. “All sorts! There’s a beautiful stream not far from here, and a family of deer came through while you were still asleep.” She inhaled deeply through her nose. “Boy, do I miss this. Being outside heals the soul.”

I climbed out of my sleeping bag, pulled an extra jacket over my sweater, and laced up my hiking boots. “Can you even feel anything?”

“Not really,” Winnie replied. She tipped backward, dangling upside-down from the branch and using her knees to keep herself rooted in place. “But who says that should stop me from pretending?”

“I wish I was that optimistic,” I said, marveling at her gymnastic-like abilities. “Can you see the house? Or the girl?”

“It appears they’re preparing for some kind of party,” Winnie reported, swinging down from her perch. She leapt from twenty feet up, landing in a crouch beside the remains of last night’s fire. “Phew! I could get used to that.”

I began packing up the camp, rolling up my sleeping back and stuffing it back into my knapsack. “Okay, Catwoman. What kind of party?”

“No idea,” she answered. “But I haven’t seen any witches at all yet. The decorators and staff are all mortal.”

“So not any kind of coven gathering then,” I mused. “Who are these people? It’s like this girl doesn’t have a coven at all.”

“Or they’re concealing themselves,” Winnie suggested.

“For what purpose?” I asked. “And why would they leave the girl unprotected?”

“As bait.”

I froze in the middle of loading my backpack. “You think they’re expecting me?”

Winnie motioned for me to continue cleaning up. “In a game like this, you have to consider every possible angle. Maybe Morgan was right. Maybe someone in this girl’s coven attacked the Summerses as a power play. They knew you’d come looking for her. It’s a perfect trap.”

The possibility made me paranoid. I kicked the burned wood pieces of the fire aside and scattered dirt over the rest. With a flicker of witchcraft, I rid the clearing of any traces of our visit. Morgan and Laurel’s footprints disappeared, along with the lingering colors of their auras.

“What I don’t understand is why anyone would target the Summerses in the first place.” I hiked the pack over my shoulder and led the way out of the clearing. “It’s not like we’re trying to take over the world.”

“You underestimate Morgan’s influence,” Winnie said. “The Summerses are incredible in numbers compared to these other covens. You’re one of the five largest families in the United States, and none of them are close to New England.”

I raised an eyebrow. “How did you know that?”

“I’ll admit I was researching more than just cures for curses during all our time in the archives,” Winnie replied with a wink. “I was curious about you.”

“I would’ve told you whatever you wanted to know,” I said. “For instance, the alliance includes four out of five of those covens. Morgan’s binding spell prevents any coven in the alliance from attacking another without suffering severe consequences. It’s not foolproof, but it was a huge step forward in coven politics.”

At the border of the trees, I crouched down and peered across the vast backyard of the estate house. In the daytime, it was easier to see how privileged the other half was. The house was enormous. It would easily fit four of the Summers residence comfortably inside. In addition, there was a massive pool, stables, and a separate garage that no doubt housed several expensive vehicles. I rolled my eyes at the extravagance of it all. There were people who lived on the streets, begging for scraps, while the residents of Windsor Falls planned their next badminton tournament.

“What’s the plan?” Winnie asked.

I heaved a sigh, shielding my eyes from the rising sun. “Honestly, the only plan I’ve got is to play it by ear. Keep an eye on the girl, get her alone, and bring her back to Yew Hollow.”

“Totally foolproof.”

I nudged Winnie’s ribs before I remembered that she couldn’t feel it. My elbow sank into her midriff. “Do you have a better idea?”

“Active reconnaissance,” she replied. “We aren’t going to find out anything about the girl if we sit out here in the dirt. I say we head for the high street, sit down at a cafe, and eavesdrop a little. It’s a small town. If there’s a party tonight, it’s likely that everyone’s invited. Maybe we can get a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

“And if we’re lucky, we might get a glimpse of our super-powered witch herself,” I said. “Have I ever told you that you’re a genius, Winnie?”

“Once or twice.”

In my dirty jeans, mussed sweater, and hiking boots, I felt conspicuously out of place as we walked past acres of pristine lawns toward the high street of Windsor Falls. I envied Winnie her invisibility. Her airy bohemian style would’ve blended better with the community than my camping clothes. On the upside, it appeared that Windsor Falls favored sleeping in on Saturday mornings. There weren’t many people about as Winnie and I strolled into town, so I found an open bakery, ordered overpriced coffee and a fresh chocolate croissant, then sat down at one of the patio tables outside to wait for everyone else to wake up.

An hour or so later, the entire scene changed. I abandoned the bakery as the line snaked out the door and through the patio tables. Breakfast restaurants advertised peach mimosas and avocado toast. Boutiques opened their doors to display racks of designer clothing in the streets. Woodsy smoke wafted from the windows of a cigar emporium. As I lazily explored the area, nursing my cold coffee, Winnie hovered a few feet above the crowds. I waved her down.

“I don’t see how we’re supposed to gather intel like this,” I mumbled out of the corner of my mouth. “There are too many people here. How are we going to single out the ones who know about this girl?”

A group of giggling teenagers shuffled by us. Winnie nodded toward them. “Start with the obvious.”

I waited until the teenagers passed before falling into step behind them. As I pretended to inspect the shop windows, I listened in on their conversation. There were four of them, two boys and two girls, all well-dressed and about the same age as the healer we were looking for. One of the girls, a tall blonde, playfully slapped her friend’s butt.

“Isabella!” the friend scolded.

Isabella grinned and stuck her tongue out. “Just keeping you on your toes, Lexi. Are you guy still planning to go to Nora’s party tonight?”

“I can’t,” a black-haired boy replied with a sullen look. “I’m grounded. My mom found out that I’ve been selling essays at school.”

“Duncan, you are the only person I know who gets in trouble for doing extra homework,” Isabella said, cuffing her friend lightly over the head.

The other teenager, a spindly boy with lopsided glasses and floppy brown hair, roughly jostled Duncan’s shoulder to place himself beside Lexi. “Don’t worry, D,” he said, draping his arm around the shorter girl’s shoulders. “I’ll take care of Lexi for ya.”

Lexi shrugged the taller boy off. “Get off, Mark. It’s not really Nora’s party though, is it? It’s just another charity gala her mom is throwing, so it’s bound to be boring anyway.”

“Which is why we go and form our own party separate from the adults,” Isabella countered, steering Lexi away from the boys. “Can anyone say free champagne?”

“Free champagne,” Duncan supplied.

“I’m definitely going,” Mark declared. “We can’t leave Nora all alone in a sea of old drunk losers. Maybe I can finally—”

Duncan clapped the taller boy on the back. “Give it up, buddy. Nora already turned down your invitation to the homecoming dance. She doesn’t like you like that. Just accept it.”

“Shut up, D!”

As the conversation devolved into an argument over where the elusive Nora’s affections lay, I let the teenagers disappear into the crowd and ducked into a narrow vacant alleyway between two buildings to talk to Winnie without drawing attention to myself.

“What are the chances this Nora is the girl we’re looking for?” I asked her.

A gust of wind swept through the alley, blowing my hair against my cheeks. A colorful flyer dislodged itself from the window of the nearest shop and wafted between the buildings. I snatched it out of the air and examined the fancy font. It was a town-wide invitation for the gala in question, some kind of charity event meant to benefit cancer research hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Owen McGrath. The address matched that of the estate home we spent the night scoping out.

“I’d say a very good chance,” Winnie remarked, examining the invitation over my shoulder.

“Looks like we’re crashing a gala fundraiser.”

By eight o’clock in the evening, I had pilfered a dark green ball gown in my size through the back door of a boutique with the help of an illusionary ward, stolen a pair of black pumps from the shoe store next door, and procured diamond earrings from the local jeweler. I got ready in the woods beside the estate house, careful to keep the gown out of the dirt. Winnie laughed as I used witchcraft to set my hair and makeup. I never had the patience or the need for materialistic beauty until now, so it took me a few tries to get it right. Once I was fully dressed, I transformed a small pond into a makeshift mirror to check my work. I looked more like Winnie than Gwenlyn, something my twin sister noticed as well.

“You look more like yourself in jeans,” she commented. “Not that you aren’t gorgeous, of course. After all, we have the same face, so how could you not be?”

I rolled my eyes, rummaging through my backpack. Near the bottom, I found a small container full of black capsules and popped two into my mouth.

“What are those?” Winnie asked.

“Aura blockers,” I replied after I had swallowed. “Once they kick in, they’ll trick other witches into thinking I’m mortal. I made them before we left Yew Hollow, just in case.”

“Any side effects?”

A wave of tremors shook my body as the blockers worked their magic. “Yeah. I won’t be able to do perform any spells until they wear off.”

“Is that safe?”

“Probably not.”

I stowed my backpack at the base of an elm tree with funny-shaped branches so that I would remember where I’d left it. Then I circled to the front of the house through the woods, holding the train of my dress in one hand and my heels in the other. The guests arrived in droves, piloting luxury sedans up the driveway and handing their keys over to a valet attendant. Each and every one of them was dressed to the nines. The men wore full suits complete with cummerbunds and bowties, while the women donned every color of ball gown imaginable. I let down my dress, stepped into my heels, and slipped from the shadows, effortlessly blending in with the flow of affluent blue bloods toward the front door. There were so many people in attendance that no one questioned my presence. Rather, they chatted excitedly to one another about what they expected from the night.

When I finally made it through the front door, I gasped aloud. The interior of the estate house was even more decadent than I expected. A marble staircase led to a decorated mezzanine that looked over the entry hall, but I didn’t have time to marvel at the architecture before the crowd ushered me toward another set of doors at the opposite end of the room, which were set under a massive replica of the Eiffel Tower. The mouth-watering scent of catered food washed over me, and I craned my neck to see over the heads of those in front of me for a look at the banquet table, momentarily forgetting what I was really at the gala for. Winnie, who hovered overhead, reminded me with a quick swipe through my skull.

“Don’t get distracted,” she shouted over the hubbub echoing through the hall.

With so many people around, there was no discreet way to respond to her, so I gave her a minuscule nod instead and resumed surveying the room. There were several witches in attendance, their auras shining brightly in the crowd. I picked up on their interactions with each other. Some embraced, while others nodded curtly, which made it clear which women belonged to which coven. The teenaged healer was nowhere in sight, and I assumed that she was already in the main room beyond the Eiffel Tower doors.

I spotted the teenagers from earlier. As promised, Duncan was missing, but Isabella and Lexi both surpassed the physical expectation for their age bracket in floor-length gowns of gold and purple respectively. Even Mark, the gangly bespectacled teen, looked too sophisticated for a high schooler in a tailored black tuxedo. The trio ignored the adults around them, instead searching the crowded floor. Occasionally, they waved to another teenager who’d been dragged along to the gala, but they seemed to be looking for someone in particular.

I was nearly through the second set of doors when I felt the girl’s unmistakeable aura arrive in the room. I stopped dead, causing a backup of guests behind me, and turned around. There, having just descended the extravagant staircase, were two witches. I paid little attention to the first, enraptured by the stunning pink glow of the girl’s power. Within seconds, the pair disappeared into the throng below, but it was easy to keep track of the younger woman’s ethereal light. I stepped aside and hugged the wall as the crowd surged into the main hall, bringing the girl toward me slowly but surely.

15

The girl reached her friends before she reached me. Isabella and Lexi pulled her into a hug before holding her at arm’s length and twirling her around to get a three-sixty view of her stunning red dress. As she danced in circles, laughing, her aura hit me in waves. I glanced around, wondering if any of the other witches in the room were as affected by the girl as I was, but they did not even spare her a passing glance.

“Oh my God, Nora!” Isabella squealed, spinning the girl again. “You look amazing!”

“Seriously beautiful,” Lexi agreed, nodding.

“If I wasn’t here, you’d be the sexiest person in the room,” Mark added and winked.

The girl, Nora, made a face. “Gee, thanks, Mark. Where’s Duncan?”

The group of friends passed me, jostled along by the crowd, and I followed them beneath the paper mache legs of the Eiffel Tower and into the main hall. Again, I was overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of the party. Models in antique couture strutted up and down a runway, burlesque dancers commandeered another stage, and some of the guests had already taken a place on the illuminated dance floor. Nora and her friends headed straight for the banquet table, laughing and catching up as they loaded small plates with hors d’oeuvres and fondue. I trailed along behind them, keeping them within earshot. No one paid me any mind as I joined the line at the banquet table and mindlessly collected salmon puffs from a crystal platter.

Mark popped a piece of bacon-wrapped sirloin into his mouth with his fingers. “So, Nora. How long do you have to stick around here before we can form our own little after party?”

Isabella smacked his chest with the back of her hand. “Hey, that was my idea!”

Nora giggled at her friends’ antics. “It depends. I think my mom wants me to chat with a few people first. You know, investors and a few people from application committees for Harvard and Yale.”

“Is this a business luncheon for you?” Lexi asked dryly. “Why don’t your parents entertain their investors?”

“Also, why are they pimping you out to the Ivy Leagues already?” Isabella added. “You just turned sixteen. Isn’t it kind of early?”

“Apparently I make an excellent first impression,” Nora replied, topping off her plate with a dollop of chutney from the condiments bar. “And it’s never too early to think about college.”

Mark groaned and crumpled a paper napkin in his fist. “Don’t remind me. My dad’s already talking about how I need to follow in the footsteps of the men in our family and start thinking seriously about getting into Columbia.”

“Columbia’s a great school,” Nora said, patting him on the back.

“Yeah, and it’s in New York,” Isabella added with a smirk. “Which means if the rest of us get into Harvard, we only have to see you on holidays.”

As Mark and Isabella bickered, Nora looked on endearingly before piloting Lexi away from them, balancing her plate in her palm. I sighed deeply and squeezed between two portly guests to follow them. It was going to be a long night.

For three and a half hours, I tailed Nora around the extravagant party. She mostly stuck with her friends, laughing and dancing, but every so often a tall, good-looking man that I assumed was her father introduced her to some other suited business official. As the night wore on and the guests guzzled glass after glass of champagne, the party grew sillier and messier. Business deals and polite chitchat went by the wayside, replaced by raucous conversations and erratic dance moves that should never have seen the light of day. I was getting tired, and Winnie was so bored that she joined the models on stage and struck dramatic poses to make me laugh. All the while, I kept an eye on Nora, waiting for an opportunity to get her alone. Approaching midnight, I got my chance.

I leaned against the wall behind the banquet table, allowing the tipsy crowd to keep me hidden. Nora approached the table, glanced left and right, and liberated an unopened bottle of champagne. She froze suddenly, gazing out of the floor-to-ceiling window. I checked her line of sight. Another witch sat on the porch outside—the same woman who’d escorted Nora down the stairs at the beginning of the party. Her features were hazy through the glass, but I could just make out the faintest hint of her aura, which seemed to be orange or red. A silent exchange occurred between the pair, then the woman outside grinned, winked, and looked away from Nora. Nora’s shoulders visibly relaxed, and she scuttled toward the opposite end of the room with the champagne.

I pushed off the wall and followed her out. She sidled through a back door and into the side yard of the house, where there was no cover for me to tail her without being noticed. I propped the door slightly open with my heel, spying on Nora through the crack at the hinges. She joined her friends, who pumped their fists at the sight of the pilfered booze, and the quartet stole away from the party toward the driveway. When they had enough of a head start, I left the cover of the house behind, hugging the wall to stay in the shadows.

The kids hopped into a black Range Rover at the front of the valet line, whispering and giggling to one another. Nora settled for the passenger seat, responsibly buckling her belt. As the car trundled down the gravel driveway, Winnie appeared beside me.

“What now?” she asked, looking after the Rover.

Without answering, I stunned the valet attendant with a quick hex. The witch’s mark on my calf responded in kind, twinging as I stole a pair of keys from the valet stand and slid into the driver’s seat of the matching vehicle. It was a sleek sedan with luxurious leather seats and a power button. I jammed my index finger into the button to start the car, revved the engine, and peeled out in an attempt to catch up with the teenagers. My calf stung like a fresh burn, but I ignored it in my haste.

Winnie materialized in the passenger seat beside me, holding on to the dashboard as we careened through the neighborhood. “I guess the aura blockers wore off just in time.”

“Good thing.”

I gunned the engine, putting on an extra burst of speed. Whoever was driving the teens’ getaway car had a lead foot, but as we crested a hill, the Rover’s tail lights appeared at the bottom of the road. They were heading out of town, in the opposite direction of the high street, where the houses grew farther and farther apart before giving way to endless rolling hills and green grass. In ten minutes or so, the Rovers passed under an extravagant stone welcome gate guarded by two gargoyles. The accompanying sign read Windsor Falls Preparatory School.

“Really?” I grumbled, turning off my headlights to avoid detection as I steered the sedan after the teenagers. “Who goes to their own high school to party?”

The school itself was a daunting structure of stone masonry, looming above the land like a castle fortress. I ditched the sedan behind a maintenance building, chucked my heels into the passenger seat, and proceeded barefoot. Nora and her friends were easy to keep track of. They whooped and catcalled gleefully as they skipped through the campus. The click of the girls’ heels on the stone walkways echoed through the halls. I shadowed them at a safe distance until we all arrived in a grand courtyard with a giant water fountain. The girls shucked off their shoes to dip their feet in the pool as Mark struggled with the champagne bottle.

“He’s going to blow his eye out,” Winnie mumbled, watching as the lanky boy steadied the bottle between his knees. Thankfully, Isabella snatched it from his grasp and expertly wiggled the cork free. They all cheered at the effusive pop, and Isabella quickly sipped from the top to catch the escaping foam.

“To freedom from that boring party,” she toasted, lifting the bottle into the air before passing it to Lexi.

“To Nora’s excellent thievery,” Lex added, nodding at Nora before taking a swig.

Nora saluted, hiked her dress up to her knees, and hopped into the fountain’s pool. Lexi passed her the champagne bottle as Nora waded around, happily dodging the spray from the waterfall that poured over a large stone arch in the center of the pool. Mark rolled up his pant legs to join her. Isabella dipped her hand in the water to splash the outnumbered boy.

I settled in to wait, casting a quick illusionary ward to hide myself from the teenagers should one of them happen to look my way. For another forty-five minutes, the group of friends chatted about everything under the sun, from the approaching homecoming dance to Duncan’s unfortunate grounding to their test in English Literature on Monday. Just as my eyes were beginning to drift shut, the click of boots behind me jolted me awake.

It was a security guard, patrolling the school grounds to check for harmless hooligans like the teenagers in the courtyard. His eyes passed right over me, guarded as I was by the illusionary ward. He followed the kids’ voices toward the courtyard. If he found them, I would never get the chance to get Nora alone. I readied myself to cast another hex.

“Wait!” Winnie ordered in my ear. “We can use him. Protect Nora and let him chase off the others.”

“I knew I kept you around for something,” I mumbled back.

In one quick movement, I dodged around the security guard and emerged into the courtyard before him. Nora was closest, so I took care of her first, firing an offensive spell at the nape of her neck. She toppled backward, falling off the low bordering wall of the pool. Isabella and Lexi rushed to her aid, blaming the half-empty champagne bottle for Nora’s tumble. Mark, on the other hand, froze suddenly as the beam of the security guard’s flashlight tickled the edge of the courtyard.

“We have to go,” he hissed, tugging at Lexi’s forearm.

“Get off, Mark!”

“You wanna get caught? Security’s just around the corner!”

“Crap!”

Isabella helped Nora to her feet, but she was unsteady. Mark grabbed Lexi’s hand, yanking her out of the guard’s line of sight.

“Hey!” the guard called out in a gruff voice.

Isabella panicked. She gave Nora’s hand a halfhearted tug before letting go, her eyes fixed on Mark’s retreating back. “Come on, Nora!”

In the split second between Isabella’s exit from the courtyard and the security guard’s entrance, I cast an illusionary ward over Nora. She disappeared from view, taking on the appearance of her surroundings as the security guard rushed around the fountain and sprinted after the fleeing teenagers. A jolt of triumph flooded through me. Finally, I had Nora on her own.

She sat down on the edge of the pool, cradling her head in her hands. The jinx I’d hit her with wasn’t a fun one. It gave the victim a nauseating case of vertigo and a wicked headache. I felt bad for employing it, but if I was going to go through with Morgan’s test, Nora had more than a headache in store for her. I lifted my hands, summoning my craft, and my fingertips glimmered with the dark green light of my aura, but Winnie’s hand sunk through my forearm, stopping the flow of magic.

“What are you doing?” I demanded, stepping out of her reach.

Winnie’s expression was startled and sad. “I’m leaving.”

“You’re leaving? What do you mean—?”

When her body shimmered without warning, flickering on and off like a faulty light bulb, I abruptly understood. The otherworld was calling to her. Winnie was passing over.

“No,” I gasped, my attention straying from Nora. “You can’t go! I need you.”

Transparent tears flowed down Winnie’s cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Gwenlyn.”

“No!”

A cloud shifted overhead, revealing the bright light of the moon. It shone down on Winnie, and she nearly disappeared in its silvery glow. She reached out to caress my cheek, but all I felt was the frosty touch of her nonexistent fingers.

“I’m so glad I got to know you,” she murmured as I began to cry. “All my life, I felt like I was missing something. It was you, all this time.”

“We’re not finished,” I sobbed, sinking to my knees. The silk dress pooled around me like a puddle of liquid emeralds. “You said you were here to help me cure the coven. The curse isn’t broken yet!”

Winnie flickered out of existence and back in again. “I’ve done my part. The rest is up to you. I wouldn’t be leaving if you couldn’t do it on your own.”

“Winnie, please.”

She floated down to my level, taking my face between her frigid, immaterial palms. “You can do this. Get the girl. Bring her home. Save the Summerses. I love you.”

“Winnie—”

The moonlight shone down, almost as if opening a portal between this world and the next one. Winnie faded ever-so-slightly.

“Say you love me too.”

“I love you,” I choked out.

My own dimpled face grinned back at me, and I flashed back to the first night Winnie and I had met. In a little over a month, she had grown to mean everything to me, and now I couldn’t bear the idea of letting her go.

“See you later, sis,” she said.

When the moonbeams swallowed her and the last outline of her face was no longer visible, my emotions overflowed and ran wild. I heaved for breath, crouched on all fours in the courtyard, as sobs wracked my body. The rough stone scraped against my knees and hands, but the pain of saying goodbye to Winnie was immeasurable compared to something so trivial.

“Why are you doing this?”

My head snapped up at the sound of the soft voice. The girl in the red dress, Nora, stared at me from her spot on the edge of the fountain.

“You…you can see me?” I stuttered. At some point during Winnie’s passing, I’d forgotten to maintain the ward that kept me out of sight.

The girl nodded and winced. The jinx was still in place. “I saw you at my parents’ party too. You’re like me, aren’t you?”

I swallowed hard, trying to regain my composure. “Yeah, I’m like you.”

She heaved forward like she was going to retch but managed to hold her nausea at bay. “You followed me. You attacked me just now. What do you want?”

At the sight of her challenging stare, an angry determination rose within me. Panting, I lifted myself from the ground and wiped the tears from my eyes. The train of my dress trailed behind me as I approached the younger girl. She glared up at me, and I saw the comprehension in her glazed eyes. She knew I was not here to be kind to her.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

Green witchcraft exploded, setting the courtyard alight. My leg felt as though someone had set it on fire, but my energy circulated through the witch’s mark and amplified itself. A sinister satisfaction flowed through me as Nora crumpled at the foot of the fountain. She fought valiantly, casting her rosy pink aura as far as she could, but she was no match for the burst of dark power that rushed through me from the witch’s mark. As our colors combined, bathing the courtyard in a queasy hue, she collapsed and passed out. I heaved for breath, staring down at the girl as the witchcraft settled and the power dissipated from my aura. Winnie was gone, but I’d done my part. Nora was mine.

Many thanks to everyone who read my story!

Writing is the best way I know to express myself, and I’m so glad that you all have rewarded me with the opportunity to share my imagination with you. As an author, I learn and evolve from the input of others, so if you have a spare moment and you enjoyed the story, please leave a short, spoiler-free review of the book. As readers, your personal opinions are often the best references for a writer. Your commentary allows me to further provide you all with fun, engaging material.

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Again, thank you all for diving into mine and Morgan’s world. May we meet again!

All the best,

Alexandria Clarke

Witch Myth Wildfire: A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery- Book 1

Prologue

Grass folded underfoot as the three women tread carefully through the woods, but their footsteps didn’t make a sound as they swept across the ground. An eerie silence enveloped the trio, but none of them were bothered by it. On the contrary, the cone of quiet that followed them through the forest comforted the tense women. All three wore dark clothing to blend in with the nature around them, and they slithered so expertly amongst the trees that not even a seasoned hunter would have spotted their stealthy advance. The leader, who had taken point, had an easy air of nonchalance that translated to all of her movements. Almost all of them. Out of character, she stumbled over a tree root. At once, her dual escorts reached out to steady her.

“I’m fine,” she barked in an undertone. Up close, it became obvious that she was not fine at all. Her green eyes looked sickly, red, and watery in the pale sun. Dark circles drew half-moons below them, sinking the sockets deep into her skull. Her usually golden brown hair was limp and oily. It hung in loose clumps around her pale face.

To her left, one of the other women—a willowy figure with impossibly long fair hair and solid gray eyes—appeared similarly afflicted, her delicate shoulders rounding with every step forward. She rested a hand on a nearby tree. A shimmering light the same color as a blue summer sky grew beneath her palm. The tree shook its leaves. A few rained down from above, lighting upon the women. The blonde sighed with relief, straightening a little as she joined hands with the leader. The other woman’s cheeks flushed, a welcome change from her previous pallor.

“Thank you,” the leader said. “But save your strength and don’t burden the trees. It’s likely we’ll need their help on our return.”

The third woman, who appeared to be the youngest, looked healthy and well. Her hands hovered behind her companions in anticipation of catching them should they succumb to whatever illness weakened their systems. While the leader and the blonde shared certain features—the same shapes along their noses and brows—the third woman bore no resemblance to them. From the outside, there was no blatant explanation as to how the three unique women had become travel companions.

They neared the edge of the woods, but just as the third woman made to step beyond the shadow of the trees, the slender blonde pulled her back under the cover of the leaves. Instinctively, all three women stilled. No one questioned the blonde’s actions as they waited beneath the gently whispering leaves. Time passed. Then, from a long way off, the thunderous sound of hooves shook the ground. It grew louder and louder until a lithe rider on a golden mare with a black mane galloped right past the trio’s hiding place. As the rider faded in the opposite direction, the leader emerged from the trees.

“That was her, wasn’t it?” she asked no one in particular. She didn’t require an answer. The small rider had left a sweet taste in the air, her rosy golden aura wafting along behind her like a condensation trail. The three women could not mistake her for anyone but their target.

“She’s so young,” the blonde remarked. “I wouldn’t have expected it for—”

“For someone so powerful,” the third woman finished for her. “She’s dripping with energy, isn’t she? Have the two of you ever felt anything like that before?”

The leader shook her head. The small movement disoriented her, and she steadied herself on the third woman’s dependable forearm. “Let’s go,” she said, and though her tone was calm, the words were clearly an order.

The women commenced their journey, hurrying along the tree line. They followed the young rider not by the grass that had been disturbed by the horse’s hooves but through a feeling or instinct that one of lesser knowledge would not be able to comprehend. It was a force that existed on a plane that only a select few had access to. The trio was well-versed in this energy. Though each of them interacted with it through different methods, all three embodied it in every movement. Every breath. Every moment.

After some time, they happened upon the young rider again. She had dismounted in the middle of a wide meadow. Her mare grazed nearby, and the girl had all but disappeared as she lay down among the tall wildflowers. The trio halted, and the youngest woman—the healthy one—trailed her fingers through the air around them. A dark green mist appeared from her hands, circling around the women and solidifying like a shield. They could see through the unearthly fog without hindrance, but anyone else who might glance in their direction would only see the shadows of the woods. The young rider, however, propped herself up on her elbows, looking around as if she sensed that something was amiss. Her bright green eyes honed in on the women, startling the trio.

“Can she see us?” the youngest whispered.

“No,” the leader murmured, but even as the word left her lips, she could’ve sworn the rider made eye contact with her.

“Curious,” the blonde muttered, distracted. “She looks like Cassandra.”

“Except for the eyes,” the leader said.

The youngest shuffled nervously from one foot to the other. “Shall we get this over with?”

The leader stilled the youngest’s hand as the green fog thickened. “Not like this,” she said. Her gaze never strayed from the girl in the meadow. “We’ll keep an eye on her. When the time is right, we’ll make her one of our own.”

“No one can know,” the blonde said. “Not her friends or family. They’ll come looking.”

The leader’s lips pursed in a tight line, and a dark blue haze involuntarily grew at her own fingertips. She stared across the wildflowers, fixated on the girl.

“I can ensure that they won’t.”

1

On such a beautiful fall day in late September, when the sky was clear and the temperature was perfect and all of the other students were enjoying recess outside, there was no reason for a rambunctious fourth grader to be pinned in by the solemn brick walls of Saint Anne’s Preparatory School for Girls. She sat in the hallway beyond the headmistress’s office, scuffing the toes of her saddle shoes against the shiny waxed floor. There was a window above her set at an adult’s chest level. She tipped her head against the brick, mussing the braid that pulled her bright auburn hair tight against her scalp, and sighed at the sight of the blue sky. Out of her line of vision, the other kids yelled and giggled in the schoolyard. She envied them, even if she didn’t necessarily want to be playing with them. The other children always excluded her, something that frustrated and angered her. It was one of the various reasons that she had transferred schools so many times. Her father and stepmother had meant for this institution, with its ivy-covered walls and plaid collared uniforms and borderline abusive instructors, to whip her into shape. After all, what better way to reform a problematic child than sending her to boarding school in an entirely different state?

A particularly joyful scream, muffled by the glass window, found its way inside. The little girl couldn’t stand it anymore. She glanced down the hallway. It was free and clear of teachers, so she drew her knees into her chest, planted her saddles shoes on her straight-backed chair, and rose to her full height. Her fingertips found the windowsill, but the view was far beyond her reach, even if she hopped up and down on her tiptoes. She squeezed her eyes shut, concentrating, until she felt herself rising up. Her polished shoes left the chair. She grinned, satisfied, as her chin cleared the windowsill. She hovered there, resting her arms on the marble ledge, and watched the other students gambol about in the schoolyard.

The door to the headmistress’s office opened. The little girl had spent so much time in this hallway that the creak of those brass hinges was as familiar to her as her own voice. She dropped from the window, wincing when the thud of her shoes against the wooden chair echoed down the long hallway. As she clambered into a seated position, her hands folded neatly in the lap of her plaid skirt, the headmistress’s secretary emerged from the office. She, too, was familiar to the fourth grader. Though strict and cold toward other students, the thin young woman often took pity on this little girl. For good reason.

“Kennedy? We’re ready for you now.”

Kennedy’s blood ran cold. She tried to tug the sleeves of her wool sweater down to cover her frigid fingers, but she had outgrown the garment a month before. No one had bothered to buy her a new one. As the secretary held the door open for Kennedy, the older woman looked down at her. Kennedy knew that look, the one with the furrowed brow, the worried eyes, and the pursed lips. This wasn’t good, and Kennedy shivered as another chill washed over her.

The secretary patted Kennedy’s bony shoulder. “It’ll be okay, dear.”

Kennedy said nothing. She often had nothing to say in situations like these. She straightened her shoulders as she stumbled into the headmistress’s office. The room itself was overbearing. A magnificent marble desk dominated most of the floor, complete with the Saint Anne’s seal pressed into the front with gold filigree as though it merited the same notoriety as that of the president’s. The ceiling was higher here than in any other part of the school, including the chapel. The room soared on forever, making the students who frequented it feel impossibly small. Then again, this was probably the original intention. The headmistress herself lounged in the great leather chair behind the marble desk. Her brass nameplate read Headmistress Kathleen Queller. She was a bear of a woman, not overweight but broad in every way and a straight line from head to toe. To other children, her boxy unflappable presence was off-putting, but Kennedy was different.

Because for all the room’s overwhelming elegance and all the headmistress’s subtle intimidation, there was nothing that frightened Kennedy more than the lissome woman sitting in the lesser chair opposite the marble desk. She was tall and lean—so much so that the muscled lines of her calves were visible through her stockings—with flowing blonde hair and sharp green eyes. It was not her rigid posture or unequivocal beauty that stunned Kennedy, but the woman’s mere presence. They were not meant to coexist—this statuesque being and the disreputable child—and yet the universe played a cruel joke once again to place such opposing forces in the same room together.

Though the woman turned to tip her chin in the child’s general direction, lifting a moisturized manicured hand to rest over the back of the chair, her penetrating gaze did not settle directly on Kennedy. She looked through the little girl rather than at her, a habit that made Kennedy all the more uncomfortable. Kennedy swallowed hard as the secretary led her to the other open chair, but before she could settle against the cold leather, the woman spoke in a high, clear tone.

“Again, Kennedy?”

The secretary slipped out of the room, as though she sensed the oncoming storm and knew there was no escape. She gave Kennedy one lingering apologetic look and excused herself, leaving the little girl to confront her fate alone.

“I knew better this time around,” the woman went on, surveying Kennedy’s short sleeves with an explicit air of condescension, “than to buy you a new uniform. Why bother when I knew you wouldn’t make it to the end of the semester?”

If Kennedy’s heart could sink lower, it did. She had tried. Really, she had. Saint Anne’s was severe, but it was across state lines from the house Kennedy had grown up in. The house that never felt like a home. The house where this woman resided.

“Do you know how long it takes to get here?” the woman asked of Kennedy. “Four hours. Four hours in the backseat of a stuffy car with an incompetent driver because your headmistress required a face-to-face meeting with one of your legal guardians. Again. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Kennedy remained silent. So many times had they practiced this script that Kennedy had refined her role in their egregious real-life play. It was easier to stay quiet, she learned. To shrink into the background. To disappear in the depths of the leather chair far too big for her in an attempt to escape those acidic green eyes boring into her. When it became obvious that neither Kennedy nor the woman planned on breaking the icy silence, the headmistress cleared her throat.

“Mrs. McGrath, I’m afraid we have no other options to consider,” Headmistress Queller said. “If it was just a matter of poor behavior, we would have notified you and addressed the situation ourselves, as we have in the past. Unfortunately, we cannot condone acts such as these when they put our other students in immediate danger. Your daughter—”

“Stepdaughter,” the woman corrected.

The headmistress bowed her head. “My apologies. Your stepdaughter continues to challenge our students and staff. Her expulsion was imminent from day one. Forgive me for not recognizing that earlier.”

“I could’ve told you that,” the woman snapped. “But I was rather hoping the most expensive prep school in the Northeast might actually have an effect on her considering how much we pay for her to attend.”

“Again, Mrs. McGrath. I apologize. Saint Anne’s reputation precedes us, but we cannot excuse a student for setting a dormitory on fire.”

Kennedy nervously threaded her fingers through her hair, pulling it out of its unforgiving braid in thick clumps. The woman smacked her hand.

“Stop that,” she ordered. “As if you aren’t slovenly enough already. What’s your excuse this time, Kennedy? How did you manage to burn down an entire wing of the school?”

She had rehearsed her next line over and over. It never satisfied, no matter what situation she applied it to. In every instance of misbehavior, Kennedy found herself unlucky. When she was five, she melted the sole of a teacher’s shoe to the floor, rooting him in place. A year later, burn marks appeared on a bullying little boy that had called Kennedy a freak. Just last week, Saint Anne’s cook scolded Kennedy for slipping into the kitchen and turning the stove on to high heat, charring the food, but Kennedy had never set foot in the kitchen.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Kennedy mumbled.

She braced herself for the blast, but there was no explosion of anger from the woman beside her. Her rage manifested in a slow seethe instead, boiling within her, and though from another’s perspective, she might have appeared calm and collected, Kennedy knew better. Beyond the walls of Saint Anne’s, she was in for a world of trouble.

“It wasn’t your fault,” the woman repeated dangerously.

“Mrs. McGrath,” Headmistress Queller interrupted. “Far be it from me to suggest how you raise your children, but I think Kennedy would benefit from a different type of institution. Say, one with a mental health ward.”

“Thank you, Headmistress,” the woman said. She rose from her seat like a wisp of smoke. “I’ll take your advice into account.” She angled a finger in Kennedy’s direction. “You. Let’s go. Now.”

Kennedy didn’t dare to dawdle. She slid off her chair and hurried past the woman, but Mrs. McGrath seized Kennedy by the back of her neck to stop her from running off. Her long fingers were cold, and her sharp polished nails dug into the skin of Kennedy’s neck. As she guided the girl out of the office, she leaned down and hissed a chilling sentence into Kennedy’s ear.

“I’m not done with you.”

“Goodbye, Kennedy,” Headmistress Queller called through the open door. “Good luck, Mrs. McGrath.” As the dichotomous pair disappeared, the headmistress breathed a sigh of relief, slumped in her chair, and added in an undertone, “And good riddance to the both of you.”

Twenty-Two Years Later

This. Could not. Be happening.

I stared close-mouthed at my manager. His words went in one ear and out the other. I’d heard the spiel before. Multiple times. Countless times. I’d lost track of how many times I’d been on this side of this specific conversation. Nothing ever changed, but with every new job, I harbored hope that this one, maybe this one, might stick.

All I did was make copies.

That was it. That was my title. Professional copy-maker. Boy, oh boy. Wasn’t I gem of an employee? Wasn’t I a stunning contribution to society? This company would crumble without me, an indispensable cog in the machine.

Or not.

I walked out of my manager’s office before his lips could mouth the word “fired.” It wasn’t worth it. There was no point in pretending to be polite. I abandoned any patience long ago, and I wouldn’t waste my time listening to another higher-up blathering on about things that, to my knowledge but apparently no one else’s, were beyond my control. The copy machine exploded. So what? No one could prove that it was my fault. I just happened to be the only one in the room at that time. The security footage just happened to show me fiddling with the machine and evacuating the room mere seconds before it burst into flame and showered the entire mail shelf with melted plastic. That didn’t mean anything.

I replaced the paper. I didn’t plant a bomb.

Nevertheless, I had no explanation as to why the copy machine spontaneously morphed into an incendiary device. By now, I should have been used to my unstoppable string of bad luck. It was something I’d been dealing with since I was born. Set a dorm room on fire? Expelled. Blow up a copy machine? Fired. I had no idea why poor karma followed me wherever I went, but at this point, I was beyond sick of the inconvenience. There were things you couldn’t do when bad luck dogged you like a slow-burning plague. Like finish college or hold a full-time job or live in an apartment complex that wasn’t home to a motley collection of meth addicts. Every relationship was strained. Every moment was sabotaged. I was wearing thin, as if someone used a sharp stick to poke holes in the fabric of my life. There were only so many times I could pick myself off the ground. I kept wondering when my breaking point was going to sneak up and smack me in the face.

The day wasn’t through with me yet. I walked back to my current apartment complex—my most recent attempt at owning a vehicle ended in a fiery inferno two weeks after I’d purchased the hunk of junk—to discover my meager assortment of belongings in the landing outside my doorway. Pasted to the door was an eviction notice.

“Nooooo,” I moaned, peeling the notice off. The block red letters taunted me. I banged my forehead against the rough wall of the corridor, wishing for someone to come along and put me out of my misery. The door opposite mine swung open, and I stifled a groan as my neighbor emerged. This was not what I had in mind.

“Ken, Ken, Ken,” said a coarse but chipper chav accent.

I held up a finger. “Not now, Chad.”

Chad, regrettably, was not the best of listeners. In the month that I’d lived there, he had hit on me fifty-three times. I counted. I kept a tally on a whiteboard in my kitchen. A whiteboard that now leaned against the complex wall, displaying “Chad the Lad Disappointment Count” in thick black marker for all to see.

“Oi, gorgeous, what chu doin’ with all ya stuff in the hallway?”

I shoved the eviction notice in his face. He studied it for longer than it should’ve taken to read the two short words, squinting at the red letters before handing it back to me.

“Unlucky, love. Unlucky. Chu know what makes me feel better in times like these?”

I grit my teeth. “What, Chad?”

“A little love, love.”

He gyrated his hips in my direction.

I hoisted the whiteboard up from the ground, uncapped the magnetic marker, and added another tally mark to the Disappointment Count, all while staring Chad down with an apathetic glare. He didn’t get the hint.

“All the times you’ve thought about me in bed, eh?”

“Oh, God.”

I dropped the whiteboard and stormed off toward the complex’s office. I banged on the door, and when no one answered, shouldered it open. The property manager, Max, sat with his feet propped up on his desk. He was in his fifties, crusty and leathery, with a poorly groomed beard and a wrinkled department store shirt that I was sure he’d retrieved from the donation bins at the front of the complex. A haze of smoke surrounded his head. As the door whacked against the wall, he shot up, coughing, and flicked a cigarette butt out of the open window.

“Damn, Kennedy. Give a guy a warning.”

I threw the crumpled eviction notice onto his messy desk. “What the hell is this?”

“That,” he said, leaning forward to examine his own handwriting on the form, “is an eviction notice. You can tell because it says ‘eviction notice’ in big, red letters at the top.”

I planted my hands on Max’s desk, trying to look as big as possible. It wasn’t hard. I was at the tall end of the feminine spectrum. At five feet and ten inches, I towered over Max. Additionally, when you were so inclined to avoid other people, you had to find other ways to entertain yourself. Me? I worked out. Push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, planks, squats, lunges, and whatever else I could manage without access to a gym. I ran miles a day. It kept me sane. As long as I could run, I could pretend that my problems were behind me. It paid off. There was a reason I could live in such crappy areas without being harassed, and it sure wasn’t because of my winning smile. My head of lengthy blazing red hair and piercing ice-blue eyes helped too. I knew I looked intense, and I played to my strengths.

“Why am I being evicted?” I demanded. “I paid my rent, Max.”

“It’s not about your rent, Ken.”

I shoved his feet off his desk with one hand. His old boots thumped to the floor. “Then what’s it about?”

Max ogled my biceps, which strained against the short ringed sleeves of my ex-company’s collared polo shirt. I clenched my hand into a fist, watching Max’s eyes bulge out of their sockets. Honestly, I’d only ever punched anyone for self-defense purposes, but Max didn’t need to know that.

“We held a surprise inspection,” he blurted out. “Your neighbors were complaining about a burning smell coming from your apartment. The place is covered in scorch marks, Ken.”

I froze. Max had me there. There was no denying the damage I’d managed to inflict in such a short amount of time. It wasn’t my fault. For some reason, things burned around me. It was always some bizarre accident too. During my first week in this apartment, my flat iron sparked and melted off a corner of the cheap countertop in the bathroom. Days later, I tried to light a stick of incense to stave off the previous tenant’s lingering odor of poor hygiene habits and stale cigarette smoke only to drop the match and ignite the tan carpet. I wasn’t too concerned about that incident, considering I was pretty sure the carpet had been white at some point. Then last week, in a feeble attempt to make grilled cheese without a working stove—the one in my unit was a lost cause—I fumbled the iron and sent it tumbling to the ground, where it settled hot side down on the linoleum.

“So you’ll evict me because of a few accidents, but the idiots cooking drugs a few doors down are okay to live here unencumbered,” I rambled.

“No one’s cooking drugs.”

“I’m not leaving.”

Max heaved a sigh, pulled another cigarette from the drawer of his desk, and lit it with a resigned puff. “Listen, Ken. I’m not a monster, okay? If I had a choice, I’d let you stay.”

“Then why won’t you?”

“Because you make the other residents uncomfortable,” Max answered around the cigarette. He gestured out the window to the dismal state of the apartment complex. “Which is saying something.”

“Tell them to shove it!”

“I would, but to be perfectly frank, you make me uncomfortable too.”

I crossed my arms. “There’s no way this is legal.”

“I’m afraid it is, sweetheart. You violated the terms of your lease.”

“How?”

“We don’t take vandalism lightly.”

“Vandalism! I didn’t—”

“Kennedy,” Max interrupted, holding up his hands to stop me from talking. The cigarette jiggled between his nicotine-stained fingers. “If you don’t leave, I’ll have to call the cops. Please don’t make me do that. I don’t want to do that to you. Just get your things and go.”

“Do I at least get my deposit back?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

I glared at Max long enough to make him fidget and look away from me. Then I left the office, slamming the door so hard that it ricocheted off of the frame and wobbled open again. I prowled across the parking lot to the apartment that no longer belonged to me. One month. That was the longest I lasted at any complex. Once the full moon rose and set, it was time for me to find another refrigerator box to live in, but as I grew more notorious in the surrounding area, the challenge increased tenfold.

In the hallway outside my flat, Chad combed through my belongings. His thin fingers searched through the pockets of my clothing while his rat nose sniffed out anything that might be worth a quick buck. He didn’t notice when I crept up behind him.

“Find anything good?” I asked casually.

He jumped and straightened up, hiding his hands behind his back. “Just lookin’, love. That’s all.”

“Bite me, Chad.”

Chad’s answering grin revealed a mouthful of cracked yellow teeth. “Are you askin’ or tellin’?”

“Ugh.” I shoved him toward his own apartment, but when he turned to go inside, he made sure to keep his hands hidden from view. “Wait,” I ordered, snagging him by the back of his sweaty T-shirt and regretting it instantly. “What did you take?”

“Nothin’.”

“Don’t mess with me.”

“Swear on me life.”

I stared him down. “Chad, if I find out that you removed so much as a paper clip from my things, I will make you wish you’d never been born. Understood?”

Chad winked and raised both palms to show me that they were empty. That didn’t mean anything. He was a grifter and a pickpocket, like so many others that lived in the area, and disappearing acts were his specialty. Without any proof, all I could do was let Chad retreat to his own apartment, grinning that stupid grin as he closed the warped door on my sad pile of possessions.

The best thing about constantly moving—if there was a “best” thing to take away from all of this—was that I never had the time or the cash to accumulate the amount of useless crap that normal people did. I didn’t own anything superfluous. No gadgets or gizmos. No electronics to be stolen. Just whatever I needed in order to live: clothes, shoes, and essential hygiene products. I did own a rusty road bike that I’d picked up at a yard sale for twenty bucks, which now leaned against the wall outside my apartment, but that was for travel purposes. A bicycle, thankfully, was nearly impossible to ignite.

At the bottom of the haphazard pile, I found the tattered duffel bag I used to haul my stuff from hovel to hovel. With an enduring sigh, I shoved my clothes into its depths without bothering to fold or organize them. They would all need a wash. The corridor was littered with dirt, cigarette butts, and other remnants of my uncouth neighbors’ questionable lifestyles. I refused to wear a pair of jeans that had been lying on this ground for who knew how many hours, but finding access to a washing machine was going to be a problem. As I sifted through the rest of my things, I realized that something was missing. I turned the duffel bag upside down, dumping it out and probing through the contents. What I was searching for didn’t appear.

I kicked in Chad’s door, the vibrations from the force of it traveling from the sole of my sneaker all the way up to my quadricep. The distorted wood gave readily. The cheap lock popped right out of the frame, and the door rocketed inward to reveal Chad reclining in a rugged fabric armchair, smoking something from a small glass pipe that certainly wasn’t tobacco, and listening to the rough cable connection of his tabletop television blaring an afternoon talk show. His reaction to my strident and unexpected entrance was sluggish. Before he could fully rise from his lackadaisical sprawl, I crossed the room in three long strides, pinned him to the armchair, and snarled in his face.

“Where is it?”

He batted fruitlessly at my forearm, which I cemented against his upper chest to prevent him from moving. The glass pipe slipped from his fingers and thunked to the carpet, spilling out whatever was inside. It smelled atrocious, and it lingered on Chad’s breath as he whined. “Oi, I can’t breathe!”

“Where—is—it?” I asked again, emphasizing each word with a harmless but annoying flick to the tender spot between Chad’s eyebrows.

“I dunno what you’re talking about.”

“The necklace, Chad,” I clarified. “It’s a gold box chain with a small tree pendant. It’s also the only thing I own that I actually care about, so I highly suggest you tell me where it is before I break so many of your fingers, you won’t be able to smoke out of that pretty glass bowl anymore.”

My elbow slipped, and I accidentally rammed my arm into Chad’s throat. He coughed, a wet hack that caused a groan of disgust to slip out of my mouth. I eased up to let him catch his breath. As he massaged his throat, he declared, “I don’t have your necklace.”

I flexed his index finger backward, and he cringed in discomfort. “Is that your final answer?”

He glared up at me. “Piss off, Ken.”

That did it.

For as long as I could remember, a fire smoldered in the pit of my very being. It was the nature of my problems—that ember of rage, the flicker of a temper that would not do me well to unleash—and it lay in wait for the day that I gave in to the heat and fueled it with gulp after gulp of wanton fury. I fought it every minute. Pushed it down. Doused it in breathing exercises and ten-mile jogs and mind-numbing work, but it persisted anyway. Before today, it had never broken free, but I’d learned long ago that the one thing I could always count on was imminent change.

It was the most natural thing in the world to let go. To allow the flare of whatever resided within me to grow and morph into an unyielding hellfire. What was this unfamiliar sense of freedom that accompanied such a release? This quick alleviation of my bottled resentment? The relief was such a surprise that I embraced it in one fell swoop, accessing that repressed part of me with an eager yet daunting confidence.

When a fiery orange glow illuminated the dingy interior of Chad’s apartment, I thought the vibrant shift in light and color was all in my mind. Chad’s expression informed me otherwise. His eyes grew wide, his mouth dropped open, and he stared at me with a mix of awe and terror. It was then I realized that the glow came from me. My hands shimmered with a red-orange glare, the same hue and intensity of the setting sun. It traveled the length of my arms, and within seconds, as warmth engulfed me, my entire body was alight with the alien force. My ears roared with white noise, and with a resounding boom, a surge of something—pure energy or whatever—pulsed from my core and spread like a shockwave to every corner of the room. The entire apartment shook with the brunt of it. The windows rattled. A leg of the rickety coffee table gave way. The fire alarm in the kitchen beeped feebly. As the force passed through Chad, he blacked out. His neck slackened, his head lolled, and his eyes rolled back in their sockets. Then, when everything settled, the gold necklace fell from between the cushions of Chad’s armchair and plinked to the floor in a tiny, tangled heap.

It took me a solid minute to come down from whatever high the strange internal energy had induced. I heaved short, spasmodic gasps of air, like I’d finished running a marathon and forgotten how to control my breathing. My fingers clutched the fabric of Chad’s T-shirt. I unfurled them, detaching myself from my unconscious neighbor, and shakily climbed off the armchair. Trembling, I checked Chad’s pulse. He was breathing—he was fine—so I let him be and knelt down to pick up the necklace. It sparkled with residual energy. I cradled the little tree pendant between my thumb and forefinger as it shimmered in the fading orange light, bracing myself against the side of the armchair. I felt exhausted and energized all at once. My inner fire calmly faded to its original smolder, but for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel overwhelmed or enervated by its subtle presence. On the contrary, I felt free. Like my mind and body suddenly embraced the oddity of it all.

A door slamming in the hallway outside Chad’s apartment brought me to my senses. I stood on wobbly legs, tucked the necklace into the front pocket of my jeans, and—with one last look to make sure Chad had survived the surreal experience—headed out. I locked his door from the inside and firmly pulled it shut. I looked left and right. Whatever had rocked Chad’s unit apparently hadn’t traveled past the dilapidated walls of his apartment. No one had come running at the sound. No sirens blared in the distance. Before any of Chad’s acquaintances had the chance to check on him, I collected my belongings, slung my duffel bag across my shoulders, and straddled my bike. I rode out of the complex with the wind in my hair, ignoring the other residents’ mixed looks of pity and relief as I disappeared into the dusky pink evening.

2

When I turned off the main road and onto one that was less busy, I abandoned the handlebars of my bike and leaned back to let my legs do the work. The strap of the duffel bag dug into the skin of my throat. I hoisted it upward so that the weight rested higher on my back, alleviating the pressure around my neck. As I pedaled down the empty road, I considered my options. In reality, I didn’t have any. There was nowhere else for me to go. I was out of cash and out of luck, and it was getting cold. It was late September, and though the leaves of the trees had just begun to change colors, the absence of the sun welcomed a chillier air than usual in this area of Massachusetts. If I didn’t find a place to stay, I’d spend the night huddled uncomfortably on a bed of grass beneath a mound of sweaters and jackets from my duffel bag. The mere thought made me shiver, so I skidded to a stop, unearthed my windbreaker, and worked my arms through the sleeves. The shiny fabric stretched tight across my broad shoulders. I needed a new one, but for now, the insulation and reflective patches prevented me from freezing on my breezy ride or getting run over by an oncoming car. I zipped the duffel and continued on my way.

The sun sank below the horizon and the moon rose in a silvery arc. My stomach rumbled. There was a handful of loose change in the back pocket of my jeans. I wondered if it was enough for a burger and fries from whatever fast food restaurant appeared along my route. It wasn’t the best meal of choice when you were trying to stay as healthy as possible on a budget, but my grumbling insides were desperate for sustenance of any kind. When I found a drive thru, I rode up to the window, ordered off the dollar menu, and paid in quarters and dimes. The visored teenager on the other side of the glass said nothing of my vagabond appearance but made a point not to touch my hands as she handed over the greasy paper bag. I thanked her anyway, burying the urge to tell her how lucky she had it and to not turn her nose up at people who were less fortunate than her, but it was a battle prematurely lost. Besides, as far as “unfortunate” went, I fell into the category in peculiar ways. I might’ve been unlucky, but I was in no position to preach or complain.

I sat on the curb in the parking lot to eat, my bike lying next to me in the grass. The fries were cold and the burger bun was mushy, but it was food nonetheless. I munched in silence, watching cars drive by on the main road. In my pocket, I felt the trunk of the tree pendant poke into my hip. I was a master of compartmentalizing, and yet there was no way to banish the flurry of thoughts racing through my mind. What had happened back there in Chad’s apartment? That energy blast had, no doubt, come from me. It felt so good to let all of it go, but I wasn’t naive. This sort of thing came with consequences. There was something wrong with me, and it wasn’t like I could make an appointment with my friendly neighborhood doctor to find out what. First of all, I didn’t have insurance. Second, I doubted any physician would take my bizarre story into account and immediately light upon a diagnosis. It was best to keep this to myself, to keep battling against the burn as I always had, no matter how cathartic it was to finally release it.

When the wind picked up, tossing my auburn hair into my eyes, I threw out my trash, righted my bike, and continued on my way. My knees protested as I set my feet against the pedals. I’d been riding for hours, putting as much space between me and Chad’s prone figure as possible. Thankfully, this entire portion of the state was familiar to me. I’d spent most of my life ping-ponging from this end to that. The riffraff lived downwind, while the affluent occupied the northern side. The farther I traveled from the apartment complex, the closer I got to estate homes and prestigious universities and people who could afford to own purebred horses and sailboats. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but my legs pedaled involuntarily in that direction. Even if it physically pained me to show up at such a doorstep, I knew that there was a place with an immaculate green lawn and a columned entryway and a perfectly pruned rose garden that belonged to someone who—no matter how many times I’d disappointed him—never turned me away.

When I steered my bike onto the private cobblestone road and my father’s house appeared at the top of the steep hill with its brick exterior and massive balconies and sky-high wrought iron gate, it was with a mixed bag of nausea and relief that I approached the intercom fastened to one of the tall pillars that flanked the driveway entrance. Balancing with one foot on the ground and one on the bike pedals, ready to make a quick getaway if someone undesirable answered, I pressed the call button on the intercom and waited for a response.

It was the longest minute of my life. The night was old. My father was most likely asleep. I was a disturbance at best, a thirty-year-old nuisance that kept showing up at this gateway every time I fell harder from grace than intended. I was a cockroach that wouldn’t die. Persistent and unwanted. I buzzed the intercom again. This time, it crackled to life.

“Yes?”

My shoulders sagged with relief at the sound of the tired voice. It was the one person I’d been hoping to hear. “Nora? It’s me.”

The tone on the other end of the call brightened at once, even if it was low and rough from being woken up past midnight. “Kennedy?”

“Yeah. Could you open the gate?”

The automatic lock on the wrought iron gate disengaged. I eased through the gap and rode up the hill. My thighs burned with the effort, and near the top I had to hop off and push the bike the rest of the way. As I ambled into the courtyard, the double doors of the house opened, spilling a hallway of golden light across the dark grass. A slender silhouette leapt from the porch, sprinted toward me, and vaulted into my arms.

“Oomph!” My bike toppled over as I stepped backward to compensate for the extra weight. Then I leaned into the hug, letting my half-sister tug me down to her height. She was the sole beneficiary of my limited love. I trusted her and no one else with my fragile sense of affection. Too soon, she let go to inspect me from head to toe.

“You look tired,” Nora said, studying my drawn face.

“Long day.”

“I haven’t seen you in a year.”

“No offense, but I wish it was longer.”

As Nora frowned, I looked her over. She was taller than the last time I’d seen her. Her nightgown stopped short above her ankles. Like her mother, she sported flawless fair hair that flowed past her shoulders like a flaxen waterfall and inquisitive almond-shaped eyes the same color as a ripe green apple. The similarities didn’t end there. They had the same high cheekbones, delicate chin, and balletic figure. When Nora was born, I distrusted her instantly. Anything made by that woman was sure to be as vile and loathsome as its creator. But as the years went by, Nora proved her decency. Perhaps it was the fact that my father raised her too—perhaps it was something else—but Nora and I, despite the age gap between us, proved closer than my stepmother originally intended. I reveled in that. What a joy it was to have earned Nora’s fondness when it so disturbed and vexed her mother. I hated leaving Nora alone in this house, but I hated being here even more.

I picked up my bike and wheeled it toward the front porch. “How was your birthday?”

“It would’ve been better if you were here to celebrate it with me,” Nora answered, reaching up to relieve me of the heavy duffel bag. She prodded the muscles between my shoulder blades. “Hey, Ken. I don’t think you’re getting enough protein.”

“Shut up.”

Her answering giggle pealed through the night.

“So did you get a car?” I asked her as I lifted the bike onto the porch and rested it against the house. “Sweet sixteen and all that.”

Nora nodded. “Naturally.”

“Leather interior? Heated seats?”

“Naturally. Oh, and it’s self-driving, which apparently is a major perk, but actually takes all the fun out of owning a car.”

I rolled my eyes. “I could buy a house with a car like that.”

“If I thought you’d take it, I’d give it to you so you could.”

I hushed her as we stepped inside the house. The soles of my cheap sneakers squelched against the waxed floor. I looked up the grand staircase to the mezzanine. Though the house was thoroughly heated, the place made me feel colder than the chilly wind outside. I’d grown up here, but there were no happy memories associated with my childhood bedroom or any other part of the gargantuan residence. My relationship with it started and ended with a heavy, neglected heart.

“Where’s Adrienne?” I whispered.

“She’s asleep,” Nora whispered back. “So is Dad. Are you hungry?”

“I already ate. I could go for a hot chocolate though.”

Nora dumped my bag near the bottom of the stairs, took my hand, and led me through the maze of the house until we arrived in the kitchen. It was meant for staff mostly—in a house this enormous, you paid someone to do the cooking for you—but I’d spent a lot of time when I was younger teaching Nora how to do things on her own. That included whipping up scrambled eggs or boiling a plate of pasta for when the cook wasn’t around. Those were things I wouldn’t usually be able to do without setting the house on fire, but Nora’s presence lessened the effect of my terrible, terrible luck. She had a soothing aura about her, and it seeped into my own to quell and quiet the burn within me. If I could, I would take Nora with me wherever I went, but that wouldn’t be fair to her. She deserved more than my life of vagrancy, and she fit in far better with the upscale teenagers of the surrounding area. For the most part anyway.

As Nora bustled about the kitchen, gathering a gallon of whole milk, a carton of cocoa powder, nutmeg and cinnamon, and a bag of marshmallows, I sat at the preparation table in the middle of the room. With a groan, I kneaded my aching quadriceps. I hadn’t biked such a distance in a long while.

“So where have you been?” Nora asked, heating a pot on the stove.

“Here and there.”

She shot me a look. “Really, Kennedy? That’s all I get?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. I went to Connecticut for a couple months. That didn’t work out. New York was all right for a while, but things went south there too. And Rhode Island was quite frankly a nightmare.”

“When did you get back to Massachusetts?”

“Last month.”

Nora’s back was to me, but as she poured milk into the saucepan, I could tell from the rounding of her shoulders that she was disappointed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek, trying to keep my emotions in check. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up. If I had my way, I wouldn’t be here at all.”

“Because of Mom?”

“That’s one reason.”

Nora stirred a clump of cocoa powder into the milk. “I don’t get why you won’t just stay here. You said yourself that it’s easier here.”

“Because of you,” I reminded her. “I can’t live here. I’m just stopping in, Nora. As soon as I save a little money and find a new place, I’m leaving again.”

“But what if—”

“What if what?” I interrupted. The slow burn was building again. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to entertain Nora’s imagination, but the more I dreamt of an alternate timeline in which I wasn’t miserable twenty-four seven, the more it hurt me to know it wasn’t real. “What if Adrienne suddenly decides I’m not a plight to this family?  What if Dad finally stuck up for me? What if I found a job that didn’t involve mopping floors or making copies? Yes, Nora. Then I might stick around.”

Nora turned the burner down to let the milk simmer then crossed her arms as she leaned against the kitchen counter. “I was going to say what if I helped you?”

A breadcrumb littered the preparation table, having escaped the attention of the maid earlier on in the day. I flicked it across the room. “How are you going to do that?”

“You know.”

I looked at my little sister. She was determined. I’d give her that. She squared off her shoulders, lifted her chin, and held my gaze. If I didn’t already know that I was a hopeless case, I might’ve believed she could do what she proposed. But she couldn’t.

I sighed. “No.”

She stomped her slippered foot. “Why not?”

“Don’t whine,” I scolded her. “And don’t you dare stomp at me like a two-year-old who wants a piece of candy. I said no. Drop it, Nora.”

A year ago, she would’ve kept arguing with me. When she fell quiet instead, it was a mark of the passing time. Maturity had captured her in physicality and emotion. I pined for her youth. Everything was so much simpler when you were small and ignorant of the world. She calmly studied me from across the table. The milk bubbled on the stovetop. Then Nora circled around to my side and hugged me from behind, perching her chin on my shoulder. I stiffened, unfamiliar with this new tactic of hers.

“Kennedy, I just want to see you get better.”

I folded and patted Nora’s hand. “I know you do. Now go get the hot chocolate off the stove before it burns.”

“Oh!”

She danced away to rescue the milk, separated it out into two handmade mugs, and decorated the top with marshmallows and spices. Then she sat down next to me at the table and offered me one of the drinks.

“Thanks,” I said, warming my hands around the steaming mug. I blew across the surface of the chocolatey liquid, causing the marshmallows to swim about in a swirling pattern. “How’s that going, by the way?”

“How’s what going?”

The first sip of hot chocolate scalded my lips. I pressed my palm to my mouth. “Ow. The, uh, stuff. You know.”

Realization crossed Nora’s face as she drank delicately from her mug. To answer my vague question, she rested a hand over my own. As soon as her skin touched mine, my stinging lip stopped throbbing. A calming sensation flowed through me from the tips of Nora’s fingers, soothing not only the minute injury but the soreness of my overworked joints as well.

“Better?” she asked.

“Much.”

“I broke my wrist the other day,” she informed me. “And healed it in under a minute.”

“Nora!”

“What? It’s not like I did it on purpose. I fell off Ainsley.”

Ainsley was Nora’s horse, whom Nora rode well if a bit recklessly. “In the yard?”

“No, the meadow,” Nora replied. She arched an eyebrow. “Don’t look at me like that. No one was around.”

“Nora, if anyone saw you—”

“I’d be whisked away to some facility to be studied and probed by creepy scientists,” she finished, rolling her eyes. “You tell me the same thing every time, Ken.”

This was our secret. This was what bonded me and Nora in a way that no other person, including her mother, would be able to understand. Because something lived inside Nora too, but where my force was dangerous and vengeful and bold, Nora’s was soft and sweet and lovely. I’d discovered her gift by accident. When Nora was ten months old, my father and stepmother had left her in my care while they attended some gala or another. I cooed at Nora on the floor of the living room, dangling a designer baby rattle above her head as my father helped Adrienne slip on a fur coat over her exquisite beaded ball gown.

“Try not to kill her,” Adrienne had hissed before following my father to the sleek black car waiting for them in the driveway.

But it wasn’t Nora that ended up in danger. As always, I’d managed to flirt with fire, burning my wrist as I warmed milk for Nora on the stove. An ice pack did nothing, but as soon as I picked up Nora to put her to bed, my blistered skin smoothed over. There was no trace of the burn at all. From that day on, I kept a close eye on my little sister, hiding her ability from others, including her own mother.

“You have to be careful,” I told her. “No more experimenting.”

Nora daintily captured a marshmallow and lifted it to her mouth. “I don’t understand you,” she said as she chewed. “In my opinion, what’s the point of having a gift like this if you don’t use it? Don’t you realize what this means, Kennedy? I could help people. People who thought they never had a chance.”

“Yeah, and those same people will exploit you until you have nothing left to give,” I told her, driving my index finger into the table for emphasis. “And then who will come around to heal you?”

“You, hopefully.”

“I can’t do what you do.”

“I bet you could if you tried.”

I stared into my mug, not really seeing the hot chocolate. All I could think about was Chad’s face as I reverberated with energy beyond my control, filling the room with something fueled by anger and frustration and eternal disappointment. That was not the same power as Nora’s. It was harmful, not helpful, and I wouldn’t subject anyone else to its wrath.

“You don’t understand,” I muttered. Another wave of relaxation washed over me, and I realized that Nora’s hand still rested on mine. I pulled away. “Stop that.”

“Why? You need it.”

Before I could protest, footsteps echoed overhead. My heart stopped. Someone else was awake.

“Kennedy?” Nora said. “Are you okay?”

“Shh.”

I listened carefully. Even from the kitchen, I could hear the steps to the mezzanine creak beneath the pressure of someone’s feet. A shiver crawled up my spine. Nora saw it, realizing what had me so spooked. She sat up straighter.

“Let me handle it,” she told me firmly.

The door to the kitchen swung open. I kept my back to it, staring at the table top.

“Ah,” a cold voice said. “I thought I smelled something foul.”

I looked up. “Hello, Adrienne.”

3

My stepmother didn’t appear to age. She was as willowy and beautiful as ever, except her beauty was not subtle or reserved like Nora’s. She paraded it for all to see, lest she be mistaken for someone beneath her level of class. Her vanity was evident in every cell of her body, from the firm set of her full lips to the way she arched a single eyebrow if anyone dared to question her. It filled out her figure in all of the appropriate places, allowed her to float instead of walk, and clouded the atmosphere with a sense of superiority that tasted bitter and acrid on my tongue. Even now, in the middle of the night, she possessed a lethal dignity. Any normal person emerged from bed with tousled hair, tired eyes, and a stiff posture, but Adrienne was the epitome of elegance. She lounged against the doorway of the kitchen, and as she crossed one delicate ankle over the other, her red satin robe swished against the smooth skin of her toned thighs.

“Mom,” Nora said. “We didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“And yet here I stand,” Adrienne replied, her fixed stare never wavering from my seat at the prep table. “I thought I might be having a nightmare, but Kennedy has truly graced us with her presence. My, my. What a treat. Is that your filthy bag in the foyer?” She pronounced foyer with a French accent. Despite her impeccable diction, the word sounded pompous and out of place. When I didn’t answer, she continued her barrage of delicately created insults. “Is that the sum of your possessions these days, Kennedy? No wonder you look and smell as though you’ve just crawled out of a dumpster.”

My face burned. She was half-right. The hours of cycling rendered me sweaty and unkempt. The wind had tied knots in my hair and flushed my cheeks. I felt sticky beneath my polyester polo shirt. All I wanted was to strip off my moist clothing and take a hot bath.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Nora said. “Can we wait until morning before we start a war?”

Adrienne sauntered toward us. Every muscle in my body tautened, but my stepmother ignored me to run her fingers through her daughter’s hair. “My darling girl. Why don’t you go back to bed? I would hate to see you tired and worn in the morning.”

Nora gently disengaged from her mother. “I want to stay with Kennedy.”

With a year out of practice, Adrienne wasn’t as talented at concealing her distaste for mine and Nora’s relationship as she once had been. A hint of a sneer touched her lips. “Kennedy and I need to speak alone.”

“Whatever you want to say to Kennedy, you can say in front of me,” Nora said, popping another marshmallow into her mouth. I ducked my head, hiding a smile. Nora had the happy habit of saying whatever she wanted to Adrienne, and the best part was that she never sounded frustrated or mad or callow. Maybe that was why her mother had no choice but to follow her lead. Adrienne saved the truly monstrous side of her personality for when she and I were alone. Nora was no simpleton though. She knew how Adrienne treated me.

Since Nora refused to budge, Adrienne instead exercised her influence by confiscating Nora’s mug of hot chocolate. “This, my love, is pure sugar. Trust Kennedy to fill you with unhealthy garbage.”

My nerves tingled as I carefully crafted a response. “Yes, my ultimate goal is to fatten Nora just enough so that she spills out of her gown at the next ridiculous ball you throw in false honor of whatever charity you think benefits your image most. Your society ladies will look at you and sneer and gossip behind their hands about Adrienne McGrath, the woman who couldn’t find a tailor with enough skill to completely cut off her daughter’s circulation.”

Nora bit her lip. “Kennedy—”

Adrienne raised a slender finger. Nora fell silent. “I see time has had no effect on your lack of propriety, Kennedy. What brings you to our home this time, hmm? Another lost job? Another eviction notice? Another ‘accident’ beyond your control?”

As she drilled into me, blood pounded in my ears. Quick shallow breaths made their way in and out of my nose, fighting through the constriction at the back of my throat. My knuckles popped as I involuntarily curled my hands into fists.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Adrienne went on, closing in on me. Her perfume smelled like rotting flowers. “You can’t help but declare your displeasure with this house every time you visit, and yet, when no one else will take you in, you continue to return to it.”

“I’m not displeased with the house,” I reminded her, my tone gravelly as I grappled with the fire spreading in the pit of my stomach, “but rather the people in it.”

“And yet you seem to get along with my daughter just fine,” Adrienne pointed out.

Nora looked from me to her mother and back again, her teeth clenched in uncertainty. Once Adrienne and I got started, there was no stopping the amount of wrath we were able to generate between us. I felt bad for Nora. This was another reason I didn’t want to be in this house. Nora had a decent relationship with her mother. It wasn’t fair for her to have to play referee for the two of us.

“You forget that Nora is also my sister.”

“Half-sister.”

“Thank you for the reminder,” I spat. “Though I don’t understand how a girl as kind as Nora ever survived your poisonous womb.”

Adrienne laughed outright. “You righteous bi—”

“Mom!”

Nora stepped in front of me to prevent her mother from advancing any farther. My knees pressed against her back. That was how little room was left in the space between me and Adrienne. My fire fizzled out as Nora obstructed the view of my stepmother. From this perspective, I could only see the outline of her cheekbone from over Nora’s shoulder. The escape from her glare alone was enough for me to catch my breath, but I suspected that Nora was multi-tasking. Serenity pushed against my kneecaps where my jeans met the small of Nora’s back. As Nora placated her mother, she flooded me with the resilience I needed to brush off Adrienne’s malicious comments.

“It’s late,” Nora said. “Everyone’s tired and cranky. Why don’t we all just go to bed and talk about this in the morning?”

We all knew that sunlight would do nothing to improve the situation, but it was better to defuse the bomb waiting to go off in the kitchen before it was too late. In addition, my father would be awake in the morning, and the staff would return to wait and dote on our privileged number. With the extra bodies, I might stand a chance at defending myself against Adrienne’s ire.

Adrienne stood down for no one but her daughter. She deflated in Nora’s presence. Delicately, she tucked a strand of Nora’s hair behind her ear. “Of course, honey. I trust you’ll show Kennedy to her room? Not that she’s forgotten where it is, I imagine. The sheets need a wash, but I’m sure she won’t mind.”

“Did you plant barbs in the mattress?” I asked over Nora’s shoulder.

Nora whacked me behind her back so that her mother couldn’t see, but a small ring on her index finger raked against the bone of my wrist. I winced, and Adrienne performed her signature eyebrow raise.

“If it were so simple to be rid of you, I would’ve tried that years ago,” Adrienne replied.

Nora cleared her throat. A warning sign.

Adrienne gave an overdramatic sigh. “I digress. Off you go. Perhaps the dark will whisk Kennedy away with it. Wouldn’t that be something?”

I opened my mouth to retort, but Nora dragged me from my seat at the prep table, past her mother, and into the hallway beyond the kitchen. It was an impressive feat considering the difference in our statures. I was more than happy to leave Adrienne alone with her devious thoughts. She’d probably thrown away my mug already. Heaven forbid she deigned to wash a dish.

As we passed through the foyer, I grabbed my duffel bag from the floor. Now that I looked at it through Adrienne’s eyes, the olive drab fabric was too ragged and dirty to mingle with the rest of the immaculate house. I lugged it up the staircase, following Nora to my old bedroom. I left my self worth on the floor below, and with every step, I withered and aged with the knowledge that lush carpets and hand-carved balustrades did not shape the image of a person. According to Adrienne, I would remain as unworthy of this family as I always had been.

Adrienne was so apoplectic about my existence that, when I was a child, she had relocated me from the nursery near the master bedroom to an entirely different wing of the second floor. Nora led me through a set of doors with polished brass handles bigger than a pair of purebred Pomeranians, across an indoor balcony that overlooked the ballroom, and around the corner of a long, carpeted corridor. Finally, we made it to my portion of the house. The room was tucked far away from the rest of humanity, which Adrienne probably thought upset me but in reality suited me just fine. It was bigger than mine and Chad’s apartment units combined and had an unending view of the backyard. From the massive paned windows, I could see the rose garden, the stables, the dock of the property’s small lake that we lounged about in the summertime, and the meadow where Nora rode Ainsley uninhibited. Thick ropes of ivy overtook the wall right outside the window. When I was younger, it was my fastest escape route. Whether I wanted to drop to the ground or sit on the roof, all I had to do was clamber through the window and start climbing.

The room itself might have been considered lacking compared to the rest of the house. There was a canopy bed and an overbearing wardrobe and a writing desk, all of which far surpassed my idea of luxury, but the walls were devoid of art or decoration and the maids were instructed not to clean or tend to any other of the room’s naturally occurring faults. The air was stale from lack of movement, a fine layer of dust coated the top of the dresser, and the stiff royal-purple duvet on the bed smelled faintly of cedar wood and moth balls. As Nora propped open the windows, allowing cool air to rush in and refresh the musty room, I drew out the top drawer of the wardrobe and overturned my duffel bag inside. Then I kicked my sneakers off and threw them onto the tile floor of the adjoining bathroom. The lush creamy carpet might not have been vacuumed in over a year, but innate guilt prevented me from wanting to sully it with the dirt and leaves from my shoes.

My ancient teddy bear, Boots, sat in the middle of the bed. Nora relocated him to peel the duvet off and ran her palm across the silk sheets underneath. She lifted a pillow to her nose, frowned, and stripped off the cover. “The sheets are all right,” she said, plumping the pillow before moving on to the next one. “But the pillows are a little funky. I’ll have Helen wash everything tomorrow.”

“Who’s Helen?”

“The maid.”

“Another one?”

“The last one whistled.”

“The horror, the horror,” I deadpanned. Adrienne was infamous for her inability to find help she approved of. The house had easily gone through a hundred different employees over the last few decades, from cooks to maids to gardeners. I couldn’t believe there was anyone else to employ in the state that hadn’t already been subjected to Adrienne’s unenviable standards.

Nora hopped into the bed and slid underneath the flat sheet. “Are you going to be okay in here?”

“As long as the door locks.”

She snuggled down, hugging one of the pillows to her chest. “It does.”

I playfully yanked the sheet off of her. “You don’t have to sleep in here, Nora. I’ll be fine. Seriously. Go back to your own bed.”

“I know you’re fine,” she retorted. “This is for me. I had a nightmare right before the intercom woke me up.”

She sneezed as dust danced through the milky moonlight.

“Liar,” I said.

Nora propped herself against the ornate headboard and pushed her lower lip out in a pout. “Did you miss me at all?”

I pulled on her pinky toe until it popped. “Of course I did.”

She played with the hem of her nightgown, picking at the seams. “But you hate Mom so much that you won’t even come see me anymore. Not even for my birthday.”

“I sent a card,” I said. “And a gift. Didn’t you get it?”

“It’s not the same.”

I heaved a sigh and stretched out across the foot of the bed, making sure to keep the rumpled duvet cover between my sweaty clothes and the comparatively clean sheets. My head hung off one side of the bed and my feet off the other. Nora’s toes poked my ribs. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you, Nora. If it wouldn’t kill me to visit more often, I would, but look at what just happened downstairs. Five minutes in, and your mother already wants to crucify me.”

“Whatever happened between the two of you anyway?” Nora asked as she continued to prod my side with her feet. “Neither one of you has ever said.”

“That woman has hated me since before you were born,” I told her. I captured her left foot and tickled the bottom. She shrieked and hugged her knees into her chest. “I have no idea why. She’s not precisely forthcoming.”

“Do you think she can tell?”

“What? That I hate her too? It’s no secret.”

“No, that you’re different.”

“Different,” I mused, rolling the word around in my mouth. “Is that what we’re calling it?”

Nora flipped over so that she could lay on her stomach and rest her chin in her hands. “I don’t know what to call it,” she said. “But you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’s the same way as me. From what I figure, that makes us pretty different.”

For the umpteenth time that afternoon, I thought about my fiery power knocking the ego out of Chad. Nora needed to know—maybe it would finally make her understand why I was so hesitant to fully embrace that part of me—but I was scared to admit that I’d unleashed myself at long last. What would Nora think of me if she knew what I’d done? The first conscious blast of my power had caused someone harm, the exact opposite of what Nora used her energy for.

“I think she can sense it,” Nora went on. “You give off a vibe, you know?”

“So do you,” I told her. “Except yours is all warm and fuzzy, and mine is sharp and pointy.”

“I don’t think you’re sharp and pointy.”

“Tell that to my ex-boss, my property manager, and the guy who lived across the hall from me,” I said, ticking people off on my fingers. “I’m practically a poison dart.”

“Maybe you need to hone your skill.”

I scoffed. “I’m not like you, Nora. There’s nothing to hone, unless you count my inexplicable ability to light things on fire.”

“That’s a skill!”

“For cub scouts maybe.” I groaned and heaved myself off the bed. “I need a bath. Are you staying in here tonight?”

Nora rolled over to balance on her elbow. “Do you want me to?”

I thought of Nora’s bedroom on the opposite side of the house, right next door to the master, where Adrienne probably lay awake plotting my demise. It was safer for her here, and if I allowed myself to admit it, I wanted Nora’s soothing presence to sway me to sleep.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

She pulled the sheet up to her chin and sank into the mattress. “Good, because I didn’t plan on moving anyway.”

I rolled my eyes and left her to it. In the adjoining bathroom, I set the dimmer switch for the vanity light at the lowest level. My eyes were so tired that I strained to keep them open. There was no shower in my bathroom, but the tub was big enough to do laps in and for once I was glad that I didn’t have to stand while I shampooed my hair. I turned the hot water on as high as it would go and added a liberal amount of bubble soap. Then I stripped out of my dirty clothes, tossed the ugly orange polo to the floor, and shook my ankles free of my jeans. Gingerly, I stepped into the tub and lowered myself into the water. An involuntary moan freed itself from my lips as my muscles relaxed in the warmth. I took a deep breath and slipped below the surface.

The muffled space underwater was a different universe. It balanced me out. Water and fire. Two opposing elements. Air bubbles escaped from my nose and floated to the surface. My hair hovered like a cloud. After a minute, my lungs began to burn, but I stayed down. Anything to escape the reality above me. Then I realized that an intense orange glow penetrated my closed eyelids. The vanity lights didn’t have that kind of luminance. With a jolt, I opened my eyes underwater. It was my hands.

I splashed upward, sputtering, and gasped for breath. A tidal wave crested over the edge of the tub to soak the bathroom floor. My eyes stung from the bubble bath as I stared at my glowing skin. The tips of my fingers glimmered with incandescent orange light. It was dimmer than it had been a moment ago, but there all the same. Before I knew it, it faded again, leaving nothing but the dirt beneath my fingernails.

“What is this?” I murmured, inspecting my calloused palms for a hint. No answer was forthcoming. My skin remained as ordinary as anyone else’s. I shook my head, showering the wallpaper with water, found the shampoo bottle, and lathered up my hair. It was late, and I was tired. My luminous skin condition could wait until tomorrow morning.

Several minutes later, I toweled my hair, found a clean shirt to sleep in, and crawled into bed beside Nora. She curled up in a little ball, clutching Boots in a tight hug and breathing evenly though her nose. I figured she was already asleep, but as I punched the downy pillow into a more agreeable shape, she rolled over to face me. The moonlight turned her pale skin silver.

“Are you okay?” she asked groggily.

I turned away from her, staring at the far end of the room. “I don’t know.”

She inched closer and draped an arm around my waist. Instinctively, I tried to wriggle away. After all, most of my human contact ended in some kind of bodily harm. Then she said, “Don’t even think about it.”

I gave in to Nora’s big spoon. The picture was comical at least. Nora was tiny—her toes didn’t even reach my calves—and yet in that giant bed, with the canopy looming and Nora’s calming presence at my back, I felt safer and more secure than I had in a long while.

4

In the morning, Nora lay with her arms sprawled across my face, squishing my cheek to the pillow, but that wasn’t what woke me. Someone was yelling in the dining room below, and if I knew my stepmother like I thought I did, Adrienne had risen early to fill my father in on my untimely, ill-favored arrival. Nora stirred beside me as I dislodged myself out from under her. She rolled over and squinted at the sunlight pouring in through the open window. The voices crescendoed, carrying up to the bedroom. Nora groaned and covered her ears with a pillow.

“I hate when they fight,” she said, her voice muffled by the cushiony fabric.

I stood up, stretched, and touched my toes. “Sorry. That’s probably my fault.”

Nora kicked the sheets off of her spindly legs. “No, they yell at each other nonstop these days.”

“Really? Why?”

“Dumb stuff. She moved his keys. He changed the settings of the driver’s seat in her car. You name it. Boom. Argument.”

I rifled through my sparse collection of clothing, looking for a pair of pants, but every garment smelled annoyingly questionable. “But Dad hates bickering.”

“He’s certainly becoming better at it. The other day he told her she had crow’s feet.”

I snickered. It was the kind of petty comment I’d make to Adrienne, but my father wasn’t usually so quick to insult his wife. He was one of the most passive people I’d ever met. His only goal was to keep the peace between his wife and eldest daughter, but our white flag of truce ended up soaked in blood most of the time anyway.

Nora watched as I dug through the wardrobe. “Do you want to borrow something to wear?”

“Like I’d fit into anything you own.” I settled for a pair of running shorts that were less odorous than the rest of my clothing. At least that’s what I tried to tell myself.

“Let’s go shopping today!” Nora suggested, sliding out of bed. “Mom gave me a credit card. I can buy you some new things.”

“I don’t need—”

“You owe me,” she interrupted. “Time to pay the piper, Kennedy. I’m cashing in on all those promises you made to hang out with me. Besides—” she plucked the sleeve of my ratty, oversized T-shirt “—you absolutely do need a few things.”

I stared down at my holey shirt. It was an old track and field jersey from one of the various high schools I’d attended. “On second thought, I have no qualms about spending your mother’s money.”

“It’s settled then,” Nora said happily. “Let me get dressed, and then we can go out for breakfast. From the sound of it, Mom’ll be throwing toast across the dining room in a matter of minutes.”

She pranced out, leaving me with no desire to venture beyond the four walls of my bedroom. I wandered into the bathroom and washed my face with some kind of pink concoction left over from the last time I was home. Nora had bought that for me too. The French phrases on the bottle boasted of anti-aging benefits and redness relief. With my shade of hair, there was no escaping a feverish appearance, but the soap smelled like fresh roses and felt good on my hot skin.

My jeans rested in an abandoned heap on the floor. A glint of gold reminded me of what lay nestled in the front pocket, and I knelt down to free the necklace. The tree pendant was cool and smooth between my fingers. I considered clasping the piece of jewelry around my neck, but thought better of it. If my dad or Adrienne caught sight of it, it would spark another battle. Instead, I hung the jeans over the towel rack, hoping to air them out, and zipped the necklace inside one of the pillow protectors on the regal bed.

“Psst!”

Nora poked her head into the bedroom. She wore dark wash jeans, a cozy, oversized sweater made out of something not meant for washing machines like cashmere or wool, and a pair of sleek black boots with heels that clicked a joyful rhythm across the floor in the hallway.

“Ready to go?” she asked.

I looked down at my outfit. With my tattered shirt and running shorts, I was neither prepared for the cozy weather or the upscale neighborhood that Nora intended to parade me through, but this was as good as it was going to get. I rooted through my single drawer, found my windbreaker, and zipped it up over my T-shirt. Then I tapped mud out of my sneakers over the bathroom sink and pulled them on over a pair of threadbare socks.

“Ready,” I told Nora, tying my hair up in a messy ponytail. I made to follow her out of the bedroom, but the expression on her face caused me to stop short. “What?”

“Nothing. Sometimes, I forget.”

“Forget what?”

She gestured between us. “It’s not fair.”

I caught on. It was the stark contrast between Nora’s crisp clean outfit and my own shabby one that made her uncomfortable, but not for the same reasons other people in this area might think. Most kids Nora’s age wouldn’t bat an eye at someone like me other than to serve a look of lofty disdain and wonder how a common garden mouse had the audacity to roam their polished streets.

“Maybe not.” I rotated Nora around so that she would stop gawking at my attire with a pity that should be reserved for stray dogs. “But that’s the way it is. And there are a lot of people who have it worse than I do.”

“I know.”

I steered Nora along the landing. As we neared the main area of the house, the voices grew louder. Our parents were arguing from opposite sides of the lavish dining room table. My father’s low baritone carried up to the mezzanine. He wasn’t the type of man to shout and never had been. When he raised his voice, it resonated like the bass drum of a symphonic band. You felt it reverberate through your chest and head. Ultimately, it was harmless, but the impact was profound.

Nora and I tiptoed down the staircase. The dining room was set off to our left, beyond the lavish entryway. As Adrienne’s shrill demands echoed through the open doors, a harried maid—Helen, I presumed—scurried past us, holding a hand-painted glass plate upon which a delicate breakfast of toast, real bacon, and a poached egg complete with a parsley garnish rested like a fine piece of food-related art.

“Miss McGrath,” the maid said, nodding to Nora as she scuttled toward the kitchen. Her eyes rose to take in my full height, and she squinted at me as though trying to understand what this towering, toned woman in rumpled shorts and a too-small windbreaker was doing in the middle of the foyer.

“Other Miss McGrath,” I supplied.

But Helen was more concerned with whatever Adrienne considered wrong with the breakfast than the return of Mr. McGrath’s estranged daughter. She swept herself away to the kitchen.

“Let’s get out of here,” Nora murmured. Her boots clicked against the floor as she crossed to the front door and pushed it open. A gust of wind ruffled the strands of hair that had escaped my hairband. We were nearly free.

“Hold it!”

Nora froze, one foot in the foyer and one foot on the porch. I had half a mind to push her through it and make a wild sprint down the endless driveway toward the wrought iron gate. “So close.”

“I knew we should’ve climbed out the window,” I grumbled in an undertone before pasting a sheepish smile on my face and turning around to face the voice. “Hi, Dad!”

For a guy nearing sixty, my father had aged well. He wasn’t so immortally influenced as Adrienne, but he took care of himself. That was evident in his trim build, wiry jaw, and full head of well-groomed, peppery gray hair. My father had been raised not by his blue-blooded parents but by the instructors of private schools who believed knowledge of etiquette surpassed knowledge of basic arithmetic in the grand scheme of things. He stood tall and broad—the picture of perfect posture—with square shoulders and a strong chin. It pained me to say it, but in looks, he and Adrienne were entirely suited to one another. If you overlooked the permanent sneer on Adrienne’s face, they complemented each other nicely, and they were the envy of the room at every social event.

“Don’t you ‘Hi, Dad!’ me,” my father said. He held a piece of half-eaten buttered toast in one hand and a folded newspaper in the other. “When were you planning on telling me about your visit?”

Adrienne sidled out of the dining room, crossing her arms as she took in my harried appearance. I flashed her a tight-lipped smile. With all four of us in the same room, it was impossible to ignore that I looked more like a member of the staff than part of the family. I hadn’t inherited many of my father’s qualities aside from his eyes and athletic build. The red hair, visible dimples, and entire shape of my face was contributed by the other half of my genetics. The half I’d never met. Growing up, people asked my father and Adrienne if I had been adopted, a question Adrienne always answered with a scowl.

“By the sound of it,” I said, “I’d assumed someone else had already informed you of my visit.”

Dad stared at me, his expression unreadable. Then his cheeks spread in a wide grin. “Get over here, Kennedy.”

He met me halfway across the foyer and hugged me like I was still his little girl. When Nora was born, I thought she might secede me in that position, but my father treated us with an equal amount of love and respect. It came naturally to him. He adored both of his daughters, despite the repeated failures of his eldest. As he lifted me off the ground, I caught sight of Adrienne’s face. There was no joy in her expression, which simultaneously annoyed and pleased me. Couldn’t I say hello to my own father without her silent judgmental input?

My father set me down and twirled me around as though teaching me the essentials of ballroom dancing. “All right,” he said. “Let me look at you.”

“There’s not much to see,” I told him, spinning all the same.

“I beg to differ.” He took hold of my arms, trying to pinch his thumb and index finger together around one of my biceps. “I didn’t know the gun show was in town.”

As I made a face at the overused joke, Adrienne tapped her crimson nails impatiently against her forearms. “Owen,” she said. “We weren’t finished talking.”

Dad glanced carelessly over his shoulder at her. “We weren’t? Because I felt quite finished with the conversation. I don’t suppose you care to continue your diatribe in another room, dear? Or perhaps you could head into the kitchen and apologize to poor Helen for your tactless remark about the poached egg.”

Adrienne didn’t care to respond to these suggestions. In fact, she ignored them altogether. “Nora?”

“Yes?”

“Come with me.”

“Actually, Kennedy and I are going out.”

As if that wasn’t already apparent in the way Nora stood on the porch, waiting for my reunion with my father to wrap up so that we could head into town.

“Not anymore, you’re not,” Adrienne replied. “Let’s go.”

Nora refused to budge. “Mom, I haven’t seen Ken in a year. I’ll be back this afternoon. Whatever you need can wait until then.”

Adrienne stared down her daughter, but when Nora stood her ground with an innocuous smile, her mother stormed off, the satin robe swishing behind her as she shoulder-checked my father on her way out. He was firm and steady, swaying gently but otherwise unbothered. When she disappeared, Dad clapped me on the shoulder.

“What are you girls up to today?”

“Shopping,” Nora answered brightly.

Dad looked at me. “You’re going shopping? In town?”

“Against my will,” I answered. “Nora’s persistent.”

Nora struck a pose on the porch. “It’s one of my many attributes.”

“All right,” my father rumbled. “Get out of here then.”

“Thanks, Dad. See you later.”

As I turned on my heel to join Nora, he called after us. “Kennedy? When you get back, we need to talk.”

Nora tugged me away from the house before I could reply, but a tight feeling of uncertainty settled in the pit of my stomach in response to my father’s words. Usually, my father welcomed me home without question. He knew from the experience of raising me that I was prone to misfortune. Whether he considered that my fault or not, he kept it buried beneath a mask of ardent love and support. The implication behind his casual statement was new to me. Had he finally grown weary of entertaining the low points in my life?

Nora saved me from overthinking it. As we crossed the lush green lawn, she chattered away about the recent events in her life. From what I could discern, the highlights included getting a B in physics that wrecked her four-point-oh average, rejecting invitation after invitation from potential dates for the homecoming dance, and realizing that Kurt Vonnegut was her favorite author after reading Slaughterhouse Five in AP English. The normalcy of Nora’s life helped me forget about the chaos of mine. I was glad that she was doing well.

We took Nora’s new car into town. It was sleek and shiny and so blindingly white that I actually shielded my eyes as we approached it. It even parallel parked on its own, so Nora let go of the steering wheel as it piloted itself into a space at the top of the Avenue. When we got out, I cringed inwardly. The Avenue was smack in the middle of a sophisticated shopping district, and on a Saturday morning like today, it was rife with the wealthy aristocrats of the surrounding area called Windsor Falls. Restaurants and shops lined the street, spilling out onto the sidewalk. Women sat at the outside tables of each eatery, drinking mimosas and chatting while their designer purses hung from the back of their chairs. Sharp dressed men lingered outside a cigar company, puffing away and discussing the aftertaste of their Romeo y Julietas. A group of kids around Nora’s age passed by, each sipping a latte or some other pretentious coffee drink. They huddled together, bumping shoulders companionably as they walked, and laughed at a video on one of their new smartphones. When one of the girls spotted Nora, she waved.

“Do you know them?” I asked, stepping off the curb and into the gutter so that the majority of my outfit was hidden behind Nora’s new car.

“They go to Windsor too.”

Windsor Falls Prep was the high school that Nora attended. It was the best in the area. Ninety-eight percent of the student body went on to attend an Ivy League university. I remembered the school well. I lasted one semester there before getting expelled on the first day of my second, so I went down in history as a contribution to that other two percent. After Windsor, Adrienne had no choice but to enroll me in public school since I’d already terrorized every private school within distance. At first, she attempted to sign me up for reform school, but my father put his foot down before the paperwork went through. Ah, family. What favorable memories I had.

“What are you doing?” Nora asked me.

I realized that I was still slouching behind her car. “Hiding.”

Nora rolled her eyes, took my hand, and led me down the Avenue. I self-consciously yanked the hem of my shorts down as we walked, trying to ignore the disapproving looks that streamed in from every direction. As Nora piloted me toward a boutique, I thought it might not be so bad to let her dress me. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel so out of place.

A bell above the door jingled merrily as we walked into the store. Nora made for a rack of pretty sweaters, picking out a handful of items in my size, while I beelined toward an impressive array of denim near the back of the store. I marveled at the high-quality fabric and tailored cuts, unfolding a pair of dark wash jeans that looked long enough to reach my ankles and stretchy enough to suit my sturdy thighs. Then I checked the price tag and nearly had a coronary.

Nora dumped a collection of tops and sweaters over my forearm. “Why are you making that face?”

I showed her the price tag. “Three hundred dollars? For a pair of jeans?”

“Do you like them?

“Yeah, but—”

“Go try them on.”

She shoved me into a dressing room at the rear of the store, although it wasn’t so much of a room than a tiny alcove with a privacy curtain. I knew better than to keep Nora waiting, so I shed my shabby T-shirt and parsed through the variety of tops she picked out for me. Nora knew better than to collect flimsy blouses or frilly skirts for me to try on. Everything she’d chosen sported subtle neutral colors with clean lines and crew necks. I tugged on a black long-sleeved shirt first. It hugged my frame tightly but not obscenely. When I spun to check out the back, I was pleased to see that fabric accentuated the lines of my shoulders. I shook off my running shorts and pulled on the jeans, suppressing a groan of delight as they slid over my thighs and settled on my hips without a hitch.

“Kennedy?” Nora called from the other side of the curtain. “Anything fit?”

I swept the curtain aside so that she could judge my new outfit. “What do you think?”

“You look great,” she said. “But those shoes have got to go. I’ll go find you another pair. Try on the rest.”

By the time Nora was through with me, I looked like any other woman shopping on the Avenue. Nora paid with her credit card—I pointedly looked away from the total—and clipped the tags for me. I wore my new clothes out of the store, reveling in the relief of blending in with the rest of society even if I was dressed in an outfit that cost more than a month of rent.

“I’m starving,” I declared, propping a new pair of sunglasses on my forehead so that I could survey the Avenue for brunch options. “Where are we eating?”

Nora pointed to a restaurant down the block where yellow and white umbrellas shaded patrons from the sun. “Briar Patch is my favorite. They have the best Belgian waffles.”

“Lead the way—”

“Kennedy?”

I didn’t recognize the voice, but I turned to face it anyway. It belonged to a tall, good-looking guy about my age wearing pressed slacks and a navy-blue sweater. His brown eyes and straight nose looked vaguely familiar, as though I’d passed him in the grocery store one or twice but never got his name.

“Hi?” I said.

“It’s Toby!” he said, grinning. “Toby O’Toole. From Windsor Prep?”

Gradually, one facial feature at a time, I realized who he was. The Toby I’d known was skinny and gawky with feet too big for his body. We had been in the same grade during high school. He was a scholarship kid, and the rest of the student population loved to remind him of it. Between the two of us, we were the least popular kids at school, but for the duration of my short Windsor enrollment, Toby had been my only ally.

“Oh!” I said. “Wow, you look great. Nora, this is Toby. We went to high school together.”

Nora bounced on her toes, eager to get to the brunch restaurant. “Hi, Toby.”

Toby waved, and I noticed that a shopping bag from the same boutique that Nora and I had just exited hung from his wrist. I pointed to it. “Retail therapy?”

He laughed. “No, it’s for my wife. I can’t believe it’s been so long. What have you been up to?”

“This and that,” I answered dismissively. “What about you?”

“The usual,” Toby answered. “I finished my graduate degree a while ago. I work for a company nearby that focuses on using biotechnology to reduce harmful effects on the environment—”

He cut himself off abruptly. At first, I thought it might have been because Nora’s expression had glazed over as soon as he’d launched into his life story, but then I realized he was gazing worriedly at my eyes.

“Are you all right?” Toby asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Why?”

“Your eyes—”

Suddenly, Nora grabbed the sleeve of my new sweater and dragged me away from Toby, but we didn’t head in the direction of the restaurant like I thought. Instead, she piloted me up the street toward her car.

“Sorry, Toby!” she called over her shoulder. “I just remembered that I have a giant essay to write for my literature class. See you later!”

“What the hell are you doing?” I grumbled as she pushed me along from behind. Her car beeped as she unlocked it, and she shoved me into the passenger seat. Then she rounded the hood, hopped in on her side, and angled the rearview mirror so that it reflected my own image back to me.

“Look,” she instructed.

I looked, and it became painfully obvious what had startled Toby mid-conversation. My irises were no longer blue. They were bright orange.

I blinked furiously, waiting for my eyes to fade to a more acceptable color, but they continued to flicker like candle flames. The original blue was nowhere in sight. I tilted my head this way and that, studying the hue from every angle. I didn’t feel any different. There was no accompanying headache or other side effects. With Nora around, my energetic fire lay dormant—I felt better than I had in a year—so why were my eyes the same color as a traffic cone?

I grabbed Nora’s wrist. “Do the thing.”

“What?”

“Do the healing thing or whatever it is!”

When Nora’s familiar peace pulsed from her hands to mine, it did nothing to lessen the effect of my ocular issue. On the contrary, it made it worse. My eyes flared, and Nora squinted, shielding her own eyes from the intense light. I tore my hand away from hers.

“What the hell is happening?”

“I was wondering the exact same thing,” Nora said. She examined my irises as they dimmed again. “Do you have something you want to share with the class, Kennedy?”

I rested my new sunglasses on the bridge of my nose, subduing the glow as Nora reset the rearview mirror, put the car in drive, and pulled out of the space. “I have to tell you something.”

5

At the house, I waited for Nora as she pilfered enough food for a picnic lunch from the kitchen, hiding in the side yard in case my dad or Adrienne spotted me through a window. Then we saddled Ainsley and another horse to ride out to the meadow beyond the lake. As the wind coaxed my hair from its ponytail, I imagined what it would’ve been like to grow up in this house under different circumstances. Nora and I experienced similar upbringings, though she had two parents that adored her rather than just one. We both had riding lessons, etiquette training, and a top-tier education. Though my experiences were disjointed and riddled with trouble, I retained the information nonetheless. I galloped alongside Nora, savoring the illusion of freedom and adventure that naturally arose whilst riding a horse. After all, I wasn’t sure how long this would last.

We laid out a blanket on a bed of daisies. As the horses grazed nearby, Nora snacked on fresh apples from a local orchard, some kind of expensive cheese that was meant to be paired with fine wine, and imported prosciutto that cost more per pound than an entire menu of fast food combo meals. I tried to eat, but I was no longer accustomed to such rich, savory flavors. Not to mention, Nora wouldn’t stop staring at me, which reminded me that my eyes had yet to transition back to blue.

“Stop it,” I told her, tossing a cheese rind at her.

“I can’t help it. Has this happened to you before?”

“Not like this.”

“Then like what?”

I looked across the meadow. In the distance, the lake gleamed in the sunlight. “I did something yesterday,” I admitted. “Like what you do, but completely different.”

“You used your magic?”

“Don’t call it that. People are going to think we’re insane.”

“Fine,” Nora conceded, standing up to feed an apple slice to Ainsley. “Power. Energy. Force. Whatever you want to call it. You actually used it?”

“Yes,” I confirmed. “On the guy who lived across the hall from me.”

As Ainsley munched messily on her fruit, Nora knelt next to me. “This is great, Ken! What was wrong with him? How did you help? Did you—?”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “It’s not what you think.” Even though the day was cool and breezy, the sun warmed my skin to an uncomfortable temperature. Either that, or my inner fire wasn’t as subdued as I thought. Nora watched me expectantly, but I couldn’t look her in the eye. “Nora, I didn’t heal Chad. I knocked him out.”

“You… what?”

I heaved a sigh. “He pissed me off, okay? He was a thief and a con artist, and he tried to steal something from me. So I went into his apartment and got it back. It didn’t go quite according to plan.”

Nora’s forehead crinkled as she studied me. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I told her, peeling a piece of prosciutto from the wrapper to eat. “One second, I had him pinned to his chair, and the next, this giant burst of energy radiated through the room. He passed out in less than a second.”

“And you’re sure it was you?”

“Without a doubt.”

Nora chewed thoughtfully on a wedge of cheese. “Did you do it on purpose?”

“No.”

“I figured. You’re always so weird about using your energy.”

“That’s because this energy has caused me nothing but trouble since the day I was born,” I retorted. “I’ve told you a million times, Nora. You help people. I don’t.”

“Maybe there are different types.” She plucked a dandelion from the ground and held it up at eye level. “Let’s try something,” she said, twirling the weed between her fingers so that it spun like a top. “Light this dandelion on fire.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

I blew at the fluffy seeds of the dandelion. They floated into Nora’s face, and she batted them away like pesky mosquitos.

“It’s a bad idea,” I told her.

“You won’t even try?”

“No! Nora, what if I light you on fire instead?”

“Good thing I’m indestructible.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Come on,” she wheedled, tossing aside the stem and picking another dandelion for me to kill. “Just try it. Give it a little gas. A tiny bit. Miniscule. Hardly tap the pedal.”

“This isn’t a car. I don’t have an emergency brake.”

She bopped me on the nose with the dandelion. “I’ll be your emergency brake.”

“Nope.”

Nora rolled her eyes and lay back on the blanket, interlacing her fingers behind her head. “Kennedy, consider this. What if the reason you have so many problems with your energy is because you’ve never bothered to practice with it? As soon as I was old enough to understand what was happening to me, I started playing around with my abilities. You never did that. You were too busy burying it so deep, it probably started to fester.”

“Thanks, Nora. You’re really selling me on this.”

She threw an apple slice at me. It pelted me in the forehead with a wet smack. “Do it.”

“Ow! No.”

Another apple slice took to the air. I dodged to avoid it.

“Do it, Kennedy.”

“Stop throwing food, Nora. It’s wasteful.”

“Try the dandelion, and I’ll stop.”

I threw the fallen apples to the other horse, who rooted through the grass to snuffle them up. “I’ve always thought you were mature for your age, but I’m currently questioning that judgement.”

She smacked a slice of prosciutto to my cheek.

“Nora!”

“Why don’t you just admit that you’re scared, huh?” she demanded as I peeled the deli meat off my skin like an unusual spa treatment. “You’re not a healer, Ken. Fine. That doesn’t mean you can’t be something else good, but you’re so damn caught up in your own self-righteous pity—which by the way has been stewing for thirty years—that you won’t even try. Guess what, Kennedy? You can’t sit around and bitch about how terrible your life is and then do nothing in order to change it.”

A stunned silence followed her short diatribe. The breeze whistled through the grass. The horses grazed peacefully. Nora glared at me with a look that reminded me explicitly of her mother.

“I have never heard you swear before,” I told her.

“Not the point, Ken.”

I pinned a piece of trash to the blanket before the wind could whisk it away. “Am I really self-righteous?”

“No, but you’re so worried about keeping your energy under control that you don’t think about anything else,” Nora said. The words weren’t pleasant to hear, but she delivered them as gently as possible. “Doesn’t that get tiring? Consider the possibilities. If you learned to use your abilities safely, you wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally blowing up your apartment or tranquilizing your neighbors.”

“Fine. Give me the dandelion.”

She punched the air in triumph and rolled over to pluck another flower. “Here.”

“Stay over there,” I ordered, pinching the stem between my fingers. “Just in case.”

Nora retreated to the far corner of the blanket. I stared at the fluffy white dandelion seeds. I had no idea how to do this. I spent every day of my life trying to squash my inner energy. Accessing it on purpose felt impossible. I closed my eyes, thinking of the previous day. My forearm resting against Chad’s throat. Heart pounding. Chest heaving. The complete surrender to myself. I wanted that again, but in a concentrated, controllable dose. And preferably without blasting Nora to kingdom come. I knocked on the door to where the fire was housed, a place that started at my heart and lit up my entire core. My fingertips fizzled with the sparkling orange light.

A swift gust tugged the dandelion from my hands, disrupting my concentration, and the light burned out. I was dark inside, as though the fire had been snuffed and suffocated without my approval, but it wasn’t the same cathartic relief as yesterday.

“Hmm,” Nora said thoughtfully. “Your eyes are blue again. What did you do?”

“No idea. It’s gone though.”

“What is?”

I patted my chest, unable to put my ailment into words. “Whatever this is.”

Nora scooted over to me and offered her hands. “Do you want it back? I’ve depleted myself before. It’s not permanent.”

I hesitated before placing my hands in hers. I wished that the lack of energy was permanent. It would save me a whole lot of hassle. On the other hand, I felt nauseous in the absence of the familiar smolder. As Nora infused me with some of her own power, the light turned back on. My stomach settled, and comfort washed through me at its return.

Nora squeezed my fingers reassuringly. “The good news is that you didn’t blow anything up,” she said. “But the bad news is that you didn’t blow anything up.”

“I’m not sure which is worse.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll practice together. I can teach you.”

She resumed her lunch, finishing off the cheese and chugging a bottle of fresh lemonade. Her confidence both inspired and worried me. Maybe Nora was right. Maybe the reason for my bad luck was that I’d never attempted to master my abilities. Now that Nora was determined to teach me her ways, I wasn’t so sure. While the thought of living a normal life was more than enticing, there were risks involved. It wasn’t lost on me that the one and only time I’d accessed my energy was during a complete failure to manage my rage. If unstoppable anger was what it took to fuel that power, I refused to put Nora in the crosshairs. For now, it was okay to entertain her, but at the first sign of trouble, I intended to shut our “lessons” down before either one of us could get hurt.

By the time we rode back to the house, I was sweaty and tired. Nora offered to put the horses away. I insisted on brushing my borrowed buddy down, but he apparently belonged to Adrienne, who followed a specific routine to take care of him, so I left Nora to it. In the backyard, the swimming pool glimmered like an invitation. I knelt alongside the bordering brick pavers and dipped my fingers in the water. It was heated, just tepid enough to offset the cool wind but refreshing enough to soothe my skin. I stripped out of my new clothes, slid in, and swam a couple of laps. Like last night’s bath, the water calmed me. I automatically felt more at ease, floating on my back as the sun danced on my eyelids. The guest house hid the pool from view of the main house. Otherwise, I never would’ve dared to jump in. Unless Adrienne fancied a dip, we wouldn’t run into each other.

I lay on the patio for a bit and let the sun dry me out. Then I tossed my new jeans and sweater over my shoulder, snuck past the windows of the main house, and scaled the ivy that led up to my secluded bedroom on the second floor. The longer I could avoid that talk with my father, the better. The climb busied my mind as I sought handholds and strong roots to hoist myself upward. My back and shoulders spoke to me, happy for a challenge that differed from the usual calisthenics I did every day. I reached the window and somersaulted in, puffing out a laugh. It felt good to move. Between the horseback riding, the mid-morning swim, and the improvised rock wall, my muscles sang in perfect harmony with each other. For a brief moment, I savored the sweetness of being alive. Then I noticed that the bed had been stripped. The sheets and duvet were gone, along with the pillow that I’d hidden the necklace in.

I ripped the mattress cover off to search underneath it. Then I checked under the bed, behind the headboard, and in the drawer of the side table in case Helen had found the necklace herself. It was empty save for a few dust bunnies, so I thundered from the room, raced down the corridor, and took the stairs two at a time, not caring about who I might interrupt in my haste. The laundry room was next to the kitchen. I blasted through the swinging doors, nearly decapitating Helen as she carried a load of towels in a laundry basket.

“Helen!” I took her by the shoulders. “Did you find a necklace in my room? Zipped into the pillow protector?”

Helen looked as though all she wanted to do was fold her towels in peace. “No, Miss McGrath.”

I tore past her into the laundry room. The royal purple duvet cover spun in the window of the dryer. I pressed the pause button and yanked the damp linens onto the floor. The pillow protectors shook free of the duvet cover, but when I overturned each one to look inside, there was no hint of the tree pendant necklace. I threw everything aside and searched through the dirty sheets waiting to be washed. No glint of gold greeted me.

“Looking for this?”

Adrienne’s chilly voice turned my bones to ice. The necklace dangled from her slim fingers, the tree pendant swaying back and forth like a tiny pendulum.

I held out my hand. “Give it to me.”

Adrienne laughed without humor, cupping the necklace in her palm so that it was no longer visible. “Say please.”

“Don’t mess with me, Adrienne.”

“What are you going to do?” she teased. “Run to Daddy? To Nora?”

She wanted a rise out of me. While Nora did everything in her power to keep me cool and collected, Adrienne prodded and poked me like a bull in a pen. It had been that way since I was a child. Adrienne provided snide remarks and sidelong glares and sickening insults until I learned to tune them out. At some point, I shut down completely. I was an empty frame, sitting at the same dining room as my parents but never truly present. For years, I was vacant and emotionless. Otherwise, my luck worsened and my hate for Adrienne bubbled over. I would not give her the satisfaction of angering me after the first few hours during which I’d actually enjoyed myself in over a year.

“Listen, Adrienne.” I crossed the small room in long, languid strides until my face was inches from Adrienne’s own and smiled down at her. It delighted me that she had to look up if she wanted to challenge my glare. “I’m going to stay here as long as I want. I’ll swim in your pool and sleep in your sheets and eat the organic food from your table. I’ll talk to my father like I haven’t seen him a year—because I haven’t—and I’ll laugh with my sister without the looming feeling that I’ve done something wrong because you don’t approve.” Adrienne’s sneer deepened with every declaration, but I wasn’t done yet. “I don’t have a lot of things that I care about. Nora’s one of them, and I will forever question why you think that’s such a terrible quandary. But that necklace—” I pointed to her clenched fist “—is something else I never intend to give up. Yesterday, someone tried to steal it from me. Can you imagine what I did to him?”

I was exaggerating, but the lethal tone of my voice and the quiet calm with which I spoke spread like a thick fog through the cramped room. A quick flash of something—fear or uncertainty or utter hatred—turned Adrienne’s green eyes sour. It lasted less than a second, but it lit the torch in my core again, and I pinned Adrienne’s hand to the door frame in order to pry the necklace from her polished fingers—

A hot burst of power ruptured through me, and a cloud of utterly black darkness mushroomed outward, sweeping to the far corners of the laundry room and the kitchen. The washer and dryer shut off. A value-sized container of soap fell off a shelf and cracked open. Dishes in the rack next to the sink shattered, while a collection of pans that hung from a contraption bolted to the ceiling rattled in place as though an earthquake shook the ground below. I half-expected Adrienne to drop, knocked unconscious like Chad, but she remained standing and steady. Before either one of us could acknowledge the damage, the door to the kitchen swung open. My father bolted in, followed closely by Helen and Nora. The three of them stood dumbstruck as they stared at the wreckage. Adrienne’s grip on the necklace loosened, and I wrenched it free while everyone was distracted, hiding the humble piece of jewelry behind my back.

“What the hell happened down here?” Dad demanded. He clapped a hand over his eyes as he caught sight of me and Adrienne nose-to-nose in the laundry room. “And Kennedy, why are you only half-dressed?”

My father’s study remained mostly unchanged in the past thirty years. His book collection expanded, the leather sofa was reupholstered once, and the comforting scents of pipe tobacco and mint fluctuated in intensity, but the dark quiet room was safe from Adrienne’s devilish effect. It was the one place in the house she allowed to exist separate from herself. I assumed it was because my father had an acute obsession with rugby and the tendency to shout profanities at the players on the screen during games. The large flatscreen in the corner of his office allowed him to do so in the comfort of his own space, and the large oak doors prevented his booming voice from carrying to the rest of the house.

As I waited for my father, I perused his bookshelves, looking for new acquisitions. My father hadn’t passed his love of reading on to me. As much as I wanted to dive into tales of adventure and swashbuckling, especially as a child, the words weren’t enough to keep my attention for long, at which point my fingertips seared cigarette burns into the precious pages of expensive first editions. My father never questioned why or how his books were marred, and I had no intention of telling him. When your child was accused of arson so often, it wasn’t exactly a mystery. I picked up a novel by Joseph Conrad and leafed through the first few pages. The door to the study creaked open, and my father walked in. He ducked his head to look at the cover of the book.

“Who knows what true loneliness is?” he quoted. “Not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”

“Cheery,” I said, snapping the book shut and returning it to the shelf. “So Conrad was an optimist?”

My father chuckled. “Do you know why I remember that excerpt?”

“Why?”

“Because you burned a hole in that page.”

I grimaced. So he did know. “Sorry about that.”

He caressed the leathery spines of his collection, sending dust swirling into the air. “Every time you leave, I spend hours combing through these old books. Do you remember how often you hid in my study?”

“It was the only place Adrienne wouldn’t hound me,” I told him. “When she was chasing after me to hem yet another uniform skirt or punish me for spilling a glass of apple juice across the upholstery, I would come in here to escape.”

My father nodded solemnly. I was accustomed to his inability to process the feud between his daughter and second wife. He preferred to avoid the matter rather than confront it, which was fine now that I was grown and able to defend myself, but in my youth, I would have liked a father who did more than feebly attempt to keep the peace.

“You said you wanted to talk,” I reminded him. “What about?”

“We’ll get to that in a minute. Take a seat.” He sat in the chair behind his desk and propped his feet up on the ink blotter. I plopped down on the leather sofa. My father sighed wistfully. “Less than a day, Kennedy. You’ve been home less than a day, and my kitchen is already demolished. You want to fill me in on that fiasco?”

No matter how many times I had a conversation just like this one, my reaction never changed. I was at a loss for what to say. Yes, I had somehow managed to annihilate an entire room of dishware and appliances without making physical contact with anything. There was no explanation for that. There was no lie that might serve as an explanation for that. As usual, I contemplated my lack of answers quietly and waited for someone else to fill in the blanks.

“You know what?” Dad said, raising his hands in defeat. “I don’t want to know. Honestly, I think we’re past the point where I need to know. Just—can you keep the vandalism at a minimum while you’re here, Ken?”

“While I’m here?” I repeated. “You’re not kicking me out?”

My father looked taken aback. “Kick you out? Why would I do that?”

“I thought when you said we needed to talk—”

“You thought I was going to tell you to leave?” he finished for me. “Kennedy, I would never ask that of you.”

While it was comforting to hear him say it, doubt lingered in the back of my mind. “Then what is it?”

He released a gusty breath, setting his feet on the floor as though he needed sturdy ground to support himself. “Listen, Ken. I worry about you. Day after day, year after year. You can’t live your life like this. You can’t flounce from one job to the next, one city to another. You can’t keep coming back here—”

Dad cut himself off, his eyes snapping up to catch my reaction to the words he surely didn’t mean to let slip out.

“So this is that conversation,” I said.

“No, I—”

“Is it Adrienne?” I asked. “Did she finally convince you that I’m the spawn of Satan?”

“Don’t say that, Ken.”

I stood up and tossed the knit blanket to the floor. “I’ll pack my stuff.”

“Don’t you dare.”

The order rumbled across the study before I reached the door. I stopped. While I had no misgivings about disobeying Adrienne’s requests, my father was different. For one, I retained a certain amount of respect for him, even if he didn’t entirely deserve it. And two, if I committed to my declaration, I really would be homeless. I’d probably end up hawking the pretty sweaters and designer jeans that Nora had bought me in exchange for a place to sleep and a couple cans of instant soup.

“I’ve struck a deal with Adrienne,” my father said. He was tired. I could tell by the slump of his shoulders. Less than a day, as he’d so recently reminded me, and I’d wearied him already.

“What kind of deal?” I asked, apprehension building in my wary tone.

“She’s been wanting to hold a gala,” Dad explained, waving a hand to indicate the silliness of such desires. “Originally, I put my foot down. This year has been trouble enough without cake tastings and doily comparisons and ‘shall we have cream napkins or off-white napkins?’”

“I quite enjoy the cake tastings actually.”

He silenced me with a look. “I told her that if she left you alone to do whatever you need to do in order to get back on your feet, she could have her gala.”

“You did?”

“I did.”

I was stupefied. For once, my father had actually stood up to Adrienne. He’d told her to cut me some slack. That alone was enough to raise questions. That alone made me ask, “What’s the catch?”

“Why would there be a catch?”

“Because it’s Adrienne.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “It has to be different this time, Kennedy. I don’t care if you stay here for a month or a year, but when you leave this house again, I need you to be able to take care of yourself once and for all.”

It was the final inning. That’s what my father was telling me. This was my last chance. If I struck out again, I could no longer fall back on Dad and Nora. I nodded, accepting the terms and conditions without reading the fine print, but I had one final question.

“Hey, Dad?”

“Yes, Kennedy.”

“Do you ever get tired of choosing your wife over your daughter?”

He was too mentally exhausted to start a sparring match with me. Instead, he afforded me a long, tired look. “Ken, between the two of you, I don’t know what to choose anymore.”

“She’s unbearable.”

“She’s different with you,” Dad said. “We’re fine otherwise. It’s just you.”

I turned to leave. I’d heard enough.

“Ken?”

I nearly ignored him. One foot was already in the hallway. “What?”

“Why did you argue? What was the nature of the kitchen confrontation?”

I swallowed hard, wondering if I should tell him or not. It was a sore subject to say the least, but my decision solidified as the words It’s just you echoed through my head.

“She tried to take Mom’s necklace.”

I escaped into the hallway and eased the door to the study shut before my father’s dumbfounded expression caused me to say something stupid. In his world, and in Adrienne’s, my mother didn’t exist. It was as though I’d simply appeared on the scene as a collection of cells without explanation. My mother was a modern-day mystery. I didn’t know who she was, what she looked like, or how my father had met her. I didn’t even know her name. My father didn’t keep pictures or trinkets. The tiny tree pendant was all I had of hers. I had no memory of how I’d acquired it, but for as long as I’d been on the planet, the necklace remained with me as the sole indication of my heritage.

“Oomph! Nora!”

My little sister lurked out of sight just beyond the study’s doors—most likely eavesdropping—and I’d bumped right into her.

“What’d he say?” she asked. “Can you stay?”

“Yeah, I can stay.”

She pumped her fist in a gesture of victory. “Yes!”

“Don’t get too excited,” I warned her, leading her away from the study so that our voices didn’t carry through to the other side of the door. “I have a feeling you won’t be seeing me much once I leave.”

Nora sobered immediately. “Why not?”

I looked down at her. My heart tightened at the sad shape of her eyes. “They’re tired of me. Hell, I’m tired of me. I can’t keep coming back here.”

Nora hugged me from the side, and we walked up the stairs to my room attached at the hip. “I’m not tired of you.”

“Whether I stay or go isn’t up to you.”

A wicked smile played at the edges of her lips. “Wanna bet?”

6

The gala was set for a weekend in late October. As Adrienne met with caterers and party planners and florists to discuss menus and decorations, she kept to her word and mostly left me alone. Every once in a while, she directed a dismissive comment in my direction, but for the most part she simply acted as if I didn’t exist. This suited me well, as it was not only convenient but downright amusing to watch Adrienne attempt to have a conversation with Nora at the breakfast table while I crunched loudly on toast one seat over. It also annoyed Adrienne that I was on excellent terms with all of the staff within a week, including the grumpy gardener that tended the grounds. He filled my musty bedroom with fresh flowers every morning, the cook designed dishes specifically for my diet plan, and Helen drew me a bath first in the evenings so that no one monopolized the hot water before I had a chance to bathe. To vex Adrienne further, I often posed polite questions for her in my most sincere tone of voice. What exactly is the difference between the cream napkins and the off-white napkins? Dad wanted to know. Or Say, those salmon puffs were divine, weren’t they? I vote to serve those at your little event.

The best part was that the deal with my father forced her into equally polite responses, though she delivered them with a seething glare. I winked back, enjoying the sight of her furious face turning bright red. More than once, I received a pinch under the table from Nora, who was doing her best to keep me in check. Despite the welts, I knew I could get used to this. It was the first time I’d ever had a leg up on Adrienne.

Of course, such things came with consequences. Though my father insisted that I could stay at the house as long as I needed to, it was better and healthier for me to have a time frame in mind. The gala was over a month away, and I decided that if I lived to see it, the sight of such excess might kill me anyway. I planned to leave the day of and not a moment later, no matter if I had my affairs in order or not. The problem with this plan was when to tell Nora. She stuck to my side like a burr, chattering on and on about things that would never come to pass. Could I see her off to Homecoming, and would I help her study for her French literature midterm, and won’t it be great to spend another Christmas together? The thought of leaving Nora behind broke my heart, which was why I didn’t have the courage to tell her I was doing it sooner rather than later.

I left the house every morning to walk into town, sit in a local coffee shop, and search for jobs and apartments on the laptop that I borrowed from Nora. It was easier to fathom a life with limited access to her while she was at school, but as each afternoon waned and Nora made it routine to meet me at the coffee shop for a shared scone after Windsor’s final bell, I grew heavier and heavier with the thought of moving on. I wished desperately for a way to stay close to her and even looked for jobs in the area. Alas, I was hardly qualified to use a stapler, and the only realistic option was to find a serving job at one of the numerous classy restaurants on the Avenue, but those who worked in the service industry certainly could not afford to live in the expensive township. The matter remained that I had no money at all. Even if I could immediately move elsewhere, I had no means with which to do so. One day, I buried my pride and went door-to-door down the Avenue to ask for open positions. Finally, an uppity French restaurant granted me an interview. At first, the owner looked at me with such disdain that I longed to smack his pompous smirk right off his face. Instead, I told him off in flawless, fluent French, and he hired me as a hostess on the spot.

In other news, Nora continued to keep my inner energy controlled. Her presence alone lessened the effect of my bad luck. I hadn’t spontaneously lit anything on fire or emitted the strange orange glow since that first day on the Avenue. We spent every spare hour in the meadow behind the house, experimenting with my abilities. Nora set the lessons. We discussed theory, practiced connecting to the source of our energy, and focused on releasing tiny streams of power in controlled scenarios. To Nora’s credit, it seemed to be working. Though I grew weary of the smell of burning dandelions, the fact remained that in the span of a few days I went from struggling with uncontrollable raw energy to shaping it to my own specifications. It comforted me to have Nora nearby. Two or three times, I let my power run away from me. Both Nora and I had been on the bad end of some nasty burns, but Nora’s quick initiative healed our blistering skin before the pain had time to really set in. One of the advantages to training in such a rigorous manner was that when we were finished with the day’s practice, I was too exhausted to accidentally access my energy. I practically fell into bed every evening, asleep before my head hit the pillow. Most nights, Nora slept in my room, and though she had the unfortunate habit of sleeping smack in the middle of the queen-sized mattress, I didn’t have the heart to kick her back to her own bedroom.

Since that first argument, I wore my mother’s necklace around my neck at all times. I no longer cared what Adrienne or my father thought about this decision, though whenever Adrienne spotted the gold chain beneath the collar of my shirt, a feeling of uneasiness washed over me. Neither one of us mentioned to the other any recollection of what occurred in the kitchen. I started to wonder if Adrienne hadn’t even seen the black force that had ripped through me to wreak havoc on the dishware. She acted like the incident hadn’t happened, which was probably for the best. I juggled overflowing handfuls of anxiety regarding this new dark energy—I hadn’t felt it at all when it blasted out of me, unlike my original fire—and I didn’t have the capacity to add in Adrienne’s potential suspicion. Talking through it with Nora was confusing enough. Thankfully, it hadn’t happened since. My energy remained vibrant and bright rather than dark and depressing.

The days passed in a blend of relatively bearable moments with Adrienne, easy comfort with Nora, and an attempt at bonding with my father. Before I knew it, the gala was only a few days away. I saved enough money for a deposit on a studio apartment across the railroad tracks from Windsor Prep. It was a bit of a hike from my father’s house but close enough to continue working at the French restaurant. I figured it was a decent compromise. I’d be out of Adrienne’s hair, my father and I could possibly begin to close the figurative distance between us, and Nora would be able to visit me whenever she wanted. That last detail mattered to me the most. I knew how many of my recent successes I owed to Nora. When my one month anniversary of working at the French restaurant came and went, I danced for joy on the inside. It was the longest I’d held a job, and so far I’d managed not to light anything on fire. I couldn’t have done it without Nora’s influence, and I started to have hope that maybe things could change.

The night before the gala, I confronted my final hurdle. I got home late from the restaurant. My feet ached from standing at the host’s podium all evening, and I was dying to take off the starched oxford shirt and pressed black pants that served as my uniform. Nora was asleep in my bed. I tiptoed around the room, changed into pajamas, and eased under the sheets next to her, trying my best not to wake her. Usually, she slept like a rock. Tonight, she rolled over to face me, her palms pillowed beneath her cheek.

“Were you even going to tell me?” she asked.

“Tell you what?”

“That you’re leaving.”

I paused in my attempt to flatten a pillow. “I—how did you know?”

Nora pointed to the wardrobe. “You packed up all of your clothes.”

“Listen, Nancy Drew. You shouldn’t go through other people’s things.”

She pulled the duvet over her nose, hiding beneath the covers. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Dad told you that you could stay as long as you want. You’re actually making progress with your energy. Why are you rushing off? Aren’t you happy here?”

I gently tugged the blanket away from her face. In the dim moonlight, I could see the sad downward tilt of her eyebrows and mouth. “Nora, you’re forgetting that I don’t live here. I can’t live here.”

“Why not?”

“Because my visit is conditional,” I reminded her. “One of the reasons we’ve been able to make such progress is because your mother hasn’t been bombarding me with hatred. That ends tomorrow. She gets her gala, and then I’m back to suffering through whatever abuse she’s stored up over the past month.”

“But Dad—”

“Dad is first and foremost on Adrienne’s side,” I said. “Yes, he loves me—I think—but it’s his wife that he has to live with. Besides, I’m not sixteen. I’ve long outgrown the right to mooch off of my parents’ dollar.”

“When are you going?”

I hesitated. “Tomorrow morning.”

She sat up against the headboard to glare at me. Previously, I didn’t think Nora had the ability to express negative emotion, but there was no mistaking the anger in the look she gave me. “Tomorrow morning,” she repeated flatly. “You let me think you were going to be around for the gala.”

“I never said that.”

She thumped me with a pillow. “And you never denied it either!”

“I’m sorry.” I shielded my head against the fluffy attack. “I didn’t know how to tell you. By the way, you didn’t give me the chance to fill you in on the good news.”

Nora paused with her weapon raised in mid air. “What’s the good news?”

“I found an apartment near Windsor,” I told her. “It’s not too far. You could come visit me after school every day if you wanted. After all, that fancy new car of yours drives itself.”

She lowered the pillow. “You’re staying?”

“In the area. Yes. That way, I can still work at the restaurant and practice with you.”

Nora launched herself forward and threw her arms around my neck. “Oh, thank goodness! Why didn’t you tell me that first? God, Kennedy, you can be so cryptic sometimes.”

I grinned into her shoulder. “So you approve of my plan?”

She drew away. “Yes! Anything that means I can see you more than once a year.”

What a difference a bit of good luck made. We were both happy. I had a decent outlook for the foreseeable future. I had a job, an apartment, and a handle on my wayward energy.

“One thing though,” Nora added. “Before you leave.”

“What?”

“You have to come to the gala.”

I groaned, collapsing on the mattress in defeat. “I am not going to the gala. I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a reason: to avoid the entire evening of insanity.”

“You lied to me,” Nora said. “So you owe me.”

“I withheld the truth,” I corrected. “And when am I going to stop owing you?”

“Never,” she declared. “We’re sisters. You owe me and I owe you. Forever.”

“I feel like you meant that to be inspiring, but honestly I’m just scared of you right now,” I joked.

She lay back down on her side of the bed, snuggling under the covers. “You’re not getting out of going to the gala, Ken.”

“Nora! I don’t even have a dress.”

“We’ll get one for you tomorrow.”

“Adrienne will kill me.”

“I’ll deal with Mom.”

And that was that. She rolled over, bundling herself up like a burrito, and fell asleep, leaving me to stare at the ceiling and wonder what kind of chaos waited for me at the gala tomorrow evening.

We escaped from the house as soon as possible the following morning. Adrienne was already on a rampage, arguing with everyone from the caterer to the hired entertainment. The theme of the night was La Belle Époque, which was amusing considering Adrienne frowned upon “bohemian” lifestyles in every other aspect. I had to admit that the decorations pulled together nicely. For the first half of the week, it looked like a bomb had gone off in the entryway, ballroom, and backyard, but as the decorators worked their magic, the house transformed into a flawless combination of casino, cabaret, and fashion runway. Part of me was actually excited to see how everything would turn out, but until the first guest walked through the door and Adrienne flipped on her society switch, it was best to avoid the house altogether. Nora and I spent the day on the Avenue. We ate breakfast, shopped for dresses, dropped by the French restaurant to pick up my paycheck, and ran last-minute errands for Adrienne to keep the peace. We couldn’t stay in town forever though. Nora insisted on returning to the house mid-afternoon so that we would have enough time to get ready for the festivities that night.

To my dismay, Adrienne had hired a makeup artist and a hairstylist to manage our looks for the evening. I sat in front of a makeshift vanity mirror in Nora’s oversized bathroom for two and a half hours, wincing as the stylist cut, shaped, and colored my auburn mop before maneuvering it into a complicated half-up, half-down braid. Beside me, the makeup artist painted Nora’s face with cosmetics. When each was finished, the professionals switched positions, and I powered through another hour of eyebrow tweezing, blemish coverage, and the application of a pound of mascara on my eyelashes. When we were done, Nora helped me into the silver floor-length gown we’d purchased earlier so that I wouldn’t rub my face off all over the expensive material. As the gown settled and I took in the full effect of my makeover in the mirror, a lump rose in my throat. The person looking back at me was unrecognizable. This was the woman I would’ve become had I grown up without the complications of my childhood—a woman that Adrienne might actually approve of—but I wasn’t sure if I liked that idea.

“Wow,” Nora said, gazing adoringly at me. She looked flawless in an equally exquisite red gown that blew any department store prom dress out of the water. “What a difference a shower makes.”

I jabbed her shoulder with a little more force that I meant to.

“Ow!”

“Come on,” I sighed. Downstairs, the bustle of arriving guests had already begun, and Adrienne would never forgive us if we arrived late to our own party. “Let’s get this over with.”

From the mezzanine, the babble of voices crescendoed as Nora and I neared the heart of the gala. The entryway was full of people greeting one another and clamoring to check their coats. A replica of the Eiffel Tower, the tip of which grazed the high ceiling, beckoned guests into the main ballroom. Nora and I descended the staircase together. I held on to her for dear life and ignored the stares aimed at us from below, and when our heels finally found level ground again, I let out a sigh of relief. Nora was immediately swept up in discussion and introductions as we blended into the crowd siphoning through the entryway. I, on the other hand, didn’t recognize many of the locals unless they habitually dined at the French restaurant. Those around me greeted me with unusually amiable charm, and I wondered if the dress and heels had tricked them into thinking me one of them.

When we emerged in the ballroom, I let out an audible gasp. A band played in one corner of the room while can-can dancers flounced nearby. A giant runway had been constructed in the middle of the floor, upon which a collection of flawless models showcased French period clothing. Guests in tuxedos and ballgowns crowded around card tables, clicking poker chips together between their fingers. A banquet table stretched along the far wall, sporting everything from bite-sized coq au vin to a towering chocolate fondue fountain. The floor-to-ceiling windows supplied a beautiful view of the backyard, where fairy lights illuminated a less chaotic dance floor and the lake gleamed in the moonlight beyond.

I lost Nora quickly. Her friends from school whisked her away for a spin on the dance floor, which left me to fend for myself. I beelined for the banquet table, figuring I might as well enjoy myself. After filling my plate and obtaining a glass of champagne, I slipped outside to the quieter side of the party. In the lush backyard, I settled at an empty table to savor my food and watch couples dance under the string lights to soft music. Before long, someone approached my table, and I looked up mid-bite to find Toby O’Toole, dressed in a tailored tux with a dark blue satin cummerbund and bowtie, smiling down at me and holding a plate of his own.

“Hi, Kennedy. Do you mind if I join you?”

“Not at all.”

He unbuttoned his suit jacket, drew out the chair beside mine, and sat down. He tucked into his food, putting away three salmon puffs in a matter of seconds. Years may have passed, and Toby might have gained a little more confidence since our high school days, but a hint of intense self-awareness remained in the uncertainty of his narrow shoulders. He glanced up as I watched him.

“You clean up nice,” I told him, nodding at his bowtie.

“Thanks. So do you.” He wiped his hands on a cloth napkin and raised his glass to clink against mine. “I didn’t think this kind of thing was your scene.”

“It’s not,” I agreed. “But it’s a little hard to avoid when the hostess is your stepmother.”

“Touché. Do you want a salmon puff?”

I nodded, having already finished the ones on my own plate, and accepted the offered puff. “Fill me in, Toby,” I said. “How was Windsor after I left? It looks like you did okay for yourself.”

Toby chuckled. “I wasn’t okay for a while. No one spoke to me for the rest of that year. I bulked up over the summer and joined the lacrosse team in the fall. I learned the true meaning of walk tall—”

“And carry a big stick,” I finished with a laugh. “Good, I’m glad. Who did you end up marrying, if you don’t mind me asking? Anyone I know?”

“Bridget Callahan.”

“Bridget… the cello prodigy?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I always liked her,” I said fondly.

“Glad to hear it,” a new voice said. A familiar, petite brunette approached the table, her dark gown the same color as Toby’s cummerbund. Toby stood up to pull out a chair for her. Bridget sat down, swiped some kind of sushi roll from Toby’s plate, and smiled at me from across the table. “You look amazing, Kennedy. What have you been up to?”

The night wore on as Bridget, Toby, and I shared stories from the past fifteen years and reminisced on our short time together at Windsor. I was glad for their modest company in Nora’s absence. Through the window into the ballroom, I saw my little sister stealthily snatch a bottle of champagne to share with her friends. She caught my eye and froze, but I grinned and pointedly looked away. A little teenage debauchery would do her good, and I wasn’t about to be the type of older sister to scold her for having harmless fun.

At some point, I realized I was actually having a good time. Toby and Bridget convinced me to join them on the dance floor for a few songs. I normally would’ve refused, but an impeccably dressed waiter kept refilling my champagne glass and the bubbles had gone to my head. We twirled and laughed under the fairy lights, all three of us too woozy to pay full attention to where the downbeat landed. The best part of the evening was that I only saw Adrienne once. She nodded curtly to me and continued on her way to meet my father at the top of the runway, where the pair gave a short speech to address their guests before allowing the festivities to continue.

As the evening came to a close and the guests began to meander home tipsier than before, I said goodbye to Toby and Bridget and retreated to my bedroom upstairs. Nora was either still out with her friends or had retired to the comfort of her own room because I had the queen bed all to myself for once. I wiggled out of the silvery gown, rooted through my elaborate hairstyle to extract the multitude of bobby pins, and scrubbed my face clean in the bathroom sink. Then, as the conversation and rumble of expensive car engines faded into the night, I fell into bed and went to sleep.

“Kennedy. Kennedy?”

I woke to Adrienne’s face looming over mine and backed against the headboard to increase the distance between us. I groaned, massaging my temples. My head felt heavier than a bowling ball and my mouth was dry and tacky. The champagne from the night before packed a punch, which was probably why I didn’t immediately question Adrienne’s wake-up call. Something was wrong. She never set foot in my room, and she watched me with a worried look on her face that I wasn’t accustomed to. To make things even more confusing, she offered me a glass of water as I propped myself up in bed. I accepted it.

“What is it?” I asked her warily after a few big gulps. “What are you doing in here?”

“Have you seen Nora?”

Behind Adrienne, my father lingered in the hallway outside my bedroom. He, too, wore an expression of concern. “Not since last night. Why?”

Adrienne’s face fell.

“She’s gone,” she told me. “Nora’s missing.”

7

I sat dumbfounded against the pillows. The covers felt uncomfortably hot all of a sudden. I kicked them off, desperate to free myself, jostling Adrienne off the foot of the bed. “Did you call her friends? She was with them all last night.”

“I called every parent,” Adrienne told me. “They all told me the same thing. Nora didn’t leave the grounds last night.”

“So then she has to be around,” I said rationally. “Maybe she fell asleep somewhere else. In the home theater. Did you check the theater?”

Adrienne paced from one end of my bedroom to the other. “We combed the entire house three times, Kennedy. She’s not here.”

“Did you ask—?”

“The maid, the gardener, the waiters from last night,” she interrupted. “We’ve been awake for hours phoning the entire guest list. No one’s seen her since last night. Not in town. Not on the Avenue. Nowhere. Oh, God.” She clapped a hand to her mouth as her voice grew more and more troubled, as though she could suppress such divergent emotions and keep them trapped inside her body. When she regained her composure, she steadied herself and said to me, “I know she’s been sleeping in here lately. Did she come to bed last night?”

I shook my head. “No. Not that I know of. She wasn’t here when I came in, and I went straight to sleep.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

I wracked my memories from the night before. They were fuzzy and distant, and I silently scolded myself for how much I drank, but a specific image swam to the forefront of my mind: it was Nora, swiping the bottle of champagne from the banquet table. It was her easy laugh, silent through the window but familiar all the same, as I intentionally excused her caper. It was her darting away through the backdoor of the ballroom as she giggled with her friends.

“She was—” I trailed off, staring at the pattern in the duvet cover in shock.

“She what?” Adrienne prompted.

“She took a bottle of champagne and ran off with her friends,” I reported. “I didn’t see her after that.”

Adrienne halted her pacing to cross her arms over her chest and fix me with a penetrating stare. “Do you mean to tell me that you saw this happen and you didn’t bother to stop it?”

“It was one bottle,” I said, rubbing my forehead to soothe the ache. “They’re teenagers, Adrienne. It’s a rite of passage to drink underage.”

“Your sister is missing!”

“I know!” I said strongly and winced as the words rang through my head. I leveled my voice. It was not the time to start an argument with my stepmother. “Let’s try not to jump to conclusions. I’m sure she’s fine.”

The sound of the intercom buzzing rang through the room. My father rushed away to answer the door. I listened to his slippered feet thunder down the staircase and ignored Adrienne’s calculating gaze.

“Adrienne?” My father’s voice echoed over the intercom. “The police are here. Will you please come downstairs?”

Adrienne swept out of my room. As soon as she was out of sight, a sob took me by surprise. I buried my face in my hands as my breath tripped over itself. How could I let something like this happen? I should’ve never let Nora out of my sight. I’d grown complacent in the last month, convinced my string of bad luck had finally fizzled out. Now Nora was gone, and I had done nothing to prevent it from happening. In fact, my lack of common sense had most likely escalated the situation. What was I thinking letting Nora sneak off on her own with a bottle of alcohol? Where had she and her friends gone? Did she have too much to drink? Where was she now?

I wiped my runny nose on the corner of the duvet and got out of bed. In the bathroom, I popped a couple of pain relievers then got dressed in a pair of designer joggers and a comfortable T-shirt. As I tugged on the pants, my heart hammered against my rib cage. Like the rest of my wardrobe, I’d picked out the joggers with Nora on the Avenue. I’d stared longingly at them in the store, unable to justify owning such an expensive pair of sweatpants, but Nora had noticed my infatuation and added them to our other purchases. This was how I repaid her for her kindness, by letting her disappear in the middle of the night. What kind of sister was I?

In the entryway, Dad and Adrienne spoke with two police officers. The first was a man with a jaw that jutted out like a bulldog’s. He looked perpetually upset as he questioned my parents about Nora’s whereabouts. The second was a woman whose uniform swallowed her. She was rather petite for a police officer and highly aware of it. She stood as tall as possible, shoulders back, leaning slightly forward on her toes. As she took notes on a mini legal pad, I lingered on the mezzanine, listening to the discussion at the bottom of the stairs.

“And you said she’d been drinking?” the first officer asked.

“Yes,” Adrienne answered. “I didn’t know. There were so many people here last night. Normally, she’s so well-behaved. I can’t imagine—”

“Kids drink, Mrs. McGrath.”

Hearing the cop deliver the same excuse as my own did nothing to alleviate the blame or worry I was feeling. Adrienne did not accept this the second time around either.

“I understand that kids drink, Officer Bradley,” she said. “But Nora doesn’t get drunk and leave the house. She comes home. She always comes home.”

“Did Nora have any boyfriends?” the petite officer asked. “Anyone she might’ve snuck off to see?”

“No,” Dad replied. “She won’t even take a date to the homecoming dance. Says all the boys are immature.”

The small woman scribbled in her notebook. “And who was the last person to see Nora? Do you know?”

Adrienne’s gaze snapped up to where I stood on the mezzanine. My pulse fluttered. I hadn’t realized she knew I was listening in. “Kennedy,” she said, pointing upward. “Her older sister.”

“Would you mind joining us, Kennedy?”

I took the stairs without argument. As I neared the group in the entryway, the name embroidered on the jacket of the petite officer’s vest came into focus.

“Officer Martinez,” I greeted her, shaking her hand. “Officer Bradley.”

Both cops looked me over from head to toe, probably thinking the same thing. I knew I looked rough. My hair was rumpled and tangled, stiff from last night’s hairspray, the imprint of the duvet pattern was etched into my cheek, and my breath probably smelled great considering I’d forgotten to brush my teeth. At a glance, I was the least reliable person to ask about Nora’s recent whereabouts.

“You’re Nora’s sister?” Officer Bradley asked.

“Half-sister,” Adrienne confirmed, as she was prone to do.

“All right. Kennedy, what time did you see your sister last?”

“Around eleven, I’d guess.”

“And where was she?”

“She left the gala with her friends through the backdoor of the ballroom,” I told him. “It leads out into the side yard. I figured they were just going to go hang out by the lake or something.”

“And you didn’t see Nora for the remainder of the evening?” Officer Martinez questioned.

“No. I was on the patio in the backyard for most of the night.”

“Are you close with your sister? Would she confide in you if she decided to go somewhere without telling your parents?”

I side-eyed my father and Adrienne, unsure of how to answer. “I’d say we’re close, but I’ve only been home for a little over a month. I’m not entirely sure if Nora would tell me something like that or not, but I’d like to think that she would.”

Officer Martinez made another note then tucked the legal pad in her back pocket. “All right, folks. We’re going to have a walk around the property. That okay with you?”

My father and Adrienne nodded, and the officers left through the front door to conduct their search. The sweet scent of fresh cranberry scones floated into the entryway from the kitchen, but Adrienne drifted upstairs, apparently unable to eat. My father watched her go, sighing, then turned in the direction of his study.

My lower lip trembled. “Dad?”

He paused to look at me, taking in my disgruntled appearance and the moisture in my eyes, then opened his arms. I rushed into the embrace, pressing my face into his shoulder.

“It’s not your fault, Ken,” he said gently, stroking my matted hair. “Don’t you worry. We’ll find her.”

“Where would she go?”

My father’s arms tightened around me. “That’s the thing, Kennedy. She wouldn’t go anywhere unless someone else forced her to.”

I spent most of the day with Dad, phoning the rest of the locals in the hopes that someone had seen Nora, but I had a dinner shift at the French restaurant that I couldn’t get out of. I was distracted the entire time, leading guests to the wrong table or calling the incorrect name from the waiting list every time I caught sight of any blonde girl that remotely resembled Nora. Eventually, the manager scolded me and told me to go home. I complied without argument, not caring that I’d forfeited my portion of the tip-outs for the night.

When I arrived home, I half-expected Nora to come bounding down the driveway to meet me, but the gravel pathway remained heartbreakingly empty as I plodded up to the house. I let myself in, warmed a plate of leftover chicken pot pie in the microwave, and poked my head into my father’s study. He looked up from one of his many novels.

“No luck?” I asked.

He shook his head sadly and returned to his book. I withdrew from the room and carried my meal up to my bedroom. Adrienne would kill me if she knew I’d been eating outside the kitchen or dining room, but at this point I needed comfort food in a comfortable place. I collapsed on the bed and took a bite of pot pie. It scalded my tongue.

That was about all I could take. Tears welled up as I pushed the plate away. I flipped over and cried into a pillow, hoping no one could hear the muffled sounds. Nora had been missing for almost a whole day. If she had the option to do so, she would’ve returned home by now, which meant my father was right. Something had happened to her. Either someone took Nora away or she was hurt so badly that she was unable to call for help. The thought made me sick to my stomach, and there was nothing I could do but wait around for the cops to figure out where she’d gone.

Once I’d cried myself dry, I ate my dinner, which was now cold. My bedroom was empty without Nora. For the first time in my life, I wished for a television or a radio, anything to fill the silence. All I had were four blank walls, the abandoned gown in a heap on the floor from last night, and my duffel bag, unzipped and open. It was the second day in a row I’d postponed my move to the new apartment. Nora’s absence had derailed my entire day. All I needed was to lose my deposit because I hadn’t shown up to move in. I didn’t even have a cell phone for the new complex to contact me. The property manager was probably wondering what kind of flake he’d approved to live in the studio unit.

I got up, stuffed the rest of my clothes into the duffel bag, and zipped it shut. I longed to escape this bedroom, this house, where everything reminded me of Nora. It was late though, and if I left now, I’d be sleeping on the doormat of my new apartment instead of inside it. I settled for dropping the duffel bag near the door of the bedroom. First thing in the morning, I was getting out of here.

I woke as the sun peeked over the horizon, staining the sky pink and orange. The colors reminded me of Nora. I drew the curtains shut, but as morning beckoned, the light filtered in through the diaphanous fabric. As quickly as possible, I dressed in a pair of stretch jeans and a comfortable sweater. I had to ride my bike to the new complex, and I wanted to have decent mobility. Then I scooped up my duffel bag from the doorway and went downstairs.

Dad and Adrienne were already up. They sat at opposite ends of the dining room table. Dad held a newspaper alongside an untouched plate of French toast, his glasses poised at the tip of his nose. His eyes didn’t move along the text. He stared blankly, lost in his own thoughts. Adrienne curled up like a cat in her own chair, her legs tucked underneath her as she absentmindedly stirred a cup of black coffee with an escargot fork. I reached across her for a platter of English muffins. The movement stirred the somber air, and Adrienne glanced at the duffel bag over my shoulder.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I buttered the muffin and added jam. “Getting breakfast.”

“No, with your bag.”

“Oh. I was meant to move into my new apartment a couple days ago. I’m going now.”

Her fork clattered to the table, and a spot of coffee spread across the white tablecloth. “You’re leaving?”

I paused, confused by the question. “Yes?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

My father finally looked up from his newspaper. “Where are you going?”

“I just said—” I began, but he was bewildered and tired. “My new apartment. It’s near Nora’s school.”

“Now?”

With Nora gone, the family had collectively unhinged, but the weirdest thing was that both Dad and Adrienne looked at me as if this conversation wasn’t brought about by their own decisions. “I thought it might be for the best,” I told them. “I’ll be around. I have to work later anyway. Do you want me to come by for dinner?”

“You can’t go,” Adrienne said.

The English muffin sucked the moisture out of my mouth. I coughed, spraying crumbs across the floor, and wiped butter from my lips. “I’m getting mixed signals here. First, you couldn’t wait to get rid of me, and now you want me to stay?”

“Why would you leave now?” Adrienne asked, untucking her feet to sit a little straighter in her chair. “Honestly, Kennedy. It’s just like you. You always bail as soon as things get tough.”

“And on that note, see you later.”

“Kennedy, wait.” Her chair scraped across the floor as she pushed herself away from the table and stood up. “I’m sorry. I’m stressed. I didn’t mean it.”

I stared at her. “Did you get hit over the head or something? You’ve never apologized to me for anything.”

Dad cleared his throat, as if reminding me to be civil. I wasn’t trying to make trouble. It was just a statement of fact. I wasn’t used to Adrienne acting human. She swirled her long hair around and pinned it at the top of her head in an elegant bun.

“Please,” she said. “We’re all under a lot of stress right now. We should be together. As a family.” She took my duffel bag off my shoulder and passed it off to Helen. “Will you put Kennedy’s bag back in her room, Helen?” I watched, bewildered, as she retrieved the cordless house phone from the table behind her and handed it to me. “Call the apartment complex. Tell them you won’t be needing the unit.”

I leaned to the side to look past Adrienne, where Dad observed our interaction with a mixture of shock and acceptance. When he caught my eye, he nodded emphatically, so I accepted the phone from Adrienne and said, “Um, sure. I’ll just—”

I wandered away from the dining room and into the entryway, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Adrienne was actually being… nice? Did Nora’s disappearance have that much of an effect on her? If anything, I expected her to hate me even more, especially since she considered me partially to blame for not keeping a better eye on my sister. This was unreal. My entire world had shifted, like I’d suddenly woken up in an alternate universe where Adrienne accepted both her biological daughter and the one she’d reluctantly inherited through marriage.

I called the complex. Thankfully, the property manager was accommodating, and it wouldn’t be any trouble to get my deposit back. The thought didn’t comfort me much. That studio apartment was a steal, and if things went south here at the house, I wasn’t likely to find another place to live with the same benefits. I hung up, slightly queasy as I listened to Dad and Adrienne’s murmured conversation in the next room over. Before I could join them again, the house phone rang in my hand.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Mrs. McGrath, this is Officer Martinez with the Sheriff’s department.”

“Oh, I’m not—”

“We have some information regarding your daughter Nora,” Officer Martinez went on before I could correct her identity mistake. “Would you be able to come down to the station as soon as possible?”

8

When I passed on the message to Dad and Adrienne, I wasn’t invited to attend the meeting at the police station. Instead, I was instructed to stay behind in case Nora returned to the house. All three of us knew it was a garbage excuse. If Officer Martinez needed to see Dad and Adrienne face-to-face, she couldn’t have good news. Nevertheless, I didn’t argue. I wouldn’t be able to keep my composure at the station anyway.  As the second day of Nora’s absence wore on, I began to feel off-balance. My queasiness morphed into full-on nausea, my stomach burning and boiling with an overflow of energy. In the chaos of the past couple of days, I’d forgotten to practice connecting to my core power. It bottled up, rising in my throat like acid, so I rode Ainsley out to the meadow in order to spend the necessary time releasing it.

It was impossible to concentrate. I wasn’t used to doing this alone. Nora guided our practices like a yoga teacher, easing us through meditation techniques. I tried to remember how we usually started—it was only three days ago that we had last spent time in this meadow together—but the lessons filtered through my memory like water through a sieve. Breathing exercises. That was step number one. I sat down in the grass, faced the lake, and closed my eyes. I attempted to focus on my inner abilities, counting each inhale and exhale, but my mind kept wandering. Ainsley chewed loudly. The click-clack of her teeth distracted me. Then it was the way the wind whistled through the meadow, permeating my light sweater. It was a nice day. The sun was warm and the temperature was pleasant, yet I felt cold and shivery.

I skipped the rest of the warm-up exercises, annoyed that I couldn’t quiet my anxiety enough to focus. What I really needed was to get out some of my pent-up energy. I spotted a patch of poison ivy in the distance, honed in on it, and accessed the orange light. It flared immediately, and the plant went up in smoke within a second, but I’d given it too much gas. The grass surrounding the ivy ignited, sending a plume of billowing smoke up to the sky. I ripped the picnic blanket out from underneath myself, ran over, and fanned the fire out. Then I stomped on the charred ground to make sure it was completely extinguished and kicked a layer of dirt over the burnt plant.

I returned to where Ainsley grazed in the grass and draped the blanket over her back. She gazed lazily over her shoulder and blew a wad of spit at me. I glared at her as I wiped it from my sweater. “What’s your problem?”

She flapped her lips, and more spittle flew on the breeze. I ducked my head to avoid the splash. A feeling of wistfulness washed over me, but it wasn’t my own.

“Nora isn’t here,” I told the horse. “She’s missing.”

Ainsley nodded her head, almost as if she understood, and gave a loud snort.

“I don’t what you want me to do,” I said. “I don’t know where she is. I haven’t seen her in two days.”

She whinnied loudly and bumped my shoulder.

“You go find her then.”

Without further ado, Ainsley turned and trotted off toward the surrounding woods. I watched her go. Great. Now I was talking to a horse. A horse in desperate need of an attitude adjustment. I jogged after her. If Nora returned and found out that I’d let her favorite quadruped run off the property, she would never forgive me. Of course, that was if Nora returned at all. I shook the thought from my head and picked up the pace. Ainsley marched resolutely into the woods, and her big butt disappeared behind a thick tree trunk. I darted around it, trying to keep her swishing black tail within view. The damp ground muffled the clop of her hooves, and I grunted as I vaulted over a fallen log that Ainsley easily stepped over. Up ahead, a stream bubbled through a small ravine. It was no Grand Canyon, but I knew that if Ainsley jumped over it, I would have a hard time catching up.

“Hey!” I called out. “Don’t you dare!”

An air of resolution passed from the determined horse to my own conscience as she cantered toward the gap. I sprinted with all of my might, but Ainsley leapt clean over the stream and landed neatly on the other side before I could reach her. I skidded to a stop, windmilling my arms to prevent myself from spilling over the edge of the ravine. Ainsley shuffled around to fix me with a look that seemed to ask Are you coming?

“Are you kidding me?” I jabbed a finger at my side of the ravine. “Get back over here!”

She stomped a hoof in the leaves. You come over here.

“I will not!”

A flick of her tail as she turned away. Have it your way.

“Wait!”

The horse paused, and I could’ve sworn she rolled her eyes.

“I’m coming,” I said. “I don’t suppose you see an alternate way to get across this stream, do you? Like a bridge maybe?”

Ainsley tossed her head and nickered.

“I’m taking orders from a freaking horse,” I grumbled, bracing myself against a mossy rock to take off my riding boots and socks. “And I thought I was insane before.”

After I threw the boots to Ainsley’s side, I rolled up the legs of my jeans, lowered myself off the edge of the ravine, and splashed into water below. It was absolutely freezing, and I thought my toes might shrivel and pop clean off. Thankfully, the gurgling stream didn’t pass my shins, so I waded to the other side of the gap and looked up. The opposite edge was a good four feet above my head, as was Ainsley’s snout.

“A little help? No?”

She ignored me. I dug a divot in the wall of mud to give myself a leg up then lunged for the top. The dirt crumbled beneath my grip, and I slid down the muddy bank.

“You know, Nora bought me this sweater,” I called up to the horse. The creamy cashmere was soaked through with dirt, twigs, and leaves. With a sigh, I dug a second foothold in the side of the bank. Then I took a running leap, splashing through the stream like a madwoman, and made a wild grab for the top of the ravine. This time, my fingers found a strong vine. I thumped against the dirt embankment, wrapping my hand around the plant, and tried to scrabble up the rest of the way. Ainsley dipped her head, grasped my sweater between her teeth, and dragged me onto level ground.

I clambered to my feet, glaring at her as I tried to brush mud from my soaked pants. As I sat down to pull my boots back on, I asked the horse, “What are we doing? Is there a reason for this side quest or are you just yanking my chain?”

Ainsley shook her head. Her mane flew out from side to side, tangled and full of leaves. It would be a bear to brush out when we got back to the stable. She turned to the side, presenting a stirrup to me. With a nagging feeling, I hoisted myself into the saddle and took the reins.

“All right, Ainsley,” I said, not quite believing that I was letting a horse call the shots as if I was the protagonist in a cheesy kids’ movie. “Lead the way.”

We trundled through the woods together. I had no clue what Ainsley was looking for. Her ears flickered at birds whistling or animals rustling through the brush as I rode in silence. The sunlight filtering through the trees eased my worried mind. I wondered how far we’d wandered from the house—I should’ve been concerned with finding our way back—but Ainsley was confident in her trajectory. After several minutes, she stopped in a small clearing and pawed at the ground.

“What is it?”

There was nothing remotely exceptional about the immediate area. The grass and the dirt and the moss and the leaves looked the same as it did anywhere else in the woods. I nudged Ainsley’s sides with my heels, but she refused to budge.

“There’s nothing here, you crazy horse.”

She tossed her head and pawed the ground again. I squinted downward. There. In the dirt. Something shiny reflected the sunlight near Ainsley’s front right hoof. I slid out of the saddle and leaned down to inspect the item. It was an earring, stamped into the dirt by a mid-sized footprint. My breath caught in my chest as I pried it out of the ground and held it up to eye level.

“This is Nora’s,” I muttered, studying the small pearl set in the stud of the earring. “She was wearing these on the night of the gala.” I looked at Ainsley. “How did you—?”

Ainsley nudged my chest with her nose. I patted her forehead then knelt down to examine the footprints. There were two sets. The first was a boot print that, judging by its average size, could’ve belonged to a man or a woman. The second was smaller, Nora’s size, and each toe had visibly pressed into the mud. She was barefoot. I followed the prints through the clearing. They overlapped one another, turning in circles without any kind of pattern. Nora’s tracks were smudged, as if she had dug her heels in to prevent the boot owner from taking her any farther. Then, at the edge of the clearing, I noticed that the footprints continued unhindered side by side. Had Nora suddenly changed her mind and accompanied her mystery captor willingly? As the mud transitioned to leaves, the prints faded and vanished. I searched around a while longer, hoping to stumble upon more clues, but beyond the clearing, it was as though Nora had never been here at all.

With nothing left to discover, I pocketed the earring, mounted Ainsley, and rode off in the opposite direction. Thankfully, the horse seemed to remember which way the house was. She trotted through the woods, satisfied now that I’d found what she’d been looking for, as I thought about what could’ve happened that night. On the grim upside of things, Nora was definitely alive when she’d left the area. Maybe there was hope.

We had traveled farther from the house than I’d expected. It took Ainsley the better part of an hour to find the meadow again. She leapt over the ravine with me on her back during our return. I hadn’t jumped a horse since high school and made the mistake of looking down as we crossed the stream. When we landed on the other side, I tumbled out of the saddle and over Ainsley’s head. She politely paused, ducking so that I rolled lightly to the ground, but the impact was just enough to bruise my shoulders. By the time we reached the stables, my thighs felt like Jell-O. As I wiped Ainsley down and put her away, I heard the purr of Dad’s car in the driveway. I jogged around the side of the house as he piloted his luxury sedan into an empty spot in the garage. When he and Adrienne stepped out, my heart sank. Dad looked as though he hadn’t slept in a year, and Adrienne’s usually impeccable eyeliner was smudged with tears.

“You’re back,” I said, intercepting the couple as they made their way to the front door. “What did the police say?”

My father took in my harried appearance. I was covered in mud from head to toe like I’d been dragged behind Ainsley instead of riding in the saddle. “What happened to you?” he asked gruffly.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Dad, what did the cops say?”

Adrienne rushed by us, wiping her face and further smearing her makeup. Dad and I trailed along behind her, up the porch steps, and into the house. Why wasn’t anyone telling me anything? What had the police discovered about Nora?

“Dad!”

He halted in the foyer as Adrienne hurried upstairs, sobbing, and disappeared with a slam of the door to the master bedroom. He rubbed the back of his neck, uncertainty lingering in the gesture. “Kennedy…”

“I’m her sister,” I reminded him. “I deserve to know.”

“I know that,” he sighed. “I’m just not sure if you’d want to know.”

“Tell me.”

Dad looked wistfully up at the mezzanine, but Adrienne wasn’t coming downstairs anytime soon. He waved me forward. “Come on. Let’s go to my study. Helen?”

Helen emerged from the kitchen. “Yes, Mr. McGrath?”

“Would you mind bringing us two glasses of whiskey?”

“Yes, Mr. McGrath.”

“And Helen? Maybe a couple of those cranberry scones if there are any left.”

“Of course.”

I followed Dad into his study, but instead of taking the seat behind his desk like he usually did, he sat next to me on the leather sofa. I opened my mouth to ask about Nora again, but he held up a finger and shook his head.

“I need a drink first.”

We waited in heavy silence until Helen bustled in with two glasses filled with some kind of aromatic whiskey and a single sphere of ice in each, along with a plate of warmed scones. Dad thanked her, took a long draught from his glass, and let out a prolonged breath. He picked at a scone but didn’t eat it.

I took a sip from my glass and winced. The drink was too potent for my taste. “Dad.”

“They found her dress.”

“They… what?”

Dad drained the rest of his whiskey. The glass plinked to the coffee table as the ice cube slid around in the leftovers. “The police found Nora’s dress from the night of the gala. And her shoes. At Windsor Prep.”

I scrunched my nose in confusion. “At school? But—”

“That’s not all, Ken.” I could tell from the raspy tone of his voice that the forthcoming news was not something I wanted to hear. “There was blood on the dress.”

A chill ran through me. “Blood. Nora’s blood?”

“Yes.”

“How much blood?”

“Enough to be a concern. The police—they think she’s badly hurt. Or already dead.”

The words ripped through me like a hot knife. I couldn’t make sense of them. Not here in front of my father. I stood up abruptly. “I need to go. I’ll be in my room.”

My father mistook my reaction for shock. “Kennedy, if you need to talk about this—”

“I’ll let you know,” I called over my shoulder as I slipped out of the room. As I eased the door shut, Dad reached for my unfinished glass of whiskey. I rushed down the hallway and up the stairs, keeping a hand over the pocket of my filthy jeans where Nora’s earring poked into my thigh.

Something didn’t add up. The police found Nora’s dress and heels near the high school, which was in the complete opposite direction of the clearing that Ainsley and I had discovered. There was no way in hell Nora would’ve let herself bleed out to such an extent. Her abilities should’ve healed her automatically. She hadn’t suffered from so much as a paper cut since the day she was born. The only reason she might have postponed the treatment of blood loss like that was if she was with someone else that she couldn’t trust with her secret. My chest tightened at the thought as I pulled the door of my bedroom shut. I was the one who was always telling Nora not to reveal her energy in front of other people. Had that stopped her from saving herself?

No. She was still alive. She’d been in that clearing barefoot, which meant that she’d already ditched her dress and shoes at the high school before traipsing through the woods. I peeled off my sweater. The mud on my front had stiffened. The dirt cracked and fell to the carpet, but I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. I dug into the front pocket of my jeans for Nora’s earring. Instinctively, I drew on my fiery power, but this time, I wasn’t trying to light anything ablaze. The orange glow began at the tips of my fingers, illuminating the tiny pearl in my hand. My vision went black.

I panicked at first, groping blindly until I found the corner of my bed and sat down. The earring pressed into my palm. It felt hot, but I wasn’t sure if that was a result of my energy or some hidden facet of the pearl itself. Scenes flashed before my eyes. Nora at the gala, laughing with her friends. Nora kicking off her silver heels in one of Windsor’s massive courtyards and dipping her bare feet into an extravagant fountain. Nora in the woods, wearing a pair of jeans that were too long for her and a forest-green T-shirt that I didn’t recognize. Nora speaking rationally to someone hidden behind the trees. Everything vanished as quickly as it had appeared, blazing out in a glow of orange light until all that remained was my bedroom and the pearl in my palm. Nora’s voice echoed in my ear as if she was standing beside me.

“Come find me.”

9

I whirled around, my pulse racing. Her voice sounded so close and so real. Some inexplicable instinct told me that she’d recorded that message herself. It was too intentional, too applicable to the situation at hand, to think otherwise. Nora knew that I would go after her if she asked me to. Had she left me a trail of breadcrumbs? I thought of her gown and heels, no doubt sitting in a plastic bag labeled “evidence” down at the police station. There was no way I’d be able to convince Officer Martinez to let me have a look at it, and even if there was, it wasn’t like I could whip out my abilities to read any potential message of Nora’s right there in the police station. There had to be another way. Something else that Nora left behind for me. Windsor Preparatory School was the best place to start looking. It was the only other location that Nora had been seen on the night of the gala aside from her own house.

There was no time to waste. Nora may have figured out a way to contact me through unusual means, but she hadn’t left me any clues to indicate whether or not she was okay. I needed to get to Windsor as soon as possible. I shed the rest of my muddy clothes, wiped my skin clean with a damp towel, then dressed again. Shoving Nora’s earring into my pocket, I hurried out of my room and into the corridor. When I emerged on the mezzanine, Adrienne was leaning over the banister, staring vacantly out of the windows above the front door. I tried to slip by her.

“Did you hear?” she asked.

The anguish in the question caused me to pause. Not even Adrienne deserved the pain of not knowing what might have happened to her child. “About Nora?”

She nodded, her gaze fixed to a point in the trees outside.

“Dad told me.”

I had nothing to say. I couldn’t tell Adrienne I had a hunch that Nora was alive. She would demand proof or an explanation, neither of which I could give her. I almost put a reassuring hand on her shoulder but stopped myself. Sure, the last month hadn’t been terrible between us, but that didn’t mean Adrienne and I were friendly. I couldn’t bring myself to comfort her. A giant concrete wall stood between us, and each of us had been cementing more cinderblocks to our respective sides over the last several years. Not even Nora’s absence could tip it over, though it may have cracked the surface the tiniest bit.

I chickened out. Most days, I felt eternally five-years-old in Adrienne’s presence. This was the woman who spanked and scorned me every day of my childhood. That was not forgiven in a moment.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. That was all I could give her. None of the other words in my mind seemed sufficient. I scuttled past her, no longer able to withstand the awkward vibe between us.

“Where are you going?” she asked, watching as I took the stairs two at a time.

“Out,” I answered. I gestured vaguely around my head. “To clear my mind, you know?”

From the first floor, Adrienne’s solemn pose in the mezzanine made her look like a model in a fashion magazine. Her long platinum hair cascaded over her shoulders and the balustrade, and her sorrowful expression was evident even at a distance. “Come back soon,” she said, and for once, it didn’t sound like an order. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but your father worries. We can’t lose both of you.”

“I won’t get lost,” I promised, and I slipped outside before the conversation progressed any further.

Someone—the friendly gardener perhaps—had installed a kickstand on my rusted bike so that instead of leaning pathetically against the side of the house, it stood upright, tucked out of the way near the edge of the porch. I lifted it off the stairs, swung a leg over the seat, and coasted down the driveway. The chain had been oiled too. The gravel below the tires was bumpy, but the pedals’ rotations were smoother than ever. I was grateful. It was at least a thirty-minute ride out to Windsor Prep, and my legs were already tired from my trip with Ainsley that morning. I slipped through the wrought iron gate and trekked up the road toward the Avenue. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the kids from Windsor usually hung out in town on the weekends. If I happened to run into any of Nora’s friends, all the better.

As the wind whipped my long hair away from my face, I reflected on the past few days. Everything had flipped on its head. Nora was missing instead of me. Adrienne was being nice. My father, usually so stoic and impassable, was falling apart and drowning his worry in whiskey. And I was the only one taking the initiative to find the missing member of our family. Granted, I also had access to information that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. The police could track footprints and run blood tests all they wanted, but unless someone on the force harbored powers similar to mine and Nora’s, I had a feeling they weren’t going to unearth anything other than dead ends.

On the Avenue, I maneuvered my bike around slow-moving cars and leisurely pedestrians. I scanned the crowd, seeking out younger faces, but I hadn’t seen Nora’s friends often enough to recognize them from a distance. It occurred to me how bizarre it was that life outside the McGrath residence continued on as if nothing had changed. Women drank wine. Men smoked cigars. Dogs barked. Babies cried. Teenagers ran amok from shop to shop. Their individual worlds were carefree, while mine and Adrienne’s and Dad’s had all splintered into unrecognizable puzzle pieces nearly three days ago.

I cycled away from the busy high street and onto the little country road that led up into the emerald lawns of Windsor Preparatory School. The school owned a vast majority of the surrounding land. I biked past a welcome sign well before any buildings that belonged to the school itself came into view. I spotted the dormitories first. Windsor boarded a small number of foreign students to increase the diversity of their classes. A few of them lounged outside, soaking up the last of the day’s sunshine before the weather turned too chilly to do so. I gave the brick building a wide berth. It was best if I kept my presence at the school to a minimum. Just in case. Besides, the courtyard with the fountain was between two of the main buildings on campus, not in the dorms.

I crested a grassy knoll. The rest of Windsor Prep loomed ahead like a mammoth stone dragon slumbering in the afternoon sun. It looked exactly as it had during my brief attendance fifteen years ago, with its towering spires, dark windows, and glowering gargoyles. Yes, there were gargoyles. They flanked the large arch that welcomed students and faculty into the campus. I zoomed past them, unable to shake the feeling that their eyes trailed after me as I emerged into the deserted schoolyard. A shiver rode up my spine. There was nothing friendly about Windsor Prep. For me, at least. All that remained here were some of my most painful adolescent memories.

I remembered the campus like the back of my hand. When I was a student here, I’d become familiar with the layout. I knew the best escape routes and hiding places. I knew where the students bottlenecked during passing period, pressed against each other and plodding along to their next classes like cattle. I knew that if I made a right at the library and a left at the main office, the imposing buildings would open up to expose the courtyard with the fountain. Sure enough, a trickle of water confirmed my internal map, and the bike’s tires bounced over the cobblestones as I steered into the quad.

The fountain was a work of art and the only thing I ever liked about Windsor Prep. It was a free-standing sculpture with a massive stone arch that stretched from one side of the pool to the other. In a feat of physics that to this day I did not understand, water spilled from the top of the arch downward, creating a blurry curtain between one side of the courtyard and the other. The pool around it swirled and shifted with the movement of the water. It was lined with gold filigree that danced and shimmered when the light caught it at the right angle. While I was at Windsor, it was tradition for each senior class to sneak out to the fountain on the last night of the school year to run beneath the arch through the curtain of water. The trick was getting everyone across the fountain before campus security completed their rounds. I wondered if the tradition had died off or if the students of Windsor still considered it an accomplishment to emerge soaking wet on the other side of the courtyard in such a simple rite of passage.

I hopped off the bike and circled the fountain on foot. The stone offered no hints. I assumed this was where the police found Nora’s dress, but there were no signs of bloodstains on the ground. I tried to recall the short vision from earlier in the day, but the image slipped away from me like waking from a pleasant dream. I drew the earring from my pocket, clenching the pearl tightly between my two fingers, and squeezed my eyes shut. I imagined that Nora was there beside me, the soft and soothing effect of her energy warming me like a sunset in summer.

“Oh, you’re good.”

My eyes flew open. Nora lounged on the lip of the fountain’s pool, kicking her delicate feet in and out of the water so that it splashed merrily in the dying sunshine. She giggled at the look of shock on my face. She was there, but not. She glowed with a hazy pink hue that ebbed and flowed like a river. The effect was strange and ethereal, and more than anything else, it made me question my deepest fear.

“Are you dead?” I asked her, noticing that when I spoke, her pink force field grew stronger.

“Do I look dead to you?”

“No, but—what are you?” I blurted out. “Where are you? Because you’re not here. If I—” I tried to touch her cheek, but my hand passed right through her as though she was a ghost. “That’s what I thought. Nora, what’s going on?”

“You’re asking me questions I can’t answer,” she replied in a bubbly tone. “At least, not yet. Ask me something else.”

“Okay. Um, is this your energy? Are you doing this?”

“I can’t answer that.”

A pattern was appearing, one that I didn’t like. “Is there anything that you can answer?” I demanded, already frustrated.

Nora tipped her head back to look at me and smiled. “Did you ever walk through this fountain?” she asked. “You wouldn’t have, right? You never made it to your senior year of high school.”

“No,” I told her. “After my epic failure at Windsor, I decided high school wasn’t for me. I got my GED.”

She hummed sympathetically. “That’s a shame. You missed out on all the fun.”

“Honestly, I’m not too torn up about it,” I said, shielding my eyes against the sun to look up at the tall arch. “It was a way for everyone to say goodbye, to leave the past behind, but those kids all knew each other since elementary school. I was an outsider. They never would’ve invited me anyway.”

Nora paddled her bare feet in the water. “Something tells me that you always wanted to do it though. That it would finally make you feel like you were a part of something.”

I glanced at her, wondering how she could’ve guessed something so personal when I’d never mentioned it to her before, but she only smiled.

“Now’s your chance, Ken,” she said. “Take the plunge.”

And she vanished. Gone was my little sister and her pink halo of light. I stood alone at the fountain’s edge, clutching the earring, as if I’d never moved from that spot at all.

“Damn you and your horse,” I muttered through gritted teeth as I glared up at the wall of water. It was sure to be cold on the cool autumn day. “Why are you both so determined to have me catch pneumonia?”

But Nora’s vague hint was all I had to go on, so I stripped my shoes off for the second time that day. The thought of riding my bike through town and back to the house in soaked clothing made me shiver. I glanced around the courtyard. There was no sign of anyone, not even a security patrol, so I slid out of my jeans and shirt and left them folded neatly on the cobblestones. Then I eased myself over the stone border and into the pool, stifling a shudder when my feet hit the water. It was cold, all right. I waded to the center of the fountain, where the spray from the arch dusted my skin with crisp dew drops.

“This better be worth it, Nora,” I mumbled.

I took a deep breath and plunged through the water. I emerged on the other side completely drenched, sputtering and shivering. The sun did nothing to alleviate the frigid effect of the fountain and my teeth chattered as rivulets streamed from my wet hair and down my back. I crossed my arms over my chest in a feeble attempt to keep warm and waited. Something had to happen, right? I’d done what Nora had asked. What was the next step in this weird, otherworldly investigation? But the courtyard had no intention of revealing further secrets.

“Nora?” I called out, trembling as I squeezed excess water out of my hair. “Come on, little sister. I walked through the fountain, just like you asked.”

There was no reply, magical or otherwise. I stamped my feet in the pool, hoping to restore some feeling in my numb toes, and tried again.

“Nora! Seriously, kid. Give me a hint.”

No luck. Whatever energy allowed Nora to appear by the fountain had faded, leaving me to figure out her cryptic message for myself.

“Are you kidding me?” I muttered darkly. I stared up at the stone arch, wondering if I should duck through the curtain of water once more in case I’d missed something on my first pass. I grimaced at the thought. Once was bad enough. Twice was asking for bronchitis. Nevertheless, it was the only thing I had to go on, so I braced myself for a second dip. However, just as the tip of my nose reached the water, something green flashed in the corner of my eye. I jerked my head up in that direction, thinking it was a trick of the light, but the color remained. It looked like sea glass, sparkling from the far end of the arch. I slogged through the pool and stepped up to the stone border to get a closer look. Something was tucked into the underside of the arch, hidden from most angles by the flow of water. I stood on my tiptoes, one arm wrapped around the arch to prevent myself from falling into the pool, and groped for whatever rested above. My fingers found something smooth and cool. I closed my hand around it and pulled it from the water.

It was a champagne bottle, and if I wasn’t mistaken, it was the same one that I’d seen Nora cop from the banquet table to share with her friends during the gala. The label had worn off from hours beneath the water, but I recognized what was left of it. It was identical to the expensive brand Adrienne favored. I clasped the bottle tightly to my chest, praying not to drop it, and eased myself off the ledge of the fountain.

Shivering, I sat on the cobblestones with my back to the fountain. The stone, warmed by the sun, soothed my tremors. With the bottle in hand, I opened the cap to my internal energy and drew it upward. This time, it took less than a second for light to burst from my fingertips, as if with steady practice, it was easier to reach that part of me. The orange flare stained the green bottle a strange shade, and just like before, my vision blinked to black.

There was Nora, walking alongside a tall, broad-shouldered feminine figure in the woods behind the house. Were it not for her dark chin-length hair, I would’ve mistaken the other person for myself. The scene changed. Nora, in the passenger seat of an unfamiliar vehicle, dressed in a stranger’s clothes as she gazed starry-eyed out of the window. The car drove by a small sign with peeling paint: Welcome to Yew Hollow. Nora, strolling up a hill of dry, dead grass. Nora, approaching a large, unfamiliar house. Nora, stepping up to the porch of the old house as though she knew exactly where she was. The door opened. Nora waved. Everything disappeared.

And the beam of an LED flashlight swept across the courtyard.

10

It felt like seconds, but by the time Nora’s energy released me, dusk had fallen on Windsor Preparatory School, and the night watch was making his rounds. I ducked down, huddling behind the fountain, as the beam of his flashlight swept right over my head. I clenched my teeth. My clothes were on the opposite side of the courtyard. I’d have to outmaneuver the night guard or wait for him to leave in order to get to them. Thankfully, I’d thought to park my bicycle in the shadows of the nearest building, and the night guard wasn’t thorough enough in his search to notice it leaning against the stone. His boots rasped against the cobblestones as he walked the perimeter of the fountain, closer and closer to my position. I swore silently and, hunched over, shuffled quietly along in order to keep the large pool between me and him. I moved at his pace as quietly as possible, the champagne bottle cold against my skin. We edged around until I reached the spot where I’d left my jeans. The flashlight made one last sweep across the courtyard before the guard turned away. I breathed a sigh of relief, unintentionally releasing the champagne bottle from my grasp. It clinked to the ground and clattered across the cobblestones.

“Who’s there?” the guard called out.

He was coming back into the courtyard. I snatched up the bottle before the flashlight found it, grabbed my clothes, and sprinted to the cover of the nearby building where my bike was. My heart pounded as I pressed myself to the wall, stifling my heavy breathing, as the guard walked the courtyard again. I couldn’t ride my bike off quite yet. The sound of the gears clicking would no doubt alert the guard to my presence. I nearly choked when I noticed the trail of water leading from the fountain to my hiding spot. While my skin had dried, my hair had not, and the steady drip provided a perfect path for the guard to track me down. He hadn’t seen it yet, still roaming the far side of the courtyard. An idea struck me.

“Please let this work,” I mouthed, and I summoned my energy, fighting to keep the orange glow from appearing at my fingertips. I focused on the water droplets staining the cobblestones. “Come on. Come on.”

Just as the security guard rounded the fountain and I thought it was too late, the droplets sizzled and evaporated, leaving no trace of my escape in their wake. I slumped against the wall in relief. The guard’s flashlight breezed over the spot where they had been. Then, apparently convinced that he was hearing things, he shook his head and exited the courtyard to continue the rest of his rounds.

I yanked my jeans and shirt on over damp underwear, straddled my bike, and rode out into the darkness, navigating the gloomy campus by instinct rather than sight. I kept an eye out for rogue night guards, and when I cleared the gargoyles lurking at the entrance, I pedaled all out, flying down the hill at a breakneck pace. The champagne bottle was tucked between my shirt and my stomach, resting safely on my hips as I made my getaway. I had no idea how Nora had managed to imbue objects with her energy. From recent experience, it appeared that she was capable of a whole lot more than healing broken wrists and first-degree burns.

By the time I reached the main road, night had fallen completely. If there was one thing that I loved about this part of town, it was the lack of light pollution. The stars stretched out for miles, bright and radiant against the black sky. It was one of the few places that I could easily pick out the constellations. There was Orion and Ursa Major and Draco. And right above me, guiding me back toward the Avenue, was Gemini. The twins. Nora and I were nowhere close to being twins, but the connection between us felt the same. We were bound by something other than my father’s genetics. Maybe that was why I was the only one able to make progress on her disappearance.

The activity on the Avenue had died down. Most everyone had gone home to get ready for school or work the next day. A few stragglers remained, finishing up their shopping or eating dessert. The French restaurant had already closed its doors, and with a jolt, I remembered that I was meant to work a shift that evening. Hopefully, my boss would excuse my absence considering the recent family emergency, but I doubted it. I coasted the rest of the way down the street. Near the end of the Avenue, a group of teenagers exited a burger restaurant, clamoring excitedly. I smiled at them, steering carefully so that I wouldn’t knock anyone’s milkshakes out of their hands. One of the girls paused, peering at me with a keen eye.

“Hey!” she called out.

I skidded to a stop in the gutter. “Yes?”

She sipped daintily on her milkshake through a pink straw. “Aren’t you Nora McGrath’s sister?”

“Half-sister,” I corrected before mentally chiding myself. Adrienne had more of an influence on me than I thought.

“Same difference,” the girl said. She approached my bike and offered her hand. “I’m Isabella. I’m friends with Nora.”

“Yeah, I think she’s mentioned you,” I said, shaking hands. “You have French Lit class together, right?”

The other teenagers tittered on the sidewalk, but Isabella ignored them. “Yup. History and Pre-Calculus too. We’ve known each other for a while. Have you heard from her yet?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“What about the police?” Isabella asked. “Did they find anything?”

I studied Isabella’s expression in the streetlight. She was concerned. They all were. At first, I’d thought the other kids were impatient for Isabella to wrap up her conversation with me, but now I noticed that they hung on to every word. These were Nora’s friends. Like me, they wanted to know where she’d gone and if she was okay. Some of them had probably been with her on the night of the gala. One thing was certain: I had no intention of telling them about how the police found Nora’s gown covered in her blood.

“They’re working on it,” I said instead. “But they don’t have much to go on. No one’s seen Nora since that night. Were any of you at the gala with her?”

“I was,” Isabella said immediately, but the group behind her shrank backward a few steps. “We all were,” she added firmly. “Except Duncan. He was grounded that night.”

One of the other teenagers, a tall skinny boy with glasses, groaned. “Sheesh, Izzy. Throw us under the bus, why don’t you?”

I looked from Isabella to the other kids. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Isabella glanced over her shoulder at her friends. The spectacled boy pointedly shook his head. Isabella rolled her eyes at him but kept her mouth shut.

“Is this because you were all at Windsor after hours that night?” I asked. “I already knew that.”

The skinny boy threw his hands up in defeat. “We’re screwed.”

“I’m not going to tell anyone,” I said to him. I returned my focus to Isabella, who seemed most willing to speak with me. “If you fill me in on everything that happened that night.”

The teenagers exchanged glances, as if to check with one another whether or not my deal felt like a trick.

I sighed. “Look, guys. I want to find Nora as much as you do. She’s my little sister, and if anything ever happened to her, I’d never forgive myself. Please?”

Isabella chewed on her lip, as if she wanted to say something but feared retribution from her friends. The boy with the glasses frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. The other girl and boy scuffed their shoes against the pavement, avoiding my gaze. So this was how they wanted to play.

“Okay, you have five seconds to decide,” I said, holding up as many fingers. “Then I pay a visit to the police station and let them know that I wasn’t the last one to see Nora that night after all. What were your names again?”

The skinny boy raced off, abandoning his friends to their fate. He vaulted over a hedge and disappeared into the night.

“Wow,” I remarked. “Heart of a lion.”

“You can turn him in if you want,” Isabella said darkly. “That’s Mark. He’s kind of a jerk. Actually, he was the one who suggested we go to Windsor that night in the first place, so I can see why he’s particularly worried about you turning him in.”

I peeked around Isabella to wave the other couple forward. “What about the rest of you?” I asked them. “I really don’t care that you were at school when you weren’t supposed to be. Believe me, I get the whole ‘teenage adventure’ thing. I just want to know what happened to Nora.”

“We wanted to get away from the stuffy party,” Isabella said. The brunette girl behind her confirmed this with a nod. “It was mostly older people, you know? That gets boring. So Mark suggested we drive to the school.”

“We just wanted to swim in the fountain,” the other girl piped in. “It’s off-limits, so naturally it seemed like a fun thing to do.”

“I wasn’t there,” the boy said.

“We’ve already established that, Duncan,” I told him. “When you got there, what happened? You hung out in the courtyard for a while, drank some champagne, then what?”

Isabella took another sip of her milkshake before answering. “The night watch showed up. We kind of forgot about him. Anyway, we all ran off except Nora. She was acting really weird.”

My pulse sped up. “Weird how?”

“She got all spacey for no reason,” the other girl explained, interlacing her fingers with Duncan’s. “Staring off into the distance, not talking to anyone. We figured she was tired, but when we bolted to get away from the guard, she didn’t move.”

“None of us even noticed until we were already in the car,” Isabella added.

“And you didn’t think to wait for her?” I asked them.

“We wanted to,” Isabella said, pointing to herself and the brunette. “But Mark was driving.”

I laughed grimly. “Of course he was.”

“Nora wouldn’t answer her phone for the rest of the night,” the brunette said. “And the next morning, her mom called us asking where she was. None of us knew. Isabella and I went back to Windsor to check if she was still there.”

“No luck, I assume?”

Isabella shook her head. “She was already gone.”

Another thought crossed my mind. At what point did Nora’s dress end up soaked in her own blood? “This is going to sound really weird,” I said, “but did Nora take off her dress that night?”

Isabella and the brunette exchanged confused glances. “No,” Isabella said. “Not that I know of.”

“And she didn’t seem hurt at all?” I ventured.

“No,” the brunette answered. “Like I said, she looked really tired, but that was it.”

A swift breeze rustled through the trees, and I remembered that my hair and clothes were still damp from my dip in the fountain. “All right,” I said. “Thank you for talking to me. I really appreciate it. Do me a favor though?”

Both girls nodded. Duncan perked up too.

“If you hear from Nora or if you remember anything else about that night, could you call me and let me know?” I asked them. “I don’t have a cell phone, but you can phone the house and ask for Kennedy. Would you do that for me?”

“Totally.”

I placed my feet on the pedals of my bike. “Thanks, girls. Have a good night. Enjoy your milkshakes.”

“Hey, Kennedy?” Isabella called before I could ride off.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think she’s okay?”

I took in the trio’s tense expressions. “Let’s hope so.”

“Okay. And, uh, why are you wet?”

I let out a laugh and flipped my damp hair over my shoulder. “It’s a long, weird story.”

Light streamed from the windows of the house, illuminating the dark lawn as I pedaled up the driveway. I could see straight into the foyer and the neighboring dining room. It was like looking into a snow globe. The inside of the house was a different world. Maybe if I shook it hard enough, it would momentarily disappear in a flurry of fake frost. Though it was well past dinner time, my father sat at the table, picking through a meal of spaghetti and meatballs. Adrienne was nowhere in sight, but Helen stood nearby. She discreetly watched as my father spun a single strand of spaghetti around his fork. When the pasta slid from the tines and back to the plate, Helen’s lips twitched downward. My father’s shoulders slumped, and he pushed the dish away from his place setting.

I left the bike on the porch, propping it up on its new kickstand, and went inside, cradling the champagne bottle in the crook of my arm. My shoes squeaked against the freshly polished floor of the foyer as I made my way to the staircase. Through the door to the dining room, I caught my father’s head perk up out of the corner of my eye.

“Kennedy?” he called. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

“Could you come in here, please?”

I sighed, one foot poised on the bottommost step. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to my father. It was the exact opposite. More than anything, I wanted him to know that Nora hadn’t bled out in the Windsor courtyard, but I was having trouble processing the information provided to me. No scientific proof backed up my visions of Nora. All that I had to confirm the truth of their content was the feeling in my gut. That wouldn’t convince my father that his youngest daughter was out there and alive, which made it all the more difficult for me to set the bottle at the foot of the stairs and cross into the dining room. I’d have to lie. Again. I’d been doing it my entire life, but unlike others who found it effortless after years of practice, deception merely exhausted me.

“What’s up, Dad?” I asked.

His face was drawn, the lines around his mouth more prominent than usual, and his hair hung limply over his forehead. “Are you all right?”

I decided not to mention that it wasn’t me he needed to be asking. “I’m fine.”

He shuffled his chair closer to the table. “I thought when you left, you might be heading to your new apartment.”

“No, Dad. I’m staying here until we find Nora.”

“Good.” He cleared his throat. At a loss for words, he gestured to his unfinished pasta. “Are you hungry?”

The cold meatballs and limp spaghetti weren’t appetizing, though it had been hours since I’d last eaten. “Um—”

“I can warm you a fresh plate,” Helen offered from her secluded corner of the room.

“Thanks, Helen.”

She bustled off with a look of relief. Now that I had returned, she no longer had to babysit my father. I sat down next to him. The tablecloth had lace accents. I stuck my finger through the patterns, forming tiny tents in the fabric. We sat in complete silence, much like we had earlier that day in his office, until Helen returned with my dinner. She set it down in front of me, along with a fork and a napkin. I glanced at my father again, his eyes blank as he stared at nothing. This was not how I wanted to spend time with him.

I pushed my chair away from the table, startling Helen like a bird from its nest. “Actually, I think I’m going to take this upstairs.”

Helen raised an eyebrow at my declaration. She knew Adrienne’s rules—no food was allowed beyond the kitchen or the dining room—but she kept quiet. Dad didn’t react at all, and I began to worry that he might slip into a catatonic state.

“Dad.”

“Hmm?”

“Do you know where Nora’s laptop is?”

“In her bedroom, I imagine.”

I left him in the dining room with Helen, whose look of despair returned as I picked up my spaghetti, holding the bowl by the edges so that I wouldn’t burn myself on the bottom, and headed into the foyer to collect the champagne bottle. At the top of the stairs, instead of making a right toward my own bedroom, I turned left instead. The double doors to the master bedroom loomed at the end of the hallway, but I stopped short before I reached them. Nora’s room was right next door. I hadn’t been inside since I was a teenager, when Adrienne occasionally trusted me to watch Nora while her and Dad had a night out. Afterward, when Nora was old enough to take care of herself, I actively avoided her bedroom. It was too close to the master, and I wanted to put as much distance between me and my stepmother as possible. In the past month, Nora had spent so much time in my room that I’d all but forgotten she had her own. I balanced my pasta in one hand and the bottle in the other and eased the door open with my hip. Nora’s light, airy essence hit me like a ton of bricks.

11

It smelled like her. Her flowery spirit filled the entire room. It was like walking into a rose garden at the height of spring. It was in everything, from the perfectly made queen-sized bed with its pale pink duvet and matching plump pillows to the framed pictures of Nora and her friends on the windowsill to the pretty sweaters and delicate dresses spilling out of the open closet. Her energy had been collecting here ever since she was born. I stood frozen in the doorway, overwhelmed by the feel of Nora even though she wasn’t there. It was almost stronger than having her in person, as though she naturally subdued her energy around people and saved it for the privacy of her bedroom. The thought made me sad. I did the same thing, hiding that part of myself because it was unnatural, but the idea of Nora suppressing her true self for the sake of normalcy didn’t sit right with me.

I flipped the light switch. Her laptop rested on the desk by the window, its pink hardshell case glimmering from across the room. I walked over to it, trying to push down the feeling of invading Nora’s privacy, drew out the desk chair, and sat down. I set the champagne bottle on the windowsill, where it reflected the fairy lights from the backyard into Nora’s room. Then, with the bowl of pasta resting just beneath my chin to catch any wayward meatball particles, I opened up Nora’s laptop and clicked to a search engine.

Welcome to Yew Hollow. That was what the sign said in Nora’s latest vision. I’d never heard of a Yew Hollow before. Furthermore, I didn’t recognize the area beyond the windshield of the stranger’s car. It was dark, and the trees looked like any other trees in the state of Massachusetts, but the branches were dead and gray, as if it were mid-January rather than late October. The same applied to the grass outside the mysteriously old house. What kind of place was Yew Hollow that it seemed to exist outside the regular effect of normal seasons? I typed the two words into the search engine, surprised when I was rewarded with an entire page of results. I clicked on the first link. It was a personal account from a small online travel magazine that seemed to focus on exploring lesser known tourist destinations with strange histories like hauntings or other oddities in the United States. I lifted an eyebrow at the corny title, but read the article anyway.

Move Over, Salem. Welcome to Yew Hollow.

By Samantha Scott

When our editor first suggested I check out the small quirky town of Yew Hollow in northern Massachusetts, I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical. We’ve done articles on similar destinations, including those riddled with history like Salem and Ipswich, so I wasn’t banking on finding much to pique my interest in a town that was no bigger than a shoebox. I begged to go to Saint Augustine instead. Ghost stories! Conquistadors! Pirates! The beach in February! That’s what I was interested in, not some tiny spot on the map where the snow was as deep as my knees. Boy, was I wrong about that. Yew Hollow might be the most exciting place I’ve ever visited.

All of us at the office had already heard of Yew Hollow. Ten years ago, it gained a modicum of notoriety when a string of unexplained deaths stupefied investigators far and wide. The weirdest thing was that even though these mysterious deaths went unsolved, everyone seemed to conveniently forget that anything odd had ever happened. While I was there, I made it my mission to ask every local in town what the real deal was, but if ever there were a group so skilled in avoiding the question, it was the Yew Hollow natives. They all gave me the same answer: Ask the Summerses.

Who are the Summerses? They’re the reason we decided to visit Yew Hollow in the first place. You see, the town itself is marginally infamous, sure, but it’s this particular family that put Yew Hollow on our map of historical abnormalities in the first place. Why? Well, the Summers family isn’t just a family. It’s a coven. Of witches.

I squinted at the last line of the paragraph. Samantha Scott wasn’t the only one riddled with skepticism. The article sounded like a poorly thought-out plot to encourage mindless tourists to visit the town. Then again, who was I to judge? I conducted energy that no scientific process could explain. I read on.

We all know the stories. In the early 1690s, mass hysteria broke out in Salem Village when rumors spread that a pair of young girls had been influenced by the devil. No one really knows the truth about what caused the girls’ epileptic episodes. Was it witchcraft? Demons? The most rational theories claim that the victims were likely affected by a certain type of fungus growing in that year’s crop of wheat, but there are those who to this day believe that witches are real and dangerous. These events, witchcraft or not, inspired a shift. According to lore, the Summers coven, originally of Salem, quietly relocated to another town in order to avoid persecution. This is where the story of Yew Hollow began. I met with coven leader, Morgan Summers, to discover more.

“The Summerses settled Yew Hollow in 1693,” she told me as she took me on the grand tour through the town square. “At that time, those who fancied themselves witch hunters were on the warpath. Our family was in danger of being exposed, so the original coven left Salem in search of safer territory.”

It turns out that Yew Hollow was so named for a reason. The town is full of yew trees, which, according to Morgan, are known to ward off evil spirits. The most famous tree sits smack in the middle of the town square. Once, it rose high above Yew Hollow. Now, it is much smaller due to a fire that burnt the tree to the ground ten years ago. When I approached the topic with Morgan as the locals had suggested, she brushed it off with a laugh.

“Oh, we love to perpetuate the story of the yew tree,” she said. “Yew Hollow relies greatly on its tourism. That’s why the whole town celebrates pagan holidays and other strange rituals. It’s all in good fun.”

Maybe it was just me, but I felt like she was holding back. What was the truth behind all of those unusual deaths? Was it coincidence that the string of violence came to a sudden halt after the yew tree burned down? Why are the townspeople so unwilling to discuss the previous decade? We may never know what secrets Yew Hollow is harboring. In my own personal opinion, there’s something alive and humming in the air around the tree at the center of town. The hair on the back of my neck prickled every time I went within ten feet of it.

So are there real witches in Yew Hollow or not? History says yes. Modern day says no. I guess you’ll have to visit yourself to find out. The Summers coven is waiting for you.

I clicked out of the article, back to the main page, and switched to an image search. The first photo that appeared was a sepia-toned picture of what I assumed was the yew tree Samantha Scott had mentioned in her article. It was massive. The topmost branches escaped the parameters of the photo. I was so distracted by the shape of it that I almost didn’t notice the small group of people standing at its trunk. I thought these might be the original members of the Summers coven before I remembered that photography wasn’t invented until the 1800s. At the time of the photo, the Summerses had already lived in Yew Hollow for almost two hundred years. I squinted at the group. There were about twenty in total, all women who shared similar bone structures and expressions. They looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen those noses and brows before. My gaze flickered back to the enormous tree. Involuntarily, my fingers found the gold pendant resting at the base of my throat.

I searched the Internet for Morgan Summers. The results were less numerous but widely varied. The first hit confused me. It was a long-forgotten website, advertising the services of one Morgan Summers: Psychic Medium in New York, New York. A blurry picture featured a woman about my age, with brown hair and sharp eyes, staring haughtily into the lens of the camera as though she objected to being photographed but had no other choice. I clicked back to the search results and hit the second link. This one took me to a short article from Yew Hollow’s own website. Again, it was dated roughly ten years previous. It featured another photo of the same woman, but in this one, she discouraged the photographer with a rude blurry gesture. I stifled a snort. Morgan Summers and I would get along just fine. I skimmed the article, the title of which alarmed me more than I’d expected it to.

Estranged Daughter Accused of Murder

Following the bizarre and tragic murder of Leigh Lockwood beneath the yew tree in the town square, the police have identified Morgan Summers as their number one suspect. Summers, the second youngest daughter of Cassandra Summers, had returned home from New York City earlier that day, only to be found at the scene of the crime shortly after the grisly event occurred. The twenty-eight-year-old is notorious for being the only member of the Summers coven to leave Yew Hollow, a decision that appeared to create a rift between her and the rest of her family. Locals attest that Summers is short-tempered and apathetic, often reacting to questions with aggression or annoyance. As of this publication, Summers has not been charged with anything as there is no proof of her involvement in Lockwood’s murder. This investigation is ongoing.

I sat back in my chair. A decade prior, Morgan Summers had been suspected of murder. In February of this year, she chatted amiably with subpar journalists but glossed over the details of any questions involving witchcraft. What happened in the time between? Was Morgan Summers hiding a sick secret? Was she really a witch? She looked benign enough. A recent photo from Yew Hollow’s web page showed Morgan at some kind of annual town event. Her hair had faded slightly and there were a few more lines around her mouth now, but the biggest difference was that she looked positively happy in comparison to any of the pictures from before. The web of mystery behind Nora’s disappearance grew thicker and more tangled. Had this Morgan Summers kidnapped my little sister? If she had, to what end?

I rubbed my eyes. I’d been staring at the laptop screen so intently that I’d forgotten to blink. My spaghetti and meatballs were cold. I ate some of it anyway, chewing thoughtfully as I processed the new information.

Witches. Could it be true? Was there actually a solid reason for mine and Nora’s strange energy? If that was the case, why had Morgan Summers come specifically for Nora? If they were tracking down those of their own kind, they should’ve taken me too. After all, I was the one whose energy was harder to conceal.

My mind went in circles. Nora’s voice echoed in my head. Come find me. She wouldn’t have asked if she wasn’t in danger. I searched for Yew Hollow on an interactive map, tracking directions from our house to the little town. It was a two-hour drive by car, which meant it would take forever to get there on my bike. If Nora was there, my cramped quadriceps would be worth it. I printed out the directions from Nora’s laptop, stuffed them into the back pocket of my jeans, and stood up from the desk with every intention of riding through the night in order to reach Yew Hollow by morning. The red numbers of Nora’s furry pink alarm clock blinked at me. It was past midnight, I smelled like the fountain’s chlorinated water, and I was already exhausted from using so much of my energy earlier that day. I would be no good to Nora if I fell asleep atop my bike and swerved into oncoming traffic.

I tiptoed to my own room, showered, and returned to Nora’s. I felt closer to her there, so I pulled back the duvet and climbed into bed, burying my cold feet beneath the thick layers of satin sheets. November was just around the corner, and the weather was seeping indoors. I hugged Nora’s pillow, trying not to think about how cold it would be tomorrow morning. It was miserable to ride a bike in the cold. It was all runny nostrils and dry eyes and chapped lips. As my eyelids drooped, a warmer thought occurred to me. I could take Nora’s car to Yew Hollow. After all, it was obsolete, sitting between Dad and Adrienne’s cars in the massive garage, without Nora around to drive it. The thought of heated seats, built-in navigation, and leather interiors lured me to sleep. I faded from consciousness, and sepia-toned photographs swam in and out of my dreams.

“Nora, where are we going?”

I trailed after my baby sister. She was younger. Twelve or thirteen maybe. Frolicking through a field of pinkish white flowers. Nora trailed her fingers through the oddly shaped petals as she pranced away from me. I followed after her in a trance. The edges of the world were blurred. There was no sun. Where did the light come from? I passed a mirror. It hung in midair, showing my own face. Except I was younger too. Seventeen or so. I touched my flushed cheek. My reflection laughed. This didn’t make any sense.

“Kennedy!” Nora’s giggling voice echoed back to me. She was too far ahead. I sprinted through the flowers, but night had fallen. There were no stars. No moon. We existed in a void. Another world. What was this place?

Trees loomed. Branches reached out like gnarled fingers. They interlaced, weaving together overhead in order to keep me closer to the ground. I hunched over. Tripped in the dirt. Fell on my back. The scent of the white flowers filled my nose. My throat closed up.

“They’re mountain laurels,” Nora said. She stood above me. Looked down. Her face was pale. “Poisonous if ingested.” She caressed the petals closest to my face. “Honey made by bees that have taken pollen from these plants can cause cardiac arrhythmias and mild paralysis. Can you feel it, Kennedy?”

My heart raced. Pounding. I couldn’t breathe. My arms and legs felt heavy. The black sky pressed down on me from above. I was going to die here.

Nora laughed.

The flowers vanished. I stood in the middle of a two-lane road, the asphalt gray and crumbling. I looked to my right. There. On the shoulder. A sign beckoned. Welcome to Yew Hollow. I touched the peeling paint. It turned to dust beneath my fingers.

“Nora?” I called. The grass beneath my toes was dead. Crisp. I walked on. “Nora?”

“Come find me.”

I followed the voice. There was Yew Hollow’s town square. There was the yew tree, royal and vast. My feet carrying me unwillingly. The fire in my stomach began. It rose in my throat like a poison. My palms were sweating, set alight with my energy. It grew beyond my control.

“No,” I pleaded. I tucked my hands away, but the fire roamed up my forearms. It overtook me, casting an orange glow across the town square. A leaf on the yew tree ignited. Then another. And another.

Nora’s panicked voice echoed from the yew tree itself as it went up in flames.

“Kennedy!”

I ran toward the tree, searching for her. She was nowhere in sight, and with every step I advanced, another section of the yew tree caught fire. I halted, heaving for breath. This was my fault. I was responsible.

Nora shrieked. I covered my eyes. The fire raged on.

And then everything disappeared.

The world was white. The earth was pale. Snowy. Flat. Nothing remained. I knelt to the ground, sifting through the curious powder that coated the remains of what used to be a town.

It was ash.

A face rose from the depths, bloodless and unmoving.

“Come find me,” Nora whispered.

I jerked violently back to consciousness. A strangled yell startled me before I realized that it had come out of my own mouth. I clapped a hand over my lips, trapping the sound. My whole body shook as I rolled over to turn on the lamp resting on the bedside table. The soft yellow glow illuminated Nora’s room, but it did little to ease the panic left over from the nightmare. It had been so vivid, surreal as it was. I buried my face in a pillow and let go of a sob. The feathers muffled the sound, but Nora’s pale face haunted the space behind my eyelids. I hurled the pillow across the room and sat bolt upright against the headboard, panting like a wild dog. Nora’s voice echoed in my ears.

Come find me. Come find me.

12

It was dark. Nora’s pink alarm clock blinked five minutes after four. The house was quiet. Dad and Adrienne were asleep in the adjacent room. Helen was sure to have gone home. The keys to Nora’s car winked at me from a hook shaped like a fleur de lis near the door. I pocketed them, slipped out of Nora’s room, and snuck down the hallway toward my own room. Once inside, I got dressed, packed a spare change of clothes in my new hiking rucksack—yet another gift from Nora—and surveyed the room for anything I might need for the trip. I was going to Yew Hollow. Now. If that nightmare was any indication, there was no time to waste. How long did I have before that awful vision came true? Nora needed me, and I wouldn’t keep her waiting any longer. With any luck, I would be back in Windsor Falls with Nora in tow by that afternoon.

I climbed out through the window and shimmied down the ivy on the side of the house. It was easier to avoid Dad and Adrienne. If I told them I was going after Nora, there would be no end to their questions. How did I know where she was? What and where was Yew Hollow? What do you mean, it’s some place full of women who think they’re witches? I had no idea what I was walking into. Hell, I didn’t even know if I was even on the right track. I had no guarantee if Nora’s visions were reliable or not. Maybe I’d turn up in Yew Hollow and fall into the tourist trap that it advertised itself as. Maybe Nora wasn’t even there, but I couldn’t not try to look for her.

It was a good thing Nora’s car was so catlike and quiet. It purred gracefully as I pulled it out of the garage and coasted down the gravel driveway, keeping a close eye on the front door of the house through the rearview mirror. As the iron gate opened for me to drive through it, I could’ve sworn I saw the curtains in an upstairs window billow shut, as though someone had been peeking through them a moment before. The car’s tires slid over the rocks as I steered off the driveway and onto the road. Then it was just me, the thoughts in my head, and the distance to Yew Hollow.

I hadn’t driven a car in so long, I forgot what it was like to not ride a bike somewhere. I kept calculating the time it would take me to get to Yew Hollow as if I had embarked on the journey with my trusty two-wheeler rather than Nora’s luxury sedan. Thankfully, there was no one on the road as I got used to it. Yes, it drove itself, but I had no idea how to set up the autopilot or the navigation. It took me a good ten minutes to find the dials to adjust the driver’s seat. Nora was a few inches shorter than me, and my knees were flush with the steering wheel until I finally scooched the seat back to accommodate my lengthy limbs. In the process, I accidentally switched on the seat heater. As I whirred past houses and yards larger than Dad and Adrienne’s, the leather gradually warmed, escaping my notice until I realized that the heat under my butt had not, in fact, been generated by my own inner fire. I hastily switched off the feature. Extra heat was the last thing I needed, even if the misty morning left a chilly dew on the windshield.

Though the car was practically brand new, it was full of Nora’s energy. Just like in her bedroom, I could feel Nora there, albeit in a spiritual form rather than a physical one. The car absorbed her peaceful energy and radiated it outward. It was a wonder that no one else felt it. Did Nora’s friends hop into the passenger seat of her car and question the sudden uptick in their mood? Or did they simply credit the feeling to Nora’s unwavering positive attitude? Whatever it was, I was glad to share the sobering effect. It settled my racing pulse and soothed my worried mind, although my mind did its absolute best to keep me busy with racing thoughts.

There was too much to fret about. Nora’s current location was the biggest problem, but other things kept creeping into my train of thought, piling up at the station and crashing into one another. I gripped the steering wheel at ten and two as I pulled out onto the highway, neurotically checking all three mirrors for signs of other vehicles. At such an early hour, the roads were empty, but with my luck, I’d crash Nora’s new car into the one eighteen-wheeler on the interstate. I avoided operating heavy machinery for a reason. I blamed my last vehicular failure on a mechanical issue, and while it was entirely possible that some faulty wiring or a gas leak could’ve caused the resulting inferno on the side of the road, I didn’t think it was likely. It had happened right after some jerk cut me off, forcing me to swerve into the next lane over to avoid a collision. In the next second, the familiar rage boiled over and ignited something under the hood. I remembered the adrenaline rush as flames licked the windshield. I’d lurched off the road, thrown the driver’s door open, and dove from the car, rolling into a run-off ditch just as the entire vehicle exploded. It was as close to death as I’d ever come, and I didn’t care to repeat the experience, especially in a car that didn’t belong to me.

I took a deep breath, trying to dispel the tightness in my throat. It was easier to think of happier times, to cast aside the distressing thoughts in favor of better ones. There weren’t many to draw on, but in the last month, I’d built up more than enough memories with Nora to keep my mind quiet. I turned on the radio to Nora’s favorite station. It was too early for talk shows or a DJ, but a prerecorded setlist pumped a few popular singles through the speakers of Nora’s car. I rotated the volume knob, drowning out my thoughts with the inane electric beat. Then I leaned back, relaxed my shoulders, and let my mind wander to one of the last times Nora and I had been in this car together. We had been on our way out to the feed store to pick up a few things for Ainsley and the other horses. During the ride, Nora had pulled over to buy roasted almonds from a stand on the side of the road.

“What are they coated with?” I’d asked, peering into the little paper cone as Nora fired up the car again.

“Cinnamon sugar.”

I plunked the cone into a cup holder. “No, thanks. Sugar makes me crazy.”

“I don’t think it’s the sugar,” she’d deadpanned. “Just try one, Ken. You need to loosen up a little bit.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Cinnamon sugar flew, landing on the sleek middle console, as she steered with one hand and ate almonds with the other. “It means you have a stick up your butt,” she declared. “When was the last time you ate a donut?”

I ignored the question. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten something for pleasure rather than practicality. “Sugar is the silent killer.”

“See, that’s your problem,” Nora said. “Kennedy, I know you’re careful, but a touch of enjoyment every once in a while won’t kill you.”

“Speak for yourself,” I muttered.

She thrust the cone of almonds toward me. “Take one.”

“Nora, really—”

“Just one! If you hate them, I’ll let you throw them out the window.”

With a sigh of defeat, I pinched one almond between my index finger and thumb and popped it into my mouth. As soon as the sugar hit my tongue, my entire mouth reacted. My eyebrows shot upward in surprise. I reached for another one.

“See?” Nora said triumphantly. “Aren’t they delicious?”

I relented. “Maybe.”

“You can’t always keep yourself so locked up, Ken,” Nora said, her tone taking a more serious route. “This is a prime example. They’re just almonds. Snack food. You won’t let yourself try something new because you’ve already decided to be miserable. Why do you do that?”

“I haven’t decided to be miserable,” I told her. “I’ve just gotten used to the idea of inconvenience following me around wherever I go. I’m cautious, not outright pessimistic.”

Nora checked her blind spot and moved around a minivan. “You’ve boxed yourself in. Let it out, Ken. It’s about time. If it bothers you, let it go.”

I’d never thought about it that way before. I’d never considered the possibility that bottling up all of my problems was the root of the issue. I wondered what would have happened if Nora had been born first, if she was fifteen years wiser than me. Sometimes, it felt like she already was. She thought about everything rationally, from a fresh point of view. I envied the ease of her personal philosophy. If it bothers you, let it go.

The navigation engaged, offering directions to exit the interstate at the next ramp in a dulcet, inhuman tone. I followed the instructions, noticing that the green highway signs on the side of the road did not include the mileage to Yew Hollow. I had to be getting close. I’d been driving for a solid hour and forty minutes. The very edge of the horizon, right at the tree line, lightened to a bright pink as I cruised down the access road and stopped at a single red traffic light. The intersection was empty—there were no cars visible in either direction—but the light remained red. I leaned over the steering wheel to frown at it. When a few minutes passed and it still hadn’t switched to green, I looked both ways and guided the car onto the road.

The back of my neck prickled as I drove. I rubbed it with my fingers, but the gentle massage did nothing to alleviate the feeling. The odd energy spread, trickling down my spine like a drop of sweat. I rolled my shoulders, ignoring the buzz that took hold of my muscles. As the navigation counted down the minutes to my destination, things grew weirder. The first thing I noticed was that the farther I drove, the less lively the world around me presented itself. It was late October. At my father’s house, the woods were full of color-changing trees. It was my favorite time of year. The world looked different in autumn. The red, orange, and yellow hues made me feel vibrant and alive. The air always smelled like woodsmoke. People wore boots and scarves and jackets as they shopped on the Avenue, shuffling through a kaleidoscope of fallen leaves. Here, not two hours away, it should’ve been the same. Instead, the trees looked frail and brittle. Most of them were bare, but some sported gray or brown leaves, quivering like hopeless baby birds that had flown the nest too soon. The air was dead. No hint of a breeze rustled the brown grass on the shoulder of the road. I rolled down the window, but even the gust created by the movement of the car felt empty. It smelled odd outside. There was no scent of pollen or flowers or anything else. It was just… nothing. I pressed the button to roll up the window, disturbed, but the car didn’t respond. I jabbed the control. It whined pathetically, and the window remained in place.

“Great,” I grumbled, settling for the heavy air that clogged my nostrils and filled my lungs. It thickened into a solid gray fog. I let my foot off the gas pedal and fumbled around for the dials that controlled the headlights. The lines on the road were visible for two feet in front of the hood before they disappeared.

The navigation cut out. The melodious instructional voice squeaked and went silent while the interactive map flashed once like a strobe light before blacking out. I tapped it experimentally, but it remained blank.

“What is going on?” I murmured.

Suddenly, the radio blared. I winced at the abrupt change in volume as the bass pounded through the car and made the windows shake. I recognized the song. It was one of Nora’s favorites. She sang along to it so often that I knew the lyrics now. I reached for the volume dial, but when the radio didn’t respond to my touch, I wasn’t all that surprised. Something else was going on, and it didn’t have to do with Nora’s luxury sedan.

As though this realization triggered a knee-jerk reaction, the autopilot engaged, yanking the steering wheel out of my hand. The car trundled off the road and bumbled over the dirt in the shoulder. My fingers gripped the handle, ready to throw the door open and bail if things got dangerous, but the vehicle slowed to a jerky halt beneath a familiar blue-and-white sign before powering off completely. Welcome to Yew Hollow.

Despite the fact that the car appeared to be dead, Nora’s voice powered through the radio. “Come find me.”

For good measure, I pressed the start button. The car whined and groaned, so I kicked open the door, stepped out, and stretched. Then I took my backpack from the passenger seat, swung it across my shoulders, and looked down the road toward the murky gray ahead.

“I guess I’m walking the rest of the way.” I made sure Nora’s car was far enough off the road to avoid damage from passing vehicles before pressing the key fob to lock it. It beeped feebly, like it had all but given up on life. I rolled my eyes, turned my back on it, and stepped past Yew Hollow’s welcome sign. I swallowed hard. For some reason, it felt as though I’d passed through a wall of warm water.

The farther I walked, the more I felt a shift in the atmosphere around me. The shiver in my spine radiated through me, the familiar feeling that someone was watching me. I kept my eyes on the yellow line that marked the edge of the road. Looking around made you appear unsure. It gave the watcher a sense of satisfaction, knowing that they’d unsettled you. I was afraid to peer through the trees to find another pair of eyes peering back. I kept my shoulders down, gripping the straps of my backpack tightly. When I finally looked up, it was because the road had diverged from its linear path, splitting to form two right angles to my either side. I stopped short, my breath caught in my chest.

“Whoa,” I huffed.

Yew Hollow was dead, though it wasn’t quite like my nightmare. The town was still intact. A spired hall sat at the top of the road, gray and silent. Privately-owned businesses and small homes bordered the square, indistinguishable save for the signs that read Dover’s Fresh Market or Ms. Winning’s Antiques or Palumbo & Sons Shoe Repair. A modest church sat next to the tiniest of all police stations, as if they had joint custody over Yew Hollow. It was a place meant for passing pleasantries and friendly neighbors and bustling weekends, like Windsor but on a smaller, more authentic scale. Instead, it was a ghost town. There was no sign of anyone or anything alive. Not even a squatter. Not even a rat. Not even a flower. If the leftover landscaping was any indication, Yew Hollow once bloomed with color. Now, everything had withered and died, despite the fact that winter wasn’t due for another couple of months. The grass was dry and crunchy, the shrubs were stripped clean of leaves, and the gray broken trees would look more at home along the pathway to the world beyond this one than in Yew Hollow’s town square.

One tree in particular caught my eye. It was the yew that sat directly in the center of the square, bordered by a collection of dead wildflowers and white stone benches. The tree itself was barely taller than a basketball hoop, a baby in comparison to the photo I’d found of it during my search last night. A pang of guilt washed over me for no apparent reason. This tree had stood firm for several hundred years. It was a stern symbol of protection and serenity, and yet a fault of nature had burned eons of growth to the ground in one fell swoop. The tree was a fraction of what it had once been, and its smaller stature was a swift reminder that nothing, nothing at all, was permanent.

Without thinking, I stepped over the curb and approached the tree. My fingers found the pendant hanging around my throat. It was cold, even though it had been lying against my skin this entire time. With every foot forward, the eerie murmur that had begun on the back of my neck at the entrance to Yew Hollow spread through my bones. It was different than my own energy, foreign and uncomfortable, like an itch I was unable to scratch. Something unspoken urged me to continue forward. I reached out for the trunk of the modest tree, but someone tossed a hood over my face and drew it tight around my neck.

13

I panicked, drew in a deep breath, and inhaled the fabric. My hands flew to my throat, struggling to free myself from the hood. I stumbled blindly and toppled off the curb, torquing my ankle at an uncomfortable angle. My attacker remained cool and collected. As they steered me around with one firm hand on the hood to prevent me from taking it off and the other on my backpack, I realized they were trying to tire me out. I planted my feet, bent my knees, and dropped my hips, bringing the game to an immediate end. It was almost impossible to move someone in such a stable position, something that my attacker wasn’t aware of. They tugged on my backpack, but I brought my shoulders up to my ears, keeping myself in place. Without conscious thought, I accessed my inner energy and lashed out. I acted with the intent to protect myself, but like that first day in Chad’s apartment, the power that I unleashed was unbridled and violent. It burst out in a wave of fire. This time, I felt an odd sense of satisfaction. Whoever tried to pull one over on me had it coming. That kind of energy would knock them clean on their back.

Except that wasn’t what happened. Though my attacker gasped in shock—a surprisingly feminine sound for such a forceful grip—their hand remained strong and steady on my backpack, rooting me in place. Then, in the moment following my release of power, another blast of energy ripped through the square. Forest green met my fiery orange, muting the color and its effect. I doubled over, weary and nauseous, as the green essence came over me like a fast-moving fog. I braced my palms against the ground, gritted my teeth, and tried my luck again. The resulting boom knocked my attacker off their feet, putting a stride’s worth of distance between us. I didn’t have time to rip the hood off my head, so I honed my focus, recognizing shapes through the threads of the fabric, located my target, and lunged. I locked my arms around the knees of this person with the mysterious forest power and held on fast. They kicked out, jarring my shoulders, but I tightened my grip. Another wave of green washed over me. I fought against bile rising in my throat and retaliated with a shot of my own energy. Sweating, I spat cloth out of my mouth as I tried to dislodge the hood without my hands. The attacker shoved my shoulders. When that didn’t work, they yanked the hood tight against my face.

I blacked out. Survival mode took over as adrenaline surged through me. Instinctively, I shot forward, straddling the other person at the waist. We were roughly the same size, but I weighed a little more. They bucked their hips, but I sat down and pinned one arm against their windpipe. They wheezed, their grip loosening on the hood. At this angle, it slid forward, and I shook it off the rest of the way, gasping for air. Finally, I looked my attacker in the face.

It was a girl. A woman. I was sure I’d been fighting a guy, albeit one of average strength and stature. Automatically, I lessened the force of my hold. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. We were similar in build. Even on the ground, I could tell that she was only an inch or two shorter than me, with broad shoulders and a solid jaw. She had black hair, cropped short at her chin, and dark, deep set green eyes the same color as the energy she’d used to deflect mine. This was the woman I’d seen in Nora’s vision. Her expression rested somewhere between impressed and surprised. She was not afraid that I’d pinned her to the ground while blindfolded. This last observation alarmed me the most. Anyone in a vulnerable position should exhibit some type of anxiety, but she looked confident and reassured, like she knew she wasn’t in danger. Or like she had something else up her sleeve.

She took advantage of my momentary distraction and released an extra burst of power. It punched me in the gut with a force twice as impactful as a champion boxer’s fist. I groaned, cradling my stomach as I doubled over. She rolled free, putting several paces between the two of us, and got to her feet. I folded in on myself. The pain was fading, but so was my energy. My opponent, on the other hand, did not tire. Though her shoulders rose and fell with the force of her breath, her entire body glowed with that peculiar dark green color. Her predatory lope unnerved me. I lifted a hand in defeat.

“Enough,” I gasped, upping the dramatics. It was times like these my athleticism came in handy. Maybe I’d expended all of my inner power for the time being, but it would take a lot more than a supernatural fist fight to wear down my physical energy. “I’ve had enough.”

The younger woman stalked forward, halting just beyond my reach. I bided my time, waiting for an opportunity to present itself. She knelt down to study me. Then, as if she had come to a silent decision, her fingers began to dance and swing through the air, drawing patterns with her sparkly forest light. She didn’t have the time to finish whatever incantation she started. As soon as her attention wandered, I rocketed toward her and drew my elbow back as if pulling a bow. My fist was the arrow. She ducked, but not quickly enough. My knuckles landed on the outside edge of her left brow bone, splitting the skin. The woman staggered and fell, landing on her butt in the dirt, dazed but conscious. Before she could regain her wits, I sprinted off.

I vaulted over a row of dead shrubs, the soles of my shoes demolishing the brittle branches, and landed neatly on the opposite side. Then I ducked around the corner of a small house, made a sharp turn, and clambered over the picket fence that walled in the backyard. I kept the yew tree at the westward point of my internal compass as I used the space behind the houses to cover my trail. When I was certain that the young woman had no hope of visually locating me, I crept around to the front of one house, flattened myself out on the ground, and scooted forward to peek through the sparse branches of the yard’s landscaping.

I was near the north end of the square now, closer to the spired town hall. Down the way, the young woman sat at the base of the feeble yew tree. She pressed her palm to the wound near her eye. It came away red. I flexed my hand. My knuckles were pink and swollen. I had meant to daze the woman just long enough to make my escape, not cause her long-lasting harm. She tenderly prodded the side of her face, moving her neck this way and that, as if to gauge the extent of her injury. When she was good and ready, she pushed herself to her feet and stumbled up the hill. Toward my hiding spot.

I pulled up the hood of my jacket, tucking my hair into its depths and tugging the drawstrings tight. It would do me no good to take cover in the gray plants when my flaming head of hair drew attention at every angle. I scooted closer to the side of the house, pressing myself in a long straight line against the foundation. As the woman staggered past, I held my breath. Her green eyes were tired but alert. She kept up a constant visual sweep of the landscape around her, as though she expected me to come hurtling out of the bushes in a poorly planned sneak attack. I remained still and silent. I didn’t want to hurt the woman. I wanted to follow her.

In the deserted town of Yew Hollow, her presence stood out. Something had happened to drive the residents away, so why was one magically-endowed woman lingering in the aftermath? Furthermore, why had her immediate reaction been to blindfold and strangle me? I’d done nothing to warrant such a disturbing welcome. Then there was the matter of her green glow. I wasn’t naive; she wielded it the same way Nora and I used our own powers. Admittedly, she did it with an effortless finesse that I envied. The woman was well-practiced, as though she had trained in the art of scientifically impossible energy. I’d gone so long thinking that Nora and I were the only ones in the world able to harness our abilities like that, but if I had been more practical, it might have occurred to me that maybe my little sister and I weren’t so special after all.

I let the woman get a head start up the road. Then I darted up from my hideaway and trailed her at a distance, leaving enough room to allow her the illusion of safety. As we made our way upward, the town gave way to residential properties separated by acres of land, but it wasn’t like Windsor Falls. At one time, the land here served a purpose. Perhaps the original settlers of Yew Hollow favored growing their own crops or raising animals. The land spoke of hard work and history, unlike the rolling green lawns of my home town that served as ornate declarations of wealth by hosting polo matches and bocce ball tournaments. The longer we walked, the fewer the properties, until I began to wonder if the younger woman lived in the woods that bordered the horizon. Every once in a while, she glanced behind her. Each time, I dove for the nearest cover available, skinning the knees of my jeans against the curb as I curled up behind burly tree trunks and thickets of thorny overgrown weeds. Finally, as the land crested and leveled out, a three-story house with a gothic exterior came into view. It was large for the town—nothing in comparison to my father’s house though—complete with turrets, a wraparound porch, and a swinging bench. The porch creaked as the young woman stepped up to it, as though the warped wood had grown weary of supporting countless visitors’ feet over the years, and she let herself inside.

I waited a moment, letting the details settle in. The yard was quiet. The house was still. I kept an eye on the windows, but there were no signs that anyone else occupied the residence. I dashed out from behind one of the pine trees that hugged the property, pelting across the yard in long steady strides, and hunched beneath one of the windows on the side of the house. Voices floated through the open glass. The young woman wasn’t the sole survivor of the town’s desolation after all.

“Gwenlyn!” someone gasped in horror. “What happened to your eye? Who did that to you?”

Gwenlyn, I assumed, was the name of my attacker. She replied in a weary tone. “Never mind that. Where’s Morgan?”

Footsteps fell in a pattern that suggested someone was descending an old, squeaky staircase. “I’m here. Laurel, mix a healing salve for her eye. Tell me everything, Gwen. Did you take care of it?”

Chair legs rasped against the floor. I gained the courage to peek over the windowsill. The young, dark-haired woman sat at an ornate mahogany dining table, her back to me as she probed the tender spot on the side of her face. Beside her, at the head of the table, was a woman I recognized from the photographs that I had come across the night before during my Internet search on Yew Hollow. She had the same golden-brown hair and green eyes, but there was something different about her. She appeared ill. Her face was drawn and pale. Despite this, she sported a hard look of determination that was present in every picture I’d seen of her. This was Morgan Summers, the supposed head witch of the infamous Summers coven. The blurry pictures from Yew Hollow’s website didn’t do her justice. She was younger than I expected, maybe thirty-nine or forty. In my mind, I pictured the leader of all witches as some kind of wizened hag, although my imagination was supplemented with stereotypes from fairy tales. I had drawn an image of Morgan in my mind that didn’t flush with the woman sitting at the dining room table. She was petite with a giant’s presence, beautiful without vanity, and sharp without noticeable edges. Even sick, she exerted a sense of supremacy, but she maintained it so that it did not overwhelm or make others uncomfortable.

“Not exactly,” Gwenlyn replied.

“What does that mean? Who was it?”

“I don’t know.” Gwenlyn groaned as she found a particularly fragile spot on her head. “Some tall redheaded woman with an orange aura.”

Aura. The word resonated with me. There was a name for the weird radiation of light that accompanied my inner energy. It sounded right, like I’d been missing that piece of vocabulary for all these years and someone had suddenly supplied it to me.

“And?” Morgan prompted.

“She got away.”

“She got away?” Morgan repeated. “Gwenlyn, did I not tell you that it was absolutely crucial to capture whoever broke through the ward? What did I say before you left to apprehend her?”

“Look at my eye, Morgan!” Gwenlyn pointed to her face. Blood ran down her cheek and neck from the laceration, and the skin around her eye socket had already begun to bruise. “She was ripped. It wasn’t a fair match. One round knockout.”

I arched an eyebrow at the unintended compliment. Morgan, on the other hand, heaved a defeated sigh. “Did you at least get her name? Whatever coven she’s from? Did you happen to see where she went after she sucker punched you?”

Gwenlyn stewed in defiant silence.

Morgan leaned across the dining room table. “Do you mean to tell me that this woman—this witch—crossed through our very carefully crafted ward without a hitch and now she’s roaming around Yew Hollow with free access to our entire coven? What if she’s the problem, Gwen?”

Before Gwenlyn could answer, the woman called Laurel returned from the kitchen. I ducked below the windowsill before she could spot me. Me… a witch? With a coven? It didn’t make any sense. If I belonged to a coven, it was the simple duo that Nora and I had created together. Nothing else. And when had I crossed a ward? There was no sign of any force field around Yew Hollow. Nothing stopped me from entering the town… or had something tried? After all, Nora’s car inexplicably broke down, and there had been that strange feeling of walking through water near the welcome sign. Did I break through the Summers coven’s defensive spells without even realizing it? Once more, I chanced a peek into the dining room.

Laurel smeared a thick orange paste across Gwenlyn’s wound, murmuring unintelligible words under her breath as she did so. I did a double-take at the sight of her. She looked like Nora, but her hair was paler than my sister’s, almost white-blonde, and her eyes were gray rather than green. Like Morgan, she appeared sickly. She broke into a light coughing fit, at which point Gwenlyn gently relieved her of the bowl of paste.

“I’ll do it,” Gwenlyn said softly. “You rest.”

Laurel rested a hand on Gwenlyn’s forehead, where a spark of sky blue energy flared and went out. Then she excused herself from the room, rubbing excess paste into her hands as if it was expensive moisturizer.

Morgan rubbed the circles beneath her eyes. “Gwenlyn—”

“Morgan, I’m tired,” Gwenlyn interrupted. “I know you’re upset with me. I know I should’ve done more to catch the other witch, but you’re forgetting that I have no one to help me. Please. I’m exhausted.”

As Gwenlyn slumped over the table, the healing salve matting her hair, a look of concern came over Morgan. She brushed Gwenlyn’s hair away from the younger woman’s face with a motherly touch.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This hasn’t been fair to you.”

“I’m doing my best,” Gwenlyn mumbled, resting her head on her arms. “But I’m used to having someone else to back me up.”

The pair idled in silence. Morgan’s fingers combed through Gwenlyn’s dark hair as her gaze drifted toward the window opposite mine. Gwenlyn turned ever-so-slightly, revealing the injured side of her face. The laceration had closed, and the bruise was nearly gone. Either these women knew of some undiscovered herb with exceptional healing powers, or that salve was infused with witchcraft too.

“What about the girl?” Morgan asked.

I perked up, adjusting my precarious footing to get a better view of the dining room.

“She’s asleep in the barn,” Gwenlyn answered. “I think yesterday’s ritual wore her out. Do you feel any better?”

“Marginally,” Morgan said. “But that’s not why I was asking. What if we trained her to make rounds with you?”

Gwenlyn propped her chin in her hands. “Do you think that’s a good idea? She’s so young.”

“So were you.”

“Touché. I’ll go get her.”

“No, no,” Morgan said, gesturing for Gwenlyn to relax. “Let her sleep. She worked hard yesterday. She deserves the rest. Here. Have some coffee.”

Morgan waved a hand, and a navy blue mug appeared out of thin air in front of Gwenlyn. Steam rose from the top as I gawked through the window. Gwenlyn made nothing of it and sipped gratefully. The women settled into a comfortable silence, contemplating the early morning mist that blanketed the dead ground outside. I sank beneath the windowsill. If Gwenlyn wasn’t going to lead me to Nora anytime soon, I would find her myself.

14

Unless the Summers coven made a habit of kidnapping teenagers—which at this point I wouldn't entirely put past them—I assumed that the girl Morgan and Gwenlyn had discussed was Nora. More than one aspect of the conversation worried me. First of all, she was sleeping in a damn barn. The peculiar women of the Summers clan couldn’t be bothered to give her a real bedroom. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have the room. From the looks of it, there were only three of them: Morgan, Gwenlyn, and Laurel. The spacious house was sure to have more than one guest room, so what was Nora doing in a barn? Second, they had included Nora in some kind of ritual the day before that she was now required to recover from. These women had not only kidnapped Nora, but they had taken advantage of her as well. I didn’t care what oddities were going on in Yew Hollow. All I knew was that I had to locate Nora and get her the hell out of here.

I sidled around the edge of the house, keeping close to the wall in order to avoid detection. Around the back, a collection of homemade rocking chairs decorated a screened-in portion of the porch. On a nice day—in a world where Yew Hollow wasn’t a town of dead leaves and parched grass—it would be the perfect place to cuddle up and watch the sunrise while sipping hot tea, but the chairs were eerily inert. They rested in stagnant stasis on the porch, bringing the lack of moving air to my attention once again. What was wrong with this place?

I rested beside the porch, crouching down in a bed of what once might have been roses, and surveyed the rest of the yard. The space behind the Summers house was vast. Again, in a prettier universe, it would have been gorgeous. The yard went on for several acres, and a thick line of trees bordered the edge. If they were the usual autumnal colors, the entire property would light up with the undeniable glow of the season. In the distance, a rickety swing set sat in a sparse bed of mulch. Were children here at one point? The woods resumed just behind it, but there was no sight of anything that resembled a barn. I frowned. Perhaps the witches had been referring to some structure closer to town, although I didn’t recall seeing any kind of barn on our way up to the house. Maybe it wasn’t going to be so easy to rescue Nora after all. She could be anywhere. I altered my route, swinging to face the front of the house again. I’d sweep the town for Nora first. Then, if I still couldn’t find her, the Summers coven would have to answer directly to me.

Something caught my eye along the tree line of the woods in the backyard. There was a break in the trees, a footpath that led deeper into the forest. The ground leading up to it looked worn, as though the witches made regular trips along the passageway. Were they hiding something in the deadwoods? My little sister, perhaps? I had to check. The problem was that the only way to the footpath was across the massive backyard. There was no cover along the way. I would be exposed for whatever length of time it took for me to cross to the other side. Good thing I was a runner.

I glanced up at the house. Hopefully, the women inside were too preoccupied with their morning coffee to look out the windows into the backyard. When I saw no sign of watching eyes, I bolted across the lawn at top speed, coaxing my legs into the longest and quickest strides possible. As my backpack bounced on my shoulders, my hood fell off and my hair unraveled like a spool of thread. I grimaced but thundered on, praying that no one noticed the bright spot of red in the otherwise colorless backyard. I didn’t slow my pace until I had cleared the swing set and plunged into the darkness of the surrounding woods. Then I skidded to a stop to catch my breath. Bracing my hands on my knees, I looked around.

The path wound through the splintered trees and continued on out of sight in the murky gloom. The sun had risen, but it wasn’t strong enough to permeate the impenetrable fog that lay upon Yew Hollow like some kind of chemical smoke bomb. The forest was even more disturbing than the deserted town at my back. It absorbed sound and essence. As I tentatively explored the path, my shoes made no noise against the rough fallen leaves and dirt floor. I felt as though I’d journeyed into a void, one that punished and confused its visitors by stripping them of their senses. I pushed forward, following the trail as it twisted and turned, and tried to ignore the uneasiness building in the pit of my stomach. At last, something appeared in the space between the trees. It was a small stable painted brick red. Warm, glowing lights shone through the windows, as though whoever was inside relaxed by candlelight. Hope swelled in my chest, but I stopped myself from sprinting to the door and barging inside. If this was the barn currently serving as Nora’s temporary quarters, I had no guarantee that she was alone inside.

Instead, I peered through the little windowpane set in the humble door. The interior didn’t resemble a traditional barn. There was no moldy hay or smelly horses or grain sacks stacked along the stalls. The structure had been remodeled into a modest apartment. The ground floor sported a full-sized kitchen and living area, while a simple staircase made of strong wood planks led to a cute loft space with a bed and a writing desk. It was warmly decorated. Delicate sconces and periwinkle curtains kept the cold gray light from seeping inside, and if I wasn’t mistaken, the alluring scent of blueberry muffins swept out to meet me on the doorstep. I glanced skyward at the sleeping space, and my heart leapt at the sight of Nora’s long blonde hair.

I knocked gently, but she remained asleep. I tried again with more force. When Nora didn’t stir, my rib cage tightened around my chest. Yes, she had always been a heavy sleeper, but this felt wrong. I reached for the doorknob. It was unlocked. There were only two reasons for Nora to leave herself open to visitors. One, she felt safe enough in the barn to not need the lock. Or two, she had no hope of defending herself against those keeping her captive anyway.

My anxiety mounted as I moved across a cozy rug in front of the couch. The barn was immune to the dampening effects of the surrounding woods. A radio played oldies softly from the corner of the kitchen counter while a timer on the stove counted down the minutes until the muffins were ready. My boots fell heavily on each stair as I made my way to the loft, but Nora’s slumber persisted. She faced away from me, toward the wall. My heart pounded as I sat on the edge of the bed and gently brushed her long hair away from her face.

She was warm. Thank goodness. Her cheeks were pink and her breath was long and steady. She appeared healthy and, more importantly, very much alive. I jostled her shoulder.

“Nora,” I whispered. “Wake up, kiddo.”

She rolled over and rubbed her eyes, gazing sleepily up at me. At first, she didn’t recognize me. Then she threw her arms around my neck. “Kennedy!”

I hugged her, stifling a sigh of relief. “Got your messages.”

She withdrew and leaned against the pillows. Now that she was awake, I saw that she was just as exhausted as Gwenlyn. Her eyes were red and puffy as though she’d cried herself to sleep the previous evening.

“I’m so glad,” she said. “I wasn’t sure it would work.”

“No, you did amazing. I had no idea you were capable of that,” I told her in a hushed tone. There was no one around—to my knowledge—but it felt dangerous to speak above a whisper. I squeezed Nora’s shoulders, noticing that the sleeves of her pajama top extended far past her fingers. “Let’s get you out of here. Do you have a change of clothes?”

“In the dresser.”

The chest of drawers was white with hand painted flower detailing, and like the rest of the barn, it exuded a homey warmth that warred with the concept of Nora’s captivity. I opened the top drawer and drew out a black T-shirt. It was soft with age and featured a tour schedule for Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. I tossed it to Nora.

“Whose are these?” I asked her as she changed out of her oversized pajamas. “Does someone else live here?”

“Morgan used to,” Nora replied. “She’s—”

“The head of the coven,” I finished for her. When she glanced at me in surprise, I shrugged.  “I did some research. Is this real, Nora? Are they—are they really witches?”

Nora nodded as she tugged on a pair of black leggings. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? That’s what we are, Ken. That’s why we have these weird powers.”

I swallowed, unsure of how I felt about this revelation. “I gathered.”

Nora glanced up at me. “You’re freaking out, aren’t you? I can tell. Your eyes do that weird darting thing when you freak out.”

“I’m not freaking out.”

“Mm-hmm. Pass me those boots.”

I stooped to collect a fashionable black pair of heeled booties from the corner of the loft, marveling again at the care the Summers women took of their hostage. Nora looked totally different. Gone were her lush cashmere sweaters and tailored designer jeans. In the old rock n’ roll shirt and dark pants, she looked more like a haphazard punk from the eighties than a wealthy teen in present day. She laced up the boots and gathered her long hair in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. That was different too. Nora never put her hair up. She loved to let it flow along behind her like a pale golden cape.

“What happened, Nora?” I asked her. “The night of the gala. The police found your dress. Your blood—”

Nora shook her head firmly as she stood up from the bed. “Not here.”

I followed her to the ground floor, where she lifted a black leather jacket from the back of the couch and swung it across her shoulders. “But who are these people?” I pressed, trying to ignore the fact that the leather completed Nora’s transformation into a girl that I didn’t seem to know. “Why did they take you?”

“Because I’m the only one that can help them,” Nora answered darkly. She zipped up the jacket, flipped her messy bun out from under the collar, and led me to the door. “Or so it would seem.”

As we emerged into the chilly morning, I squinted against the white glare of the sun through the clouds. “Why didn’t you just leave? It’s not like they’re keeping a close eye on you.”

Nora marched along the footpath toward the main house. “There’s a ward around the entire town. Nothing can pass through it. I tried the very first night they brought me here and I bounced right back. It nearly singed my nose off, but you got through it. I knew you’d find a way—”

“Yeah, about that—”

“I feel bad for them,” she went on as though she hadn’t heard me. “But they kidnapped me, Ken!”

I wasn’t familiar with this version of Nora at all. She was tall and angry and tired. She seemed older too, but not in a good way. It was as though in the time since her disappearance, she had forsaken the last of her innocence. She’d recognized that the world was no good. She reminded me of the woman I’d been just a month ago, a realization far from comforting. I hated the Summers coven for turning her into this. They had stripped my little sister of her unshakeable positivity in less than three whole days.

“I heard something about a ritual,” I mentioned. Nora’s shoulder blades tightened as she hopped over a thorny bramble in her way. “What did they do to you?”

The main house came into view as the footpath widened and the trees thinned. Nora kept to the shadows, circling around the edge of the yard. I followed behind her since she was more familiar with the area than I was, but the forest opened up and we were forced into the uncovered area of the backyard. As soon as I stepped forward, a wave of energy blasted me off my feet. Unprepared, I slammed into the trunk of a tree and toppled to the ground, dazed and disoriented.

“No!” Nora cried.

“Stay out of it,” Gwenlyn’s voice growled from somewhere across the way.

I tried to get to my feet, but the force behind the attack rendered me immobile. Nora stepped in front of me. Her hands shimmered with her rosy glow. Her aura. I’d never seen her like this, wielding her energy offensively. In that past, she’d only used it to heal herself, myself, and the occasional injured animal. It wasn’t just her wardrobe that had changed in the past few days.

“Don’t do this, Nora,” Gwenlyn said in a tired voice. Through my hazy vision, I saw her approaching us at a steady pace, surrounded by her own aura, a sign that her craft was still active. “You don’t understand the danger—”

“You aren’t in any danger,” Nora spat. “She’s my sister.”

Gwenlyn stopped short, one eyebrow raised. “She is?”

“Half-sister,” I managed to get out.

Gwenlyn lowered her hands, and her aura dimmed as she peered down at me. Nora stood firm, planting herself between me and Gwenlyn.

“Who are you exactly?” Gwenlyn demanded.

I glared up at her. “Not sure if you deserve that answer after our lovely introduction.”

She acknowledged this with a shrug that was not apologetic. “I got a vibe off of you,” she said. “A dark one. What I did was instinctive. I had instructions to take you in. Besides, you attacked me back.”

“That was defensive!” I replied hotly.

“Are you going to answer my question or not?” Gwenlyn asked, ignoring my agitation. “What coven are you from? Morgan needs to know.”

Nora’s fingers shimmered pink. “I told you already. We don’t have a coven.”

Gwenlyn’s nose wrinkled as though she couldn’t understand why we were so dim-witted. “Everyone has a coven. It’s your family.”

We stared at her in consternation. I doubted that Dad and Adrienne were a part of mine and Nora’s “coven.”

“What’s your name?” Gwenlyn clarified with an impatient roll of her eyes.

Her index finger curled in a “come here” gesture, and a twinkle of green energy flickered at the tip of it. I felt the answer spilling out of my mouth without my express permission.

“Kennedy,” I said. “Kennedy McGrath.”

Gwenlyn’s lips parted in what almost looked like recognition, but she quickly hid her reaction. “You didn’t know either, did you?”

“Know what?”

“What you are.”

When I didn’t respond, Gwenlyn let out a whistle. “Wow,” she said, wiping her brow. “I’ve never met anyone your age like that. Your sister is kind of understandable. I found out when I was sixteen, but you’ve gone this long?”

Nora shuffled from one bootie to the other. If she knew what Gwenlyn was talking about, she didn’t show it.

“How is it possible?” Gwenlyn murmured, more to herself than to us. “You cast an offensive spell in the square without even thinking about it! And you have some kind of ward around you. My hits should’ve made you vomit your brains up, but you powered through it.”

I tried to stand up, but Gwenlyn’s energy bound me to the dirt. “Look. Gwenlyn, right? I’m not here to cause trouble. I just came to get my sister back.”

Gwenlyn circled around to inspect me from head to toe. “You’ve never trained? No one taught you anything? What about your mother?”

“I don’t have a mother,” I bit back. “Nora and I—”

“Ah, that would explain it,” she interrupted. “Magic travels through the maternal side of the family. What’s your tragic backstory then? Are you an orphan? Abandoned? Parents killed in a tragic car accident?”

“None of the above,” I growled. “Now can you let me up so we can talk about this witchcraft crap like adults?”

“Oh no,” Gwenlyn said, shaking her head. “I’m not taking any chances.”

With a wave of her hand, she cast Nora aside. Nora slid across the grass, responding to Gwenlyn’s green power than her own will. The feeling returned to the lower half of my extremities, but before I remembered how to move, Gwenlyn summoned a pair of handcuffs out of nowhere and clasped my hands together behind my back.

“On your feet,” she said, grunting as she helped me to stand. “It’s time for you to officially meet Morgan.”

15

I stared across the length of the dining room table. Morgan Summers stared back, her cool green eyes narrowed in equal parts suspicion and intrigue. Nora sat on my left-hand side, watching our silent contest, while Gwenlyn leaned against the arch that led into the entryway with her arms crossed like a grumpy sentry. Now that I was inside, it was plain to see that the Summers house had not been built in recent times. The interior design was influenced by a peculiar mix of colonial and gothic looks, but certain clues—like the patterned wallpaper and updated laminate wood flooring—hinted that the witches used their abilities to maintain the house however they saw fit. The strangest thing about the house wasn’t the hodgepodge of interior decorating or the women that resided there but rather the power in the air. I had felt it as soon as Gwenlyn pushed me through the front door, breathing it in like a heavy perfume. It was weirdly energizing, and I swore that I could separate certain “auras” from the mix. Nora’s was easiest to recognize, even though it was the least prominent. Gwenlyn’s hit me like a smack in the face, but maybe that was because she was so adamant about keeping me restrained as we made our way into the dining room. Morgan’s was the strongest yet the most subtle. It spread through the house like a warm blanket. I had a feeling that no matter where you sat or how you adjusted your perception, you felt her in essence.

I rattled the cuffs around my wrists, shuffling in my seat to prevent my hands from pressing uncomfortably against the high-backed dining room chair. “Are these really necessary?”

She tilted one delicate brow. “I’m surprised you haven’t found a way out of them yet.”

“How would I have done that?” I asked. “I’m not a criminal. I’ve never been in handcuffs before. I have no idea how to escape them, and I don’t have the key.”

“You’re a witch,” she reminded me, and I cringed internally. “Release yourself.”

“Is this a test?” I glanced at Nora, who shrugged back. “Because this whole witch thing is new to me. I had no idea.”

“I find that very hard to believe,” Morgan replied. Her fingers traced absentminded patterns on the mahogany tabletop. “You see, Kennedy, when a witch suppresses their own power for so long, there are only two outcomes, neither of which are fun to experience. The first is that your power builds so uncontrollably that when you finally do release it, you do so in a way that is intensely harmful to whoever or whatever may be around you.”

My mind flickered to that moment in Chad’s apartment. That had to the kind of thing Morgan was talking about, but Chad came out of it unscathed. Or had he? I’d never really bothered to go back and check other than to make sure he was still breathing.

“The second,” Morgan went on, “is that you work nonstop to subdue the energy within yourself. While you might succeed for a time, this eventually morphs into your destruction. When a witch bottles all of that power up for such a long period, it festers and darkens. It eats away at your soul. Then, when the witch can no longer withstand such deterioration, she lets everything go, and her power devours her from the inside out.”

My throat constricted as she spoke. Every word haunted me. She had summed up my entire life experience in a matter of minutes. Except for that last part of course. Thanks to Nora, I hadn’t quite reached the point of no return.

“Take Gwenlyn for example.” Morgan indicated the younger woman pouting in the corner of the room. “She came to me roughly ten years ago. She was sixteen, like Nora, and just discovering who she really was. Gwenlyn’s gift is a rare one. She’s a medium, which means that dead souls follow her at every twist and turn in her life—”

“I’m sorry. What now?”

“I can see dead people,” Gwenlyn clarified. “So can Morgan. We’re the only two psychic mediums in the United States, unless there are more witches like you out there who refuse to cooperate with the coven alliance.”

“Alliance? I—” I let that one go. “You can see dead people?”

Morgan thunked a fist on the mahogany tabletop, demanding our attention. The room fell quiet. “Thank you,” Morgan said. “As I was saying, Gwenlyn grew up without knowing what she was. As a result, she spent more time in foster homes and juvenile psychiatric wards than with her own kind.”

Gwenlyn pursed her lips and left her guard post to push through the swinging doors into the kitchen. Though she had been a part of the Summers coven for over a decade, it appeared that certain wounds still stung. I could relate. I’d never known my mother either. It had apparently been a detriment to the both of us.

“The point,” Morgan continued, reclaiming my focus, “is that had Gwenlyn not found us when she did, she might have suffered a crueler fate. What I’d like to know is how you managed to go so long without your craft imploding. Who did you train with if not your mother?”

“No one,” I answered, exasperated. I pointed at Nora. “Unless you count my little sister, but we just started working together about a month ago.”

“A month?” Morgan repeated. “You learned to dismantle a defensive ward of that proportion in a month?”

I jostled the handcuffs again, gritting my teeth as they bit into my skin. “Look, lady. I don’t know how to get this through your head. I don’t know anything about witches or covens or spells or wards, all right? I’m just trying to not blow everything up.”

As if on cue, heat coursed through my arms. The handcuffs lit up orange, like someone had dropped them into a pit of fire, and they vanished in a puff of smoke. I groaned, stretching my arms above my head.

Morgan leaned back in her chair and propped her feet up on the next one over. “See?” she said. “You knew how to free yourself after all.”

I rubbed my sore wrists. “I didn’t do that on purpose.”

“No, witchcraft is mostly instinctive,” Morgan conceded with a nod. “I’ll give you that.” She regarded me from across the table. “So you’re an elemental witch.”

“Sorry?”

Morgan held up a finger to silence me and turned to Nora. “Did you forget about the muffins?” she asked my sister.

Nora glared at her. “I’m not your personal baker.”

“If I recall, you volunteered to make those.”

“Gwenlyn volunteered me.”

“Ah,” Morgan nodded understandingly. “In that case—”

She snapped her fingers, and a pile of steaming blueberry muffins appeared on a doily-lined china plate in the middle of the table. The tops were slightly crispy, but they smelled divine all the same. My stomach rumbled. Morgan helped herself to the first muffin then slid the plate across the table toward me. I turned away.

Morgan rolled her eyes. “They aren’t poisoned.” She seemed to reconsider her statement and turned to Nora. “Are they?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Nora replied sharply. To me, she said, “Go on, Kennedy. You look like you could use one.”

With Nora’s blessing, I took a muffin and bit into it. Either it was the most delicious muffin I had ever tasted or I was just that hungry. Warmth flooded through me as the tart blueberries burst like candy in my mouth. I felt better and stronger immediately, but there was something more to the muffins than butter and sugar. Nora had somehow infused her healing power into the batter.

“Did you—?” I began to ask her. Nora nodded. I took a second bite. “Wow. What else did they teach you?”

Morgan cleared her throat, and I remembered that this was an interrogation, not a sister-bonding culinary experience. I tossed my muffin wrapper across the table. “What’s this about elemental witches? Are there different kinds?”

Morgan gave a dismissive flick of her fingers and the wrapper disappeared. “Yes. Each witch has a specific ability that she shapes her craft around. For instance, your sister is a healer. You, my dear, work with fire.”

I felt a turn in the conversation. Morgan’s tone had transitioned from demanding to educational. “Is that… good?”

“It’s just what you are,” Morgan replied. “An ability isn’t good or bad. How you choose to wield it determines that outcome.”

“Are there other fire witches?”

Morgan nodded and finished off her muffin. The bags around her eyes deflated in response to the healing spell Nora had worked into her baking. “Elemental witches are common. We have a few fire witches in our coven. I would invite you to speak with them, but I’m afraid we’re facing more than a few complications as of late.”

I wrinkled my nose. We would get to the complications later. If Morgan wanted to know about me, then she would have to answer a few of my questions too. “How large is your coven? I thought it was just the three of you here.”

Morgan tilted her head. “You’ve been watching us.”

“Observing,” I corrected. “You did kidnap my sister after all.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t feel comfortable sharing that information with a witch I’m unfamiliar with.”

“Says the woman who stole a teenager from the comfort of her own home for a reason she has yet to explain,” I countered. “I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine. That way we can leap over this annoying stalemate.”

Morgan folded her hands in her lap, relaxing in her seat. “For a witch without a coven, you certainly embody the elements of a clan leader,” she noted. I remained silent, meeting her unblinking stare, and she relented. “Fine. As of this moment, the Summers coven consists of forty-six witches total, not including the seven children who haven’t been fully trained yet.”

“Forty-six?” I repeated. I looked around the empty room. “Where is everyone then?”

“Home,” Morgan answered shortly. “We don’t all live in one house. How did you get through the ward around Yew Hollow?”

“I honestly have no idea. I didn’t even know there was a ward.”

Morgan’s fingers drummed on the table. “It took fifteen witches to build that ward over a period of three days during the waxing moon. No common fire witch should have been able to waltz through it.”

“I don’t know anything about waxing moons or dancing through wards,” I told her. “My car broke down at the Yew Hollow sign so I walked the rest of the way here. That’s the whole story.”

“And yet I still don’t trust you.”

“Right back at you,” I replied. “Which brings me to question number two. Why did you kidnap my little sister?”

Nora straightened up. We hadn’t had the chance to fill each other in on the details of the last few days before Gwenlyn had caught up with us. What had I missed in her life? What had the Summers coven done to her?

“Perhaps you’ve noticed that I don’t appear exactly well,” Morgan said, gesturing to herself as if to indicate her poor health. “It isn’t just me. Our whole coven is likewise affected. Gwenlyn is healthy because she’s not a descendant of the original five, but anyone else with Summers’ blood is currently under the weather. Your sister—” she nodded to Nora across the table “—possesses a healing ability.”

“I know,” I interrupted, scooting closer to Nora to clasp our hands together under the table. “But I saw that salve you used on Gwenlyn’s face earlier. Don’t you have your own healers? Make yourselves better.”

“You speak as if we didn’t already try,” Morgan replied. “We were too sick to heal ourselves. We needed someone outside the Summers coven to help us, someone who wouldn’t fall ill to whatever ails us. Fresh rumors of a young healer with extraordinary powers reached our ears. Nora, for reasons unknown, has exceptional ability. She’s easily ten times stronger than some of the best healers I’ve ever encountered.”

Nora’s fingers tightened on mine.

“What happened that night?” I demanded. “The police found Nora’s dress covered in blood. What did you to her?”

Morgan sighed heavily. “We had to test Nora to determine if the rumors were true, so we sent a security guard to scare her friends away and compelled Nora to stay. The blood was part of an enchantment to throw off anyone who might come looking for her. You only need a drop of it for the spell to work.”

“And the test?”

I couldn’t ignore Nora’s wince.

“Was unpleasant,” Morgan admitted. “But Nora came through unscathed. A feat of excellence, if I do say so myself.”

My chair toppled over, banging loudly against the floor as I detached myself from Nora to rise to my full height. “Did it not occur to you,” I began, planting my palms on the table to look Morgan directly in the eye, “that forcing a sixteen-year-old girl to harm and then subsequently heal herself might classify as both physical and mental abuse?”

“It did indeed, but we had to know—”

“What about Nora’s state of mind?” I thundered. My anger boiled over, dialing the volume of my tirade up to ten. “Or did you not care that you ripped an innocent girl from her life and family? What if she hadn’t been able to heal herself? Would you have let her die?”

“Certain sacrifices—”

I slammed my hand on the table. My aura rocketed out, pulsing through the room and shaking the window panes. “You do not sacrifice a child!”

“Kennedy,” Nora whispered softly.

“No, Nora. It isn’t right!”

“It’s not that. Look around.”

I glanced away from Morgan, who appeared annoyingly collected at the head of the table. A moment later, I understood why. Every witch within a reasonable distance had sensed trouble. Ten to twelve women of various shapes and sizes—all bearing distinctive genetic markings of the Summerses’ bloodline—had silently appeared in the house. They stood in the doorways or half-hidden in the hallway or perched on the stairs. Their auras glowed subtly. Most of them were shades of blue or purple, but the occasional bright yellow or pink stood out too. Their attention was trained on me, and though all of them sported bloodshot eyes and heavy postures, I didn’t doubt their capability to collectively boot me out of Yew Hollow. I backed up, hoping to put a wall behind me, but ended up bumping into another witch instead.

I held up my hands, letting my orange aura extinguish itself. “Easy. I’m not going to do anything rash.”

Gwenlyn had returned from the kitchen, her own aura shimmering as well. “Oh, good. You have a little common sense in you after all.”

I swallowed my retort, staring at each ill witch in turn. “What happened here? I read about Yew Hollow. I thought it was supposed to be some kind of gimmicky tourist trap. Where are the fall festival decorations? The bustling townspeople? The tourists?”

“It’s the off-season,” Gwenlyn answered. Morgan chuckled.

“Bull,” I countered. “Halloween is around the corner. This place should be teeming with out-of-towners. You can’t tell me that no one else lives here.”

“That’s the nature of the problem, isn’t it?” Morgan piped in. “Yew Hollow isn’t meant to be like this. In less than a month, we fell ill, the townspeople scattered, and everything within the district died. This is no occurrence of nature, Kennedy.”

“Then what is it?”

“An attack,” Gwenlyn said gruffly, crossing her arms. “Entire covens don’t suddenly contract the same disease all at once.”

The meaning of the conversation was finally beginning to dawn on me. “You think someone’s done this to you. Another coven or witch.”

Morgan nodded wearily. From behind her, a witch with a lilac essence who bore a remarkable resemblance to Morgan offered the leader of the coven a mug of steaming liquid. As Morgan thanked her, the scents of turmeric and black pepper wafted through the air. After a sip, she looked at Nora. “Darling, there is no doubt in my mind that I owe you the sincerest of apologies,” she said. “I’ve refrained from offering it to you for many reasons. Pride, spite, doubt. Take your pick. I am truly sorry to have caused you pain and to have brought you here to our town against your will, but I would not alter my actions had I the option to turn back time and try again.”

Nora turned her head down and murmured shyly, “I understand.”

I opened my mouth to craft a more appropriate reply, but Morgan silenced me with a sparkly wave of her fingers.

“As for you,” Morgan said as I attempted to overpower whatever hold she had on my vocal chords. “Look around. Look at my family. You claim you’ve come to Yew Hollow for one purpose only: to rescue your sister. You crossed into a world that bends and breaks around the structure of reality in order to save her. In that same vein, do you not understand that I would do anything necessary to save my coven from their suffering?”

I drifted to stand behind Nora’s chair, squeezing her shoulders. Morgan released her hold on my voice. “This was not the way to go about it.”

“You may be right,” Morgan agreed. “But Nora has done wonders for my family. As you can see, she has not been harmed. In addition, she has learned more about the nature of her craft and how to use it in the past three days than in her entire life. We’ve taken quite good care of her, if I do say so myself. We aren’t monsters, Kennedy, so I’ll make you a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

Morgan fixed me with her green-eyed gaze. “Tell no one of your whereabouts. Allow Nora to continue helping us. Assist Gwenlyn in caring for our coven. Do that, and I promise to train you. After all, it beats inevitably blowing yourself up.”

16

The entire coven awaited my reply. The bitter taste of their impatience tinged the air around me, but there was something else too. They were scared. They needed Nora’s healing abilities. The coven would suffer without my little sister, and whatever mysterious illness that plagued them would rage unhindered until it ran its course or killed the entire Summers bloodline. Their fate rested in my decision. Or did it?

“I’m afraid your deal isn’t for me to consider,” I told Morgan. At once, the witches tittered, and the strength of their auras swelled. I raised my voice to be heard over the noise. “Nora is the one you need, but she belongs to herself and no one else. I’m simply her guardian. Any proposition you make is for her to accept or deny.”

Nora tilted her head back to look up at me, eyes wide as if it had never occurred to her that the choice to stay or leave was hers. I pushed aside the collar of her leather jacket to give her thin shoulders a reassuring squeeze. Then I knelt down to speak to her somewhat privately. The witches would overhear no matter what, but in the space between me and my sister, I could almost pretend that we were alone in the room.

“Nora,” I murmured. “I mean it. If you want to go, we’ll go. No questions asked. Dad and Adrienne miss you. If you want to stay—”

Nora looked at her hand-me-down boots.

“I won’t stop you,” I finished. “I know how you are, Nora. You’re so giving and so gentle. It’s no wonder these women want you amongst their midst. Who wouldn’t?”

“Too right,” a woman next to us mumbled. Nora smiled slightly.

“I can already see that you’ve learned so much here,” I told her. “You deserve that. If you really are a witch, you should get the education that you missed out on as a child.”

“What about you?” Nora asked. “Would you stay?”

“I’ll go wherever you go,” I promised her. “I won’t leave you again. We’re in this together.”

“But Mom and Dad—”

“Let me figure that out.”

Nora toyed with the frayed fringe on the sleeves of her jacket. “I think we should stay in Yew Hollow for a little while. Now that you’re here, it feels like everything will be okay. Besides…”

She trailed off. I nudged her knee, encouraging her to continue. “Go on.”

Nora looked up, her eyebrows knit together in a tense line. “I don’t want you to blow yourself up.”

Part of me wanted to laugh at Nora’s concern. No matter what Morgan said, I’d lasted this long controlling my energy on my own. “I have no intention of doing so.”

“Let them help you,” she said quietly. “Please, Ken. If I’m staying to heal them, then the least they can do is teach you to control your magic.”

I suddenly understood Nora’s compulsion to stay in Yew Hollow. It wasn’t just because she felt obligated to help the witches. She was worried about me.

“Nora, you don’t have to stay here for me,” I said. “That wouldn’t be fair. I’ll figure this out on my own—”

Gwenlyn scoffed from the corner of the room but quickly covered it up by faking a series of overdramatic sneezes.

“Bless you,” I growled before returning my attention to Nora. “Don’t let anything pressure you into staying here if you don’t want to. Not them—” I glared around the room at the myriad of witches waiting on Nora’s decision. “—or me. This is your choice, Nora.”

A collective anxiety scattered throughout the coven as Nora deliberated. She glanced around the room, taking each witch’s expression into account. Then she looked across the table at Morgan.

“I’d like to stay,” she announced.

The room didn’t erupt into cheers, but the abrupt release of positive energy from every witch within earshot had a similar effect. It pulsed through me, and an involuntary burst of laughter escape from my lips before I could understand why. Relief spread to every corner as the witches nearest Nora swept her into a group hug. I lost sight of her pale hair as they surrounded her, offering their thanks and wiping tears from their eyes. I retreated from the hubbub, circling away from Nora to let the witches express their gratitude, and found myself framed in the doorway of the kitchen, unsure of where to put myself. Morgan stood from her seat at the head of the table but bypassed the commotion around Nora and strolled toward me instead. For the first time, I took in her full appearance. Though she exuded a superior presence with every step, she became more human to me in that moment. It helped that she was not dressed like any sort of witch I’d imagined as a child. None of them did. There were no pointy hats or long cloaks in the room. Morgan wore harem pants and a shirt for The Cure that made me question if her entire wardrobe consisted purely of band T-shirts. The baggy navy cardigan that she wore over her top lent a comfortable vibe to her. It billowed behind her as she walked, the only piece of clothing that made her look as ethereal as her aura felt.

“Interesting,” she mused, joining me near the kitchen as I supervised Nora’s interaction with the coven.

“What is?” I asked her reluctantly.

She tipped her chin toward Nora. “As soon as your sister arrived here, I understood that she had always been told what to do.”

I glanced at Morgan out of the corner of my eye, watching her speak. Something told me that she was aware of my observation, but she continued on as if she didn’t notice.

“Some children are raised that way,” she said, drawing one side of her cardigan to overlap the other. “To follow a routine and a strict set of rules. It makes it easier on the parents, you see? To raise a child that they consider well-behaved when in fact they’ve simply robbed her of the innate joys that naturally accompany youth.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” I said. “Nora’s childhood was far more cushioned than mine.”

“I didn’t say she was uncared for,” Morgan replied. “Just that she was expected to act a certain way. It’s in everything she does, from her posture to her tone of voice, but there is a subtle hint of rebellion under that posh exterior of hers. I wondered how she’d fostered it. Then you showed up, and I understood immediately.”

She turned sharply toward me. I almost looked away, but the determination in her expression made me hold her gaze.

“I have no reason to trust you, Kennedy,” Morgan said. “There’s no earthly reason you should have been able to pass through our ward. However, you taught that girl the importance of being able to balance structure and freedom. You taught her to make decisions for herself, to weigh the outcomes of her choices rather than to rely on someone else’s word. You allowed her to grow into an individual where her parents would have preferred for her to blend into the masses. She would be a different person without you, and a lesser one at that.”

I snorted at her speech. “I doubt it. I haven’t been the best older sister in recent years.”

“Be that as it may, Nora cares for you more than anyone else in her life. She would die for you.”

“Don’t say that—”

“It’s true,” she went on. “And that is the kind of bond that I honor. It’s the reason I offered you any kind of deal in the first place. Mark my words, Kennedy. If I wanted to keep Nora for my own and decided you were more trouble than you were worth, I would not have hesitated to expel you from Yew Hollow.”

“Wow, thanks.”

Morgan smirked. “You remind me of myself, you know. I didn’t want to be a witch either. I thought that it wasn’t worth the hassle, or the drama, or the ghosts. Ugh.”

I studied the shorter woman, recalling the article I’d read about her, as she reminisced on her past. “What changed?”

She gave me a knowing smile. “Life,” she answered simply, and then she swept past me into the kitchen.

Gwenlyn caught her before she slipped out through the back door. “You know you sound more and more like your mother every day.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Gwenlyn laughed outright as Morgan let herself out on the patio. I watched through the window as she sat in one of the rocking chairs, swaying back and forth, and surveyed the dead land around the house with a forlorn expression. Gwenlyn knocked into my shoulder, and I snagged her by the elbow.

“Hey,” I said to her. “Is it Morgan, as in Morgan Le Fay?”

A zap of energy jolted through my fingers, causing me to yelp and abruptly release the younger woman. She winked and replied, “Not as dumb as you look.”

She joined the throng of witches around Nora. The revelry didn’t fade easily. I watched the small celebration from my secluded position near the kitchen. Nora blended right in. With her rosy pink hue and long blonde hair, it was almost as though she was meant to be a part of the Summers coven all along, while I, as always, stood separate and disjointed from everyone else.

I dodged an arrow of dark green energy, huffing as it changed direction at the last second and grazed my calf. It left a bright red welt on my skin that smarted and stung. I grimaced, heaving for breath, and looked up to find yet another bolt heading my way. I dove out of the way, but not quickly enough to avoid the next burn on my shoulder.

“Enough!” I yelled, flattening myself to the dead earth as the following attack darted across my scalp and ruffled my hair.

“You’re meant to block them,” Gwenlyn called. She lounged on the top step of the front porch, lazily conjuring green fireballs to lob in my direction.

It hadn’t taken long for my “training” to commence. Laurel, who I’d learned was Morgan’s youngest sister, had whisked Nora away to complete healing tasks, which left me to defend myself against Gwenlyn’s biting sarcasm and capable witchcraft on my own. Gwenlyn had not forgotten the solid right hook I’d delivered to her eye that morning, and she took particular glee in exacting her revenge. She tossed bolt after bolt of energy my way, not bothering to conceal a grin every time one of them found its mark.

“You haven’t taught me how,” I reminded her, flicking my sweat-soaked hair over my shoulder. This was not the kind of workout I was used to.

“Wax on, wax off,” she replied carelessly.

“For the love of—”

In the split second between Gwenlyn’s attacks, I tried it her way, mimicking the movement of her fingers. A tiny streak of orange flame launched across the lawn, but it fizzled out before it reached Gwenlyn. Her own energy nipped at my hip, a fierce reminder that she was far more practiced in the art of witchcraft than I was.

“Defense,” she instructed. “Not offense. That comes later.”

“Aren’t you a little young to be my wise and worthy mentor?” I asked, tucking my arms in and rolling over a patch of dry dirt to avoid her next missile before lunging to my feet. “Why can’t I train with Morgan?”

“First of all, the only reason age and knowledge often coincide is because if one uses their time wisely, they are able to acquire said knowledge over several years,” Gwenlyn said. She leaned back on one palm, using the other to keep me on my toes. “You, I’m afraid, have squandered your time. I, on the other hand, have been honing my witchcraft for the past decade with the help of one of the most notorious coven leaders of all time. Age is just a number, pal.”

She hit me square in the chest. I went sprawling to the ground, landing with a grunt in the dirt. A pebble lodged itself in the palm of my hand, digging into the skin. I stayed down, breathing hard, and glared at Gwenlyn. Much to my relief, she lowered her hand and allowed me to recuperate.

“Which brings me to answer your second question,” she continued. “Morgan Summers is without a doubt the strongest and most renowned witch of twenty-first century America. She is far too important and far too busy to take time out of her day to train some no-name witch with no mother and no coven.”

“You really know how to make your words count, don’t you?” I inspected the burn mark on my leg. It wasn’t too bad to look at it, but it itched and stung. “I thought you might be a little more sympathetic to my situation. What about you, huh?”

“I have a coven,” Gwenlyn replied sharply. “They may not be my flesh and blood, but Morgan and her sisters took me in and raised me like one of their own. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. I owe Morgan and her mother my life.”

I blew on the welt to dislodge dirt and dry grass from the wound. “What is with witches and their mothers? Why do you all have mommy issues?”

“Speak for yourself,” Gwenlyn retorted. “And I told you already. Magic is passed down from mother to daughter. Circumstance separated you and your sister from your mother, which is probably why neither one of you ever figured out what you were. Are you ready to try again?”

She summoned her energy in her palm, but I waved her away. “Hold on a minute. Nora knows her mother. Adrienne’s alive and well.”

Gwenlyn seemed confused. “You share a father? Not a mother?”

I nodded. “My mother died in childbirth, and my father remarried. Fifteen years later, they had Nora.”

“So your father cavorted with two different witches?” Gwenlyn asked. “Impressive.”

“My stepmother isn’t a witch,” I told her. I groaned as I pushed myself up from the ground and joined her on the porch. “Not literally anyway. Figuratively, you might have an argument.”

“If she’s Nora’s biological mother, then she’s definitely packing craft,” Gwenlyn said. She wriggled her fingers, and a tall glass of ice water appeared on the porch. When she offered it to me, I accepted gratefully. “I’ve never heard of a human giving birth to a witch.”

I gulped the ice water, savoring its cooling effect on my overheated body. “I’ve known Adrienne my entire life. I think I would’ve noticed if she was mixing potions and casting enchantments.”

“If you say so.”

I lay back on the porch and winced. The splintered wood wasn’t the nicest surface for the multitude of welts on my skin. The sore on my shoulder begged for some kind of soothing antiseptic.

Gwenlyn reached into the front pocket of her tight jeans, extracted a tiny tin of what looked like lip balm, and thrust it toward me. “Here. Rub this into the burns. It’ll numb the pain.”

I uncapped the container. The concoction inside looked similar to the healing salve from earlier except it was pink instead of orange and smelled like aloe vera and roses. I dabbed it on, moaning with relief as a cooling sensation dulled the sting of the burns.

“Thanks,” I said, closing the tin and handing it back to Gwenlyn. “So tell me about Morgan. What’s her deal? Why didn’t she want to be a witch?”

“Who told you that?”

“She did.”

“Oh.” Gwenlyn fiddled with a splinter of wood that had separated from a plank in the porch. “It’s a long story, but the gist of it is that the ability to communicate with the dead is one of the rarest in our world. It also happens to be the hardest to cope with. Mediums before us have gone insane. Dealing with the dead all the time will do that to you.”

“But Morgan was accused of murder,” I said. When Gwenlyn shot a fierce look at me, I added, “I read about it online. Did she really do it?”

“She solved that murder,” Gwenlyn corrected brusquely. “And took down an idiot channeling dark magic in the process.”

“Is that why the yew tree burned down too?”

Gwenlyn shook her head. “Different idiot.”

“Sounds like Yew Hollow’s got quite a history.”

“You have no idea,” she said. “We thought we were in the clear. Ten years of peace. You start to get used to it, you know? You get complacent, and then something comes along to derail everything all over again.”

I gathered my dirty hair and restrained it with a hair tie at the top of my head. “What happened ten years ago? I tried to research it, but there’s hardly any information available about this town anymore. Did your coven do that on purpose? And what’s with this tree anyway?”

Gwenlyn rested her arms on her knees. “Everything starts and ends with the yew tree, Kennedy.”

Her gaze drifted lower, to the necklace around my throat, which had roamed free of my collar during our haphazard training session. I tucked it under my shirt once more.

Gwenlyn stood and dusted her clean palms on the seat of her jeans. “Let’s take a walk.”

17

There was more to the story of Yew Hollow than I could have ever imagined. As Gwenlyn guided me through town, she detailed the events that led up to present day. Some of it I already knew, though I’d gathered that information before fully accepting that witches existed. The Summers coven had moved here from Salem and cast a protection spell over the town. What I didn’t know was that they had sacrificed a witch hunter to do it, a descendant of whom decided to punish Morgan and her family for a series of choices the previous Summerses had made long before any of the current witches were born. Soon after, Morgan’s abilities were tested again, when another imposter raised the dead and threatened to wipe out the entire Summers coven.

“At the time, Morgan’s mother, Cassandra, was the head of the coven,” Gwenlyn explained as we passed the police station and the church on our way to the town square. “She sacrificed herself to become one with the yew tree in order to save the rest of the family, which is why the tree burned down in the first place.”

But Gwenlyn saved the real kicker for last. Morgan was no stranger to death, and it wasn’t just because her ability allowed her to talk to ghosts.

“She died,” Gwenlyn said matter-of-factly. “She got yanked into the otherworld and had to fight her way out. I helped get her back.”

She rolled up the sleeve of her sweater to show me her forearm. There, amongst a myriad of faded crisscrossed blemishes that I recognized as souvenirs from self-harm, a long jagged scar stretched from Gwenlyn’s wrist to the inside of her elbow. It glowed electric blue.

I raised an eyebrow at the strange color. “Do I want to know?”

Gwenlyn shook her sleeve down. “Probably not.”

The yew tree came into view, and although it was barren of leaves, it projected an energy that reminded me of Morgan herself. This, I assumed, was leftover from her mother’s effect. Gwenlyn stepped over one of the stone benches and pressed her cheek to the trunk of the tree, humming contently. I looked away, unsure if I was invading a private moment or not.

I cleared my throat. “So what then? Why the big mystery around Yew Hollow?”

Gwenlyn hoisted herself up to sit in the fork of the tree, gazing fondly up at the sad, droopy branches. “As you can imagine, Morgan gained a bit of notoriety when she got back from the dead. No one’s ever done that before, not without serious repercussions. Naturally, it attracted attention, the kind of attention that we prefer to avoid. Other people sought out Yew Hollow. Weaker witches, petty dark magic users, occultists who fancied themselves intelligent, et cetera. The townspeople were beside themselves, and Morgan ran around like a chicken trying to keep everything under control.”

“Hang on,” I interrupted. “The townspeople knew? Humans, regular humans, knew they were living in a town full of witches, and they just accepted it?”

“They used to,” Gwenlyn replied. “They didn’t have much of a choice. Yew Hollow has and always will belong to the Summers coven, but after the yew tree was reborn, Morgan decided it was better to keep things quiet. She cast an enchantment over the townspeople to make them forget anything magical had ever happened in the area. Our myth returned to exactly that: a myth. The locals thought us eccentric and charming but didn’t remember anything other than the legends, so Yew Hollow kept its history and let the truth slip through the cracks.”

I kicked a pebble down the barren street. “That seems kind of sad.”

“You do what you have to. Most things calmed down after that. The only time we had trouble was if other covens showed up to challenge Morgan.”

“Did that happen often?”

“Often enough to create the alliance,” Gwenlyn answered. “Yet another reason Morgan is so well-known. No one had ever banded so many witches together before. It’s not everyone, of course, but most of the larger covens are with us. You and Nora are plenty of proof that we don’t know about a lot of the smaller ones. Morgan banded the ones that she could, but some wouldn’t agree to band together. You get the gist.”

“Not really.”

“It’s witchcraft history,” Gwenlyn explained. “Morgan made history in more ways than one, so I highly suggest that you don’t test her.”

“I don’t intend to.”

“Good, because she’d annihilate you in a second.”

I planted my hands on my hips as I peered up at her. “As you like to keep reminding me. Can I ask why you’re so hostile toward me? I assume you like Nora, right? You couldn’t not like her. We come from the same family, so what’s with the chip on your shoulder every time you talk to me?”

Gwenlyn looked down her nose at me but didn’t reply.

I took a wild guess. “Is it because you have to train me?

She scoffed. “That responsibility would’ve fallen to me anyway, considering the rest of the coven can hardly see straight, let alone educate a newbie.”

“Then what’s the issue?”

“Like I said. Dark vibes.”

I threw up my hands in defeat. “I have no idea what that means.”

“It means that I don’t trust you,” she declared, standing in the tree so that she towered over me. “Even if Morgan’s letting you stay here. Even if I have to train you. Even if Nora’s your sister and she’s the best thing to happen to the coven in a month. I don’t trust you, Kennedy McGrath, because you give me bad vibes.”

I squinted up at her. “Is that a witch thing?”

She leapt down from the tree and landed catlike at my feet. “It’s an instinct thing,” she replied curtly. “Check yourself. Constantly.”

She stalked off down the road that led out of Yew Hollow, toward the point where I’d left Nora’s car. She glanced over her shoulder.

“Well?” she demanded. “Are you coming or not?”

“Oh, was I meant to follow you?” I asked innocently. “Perhaps you should ask nicely.”

In the moment following my smartass remark, I learned my first lesson from Gwenlyn: to never test her. A look of pure snark came over her as her witchcraft wafted out and solidified into a smoky green dragon. Before I could react, the mythical creature crossed the square, growing all the while, and opened its massive mouth. I fell over, crawling away from it, but its maw advanced until all I could see were saber teeth and a forked tongue. My pulse burst as it swallowed me. I closed my eyes at the incoming darkness. Gwenlyn’s laugh rang out, but the dead air of Yew Hollow quickly absorbed the sound. Gingerly, I lifted one eyelid. The monster had vanished, leaving no hint that it had ever existed in the first place.

“That’s what we call a mirage,” Gwenlyn explained, chuckling. “They’re frightening enough but ultimately harmless. We mostly use them as distractions.”

I pressed a hand to my aching chest. “What does a heart attack feel like?”

She rolled her eyes and strolled away. “Get up, McGrath. We have work to do.”

I pushed myself out of the dirt and broke into a jog to catch up with the younger woman. “Can you teach me how to do that? The mirage thing?”

“If you play your cards right,” she replied, looking me up and down. “I don’t really know what I’m working with here. It would be a whole lot easier if you filled me in on what you’ve already figured out on your own.”

I ran my fingers through my hair, combing out sweaty knots. “Not much, I don’t think. It’s always caused me trouble, so I tried to push it down. Nora helped a lot, but we mostly worked on controlling the impulse to set things on fire all the time.”

“Good,” Gwenlyn said. “That’s the first step. You learn the extent of your power first, then apply it to other aspects of witchcraft.”

“How does that work anyway?” I asked her, brimming with curiosity. Now that I knew why my life had been so tumultuous before, I wanted to learn everything I could about my abilities. “You’re a medium, right? But you can do more than communicate with ghosts.”

Gwenlyn nodded. “Every witch has the capability to do all sorts of spells: general, healing, offensive, defensive, et cetera. You’re best at whatever comes along with your specific ability. For instance, we can all whip up a healing salve for a small bruise or even set broken bones, but Nora can fix larger injuries without extra ingredients and in less time. You, I imagine, would be particularly skilled at offensive spells. Between the fire ability and your attitude, that should be a piece of cake.”

I brushed off the comment about my attitude. “But what do you use it for? It’s not like I’ll be fighting off enemy combatants with my fire power anytime soon.”

Gwenlyn smirked. “I used to think that too, but I’ve learned that Yew Hollow is always a good place to pick a fight.” She looked to the nonexistent horizon. The dusty road blended in with the fog and the clouds. “A storm is coming.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can feel it. Let’s hurry up.”

Gwenlyn picked up her pace, and I set my own to match it, the two of us strolling along until we reached the welcome sign. Nora’s car sat untouched right over the border line of the town. I could see the ramp to the interstate. Above us, a straight line divided Yew Hollow’s permanent overcast from the rest of Massachusetts’s sunny autumn day. Gwenlyn stopped short of it, peering upward.

“Man, I miss the sun,” she said dreamily. She was so close, yet the warm rays of light could not breach the invisible barrier to reach her skin. “I could use a tan.”

“Why don’t you leave?” I asked her. “You’re not technically part of the coven, right? You’re free to go whenever you want.”

Gwenlyn glanced sideways at me. “You act like this is a life sentence. Sure, I could go, but those women back there are my family. What kind of piece of crap person would I be if I left them all to suffer?”

“I didn’t think of it that way,” I admitted.

“Clearly.”

“Look, I don’t have family like that,” I told Gwenlyn. “Nora matters the most.”

“If that’s true, you’ll stay in Yew Hollow too,” Gwenlyn said. She gestured toward Nora’s car. “Off you go.”

I looked between her and the welcome sign. “Didn’t you literally just tell me to stay?”

Gwenlyn rolled her eyes. “Walk through the ward, clueless. I want to see this for myself. And don’t get any ideas about running off.”

“As if,” I grumbled. I examined the invisible line between Yew Hollow and the rest of the world. The so-called ward that everyone kept talking about was nowhere in sight. “I guess this ward doesn’t manifest visibly?”

“Depends.”

“On what exactly?”

Gwenlyn stooped down and picked up a rock. Then she cocked her arm back and threw it toward Nora’s car with all of her might. I opened my mouth to scold her, sure that the rock’s trajectory would guarantee a nice crack in the windshield, but midway through its arc, the rock hit a force field with an earsplitting crack. When it ricocheted off the ward, veins of what looked like blue lightning spread along a dome-like pattern, marking the parameters of the witches’ protective spell. The rock landed at my feet, glowing red and black.

“Whoa,” I said, bending to examine the ballistic. Tendrils of smoke curled up around it as if coming in contact with the ward had the same effect as the heat of a volcano. “The witches created this?”

“Before they got too sick,” Gwenlyn confirmed. “I helped too. It’s the strongest ward we’ve ever built. Nothing in, nothing out. Except you.”

I ignored the implication. “What happens if someone tries to pass through it?”

“Ask your sister. She broke her nose the first night she was here in an attempt to escape.”

I rounded on Gwenlyn. “She what?”

She raised her hand in warning. “Relax. She fixed it in five seconds flat. Set it herself and everything, which was downright nauseating to watch by the way.”

“How did you get her through it then?” I demanded. “When you brought her in three nights ago?”

“We built it,” Gwenlyn replied simply, as if I was a little slow not to know this answer to begin with. “We can open a doorway if we need to.”

I decided not to ask whether or not a witch who hadn’t been involved with the creation of the ward would be able to open her own escape hatch into the real world. I might be able to pass freely through the ward—for reasons unknown—but Nora couldn’t. If I found a way to chip a weak spot in it, I could get Nora out of the witches’ grasp. It made me uneasy that I didn’t know what the coven had planned for her. Her safety was more important to me than controlling my energy. My best bet would be to play along in Yew Hollow for a few days, learn the ins and outs of witchcraft, and get Nora home as soon as possible. The two of us could work from there. After all, it wasn’t our responsibility to cure the Summers coven, and we weren’t part of any alliance to hold us accountable.

“What are you waiting for?” Gwenlyn asked. “Cross the ward.”

The rock smoldered on the asphalt. I stared at it apprehensively. “What if the first time I got through was a fluke? How do I know I won’t be incinerated as soon as I come in contact with it?”

“You don’t,” Gwenlyn replied. “And there’s only one way to find out.”

“But—”

“Don’t make me do this, McGrath.”

“Do what—?”

Before I could finish my sentence, Gwenlyn shoved me across the line. I braced myself for impact, but just like the night before, I felt a slight shudder, like wading through shallow pool water, before emerging unharmed in the bright sunshine on the other side of the welcome sign unharmed. A breeze ruffled my hair, chilling me through my damp long-sleeved shirt. Sound returned too. Birds whistled and tweeted, a squirrel tossed acorns from a nearby tree, and engines rumbled from the cars passing by on the distant interstate. Gwenlyn, in the shadow of Yew Hollow’s eternal clouds, gaped at me.

“Are you happy now?” I asked her, spreading my arms and whirling around to indicate my freedom. The jealous curl of her upper lip shouldn’t have pleased me so much. “You’re lucky. If I’d gone up in smoke, I would’ve haunted your ass from here to eternity.”

“Like you’re special enough to be the first,” she spat back. “Get over here.”

I wasn’t through pushing Gwenlyn’s buttons yet. I wandered over to Nora’s car and reclined on the hood, tipping my face up to soak in the sun’s warm light. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said casually. “I quite like it on this side. It’s nice. Lively.” I glanced at the glowering woman across the line and winked.

“If you don’t—”

“What are you going to do?” I challenged her with a grin. “You won’t cross.”

“And you won’t leave,” she retorted. “Not while your sister’s here.”

I lifted my shoulders. I could feel Gwenlyn’s annoyance like a bitter burn to my skin that had nothing to do with the sun. “That’s true, but it won’t stop me from sitting right here and reveling in the fact that you’ve been tasked with the sheer pleasure of babysitting me.”

“Ten seconds,” she warned.

“To what?”

“To get back over the line,” she clarified. “Otherwise, I show you how much I learned from the greatest coven leader of all time. Just because I can’t cross the line doesn’t mean my craft can’t bridge the distance.”

I hadn’t thought of that. “You’re bluffing.”

“Try me.”

I considered it, but Gwenlyn’s easy stance made me nervous. The more relaxed she appeared, the more trouble I usually found myself in. She rubbed her fingertips together as though she was thinking of the most wicked spell in her arsenal to coerce me back to her side. As her craft sparkled to life, I hurriedly slid off the hood of Nora’s car.

“All right, all right,” I said, crossing the line and internally cursing the dry, stale air. “Don’t get all hot and bothered. I don’t suppose there’s a way we can push Nora’s car across the line, is there? My stepmother will kill me if someone nicks it.”

Gwenlyn’s answer was to seize my elbow and march me toward the town square. The experience reminded me of my youth, when I was hauled into the principal’s or headmaster’s office every other day, but I’d never pissed off a temperamental witch before now, so maybe it wasn’t quite the same.

“You like deals, right?” Gwenlyn asked as we passed the yew tree and continued up the hill toward the house.

“I’m hopeless at gambling actually.”

“Whatever,” she replied. “You cut a deal with Morgan, so I’ll cut one with you. I’ll teach you whatever you want. Mirages, protective wards, attack spells, whatever. And in return, you shut up and do what I say. At the end of all this, we can go our separate ways and pretend like we never knew each other.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“McGrath,” she growled, her fingers tightening on my arm.

“Fine,” I conceded. “Tell me your theories then.”

“What theories?”

“About why I can pass through the ward.” I held out my arms to show off the fact that the witches’ boundary had no effect on me. “There’s got to be a reason for it, right? And you said earlier I had a ward around myself as well. What’s that about?”

“Witches can create personal wards,” Gwenlyn explained. She was reluctant to instruct me after my show of immaturity at the welcome sign, but if this deal was going to work, it had to go both ways. “But we do it for battle or if we specifically know that something means us harm. You, on the contrary, appear to always have a shield up. For example, when we fought earlier, you held your ground for as long as you did because my offensive spells were dulled by your defense.”

“And that’s bad?”

“Not exactly,” she answered. “It just shouldn’t be possible. Protective wards take up a lot of energy, so it’s difficult to sustain them for long periods of time. Anyway, that’s my main guess. Technically, your ward shouldn’t cancel out ours, even if it’s of the same defensive nature, so you should understand why you’re such a quandary to us.”

As we approached the Summers house, a group of five or six witches passed us going in the opposite direction. As we crossed paths, the witch at the front of the group—a curvaceous woman with hazel eyes instead of gray and tight curly hair—sneered in Gwenlyn’s direction.

“Wow,” I said to Gwenlyn once they were out of earshot. “Did you curse her cat or something?”

Gwenlyn’s nose wrinkled as though she smelled something foul. “That’s Camryn, one of Morgan’s distant cousins. She was pissed that Morgan became coven leader. She hates me by extension. This whole epidemic thing has given her a reason to stir up more trouble.”

“Why’s that?”

“She’s always been jealous of Morgan,” Gwenlyn answered. “The coven is a unit, but there’s no denying that some witches are superior to others. Morgan’s immediate family is the strongest line. Not everyone is okay with that. Camryn’s taking the illness as an opportunity to instill doubt. She’s vying for a new leader.”

“Herself?” I guessed.

Gwenlyn nodded, her lips set in a grim line. “The coven would be foolish to instate her. She’s vain and inexperienced.”

“Then why would the coven trust her in the first place?”

“People do crazy things when they’re afraid, Kennedy.”

In the front yard, Nora stood in the center of a circle of witches. Laurel, Morgan’s sister, was among them, but I had not yet been introduced to the remaining members of the coven. Nora was barely visible, obscured by a cloud of her rosy aura, tendrils of which danced to connect with the witches around her. It looked like some kind of ultimate healing ritual. The other women’s auras reached out to intertwine with Nora’s until the colors blended in a rainbow of different hues. It was a breathtaking sight to say the least, but it wasn’t until Gwenlyn and I neared the group that I realized something was wrong. Nora’s cheeks were pale, and her collarbone protruded through her skin as she heaved for breath. I broke into a jog, but not quickly enough. Just as I breached the gaggle of witches, she fainted, her legs folding beneath her like a newborn doe.

18

The storm broke as I rushed to Nora’s side, shoving between two witches and accidentally shoulder-checking one of them to the ground. I didn’t register the commotion—the witches’ agitated murmurs at my carelessness or the rolls of thunder from the storm clouds—and knelt beside my sister, carefully propping her head up on my thigh.

“I’m all right,” she muttered, her eyelids fluttering shut as though she didn’t have the strength to keep them open. “Ken, I’m okay.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” I breathed, smoothing Nora’s windswept hair. The air in Yew Hollow may have been dead, but whatever the coven was doing to Nora left her weak and disheveled.

“She’ll be fine,” a voice said.

I looked up. Across the circle, tending to one of the witches that I’d knocked over in my haste to reach Nora—I grimaced with guilt when I realized how much strength I’d used to power through the unsuspecting coven—was a woman that looked remarkably like Morgan. They had the same olive skin tone and honey-tinted brown hair, though this woman’s aura was a smooth lilac rather than Morgan’s solid blue. She helped the other woman to her feet before making her way toward me and Nora.

“Nora used too much of her power,” she explained. She gently prodded the pale skin beneath Nora’s wrist, kneading her bright blue veins as if looking for Nora’s pulse. When she found it, she pressed firmly and sent a lilac hue flowering across Nora’s skin. Nora sucked in a deep breath, her eyes brightening to a healthier glow. “There she is.”

Fat raindrops fell from the sky as the witch guided Nora into a comfortable sitting position. Gwenlyn began to herd the other women inside before they were soaked through. I blinked water out of my eyes, focusing solely on my little sister. Nora searched for my hand, and I gave it to her. Her grip was weak and her skin was cold. I drew on my energy. A bubble of orange light expanded around the three of us. Moisture steamed inside it, drying us out, while the raindrops that made contact with the shield’s exterior hissed and evaporated.

The other witch gazed up at my translucent creation. “Curious. I suppose we should take you with us the next time we go camping.”

“She’s passing out again,” I said, trying not to panic as Nora relaxed in my grip and lay back on the brown grass.

The witch seemed unconcerned. “She needs rest. That’s all.”

“How do you know?”

The witch smiled at me as she massaged Nora’s hands and forearms in her lap. “I admire you. I feel what Gwenlyn feels, of course. There is something inherently odd about you, but I don’t consider it hostile. Then again, I understand the bond between sisters. When it is cared for and fed properly, it is unbreakable.”

Comprehension set it as I met the witch’s eyes and noticed they were the same color as the coven leader’s. “You’re another one of Morgan’s sisters, aren’t you?”

She might have extended a dainty hand for me to shake had she not been so focused on Nora’s recovery. “Yes, I’m Karma. Second eldest of the Summers sisters.”

“How many of there are you?” I grumbled.

A tinkly laugh resonated within the intimate space of our orange bubble. “Four. There’s Malia, whom you haven’t met yet, me, Morgan, and Laurel. Lend me your hand, won’t you? Your energy appears renewable.”

I allowed her to take my hand and place it between hers and Nora’s, observing carefully as she closed her eyes and chanted some kind of psalm in Latin. Before long, the weather ward flashed around us. I felt a pull in my core and realized that Karma was drawing on my strength to help Nora. I hadn’t thought of that solution before, but then again, I was just beginning to realize I had the option to do so.

“Are you a healer too?” I asked Karma. Color flushed in Nora’s cheeks and her breathing evened out in response to Karma’s spell.

“No,” Karma replied. “My primary talent is more ritualistic. Like yours, it often causes more harm than help, so I’ve spent these many years practicing other crafts to make up for it.”

I stopped myself from pressing her about her ability. As much as I wanted to know what kind of ability was comparable to my own, I didn’t want to overstep my boundaries. “What about the other Summers sisters?” I asked instead. “What are their abilities?”

“Malia can speak to objects,” Karma answered. “And Laurel is one with nature.”

“Do sisters ever share the same ability?”

“Sometimes,” she said vaguely. “Oh, she’s awake.”

Nora stirred, responding to the combined power of mine and Karma’s energies. I smiled down at her as she opened her eyes. “Hey there. Feeling any better?”

Nora nodded wearily, rubbing her temples. “Did you heal me?”

“Kind of,” I said. “I don’t really know how to do that, so Karma helped.”

“Hmm.”

“What happened?” I asked the both of them. “What were you all doing when I got here? Was this another one of these rituals that keep wearing Nora out?”

“Energy sharing,” Nora mumbled. “Like what we’re doing now, but on a grander scale.”

“Except they aren’t sharing with you, Nora,” I grumbled, throwing Karma a dark look. “They’re taking without giving anything back. That’s why you fainted.”

When Karma didn’t reply, I knew I was right. They were using Nora to help themselves, and they didn’t care whether or not my younger sister suffered because of it.

“No more,” I barked at Karma. “I won’t have Nora half-dead because the coven needs a pick-me-up. From now on, I want to be present every time Nora heals someone.”

“That’s impossible—”

“She needs to sleep,” I interrupted. “At least eight hours. Did you do this to her yesterday too?”

“The coven requires attention.”

“She’s sixteen,” I reminded Karma hotly. “Nora requires rest. I’m taking her back to that barn.”

I scooped Nora up from the ground and stood up, the weather ward elongating to accommodate us. She leaned heavily on me as I guided her toward the old swing set, but when she swayed too far, I swept her into my arms and carried her across the yard myself. The poor girl couldn’t even stand, and the Summers coven thought it was perfectly acceptable to stretch her so thin. I was glad I’d arrived in Yew Hollow when I had, since no one else was going to look after my little sister for me. Karma detached herself from the weather ward, lingering in the front yard of the house as we receded into the distance. Like the others, she looked ill, but it was difficult to feel bad for her when she too had taken advantage of Nora. I understood it on a certain level. They were sick and they needed help, but forcing an inexperienced teenager to heal them was crossing a line.

I grunted with the effort of hauling Nora through the woods, doing my best not to stumble as I blindly navigated the uneven terrain. She tucked her forehead into my shoulder, and the heat of her skin alarmed me. She felt feverish. According to Morgan, the mysterious illness of Yew Hollow only targeted women of the Summers coven, but I worried that Nora had somehow contracted it during one of these “healing” rituals. I sagged with relief as the warmly lit barn drifted into view. I hefted Nora over the threshold, set her down on the small sofa in the living room area, and covered her with a crocheted blanket.

I sighed as she dozed off, adjusting her head against the arm of the sofa so that she wouldn’t wake with a crick in her neck. Then I lifted her legs and sat down beneath them, letting her gangly limbs rest over mine. Outside, the rain picked up. It drummed against the roof of the barn, but Nora slept right through it. My eyelids were heavy, so I leaned my head back to rest against the sofa. One day. Not even. This morning, Nora had been missing in action. Now we were both a part of something I felt like I would never truly understand. I marveled at how much life could change in the short span of a few hours. Distance, too. There were roughly two hundred miles between Windsor Falls and Yew Hollow, but I would’ve guessed we were in entirely separate dimensions.

A soft knock on the barn door startled me out of my thoughts. Morgan peeked through the window pane. Rain poured off a bright blue umbrella perched over her shoulder. When she caught my eye, she waved jovially. I gestured for her to come inside out of the rain, and she pushed open the door.

“Phew!” she said, shaking off the shoulders of her raincoat. It was then I noticed that her umbrella wasn’t an umbrella at all but rather a weather ward of her own creation. “You know, I usually hate the rain, but it’s such a welcome reprieve from the last month of steady cloud cover. May I?”

“It’s your house,” I replied. “Or barn or whatever.”

Morgan chuckled, shucked off her wet coat, and bustled off to the kitchen. The stove flared to life as she directed a pot of water onto a burner with a wave of her hand. The fridge flew open and a variety of vegetables soared over to the cutting board, where a sharp knife began to dice them without any apparent guidance. Soon, the barn smelled of poultry seasoning and salty broth, all courtesy of Morgan’s quick culinary witchcraft. As the soup simmered, the woman sank into the chair next to the sofa with a content sigh.

“I always feel like soup is so good for the soul on days like these,” she said, kicking her feet up on the ottoman. “It’s comforting. Are you settling in all right?”

“Define settling in,” I replied. Despite the aromas from the kitchen and Morgan’s lilting voice, Nora remained asleep. I looked at her sadly. “What did you do to her? She’s never this unresponsive.”

Morgan frowned. “I do admit I wish there had been a different way for us to test her, but we all bear scars. Me more than most.”

“Yes, but no one forced you to self-inflict yours.”

Darkness crossed Morgan’s expression. “Don’t trivialize my experiences, Kennedy. You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

“I have an idea,” I retorted.

“Gwenlyn told you then.”

“Some of it. Not sure if I believe it.”

Morgan went to work rolling up the sleeves of her sweater. Beneath the fabric, faded blue tattoos snaked around her skin in archaic patterns and text. It continued all the way up to her shoulders and I assumed around to her back as well.

“Someone had a rebellious phase,” I remarked.

“It’s the sign of an ancient power,” she explained. “One that you can only meet in the world that follows this one. But if that’s not enough for you—”

Morgan turned around and lifted her shirt. A gasp escaped my lips at the sight. A pair of crude angel wings were etched into her shoulder blades. The scars were white and faded, but the raised ropey patterns would never disappear. Her sweater fell back into place, hiding her marred body. Then she pointed to a shiny spot on my forearm, a large patch where the fine hair had never grown back after I’d singed my skin off during one accident or another.

“Like I said, we all bear scars. They tell our stories.”

I tugged my sleeve down over the old injury. “I’d prefer if Nora refrained from starting her own collection until she’s much older, thank you very much.”

Morgan smiled sadly. “And yet fate has brought her to Yew Hollow.”

I scoffed. “Fate? If I recall, you brought her here.”

She leaned back, and the massive cozy armchair swallowed her. “In our world, when we say that everything happens for a reason, we mean it. You’re meant to be here, Kennedy, whether you like it or not, so you might as well make yourself comfortable.”

As if to make her point clear, she conjured another blanket out of thin air. It settled across my shoulders, the warm cotton soft against my cheeks.

“For how long?” I asked her.

Her eyes found mine. “For as long as it takes.”

19

Time seemed arbitrary in Yew Hollow. It passed without conscious thought. Perhaps this was due to the never-changing gray atmosphere that made it difficult to tell whether the sun was rising or setting, but as the days wore on and I adjusted to a new lifestyle, I lost track of how long it had been since Nora and I had arrived in Yew Hollow. Days turned into weeks, and I fell into a pattern that, strangely enough, suited me better than any other I’d attempted to establish during my hectic adult life. Nora and I stayed in the barn, sharing the queen-sized bed in the loft. The witches did not seek after us there, and I suspected that Morgan specifically told them to avoid our little home. The barn, with its warm lighting and cozy interior, became a sanctuary of sorts, a tiny speck of normality in an impossible world. In that respect, mine and Nora’s sisterly interactions went unchanged. I could almost trick myself into thinking that the two of us had moved to Yew Hollow on our own and preferred the quirky townspeople with mysterious powers to the haughty superciliousness of the folks back in Windsor.

The problem with this state of mind was the reality of our daily activities. Nora and I woke every morning and made ourselves breakfast in the barn before heading out to the Summers house to go our separate ways. I mostly trained with Gwenlyn. We spent the first few lessons reading through decrepit leather-bound witchcraft textbooks that smelled like mothballs and cedar wood. I never thought witches would resort to such a standard method of learning, but it turned out that witchcraft theory was an essential part of the process. As it was, I was a late bloomer. The children of the Summers coven—who varied in age from five to thirteen—could recite the list of ingredients needed to concoct healing salves, conduct electrical currents between their fingers, and shoot harmless rays of their craft at each other whilst running hog wild through the house. They took cover behind walls and knocked over furniture as they engaged in the most thrilling games of Sardines that I’d ever witnessed. Rays of jealousy colored my aura as I watched how easily they manipulated their energies. There were six girls and only one boy, the youngest of the children. Lore dictated that he was powerless, and Gwenlyn explained to me that when he reached an acceptable age, he would leave the coven behind to pursue a different lifestyle, as was the norm. There was a distinct shortage of men in the Summers coven, though some of the witches bore signs of participating in relationships. More and more, I felt like that one little boy, doing his best to keep up with the talented girls around him but falling short. This wasn’t necessarily the case, but the fact that I was learning the basics of witchcraft at my age while a pair of ten-year-old twins cranked out enchantments to summon fairies—which actually existed—with an enviable ease was not lost on me.

Gwenlyn did her best to encourage me despite her determined reluctance to get to know me. She kept herself at a distance during our training sessions and avoided personal questions. I established a personal goal to crack her cranky exterior. During our downtime, I studied her closely. She was not always cold and closed off. She was downright charming in the presence of those whom she loved and admired. Her body language shifted and relaxed as soon as she was no longer alone with me. She laughed and grinned and talked to the kids in funny voices, and doubt whispered conspiratorially in the back of my mind that maybe there was a solid reason for Gwenlyn to distrust me. No matter her aversion to me, she had a duty to fulfill at Morgan’s request. She trained me tirelessly and without complaint. Mostly.

Every once in a while, Gwenlyn skipped a day to address some mysterious task or another for Morgan. In her absence, I spent time with substitute teachers. This was how I grew to know more women of the coven personally. Karma taught me the parameters of control. She revealed that she had the power to manipulate people with voodoo dolls, providing me with a demonstration that chilled me to the bone. All she did was toy with a crude figure made of canvas, but the eldest Summers child marched out of the house under Karma’s influence and performed a series of gymnastic routines that she in no way should’ve been capable of. The exhibition was ultimately harmless, but the knowledge of Karma’s abilities set my skin crawling. A few days later, I officially met Malia, Morgan’s eldest sister. She impressed upon me the importance of connection every time I drew on my energy. She too displayed her ability for me, allowing me to “see” into her aura as she accessed the memory of an old coffee mug. The seemingly insignificant ceramic held decades of mornings that belonged to Cassandra, the former coven leader and Morgan’s mother, and I learned more about what shaped the four current Summers sisters in one lesson from Malia than I could ever yank out of Gwenlyn.

Laurel oozed an earthy ethereal lightness no matter what the situation. My experience with her led us to the edge of the ward, where she requested I step to the other side and sit in the fork of a beautiful tree with colorful leaves while she provided me with a lecture on what it meant to be an elemental witch. Since our abilities relied on things that, in a manner of speaking, had minds of their own, our energies were more fickle than others. According to Laurel, it was a matter of mutual respect. She respected the earth—adored and worshipped it even—and I was equally expected to recognize the symbiotic relationship between myself and “Fire.” She guided me through a meditation practice similar to those Nora and I used to do at home. Laurel supplemented the lesson with practical direction, instructing me to summon Fire into the palm of my hands and hold it there for as long as possible. At first, I didn’t grasp the concept and kept burning myself, but after Laurel reminded me that I shouldn’t fight with my own energy, I realized I could adjust the intensity of the Fire. Soon, I grinned down at a tiny flame, grateful for the subtle warmth in the chilly air. When I returned to Yew Hollow’s side of the ward, I brought Laurel a handful of red and orange leaves that I’d collected from the ground. She performed a joyful jig as she accepted them, braiding them into her hair and stuffing the rest into her pockets. I almost laughed at her eccentric appreciation for such a small gesture, but as we walked back to the Summers house and I admired Laurel’s pop of color in the gray town, I thought maybe the gesture wasn’t so insignificant after all.

Other witches of varying health rotated through my fast-paced education. Some were keen to bond with me as surrogate parents, while others blatantly stated their mistrust of me. None of them made exceptions in the quality of my training. Morgan had instructed them to do their best, and they followed their coven leader’s orders. I learned healing enchantments from a young narcoleptic brunette, energy pick-me-ups from an elderly fire witch, protective spells from one of Morgan’s many cousins, and a whole slew of knowledge from the coven in general. Each night, I returned exhausted to the barn, my head swirling with new spells, Latin incantations, and the growing familiarity of the Summers coven’s trademark physical features.

Despite my adamant declaration to supervise all of Nora’s interactions with the coven, I hardly ever saw my little sister. As soon as we arrived at the house in the mornings, a group of witches whisked her away to do their bidding. We caught up with each other in the evenings when we rendezvoused at the barn. According to Nora, she split her time between her own version of training and tending to the witches that were feeling the worst symptoms of the Summerses’ illness. She assured me that the Summerses had taken my warning into account and weren’t working her too hard, but every night she returned to the barn looking wearier than the day before. Though I trusted Nora to be a good judge of her own abilities, I worried from a distance. The circles under Nora’s eyes grew darker, and with every passing day, she resembled the sick witches more and more. One night, I stayed up as she tossed and turned in bed next to me, twisting the duvet into a straight jacket. When I finally woke her, she let out a feral yell and blasted me across the room with a burst of her rosy energy. My head thunked against the opposite wall and I fell, stunned, to sit in a heap on the floor. Upon realizing what she’d done, Nora covered her mouth in horror.

“It’s okay,” I grunted. The force of her hit had knocked the wind out of me, and I spent the first few seconds afterward trying to remember how to breathe again. “I shouldn’t have woken you up. That was my fault.”

Tears leaked from the corners of Nora’s eyes. “Kennedy, I—”

“I know, Nora.”

“I didn’t even know that I could do that.”

“Neither did I.” I gingerly pressed on the muscles of my back, feeling out any possible injuries. I’d be bruised, but nothing felt broken. Nora’s violence astounded me, even if she hadn’t been consciously aware of her actions.

Nora slipped out from under the tangled sheets and padded across the wood floor. “I can help.”

My first instinct was to jerk away from her when she reached out to me. Immediately, I recognized my mistake. Nora’s lower lip trembled, and she drew back.

“You’re afraid of me,” she whispered.

“No, of course not.” I took in her bloodshot eyes, her gaunt cheeks, the betrayal in her expression. “I’m sorry. It’s just… I guess now I know what it feels like to be around someone like me.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Nora had always admired me, but she knew I wasn’t referring to my stalwart strength or determination to plod onward no matter how many things I’d screwed up. It was the screwed-up stuff that scared her. The angry fits and uncontrollable rage that plagued me before I’d started learning to control myself. The perpetual loneliness and self-inflicted separation that set me apart from the rest of society. The instinct to lash out in times of stress, even at the people who loved me. Especially at the people who loved me.

Nora turned away from me, but I took her by the shoulder and pulled her into a hug. Her armor fell away and I tensed when she collapsed against my sore body. I murmured soothing words as she broke down and sobbed into my shoulder. At some point, I realized I was speaking in Latin and delivering a calming spell as I rubbed Nora’s back. For all the strife living in Yew Hollow had caused Nora, it seemed to have the opposite effect on me. As the comfort of my spell lulled Nora into a quieter state of being, I kissed her forehead.

“What were you dreaming about?” I asked quietly.

It took her a moment to reply. “What might happen if the coven doesn’t find out what’s making them sick.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She lifted her face to meet my gaze. “It’s bad, Kennedy. It’s really bad.”

Her cheeks were blotchy and red. I wiped away a wayward tear with my thumb. “They’ll figure it out.”

Nora nuzzled into my side. “I think they’re running out of time.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I see the witches every day,” she replied, staring vacantly off into the distance. “They’re all getting worse. When I first got here, our healing rituals would help them cope for a few days, but now it only lasts a few hours. They’re deteriorating at a faster pace. Some of them are bedridden. One of Morgan’s aunts is in a coma.”

“You think this illness did that?”

“What else?” she replied with a sniff and a shrug. “And what’s worse is I think they’re all heading in that direction. Even Morgan has been showing signs of worsening symptoms.”

“She has?”

“She hides it well,” Nora said. “So that she won’t scare the rest of the coven, but I can see it. I can sense it. She’s desperate, Kennedy. She needs answers. That’s what she and Gwenlyn are doing on those days they both disappear. Looking for a solution.”

I absentmindedly stroked Nora’s hair. All this time, I’d been so wrapped up in my education that I hadn’t bothered to notice the downward spiral of the coven’s health. Sure, the witches who served as my temporary instructors didn’t look well, but it was hard to believe that so many of them had fallen prey to the darker side of this baffling sickness. In hindsight, I should’ve been working with Morgan and Gwenlyn to unearth the truth. I didn’t know much, but one more brain on the case couldn’t hurt. That way, everyone got what they wanted. I could speed up the process of finding Morgan’s cure and get Nora away from the rest of the coven before they reduced her to a quivering mess of a girl.

“What does the coven have planned for you tomorrow, Nora?” I asked her. I boosted her from our spot on the floor and led her back to the bed, where I flapped the gnarled bedsheets to straighten them out.

“I’m supposed to go see Alana,” she answered, sniffling as she settled against the pillows. “That’s the witch in a coma.”

“Skip it,” I told her. “We’re going to have a word with Morgan about all of this.”

“I can’t skip it,” Nora said. “I see her every other day. Honestly, I’m afraid she’ll slip away if I don’t.”

I tucked the duvet around Nora. “Fine. Can I come with you?”

Her eyes lit up in the dark. “Will you?”

“Of course.”

“It won’t disrupt your training?”

I waved a hand dismissively. “One day won’t set me back.”

“I would love it if you came,” she said softly.

I smiled, though I was unsure if Nora could see it in the dim room. “Then it’s done.”

In the morning, I stuck to Nora’s side like glue. After her episode, she’d slept like a stone through the rest of the night. To my relief, she appeared in better spirits and health on our morning stroll to the main house. When three or four witches met us in the front yard, all clamoring for Nora’s attention, I pulled her close to my side and announced that she wasn’t available until I had the opportunity to speak with Morgan face-to-face. Then I sat on the swinging bench on the porch with Nora next to me and refused to budge while someone went to fetch the coven leader.

It wasn’t long until Morgan arrived from upstairs. Though the morning dragged on, she wore pajamas and a long robe as though the witches had roused her from bed. She punched open the door to the house and joined us on the porch, shooing away the other witches so that she, Nora, and I could talk privately.

“What is it?” she grumbled, tightening her robe as she leaned against the railing. “We have work to do, and there’s no time to waste.”

“Straight to it then,” I told her. I wrapped one arm firmly around my little sister. “First of all, Nora’s not feeling well, so I insist that she takes it easy for the next few days.”

Morgan pressed the back of her hand to Nora’s forehead. “She does feel a little warm, so I suppose that can be arranged. Next?”

The lack of argument surprised me, but I plowed forward. “Second, I want to help you figure out what’s wrong with the Summerses. Before you protest and insist that I’m not trustworthy, I know I’m not an expert in the world of witchcraft, but it can’t hurt to have another healthy body looking into things.”

Morgan crossed her arms. “I’m inclined to agree with you, Kennedy. The problem is we have no leads.”

“So we’ll find a lead,” I said.

“It’s not that simple.”

“You don’t know Kennedy,” Nora interjected. “She’s well-practiced in a crisis.”

Morgan looked out over the dead expanse of Yew Hollow. In the distance, the spire of the town hall loomed above the tree line. “We’ll see about that. I heard you want to run rounds with Nora today?”

I nodded. “I’d like to know what she’s up to and how she’s spending her energy. Besides, if I’m going to start working with you, I figured I should start by familiarizing myself with the symptoms of this illness.”

Morgan nodded approvingly. “Fine. Nora?”

“Yes?”

“Do what you can. No more. I can’t have you burning yourself out.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Morgan studied me, shivering in the stagnant cold air. I held her gaze, wondering what she was thinking about. She looked away first. “All right then. Get to work. Kennedy, come find me when you’re through with Nora.”

I responded instinctively, as though Morgan was the leader of my coven too. “Yes ma’am.”

20

The other witches lived in a small cluster of homes in a cul-de-sac a little closer to the center of town. A towering hedge separated the circle of houses from the neighboring residences, which were all empty in the wake of Yew Hollow’s fall from favor. Nora filled me in on the details of each section of the Summers family. They were all descendants of one woman and her four daughters who together made up the original Summers coven, but Morgan’s line was the most direct, which was why she and her sisters were so prominently featured within the family tree. Aunts and cousins of varying degrees shared spaces together. Sisters tended to stick with one another, and Morgan’s words about the unbreakable bond between siblings floated to the front of my mind again. Nora explained how each witch was affected by the illness. Symptoms ranged from those of a common cold to a nasty rash to mental instability and finally the dreaded coma. So far, only the witch called Alana had succumbed to the most worrisome stage, though Nora feared others were on their way.

We stopped by each house in order. There was no need to knock, as all of the doors were propped open in anticipation of Nora’s arrival. As I watched her tenderly care for the witches, lending my energy when she needed it, I realized that something had shifted within her. On that first night I’d arrived in Yew Hollow to whisk Nora away, she was perfectly fine with leaving the witches behind. Now she fostered a true liking for them. She spoke in dulcet tones to the healthier witches, reassuring them over the state of their sisters’ and cousins’ health. The sick witches relied on her soothing effect. I could see their relief when Nora walked into the room. Each house was the same. We entered in a cloud of anxiety and left temporary peace of mind in our wake. Nora was the defining factor.

When we arrived at Alana’s house, I felt a taciturn pall in the air as we stepped over the threshold. The little cottage was bright and airy with pure white walls and dark wood floors. If the weather had allowed it, the sun would stream in through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the front room to tickle the collection of indoor plants and succulents decorating every surface. The pots of begonias, aloe, and orchids were in good health. Whatever plagued the rest of Yew Hollow hadn’t reached this particular room, and I took a deep steadying breath to savor the feel of fresh air filtering through my lungs. It seemed like a contradiction that the witch with the worst symptoms lived in the house with the best quality of life. Then again, what did I know about the correlation between the two?

Alana lived with two other witches, who were sisters and both in better health. The first, Yvette, bore the Summers’ blonde hair and gray eyes like Malia and Laurel. She too was an elemental witch, but she worked with wind. I’d seen her a few times around the main house, conjuring a breeze to disrupt the stagnant interior. She embraced me as she’d embraced Nora, whispering thanks in my ear for allowing Nora to stay in town. The second witch, Yvonne, observed me and Nora from the corner of the sunroom and refused to speak with me. She deigned to accept one of the fresh juice mixtures that Nora and I had spent the morning infusing with healing spells but wouldn’t let Nora perform an actual healing spell. According to Yvette, she was a truthsayer, able to sense when someone was lying or not. However, Nora and I were both blind spots to her, which was why she preferred to limit her interactions with us.

As Yvette led us to Alana’s bedroom, I mentally prepared myself for what might lay inside. I pictured a hospital bed with collapsible sides, heart rate monitors, IV fluids, and whatever else a woman in a coma needed to stay alive. I forgot that witches didn’t function as normal humans did. They didn’t follow the traditional definitions of Western medicine. When Yvette opened the shades in the bedroom and my eyes adjusted to the lighting, I was taken aback by the scene. Alana lay peacefully in the center of a full-sized bed, breathing evenly on her own. There were no devices to measure her health, and if I didn’t know any better, I would’ve thought she was sleeping. Apprehension settled over me as Nora shifted forward to check on her patient. I lingered in the hallway as Yvette returned to the sunroom, but Nora beckoned me forward.

“Come here, Ken. I want you to meet her.”

I swallowed hard and took a step toward the bed. How did you make the acquaintance of a comatose woman? She couldn’t hear me or see me, so what was the point? Nora drew me toward her until I hovered over Alana’s prone figure. I inhaled sharply at the sight of her. She was beautiful even in stillness, but it was her hair that startled me. Unlike the rest of the Summerses, who sported shades of golden brown or pale blonde, Alana’s hair was bright red. Just like mine. No wonder Nora was particularly worried about the older woman; Alana looked like a more mature version of myself.

“How long has she been like this?” I murmured.

“She was the first one to fall ill,” Nora answered. She held Alana’s hand in her own, and the pink glow of her aura passed between them.

“Why her?”

Nora lifted her shoulders. “We don’t know. That’s part of the problem. No one’s sure why the sickness started, how it spread, or why it’s worse for some witches than others. Do you mind?”

Her palm extended to meet mine, and I took it without thinking. As soon as Nora drew on my energy, siphoning it through herself to feed into Alana, my lungs tightened. At this point in the healing process, the receiving witch usually showed her aura. I was used to the glow by now, and I learned about each member of the coven through the color of her craft. Alana, however, remained dark. I didn’t need anyone to tell me it was a bad sign. I could feel the emptiness in the room, almost as if Alana’s body was there but her soul was not. From the sad look on Nora’s face, she understood this too.

“Is she breathing on her own?” I asked Nora, taking note of the rise and fall of Alana’s chest. She was not hooked up to anything that might assist her in staying alive.

Nora shook her head. “Yvonne and Yvette have enchantments in place that mimic human devices. There’s one for everything. Ventilators, fluids, and all of that.”

“It’s no way to live,” I mumbled. “Trapped in your own body, unable to interact with the world around you.”

“I agree,” Nora said. “But what else are they supposed to do?”

I kept quiet. I’d rather be dead than resigned to a life in bed, but that wasn’t the kind of information Nora needed to hear.

“I can’t do much else for her.” She patted Alana’s hand as she placed it back on the bedspread. Unlike the other witches that Nora had helped, Alana showed no sign of improvement.

“That’s it?” I asked in disbelief. “She doesn’t respond at all to you? How do you know if you’re actually helping or not?”

Nora’s face fell at my phrasing and answered, “I guess I don’t. I just hope that I am. Would you wait with her for a minute? I have to ask Yvette about her progress.”

She went before I could protest about being left alone with a woman that appeared to be on her way out of the world. Alana’s hair splayed out in stark contrast against the white pillow. I wondered what genetic factors had separated her so cleanly from the rest of the Summers’ clan. As far as I’d noticed, none of the other witches sported ginger roots. We were a rare bunch, and in the waning population of Yew Hollow, I hadn’t expected to meet someone else with my hue of hair. Perhaps it was this insignificant coincidence that urged me to place my hand in Alana’s, or maybe it was because I couldn’t ignore the feeling that I shared the small room with a hollow void rather than an actual person. I needed definite proof of Alana’s spiritual existence because her body wasn’t giving me any hints.

As soon as my fingers touched hers, I knew something was wrong. The world disappeared around me in a hot rush of orange and red. I yelled out, sure that I’d been sucked into the same vacant space that Alana’s spirit occupied, but my voice was lost in the roar of the inferno. It was just the two of us, trapped in a swirling fiery vortex. She sat bolt upright and her eyes flew open. Her irises burned white-hot. I tried to yank my hand out of her grip, but she held on fast. Each of her fingers felt like a fire poker, searing my skin. She jerked me forward until there were mere inches between us. Horrified, I stared into her burning eyes.

“You,” she gasped. Her voice was a low, terrifying rasp. “You are the catalyst.”

“I’m—what?”

She clawed at my shoulders, drawing me closer. “Kennedy.”

I backpedaled, but there was no escape from the flames that boxed us in. “How do you know my name? What happened to you?”

“You are the catalyst.”

All at once, the fire extinguished itself, and I rocketed back to the real world. I slumped against the edge of Alana’s bed, drenched in sweat. Her fingers tore violently from mine as she convulsed beneath the sheets. Nora, Yvette, and Yvonne rushed into the bedroom. I tried to get out of the way, but my legs wouldn’t support my weight, so I crawled to the corner of the room. Nora pinned down Alana’s limbs, shouting directions at the other two witches. Even in my state of panic, it was strange to see her in a position of leadership. Yvette and Yvonne followed her instructions without question.

“She’s tachycardic,” Nora reported, pressing her palms to Alana’s chest.

Yvonne whipped around to glare at me. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing!” I insisted.

Nora hushed us. Her aura pulsed as she worked to restore Alana’s normal heart rate. “Enough! Yvonne, I need you here. Kennedy, are you all right?”

I couldn’t answer honestly. I hadn’t even managed to control my rapid breathing. I pinched my nose and closed my eyes, focusing on the pressure in my head rather than the chaotic scene of the bedroom. Then I stumbled up from the floor, knocking over a framed photograph as I steadied myself on the window sill. It fell to the floor and shattered, but I didn’t stop to pick up the broken glass. I had to get out. I left Nora and her assistants, weaving like a drunken sailor down the hallway and into the sunroom. Once outside, I heaved for air. The other witches, sensing a commotion, emerged from their houses and surrounded me. I waved them away as they pelted me for information.

“I can’t breathe,” I declared as their auras wrapped around me in a confusing whirl of colors. “I can’t breathe.”

The women bombarded me with questions, demanding to know what had happened. I rotated around in search of an escape route, but they boxed me in. I let out a yell of frustration, unintentionally creating a ward. It exploded like a firework and expanded to surround me, effectively sending every witch within a five-foot diameter soaring out of my personal space. Once I was free and clear, I broke into a heavy sprint toward the barn, leaving everyone else to sort out the disaster behind me.

Within the privacy of my provisional home, I broke down. My mind had overloaded. I couldn’t process anything more. I didn’t make it up the stairs to the loft. I sank to my knees beside the couch, gasping for breath, then lowered myself to lay across the floor. With my cheek pressed to the soothing wood planks, I let myself run through the gamut of my emotions until I had nothing left.

The purple light of dusk stained the inside of the barn when I awoke. As I came to, I let out a groan. Sleeping on the floor was a mistake. My shoulder and neck were both sore and stiff. I sat up, stretched my arms over my head, and caught sight of Nora, who watched me from the overstuffed armchair in the corner of the room.

“You look awful,” I told her.

Nora’s usually vibrant eyes were dull, and her lips were dry and cracked. “You don’t look so great yourself.”

I tilted my head from one side the other, hoping to loosen up the muscles. “What happened after I left? Is Alana okay?”

“We got her heart rate under control,” Nora said. “And I gave her an extra dose of energy to keep her going.”

I studied her sunken cheeks. “Which it looks like you couldn’t afford.”

“It was either me or her, and I can heal myself.”

The intensity of my own cowardly guilt grew in the face of her resolve. “I’m sorry I ran off,” I told her, bowing my head. “I shouldn’t have left you like that. I should’ve stayed to help.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not.”

She looked sad, even though Alana had pulled through. Her lip trembled as she spoke. “Listen, Ken. Morgan wants us to meet her at the house for dinner. We’re going to talk over what else you can do to help the coven.”

I almost checked my watch before I remembered that the hands didn’t turn within the parameters of Yew Hollow. “Right now?”

“Yeah.”

I heaved myself to my feet with a moan. “Fine. I hope they’re serving something hot and delicious. Are you ready?” As Nora stood, I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and kissed her temple. She was still hot, as though her internal temperature was steadily rising. “You should take tomorrow off, kiddo.”

“Okay.”

I frowned. The Nora I knew didn’t fold so easily. Every time I suggested she rest, she promised never to work beyond her capabilities, but she never agreed to take an entire day off. “Everything all right?”

She nodded. I let it go. Maybe Nora had finally worn herself out to the point of absolute exhaustion. If that was the case, it would be good for her to completely recuperate. I opened the door of the barn for her, and together we set off into the woods. Silence enveloped us. Nora wasn’t particularly chatty, and I didn’t want to tire her further with forced conversation, so I settled for guiding her through the dark forest so that she wouldn’t trip. The lights of the main house appeared through the branches of the trees. The moon had risen, casting luminescent silvery beams through the blanket of clouds. I missed the stars. Nighttime wasn’t the same without them.

“Ken?”

I looked down at Nora as we approached the edge of the woods. “Yes?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m really sorry.”

“For what?”

Before she could reply, the witches descended. As Nora detached herself from my side, auras shot out from every direction. They wrapped around me, binding my arms to my torso and gluing my legs together from inner thigh to ankle. I toppled over like a stiff board, unable to catch myself as I plunged toward the ground. Luckily, a sky blue aura flipped me over at the last second to save me from a broken nose. My back met the dirt with a loud smack, forcing my breath out of my lungs, and I got a look at my attackers. All four of the Summers sisters plus Gwenlyn looked down at me.

“What the hell, Morgan?” I growled. Though the rest of my body was immobile, my mouth still worked.

Morgan snapped her fingers. Her blue craft swelled around us, and the forest vanished, sucked out of existence. In the next instant, the world rebuilt itself, except now we were at the edge of Yew Hollow. I didn’t have time to catch my breath or consider the wonder of magical teleportation. Gwenlyn hefted me from underneath my shoulders and began to drag me toward the borderline.

“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded, struggling to free myself. I bucked my hips, but Morgan’s spell kept me tightly bound.

The Summers sisters stood in a straight line, their hands poised at the ready. Behind them, Nora looked on tearfully. Her aura shimmered too, but it brightened and faded like she was attempting to control a knee-jerk reaction.

“Nora!” I cried out. “Nora, please!”

Nora did nothing as Gwenlyn hauled me over the line. This time, the feeling of passing through water was absent. There was a break in the ward, a doorway that allowed Gwenlyn to carry me through it. As soon as my feet cleared, Gwenlyn dropped me and rushed back to the other side of the welcome sign to join the other witches.

“Now!” Morgan ordered.

Immediately, five different auras exploded from the women, arcing upward in great bolts of lightning. The color spread across the dome that housed the town, reinforcing the ward. Witchcraft lit up the night sky. My knees unstuck from one another, and I scrambled to my feet. The magic settled, but though the auras ebbed away, a layer of twinkling blue lights coated the entire dome like a dusting of stars.

“I’m so sorry, Kennedy,” Nora said again. Her pale skin looked eerily blue through the filter of the shield, as did the faces of the Summers sisters.

I raised a hand to touch the incandescent ward. “Nora, what is this?”

“Don’t!”

The warning came too late. As soon as I made contact with the shimmering lights, the ward blasted me away from Nora’s side of the line. I flew backward, slammed into the grill of Nora’s car, and sank to the ground. Groaning, I clutched my side. If the sharp stabbing pain in my upper torso was any indication, I’d fractured a rib.

“Careful,” Morgan warned. “The defense mechanism grows stronger every time you touch it. Unlike the previous ward, this one was manufactured to specifically prevent you from returning to Yew Hollow.”

“You can’t cast me out,” I growled at her. “We had a deal.”

Morgan’s tone was cool and collected. “I declared our deal null and void. It has come to my attention that you are the root of our coven’s problems. Your interaction with Alana is proof enough of this. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“No, I don’t!” I winced as pain radiated up my side. “Because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The Summers coven has been cursed,” Morgan declared. “This much we already knew. The signs all pointed to the same conclusion. What we didn’t know was who had cursed us.”

“And you think it was me?” I demanded. “I don’t even know how to light a match properly. How could I hex an entire coven?”

Gwenlyn stepped forward. “We know it wasn’t you,” she began, “but you’re the catalyst.”

The words doused me like an icy bath. Alana had told me the same thing mere hours ago. I shook my head. “I don’t understand what that means.”

Gwenlyn opened her mouth, but it was Nora who replied.

“It means someone used you to get to the coven,” she said in a timid voice. “You may not have set the curse, but something you did activated it.”

Morgan drew invisible lines in the asphalt with the toe of her shoe. “Ever since you arrived in town, the health of my coven has increasingly worsened. At first, I thought to give you the benefit of coincidence, though I should’ve learned by now that coincidences don’t exist.”

“Morgan, I never meant to hurt anyone.”

“I believe you,” she replied calmly. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the circumstance. Believe it or not, I’m doing this for your own protection.”

I scoffed, and my ribs throbbed again. “Really? How do you figure?”

“Because there’s only one way to break a curse like this,” Morgan replied.

I didn’t think it was possible for Nora’s expression to grow even more forlorn, but as her mouth twisted into a worried line, a shiver wracked my spine. “How’s that?”

A beat of loaded silence passed, then Nora’s voice cracked as she answered the question in Morgan’s stead.

“It’s simple,” she said. “Kill the catalyst.”

Many thanks to everyone who read my story!

Writing is the best way I know to express myself, and I’m so glad that you all have rewarded me with the opportunity to share my imagination with you. As an author, I learn and evolve from the input of others, so if you have a spare moment and you enjoyed the story, please leave a short, spoiler-free review of the book. As readers, your personal opinions are often the best references for a writer. Your commentary allows me to further provide you all with fun, engaging material.

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Again, thank you all for diving into mine and Morgan’s world. May we meet again!

All the best,

Alexandria Clarke

Witch Myth Wildfire: Book 2

1

Kennedy

Betrayal was a poison dart. It hit you out of the blue. No warning. No restless anticipation. One moment, everything was fine, and the next, your whole world was falling to pieces. That’s how I felt, my knees buckling underneath me. I was on the wrong side of everything: life, love, and sisterhood. No matter how much effort I put forth, some minuscule detail would come along and ruin my progress. My whole life was a battle, and I couldn’t fight for much longer, especially when my own sister delivered my death sentence.

The ground was cold. It seeped through the knees of my jeans and crept up my legs like a slow plague. My fingers spread out in the dirt, bracing myself, but a gleam of radiant blue light flashed, and I yanked my hand away. The witch’s ward was complete, a massive dome that separated Yew Hollow from the rest of the world like some kind of post-apocalyptic bunker. But the Summers coven wasn’t warding off the end of the world. They were protecting themselves from me.

Six witches watched me from the opposite side of the ward. I had no ties to five of them. Morgan Summers and her eclectic team of sisters and adopted daughter were not women I’d ever expected to meet, but in the time since, I thought we had developed a reluctant respect for each other. Even so, their decision did not affect me as much as the sight of the sixth witch standing with them in solidarity.

“Nora.”

My sixteen-year-old sister’s brilliant green eyes watered. The ward cast a blue tint on her pale face and blonde hair. Her aura, usually a prominent rosy pink, was absent, as though the stress of the situation drove her witchcraft from her very being.

“I’m sorry, Kennedy,” she whispered.

“You tricked me.” The statement tasted bitter on my tongue. Nora was the epitome of good will. We had relied on each other for her entire life, even if I was absent from hers for long chunks at a time. Never in a million years would I have expected her to be dishonest with me, which was exactly what the Summers sisters had counted on.

“It’s to keep you safe,” Nora said, her lip trembling. “Please, Ken—”

I waved her excuses away. “No. You should’ve told me.”

Morgan Summers stepped closer to the ward. She was everything and nothing that I expected one of the most powerful witches in the nation to be. On one hand, her mere presence exuded strength and wisdom. Even outdoors, she filled the space with her energy. On the other, she was a pretty, petite woman wearing a threadbare Travis T-shirt, jeans, untied leather boots, and a bulky overcoat. She didn’t look like the leader of the largest coven of witches in New England.

“Don’t blame your sister for this,” she said, tucking her hands into her pockets. “It was my decision.”

I realized that I was practically kneeling before her, something that made me feel small and insignificant. I pushed myself out of the dirt, rising to my full height. I soared a good six inches over the shorter woman, but somehow she managed to dwarf me, not in size but in attitude.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” I demanded, my voice rough with emotion. “This whole time I’ve been trying to help you—”

“Cut the crap, Kennedy,” Morgan interrupted. “We all know the only reason you ever wanted to help this coven was to get Nora back.”

“You kidnapped her.”

“And she chose to remain here of her own free will,” Morgan shot back.

Fire flared in my fists. Automatically, as if they were of one body and mind, the other witches stepped forward. Morgan’s sisters—Malia, Karma, and Laurel—all glowed with the trademark blue hues of the Summers coven. Gwenlyn Bennett, the odd woman out, shone green and gold. Together, they were a force to be reckoned with, but Morgan stayed their advance with a dismissive gesture.

“Fall back,” she ordered the other women. “She can’t harm me through the ward. In fact, I need the four of you to return to the house. The other witches could use your help now that we’ve finished with the ward.”

Gwenlyn was the first to protest. “But Morgan—”

“Go.”

Before she obeyed Morgan’s command, Gwenlyn threw me one last unreadable look. Then she glanced at Nora, whose cheeks were now stained with tears. As she passed my sister, she squeezed Nora’s shoulder in a gesture of comfort. My throat tightened at the sight. It should have been me reassuring Nora, not the woman that Morgan had assigned to babysit me for the past month and a half.

“Nora,” Morgan began.

“I’m staying.” Nora crossed her arms over her chest and planted her feet. “I agreed to help you, but I’m not a part of your coven. I don’t have to do what you say.”

Morgan’s lips twitched, almost as if she was going to smile but thought better of it. “I was going to ask you to fill Kennedy in on the situation. It’s only fair after all. Sister to sister. Besides, you understand the healing aspect of it better than I do.”

If Nora valued Morgan’s compliment, she didn’t show it. Instead, she stepped as close to the ward as she dared to look up at me through the blinking cerulean shield. “Kennedy. It doesn’t look good for you.”

“I gathered.” Nora frowned at my brusque reply, so I sighed and leveled my tone. “Fine. Tell me what happened. Why am I out here instead of in there protecting you?”

Nora chewed on her bottom lip, as if choosing her words carefully. “Earlier today, when we visited Alana, you connected with her somehow, didn’t you?”

I stiffened, my spine solidifying like an iron rod. The memory of being sucked into Alana’s immaterial, fiery world took over my mind. For a second, I was trapped there again. Alana’s fingernails dug into my skin as she held onto my arms with a vise grip, but was she intentionally trying to keep me in that terrible world with her or was she simply scared to let go?

My silence was enough of a confirmation to Nora. “It’s not a bad thing,” she assured me. “Actually, it’s kind of a relief. It indicates that Alana’s alive in there. She’s fighting against the curse as much as possible. Do you know what her ability is? Perseverance. Yvette and Yvonne told me she used to use her witchcraft to paint or sculpt for hours on end.”

“Seems like the short end of the stick compared to some other abilities,” I replied. Nora’s unusually proficient healing craft was proof enough of that.

“I guess that depends on your own personal opinion,” Nora said. “But for now, Alana’s ability is what’s keeping her heart beating. She wouldn’t have survived this long without it.”

“What’s your point, Nora?” The ward fizzled when I instinctively stepped toward my sister. I swallowed hard, cradling my side. The ward had already bruised a few of my ribs, and I didn’t need another injury to contend with. “What does any of it mean?”

Nora’s eyes honed in to where my palm rested against my torso. She could heal me in a matter of minutes if we weren’t separated. Wisely, the fact remained unspoken. To say it out loud would only emphasize our recent estrangement.

“I know the situation seems dark right now,” Nora said. “I never thought we would be working on this from opposite sides of a fortress, but you have to understand that we’re making progress. As soon as Morgan saw the effect you had on Alana, she realized what kind of curse we were dealing with.”

I stole a glance at the coven leader, who leaned casually against the trunk of a tree while she chipped blue polish from her thumbnail. Her nonchalance didn’t fool me. I knew she was listening in on our conversation.

“Is that true?” I called out to her.

“Call it an epiphany if you will,” Morgan replied, examining her nail beds. “There are records of curses like this in the history books. One dark witch to cast the spell, one catalyst to set the plan in motion, and one way for the victims to escape certain death.”

“Kill the catalyst,” I finished.

“Right you are.”

“And how do you figure that I’m the catalyst?” In Alana’s world of hellfire, she had already told me about the role that I played in the Summerses’ slow decline, but I wanted to hear it from Morgan herself.

Morgan finally looked up. “If you recall from a previous conversation, Alana was the first of our number to fall ill. Her descent into unconsciousness was sudden and unexpected. She bore no symptoms of the first stages of the curse, instead progressing straight to the last phase before death. That alone should have concerned me. It means that Alana is central to our problem.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“For months, we’ve been doing everything in our power to revive Alana,” Morgan answered. “To get through to her, to find some sign that she was going to push through this and make it to the other side. We found nothing. There was no indication that she would survive this. Even exposure to Nora’s healing abilities didn’t cause her to stir. But you—” Morgan pushed off from the tree and swaggered toward the ward. Her eyes scanned me from my head to my shoes, as though X-raying me for hidden secrets. “You march into her room, meet her for the first time ever, and she instantly responds to your presence. Quite violently, I’m told.”

I wasn’t likely to forget the encounter anytime soon. Alana’s convulsions were fresh in my mind, as was the pounding of her overactive heartbeat in my ears. Nora ducked her head. No doubt she had been the one to fill Morgan in on Alana’s condition.

“You have a connection with her,” Morgan continued.

“I don’t even know her.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she countered. “You are both integral elements of this curse. You each serve a purpose. It may seem grim to you now, Kennedy, but the more we know about this curse, the closer we are to thwarting it.”

I glared down at Morgan. On her side of the line, it began to drizzle. The droplets caught the light from the ward, shimmering like iridescent fairies as they pattered to the ground. “And you think that killing me is going to solve all of your problems.”

“I know it would.”

Nora released a barely audible squeak. This was not news to her. Chances were that my little sister knew more about Morgan’s plans than I did. She was privy to information that would never reach my ears.

“But—” Morgan continued, silencing Nora’s tiny protest, “I’m not so hasty to accept this as our first and only option. No longer do I wish to fight violence with violence. With Nora’s help, the coven can hold on a while longer. I hope to buy enough time until we find an alternate solution, one that doesn’t involve sacrificing a good witch to dark magic.”

I spread my arms wide to indicate the sky-high, glimmering shield. “Then why the hell am I out here, huh? I can help you figure this out. You said yourself that I have a connection with Alana. What if we could control my interactions with her? What if—?”

Morgan lifted a finger to cut off my desperate diatribe. “There are two reasons I cannot allow you to return to Yew Hollow. The first is that, quite obviously, you are a detriment to our health. In that sense, you are working in opposition to your sister. I know this is not intentional, as I’m aware of your loyalty to Nora. She has to work twice as hard to combat your effects, which weakens her in turn. Can we agree that this is not ideal?”

Over Morgan’s head, I caught sight of Nora again. Alana’s rescue had cost her. She looked exhausted and frail, as if one solid gust of wind might topple her. Nora was usually unflappable. No rainy day or family argument could hinder her positive energy, but her eyes had lost their luster, and it was partially my fault. She shivered in the rain.

“Agreed.” I jutted my chin toward Nora. “She needs a jacket though, or she’ll be even worse off.” Morgan shook off her overcoat and tossed it to my little sister, who gratefully threaded her arms through the sleeves. “What’s the second reason?”

“If I thought that you would be safe in Yew Hollow,” she replied, “I would consider allowing you to remain within the ward, albeit quarantined from the other witches to prevent further harm.”

“But? There’s always a but.”

Morgan braved the dismal weather in her heather gray T-shirt, tucking her arms around her midriff to ward off the cold. “But your incident with Alana spread like high school gossip through the coven. Your position in all of this is no secret. The same applies to this archaic solution. Every witch in Yew Hollow knows that you’re the catalyst.”

“So what?” I said. “You’re the leader of the coven. Why don’t you just tell them to leave me alone until we figure something else out?”

“Oh, that I could.”

A gust of wind swept my auburn hair out of its messy bun. As it cascaded down the nape of my neck, I shivered. It was a reminder that, once again, I was without a home to return to. Once night fell, there would be no place to take shelter from the frigid air. “I don’t understand. They follow your command, don’t they?”

Morgan looked away, hugging herself tightly. “In theory, yes, but for some time now, we’ve been on the brink of a fracture. I don’t suppose you’ve had the pleasure of meeting my lovely cousin Camryn?”

The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I had yet to commit the many faces of the Summers coven to memory. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“She’s trouble,” Morgan said. “In short, she wants to take over as coven leader, and she doesn’t care if her methods of doing so are unsavory. My point is that, while I haven’t called for your capture or death, there are other witches in Yew Hollow that would not falter to kill you, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they attempt to go over my head in order to accomplish their mission.”

This was why Nora had agreed to banishing me beyond the borders of town. She was protecting me. One look at her anxious expression caused me to melt. I should’ve been the one looking out for her, not the other way around.

“I am trying my best to ensure that no one here gets hurt,” Morgan went on. “Please, for your own benefit and for Nora’s, I need you to stay vigilant. The ward should discourage most of Camryn’s supporters from trying anything rash, but we can’t overlook their desperation. Protect yourself, Kennedy. If you encounter any of our witches that aren’t me, Gwenlyn, or my sisters, run. Don’t try to fight them. I’d like to keep Nora’s sister alive for as long as possible.”

The last four words of her statement did not go lost on me. As long as possible. Morgan could stall the coven and search for an alternate solution, but the truth of the matter found its way through the shimmering blue shield. Morgan didn’t expect to unearth another way to break the curse. She expected that she would have to kill me.

2

Gwenlyn

I could feel a headache coming on as I followed Malia, Karma, and Laurel back to the Summers house. We trudged along in silence, all too aware of the weight the coven collectively bore on its shoulders. Morgan’s sisters may have been thinking of ways to quell the rebellion that was sure to rise in reaction to our new revelation, but my own mind was otherwise occupied.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Kennedy McGrath. She’d marched into Yew Hollow at exactly the wrong time, greeted me with a punch to the face, and generally showered me with bad vibes like an acid wash. It didn’t help that the untrained witch with no knowledge of her own background had ended up as my responsibility. In addition to helping Morgan break the curse, it was my job to get Kennedy caught up on the ins and outs of witchcraft. It was no easy feat. She was cocky, impatient, and quick to fire. Literally. She was an elemental witch with the ability to harness an inner flame, or she would be once she finally learned to control herself.

The point was that Kennedy and I didn’t get along. We tended to butt heads, despite our efforts to work alongside each other. Nevertheless, dragging her over that line and dumping her outside of Yew Hollow’s perimeter didn’t bring me any kind of catharsis. On the contrary, it did the opposite. When the ward went up and I saw the look on Kennedy’s face when she realized that she had no control over her sister’s fate anymore, invisible ropes cinched tight around my heart. She was annoying, but she didn’t deserve to be separated from the one person that she loved with all of her might. Furthermore, I wasn’t so certain that leaving Kennedy outside the ward was the best idea. As we approached the Summers house, the air grew thick with the troubled auras of the coven. A storm was brewing, one that had nothing to do with the clouds overhead.

“Gwenlyn!”

Nora’s voice echoed across the front lawn, and I fell behind the Summers sisters, grateful for an excuse to postpone my entrance into the hectic household. Nora caught up to me, wearing Morgan’s coat.

“How’s your sister?” I asked.

“She’s mad at me.”

“I suppose that’s to be expected. And Morgan?”

“Not far behind.”

I stopped short of the porch. Through the windows, I could see that the whole coven had gathered. The dining room teemed with bodies, and the sound of their arguing wafted outside. All I wanted was to bypass the chaos, hide in my bedroom, and cast a silencing spell to ignore the bickering. This was coven politics at its finest. The witches would argue for hours on end about how best to separate themselves from the curse, but no resolution would follow the debate.

I jumped when Nora’s fingers made contact with the palm of my hand, but she only meant to lend me a small burst of positive energy. “Sheesh. Warn me before you do that.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Habit. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. You should save your strength. You’re going to need it.”

“Hmm. If you’re fine, why aren’t we going in?”

The kid had a point, but I wasn’t going to admit that to her. Instead, we stood outside in silence. Nora leaned against my shoulder. In Kennedy’s absence, she had already taken to me as her surrogate big sister. I wasn’t sure whether or not I was okay with that, but I would rather hang out with Nora on the front porch for the next few hours than spend it inside with the rest of the coven’s heated tempers. Unfortunately, the universe had other plans for me.

Morgan returned, her T-shirt and hair damp with rain. She clapped me on the shoulder, her frigid fingers grazing the back of my neck, and contemplated the turbulent scene inside the house. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”

We had no choice but to follow her inside. As soon as Morgan pushed open the front door, the witches boxed us into the entryway, each one trying to be heard over her neighbor. Kennedy’s name was thrown around like a nasty swear word. I moved in front of Nora, putting my body between her and the rest of the witches in case someone made the poor decision to try to use her as leverage. She was shaking like a leaf, frightened by the threats and angry yells from the group of women that she had spent so much of her time protecting.

Morgan was in no mood to debate. I recognized the set of her shoulders and threw a ward up around me and Nora in the split second before Morgan released a huge blast of power. Her craft mushroomed through the room, forcing the witches back to clear a space in the entryway. In addition, each and every one of them found herself without a voice. Morgan had momentarily relieved them of the use of their vocal chords, and the silence that fell afterward was a welcome respite to my ears.

Morgan cleared her throat, kicking the door shut behind her. “Now that everyone’s calm, I’d like you all to move into the living room to discuss our options. Gently.”

The coven may have been upset, but none of the witches were audacious enough to ignore Morgan’s request. They shuffled into the dining room, which magically elongated to accommodate the number of bodies, and sat at the table. Nora almost followed them, but I took her by the arm and shook my head. We sat on the steps to the second floor instead, where we had an open escape route through the front door if things went sideways.

As the coven settled down, Morgan took her time in addressing them. She fetched a spare coat from the closet first and draped it over her damp shoulders. The starched collar stood at attention around the back of her neck, making the black jacket look like a cape. The effect gave Morgan the rare appearance of a typical twentieth-century witch, if you could look past the shredded band T-shirt that she sported underneath.

She pushed aside the chair at the head of the table and surveyed the women of her family. By now, the vocal enchantment would have worn off, but the witches knew better than to raise their voices again.

“First of all,” Morgan began. “We will not conduct our meetings like this. It is far from productive. I want open communication between all of us, so long as it does not devolve into insanity. Understood?” A murmur of consent stole through the coven before Morgan went on. “Good. On that note, let’s begin.”

Yvette, one of the witches responsible for taking care of Alana, raised her hand before Morgan could go on. Morgan gestured for her to speak freely.

“Is it true?” she asked. “Is Kennedy the catalyst?”

“Yes,” Morgan confirmed. Her answer was met by rumbling conversation around the room. Beside me, Nora grasped my knee like she needed something solid to hold on to. “But that does not mean we follow the script when it comes to this curse. As of right now, I have no plans to kill Kennedy McGrath.”

Were it not for Morgan’s warning, the room would’ve erupted into chaos once again. Instead, half of the witches looked relieved, as though they were glad not to have to consider homicide in order to survive, while others looked upset or angry, casting vicious sidelong glares at Morgan.

“I want to make one thing very clear,” Morgan said, raising her voice a notch. “Kennedy McGrath did not cast this curse over Yew Hollow. She has been as affected by it as we have, which means that she is also a victim. However, it is obvious that her presence in Yew Hollow was detrimental to our health. She has been cast out, and the ward solidified to specifically protect us against her damaging effects.”

An indignant scoff rose from the back of the room. The witches parted to reveal Morgan’s cousin Camryn. It was impossible to ignore her. She was a voluptuous woman in every sense of the word, from her appearance to her personality. She lounged in her chair, kicking her booted feet up on the dining table as she stole the coven’s attention from Morgan.

“That’s just like you,” she said. Her voice was low and husky, as though she meant to lure a small animal from safety only to devour it whole. “We finally discover the secret to breaking this curse, and you toss it over the county line. Excellent job.”

“You didn’t discover anything,” Karma reminded her hotly. “You were too busy spewing nonsense and recruiting followers to help the rest of us.”

“Easy, sister,” Camryn warned with a wink. “I’ve seen what happens when you lose control of your temper. Let’s avoid another tragic mistake, shall we?”

As Karma’s face turned bright red, Nora whispered in my ear. “What is she talking about?”

I watched through the gaps in the banister as Morgan rested a hand on Karma’s shoulder, steadying her sister. “An incident that’s no longer relevant. It happened when Karma was a teenager, but Camryn will try anything to defame the sisters’ reputations.”

As Camryn smirked, Morgan snapped her fingers to regain the coven’s focus. “Here is my concern, ladies. This curse is one of a dark nature. It’s black magic. Our goal is obviously to reverse it. However, the curse itself is a paradox.”

“Oh, good,” Camryn quipped, reclining with her arms behind her head. “You have some kind of excuse as to why you threw our best shot at surviving out the window.”

“Shut up, Camryn,” Malia growled.

“All bark, Malia.”

“Pay attention,” Morgan snapped, her teeth clicking together like an angry wolf’s. “As I was saying, curses like this one are particularly dangerous. The hex weakens a witch or a coven until they have no choice but to kill the catalyst, but an act of murder is an act of dark magic. Therein lies the problem. Covens lesser than ours have suffered the consequences of committing such a sin, and I will not see the Summerses following the same bleak path.”

“And how do you plan to save us instead?” Camryn asked.

Morgan hesitated. She didn’t have a plan. I knew that much. As much as I hated to admit it, this curse was the perfect way to take out the Summerses coven. Morgan was opposed to any sort of dark magic. Killing Kennedy was a last resort option.

“Further research,” Morgan finally said. “With Nora’s help, we can hold off this illness for a little while longer. I plan on discovering a better alternative to ending this—”

The legs of Camryn’s chair scraped against the weathered floorboards as she stood up. “Enough already. This is bull. You’ve been telling us the same thing for months, Morgan. ‘Stay calm. Wait it out. We’ll find a way.’ We want action and real results. My gut is screaming. I say we kill the catalyst, dark implications be damned. Who is Kennedy McGrath to us anyway? Ever since she arrived in Yew Hollow, things have only gotten worse.”

Nora’s grip on me tightened until I winced. I loosened her fingers from my knee and slipped my hand into hers, but she squeezed so hard that my knuckles turned white.

“Despite your intuitive ability,” Morgan said, “you do not make the final decision for this coven. I do.”

Camryn’s full red lips tweaked upwards in a humorless smile. “I think you’ll find that might change very shortly.”

“This again, Camryn?” Morgan demanded. “Do you remember your first attempt at a coup? It didn’t go so well for you. If this coven’s opinion was more evenly split, I might consider the possibility of accepting your suggestion, but it appears that you only mean to use our unfortunate circumstance as a ploy to boost your own selfish agenda. You have no pull.”

Acid rose in the back of my throat. Weeks ago, Morgan’s words might have been true. Camryn had only managed to convince a fourth of the witches to support her bid for leadership. Since then, the situation had changed. The curse continued to impair the coven, and from a distance, I could see how it might appear that Morgan had not made confident strides in finding a counter spell. About half of the witches in the room—most of whom were on the outer edges of the immediate bloodline—traded knowing glances with each other. One of them looked up at Camryn and nodded firmly.

“Oh no,” I muttered.

“What?” Nora whispered. “Gwenlyn?”

I didn’t have to answer. All at once, Camryn’s supporters stood up from the table. Their number had certainly increased. Camryn had grown her following from eight witches to roughly twenty. Contrary to Morgan’s previous statement, the coven had divided. The opposing witches were calm and quiet, standing with their hands clasped loosely behind their backs to indicate that they meant no harm. This was merely a demonstration. Camryn was playing a smarter game this time around.

Morgan’s jaw clenched at the sight of her own family letting her down, but I could tell that beneath her anger, she struggled with profound sadness. For ten years, Morgan had protected and loved every member of her coven, and half of them repaid the favor by turning their backs on her.

“So this is how it’s going to be,” she said softly.

Camryn lifted her chin. “I’m afraid so.”

Morgan’s eyes flickered toward the staircase, where Nora sat half-hidden behind me, before she spoke to Camryn again. “Then I acknowledge your proposal. Here’s my counter offer. Should the curse progress to the point of no survival, I will order the death of Kennedy McGrath.”

Nora ripped her fingers from mine, tearing down the steps and out through the front door. The coven, in the midst of their division, barely noticed, but Morgan caught my eye. I understood her unspoken order. Nora was my charge now. As Kennedy’s sister, she would not be safe from Camryn’s influence. As I slipped off the stairs and into a winter coat, Morgan continued to speak to the witches.

“Until then,” she said, “Kennedy and her sister remain under my protection. I am still the leader of this coven, and unless an official challenge is made, what I say goes.”

The discussion continued, but the voices faded from my awareness as I let myself outside. To my surprise, the drizzling raindrops had turned into a light flurry of snowflakes. They melted mid-air—it was too early in the season for a heavy snowstorm—but there was something soothing about the snowfall anyway.

I left the hood of my coat down, enjoying the frigid flakes against my warm cheeks. Nora was out of sight already. She and Kennedy had been staying in the renovated barn in the woods behind the house, and it was likely that she had returned there. I tucked my hands into my pockets, tipped my head up toward the night sky, and headed out. Soon, the warm glow of candlelight greeted me through the dark trees, and I knocked politely on the barn door.

Nora appeared teary eyed and sniffling, inching the door open just enough to get a look at her visitor. “Oh, it’s you. Come in, I guess.”

The cozy interior of the barn smelled like cinnamon and cloves. I shook off my coat as Nora drifted off to the kitchen to check on whatever was baking in the oven.

“Morgan had to say that about Kennedy,” I told her. “She doesn’t mean it. Believe me, if there’s another way to end this curse, we’ll find it.”

Nora stared through the window of the oven. “What if there isn’t?”

“There’s gotta be.” I tossed my coat over the back of an armchair and knelt next to Nora. A batch of cupcakes rose under the heat of the burners. “Do they bake faster if you stare at them?”

Nora rewarded me with the faintest hint of a smile. “Coffee?”

“Any chamomile tea? It’s been a long day.”

“Coming up.”

As Nora bustled with the teapot, I remembered our similarities. Neither one of us had grown up knowing that about our heritage. It showed in everyday simplicities, like the fact that Nora set the kettle on the stove to boil rather than using witchcraft to do it.

“Why did you stay?” I asked her. “With the coven, I mean. You were the first one to realize Kennedy’s connection to all of this. You could’ve warned her, but instead you told Morgan straight away. I never expected you to pick our side.”

“It’s not about sides,” Nora replied. She flicked off her oven mitts. “I love Kennedy with all of my heart, and I would do anything to protect her. This was the only way I could think to do that.”

“You knew Morgan wouldn’t immediately kill her.”

“I was counting on it.” She sighed, wiping her forehead with her hand. “Kennedy doesn’t get it. Her only goal is to keep me safe. If she had it her way, she would march me out of Yew Hollow and never look back.”

“And you?”

Nora looked up at me. “I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t leave you all to die. I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel a connection to the Summerses, like I’m meant to be here.”

“That’s a relief.”

“But it doesn’t mean I’m not worried about Kennedy,” Nora went on, pacing from the oven to the sink and back again. “You don’t know her, Gwen. She doesn’t do well on her own. I’m concerned she might do something stupid out there.”

“We’ll check on her frequently,” I promised. “Believe me, I’ve seen your sister in action. She doesn’t break easily—ow!”

A flash of pain radiated up the back of my left leg, beginning at the arch of my foot and traveling all the way to the middle of my thigh. My leg buckled beneath my weight, and I grabbed the kitchen counter to prevent myself from falling over.

“You okay?” Nora asked. Her fingertips glowed with her healing craft, but I waved her away.

“Yeah, yeah. Can I borrow your bathroom?”

“Sure.”

Carefully, I slipped past Nora and into the tiny bathroom opposite the kitchen. Once inside, I rolled up the leg of my pants above my knee, twisted around, and checked the damage. A pure black Lichtenberg figure snaked up my calf. It was a witch’s mark, the leftover power of a casted curse. It wasn’t new. I had acquired it the same day the Summers coven fell ill. The coincidence wasn’t lost on me. Whoever had hexed Yew Hollow wanted me out of commission too. At first, it seemed manageable, contained to the lower half of my leg, but I was horrified to see that it had spread up the back of my thigh. Not a good sign.

The door to the bathroom swung open.

“Hey, Gwenlyn—whoa.”

I hastily yanked my pants back into place, but not before Nora got an eyeful of the ominous black pattern across my skin. “Do you mind?”

“What is that thing?”

“It’s nothing,” I said, taking her by the shoulders and attempting to pilot her out of the bathroom. “Don’t worry about it.”

She stood firm, one eyebrow raised. “It doesn’t look like nothing.”

“Listen, Nora.” I ducked down to look her in the eye. “You can’t tell Morgan about this. She has enough on her plate already without having to worry about me. I can take care of it myself.”

“I don’t think—”

“Please.”

For a long moment, I didn’t think she would agree, but she finally nodded. In the kitchen, the kettle whistled on the stove and the oven timer went off all at once. As Nora turned to tend to her cupcakes, my shoulders sagged in relief. I followed after her, doing my best to ignore the dull ache inching up the back of my thigh.

3

Kennedy

My first thought was that Nora was being selfish. It was a thought brought on by anger, resentment, and years of being second best to my younger sister. It lasted only a moment before I remembered how many times I had left Nora behind. She was dealt the bad hand in our relationship. I wasn’t an easy person to be around, let alone defend, yet Nora had done so to the best of her abilities for as long as I could remember. She was the opposite of selfish, and I tried to remind myself of that. She would never agree to warding me out of Yew Hollow without good reason, but that didn’t make the ache in my chest go away.

I didn’t trust Morgan Summers. Her main goal was to protect those in her own coven. Nora and I were not included in that number. How could I have faith in someone who had abducted my little sister from her own home? In her mind, the decision as to whether I lived or died was in her hands, but I would not go so easily. I owed the Summers coven nothing. Yes, Gwenlyn and some of the other witches had begun to teach me how to control my witchcraft, but I viewed my magical education as a trade-off for Nora’s healing services. If only I could rescue Nora from inside the ward, we could leave the shambles of Yew Hollow behind and start our own coven, just the two of us. Unfortunately, Nora’s moral compass, unlike mine, pointed true north. Her selflessness was both a gift and a curse. She would never leave the witches to their own devices if she though that she could help, which meant I didn’t have a lot of options to consider on my side of the ward. All of my contingency plans required access to Yew Hollow.

I spent the rest of the daylight walking the perimeter of the ward, circling the entire town to search for cracks or weak spots. The problem was that I didn’t know how to spot a flaw in the shield. Every part of it shimmered evenly with the Summerses’ witchcraft, the same color as a glittering ocean beneath the sun. I wondered if mortals could see it. The incandescent dome was far from inconspicuous, rising high above the skyline, but I also knew that Morgan was powerful enough to cast an illusion that would hide it from prying eyes.

When I returned to the spot where the Summerses had evicted me, I kicked a stone on the ground out of frustration. The rock, regrettably, was fixed to the dirt beneath it. An exasperated huff made its way out of me as my toes suffered from the blow through my boots. When I bent over to assess the damage, fuming, the fractured bones in my ribcage screamed for attention. I went down with a pitiful yelp, coming to rest on the cold dirt. Every breath felt like a sharp knife in my lungs. I took shallow sips of air to avoid further upset and gingerly probed my side for the injured ribs.

I had never cast a healing spell on my own before. To my limited knowledge, most witches were able to do so if the injury in question was manageable. Multiple witches could join their energies to treat more severe afflictions. Nora was special. Her ability allowed her to do what other witches could not, like bring people and animals back from near death. I, on the other hand, didn’t even know how to whip up the healing salve that the coven often used to speed along recovery. Gwenlyn taught me the very basics, but in our limited time, we hadn’t had a plethora of opportunities to practice. Nevertheless, I had to try.

It was something of a process to call on my inner fire. For years, I had an ineradicable sense of doom whenever that well of power threatened to unleash itself. It was difficult to banish the idea that something terrible would happen every time I used my witchcraft. According to Morgan, it was just the opposite. I would find more trouble in dampening my fiery orange aura, as my craft would eventually back up on itself and overflow.

Cautiously, I opened the mental valve that allowed me access to my craft. It was always there, smoldering like hot coals in the pit of my stomach. I recalled one of my lessons with the coven. Witches channeled spells through their own ability, which meant that I somehow had to find a way to turn fire into a healing tool. I took a few meditating breaths and closed my eyes, trying to clear my mind of the complications that awaited me on the other side of the ward. Then, with careful deliberation, I called warmth to my fingertips and willed the heat into my damaged bones. At first, nothing happened other than a change in temperature, so I whispered a few words in Latin that I remembered from Gwenlyn’s teachings.

The incantation did the trick. The muscles around my rib cage relaxed and the witchcraft filled in the fractures. I wasn’t strong or experienced enough to completely fix the problem. The soreness would stick around for a few more days, and though the harsh purple bruise on my torso faded slightly, it didn’t disappear. Experimentally, I twisted to either side, testing my range of motion. The injury twinged, but it was no worse than a nuisance. I could run or fight if I needed to.

Dusk transitioned quickly into night, and the temperature dropped to a worrying low. Morgan had been so kind as to drop my duffel bag off with me, but an extra sweater or two wasn’t going to save me from the chill. With a satisfied grin, I realized an easy solution. My inner fire was pretty useful for a thing or two. I collected a pile of kindling at the base of tree, sat down, and focused on lighting it. The kindling sparked and smoked, but no fire appeared despite my best efforts. The healing spell had burned me out. I didn’t have enough energy left to keep myself warm.

“Crap,” I muttered, scattering the kindling across the ground. I’d have to find another way to make it through the night without hypothermia setting in. As if to mock me, snow began to fall, alighting on my hair and nose. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I began to pull loose branches from the surrounding trees to build a makeshift shelter with, but as pine needles and snowflakes rained down on my head, I realized that my efforts were unnecessary. Just through the woods, I could make out the long road that led out of Yew Hollow toward the interstate. I jogged toward it, the condensation of my breath huffing out behind me. As I broke through the trees, I grinned.

Nora’s car sat right where I had left it upon my arrival. It wouldn’t turn on so close to the ward, but the keys were in my duffel bag and the cozy leather interior would be a far better place to sleep than the cold, hard ground. At least I’d have shelter from the snow and the wind.

The expensive sedan chirped weakly as I unlocked it. I layered the backseat with spare clothing then closed the door tightly and hunkered down in my nest, buttoning my coat all the way up to my chin and pulling the hood over my head. I curled up, tucking my knees into my chest, and closed my eyes. There was nothing else to do but sleep out the snowfall. I would try to break through the ward tomorrow. Gradually, I dozed off.

A sharp rap to the window startled me out of my slumber, and I vaulted upward, banging my head against the roof of the car. With no streetlights and the moon obscured by clouds, the night was blacker than the void. Two silhouettes stood outside the sedan. Were it not for the familiar golden-green and rosy pink glows of Gwenlyn and Nora’s auras, I would’ve thought I was being mugged. I kicked open the door. Before I could even stand up, Nora launched herself into my arms.

“What are you doing out here?” I demanded, wrapping my baby sister in a hug. To my relief, she was warm in a borrowed winter coat that I assumed belonged to Gwenlyn, if the way it swamped Nora’s small frame was any indication. “How did you get through the ward?”

Nora drew back, grinning proudly. “Gwenlyn did it.”

Surprised, I looked up at Gwenlyn. She stood with her arms crossed, shoulders hunched against the slight wind, with a grumpy look on her face, as if it wasn’t her idea to traipse through the snowy woods in the middle of the night. “You did?”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Why would you help me?”

“Because your sister is annoying.”

Nora playfully shoved Gwenlyn aside. As she stumbled away, I noticed that she was favoring her right leg. Something had happened to her between the time of my exile and now. She was hiding it too. If she was injured, she should’ve gone to Morgan or even Nora to take care of the problem. I let it go. It was none of my business, and I didn’t want to piss off the one person who’d made it possible for me to see Nora.

Nora coaxed me out of the backseat. “How are your ribs? Do you need me to fix them?”

I tucked her against my side, resting my chin on top of her head. “I did it myself. I don’t understand though. Does Morgan know about this?”

“Are you kidding?” Gwenlyn scoffed. “She would kill me if she knew, so you better keep your mouth shut.”

I gestured to the vacant woods around me. “Who am I going to tell? How did you do it anyway? I looked for weak spots in the ward all afternoon.”

Gwenlyn stamped her feet to stay warm. “Hilarious. Even if you found one, you wouldn’t be able to break through. Or did you miss the part where we told you that the ward was specifically built to keep you out?”

“I didn’t—”

“I’ve done it before,” Gwenlyn went on. “I had to get through the ward in order to find Nora. It’s a tiny passage, barely wider than an air vent. No one will find it.”

“So you’re letting me back in?”

“Hardly.” Gwenlyn stepped into my path, unsteady on her injured leg. “Just because your fruit fly of a sister convinced me to help you doesn’t mean you can come back to Yew Hollow. My assistance only goes so far.”

I looked down at Nora, who smiled mischievously. “What is this all about? The two of you are in cahoots now? The end of the world must be nigh.”

“Gwenlyn agreed to a plan of mine,” Nora explained.

“Reluctantly,” Gwenlyn added.

“I don’t get it,” I said to Gwenlyn. “Aren’t you Morgan’s favorite pet? Why would you risk helping me?”

Gwenlyn turned the collar of her coat up against the gentle snowfall. “Here’s the deal, Kennedy. I don’t like you very much—” Nora elbowed Gwenlyn, who made a noise of protest before continuing. “—but it doesn’t mean I hate you. You got caught up in something that wasn’t your fault. Wrong place, wrong time. Morgan doesn’t have a choice. She has to placate her family. When you’re in charge of that many witches, you have to make some sacrifices, so I don’t blame her for the decision she’s made, even if I don’t agree with it.”

“You don’t agree with her?”

“No,” Gwenlyn replied. “I have my reasons. There’s more to this curse than meets the eye. You aren’t nobody to us, Kennedy. If you were, you wouldn’t be the catalyst. There’s a string between you and the Summers coven. We just have to figure out what it is—”

“And how to sever it,” Nora finished. “If we can discover why you were made the catalyst instead of someone else, we might be able to find another way to break the curse.”

I warily eyed Gwenlyn, who continued to glower at me. “I thought you got bad vibes off of me.”

“I do,” she confirmed. “But I’m willing to bet that ninety percent of them stem from this damn curse.”

“And the other ten percent?”

“Let’s face it. Your personality is less than admirable.”

“Oh, really? Like you’re a ray of sunshine—”

Nora piped in cheerfully. “Actually, I think the two of you are more alike than you think.”

“We are nothing alike!” Gwenlyn and I chorused.

Nora smirked knowingly. “You’re both as stubborn as two rams butting heads.”

I released Nora from my hug. “What do you know? You’re only sixteen.” I looked at Gwenlyn again. “How do we do this then? How do we find out more about this curse?”

“It won’t be easy,” Gwenlyn answered. “I have a feeling we’re going to be spending a lot of time together, and it starts with getting well-acquainted with your past.”

“Great,” I grumbled. “And you’re sure Morgan won’t notice?”

“I’ve been tasked with following Nora around to make sure the rest of the coven doesn’t try anything stupid,” she explained. “Morgan won’t question my absence as long as I’m with Nora.”

“Is Nora in danger?” I demanded.

“No,” Nora replied before Gwenlyn could answer. “She’s exaggerating.”

I tugged Nora closer by the sleeve of her jacket. “Tell me the truth, kid.”

“There are a few witches stirring up trouble,” Gwenlyn said. “It’s probably nothing to worry about. It’s mostly you they want. I’ll keep watch over Nora. Don’t worry.”

I scoffed. “Don’t worry. Sure.”

“Whatever.” Gwenlyn hiked her shoulders up again, turning back toward the ward. “We’ll be back tomorrow to get started. Get some sleep. You’re no use to me if you’re grumpy and exhausted.”

“One more thing,” Nora added. She lifted a backpack that I hadn’t realized she was carrying and dug around inside. Then she drew out a small tea tin and handed it to me.

“What’s this?” I asked, confused.

“It’s a space heater,” she said. “Gwenlyn and I made it. Open the top.”

I flipped back the lid. Inside, a miniature flame danced merrily, flashing back and forth between Gwenlyn’s green aura and Nora’s pink one. The immediate space around me warmed to a cozy degree. It would make my bed in Nora’s car much more tolerable.

“Thanks, kid.”

“No problem.” She gave me the backpack as Gwenlyn waited patiently for us to say our goodbyes. “This is full of snacks and water. See you tomorrow?”

I planted a kiss on her forehead. “Count on it.”

Nora bounded over to Gwenlyn, who draped a protective arm over my little sister’s shoulders. I watched as they retreated to the ward and disappeared into the trees. Then I clambered back into the car, set the open tea tin on the center console, and drifted off to sleep as the duo’s auras cast ethereal patterns across the leather seats.

4

Gwenlyn

My fingers trailed over the petals of wildflowers. Yellows, pinks, and purples tickled my shins as I walked through the knee-high meadow. This was not Yew Hollow. It was Windsor Falls, Nora and Kennedy’s hometown, and it was springtime instead of reality’s winter. The sun warmed my cheeks and shoulders as a bumblebee buzzed by and landed on a tulip. What was I doing here?

Up ahead, a graceful figure danced through the high grass. Her blonde hair was unbound, flowing behind her like a curtain of spun white gold. In one hand, she held a bouquet of strange, cup-shaped, white and pink flowers. Mountain laurels. They left an enticing sweet smell in her wake, and I followed after her to bask in the scent.

“Nora?” I called. “Is that you?”

A light laugh floated on the wind to reach me. The girl skipped onward, and I broke into a jog to catch up.

“Nora, wait!”

I tripped over something hidden in the grass and sprawled to the ground. A thorny vine, out of place in the beautiful bed of wildflowers, caught at my foot. I tugged to free myself, but the vine sprang to life, crawling up my left leg and wrapping itself around my calf.

“Help!” I yelled as the thorns dug into my skin. “Someone help me!”

A shadow came over me, and I recognized the sickly-sweet scent of the mountain laurels, but it was not Nora’s comforting pink aura that arrived with it. It was an immense cloud of pure black witchcraft that stole into my lungs and wrenched my breath away. Clutching at my throat, I looked up into black irises.

I woke with a yelp, the mark on my leg burning as though someone had laid a hot poker to it. The sheets were twisted around me like I had been thrashing in my sleep. I yanked my legs free and rolled up my flannel pajama pants. The witch’s mark glittered like a night sky. Worse yet, it was slowly making its way to the front of my leg. Power pumped through my veins, but I wasn’t sure if I liked it. This witchcraft wasn’t mine to use, and the longer I housed it in my body, the more likely it was to dismantle me. The nightmare was not to be ignored. It was a warning, a message delivered to me from the mark, but it also felt like footsteps to follow, hints that led to the greater mystery of who had cursed the Summers coven. If I contained the mark, I would lose that advantage. In the current Yew Hollow climate, I needed every advantage possible. With witchcraft, dreams were never just dreams. Morgan would know how to interpret mine. Quickly, I threw off the sweat-soaked covers to get dressed.

The Summers house was quiet. There was no one downstairs eating breakfast or making coffee. Morgan and her sisters had most likely already left to deal with the day’s coven business. There was work to be done. Morgan would be traveling from witch to witch in an attempt to put out the fires of rebellion that Camryn had lit. I was supposed to help Nora do her healing rounds. Then we were going to meet Kennedy outside the ward for our first dose of camaraderie, but I needed to find Morgan first.

I left the house through the back, letting the screen door slam against the frame as I jumped down from the porch. The snow from last night had already melted, leaving the ground mushy and wet. My boots squelched through the mud as I headed toward the neighboring cul-de-sac, where the rest of the coven lived in a happy set of smaller houses. For once, the air in Yew Hollow was crisp and new, a welcome effect of the snowfall. Though it bit at my nose and lips, I inhaled it gratefully. It had been too long since the town wasn’t so stale and bitter.

I missed the way Yew Hollow used to be. If everything had been normal, the witches would’ve been out and about, celebrating the first snowfall of the season and excitedly preparing for the winter carnival. Instead, the streets were vacant and quiet as the witches waited indoors for Morgan’s daily visit. When I heard whispered mutters behind one of the quaint houses, I stopped short and peered around the corner for the speakers. Camryn’s curls were unmistakable. I dropped into a crouch, hiding as best as I could behind a dead shrub.

She was speaking to two sisters, Sage and Lana, who had decided to side against Morgan. They were both distant cousins too far removed from the bloodline to warrant any adornments other than the famous last name. Sage and Lana never had any qualms against Morgan before now. They were quiet witches with quiet powers, happy to live under the protection of the Summerses’ birthright. The Summers family in general was content with Morgan’s leadership. It was only at Camryn’s suggestion that they considered Morgan’s inadequacy, which was exactly what made me so wary of Camryn herself.

“Will you challenge her?” Sage asked of Camryn. She spoke in a low voice, her eyes darting along the landscape to check for listening ears.

“Not yet,” Camryn replied. “Last time, Morgan humiliated me. I won’t let that happen again.”

“How do you plan on defeating her?” Lana asked. “She’s Cassandra’s daughter, after all, and she has ten years of experience under her belt. Not to mention all that ancient magic she’s hoarding.”

Camryn silenced Lana with a menacing glare. “Yet another reason not to trust her. Whatever magic she picked up in the otherworld is dirty. Our rules regarding reincarnation are strict for a reason, and yet Morgan defies those too.”

“I’m just saying that she’s strong,” Lana pointed out. “If it comes down to a duel, I’d bet on Morgan.”

In a flash, Camryn pinned Lana to the side of the house, her fingers around the other witch’s throat. I tensed like a spring, ready to interfere if Camryn hurt Lana. In contrast, Sage looked unconcerned about her sister’s situation, an additional hint that not everything was as it should have been. Like most sisters in the coven, Sage and Lana were fiercely protective of each other. If one was in danger, it was not like the other to stand idly by and watch.

“Listen here,” Camryn growled. “It won’t ever come to a duel. Our coven may not be a democracy, but majority rules. If enough witches support the change of power, Morgan will have no choice but to step down. That’s what I need you for.” Camryn stepped closer to Lana, locking eyes with the younger witch. “My abilities are unquestionable. My strength is unwavering. Morgan is no longer the rightful leader of the Summers coven.”

Lana’s eyes glazed over with a blue-gray fog the same color as Camryn’s aura. “Your abilities are unquestionable. Your strength is unwavering. Morgan is no longer the rightful leader of the Summers coven.”

Camryn released her prey and turned to Sage. “Do you need reminding as well? I am the rightful coven leader. Say it.”

“You are the rightful coven leader,” Lana replied, staring into Camryn’s eyes.

“Don’t forget it,” Camryn ordered.

I scoffed then immediately shrank down behind my cover as the sound ricocheted between the two houses and reached Camryn’s ears. She peered like a hawk in either direction, searching for the source, but I pressed myself flat against the ground, holding my breath as she surveyed the area, and her gaze passed right over me.

No wonder Camryn had gathered followers so quickly. She was using her craft to compel the other witches into believing she was better than Morgan. An active spell of such nature would fall under the category of dark magic—anything that interfered with an individual’s sense of free will was considered a misdeed—but Camryn had somehow avoided alerting Morgan or anyone else to her methods. There was only one way to do so: through your trained ability. She was shaping her intuition into something more sinister and avoiding the effects of dark magic in the process.

“Placate Morgan,” Camryn ordered the sisters, who both appeared out of sorts. “We need to pacify her for now. Let her think that we’re working together to find a cure.”

“And the girl?” Sage asked.

Camryn sneered. “No doubt Morgan has assigned her faithful guard dog to snip at the heels of anyone who goes within fifty feet of Nora McGrath.”

I felt a deep sense of satisfaction. Camryn considered me a threat. The thought was comforting. It meant that she wouldn’t make a move on Nora without a plan, but it also meant that I needed to be as vigilant as possible in my protection of the younger girl.

“But she’s our best chance at leverage,” Sage pointed out. “Trade Nora’s life for Kennedy’s. At least one McGrath sister gets to live.”

“Leave the girl alone unless I instruct otherwise,” Camryn ordered. “She is our last resort. I draw the line at harming teenagers. For now, your orders remain simple. Lull Morgan into a false sense of harmony. Let her believe we’re going along with this little research plot of hers. When I decide what our next move will be, we’ll meet again. Understood?”

Sage and Lana murmured words of consent. I shot out of the bushes as the conversation came to a close, ducked around the far side of the house to avoid being seen, and sprinted across the street. Camryn, Sage, and Lana dispersed, each heading in a different direction. Part of me wanted to follow Camryn—she was surely on her way to convince more of Morgan’s cousins to support her instead—but a twinge of pain in my leg reminded me that finding Morgan was my first priority.

As I strolled into the cul-de-sac, I spotted Morgan exiting Alana’s house, waving a temporary goodbye to Yvette and Yvonne. Before I could catch up to her, Nora popped up near my elbow like a jack-in-the-box.

“Morning, Gwen!”

I jumped, wincing as her shrill voice reminded me of my lack of sleep. I wrapped my arm around her neck and mussed her hair. “Stop doing that, or I’ll hex you. How are you?”

She wriggled free easily, which made me think that I wasn’t the first person to put her in a playful headlock. “Better now that I know we’re going to help Kennedy.”

I groaned. “Don’t remind me.”

Nora rearranged her expression in a mock look of shock. “You mean you aren’t excited to dig into my sister’s tragic backstory?” She clapped a hand over her heart. “Say it isn’t so.”

“You’re awfully chipper this morning.”

“I can’t say the same for you,” Nora replied. She tipped her head to the side, analyzing me from head to toe. “You look tired. Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Counted sheep with the best of them.”

“The baggage you’re carrying under your eyes says otherwise.”

I furiously rubbed the tender skin beneath my eyes. My complexion had never been the brightest, but if Nora could tell that I was sleep-deprived, Camryn’s clan might mistake it for weakness.

“I’m fine,” I retorted. “But guess what? I’m moving in with you tonight.”

I thought Nora might be put off by the idea, since the only person she’d ever shared a room with before was her older sister, but her face brightened immediately.

“You are?”

“Don’t get too excited,” I warned. “We won’t be braiding hair or having pillow fights or giving each other manicures. This is for your safety. I don’t like you being all alone in that barn out there in the woods. It’s too easy for Camryn or one of her followers to take advantage of you.”

“Live a little, Gwenlyn,” Nora replied. “You could use a good pillow fight.”

“If I see so much as a hint of feathers heading in my direction, I’ll hex you from here to the moon,” I told her.

Nora smirked at the empty threat. “Fine, but I’m totally doing your nails.”

“No.”

“Just you wait,” she promised, taking my hand. “Come on then. We have a lot of work to do before we go meet Kennedy.”

I held her back. “I need to speak to Morgan first.”

“I’m already late for rounds.” For a sixteen-year-old, Nora was remarkably strong. She yanked at my arm until it threatened to pull out of the socket. It must have been all the horseback riding she did back in Windsor Falls. “You can talk to Morgan later.”

“I’m not sure you understand our respective positions here,” I said, following along behind her as she approached Alana’s house. “I outrank you. Everyone outranks you.”

“Morgan assigned me to heal the witches,” Nora replied. “Morgan assigned you to help me, so what I say goes.”

“In your dreams—”

“You promised.”

I watched Nora’s lip quiver but couldn’t tell whether or not it was an act. I decided to err on the side of caution. “Fine. I promised. What’s our first stop?”

Nora gave a satisfied grin. “Alana. She takes up most of my energy, so it’s best if we work on her first.”

I let Nora lead the way. Morgan had vanished into another house anyway. The dream could wait until later in the day, when there were no other witches around to listen to my report.

Yvette and Yvonne waited on the front porch for us. Yvette nursed a mug of restorative tea, wrapped in a purple shawl, while Yvonne rocked on the swinging bench.

Yvette lifted her mug in greeting. “Morning, ladies.”

“Hi,” Nora said, kissing Yvette on the cheek. Yvonne scowled. “How’s Alana?”

“Same as ever.”

“We’ll be quick,” Nora promised.

Nora and I let ourselves in. Alana’s room was at the very back of the house, past the trio’s collection of various indoor plants, flowers, and succulents. Alana herself was no more than an empty vessel. She slept soundly in her bed, her chest rising and falling too evenly to be considered natural.

“I have a theory,” Nora said, kneeling beside Alana’s bed and taking the witch’s hand in her own. “But if I tell you about it, you have to keep it a secret.”

“What kind of theory?”

Nora looked up at me, emitting a pink haze as she transferred energy to Alana. “Do you feel auras? Does each witch have a distinct touch to you?”

“I suppose,” I replied, not sure where Nora was going with this. “I think of everyone in relation to spices. Morgan reminds me of cinnamon, but Karma is more oregano.”

Nora laughed lightly at the comparison. “I guess that’s one way to look at it. To me, Kennedy and Alana feel the same.”

“So?”

Nora brushed Alana’s hair across the pillow. “So I think Alana is Kennedy’s mother.”

5

Kennedy

Gwenlyn and Nora were late. It was half past twelve, and with every additional minute, I worried that something bad had happened to them. I was also hungry. Nora’s snacks had lasted for the morning, but I was in dire need of hot food, and I had never been particularly gifted at catching or preparing wild game. If Gwenlyn and Nora didn’t show up with a picnic in the next five minutes, I was ready to take down the ward myself to raid the kitchen at the Summers house.

With nothing else to entertain me, I spent my time working out. Jogging around the perimeter of Yew Hollow kept me warm, and it allowed me to further investigate the ward. Whatever trapdoor Gwenlyn had created was well hidden. She was serious about keeping me out of Yew Hollow. I didn’t take offense. Agreeing to help Nora—and me, by extension—was a huge step for Gwenlyn. I knew how difficult it was for her to go against Morgan’s orders.

Finally, near one o’clock, as I lounged on the hood of Nora’s car, I heard the crunch of footsteps through the leaves on my side of the ward. I lifted my head to see Gwenlyn walking toward me, clad in an army green bomber jacket and a black scarf, still favoring one leg over the other.

“Look alive,” she said.

She tossed something across the road, which I caught one-handed. I inspected the object, unwrapping the aluminum foil to check the contents. “Is this a veggie wrap? You couldn’t have sprung for some chicken?”

“We’re a little low on supplies,” Gwenlyn retorted. She joined me on the car and handed me a thermos of hot tea. “You know, you could always walk to the next town over and pick up a few things. You think you deserve chicken? I’ve been eating homemade tofu for months.”

I wrinkled my nose at the thought and bit down into the wrap. “I’d prefer not to stray too far from Nora. Speaking of which, where is my little sister? I thought she was supposed to tag along with you on these little excursions.”

“Morgan needed her,” Gwenlyn answered. “Once-a-day rounds aren’t enough anymore. We’re working around the clock to make sure the coven is healthy enough to keep their hearts beating.”

Lunch tasted bitter on my tongue, but I wasn’t sure it was due to the greens. “And she’s still trying to convince everyone not to kill me?”

“Doing her best.”

I shook my head. “Sometimes I can’t believe that a few months ago, I thought I was merely unlucky.”

Gwenlyn reclined on Nora’s car. Her nose and cheeks were pink from the cold air. “About that. How long have you struggled with controlling your craft?”

“As long as I can remember,” I told her. “Even when I was a kid, I seemed to be lighting things on fire without meaning to.”

“It’s natural to not understand the extent of your strength,” Gwen said. “Orphaned witches aren’t unheard of. Those that grow up without a coven eventually realize that they’re different from ordinary humans. You and I were exceptions. Seeing ghosts made me certifiable until I understood what I was, but you should’ve learned to control yourself. Elemental witches are usually very in tune with themselves.”

“Are you scolding me?” I asked her. “Because I’m not sure what good that will do either of us.”

A gust of wind rustled through the trees, and Gwenlyn ducked her chin into her scarf. “Not at all. I’m pretty sure the reason you had so much trouble with your witchcraft was because you were made the catalyst of this curse at birth.”

I chewed thoughtfully. “Why would someone curse a baby?”

“Good question,” Gwenlyn replied. “Here’s the thing, Kennedy. In order to make you the catalyst, the witch that cast this curse had to have met you in person. Like I said before, there has to be some kind of connection between you and the Summers coven for the curse to have worked. Did anyone in your life make more of an impression that someone else?”

I shrugged, flicking a piece of limp lettuce off of my finger. “I bounced from boarding school to boarding school when I was a kid. Then I dropped out and bounced from city to city. I was never in one place long enough to get to know anybody.”

“Someone knew you long enough to use you as revenge,” she said. “Let’s start from the beginning. What’s the first memory you have as a child?”

Gwenlyn blew into her cupped hands. Thought the snow had stopped, the air was bitingly cold. I slid off the car, reached in through the window for the tea tin, and set it next to Gwenlyn. She nodded her thanks. I finished off the last bite of my vegetable wrap, wishing desperately for a bowl of hot soup, and thought about my childhood.

“All I remember about being a kid was getting into trouble,” I told her. “When I was five, I melted a teacher’s shoes to the floor because he was yelling at me for not paying attention in class. He had burns on the bottom of his feet. They had to take him to the hospital.”

Gwenlyn grimaced. “What about your parents?”

A chill crept up the back of my neck. “You already know part of this story. I never met my mother. She died in childbirth, and my father remarried quickly.”

“To Nora’s mom.”

“Yes,” I said, pursing my lips. “Adrienne.”

“And you don’t like her.”

“She never liked me,” I replied.

“How did she meet your dad?”

“I can’t say I ever bothered to ask.”

Gwenlyn studied me as I crumpled up the leftover aluminum foil into a ball and tossed it into the air. At the top of its arch, I quickly created a small ward beneath it. The ward caught the aluminum, and the ball of trash hovered above us like a tiny recreation of the full moon. I noticed Gwenlyn’s gaze.

“Why are you staring at me?” I asked.

“I’m trying to decide whether or not to tell you something.”

My focus shattered and the aluminum foil dropped from the sky and landed in the damp dirt as I turned to face Gwenlyn. Of course she was withholding information from me. Information was leverage, and once she revealed it, Gwenlyn had one less bargaining chip to control me with. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re keeping things from me.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“That fact has been well-established,” I snapped, feeling my temper rise. “But we’re working together now. I have to trust you, because you’re the only person on the other side of that ward that can keep Nora safe. So why don’t you extend the same courtesy and tell me what you know? It’s my life on the line, remember?”

“Easy,” Gwenlyn warned, pointing to my hands. “You’re getting hot.”

I looked down. My skin glowed orange. Warmth boiled beneath my jacket, heating up my entire body from the inside out. I shook free of my outer layer, letting the frigid air cool off my overflowing witchcraft, but the hair at the nape of my neck was already damp with sweat.

“Wow,” Gwenlyn said. “No wonder you had so much trouble growing up. I can’t imagine what it was like blowing up every time you got the least bit agitated.”

“Don’t change the subject,” I ordered. “Are you going to tell me what you know or not?”

Gwenlyn sighed, blowing a wisp of hair away from her face. “Fine. Do you remember when we first met?”

“Yeah, I punched you in the face.”

“Exactly. It should’ve been easy for me to beat you.” Gwenlyn picked at a hangnail on her thumb. “I’ve been training in offensive spells for ten years, whereas you didn’t know what you really were. Even if you had, I should’ve taken you down. Not to boast, but I’m at a much higher level than most witches.”

I uncapped the thermos Gwenlyn had brought and sniffed the contents. Rose-scented steam floated up to meet my nose, and I wondered if Nora had infused the tea with one of her trademarked energy spells. “How come I got the upper hand then?”

“First of all, I was tired,” Gwenlyn said. “Before you and Nora came along, I was doing a lot to take care of the coven. Plus I was dealing with some personal things.” Involuntarily, she kneaded her calf muscle through her thick leggings. “I also told you that I suspected you had some kind of personal ward around you at all times. There’s a reason I think that.”

I offered her the thermos. “Which is?”

She took a sip of tea and cleared her throat before continuing. “While I was looking for ways to break this curse, I found out that witches who are born of two magical parents have amplified abilities. That’s why we went after Nora. We had evidence that she was one of these so-called super-powered witches. It explains why she’s so incredibly gifted in healing.”

I rolled my eyes. “You couldn’t have found another superhero witch?”

“They’re rare,” Gwenlyn said. “But it looks like there are two of them in Yew Hollow now.”

“Who?” I asked, bewildered. “Me and Nora? That’s impossible. Our parents aren’t magical at all.”

“Genetics don’t lie, Kennedy.”

I slid off the roof of the car, pacing along the yellow line that marked the edge of the road. “I thought you said men weren’t capable of witchcraft.”

“They aren’t,” Gwenlyn confirmed. “But a boy with a witch for a mother still has witchcraft in his veins. That means your dad was raised by a coven.”

An incredulous laugh founds its way out of my mouth. “I think my father would’ve told me if he grew up in a commune of witches.”

“Or would he?” Gwenlyn challenged. “What mortal would risk telling his family that he knew a life other than a human one? It would make anyone sound insane, which is why most men who branched off from witch families keep their histories private.”

It dawned on me that this wasn’t impossible. I had spent so little time with my father growing up that he could’ve easily hidden something like that from me. “And what about Adrienne? If she was a witch, wouldn’t Nora and I be able to see her aura or whatever?”

“No, because both of you were raised as mortals,” she replied. “That’s what interests me most. Adrienne purposely ignored that both her daughter and stepdaughter were witches. It’s straight-up coven drama.”

I pulled my hair away from my collar, letting the wind float through the fiery strands. “I don’t understand any of this, and I really can’t picture our parents getting wrapped up in this.”

“Which is why you need to go back to Windsor Falls,” Gwenlyn said.

I dropped my hands to my sides with a defeated smack. “What?”

She rubbed her hands together over the flame of the tea tin. “The key to breaking this curse is hidden somewhere in your past, Kennedy. I think you already know who hexed the Summers.”

“I do not!”

“But,” she went on pointedly, “I also think someone tampered with your memories in order to cover it up.”

“Someone stole my memories?” I repeated, lifting an eyebrow. “Seems a little far-fetched, don’t you think?”

“In our world, nothing is far-fetched,” Gwenlyn answered. “Memory wiping isn’t easy, but considering the scale of this curse, I wouldn’t be surprised if the witch installed a few measures to ensure the coven’s ultimate destruction. After all, it would be far too simple if we could just ask you who hexed Yew Hollow.”

“Okay, say that’s true. How are we supposed to retrieve these lost memories of mine?”

“There’s a ritual—”

“Of course there is.”

Gwenlyn ignored my comment. “To perform it, we’ll have to infiltrate your memories, but we need something to work off.”

“Like what?”

“Photographs are easiest,” she replied. “A picture’s worth a thousand words, remember? That’s why I need you to go home. Did your parents keep photo albums?”

I laughed without humor. “Not of me. Adrienne would never keep something like that. There are plenty of Nora around.”

“Those probably won’t do us much good,” Gwenlyn said. “We need access to your past, not Nora’s. What about your dad? Would he have kept photos anywhere? Doesn’t every parent have baby pictures?”

I shrugged. “If he does, I’ve never seen them.”

“There has to be something,” she insisted. “You need to go look. Otherwise, we’re back to square one.”

“No way,” I said. Now that my temper had burned off, it was getting cold again. I picked up my jacket. “I’m not leaving Nora here alone.”

“If you ever want Nora to be able to leave Yew Hollow, then this is your only option.” Gwenlyn maneuvered off of her seat on the car, landing heavily on her injured leg. She tried to hide her discomfort, but I noticed her wince of pain. “I’ll take care of Nora. You have my word.”

I gestured to her imbalanced stance. “How are you going to manage that with one good leg?”

Gwenlyn subtly steadied herself, but even as her shoulders leveled out, it was clear that the action cost her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re limping.”

“No—”

I shot forward and landed an easy push to Gwenlyn’s left shoulder. She stumbled, instinctively stepping back on her injured limb. It crumpled beneath her and she nearly fell over, but I caught her under the arm and hauled her back to her feet. She shoved herself away from me.

“Get off!”

“What’s wrong with your leg?” I challenged, stepping into her personal space. “If it was something so simple as an ankle sprain, you would’ve mixed a healing salve for it already. You’re actively trying to hide it, which means you’re ashamed of whatever it is. You might as well just come clean with me, because I’m not letting you back inside the ward until you do. I beat you once in a fight, and I’ll do it again.”

Gwenlyn glared at me, simmering with her golden-green craft. For a second, I thought she might actually prefer to duel her way out of telling me the truth. Then she leaned over, yanked the leg of her pants up, and pivoted around.

“What the hell is that?” I demanded, kneeling down for a better look at the intricate pattern that decorated Gwenlyn’s calf.

“It’s a witch’s mark,” she grumbled. “Dark magic. A nice little present from whoever cast this curse.”

“But you’re not a Summers!”

She tugged her leggings down to cover the mark once more. “Which is why I’m a little more than worried about it.”

“Does Morgan know about this?”

“She does, but not the extent of it,” Gwenlyn admitted. “It’s grown since I first got it. And it’s feeding me power.”

I blinked. “Run that by me again?”

“I get power surges,” she said. “Big ones. I need this curse lifted as much as everyone else. That’s one of the reasons I agreed to help you.” She looked down, her lower lip trembling. “I am terrified that this thing is going to take over me.”

It was the first time Gwenlyn had showed any kind of vulnerability in my presence. She was a hard shell to crack, but it was nice to know that she was actually a normal human being under her defenses.

“Why hide it then?” I asked gently. “Wouldn’t it be better to tell Morgan that it’s progressing?”

She discreetly wiped her eyes with the collar of her bomber jacket. “First, Morgan has enough to worry about right now. Second, I’m hesitant to give up the extra power.”

“But it’s dark magic—”

“You think I don’t know that?” she interrupted. “If the limp wasn’t enough to tip you off, it hurts. I’m not enjoying this, but with all that’s going on, I need every advantage until we break this curse.”

She grimaced again as she set her foot down. I actually felt bad for her. A sigh gusted out of me. “What do you want me to do then?”

Gwenlyn finally looked up at me, her eyes shining but her expression firm. “Don’t tell Morgan or Nora that it’s getting worse.”

“Fine.”

“That’s not all,” she went on. “If this goes sideways, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to make it back from the dark. That’s where you come in. With your affinity for wards, you’re about the only person who could stop me from doing serious damage. If I hurt anyone and you can’t make me see reason, I want you to put me down.”

She was serious. I could tell by the straight set of her mouth and the worried lines at the corner of her eyes. I couldn’t argue with her. I couldn’t tell her that Morgan would kill me if I ever had to go through with it. Gwenlyn had asked me to do this for a reason. I was the only person she could trust to do it, which meant that we were finally on equal footing. We both needed something from the other, so I didn’t protest. I nodded curtly, and Gwenlyn’s shoulders dropped in relief.

“Thank you,” she said.

I took a deep breath, gazing up at the ward. “So what’s next?”

“I already told you,” Gwenlyn said. She tossed Nora’s car keys to me. “Go home, Kennedy.”

6

Gwenlyn

With Kennedy soon to depart for Windsor Falls, it was time to buckle down and focus on the situation in Yew Hollow. Nora was surprisingly resilient. After an entire day of lending energy to the other witches, she still had the breath to bend my ear with her far-fetched theories. Though we agreed that finding out more about Kennedy’s past was sure to reveal answers about the curse, it was hard to entertain the idea that Alana was Kennedy’s mother. While their hair matched in garish hue and they both had electric blue eyes, the similarities ended there. Kennedy was all brawn, where Alana was small and soft. I’d known Alana for ten years. She was a shy, timid witch who kept to herself, preferring to paint in solitude rather than interact with her sisters and cousins. Never once had she mentioned anything about having a daughter, but at Nora’s insistence, I cornered Morgan in her bedroom late that evening to ask a few select questions. As the coven leader, she was more than familiar with the members of the Summers clan.

“Aren’t you supposed to be baby-sitting the kid?” Morgan asked as I flopped down on her bed. She set aside the book she was reading and flipped the sheets up to invite me in.

I kicked off my shoes and wriggled underneath the blanket. “I locked her in the barn. No one will get in or out.”

“It’s better for you to be close to her. If Camryn—”

“I know. I just missed you. I won’t stay long, I promise.”

She softened, absentmindedly playing with my messy hair. “We haven’t seen much of each other lately, have we? I’m sorry for that. I haven’t been available to you.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “How goes the curse busting?”

“Oh,” she sighed. “Not very well. Malia, Karma, and Laurel spent the entire day in the archives with no luck. Everyone else is either too sick to help or convinced that I’m no longer the rightful coven leader.” She laughed lightly, but the sound was tired and dull. “God, maybe I should step down. Let Camryn take care of the chaos.”

“You know that would only end in tears,” I reminded her.

“I know.”

I dislodged myself from Morgan’s grasp so that I could look her in the eye. “Listen. About Camryn, I was thinking I could keep an eye on her for you. Nora is, of course, my first priority, but I saw Camryn the other day—”

“No,” Morgan said firmly.

“You didn’t even let me finish my sentence.”

She wrapped a crocheted throw blanket around my head and shoulders like a cloak and drew me closer. “I want you safe. Let me worry about Camryn.”

“You have enough to worry about—”

“Which is my duty as the head of this coven,” she reminded me. She squished my cheeks together with the blanket. “Promise me you won’t go all Sherlock Holmes and try to pin Camryn down. She’s not harmless, Gwen. If she catches you, it will just feed the fire.”

My reply was muffled by the crocheted yarn. “Fine.”

“Say it.”

“I promise.” I broke free of the blanket and turned it over on Morgan’s head instead. As she shook it off, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“I have no ideas how babies are made.”

“Har, har. Can you tell me what Alana was like before I got to Yew Hollow?”

Morgan combed her fingers through her hair to straighten out what the blanket had mussed. “There’s not much to tell. Alana was always quite reclusive. When I was a teenager, my mother had to send Aunt Alberta to bring her to town meetings.”

I wrinkled my nose. “To be fair, if you sent Aunt Alberta to fetch me, I wouldn’t show up to the town meetings either.”

“Touché. Anyway, we used to say that Alana was a gray ghost, which is kind of the witch equivalent to an ‘old soul’ but with more depth to it,” Morgan explained. “It implies that she understands the craft in a different way than the rest of us do.”

“Does she really?”

Morgan lifted her shoulders. “Who knows? It’s an idiom, nothing more. The Summerses, by nature, are extroverts, so when we happen to give birth to an introvert—you’re looking at Exhibit A, by the way—the coven doesn’t really know what to do with them.”

“Did she ever, I don’t know, date anyone?”

Morgan looked taken aback. “Not that I know of. You know how we are. No one’s significant other sticks around for long.”

“But what about when she was younger?” I pressed.

“I have no idea, Gwen,” Morgan said. “I was just a kid then. Why are you so interested all of a sudden anyway?”

I immediately withdrew. We didn’t have nearly enough evidence to support Nora’s hunch, and there was no point in casting suspicion over Alana when she was already unconscious. It was best to find the facts first. Then I could clue Morgan in on the details.

“No reason,” I replied. “Just wondering.”

Nora worried incessantly about Kennedy. She wouldn’t shut up about her older sister as we made our rounds the next morning. Kennedy had only been gone for a few hours. She had left at dawn for Windsor Falls, hugging Nora goodbye and promising to return by nightfall. The sisters wore matching expressions of grief as I helped Kennedy push the car far enough from the ward for the engine to recover from its magically engineered failure. We could see Kennedy’s piercing eyes in the rearview mirror as she drove away. Nora, sniffling, had leaned her head against my shoulder, and I felt an unusual pang of guilt that it had been my idea to send Kennedy away.

So I let Nora talk. I learned things about Kennedy that she would never have told me herself. Nora rambled on and on as she diligently worked on the sick witches, unfazed by the desperate whirl of auras that entwined themselves around her as soon as she entered each house. I helped where I could, but the witch’s mark threatened to sour my own craft with its thrilling power. I concentrated on separating the green from the black, but with Nora’s interminable blather, it got harder and harder to keep the colors from intermingling. Each time I sensed an overflow from the mark, I crafted an excuse to get out of the room. I was grateful that Nora was so ensconced in Kennedy’s absence. She didn’t appear to notice as I made increasingly less graceful exits from the healing rituals.

I never strayed too far though. I knew we hadn’t heard the last of Camryn. Nora was too kind to overlook the witches who sided with Morgan’s problematic cousin, so we visited them as well. For a group of women who wanted Kennedy dead, they doted on Nora with obvious adoration. Either that, or they feared Nora might leave them worse for wear if they mistreated her. Camryn herself remained under the radar. If she was rallying her troops, she was doing so quietly. The thought made my skin crawl, so when Nora took a break at the barn around lunchtime, I doubled back in the hopes of catching Camryn in action. Deliberately going back on my promise to Morgan didn’t sit right with me, but I couldn’t do nothing.

I checked Sage’s house first, where the reward was immediate. A few of Camryn’s followers lingered on the front porch, waiting for something. I knelt behind the corner of the house and cast an illusion to disguise myself. The witch’s mark sent a spark of pain up the back of my leg, the result of a build-up of unused power. If I released it, it would relieve some of my discomfort, but I feared retribution for using something that wasn’t mine. However, in a moment of distraction, a silken thread of black craft trickled into my green aura.

“Crap,” I muttered as the illusionary cloud around me darkened to the color of the forest floor. There was no time to worry about it. The witches on the porch stirred, and Camryn swept into view, today wearing a long slate-gray cloak with brass buckles and knee-high, heeled boots.

“Inside,” she ordered.

At once, the witches scurried to obey her. There were about seven or eight of them in total, some of which Nora and I had tended to only half an hour earlier, including Sage and Lana. As Camryn followed them in, her cloak whooshing as she closed the door behind herself, I snuck onto the porch, flattened myself beneath the windowsill, and cast a listening spell to enhance my hearing. Clear as day, Camryn addressed her cohorts.

“You know how this works,” she said, her heels clicking across the floor. “Line up to see Sage. She will perform the purification spell to rid you of Morgan’s influence. Then have a seat. I’ve come to a decision, and since you are among those who I trust the most, you will be privy to this information first.”

A sneer twisted my lips. Sage was an elemental witch with the ability to manipulate air. Like her name implied, she used smudge sticks to burn herbs and cleanse objects, people, or areas. In the past, she did so to connect with the earth, drive away spirits who overstayed their welcome with Morgan, and to relieve the grief of the coven when one of the older witches passed away. There was no need for her to purify Camryn’s followers of Morgan’s so-called influence. The only influences Morgan had on the rest of the Summerses were honesty and loyalty, but I suspected that Camryn didn’t operate under a similar banner.

I waited as the witches followed Camryn’s instructions. The scent of burning sage wafted outside. I waved it away from my nose and held my breath. If Camryn was forcing Sage to use smudge sticks to push her own agenda, then I didn’t want to inhale whatever spell was infused within the herb’s aroma.

“In short,” Camryn said, once all of the witches had settled, “I plan to kill Kennedy McGrath.”

I bit my lip to keep from uttering a groan of rage. Camryn’s followers murmured in assent. Already, they believed Camryn’s decision was for the best, even if it meant murdering someone in cold blood.

“I don’t believe Morgan has the wherewithal to kill the catalyst herself,” Camryn went on. “She will delay the process until it is too late, and the Summers coven will perish without hope. I would like to prevent this. What say you?”

My blood chilled as the witches replied in unison. “We would like to prevent this.”

“McGrath’s death is imminent.”

Another murmured repetition. “McGrath’s death is imminent.”

The cultish back and forth confirmed what I already knew. Camryn continued to use her influence to strengthen the bond between herself and the other witches. I wondered if any of the Summerses felt a true allegiance to her or if Camryn had simply grasped at the opportunity to take advantage of the weaker-minded witches. My bet was on the latter.

“The time and place for this occurrence has not yet been determined,” Camryn said. “According to my intel, McGrath has left the immediate area. I expect her to return shortly. Something tells me she wouldn’t leave her little sister for long.”

So Camryn had intel. That meant someone was spying on Kennedy through the ward, watching her every move. If that was the case, Camryn probably had eyes on other people too, including Nora, Morgan, and possibly myself.

“When she does return,” Camryn went on, “I’ll contact you again, and we’ll arrange for her quick and easy death. This curse will be broken, ladies. I’ll make sure of it.”

Suddenly, the window above my head moved upward. I tried to dart away, but someone grabbed the back of my neck, hauled me inside the house, and dumped me on the accent rug in the living room. It was Camryn, aura glowing. Without help from her craft, she never would’ve been able to lift me through the window. I scrambled to my feet, needing higher ground in a room full of witches under Camryn’s spell.

“Hello, little Morgan,” she sneered.

“How did you know I was there?” I demanded. “I cast an illusionary ward.”

“Oh, please,” Camryn scoffed. “As if I couldn’t smell the piteous stench of subpar witchcraft nearby.”

I backed against the wall, away from the witches, who all stared at me with the same eerily focused, dark-eyed expressions. “No wonder the coven is splitting in two. You’re manipulating them. No one would support your otherwise.”

Camryn stepped toward me, power rippling along the folds of her cloak. Her strength didn’t make any sense. The curse touched every witch, and though there were traces of its effects in Camryn’s hollow cheeks, she looked half as ill as the other members of the coven. She’d also refused Nora’s treatments, which meant that she should have been bedridden like Alana by now. I suspected that she was stealing Nora’s energy from her followers, who all appeared gaunt and corpse-like.

I stood my ground. “I won’t let you kill Kennedy.”

Camryn laugh was bitingly shrill. “Let me? What makes you think you can stop me?”

“I’m stronger than you,” I declared, squaring my shoulders. “I trained under Morgan for ten years. You’re outside of the superior bloodline. Less original blood, less power.”

Camryn swept into my personal space, her nose inches from mine. “That’s rich, coming from you. I implore you to remember, darling, that no matter what mommy dearest tells you, the blood of the original Summers coven will never run in your veins.”

Pain ripped through my entire body as Camryn hit me with an unpredictable offensive hex. I doubled over, collapsing at Camryn’s feet. Heat built in my heart and radiated outward until it felt like my cells were on fire. Was this what Kennedy felt like all the time?

As I gasped for breath, Carmyn rolled me over with her foot and planted the heel of her boot in the middle of my chest. I fought to free myself, pushing against her, but the hex made me feel frail and brittle.

Camryn leaned over me and took a deep cleansing breath through her nose. “Did you think that being Morgan’s favorite pet would protect you here? Because you have no idea how much I’m going to enjoy killing you.”

Just as she raised her fist to deliver the witchcraft-loaded blow that would end my life, the witch’s mark came to life. The muscles in my leg seized, and a surge of frenzied power exploded from me in a burst of black and green. It blasted Camryn across the room, where she crashed against an ornate decorative mirror that shattered on impact. I rose to my feet, blossoming with the haunting shadows of the forest at night. The other witches remained seated and oblivious. Without Camryn pulling their puppet strings, they served her little purpose.

“My, my, my,” Camryn said as she recovered from my defensive maneuvers. She stood up, shaking broken glass from her cloak, but made no move to attack me again. “It seems we have a deal to make.”

Anger boiled inside me, but I didn’t rise to the bait. Slowly, the mark retracted its power, purifying the color of my aura to its original green. Camryn smirked as it faded.

“Tell no one of my plans for Kennedy McGrath,” she said. “If you warn Morgan, I’ll know.”

“Why would I go along with what you want?” I spat.

“Because if you don’t,” Camryn said, glass crunching under the heel of her boot as she moved toward me, “I’ll tell your beloved adopted mother that her favorite brat is using dark magic.”

7

Kennedy

The two-hour drive to Windsor Falls felt shorter than when I had been heading away from it in search of Nora. My anxiety mounted with every mile. I had a long history of leaving Nora in my rear view, but those past mistakes were nothing in comparison to the present-day situation. I prayed that Gwenlyn would take her role as Nora’s surrogate sister seriously. I couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to Nora, especially when it was somehow my fault that she was in Yew Hollow to begin with.

That was the can of worms to pop open. If Gwenlyn was right, my father had lied to me about his entire life. There was no other way to swing it. Though I doubted my own abilities, I wholeheartedly believed that Nora fell into the category of “rare super-powered witches.” It was evident in the way the Summerses worshipped her every move. It also meant that my dad knew he had fathered witches for daughters. All this time, he claimed to love me, but if he really cared about what happened to me, he would’ve told me why I had so much trouble making a life for myself.

I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. A different woman from the one I had been two months ago stared back. We looked the same, with the fiery hair and contrasting glacial eyes, but this new being was as foreign to me as the other side of the world. She was aware of herself, aware of the world that she had been excluded from for so long, and she was on a mission. For years, I’d protected Nora from myself. The tradition continued, but the final inning was approaching. The woman in the mirror had a plan, and I was going along for the ride.

The last thing I wanted to do was alert my father or Adrienne to my return. For all they knew, both of their daughters had inexplicably disappeared, and though I felt an immense guilt at the thought of my father suffering through that knowledge, it was safest for things to remain that way. So when the green exit sign for Windsor Falls appeared through the windshield, I piloted off the ramp and in the opposite direction of my father’s neighborhood. It wasn’t wise to drive through town either. The cops were sure to be on the lookout for Nora’s car. I took the long way around through the backroads, rolling over the hills in a roundabout pattern. Then I trundled off the pavement, hoping Nora’s tires were up to a little off-roading, and drove just far enough into the woods to hide the car among the trees.

I hiked the rest of the way with the tea tin tucked in the inner pocket of my parka for warmth, using a compass spell to navigate through the forest. Luckily, Windsor Falls’ residential area was bordered by dense trees, so it was easy to slip unnoticed across the land. At last, the familiar outline of my father’s house came into view. My heart jumped into my throat at the sight of the stables and the empty swimming pool. Nora belonged here. This was the first time I’d willingly returned to this house without her here to greet me.

I canvassed the scene before making a move. On a normal weekday, my father would be at work, Nora would be at school, and Adrienne would be at whatever socialite event promoted her notoriety the most. I couldn’t count on any of those things today, so I snuck around to the front of the house, where the expansive garage sat adjacent to the long driveway. Then I turned a trash can upside down and used it as a boost to look in the garage windows. Nora’s parking space, of course, was empty, but I was relieved to see that both my father and Adrienne’s cars were missing too. There were no signs of the cook, maid, or gardener either. I had the house to myself. All I had to do was get inside.

I wasn’t stupid enough to try the main doors. Instead, I jogged around to the back side again, where a thick covering of ivy coated the stone walls. I started climbing, hooking my fingers through the vines for a better grip. Near the top, I balanced precariously on the windowsill of my old bedroom and tugged on the pane. It opened easily, and I reveled in the fact that no one had bothered to check if it was locked after I left.

I pushed my legs through the opening and dropped to the floor of the bedroom. The rest of my things were still here, piled neatly by the door as if awaiting my return, so I shouldered my big duffel bag, which was already packed, and made my way into the hallway.

With Adrienne and my father gone, the house felt smaller and safer, which was ironic considering the sheer amount of square feet that the floor plan took up. For once, I felt comfortable roaming the corridors. I savored the freedom, pausing to admire the priceless paintings that I’d never had the pleasure of appreciating without Adrienne breathing down my neck. At the opposite end of the mezzanine, something strange caught my eye. The double doors to the master bedroom were ajar.

To someone unfamiliar with Adrienne’s quirks, the open double doors wouldn’t spark any kind of suspicion, but I knew her too well. She was anally private, as though if anyone saw the unmade king-sized bed or my father’s clothes draped over the vanity or the uncapped bottles of her perfume collection, it would reveal that she was actually human. Tentatively, I coaxed the doors all the way open.

The lush carpet cushioned my footsteps as I went inside. I breathed deeply, inhaling hints of Dad’s musky aftershave and Adrienne’s fruity body wash. After a couple months in Yew Hollow, it was surreal to return to the real world, where mortals knew nothing of witchcraft or age-old curses or wards. Everything seemed so mundane, from the bland color of the creamy carpet to the mussed silk duvet cover on the bed. The master bedroom, off-limits to me since birth except on rare occasions, was full of secrets. If my father were hiding anything about my past, the evidence would be somewhere in here.

I wandered over to the dresser, where I absentmindedly trailed my fingers across the bottles that decorated the top. Most of them were Adrienne’s—she had enough perfume and makeup to mask her true self ten times over—but a few belonged to my dad. My attention waned, and I accidentally tipped a flask of cologne over. It was full and heavy. It thudded to the floor and rolled away, knocking up against the wall of the bedroom. A hollow thunk echoed back to me.

I frowned in consternation, curled my hand into a fist, and rapped my knuckles on the wallpaper. The sound reverberated, and I sucked in an incredulous breath. It was an outer wall, and the house was made of cement block. There should have been nothing on the opposite side other than open air. I ran my fingers over the wallpaper, searching for discrepancies in the decoration but finding nothing. I pressed my ear to the wall and knocked again, closing my eyes when it echoed back to me. Despite reality and the visible architecture of the house, there was something beyond the patterned wallpaper and cinderblocks, and I had no intention of leaving it undiscovered.

I called on my craft, though I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with it. I needed a spell that would expose whatever it was that lay behind the false wall. The problem was that I’d never learned anything like that from the Summerses, so I needed an alternate plan.

I started with a ward. After all, Gwenlyn considered them my specialty. I pushed it toward the wall, letting it spread to all four corners. It stretched thin, covering the wallpaper with a shimmery orange layer. If anyone happened to walk in, they might have thought I’d somehow set just one section of the room on fire. As I struggled to focus, the wallpaper began to smolder. I recalled my lessons with Laurel, when she taught me about the mutual respect between a witch and her craft. I pulled back on the ward and extinguished the flare. Then I remembered a particularly difficult lesson with Gwenlyn during which she grilled me to conjugate Latin verbs commonly used for verbal spells.

“Reveal your secrets,” I rumbled in the dead language, unable to stop myself from feeling stupid as I generated the corny request.

But to my great shock, the wall of fire replied in turn. For a split second, it became transparent. I caught a quick glimpse of a small room with a trunk and an armchair before the image disappeared again. I tried once more, repeating my made-up spell in a loud, determined voice as I concentrated all of my willpower on forcing the ward through the wall. It pressed up against something else, another ward meant to keep visitors out. I heaved against it, planting my hands on the wall to push physically as well as mentally against the blockage. With another surge of energy and an unexpected jolt, the barrier gave way. I fell forward, stumbling into a space that wasn’t supposed to exist.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Breathing heavily, I blinked and looked around. The tiny room was illuminated by a lonely oil lamp that looked as though it had been plucked out of biblical times. There were no windows or doors, no decorations on the black walls, and no indication that the room existed in the same dimension as my father’s house. The armchair looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It was black as well and patterned with gold embroidery in the shape of dozens of flowers. The enormous trunk sat at the foot of the chair like a bizarre makeshift ottoman. I knelt in front of it, burning with curiosity. It wasn’t locked. Whoever had left it here hadn’t expected any visitors. I hefted the lid. To my immense disappointment, it was empty except for one item. A single photo album rested in the far corner of the trunk. I picked it up, closed the trunk, and settled into the dusty armchair. When I nudged the album open—tenderly lifting the weathered cover flap—the first faded photograph caused my throat to close up.

It was Yew Hollow. Specifically, it was the tree in Yew Hollow, but this picture was taken long before it had burned down. The yew tree was enormous. It towered over the town, and its branches cast a shadow that encompassed half of the square. Gingerly, I flipped to the next photo. This one cut me deeper. It was of a man holding a baby. I barely recognized my father. His hair was longer, tightly curled against his scalp, and he smiled at the camera with a warmth that actually reached his eyes. For once, he wasn’t wearing a suit and tie, opting instead for a casual T-shirt and running shorts. At first, I thought the baby on his knee was Nora, but there was no mistaking my bright blue eyes and auburn hair, even if the color had somewhat dropped out of the faded picture. From the looks of it, I was around eight or nine months old at the time. Of course I wouldn’t remember the day, but I also didn’t remember any other moment during my childhood where my father looked so happy to be with me. His unfamiliar smile overwhelmed me, so I turned another page in the album.

Another jolt of shock shuddered along my spine. Because here was a picture of someone I would have never expected to see in this album in a million years. It was Alana Summers, straddling one of the branches of the yew tree and waving cheerily to whomever was taking the photo. She was young, happy, and healthy, but it wasn’t her lively spirit that drew my eye. It was the necklace that sparkled in the sunshine of that day so many years ago, the same necklace that now rested against my own collarbones, the gold tree pendant cool against my skin.

A door slammed somewhere. It sounded a long way off, but it stirred me from my reverie. Anger took over. I slammed the album shut and kicked the empty trunk aside. Then I stood and crossed through the invisible barrier back into my father’s house without the slightest bit of trouble. The sunny daylight hit me like a punch in the face, but I barreled across the room with the photo album in hand and stormed onto the mezzanine.

My father had returned early from work. He wearily hung his hat on the coat rack, unaware of my hawk-eyed position at the top of the stairs. My temper flared, and I threw the photo album over the edge of the banister, where it landed on the marble floor below with a sharp smack. My father jumped, and his eyes flickered up to where I stood on the mezzanine.

“Kennedy?” he gasped.

“You told me she was dead,” I growled.

“What are you—I told you who was dead?”

I thundered down the steps at an alarming rate, picked up the album, and flipped it open. When my father saw Alana’s smiling face, his eyes went wide. That was all the confirmation I needed.

“You said she died in childbirth,” I said to him.

My father stammered. “I—you—she did!”

“Then explain to me why there are photographs of you two gamboling happily about Yew Hollow with a one-year-old version of me?”

I picked up the album and rustled violently through the rest of the pictures. There were a few of my first steps, tripping into Alana’s arms. Another showed the three of us cuddled up together on the swinging bench on the front porch of the Summers house. Yet another showed Cassandra, Morgan’s mother, conjuring light spells over my crib to stop me from crying. There was an entire record of my infancy in Yew Hollow, and yet no one had ever bothered to fill me in on my time there, not even my own father.

“She’s been alive this whole time!” I yelled. “I had no idea who she was or what she was. Why would you do this to me? You let me think that my mother was dead, and I don’t think I can ever forgive you for that.”

My father gazed up at me, a look of complete and utter shock etched into his expression. “Alana’s alive?”

I already knew in my gut that Alana was my mother, but hearing him say her name was more validation than I could handle. “I—you don’t know?”

“About what? Where is this place? What did you call it again?”

“Yew Hollow?”

“I’ve never even heard of it.”

“You were there!” I shook the picture album at him. “Seriously, Dad? You cannot convince me that you somehow didn’t know about this. You were there.”

Dad looked directly into my eyes. “Kennedy, I swear to you. I don’t even remember having taken those pictures. What I do remember is holding you in my arms on the day you were born and crying because your mother was already gone.”

His voice cracked, and he hid his face behind his hands. Despite the evidence in my grasp, I believed him. After all, when there was witchcraft involved, you couldn’t always trust what was right in front of your face.

“Where did you find that?” he managed, pointing at the album.

I tucked it against my chest. “Hidden away so that I wouldn’t find it.”

Dad held out a palm. “Can I see it?”

I clutched the album tighter. “No, I don’t think so.”

His face fell. “Ken, I’d like to know the truth about my—”

“Your what?” I challenged him. “She’s my mother.”

“And I had no idea she was still breathing.”

I backed toward the door. “We’re not fighting over this. Not until I can figure out what’s really going on.”

Dad stood up and followed me into the corridor. “Where are you going? You can’t just leave. Kennedy! I need an explanation for all of this!”

I whirled around to face him. “I don’t have one! Not yet, anyway.”

“Ken,” he pleaded. “If your mother’s alive, I need to know. Where is she? Where have you been? Where’s Nora? We’ve been worried sick.”

I looked up at him. He begged silently for my confidence. It was the first time he had ever asked me for anything. It was the first he had ever needed anything from me. And yet I still couldn’t give him what he was asking for.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

8

Gwenlyn

I fled from Sage’s house before anything else could go wrong. The vacant eyes of Camryn’s followers trailed after me, although Camryn herself made no move to follow. She had me on the ropes, and she knew it. The mark’s release of power was involuntary—I hadn’t knowingly employed its power—but that wasn’t something I could explain to Camryn. Morgan would be even less understanding, and worse, she would feel completely and utterly betrayed by my actions. I couldn’t let that happen.

The worse part was that it felt good. With the extra energy coursing through me, I was stronger than I’d ever been before. My leg didn’t hurt anymore. In fact, all of my muscles felt invigorated. As I sprinted away from the Summers’ cul-de-sac, my strides lengthened until I was practically flying across the ground at top speed. The wind ripped through my hair, and though my eyes watered, the chill didn’t affect me. I laughed, remembering the look on Camryn’s face as she had flown across the room with wicked satisfaction.

I made it across the Summers’ property and through the woods to the barn in record time. To my relief, the miniature ward I’d constructed to keep Nora safe while I was away bore no signs of attack. I snapped my fingers to release it and approached the front door. Nora sat on the couch with a mug of hot chocolate and a bowl of soup.

“Remind me to challenge Kennedy to a race when she gets back,” I said, exhilarated from my impromptu workout. I brushed sweaty hair away from the nape of my neck.

Nora wrinkled her nose as I kicked my muddy sneakers off near the door. “Should I be worried about where you’re sneaking off to when you promised Morgan that you’d watch after me at all hours of the day?”

I plopped down in the armchair across from her. “Give me a minute to catch my breath.”

“You’re deflecting.”

“I’m breathing,” I quipped.

“You know, I need you,” Nora said, setting down the bowl of soup to give me her full attention. “Don’t get me wrong, you seem like a cool person. I like you. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, and you shouldn’t be taking unnecessary risks. I need you. No one else is going to save Kennedy.”

As my breath regulated itself, I looked over at the younger girl. She stared intently back, and I realized how unfair her position was in all of this. She deserved what she asked of me. After all, I was the one who had literally kidnapped her from her family.

“Okay,” I said.

Nora shrank in surprise. “Oh. That’s it? No argument?”

“No argument.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you helping us?”

I threw up my hands in frustration. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Nora set her feet on the floor, leaning over the arm of the couch to get a better look at me. “Yes, but I can’t figure out why you agreed to do it in the first place. There has to be something in it for you. You’re Morgan’s second. You wouldn’t disobey her unless you had good reason to.”

The witch’s mark tingled, and I wiggled my leg to settle it. “Did I ever tell you that I had a sister?”

“No. I thought you were a foster kid.”

“I was,” I confirmed. “We both were, but she was adopted by another witch family. I never knew about her, and then all of a sudden my twin shows up in my bedroom at the Summers house one day.”

“Your twin?” Nora said in disbelief. “You mean, there’s another one of you?”

I shook my head, smiling. “Definitely not. Winnie was everything that I’m not. Beautiful, caring, positive. I’ll probably never understand how identical we were in physicality and how different we were when it came to everything else.”

Nora’s lips tilted downward. “You’re speaking about her in past tense.”

I took a deep breath. “Yeah. By the time I met her, she was already dead.”

Nora climbed into the armchair with me, wrapping her arms around me and leaning her head against mine despite my sheen of sweat. Not for the first time, I realized how much more compassion and empathy Nora stored in comparison to other teenagers. For a sixteen-year-old, she was unusually in tune with other people’s feelings, whether they wore them on their sleeve or not.

“You remind me of her,” I said. “She was a healer too. Not quite like you. She eased pain and suffering.”

“I’m so sorry you lost her.”

“Me too,” I mumbled. “She helped me find you, you know? She was there that night in the courtyard. That was the last time I saw her.” Nora used her sleeve to wipe a lonely tear from my cheek. I hadn’t even realized I was crying. “The point is that I never got the chance to know my own twin. We only spent a few months together when we should have had our whole lives. You and Kennedy don’t realize how lucky you are to have each other. Sisters are like built-in best friends. I’ve seen it with Morgan, Malia, Karma, and Laurel. No matter what happens, no matter how much they argue or disagree with each other, they always have each other’s backs.”

“That’s the most important part about being a sister,” Nora said. She sighed, looping one leg comfortably over my knee as if we were sisters too. “By average definition, Kennedy isn’t the best example of a big sister. She was gone most of the time, and she made a lot of empty promises. When I was little, she disappointed me a lot. Now that I’m older, I understand more of what made Kennedy the way that she is. I always thought that she didn’t want to see me, when in reality, she was keeping herself away out of fear that she would eventually harm me. That is infinitely more tragic than an older sister who doesn’t care.”

“That’s why I agreed to help you,” I said, prodding Nora’s side for emphasis. “I just got a taste of sisterhood, and I realized how important it is. You and Kennedy deserve to have each other in your lives. That, and it’s not fair. We forced you into helping the coven, and we repaid you by threatening the life of your sister. If that isn’t injustice, I don’t know what is.”

“I appreciate that,” Nora said. She patted my leg. “I guess your leg is feeling better if you ran here.”

I ducked my head to avoid her probing gaze. “Yeah, I’m all better.”

“So that thing is gone?”

I considered lying, but Nora’s face told me that she already wasn’t buying it. “You’re playing me,” I accused her. “How did you know?”

She slid out of the armchair with a wry grin. “I can feel it. Your aura is totally out of whack. Maybe you can hide it from everybody else, but you can’t fool me.”

“Not everybody,” I grumbled.

“What do you mean?”

I stood up. Though the initial power surge had worn off, I still felt more energized than I had in months. I wandered over to the window and pushed the curtains aside. My breath fogged against the glass. The temperature was dropping rapidly as Yew Hollow geared up for more snow. It was nearly time to break out the non-slip boots. I hoped Kennedy would return from Windsor Falls before she had to drive through any flurries.

“You asked me about sneaking off earlier,” I said to Nora. “I know I’m supposed to be watching you, but I’m very confident in your ability to get out of trouble, and I have other obligations to this coven.”

Nora tucked her bare feet beneath the couch cushions. “Such as?”

“Morgan asked me to stay away from Camryn,” I admitted, unsure as to why I was confiding in Nora. “But I think that’s a mistake. Camryn’s planning something. She’s warping her intuition to hypnotize her followers into thinking that Morgan is unfit for leadership. That’s the only reason we’re dealing with this entire uprising in the first place.”

“She’s hypnotizing them?” Nora repeated, astonished. “She can do that? Why haven’t you told Morgan yet?”

“That’s the thing,” I replied. “Camryn caught me spying on her today. She found out about the mark on my leg, and now she’s blackmailing me into keeping her plans quiet.”

“Her plans to kill Kennedy before Morgan can stop her.”

“Bingo.”

Nora combed her fingers through her lengthy blonde hair, separating the tangles with practiced delicacy. “Why don’t you just come clean to Morgan? She could put a stop to Camryn’s behavior without a problem if she knew that half the coven wasn’t thinking for themselves. Whatever that mark on your leg is, I’m sure Morgan would understand.”

“She wouldn’t,” I said firmly. “And I need the mark. I can’t get rid of it, not yet anyway. You can’t tell Morgan about this either. If you do, everything goes to hell.”

Nora expertly braided her hair into a loose waterfall. “This feels like a terrible idea.”

“It probably is.”

“So then we deal with Camryn on our own.”

“We?” I crossed my arms, looking down at her. “There’s no we. It’s my job to keep you safe. Letting you anywhere near Camryn is like throwing you into moving traffic. It’s not happening.”

Nora finished off her braid, secured the end, and tossed her hair over her shoulder. “You don’t have anyone else to help you. Besides, Camryn wants my sister dead. I have just as much right as you to try and stop her.”

I opened my mouth to insist that Nora was too young to deal with coven politics like this, but I stopped myself. Nora was too young for all of it—that was a simple fact—but it had never stopped her from doing her best in a bad situation. She never complained or cried. She didn’t continuously berate me for having taken her from her home. She worked tirelessly to help a family that wasn’t hers, all with a sense of maturity that would’ve taken me years to acquire.

So I sat next to her, staring straight into her eyes, and said, “You do as I say. Whatever we plan, wherever we go, you follow every instruction I have for you. Otherwise, you won’t see the light of day until the curse is broken. Do you understand me?”

She stuck out her hand. Reluctantly, I shook it. She grinned excitedly. “Deal. What’s the first step?”

I sank into the couch cushions and propped my feet on the coffee table. Mentally, I was exhausted, but Nora and I still had to do our afternoon rounds. “Well, first of all, we need to figure out how Camryn is manipulating the other witches—”

The door to the barn blew open with a bang, startling me and Nora. Instinctively, I sprang to my feet, stepping in front of the younger girl with a defensive spell heating up in the palm of my hands, but it was only Morgan. At first, my anxiety faded when I realized that we weren’t under attack, but Morgan marched in and slammed the door behind her. She was livid, and the heat of her anger filled the barn with a palpable pressure.

“What is it?” I asked, lowering my fists. “What’s wrong?”

She crossed the living room in three strides, her face inches from mine before I’d even registered her effortless movement. “Was it only last night that you promised me you would stay away from Camryn?”

Goose bumps raised the hair on my arms as Morgan’s words sent a chill through me. “Morgan, I—”

“You lied to me,” she interrupted. “You lied to my face, Gwenlyn.”

“I just—”

“What aren’t you telling me?” she demanded. “This isn’t like you. I’ve never known you to keep secrets from me, and I like to think you wouldn’t go disobeying me behind my back for no good reason, so imagine what it was like for me when someone reported a confrontation between you and Camryn.”

I stuttered, trying to maneuver out of Morgan’s truth-seeking stare, but she took me by the shoulders and held me fast. “Morgan, you don’t understand—”

“It was my fault,” Nora piped in suddenly.

Morgan and I both turned to look at her and chorused, “What?”

Nora bowed her head sheepishly. “Thanks for trying to cover for me, Gwen, but I should really take responsibility for my own actions.”

Beneath the throw blanket, she nudged the back of my leg with her toe, a silent command to go along with whatever she said.

“Uh, right,” I said. “Sure. No problem.”

Nora shook off the blanket and stood up. “Morgan, it’s my fault that Gwenlyn went to see Camryn. I asked her to.”

Morgan narrowed her eyes, looking between me and Nora. “And why is that?”

“Because I was worried that Camryn might try something to hurt Kennedy,” Nora murmured, scuffing her toes against the area carpet. I had to hand it to her. She was convincing. “Gwenlyn was just trying to take care of me, like you told her to.”

Morgan finally stepped out of my personal space. “Nora, honey. I know you’re worried for your sister. I’m doing my absolute best to make sure she comes out of this unharmed, but in order to do that, it would really help if the people on my side actually pay attention to the things that I say.”

“I get that now,” Nora mumbled.

“Good.” Morgan took a pair of gloves from her coat pocket and pulled them on. “As I understand it, the two of you are late for your afternoon rounds. You should get to it. Walk me out, Gwen?”

I shadowed Morgan to the door, shocked that Nora’s quick thinking had saved me from what was sure to have been a heated argument. The relief didn’t last long though. Before Morgan left, she took hold of my wrist, drawing me close to whisper a parting message to me.

“Secrets become us, Gwenlyn. Don’t hold onto yours until after it’s too late.”

9

Kennedy

“You did what to your father?”

Gwenlyn’s shrill voice echoed through the trees, startling a few crows from their roost. They took off, black bodies in sharp contrast against the white sky. I pulled the hood of my parka up and tightened it around my face, grateful that I’d been able to pick up the rest of my clothes from my father’s house. With the sudden dip in temperature, they would come in handy when night fell.

“Keep your voice down,” I ordered. I brandished a bag full of takeout containers. “Otherwise, I’m keeping the rest of these leftovers for myself.”

Gwenlyn eyed the bag. “What kind of leftovers?”

“Filet mignon from last night and chicken kiev from the night before,” I teased, letting the bag swing back and forth from my index finger. “My dad’s cook went to one of the top-ranked culinary schools in the world. How’s that tofu sounding now?”

“Give it.”

“Say please.”

A green dart of craft severed the plastic handle of the bag, causing it to fall from my hand. With another flash, the bag caught itself before the food could hit the ground and floated over to Gwenlyn.

“That was rude,” I said.

“Garlic potatoes or sweet potatoes?” she asked, rifling through the containers. “I’ll let you choose sides, but I’m claiming the steak.”

We parsed out the food. I set aside a container for Gwenlyn to bring to Nora so that she wouldn’t miss out on the rare treat, then warmed the rest of our meal with a little help from my inner fire. Gwenlyn was much more agreeable when her mouth was full and she couldn’t talk, so as she ate, I filled her in on what information I had gleaned from my brief return to Windsor Falls.

“I don’t know what I did to him exactly,” I confessed. I offered Gwenlyn a bottle of wine. Her eyes went wide as she accepted it, popped the cork with a flicker of her aura, and took a swig straight from the bottle. “It wasn’t like what you were talking about before. I don’t think I erased his memories or anything like that. He just… won’t remember what we talked about.”

“That’s erasing his memories,” Gwenlyn said dryly. She examined the label of the wine bottle. “God, this is good. What is this?”

“Ridiculously expensive,” I replied. “I swiped it from the kitchen before I left, so enjoy it while you can. And I didn’t erase his memories. It felt more like I cast an illusion over the top of them.”

Gwenlyn tucked the bottle under her arm so that she could pilot another bite of steak to her mouth. “I guess that makes sense. Witchcraft is malleable. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so problematic. Did you find what you needed at least?”

I set down my food to retrieve the photo album from my duffel bag. “One picture book full of emotional baggage, at your service.”

She set the album on the roof of the car and began to flip through it, pausing here and there to examine certain photos. “Wow, this is wild. Look, there’s Morgan when she was a kid. And your dad claimed he didn’t know anything about this?”

I shivered, but not because of the cold wind. I had left my father with a vacant expression and no recollection of our interaction, and I couldn’t stop thinking about his empty, glazed eyes the entire drive back.

“I think he was telling the truth,” I said. “His confusion seemed genuine. He doesn’t remember anything about Yew Hollow.”

Gwenlyn froze with a bite of her food halfway to her mouth. I looked down at the photo album, wondering what had caught her attention. It was the picture of Alana, waving from the yew tree.

“Is that—?”

“It’s Alana,” I confirmed.

“But is she wearing—?” Gwenlyn’s eyes darted up, searching for a glimpse of the tree pendant around my neck.

I tugged it out from under my parka. “My necklace? She sure is. Alana’s my mother. My father confirmed it.”

“Holy crap,” Gwenlyn breathed, gently caressing the photo. “We were right.”

I snatched the album away from her to study the picture again. “Wait, you knew?”

“I guessed,” she corrected. “Actually, Nora found out about it first. She told me that your auras felt the same.”

“Give me the wine,” I ordered. Gwenlyn didn’t dare to argue, passing the bottle silently. “Anything else you want to tell me? Are we long-lost cousins or something?”

“I’m not really a Summers,” Gwenlyn reminded me sourly. “But this is the breakthrough that we needed. I asked Morgan about Alana. She would’ve been about ten years old at the time of your conception, so she should’ve remembered if Alana had a boyfriend and got pregnant. She doesn’t. Your father isn’t the only one suffering from memory loss. It’s the entire coven.”

“So I’m supposed to a member of the Summers coven,” I said, realizing the full extent of what it meant to be Alana’s daughter. “I was supposed to grow up in Yew Hollow. I am a Summers witch.”

Gwenlyn nodded sullenly, using her fork to push the last bite of meat around the takeout container. “Yup. Without even trying. Lucky you.”

“What do we now?” I asked her. “We have the photos, so we can perform the memory retrieval ritual, right? When?”

“Slow your roll,” she said, abandoning her meal. “I kinda fibbed to you before. It’s not your memories we need. You were a baby when all of this happened, so you wouldn’t be of much use to us anyway. We need Alana.”

“You were stringing me along!”

“I was playing the game strategically,” Gwenlyn said. “And I’m sorry for that. I couldn’t sneak you into Yew Hollow without knowing for certain that Alana was your mother. It would’ve been too big of a risk.”

I paused in cleaning up the remnants of our dinner. “You’re going to sneak me into Yew Hollow?”

“How else are we going to get you and Alana to connect again?” Gwenlyn dusted her hands off and collected the meal I’d prepared for Nora. “I need you both for this to work. Meet me around the south edge of town at three a.m. We’re getting to the bottom of this tonight.”

At three o’clock, I paced alone along the edge of the ward, blowing hot air into the palms of my hands. The night was cold, dark, and silent. The animals, sensing the oncoming storm, had returned to their homes. I kept myself warm with my craft but tried to conserve my energy. I didn’t know how much Gwenlyn needed from me in order for this to work. She wasn’t forthcoming about what the memory ritual involved, and if my last interaction with Alana was any indication, this was going to be one hell of a ride.

“Psst, Kennedy!”

I ducked down, searching for the source of Gwenlyn’s voice. Her head and shoulders appeared from a miniscule opening in the thorny shrubs. She beckoned me toward her.

“Really?” I said, kneeling down to squint through the opening. It was, as she’d said, barely bigger than an air vent. “You hid it behind a bush? I can’t believe I couldn’t find it.”

Gwenlyn grinned, withdrawing from the woods. “Get moving, genius. We’ve got work to do.”

I kicked aside the branches to widen the space. Gwenlyn might be able to weasel through the shrubbery, but my shoulders were far broader than hers. I shook off my parka and shoved it through the opening first. It was already going to be tight without the extra padding. The wind bit at my skin as I wriggled headfirst into the break in the magical barrier. The ward itself felt like cool plastic, almost like a kid’s slide at a fast food playground. I slid along, grunting as my shoulders and knees scraped against the glittering sides. My chest felt tight. It was a longer tunnel than I imagined, and all I could see ahead were the soles of Gwenlyn’s boots.

Finally, I slipped out of the opening on the other side, where Gwenlyn helped me to my feet. Yew Hollow hadn’t improved since my eviction, although with winter fast approaching in the rest of Massachusetts, it looked more normal that it had a few months ago. Everything was gray and still, as though the entire town waited for the snow to silence it once and for all.

“Are you sure everyone’s asleep?” I whispered.

Gwenlyn beckoned me toward her. “I infused tonight’s healing spell with a little more chamomile and valerian than usual. They’ll be out for a while. Just in case—”

She tapped my shoulder, and the aura swirled around both of us to create a camouflage of dark green. In the shadowy town, anyone would have a hard time spotting us. I followed Gwenlyn as she led us past the crumbling yew tree in the town square, up the high street, past the police station and the church, and over the hill. The Summers house loomed like a sleeping giant on the dark horizon, but we turned off the path before we reached it and headed into the cul-de-sac where the other witches lived.

I hadn’t been to Alana’s house since the first day I’d met her, though our initial interaction was fresh in my mind. I wouldn’t soon forget the panic of being sucked into another world, one made solely of fire and brimstone, especially since that world seemed to exist in Alana’s mind. She was trapped there, waiting out the effects of this curse, and it was somehow my fault that she was suffering.

We bypassed the front door. Two other witches, Yvette and Yvonne, lived with Alana. Gwenlyn peeked into their bedroom windows first then signaled me to proceed to the back of the house. Keeping to a crouch, I tiptoed through a dead flowerbed and peered into Alana’s window. The room was dark, but Alana herself glowed faintly red, as though her fever was visible to the naked eye. With a soft grunt, I unstuck the window frame and pushed it upward.

“Go, go,” Gwenlyn ordered softly.

I hoisted myself over the ledge and tumbled gently into the room. Gwenlyn followed suit, but she misjudged the distance and her boots thudded against the wood floor. We both froze in place, our breaths shallow and restricted, listening for signs of waking witches.

“We’re good,” Gwenlyn breathed. She unzipped her parka and took a small wooden box from the inner pocket, and then pointed to Alana. “Take the left side. Closer to her heart.”

I shrugged off my coat. My skin was flushed and damp. The room was too hot. Either that, or my craft was already heating up this close to Alana. I knelt next to her bed, my hands folded together over the duvet like I was praying. I had expected to feel different during this visit. Knowing that Alana was my mother changed everything. I hadn’t known who I was for most of my life. I was lost and confused, but all of my unknown history was starting to piece itself together. Seeing Alana again was supposed to be monumental, but her frozen, sallow face inflicted a sense of doom on me instead.

“Ready?” Gwenlyn whispered, stirring me from my reverie. She knelt on Alana’s other side, the small box open and at the ready. I gulped and nodded. The box contained small pouches of herbs and spices. Gwenlyn introduced them one by one. “Turmeric to repair brain cells, cinnamon to increase cognitive functioning, ground sage for boosting memory recall, and cedar wood oil for purification of the spirit.”

I watched, somewhat skeptically, as Gwenlyn dipped her first two fingers into each of the packets, mixing an oily, fragrant concoction. In her opposite palm, she drew a curved triangle with the mixture. Then she took both of Alana’s hands and did the same. Finally, she reached out to me, but my fists remained firmly at my sides.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she said, waiting for me to proffer my palm.

“The last time I touched Alana, her heart practically exploded,” I said. “And Nora’s not here to save her if it happens again.”

Gwenlyn’s oily fingers unfurled my fist. “It won’t happen again. That connection wasn’t monitored or controlled. This one is. I’m going to be there for you.”

The spicy scent of the mixture wafted up to meet my nose as I allowed her to draw the triangle in my palm. Then she threaded her fingers through mine, interlocking our hands, and did the same to Alana.

“Take Alana’s other hand,” she instructed. “Make sure your palms are touching.”

With a deep breath, I lifted Alana’s limp fingers from the bedspread. They felt frail, like if I squeezed too hard, they might crumble into dust. Thankfully, no whirling vortex of fire descended. Instead, awareness of Alana’s soul washed over me. Gwenlyn whispered a rhythmic incantation, and I got lost in the cadence of her voice. The bedroom melted away, and we were born into a world of the past.

Owen McGrath, thirty years younger, was the epitome of carefree and handsome. He strolled through a livelier version of Yew Hollow, flipping his sandy hair out of his warm, hazel eyes. It was summer, and Owen tilted his head back to admire the blue sky, whistling birds, and passing butterflies. I’d never seen my father like this, so adoring of the world around him, so casual in a loose-fitting shirt and shorts.

“Owen!”

In a blur of red hair, a young woman tackled him from behind. He laughed, scooping her onto his back, and ran toward the yew tree in an erratic pattern, ducking just low enough under the branches to avoid bashing Alana’s head. As he spun her around, I saw her entire face for the first time.

We were practically identical. From the almond-shaped, icy blue eyes, to the heavy but not too heavy jawline, to the arch of her brows, Alana had passed almost every one of her remarkable genetic markers on to me. The only difference was that I had inherited my father’s height and broad build, rather than Alana’s willowy one.

Owen set her down on one of the stone benches, where she draped her legs over his knees. He drummed a pattern on her shins. “Do the thing again.”

In a heartbeat, Alana traced patterns through the air. Colorful sparks flew from the tips of her fingers before solidifying into a perfect, shimmering replica of Van Gogh’s “Cafe Terrace at Night.”

Owen grinned. “I’ll never get tired of that.”

Alana swiped her hand through the painting, sending the witchcraft swirling away. “You’ll always have it.”

“Not if my father has his way,” Owen said. His hands absentmindedly roamed over Alana’s long legs. “He keeps threatening to send his valet to collect me.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. “What does he want with you? Doesn’t he understand that you aren’t interested in taking over his business?”

“It doesn’t matter if I’m not interested,” Owen replied. He deepened his tone to mimic his father’s. “It’s my duty as a McGrath man. Ugh.”

“Stay here.” Alana nuzzled against him. “Tell me about your mom again.”

He played gently with her hair, letting the strands float through his fingers like a strange liquid. “She’s like you. Beautiful and strong. Full of life. I have no idea how she ended up married to my dad. No wonder they got divorced.”

“The fact that she was a witch probably didn’t have anything to do with it,” Alana quipped with a mischievous smile.

Owen kissed her nose. “She was so relieved when she gained sole custody of me, and to be honest, I was too. There were conditions of course. My father forced her to put me in private schools, but at the end of the day, I went home to a loving family rather than a cold businessman of a father.”

“Then you found Yew Hollow.”

“I did,” he confirmed. “And it’s the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. This is what life should be like. This place is full of free, positive energy. It reminds me of growing up with my mom. I don’t want corporate culture or office politics or loads of cash. I just want you and this place.”

Alana tilted her chin up, and Owen kissed her lightly. As the breeze ruffled the sleeves of Owen’s shirt, they snuggled closer to each other, and the picturesque scene dematerialized to rebuild itself into something else.

The second setting was far less peaceful. Alana sat in a large tub of warm water with her legs wide. Her hair was drenched with sweat, her face drawn in an expression of intense pain. She yelled in agony, clutching the sides of the tub, hardly aware of Owen’s presence. He knelt beside her, tears streaming down his face, as he supported the back of her head and murmured words of support. Other witches were there too, tending to Alana’s various needs. She was giving birth, and from the looks of it, it wasn’t going well.

“I don’t understand,” one of the younger witches said in an undertone. “Shouldn’t the healing spells have taken effect by now? She shouldn’t be in this much pain.”

The second witch winced as Alana let loose another howl. “No, she shouldn’t. Something isn’t right.”

Auras crisscrossed throughout the room, mostly the standard bright blues and violets of the Summers coven. Alana’s was the most profound, her cherry red color standing out. Another aura caught my eye. It was darker than the rest, a navy blue that looked almost black, and while the others wavered in unison as the witches attempted to help Alana, the dark aura wove its own path, entwining itself around Alana’s legs and snaking toward her womb.

Another witch monitored the situation below. “Nearly there,” she said. “Another big push, Alana.”

“Come on, baby.” Owen pressed his lips to Alana’s soaked temple. “You’re almost done.”

Alana screamed and pushed and all hell broke loose. The dark aura met Alana’s red fury and exploded. The resulting blast was bright orange. It blew through the room like an atomic bomb, knocking Owen and the witches away from the tub. Tile cracked, porcelain shattered, and a tidal wave of water washed across the bathroom floor as the vessel holding Alana gave way. The witches fought to regain their footing, wading to the young woman hunched over in the destruction. Their fear was tangible as they checked on her. Owen shoved his way to Alana, and upon seeing her, collapsed on the wet floor in relief.

Despite her struggle and the demolished bathroom, Alana was unharmed. In her arms, she held a squalling baby with a shock of fiery hair and an aura to match.

10

Gwenlyn

The sound of a door creaking open jolted me from Alana’s memories. Footsteps echoed down the hall, but Kennedy didn’t notice. She was bowed over Alana’s bed, her forehead resting against the duvet cover as she squeezed Alana’s hand tightly in her own. I severed the connection, collected the spice packets, and wiped Alana’s hands clean of the mixture. Then I shook Kennedy’s shoulder.

“We have to go,” I whispered urgently. The footsteps were growing louder. Kennedy didn’t budge. Her fingers twisted in the bed linens. I pried them loose and yanked Kennedy to her feet, dragging her toward the window. As I shoved her through, I mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

Just as we landed on the ground outside, Yvette peeked into Alana’s room. Kennedy, whose eyes were blank and unseeing, gasped for breath. I clapped a hand over her mouth, drawing her as close to the house as I could in case Yvette happened to look out the window. Her rapid pulse thudded against my forearm, but she didn’t fight me. After what felt like hours, Yvette’s aura dissipated from the immediate vicinity, indicating that Kennedy and I were safe to flee the scene.

“Let’s go,” I muttered, coaxing her along the lifeless landscaping. “We need to get you back outside the ward before anyone realizes you’re here.”

She stumbled along without arguing, her coat limply dangling around her arms. I almost tugged the collar up to cover her shoulders, but the frigid air seemed to be doing her good. Her eyes had cleared, and she looked alert and anxious rather than shocked and catatonic, which was a remarkable improvement.

“Did you see it?” she asked as we cleared the cul-de-sac and sprinted down the hill toward the town center. “That aura?”

“The darker one?” I clarified. “Yeah, I saw it. No wonder Alana was in so much pain. One of the other witches was doing something to inhibit her labor.”

“No one else noticed.”

“No, they didn’t.” I gritted my teeth at the thought. “Someone was intentionally trying to sabotage your birth, and they did their best to hide their intent from the others.”

Kennedy’s hair escaped from its messy bun and unraveled like a spool of yarn. As she looked over her shoulder, I saw Alana’s younger face.

“You think someone tried to kill me,” she guessed correctly. “Then why didn’t it work?”

We barreled past the yew tree, where I wished things would just go back to normal. Gone were the days of relaxing beneath the needle-like leaves of the tree. Not so long ago, my only worry was figuring out how to accommodate the sheer number of tourists that would turn up for the annual Fall festival in Yew Hollow. I missed the simplicity of it all.

“That orange blast was you,” I explained to Kennedy. “You created a ward as soon as you were born. It protected you, as well as your mother, from whomever was trying to harm you.”

Kennedy vaulted over a dead rose bush as we neared the woods on the opposite side of the square. “We still didn’t figure out who did it though.”

“It had to be one of the Summers,” I said, turning sideways to fit through the narrow gap between two saplings. “Dark magic corrupts the color of your craft until it turns black, but that aura still had traces of blue—”

My voice cut out when unimaginable pain ripped through my body. It was worse than a bed of nails. It was worse than Camryn’s hex from the other day. It was an immediate dislocation of my mind from my body as every cell screamed for release.

I collapsed in the dirt, jerking spasmodically. Black spots appeared in my line of vision. The muscles in my leg contracted and relaxed in quick succession, bending it at unnatural angles.

Kennedy fell to her knees, shaking my shoulders, her eyes wide and panicked. “Gwen! Gwenlyn! Oh my God. Stay with me. Just stay with me.”

Her hands ended up in mine. It was the only thing that felt real, so I held onto her with all of my might, fighting to clear my vision. I focused on Kennedy’s piercing eyes, the only source of light in the dark woods.

“I have to get someone,” she said. “Let me go get Morgan.”

“No,” I rasped, grabbing her shirt and dragging her closer. “Please don’t leave me.”

“Gwenlyn, I have to.” She tore my fingers from her clothes, where they left imprints in the fabric. “I’ll run. I’ll be back as soon as possible. Morgan will know what to do.”

And then she was on her feet and halfway across the square before I could draw another breath. As the bright spot of her hair faded into the distance, the witch’s mark clenched around my leg, sending me into another round of spasms. I rolled over onto my stomach, retching, as the pain curled tightly around my abdomen. Panting, I lifted the hem of my shirt.

Patterns like black lightning decorated my stomach. The witch’s mark was spreading again. I watched as its tendrils reached from one hip to the other, disappearing below the waistband of my jeans as it snaked down my other leg. I wedged a clean branch between my teeth and bit down on it as the mark made easy work of my lower extremities. Finally, the pain culminated in my legs before extinguishing itself entirely. I went limp with relief, my cheek pressed to the cold ground.

It was minutes or hours before the dirt vibrated lightly with the patter of footsteps. A delicate touch brushed my hair away from my tearstained face as I struggled to open my eyes. A curtain of blonde hair obscured my view of the rest of the woods.

“Oh, dear,” an unfamiliar voice said. “It doesn’t look good for you, does it, darling?”

The speaker was a beautiful woman with apple green eyes, dressed impeccably from head to toe in designer outerwear. She looked stunningly like Nora, but before I could put the pieces together in my head, the thunder of an approaching crowd interrupted my thought process.

Kennedy arrived first, but she skidded to a stop before she reached me, frozen in place by the sight of the gorgeous, slender woman. “Adrienne?”

The woman drew herself up to her full height, and I used her shift of focus to push myself across the forest floor and prop myself up against a tree. She oozed power and influence, and not in a good way.

“Ah, Kennedy,” she said, looking the younger woman over with a distinct sneer. “How are you faring with my disgrace of a family? Terribly, I hope. I see you brought friends to our unfortunate reunion.”

Kennedy stood dumbstruck as Morgan and her sisters arrived on the scene. The middle-of-the-night hubbub had attracted others as well. The Summerses grew in number, forming a half-circle around the picturesque woman, who studied her surroundings with a satisfied air of nonchalance. She allowed the Summerses to gather in total, save for those who were too weak from the curse to leave their beds.

“It was you,” Kennedy finally said, still rooted in place. The blood had drained from her face, and she looked at the other woman with horror and disgust. “You did this.”

The truth was evident in the tremble of Kennedy’s voice. Morgan reacted instinctively, raising her hands to cast a defensive spell against the woman. The other witches followed suit, but just as their auras reached a climax and the clearing glowed with the Summerses’ witchcraft, the woman lifted a single finger. A black cloud descended, extinguishing the witches’ magic in one fell swoop. A murmur of alarm swept through the crowd. The witches’ boots, including Morgan’s, appeared to be glued to the ground so that they couldn't’ move.

“Ah, ah, ah!” the woman said, as though she was scolding a naughty toddler. “That’s no way to welcome me home, is it, Morgan?”

“Who are you?” Morgan snarled. Her expression was a mixture of rage and fear. The curse had weakened her too, but she had not expected this woman to overpower her so easily. Now, her entire family was in danger. “How did you get through the ward?”

“Someone made an opening in your precious ward,” the woman replied. She swept past Kennedy, caressing her cheek with poisonous red nails. Kennedy recoiled, and when she took a step backward, I realized that she and I were the only ones free of the woman’s influence. “I simply walked right in. As for your first question—” The woman paused in front of Morgan, peering down her nose at the shorter woman, and giggled. “—don’t you recognize your own aunt, my dear?”

Morgan’s baffled expression indicated that she did not. The woman laughed again, strolling away from Morgan to stand at the direct center of the clearing.

“No, you wouldn’t, would you?” she said. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Adrienne McGrath, once the sister of Alana Summers. The reason none of you recall any of this is because, many moons ago, I laid a curse and an unbreakable memory enchantment over the Summers coven. Congratulations, ladies. You’re all dying.”

The witches erupted into chaos, shouting profanities and incantations for attack spells that did not come to fruition. Adrienne lifted her hands to the dark sky as if to revel in the insanity. Kennedy shot across the clearing, aiming for Adrienne. For a second, I thought she might actually get the upper hand, but Adrienne blew Kennedy off course with a black jet of craft. Kennedy landed hard on her shoulder, skidding across the dirt until she came to rest at my feet. The coven fell quiet, looking on in panic. As Adrienne stalked toward us, Kennedy scrambled backward until we sat side by side.

Adrienne casually examined her flawless manicure and sighed. “Oh, Kennedy. You shouldn’t cause any more trouble than you already have. After all, it’s your fault the coven is in this mess to begin with.”

“How?” Kennedy panted, her shoulder rising and falling against mine. “Why?”

“Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?” Adrienne whirled around, her blonde hair moving like a fan of golden silk. She tapped Morgan on the nose. “You were ten years old the last time I saw you.”

Morgan jerked away from Adrienne’s touch. “You are not my family. I have no idea who you are, but you are not a Summers witch.”

“Au contraire,” Adrienne countered. “Roughly thirty years ago, I was a proud member of the Summers coven. Your mother, Cassandra, was coven leader then, and she often counted on my ability to settle disputes. I’m completely objective, you see. Silly emotions don’t cloud my judgement.” Kennedy scoffed, but Adrienne pretended not to hear her. “In time, a man arrived in Yew Hollow. He was charming and handsome, everything a woman could want. His name was Owen McGrath, and he fell in love with my dear sister, Alana.”

There was a bitter edge to her voice now, which Kennedy sensed. She was tense and taut at my side. I rested my hand over hers, pleading silently with her not to do anything rash. I understood now. Adrienne was not only the root of the Summerses’ problems. She was also Kennedy’s emotionally abusive stepmother and Nora’s biological mom.

“Due to irresponsibility, Alana soon conceived a child,” Adrienne went on. She pointed at Kennedy. “This one.”

Morgan’s eyes widened as she made the connection. Then she hid her face in her hands, as if she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen it before.

“I knew that the child would bring doom to the coven,” Adrienne said. “But Cassandra did not heed my warnings. I decided to take things into my own hands. The child needed to die, so I formulated a plan when my beloved sister went into labor. Little did I know that the child would use her own unhoned witchcraft to thwart me.

“I was discovered shortly after the child’s birth,” she continued, strolling through the frozen witches as she told her tale. They followed her movements warily, hands clenched at their sides. “At the point, the coven had already fallen prey to the child’s effects. They believed me to be a monster, and so Cassandra banished me from the very family I had fought so hard to protect.” Adrienne’s expression darkened. “But I do not take disappointment well. What, I wondered, would devastate the coven in every way? What would cause them to feel the pain that I had felt at their betrayal? What would prove to my sister that she was undeserving of Owen McGrath’s love and affection?”

She made her way back to Kennedy, whom she smiled coldly at. “I knew at once. I took the child to raise as my own, rescued Owen from certain disappointment, and cast a curse over the Summers coven. The catch? Only the child could activate the curse, by intentionally performing her first act of witchcraft.”

Kennedy made a noise between a sob and a laugh as Adrienne knelt down to take her chin between her fingers.

“Don’t you see, Kennedy?” she whispered. “The entire Summers coven will die because of you.”

Kennedy let out a garbled chuckle. “I was never a danger to this coven. He loved Alana, and you were jealous. Objectivity and emotions can’t live in the same body, Adrienne, so tell us the truth. He didn’t want you. He never wanted you, and you tried to kill your own sister—and her newborn baby—to win him over.”

The slap across Kennedy’s face echoed through the trees. Kennedy yelped, more in surprise than pain, and a red handprint blossomed on her cheek. Adrienne shook with fury as she rose to her feet again.

“You filthy—good for nothing—”

She paced from one end of the clearing to the other, panting through her nose as she tried to regain her elegant composure. Kennedy’s fists glowed orange. She had a protective ward at the ready. Adrienne swept her hair over her shoulder and took a deep breath to steady herself. When she spoke again, she addressed the entire coven.

“You’ll be delighted to know that I did not return to this godforsaken town to finish what I started,” Adrienne declared. “In fact, I’m quite content to watch you all suffer and die. I came to retrieve what belongs to me.”

Black magic blossomed around her like a cloud of pure night. Deadly quick, she reached down, wrapped her fingers around Kennedy’s throat, and pinned her against a tree. Kennedy scrabbled against her grasp, unable to conjure a ward while Adrienne’s craft stifled her own.

“Where’s my daughter?” Adrienne snarled. “Where’s Nora?”

Kennedy choked, tears streaming down her cheeks as she fought for air. The coven watched in horrified silence, unable to intervene. I was Kennedy’s only chance, and though the feeling was only just beginning to return to my legs, I had to do something. In a move of desperation, I prepared to lunge—

“I’m right here, Mom.”

11

Kennedy

“Nora,” I gasped, fighting against Adrienne’s hold.

My little sister had pushed her way through the immobile witches. She stood at the front of them with her feet planted shoulder-width apart and her hands clenched in determined fists at her sides. Her pale hair was decorated with snowflakes, and she wore a pure white cashmere sweater that seemed to refract what little moonlight infiltrated the dark clearing. She was a warrior of winter, an angelic illumination, and the Summerses’ saving grace.

Adrienne released me as she found her daughter’s gaze. Immediately, her stance shifted into one that was not so predatory. She opened her arms out to Nora, but she still crackled with the leftover power of her warped craft.

“My beautiful girl,” she said, her voice soft and reverent. “My pride and joy. When you disappeared, I thought I would die.”

Nora warily stood her ground, refusing her mother’s invitation to come closer. “Is it true? Did you do this to these women?”

A touch of a sneer distorted the facade that Adrienne had employed for Nora’s benefit. “These women, Nora, deserve every moment of suffering. How long have you been listening?”

“Long enough,” Nora replied. Her voice cracked as she went on. “You tried to kill Kennedy. How could you do that?”

“Nora, sweetheart—”

“Don’t say my name,” Nora snapped. She furiously wiped a wayward tear from the corner of her eye. “You don’t get to say my name right now. Kennedy was always right about you. From the beginning, I stuck up for you because you were my mother. I didn’t understand why you could take such good care of me and give me everything I wanted then turn around and treat my older sister with such contempt. Your own niece?”

The label sounded stale in reference to my relationship with Adrienne. It was true. Adrienne wasn’t just my stepmother. She was my aunt, my own flesh and blood. It was a bitter realization. It was bad enough to be related to Adrienne by marriage. It was even worse to know that we shared genetics.

Adrienne adjusted her black satin scarf so that it drew even more attention to her pale, delicate cheekbones. I looked across to the witches, where some similarly-shaped faces, blonde hair, and green eyes peered back. It dawned on me that the Summerses’ most prominent features did not go lost on Adrienne. Instead, they had come together in a lethal combination of beauty and scorn.

“You don’t understand,” she said. Her attention was focused solely on Nora, as if the rest of the coven was so insignificant that she considered them no more than ants beneath her high-heeled designer boots. “You were perfect, Nora, untouched by the coven’s influence. Pure and beautiful. I did my best to maintain that perfection. I wanted the best for you.”

“My very existence is a betrayal,” Nora whispered, her eyes shimmering with waiting tears. “You forced my father to love you.”

Adrienne dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “Nonsense. Owen was more than happy to be free of the Summerses.”

“After you wiped his memory,” I spat. Adrienne glared sharply at me. “Yeah, I know about that too. As if Dad would let you get away with kidnapping his daughter for your own and leaving the woman he actually loved to rot. How much happiness did you steal to convince him that he loved you instead? He doesn’t remember anything. Not Alana, not Yew Hollow, not even the truth about his own mother.”

“And you think you’ll be the one to remind him?” Adrienne laughed coldly. “I don’t think so.”

“I already have,” I growled. “I returned home while you were out and found the photo album in the hidden part of the master bedroom. That was your creation, wasn’t it? I can’t imagine you kept the pictures for posterity’s sake. Why hold onto them then? Did you need them to control the memory enchantment?” When Adrienne’s brows shot upward and her lips parted, I knew I was on the right track. “Thought so. How did it feel when you discovered the key to the second half of your treacherous curse was missing?”

“Inconvenient,” Adrienne admitted. “But it led me straight to you and Nora. I plan to retrieve it before leaving you and the rest of the Summers to rot here in Yew Hollow, so in the end, it all works out, doesn’t it?”

“If you think I’m letting you leave here with Nora, you have another thing coming,” I replied, stepping toward my stepmother. The three of us—Adrienne, Nora, and I—made a straight line with three points, like Orion’s belt, and I was ready to blast this constellation apart.

Adrienne laughed out loud. “As if you have a choice. Look behind me, Kennedy.” She bowed mockingly to Morgan, who stood behind Nora’s right shoulder, attempting to maintain an illusion of strength. “Morgan Summers, arguably the most powerful witch in the nation, if I’ve kept up with the correct line of gossip, is at my mercy. So what makes you—an illegitimate child with no training at all—think you could stop me from taking what I want and leaving?”

“I won’t go,” Nora announced.

Adrienne’s hackles rose as she considered her daughter. “Nora, these women are not your friends—”

“I won’t go,” Nora repeated louder. Her aura began to glow, expanding outward until the entire clearing was bathed in her rosy golden light. It fell upon every Summers witch, Gwenlyn, and me, but it carved a path around Adrienne, leaving her in the unforgiving gray of Yew Hollow. “You hurt your family and turned your back on them. I won’t do the same thing.”

“These people are not your family,” Adrienne hissed. “I am.”

Nora shook her head. “Kennedy is my family. Morgan and Gwenlyn and the rest of the Summers have become my family. You just gave birth to me.”

Adrienne rose, rolling her shoulders back and lifting her chin. Her black aura pressed against Nora’s pink one. “Do you think so little of me? You said yourself that I gave you everything you ever wanted. You never went without. I fed you, clothed you, and put a roof over your head. This is how you repay me?”

“Common decency doesn’t cancel out the crimes you’ve committed against these people,” Nora replied evenly. “And you can’t buy love or loyalty with ponies and parties.”

Adrienne faltered ever so slightly. Then she said, “Fine. If the Summerses mean so much to you, I’ll give you one chance to save them. Leave with me. Return to Windsor Falls. If you do so, I will lift the curse from the Summers coven. They’ll go on living their wretched lives, and we can get back to our normal routine.”

Whispered mutters rose from the throng of witches as Nora considered Adrienne’s proposal. If she agreed, this could be the end of the Summerses’ trouble, as long as Adrienne kept her word.

“What about Kennedy?” Nora asked.

All eyes turned to me, including Adrienne’s. “Without the curse, she would no longer act as the catalyst,” she explained. “She would be free to do as she wishes.”

I didn’t believe for a second that Adrienne would allow such a thing to happen. She had plagued me my entire life, taking out her anger with Alana and Owen’s relationship on a baby that never had a choice in the matter. Her opinion on the matter hadn’t changed. She still believed the Summerses deserving of their fate, and if she wanted, she could force Nora to leave Yew Hollow with her. The choice was an illusion to lure Nora into doing what Adrienne wanted. And Nora was falling for it. My little sister gazed across the clearing at me, then looked over her shoulder at the Summerses.

“Nora, don’t,” I pleaded, seeing the uncertainty in her expression. “She won’t keep her promise.”

“This from the sister who was never there for you,” Adrienne cut in. “Face it, Nora. When it comes to promises, I always upheld mine to you. Kennedy, on the other hand, repeatedly let you down.”

Nora’s shoulders rose and fell with her breaths, her aura pulsing along to her rapid heartbeat. She was too good for this. She felt obligated to solve a problem that wasn’t hers to confront, and I couldn’t stand that she was considering handing herself over to her mother to do so.

Adrienne sighed, pushing up the sleeve of her knee-length trench coat to check her leather watch. “I’ll tell you what. I don’t have the patience to wait out your decision, so I’ll give you three days to consider my offer. Nora, the fate of the Summerses now rests in your hands. You may return to me at any time, but if the fourth day breaks, I will expedite the effects of the curse and kill off the entire coven. It’s up to you.”

Nora had no time to react before Adrienne turned on her heel and retreated, carving a black path through the rosy air. She knelt next to Gwenlyn, who turned her face away from Adrienne’s whispering lips. Standing so close, I overheard the quick exchange.

“Careful, darling,” Adrienne said, smiling. “Your color is changing.”

She rose to her feet before Gwenlyn could respond, threw one last look of contempt over her shoulder, and vanished from the spot with a puff of black smoke. At once, the Summerses were released from her hold. They regained control of their bodies and witchcraft, and their auras spread through the clearing in a whirlwind of confusion and chaos. The women surrounded Morgan, pelting her with demands. Nora backed out of the crowd to no one’s notice, took my hand, and led me in the opposite direction of the coven’s squabble.

“You need to get out of here,” she said urgently, keeping an eye on Morgan’s attempts to quell the riot over my shoulder. “Stay inside the ward, but keep hidden. Camryn won’t care about Mom’s offer. She’ll try to kill you anyway. Go now before it’s too late.”

She shoved me away from the conflict, but I held fast to the sleeves of her sweater. “Nora, wait. What about you? Are you all right? She’s your mother. You’re allowed to be confused—”

She cupped my face in her hands, imploring me to look her in the eyes, which shone with determination. “Kennedy, I’m not confused. Devastated, maybe, but not confused. It’s my turn to keep you safe. I love you, okay? Now get out of here.”

“But—”

“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “Go.”

I would’ve protested further, but one of the witches in the fray had noticed mine and Nora’s separation from the group. She glared over the top of the coven’s heads, her eyes boring into mine. Nora pushed me deeper into the trees. With one last desperate look at her pleading expression, I turned on my heel and ran.

Without Nora’s aura to guide me, the woods turned dark. I stumbled over rocks and roots, holding my hands out in front of me to feel for approaching branches, too scared to use my craft to light the way in case Adrienne was out there waiting for me. I had no idea where to go. There was no moon or stars overhead to guide me. I was running away again, with no concept of a plan in my mind.

When the noise of the witches’ bickering match had faded, I slowed to a jog. Through the trees, I could make out the first few houses of Yew Hollow’s modest suburban neighborhood. They were all vacant, which meant I could choose any one of them, cast a ward to protect myself from unwanted visitors, and hole up for the night. I stuck to the edge of the woods as I scouted the area, using the shadows as cover just in case. The backyard of the closest residence was a mere fifty feet away from my location. I could vault the fence and get inside within a few seconds.

I glanced left and right. All clear. I shot out from the trees and made a flying leap, catching the top of the fence and hoisting myself over. Before I could drop to the other side, an attack spell hit the direct center of my back, bruising the space between my shoulder blades and causing me to topple headfirst toward the ground. I barely got my arms up in time to protect my head and neck. They took most of the impact, and I heard the crack of my collarbone fracturing. I groaned, cradling my arm to my chest as I rolled over to face the oncoming threat.

Camryn cleared the fence with ease and landed lightly beside me, yet another indication that she was using her witchcraft in ways that didn’t suit the Summers morality clause. She was alone. I guessed that the witch in the clearing had tipped her off to my escape. I scrambled to get to my feet without the use of my hands, wincing as my movements jostled my broken collarbone.

“Were it not for the fact that your stepmother is trying to kill us, I might actually like her,” Camryn said, grinning as I backed into the fence. “She’s got the right idea about the coven anyway. Self-righteous women who think they know better than everyone else. That’s how the Summers are bred, but it’s good to know that some of us are capable of rising above our family’s flaws.”

“You’re delusional,” I said.

“I’m practical,” she countered. “For example, while the rest of the coven begs Morgan to put an end to our suffering, I have taken action. See, I don’t care about your little sister, Kennedy. She means nothing to me, so I have no qualms if her mother reclaims her from Yew Hollow. In fact, she’ll be better off. But I doubt Adrienne’s claims to lift the curse. I trust no woman but myself to finish the job, so when I saw you running off like the coward that you are, I realized it was the perfect opportunity to end you for good.” Camryn plucked her gloves off, tossed them aside, and flexed her fingers. “I thought we might do this the old-fashioned way.”

She dropped into a boxer’s stance, bending her knees and lifting her fists, but her fur-collared coat and textured boots made the offensive posture look ridiculous. I couldn’t help it. I barked out a laugh.

“You want to fight me?” I asked incredulously. “Are you kidding?”

Camryn smirked and winked. “Last time I checked, you had a broken wing.”

She lunged, and I instinctively raised my arms to block her first punch. Red-hot pain lanced through my chest, but my collarbone was the least of my worries. Camryn’s fist landed on my forearm with a sharp smack. In a normal situation, it wouldn’t have even fazed me, but her punches were loaded with witchcraft. Her aura was a bluish gray on its way to a darker hue. Like Adrienne, she was using dark magic. This was not the average fist fight.

She landed hit after hit, coming in lightning quick with every jab. I blocked them as best as I could, curling in on myself to make her target as small as possible. I used my own craft to fight back, but my wards weren’t holding against Camryn’s power. They fizzled under her blows as I gasped for breath, my focus torn apart by the pain in my collarbone.

“What’s wrong?” Camryn asked as she spun me around and locked me in a hold with my hands behind my back. “Can’t control your superpowers?” She slammed my head into the fence and let me fall to the ground, where I lay dazed in the crisp, dead grass. Camryn stepped over me, her teeth bared in a feral grin. “Any last words, Kennedy McGrath?”

All of a sudden, Gwenlyn appeared behind Camryn. She locked her arm around the other witch’s throat.

“I have one,” she snarled. “Goodbye.”

12

Gwenlyn

If I hadn’t hesitated, I could have rid the coven of Camryn’s influence forever, but Morgan’s voice whispered to my conscience. We were not killers. Even as a sinister desire to complete the act flowed up from the mark that now covered half of my body, I remembered that I should not stoop to Camryn’s level. For a fraction of a second, I loosened my grip. It was a mistake. Camryn ducked out of my hold, blasted me backward with a blue-gray force field, and fled the scene, vanishing into the woods.

I knelt beside Kennedy, who looked worse than I’d ever seen her. Her vibrant hair was dulled and matted with mud. Her face was a pattern of awakening bruises. There was a split in her bottom lip. Blood trickled down her chin. She hugged her elbow close to her chest at an odd angle, evidence of a larger injury. Camryn’s dark magic had knocked the wind out of her, sucking her dry of her powers.

I looped her uninjured arm around my shoulders and hoisted her to her feet. “Come on. We need to get you to Nora. She’s meeting us at the barn. You’ll both be safe there.”

Kennedy barely had the strength to use her voice. “But Camryn—”

“I can protect you from Camryn,” I replied firmly as I lugged Kennedy through the side yard of the house and up the sidewalk. I grunted with the effort. Kennedy was all muscle, making her heavier than a bag of cinderblocks, and I didn’t want to waste my extra power on dragging her along. “Can you at least try to move your feet?”

“Doing my best.”

To her credit, anyone else would’ve given up after Camryn’s attack, but Kennedy possessed an inhuman determination to return to her little sister. She surged ahead, her hand twisting in the fabric of my jacket as she used me as a human walking stick.

“Easy does it.” I adjusted my position so that she could lean more steadily on me, and together, we made our way up the hill.

Kennedy huffed with exhaustion, her face red and sweating. “You scared Camryn off. How’d you do that?”

“You should save your strength. I’ll fill you in at the barn.”

“No, you won’t,” she said, side-eyeing me as I heaved her over a crack in the sidewalk. “It’s that mark on your leg, isn’t it? You told me you got power surges from it. That’s what was happening in the woods when you collapsed. Miracle recovery, if you ask me.”

“Fine,” I conceded. “Yes. The mark’s growing again, and it seems to be feeding me power every time it does. Strength, stealth, combat ability. It feels natural to me now. I beat Camryn once before. If she had tried to fight me again instead of running away, I probably would’ve done it again.”

“You hesitated. Why?”

“I’ve never killed anyone. Well, I’ve never killed a human. Demons and a warlock, but that was different. Camryn’s one of us. Taking down your own family comes at a price.”

Kennedy’s breathing was becoming erratic. It bubbled in the back of her throat—a bad sign—but she spoke anyway. “You need to get rid of that mark, Gwen. It’s time. Tell Morgan about it.”

I clenched my teeth. “Soon.”

“It’s going to kill you.”

“I can deal with the pain.”

“Really?” Kennedy panted. The skin around her eyes was red and watery. “Because you didn’t see yourself back there in the woods. You were completely gone.”

Once the ground leveled out at the top of the hill, it was easier to pilot Kennedy past the Summers house and into the woods behind it. There were no signs of unrest at the house yet, though I knew that the day would deliver a new element of arguing. The sky was just beginning to lighten. Dawn steadily approached, signaling the first of Nora’s three days to decide whether or not to condemn the coven.

“Do you want to beat Adrienne or not?” I asked her. “It’s all coming down to this, Kennedy. In three days, we either win or die, and I’m not about to go down without a fight.”

“You don’t get it,” Kennedy said. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. She grew weaker by the minute. “It’s hers. That power you’re borrowing. It’s Adrienne’s.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. In the back of my mind, I already knew this. The witch’s mark had appeared the same day the curse in Yew Hollow had been activated. It was too much of a coincidence for the incidents to be unrelated. But did Adrienne even know that I was feeding off of her dark magic? Was I siphoning her power to use as my own? With any luck, it would take its toll on Adrienne, not me.

“Then I’ll find great justice in using it against her,” I replied.

But Kennedy had passed out. Thankfully, the barn was in view. I struggled to lift Kennedy’s weight onto my back, staggering toward the door. She sagged, and I nearly dropped her, but Nora appeared from behind me just in time.

“Careful,” I warned as she reached for Kennedy’s other arm. “She’s injured. Something’s wrong with that shoulder.”

“Broken collarbone,” Nora muttered, supporting Kennedy around her waist instead. Together, we maneuvered her over the doorstep and laid her down on the couch. Nora stripped off her sweater, bunched it up, and used it to prop up her sister’s head. “Get me clean washcloths and warm water.”

I did as asked, filling a mixing bowl with water from the tap to bring back to her. She dipped a washcloth into the bowl and began to wipe the dirt and blood away from Kennedy’s face. In the warm glow of the barn’s light, Kennedy looked even worse. I shuddered thinking about Camryn’s power. She too was growing stronger. It was the only explanation as to how she got the upper hand over Kennedy’s instinctive wards.

Nora probed Kennedy’s chest and sides, frowning. “She’s bleeding internally too. Camryn did all of this?”

“Afraid so,” I said. “Are you strong enough to fix it?”

“I can do enough to get her back on her feet.” She gently freed Kennedy’s injured arm from her coat. “But it will take her some time to return to her full strength.”

“That’ll have to do.”

Nora went to work, igniting her aura. It tangled around Kennedy like twine, reaching for the areas that were most severely injured first. Pink tendrils wrapped around her shoulder, and my stomach twisted as I heard the crunch of her collarbone resetting itself. The cut on her lip hardened and scabbed over, and the bruises faded from purple to yellow. Nora was in her element. I had seen her help the witches countless times, but it was a new experience watching her heal her own sister. She was completely absorbed in the process, her hands meticulously weaving spell after spell like a complicated, interpretative dance. Her love and care for Kennedy shone through and fed her strength. As she worked her magic, Kennedy began to look human again, rather than a pile of ragged skin and bones. Finally, Nora drew away and slumped against the side of the couch.

“Here,” I said, kneeling down and offering her a glass of water. “Drink this. Are you okay?”

She gulped the water. “Just tired.”

“I meant in the grander scheme of things,” I clarified. “Your mother shouldn’t have put this decision on your shoulders. The whole coven will come after you, but you don’t have to make this choice alone.”

Nora pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezing her swollen eyes shut. “She knew that would happen, and she did it anyway. I know that she’s manipulating me, Gwenlyn.”

I sat down beside her and patted her outstretched leg affectionately. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. She’s your mom.”

“She’s not who I thought she was.” She leaned her head against the couch and stared off into the distance. “I’m not okay. Not really. But I can’t think about that right now. If we’re going to beat her, you need my help.”

I sighed. “It would be a whole lot easier to imagine defeating her if the witches were all on the same side. The next three days are going to be hell.”

“Unless we can unify the coven,” Nora pointed out. “You said that Camryn is manipulating her supporters. What if we could prove that to Morgan and break Camryn’s hold on them?”

“And how are we supposed to do that?”

Nora smirked. “I have an idea.”

Snow fell in earnest as I approached Alana’s house for the second time in a matter of hours, but this time around, I planned on using the front door. I knocked lightly, and the curtains in the window rustled as someone inside checked for their visitor. A pair of keen gray eyes peered at me through the glass. I waved. The door swung open and Yvette appeared.

“You were here earlier,” she said before I could even wipe my feet on the welcome mat. “I felt your aura in Alana’s room. Kennedy’s too.”

“Kennedy needed to see her mother,” I replied. “It was imperative.”

“And now that all the secrets are out?”

“I’m not so sure that they are.”

Yvette’s hand remained on the door, as though she was trying to decide whether or not to slam it in my face. To my surprise, she opened it further and beckoned me inside. “Well then? Why have you graced us with your presence?”

“I need your help,” I answered. “Yvonne’s too.”

“With what?” Yvonne had emerged from the hallway to the bedrooms at the mention of her name. Like her sister, she watched me warily. They were both on Morgan’s side, but it was no secret that I had been the one to let Kennedy inside the ward, thus making it possible for Adrienne to infiltrate Yew Hollow. The guilt had already begun to eat away at me, but now was not the time to dwell on mistakes.

“Camryn,” I said. “We’ll never find a way to defeat Adrienne with her around. We need to make the Summerses a unit of their own again so that everyone stands behind Morgan.”

Yvette crossed her arms. “Quite the challenge, considering half the coven disagrees with Morgan’s choices at the moment.”

“That’s the thing,” I said, snapping my fingers. “What if they do agree with Morgan and Camryn is somehow making them think otherwise?”

Yvonne narrowed her eyes. “What are you trying to say?”

“I spied on Camryn and her followers,” I explained. “She’s doing something to make them compliant. We just need to find out what. Yvette, with your wind ability, you can get Camryn alone. I’ll take over from there. We’ll subdue and contain her. Then Yvonne can question her. Make her tell us how to turn off her influence.”

Yvonne was a truthsayer. What she asked of you, you were compelled to answer honestly. In my opinion, it was a frightening ability to both possess and experience. The truth never seemed to be what you really wanted.

“And when do you propose we perform our little caper?” Yvonne asked.

I glanced outside, where the snow was steadily coating Yew Hollow in white. “How about right now?”

The flaw in this plan was that Adrienne’s declaration had set every witch in Yew Hollow on edge. The air buzzed with auras and energy. After Adrienne’s departure, Morgan had called for a respite in the discussion. These days, it felt like all we did was discuss things. While Morgan and her sisters schemed to take down Adrienne, I felt compelled to tackle the action closer to home.

Like last time, Camryn and her supporters gathered at Sage’s house. Yvette, Yvonne, and I kept our distance, scouting the enemy territory through the attic window of a house across the street. If someone tipped Camryn off about our presence, our plan would go to pieces. This was why I had chosen Yvette to help.

“Ready?” I asked her.

Without answering, she began to work. Her hair blew about in the wind of her indigo aura. When she released her spell, it gusted through the open window, across the street, and into Sage’s house. I trained my gaze on the front door, waiting breathlessly.

“Come on,” I muttered. “Come outside, Camryn.”

A moment later, Camryn stumbled onto the front porch, clutching at her throat. Yvette had stolen her oxygen. She coughed and spluttered, staggering along the path of breathable air that Yvette had created for her. If she strayed, she would suffocate, so she sprinted across the street, yanked the door of our hideout open, and came inside. The click of her heeled boots echoed up to the attic from the first floor. I patted Yvette on the back and motioned to Yvonne.

“Wait for my signal,” I ordered.

I left them and crept down to the first floor. Camryn paced back and forth in the dining room, gasping for breath. As the steps creaked beneath my feet, she gripped the back of a chair.

“I know you’re there,” she growled. “I can sense it!”

With the last two words, she spun around and threw the chair with all of her might. It glimmered with gray witchcraft as it rocketed across the room. I replied with a quick protective force field. The chair smashed against it, splintering into pieces around me as I crouched in the stairwell. Then, before she could try again, I lashed out with an attack spell of my own.

The house turned to rubble as we traded blows. Dark magic shattered windows, broke picture frames, and scorched the floor, but I had never felt more powerful. Energy flooded my every pore, and I reveled in the way Camryn’s eyes widened as I descended the stairs at my full height without fear.

“You’ve gotten stronger,” she shouted over the noise of our battle.

In reply, I blocked a shimmering hex. It reflected off my personal ward and hit a vase of dead flowers. Camryn’s gaze flickered to the explosion of glass. I charged forward, tackling her around the waist and pinning her to the ground.

“Now!” I yelled.

Behind me, Yvette and Yvonne thundered down the staircase. They flanked my either side, securing Camryn’s wrists to the floor with magical bonds. She struggled to free herself, but my craft had surpassed hers. It smothered her gray aura with a wave of dark green. Finally, she gave up, her chest heaving as she glared up at us.

“Well?” she demanded. “What do you want?”

Yvonne pressed the palm of her hand to Camryn’s forehead, where turquoise witchcraft blossomed into petals. “The truth about your followers. What have you done to them?”

“Nothing,” she spat.

Yvonne’s craft encircled Camryn’s head like a crown as she tried again. “What have you done to your followers?”

“Nothing,” Camryn said again and laughed.

Yvonne pulled away, bewildered. “She’s not lying.”

“Or you’re not asking the right questions,” I suggested. “Try again.” I leaned over Camryn as Yvonne’s craft settled around her head. “Camryn, are you using your ability to influence the Summerses?”

Camryn fought against Yvonne’s control, pressing her lips together until they turned white. Then she sputtered, “Yes.”

“And what ability is that?”

Another silent struggle. “D—deception.”

I sat back on my heels in understanding. “All this time, you’ve been lying to the coven about your real ability? Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

I explained to Yvette and Yvonne. “She can claim she did nothing to her supporters because all she did was speak to them. She never cast a hex or a spell to get them on her side. Right, Camryn?”

“Right.”

“So how do we get them to recognize the truth again?” Yvette asked.

“You can’t,” Camryn huffed. “I’m the only one they’ll believe now. You want them back on your side? You’ll have to kill me.”

“At this point, I’m sure Morgan will have that arranged,” I snapped.

Camryn chuckled. “You’re forgetting something.”

“What?”

“I have an army.”

The front door blasted open with an array of auras as Camryn’s followers stormed the premises. Yvette and Yvonne immediately fell prey to attack spells. They were unconscious before they hit the ground. I heaved myself away from Camryn, who easily freed herself from the bonds. As I retreated to the far corner of the room, hiding behind a black and green shield of my own creation, the Summerses advanced. Every hex hit my shield with a resounding pop, weakening my defense little by little. I drew on the power of the witch’s mark, but against so many opponents, the well dried up quickly.

The witches parted to let Camryn through, never letting up on their attack. She looked down on me. “You’re not the only one who’s grown stronger, Gwenlyn.”

She crossed her forearms in an X shape. Her power gathered there, and when she released it, it was as though she had dropped a grenade. It fell in slow motion, clattered against the floor, then exploded right in front of me. It blew my shield to pieces and blasted me off my feet. I crashed into a china cabinet. Glass and broken plates rained down as the last bit of my energy flickered and died. My legs went limp, as though they could not support my weight without the help of the mark. I landed in a pile of debris, my hands sliding against shards of glass as I tried to steady myself. My aura had snuffed out. The familiar sense of its presence was suddenly gone. I felt empty inside, as though someone had torn out my soul.

Camryn leaned over me, took the front of my shirt in her fist, and dragged me toward her. “You know, I thought it would be satisfying enough to watch you burn yourself out with dark magic, but I don’t think I’m quite done yet.” She released me, and I thumped to the floor. As she dusted her hands off, she smiled down at me. “Thank you, Gwenlyn. This has been an unfortunate setback, but it’s made me realize that the Summerses’ survival teeters on Morgan’s inability to see reason. I understand my mistake now. All this time, I’ve been trying to kill Kennedy McGrath when I should’ve been plotting Morgan’s death instead.”

13

Kennedy

A loud crash ripped me from slumber. When I wrenched myself back to the conscious world, I forgot for a moment where I was. The barn was lit with dim gray light. I lay on the couch, coated in a layer of mud and dirt. My shoulder ached and my head throbbed as the fight with Camryn came back to me. There was no time to ponder what had happened in the time afterward. The crash was Gwenlyn’s doing. She had fallen through the door and collapsed on the welcome mat, curling into a ball with both hands pressed against her heart.

“Gwenlyn!” Nora appeared from the kitchen and rushed to Gwenlyn’s side. “What happened? Where’s Camryn?”

Gwenlyn struggled to get the words out. “She—Morgan—”

“What is it?” Nora said, soothing Gwen with a relaxation spell. “Tell me.”

“Camryn’s going to kill Morgan,” Gwenlyn gasped.

Immediately, I rolled off the couch and onto my feet, sore but stable. I felt the lingering touch of Nora’s craft in my bones. “Where is she?”

Both Gwenlyn and Nora jumped at the sound of my voice. Neither one of them had realized I was awake.

“I don’t know,” Gwenlyn answered. “I was unconscious when she left, but there’s no time to waste. For all we know, she’s on our way to Morgan’s right now. I’m no use. Camryn drained me completely.”

I picked up my mud-stained coat from the floor beside the couch and put it on. “I’ll go.”

Nora rocketed to her feet, preventing me from passing through the front door. “Kennedy, no! Camryn just knocked the wind out of you too. You won’t make it through another beating.”

“Someone has to warn Morgan.”

“Ken,” Nora pleaded, grabbing the sleeves of my coat. “Please don’t go.”

I took Nora by the shoulders and pulled her into a hug, resting my chin on the top of her head. “Stay here. Look after Gwenlyn.” I pivoted us around so that Nora was no longer standing in the way of the door and let her go. “I promise to stay out of the fight.”

Her hand slipped out of mine. “Ken, please—”

“I’ll be right back.”

It was impossible to unsee the wobble of her lower lip as I left the barn. The hardest thing in the world for me was leaving Nora behind, but I was forced to do it over and over again. That alone fueled me with a surge of motivation. If the curse was broken, Nora and I could live a normal life. I’d never have to leave her again.

I sprinted through the woods as fast as my legs would carry me. Snowflakes continued to drift down from the sky, melting in my eyes and biting at my nose. My breaths came in short, visible gasps. I emerged from the woods and lengthened my strides to cross the wide expanse of the Summers’ backyard.

When I vaulted up the stairs to the back porch, I discovered that the house was disturbingly silent. I expected Morgan to be holding court. The coven should’ve been preparing to battle Adrienne or dealing with the Camryn situation or questioning Nora about her options. Instead, it was as though everyone had given up.

I found Morgan sitting at the head of the dining room table with her forehead resting on her knees, which she had curled up to meet her chest. Pieces of paper and note cards with scrawls of handwriting littered the table. At the sound of my footsteps, Morgan looked up.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her cardigan.

“I know.” I looked around at the empty house. “Where is everybody?”

“I sent them home,” she replied. She rifled through the papers. “I had everyone write down their opinion for me to consider. It’s quieter that way. After all these years as coven leader, I still work best on my own.”

I gestured to her position. “This is working?”

Morgan sniffed and stood up, collecting the notes in a rough pile. “When you have fought as many battles as I have, Kennedy, then you can criticize my methods. Where are Gwenlyn and Nora?”

“At the barn,” I replied. “That’s why I’m here. Gwenlyn sent me to warn you. She had a run-in with Camryn and lost all of her powers. She’s plotting to kill you, Morgan.”

Morgan’s head snapped up. “You couldn’t have led with that information?”

“I—”

Right on cue, every window in the house shattered. Camryn’s supporters poured in from every direction, casting hexes and spells in a dizzying array, but there was a reason Morgan was known as the most powerful witch in the nation. In a split second, she seized the arm of my coat and yanked me toward her. At the same, she conjured a domed ward that protected us on all sides. The hexes rebounded off of her shiny blue witchcraft, returning to the witches that casted them. A few dropped to the floor, stunned by their own spells, while the rest adjusted their tactics.

“Move!” Morgan ordered, shoving me toward the entryway.

We forced a path through the witches until we reached the bottom of the staircase. The front door was wide open. Another round of witches was on their way. In the time since her fight with Gwenlyn, Camryn had recruited every standing Summers witch for her troops. Camryn herself remained at the back of the charge, shouting orders as the witches overran the house. Malia, Karma, and Laurel charged into the entryway, where Morgan’s ward resonated with another burst of witchcraft to keep her sisters’ attacks at bay.

“Kennedy!” she shouted. “My bedroom is upstairs on the third floor. Go into the closet, pull up the floorboard closest to the wall, and look for the safe underneath. There’s a small handgun inside. Bring it to me.” She fidgeted with the front of her T-shirt, unveiling a short chain with a tiny key hanging around her neck. She pressed the necklace into my hand. “Go! Use your wards! I’ll hold them off!”

With some effort, I mimicked Morgan’s dome technique and erected my own ward. The orange clashed with Morgan’s blue before separating entirely as I took the stairs two at a time. The ward absorbed the spells instead of deflecting them, but that was all I needed to reach the next level safely. With Morgan holding steady below, no one followed me up, so I rushed onward.

On the third floor, I kicked open the door to Morgan’s bedroom and located the floorboard in the closet. The safe was right where she’d said it would be. I shoved the key into the lock and twisted. The little box sprang open, revealing the handgun. It was a simple black pistol, modest and unremarkable. I shook my head, wondering how Morgan was going to fight off the entire coven with a mortal weapon, especially when there was no ammo in sight. I took the gun anyway.

I slid down the banister and back into the fray. Morgan’s ward was punctured with weak spots. She hunkered down at the foot of the stairs, doing her best to keep the coven at bay. I slid in behind her, prodding her back.

“Did you find it?” she yelled over the noise of the banister splintering.

I held up the gun.

“Perfect! Give it here.”

“There are no bullets!” I shouted, offering the weapon to her.

She grinned. “It’s not that kind of gun.”

But as the pistol exchanged hands, a hex founds its way through one of the fractures in Morgan’s ward. It ricocheted off of the gun, which spun out of my grasp, landed on the floor, and was kicked away in the chaos.

I lunged after the weapon, dodging a wayward curse but receiving a wayward jab in the ribs from someone’s knee instead. The crowd was too thick and turbulent to maneuver through, and I lost sight of the gun as the witches jostled me farther and farther from Morgan. Her ward wavered, flickering on and off like a faulty light switch. She was running out of energy to sustain her defense. I needed to act soon, before Morgan’s own sisters ended her life, but just as Morgan’s ward died entirely, Camryn finally stepped over the threshold, and all of the witches paused their offense to take heed of her entrance.

Silence fell, save for Morgan’s heavy breaths. Camryn glanced toward the floor, knelt down, and picked something up. When she straightened, she held Morgan’s gun. My heart dropped into my stomach.

Morgan climbed shakily to her feet at the foot of the stairs, raising her hands above her head in surrender as she faced her cousin. “Camryn. You’re making a mistake.”

Camryn shook her head, running her fingers lovingly over the pistol. “No, I don’t think I am. You see, Morgan, I’ve been dreaming about this day since we were kids.”

“I don’t have a problem with you, Camryn,” Morgan insisted. “I don’t understand where this competition came from.”

“Oh, now you don’t have a problem with me?” Carmyn spat. “What about a few weeks ago, huh? When you shamed me in front of my family for suggesting a solution alternative to yours?”

“Your solution involves murder,” Morgan reminded her.

“A necessary sacrifice to save the coven,” Camryn replied. “If I recall, your own mother bore that weight on her shoulders. It only seems fitting that you will as well.” She raised the gun, pointing it straight at Morgan’s heart as her tone took on a genuine quality. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of your sisters.”

I didn’t think before I moved, shoving aside the witches and firing myself across the room as Camryn’s finger rested on the trigger. The gun went off just as I made a flying leap across the entryway, blocking Morgan from Camryn’s aim. The bullet punched into my torso, knocking the wind out of me. I landed hard at the foot of the stairs, gasping for air as white-hot pain clouded my vision. Blood pooled in my hands as I clutched my side.

Morgan slid down the stairs to cradle me from behind. “Kennedy! Oh, God.”

Camryn took a step forward, staring down at me. “That was moronic of you. Did you really think you could save her? Now you’re just as helpless as she is. Let’s try this again, shall we? And if you don’t mind, Kennedy, please try to contain your poorly performed heroic gestures.”

She leveled the gun at Morgan’s head, and for the second time, I heard the click of a bullet moving into position. Morgan looked into the barrel of the gun, confident and unafraid as Camryn pulled the trigger.

Suddenly, Morgan’s skin erupted in bright blue light. The faded ancient lettering that she had acquired from her trip to the otherworld came alive, snaking around her arms, legs, and neck like an art piece in motion. The gun reacted in turn. Its matte-black exterior blazed with the same power. Camryn’s flesh smoked where it touched the metal, and she dropped the gun with a scream of pain. It clattered to the floor. Swiftly, Morgan reached over me, scooped it up, and fired one shot through Camryn’s heart.

She was unconscious before she hit the floor. A beat of silence followed, during which Morgan’s marks lessened in intensity. Then a collective gasp resonated through the room as the witches came to their senses. With Camryn out of commission, they were no longer under her influence, and by the looks on their faces, they remembered every horrible thing that Camryn had asked them to do.

“Oh, God,” Karma said, kneeling next to me and Morgan. “What have we done?”

It was only when she lifted the hem of my bloodstained shirt that I remembered where Camryn’s first shot had landed. The pain was nearly gone, which was probably a bad sign. I rested my head against the wall of the stairway, preparing myself for terrible news. Laurel and Malia joined us, murmuring their own apologies as the rest of the coven shook off Camryn’s hold over them.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Morgan assured her sister. She tucked the gun behind her back and joined Karma in examining my wound. To my bewilderment, she plucked the flattened bullet from where it was lodged against one of my ribs. “Kennedy, you’re in luck. Your ever-present personal ward stopped the bullet before it could do much damage.”

I braved a look at the wound. Sure enough, it was limited to a round, red divot on the right side of my ribcage. The blood and heavy bruising made it look worse than it was, but I imagined the pain would return once my shock wore off. My gaze drifted to Camryn, who lay prone on the welcome mat.

“Is she dead?”

“No,” Morgan replied, casting a disapproving eye over her unmoving cousin. “She’s mortal.”

“She is? How?”

“I picked up that gun in the otherworld,” Morgan explained. “The ancient magic of the dead binds it to me. At one time, it was meant to condemn all manner of enemies from this world to the next. I repurposed it to fit my own needs. Camryn was foolish to think that she could wield it.”

I studied Camryn, who did not bear any signs of injury other than the blue glow around her heart. “What’s going to happen to her?”

Morgan sighed and wiped sweat from her brow. “She’s no longer a threat to us, but she will be banished for her poor intention. No crime outweighs an attempt to kill your own coven leader. She’ll be forced to live the rest of her life as a normal human, far away from Yew Hollow.”

She squeezed my shoulder, asking for my attention. I turned to her. She looked like hell, with red-rimmed eyes, pallid cheeks, and pale lips, but she was also smiling.

“Thank you, Kennedy,” she said. “I’d be dead if it weren’t for you.”

“It was nothing.”

“It was everything,” Morgan corrected, taking my face between her palms. “By saving me, you saved my entire family. That sort of thing does not go lost on me. You have my word that you and Nora will be safe in Yew Hollow. Adrienne will have no hold over you or your sister. We’ll fight her like we’ve fought all of our other battles. Together.”

14

Gwenlyn

I was in the meadow again, the one with the mountain laurels. The place seemed familiar now. Peaceful. Each night, I traversed the tall grass and fragrant wildflowers. Each morning, I forgot the nature of my dreams. Sometimes, the graceful figure would appear, dancing ahead of me like a wind nymph, her blonde hair weaving a golden trail for me to follow. No matter how often she visited me, I never saw her face. Other times, I was alone, basking in the warm sunshine as I aimlessly wandered through a world unavailable to me upon waking.

Waking, in fact, was the worst part. To be ripped from utopia upon the lifting of my eyelids was no easy transition, and when I felt the familiar shift of the dream world fading, I held on with all of my might to the golden sunshine and vibrant petals. Yew Hollow, in its current state, was no place to return to after witnessing such ethereal and natural beauty. The dead, gray town could not compare to the never-ending meadow.

So when I awakened to find myself not in the queen-sized bed in Nora’s loft, but on the opposite side of the ward entirely, I did a double take. Yew Hollow lay behind me, its blue dome visible through the trees as it reached up toward the sky. I was nowhere near the opening that I had created in the ward. In fact, I wasn’t sure where I’d ended up. The road to the interstate wasn’t visible, and this part of the forest was unfamiliar to me. On the upside, my witchcraft had replenished itself in record time. I felt the familiar hum of it coursing through my veins, although I balked at the thought of its ever-darkening color.

It was morning. A blanket of snow coated the tops of the trees, glistening in the pale sunlight that managed to make it through the clouds. Everything from the previous day was a blur of memories. Where was Morgan? Had something happened to her? Why didn’t I seem to care if she had made it out of her tiff with Camryn alive? I shrugged it off. Yew Hollow was behind me now. I had better things to do.

My legs carried me of their own accord. I followed along, unconcerned with where they were taking me. The forest lightened even more as I strolled through it, breathing in the crisp, damp air. The cold didn’t bother me. It was refreshing after suffering through the stale atmosphere of Yew Hollow for so many months.

When a shimmering black fog appeared amongst the trees, I didn’t hesitate to stroll right through it. It weaved energy into my very being. My shoulders rolled back, my core tightened, and I stood taller. Someone was waiting for me on the other side, the fair-haired creature from my dreams.

“Oh, good,” Adrienne said, looking up at me. “You finally made it. Took you long enough.”

Adrienne had built her own campsite, but it was nothing like the flannel-lined sleeping bags and poorly pitched one-man tents that I was used to. Adrienne had used her dark abilities to their full extent, creating what essentially looked like a modest New York loft apartment—complete with a queen-sized bed, a miniature kitchen, and a bathroom—in the middle of the woods. She lounged in a comfortable armchair, sipping from a black ceramic mug as she read a fashion magazine.

“What am I doing here?” I asked.

Adrienne conjured a second chair, which floated down and settled next to her own. She patted the fluffy cushion, inviting me over. Whether it felt like a good idea or not, my boots carried me toward her, and I plopped down in the empty chair.

“Coffee?” she offered, setting aside her magazine to lift a half-full French press from a side table.

“No thanks.”

She refilled her own mug instead and added a spoonful of fresh cream. “You know, when I first discovered that the Summers coven had adopted a witch from outside of their bloodline, I thought you would be an extreme nuisance. I planned to watch the Summerses die a long, dreadful death. Little did I know that Morgan’s pet would kidnap my own daughter to stall the process. How did you find out about Nora anyway?”

“I had an unusual source,” I replied.

Adrienne waved a hand dismissively. “Someone dead, then. No matter. The situation will rectify itself shortly. Anyway, that mark on your leg was entirely unintentional. As I’m sure Morgan told you, it was the leftover power from the curse. Luckily, you were too naive to take care of it right away. Had you contained the dark magic to the lower half of your leg, we wouldn’t be sitting here together.”

My calf, where the mark had started originally, clenched involuntarily. “What do you mean?”

Adrienne stroked my cheek with the tips of her manicured fingers. I felt her nails rake across my skin. “Oh, you simple girl. I’m surprised Morgan didn’t pass her sense of righteousness on to her protégé. Then again, from what I can tell, you’ve always been the type to take whatever you needed to fuel your own strength.”

I jerked away from her touch. “What are you talking about?”

“The power, Gwenlyn,” Adrienne clarified, sweeping her hands out to indicate the loft around us. “Feels good, doesn’t it? Admit it. The real reason you never bothered to quell the dark magic inside of you was because you liked it.”

Nausea made my stomach convulse. Adrienne was wrong. I didn’t want this overwhelming darkness inside of me. It was wrathful and uncontrollable, and it reminded me of the times during my youth when I did whatever was necessary to survive, even if that meant putting my life before someone else’s. But at the same time, Adrienne was right. I hadn’t made a conscious effort to control the mark. All I did was monitor its progress and hide the truth from Morgan. In some backwards way, did I enjoy holding on to power that didn’t belong to me?

Adrienne smiled knowingly. “Don’t fret, my dear. I’m sure you’ll find our partnership to be a rewarding one. Once the Summerses are gone, I’ll allow you to return to Windsor Falls with me and Nora. I could use a witch like you.”

“Our partnership?” I repeated. “What partnership?”

“Did you think you wandered outside the ward simply for a morning stroll?” Adrienne asked, chuckling. “No, no. I called you here. That mark binds you to me. Welcome to the team, Gwenlyn.”

My lack of concern for Morgan, Kennedy, Nora, and the rest of the Summers coven suddenly made sense. Adrienne had been waiting for this moment. She’d activated the connection between the two of us, forged by dark magic. I was free of moral thought and cut loose from my allegiance to Morgan.

I squeezed my eyes shut, letting it all sink in. “You were waiting for this, weren’t you? For the mark to have enough of a hold in order for you to use me?”

Adrienne winked. “Something like that.”

“You won’t win,” I told her with faint-hearted persuasion. “Morgan won’t let you. She has a weapon. Now that she knows you’re responsible for this, she can put you down as soon as she gets in range—”

“Oh, I know all about Morgan’s silly gun,” Adrienne interrupted. She daintily sipped her coffee. “When that sort of power returns to the earth, you feel it in your bones. Not to mention the gossip. Haven’t you already figured all of this out already? The curse was built on familial bonds. There are only two ways to break it. First, kill the catalyst. Quite frankly, I was hoping Morgan would opt for this simple solution. Two birds, one stone, you know?” She set down her coffee, flipped open a makeup mirror, and checked the status of her lipstick. “Alas, I suppose I’ll have to find an alternate way to rid the world of my darling stepdaughter. Anyway, the second way is for me to end the curse myself. Can you imagine?” Her high-pitched laughter grated against my eardrums. “Oh, and Nora, of course.”

I leaned forward. “What about her?”

“Well, she’s my direct descendant,” Adrienne explained. “I made her my failsafe, you see? If anything happens to me, the curse lives on in Nora. Why do you think I’ve kept her in the dark about her heritage all this time? She’s so unsullied, so pure. She would never even think of herself as the reason for the Summerses’ collective suffering.”

“But she can end it?” I pressed. “If you were gone and she knew what you had done—”

“I can see the gears turning in your head, Gwenlyn,” she said. With a condescending gesture, she patted the top of my hand. “Did you think I would tell you all of this if I knew you had a chance of returning to them? No, no. You should let go of any lingering attachments to your so-called family. You’re mine now, and when you see them again, it will be under my orders.”

And though I knew I should’ve, I felt no anguish at the sound of Adrienne’s words. I didn’t cry or scream or yell. I didn’t think of all the love and respect that Morgan and the Summerses had afforded to me over the last ten years. I didn’t think of how I would never be able to apologize to Kennedy for the way I treated her when she first arrived in Yew Hollow. I didn’t feel anything at all. Adrienne had cut off all of my emotions and rerouted my loyalty to suit her needs.

She set aside her coffee and clapped her hands together. “So! Down to business. The Summerses’ second day is upon us, and I can only imagine what the scene is at the main house right now.” She wriggled gleefully in her chair, grinning from ear to ear. “Just picture it: Morgan desperately trying to maintain control while the rest of the coven calls for Kennedy’s blood. Oh, it’s better than chocolate.”

Despite Adrienne’s new hold over me, a hint of disgust found its way to the forefront of my mind. Adrienne was enjoying having the Summerses under her thumb a bit too much. “What are we supposed to do then? Just wait for them to hack it out?”

“And miss all the fun?” Adrienne giggled. “Never! I have an assignment for you, my dear.”

At the end of the second day, when the moon and the sun had switched places, I waited on the line between Adrienne’s loft and the outdoor world, where details of both places blurred together, unsure how to exist in the same space. A tree grew through a side table, the coat rack sported a layer of moss, and a decorative vase was filled to the brim with bright white snow. Adrienne sat on the corner of the bed in an elegant black nightgown, one leg crossed over the other as she watched me.

“Well?” she prompted. “It’s time. What are you waiting for?”

The cold bit at my ears. I retrieved my parka from the coat rack, slid my arms into it, and pulled up the hood. Then I stared at the ground, where snow and fancy plank floors merged into one.

“Off you go,” Adrienne said, with a flick of her fingers as if to shoo a dog.

Once again, my legs moved without my conscious decision. I threw one last desperate look over my shoulder, silently pleading with Adrienne to not make me do this. She only wiggled her long fingers in farewell, and I strolled off into the woods.

The snow softened the tread of my boots across the ground, but it did nothing to soothe the thoughts in my head. Adrienne’s list of instructions played on a loop while my own consciousness, however subdued, fought for freedom. It was like listening to a poorly-tuned radio station of music, overlapping morning talk shows, and static.

Morgan’s first order of business had been to seal the opening in the ward to keep Adrienne out of Yew Hollow for as long as possible. Unfortunately, Morgan hadn’t foreseen my betrayal. I located the weak spot without trouble and broke through for the second time. It was even easier with the added power rushing around inside me. I slid through the tunnel, back into Yew Hollow.

The town was quiet. Serene. The snow almost made me forget that everything here was dead for a reason other than nature. The town glistened like a Christmas postcard, perfectly untouched. I cast a spell to fill in my trail of footprints as I headed through the square. Adrienne had been adamant about covering my tracks.

At the start of the witches’ cul-de-sac, I stopped and observed silently from the street corner. All was still. The coven had retired for the evening, stressed and exhausted from what was undoubtedly a busy day of planning for the final confrontation with Adrienne. I half-hoped that someone would look out their window at just the right time to see me standing there, but Adrienne had made me an omen of death, so I prayed for a silent night and moved on.

As I approached a certain house, the witch’s mark fed me an endless stream of intel. Yvette and Yvonne were both asleep, their breathing patterns and heart rates normal. The front door was locked and protected by a spell meant to alert the residents to any intruders. The back doors and windows, including Alana’s, were also charmed. It was inconvenient but not impossible to disable the spells. After all, none of the Summerses had expected me to be the one to turn on them.

I crept through the window like a thief and stood at the side of Alana’s bed. Part of me envied her. She was oblivious to the perils of her sisters and cousins, wrapped up in her own little world of unconsciousness. As I lifted an extra pillow from the rocking chair in the corner of the room, I realized that it was impossible to ignore the similarities between Alana and Kennedy now. It lifted Adrienne’s influence ever-so-slightly, causing me to hesitate, but another surge of power forced me forward. I moved closer to the bed. Took a deep breath. Closed my eyes. And pressed the pillow down.

15

Kennedy

All knowledge of witchcraft disappeared from my mind as I leapt through the window of Alana’s bedroom and tackled Gwenlyn. We tumbled to the floor in a tangle of knees and elbows, and the pillow fell off the side of the bed. I rolled over, taking Gwenlyn with me, and pinned her to the floor.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Get off of me!”

She planted her feet against my stomach and heaved. I slammed against the bed, stunned not by the plow but by her sudden increase in strength. Not long ago, Gwenlyn never would’ve been able to pull a move like that on me. She flipped up to her feet, and I scrambled to rise from the floor as she stalked toward me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “Where have you been all day?”

“You should leave, Kennedy.”

I stepped between her and Alana. “You just tried to kill my mother. What I should do is ensure that you’ll never get another chance.”

Her complete lack of emotional response unnerved me. She fixed me with an unblinking stare. There was no light in her eyes. Her green irises almost looked black.

“What happened to you?” I murmured.

The answer came in the form of an attack spell. Gwenlyn’s aura, like her eyes, was no longer the green and gold that I was accustomed to. It wrapped me up like a straightjacket and I fell to the floor for the second time in a matter of minutes. I struggled to free myself manually before remembering that I had powers too. I flicked the switch, ignited my inner fire, and blew apart Gwenlyn’s binding hex. Panting, I rolled to my feet, but Gwenlyn wasn’t offering me a break. Another attack spell headed my way, and I blocked just in time to prevent it from burning the hair off of my head.

“It’s Adrienne, isn’t it?” I gasped. “It’s the mark. Gwen, do you remember what you asked me to do if this sort of thing happened?”

She didn’t reply. Instead, she readied herself to cast another hex.

“Gwen, you told me to dispatch you,” I reminded her. “You said to take you out with a ward. I didn’t think I’d have to do it. Please don’t make me do it.”

She raised her hand, in the palm of which she held a steadily growing ball of black power. When she arched her arm back, I knew that I had no choice. Fire and warmth grew in the pit of my stomach, waiting for me to call on it. I let it loose, creating the strongest ward possible.

It rushed through the room like a bright orange shock wave, knocking Gwenlyn right off of her feet. I didn’t stop though. The ward continued to pulse from my core, sending a new ripple of energy outward with every beat of my heart. Gwenlyn fought against it, a ward of her own—black like Adrienne’s dark magic—shielding her from most of its effect. We were evenly matched, both more powerful than the average witch, both recently recovering from complete drainage. It was a battle of endurance, and neither one of us was gaining any ground.

Gwenlyn inched toward me, keeping to the edge of the room. I mirrored her footsteps to even out the distance between us. We circled around the room, edging around Alana’s bed, each of us pushing mentally against the other’s wards. When Gwenlyn’s back was even with the open window, I realized—too late—what she had been doing.

“No!” I yelled, extinguishing my ward to leap across the space between us. My fingers closed around Gwenlyn’s coat as she escaped through the window, but she slid gracefully out of the garment and sprinted off. I heaved myself out of the room, slipping on a patch of ice as I navigated around the corner of the house. Gwenlyn moved eerily fast, enshrouded in black magic as she vanished into the night.

“I should’ve known,” Morgan moaned, burying her face in her hands as she sat at the table in the dining room.

I paced from one end of the room to the other, running my fingers so neurotically through my hair that it now stood up in waves from my scalp. “It was so weird, Morgan. She looked like a robot. No emotion. Her eyes were completely empty, like her soul wasn’t even there anymore.”

Morgan groaned, her shoulders shaking as she bent over the table and pressed her forehead to the wood, as though it might afford her information about Gwenlyn’s betrayal by way of osmosis. Either that, or she had finally lost it. Unsure of what to do, I paused behind her chair and rested a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Gwenlyn should’ve told you—”

“She did tell me,” Morgan interrupted, her voice muffled behind her arms. “We should’ve contained the mark when we had the chance, but with everything else going on, I completely forgot about it. I never expected Gwen to keep something like this from me. Why would she do that?”

“I think she was hoping that she could use the extra power to protect you,” I replied quietly. “It was for a noble cause.”

“No dark magic is noble.”

I knelt down so that I was on the same level as Morgan. “Hey. It’s not really her. Gwenlyn loves you, Morgan. She would never do something like this if she couldn’t help it.”

Morgan stirred, tilting her head to the side to look at me. Her eyes watered with tears, but she kept them at bay. “Why her?” she whispered, lips trembling.

“Because she matters most to you,” I answered easily. “I felt the same way when you took Nora from me.”

Her expression crumpled, and she surprised me by taking my face between the palms of her hands like I’d seen her do with Gwenlyn a few times. I almost pulled away, taken aback by the closeness of the gesture.

“Kennedy, listen to me,” Morgan said. “I am so, so sorry about what we did to your family. None of this was ever your fault. Your stepmother took advantage of you and pulled the wool over all of our eyes, but I was the one who tore a family apart to save my own.”

“You didn’t have a choice.”

“We always have a choice,” she replied firmly, cupping my cheeks tighter. “But sometimes we get shoehorned into a corner and it feels like we don’t. What I did—”

I took her hands in my own. “Morgan, stop. I know, okay? We’ve all done terrible things to survive. We’re all prioritized ourselves over others at times. Sometimes, all we know is how to be selfish. And this was always going to come crashing down on us. We were all wrapped up in it from the very beginning. You couldn’t have stopped any of it. All that matters now is getting Gwen back and taking care of Adrienne. You were made the leader of this coven for a reason, Morgan, so you tell me: what’s the first step?”

I moved away to give Morgan even room to push her chair away from the table. As she rose, she wiped her tears with her sleeve, and though her eyes still shone with the shock of losing Gwenlyn, there was something different and determined about her now. It was time for her second—or twentieth—wind.

“Gather the coven.”

I rounded up every witch who wasn’t too sick from the curse. Camryn was gone, cast out of Yew Hollow late last night before Morgan closed the ward. Without her devilish influence, the coven had returned to fully supporting Morgan as their leader. No one doubted her abilities, even with Adrienne’s threat looming overhead. In fact, the witches that Camryn had corrupted were some of the most determined to prove themselves worth of Morgan’s attention. They did everything that was asked of them with an unwavering dedication, bowing their heads apologetically any time Morgan addressed them.

Soon, the main house was full to bursting with auras and energy, but there was one person missing that I could never forget about. I hadn’t seen Nora since waking up in the barn that morning. With Gwenlyn on the fritz and Adrienne lurking nearby, my little sister was bound to be a wreck. I left Morgan with her family and jogged back to the barn.

To my relief, Nora’s aura was present and strong. She was up in the loft, kneeling next to the chest of drawers with an open backpack beside her. She looked over her shoulder as I climbed the stairs and attempted to slide the backpack across the floor so that it was hidden behind the bed.

I frowned, leaned over the bed, and picked up her bag. “Nice try, kid. What are you up to?” I glanced into the bag. It was full of the clothes that Nora had borrowed from Morgan, along with a few snacks, a water bottle, and a small journal. I upended the contents on the bedspread. “What is this? What do you think you’re doing?”

“Kennedy!” Nora gathered her things in her arms and tried to take the empty backpack away from me. I held it out of her reach. “Give it back!”

“Not until you tell me what’s going through that thick head of yours,” I said.

Nora jumped on the bed and snatched the backpack out of my hands. “Fine,” she replied, hugging the tattered fabric to her chest. “If you must know, I was going to meet Mom.”

“You were—what?”

She threw up her hands in defeat. “God, Ken, I don’t know what else to do, okay? This is all too much for me. Morgan, you, Gwenlyn, you’re all in danger, and I’m the only one who can stop it. Mom promised—”

“She lied to you, Nora!” I interrupted. “Adrienne has lied to you since the very day you were born. What makes you think this time is any different? If you leave Yew Hollow, you’re giving her exactly what she wants. She won’t lift the Summers curse, and she definitely won’t leave me alone. Don’t fall for her lies.”

Nora tossed the backpack to the floor and plopped down on the bed, where she pressed one of the pillows against her face and let loose a muffled yell. With Gwenlyn’s attempt at murdering Alana fresh in my mind, I pulled the pillow out of her grasp. Her face was red and blotchy as I pulled her against me.

“Listen to me,” I murmured, gently untangling the knots in her hair with my fingers. “Fixing this isn’t your responsibility. Don’t worry, okay? Morgan has a plan, and I have one too. Everything will go back to normal soon.”

Nora scoffed and sniffled against my sweatshirt. “Yeah, right. I don’t even know what normal is anymore.”

“Neither do I,” I confessed. I kissed the top of Nora’s head. “But we’ll figure it out together.”

She wiped her eyes and looked up at me. “So what’s this plan of yours?”

My heart clenched tightly. “I can’t tell you yet.”

After the meeting at Morgan’s, I lay in the loft bed with Nora and stared up at the ceiling. Nora’s head rested on my shoulder, and I took comfort in the slow, even sound of her breathing. She was fast asleep, but I couldn’t hope to follow suit when so many things were racing through my mind.

Morgan’s plan was simple. Rescue Gwenlyn. Take out Adrienne. We were to convene early the next morning in order to share energy, receive healing, and reinforce our offensive tactics. Our only advantage was the element of surprise. Adrienne wouldn’t expect us any earlier than the end of the third day, so we planned to attack her before she could gather her wits. We had numbers, but Adrienne had Gwenlyn. And both of them were equipped with dark magic that was far stronger than the Summerses’ weakened witchcraft. No one had said it out loud, but it was bound to be a bloodbath. No matter Morgan’s determination, I didn’t have a lot of faith in the witches’ ability to win this battle. Somehow, someone had to put a stop to Adrienne’s wrath.

I’d already made up my mind. In hindsight, I’d come to my decision on the very night I discovered exactly what it meant to be made the catalyst of a curse. If my little sister was to live, then I had to die, and that was how things were always going to play out. In a few minutes, I would leave the loft, walk out to the yew tree in the town square, and give myself up to whatever natural forces controlled the world of witchcraft, but I wanted just a little more time with Nora before I had to leave her yet again, this time forever.

When it got to be too much for me, I slid out from under Nora and placed a pillow under her head. Trembling, I took a mental snapshot of her sleeping peacefully. Then, before I could lose my nerve, I picked up the butcher’s knife from the kitchen, left the barn, and took to the woods.

I shivered in the snow. I hadn’t brought a coat with me. There was no point with what I planned to do. The cold made me feel more alive anyway, nipping at my nose and ears. I caught a snowflake on my tongue and twirled through the trees to the beat of a silent song, trying to infuse my last few minutes on earth with as much joy as humanly possible.

In the town square, a tiny patch of sky was visible through the clouds. I took it as my parting gift from the earth. A few stars twinkled down at me, as if reassuring me that everything was going to be okay. I approached the yew tree with a deep breath. When I touched the bark, a faint glimmer of energy called out to me. All of Yew Hollow’s history was contained in this one piece of nature. Tonight, I would join it.

I pulled my necklace out from under my shirt and slipped it over my head so that I could hold it instead. The gold pendant felt warm and reassuring in the palm of my hand. I hoped that the piece of jewelry would find its way back to Alana or Nora, one last piece of me for them to remember me by. The knife, in contrast, felt as cold as the snow on the ground. I sat with my back against the yew tree and rolled up my sleeves. My eyes fluttered shut.

“Don’t you dare, Kennedy!”

16

Gwenlyn

I stumbled into Adrienne’s loft, unaware of how I managed to return there. She was hiding her location under a shroud of dark magic, guiding me to and from it through our connection. The Summerses would never be able to root her out. When she was good and ready, Adrienne planned to bring the battle to them.

Adrienne lounged in the queen-sized bed. “Well?” she prompted as I planted my hands on my knees to catch my breath. “Is it done?”

I shook my head. “Kennedy was there. She stopped me.”

Adrienne rolled her eyes. “Ugh. Of course. No matter, dear. Killing Alana wasn’t crucial to my plan. I thought we might just have a bit of fun.”

“You’re sick.”

She flicked this idea away with a regal wave of her hand. “Day three approaches, Gwen. It’s only a matter of time before the Summerses are completely eradicated.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, sitting down on the floor to untie my boots. The woods around us were snowy and damp, but the warmth of Adrienne’s loft made me uncomfortably hot. “You’re one of them. Alana’s your sister. They’re your family. How did it all go so wrong?”

“You already know the answer to this,” she replied lazily. She picked up a novel from her bedside table and flipped to a random page.

“Yeah, Kennedy was a threat to the coven. I don’t buy it.”

Adrienne’s gaze flicked up. “Of course you wouldn’t. Despite my hold on you, your allegiance to Morgan still exists, even if it is buried deep down inside of you. Why believe anything I say?”

I shrugged and leaned against the wall of the loft. “I don’t think the way you turned out is entirely your fault. Some abilities are tough. Look who you’re talking to. You think I ever wanted to be able to talk to the dead?”

Adrienne cleared her throat. “My ability is not ‘tough.’ Do not belittle my agenda in some backhanded attempt to appeal to my empathy.”

I raised my hands in surrender. “All I’m saying is that it must have been hard growing up objective. Humans have emotions for a reason. Not having them must’ve been like waging internal war.”

She pondered this—or ignored it—in silence. When my stomach rumbled, she pointed to the kitchen. “Quiet your insides and then go to bed. I’ve set up a room for you over there.”

I looked over my shoulder, where another portion of the woods had been transformed into a small but equally lavish addition with a dressed, full-sized bed and a privacy screen. “That was uncharacteristically kind of you.”

Adrienne snapped her book shut and rolled over so that I could only see the lace detailing on the back of her nightgown. “I take care of my own.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Though she was no longer willing to participate in the conversation, I could tell that Adrienne wasn’t asleep as I bustled around in the kitchen to look for a snack. Her shoulders were too tense for slumber. My thoughts wandered. No one, not even Adrienne, was inherently evil. I was the first one to understand that witchcraft didn’t manifest the way you always wanted it to. When your ability wasn’t as simple as manipulating water or light, you took precautions to control it. Sometimes, it wasn’t enough. You gave in, plain and simple.

Behind the privacy curtain, I stripped off my jeans and climbed into bed with a bowl of organic oats, yogurt, and berries from Adrienne’s pantry. The mark was impossible to ignore. The inky patterns across my thighs made it look like I’d spent far too much time in various tattoo parlors. I pressed a finger against one of the swirls. It faded under my touch then reappeared as I lifted my hand away. Experimentally, I massaged the top of my leg. The mark undulated across my skin, moving like ripples of a viscous liquid.

Your allegiance to Morgan still exists. That’s what Adrienne had said only moments ago. In the short time during which I’d interacted with her, I discovered that she had a habit of giving out useful information without meaning to. Perhaps it was a product of confidence or that she hadn’t expected to snuff the Summerses out in such a personal manner, but she had revealed two things to me that could tip the scales to Morgan’s advantage. First, Nora could break the spell. Second, I wasn’t as obligated to Adrienne’s cause as I’d originally thought.

Across the room, Adrienne’s shoulders rose and fell with her breath. She was finally asleep. I set aside my bowl and pushed the covers to the end of the bed. Then I closed my eyes, crossed my legs, and took a long meditative breath. For a few minutes, it felt impossible to get past the fog of Adrienne’s magic. It clouded my mind and body like a steady storm, but something fought to free itself. A tiny spark of my own consciousness was buried at the bottom of my soul. It was practically nonexistent, steadily dimming under Adrienne’s influence. I silently kicked myself for not rescuing myself earlier, but I would not let Adrienne make me her secret weapon.

Accessing that green flame was like swimming through mud. I led my mind through the swamp of inky dark magic, pushing aside intrusive thoughts and frightening inner voices that didn’t belong to me. I pressed against the barrier between me and my witchcraft, looking for cracks. Finally, a wisp of pure emerald reached out to me. I latched onto it, drawing it out and letting it wrap around my mind.

A gush of positive energy caused me to gasp aloud. My eyes flew open, automatically darting toward Adrienne to make sure she was still asleep. Thankfully, she hadn’t stirred. I looked down at my legs. The mark hadn’t disappeared, but threads of green had woven their way into the black.

I hauled myself out of bed, pulled my jeans back on, and laced up my boots. Every movement was a struggle. Adrienne’s power threatened to overwhelm me again at any second, while my own witchcraft fought to stave off her influence. I didn’t know how long I had, but all I had to do was get back to Yew Hollow before Adrienne woke up and realized what was happening.

I left the loft without a coat—Kennedy had stripped me of mine earlier—and ignored the cold. With two different elements of power battling for supremacy inside me, I was overheating anyway. With a last glance behind me at Adrienne’s sleeping form, I convinced my legs to break into a run. They protested, jerking me back toward the loft, but I persevered. Picturing my family helped. I used happy memories of Morgan and her sisters to ward off thoughts of betraying them. To my surprise, recent memories of Kennedy and Nora popped up too, like training Ken to use her magic properly and watching Nora use her healing ability.

Someone had closed the ward yet again, which was an inconvenience that I had already expected. I was prepared to use the majority of my power to break through to the other side yet again. What I didn’t expect was a loophole that made my plan unnecessary. There was a tiny crack in the ward, a fiery orange divot that provided just enough of a weak point for me to force my way through. Kennedy, of all people, still had faith in me.

I met another unexpected sight in the town square. It was the middle of the night. By now, the witches should’ve all been asleep or worrying silently in bed, but I sensed two distinct auras around the yew tree before it had even come into view. I hid behind an abandoned car and peeked over the hood to catch a glimpse.

It was none other than the McGrath sisters themselves. Kennedy’s orange aura glowed from the base of the yew tree while Nora’s pink one hovered a little higher. Their voices floated on the wind, angry and hurt. They were arguing about something.

A surge of nausea bubbled in my stomach as Adrienne’s power made another attempt to regain control over mine. I swallowed it back then did my best to cast an eavesdropping spell with my thread of witchcraft only.

“You lied to me, Ken,” Nora was saying, her voice thick with emotion. “You told me that everything was going to be all right—”

“I’m trying to protect you, Nora.” Kennedy sounded desperate.

“Well, I don’t want you to! What I want is for my sister to stop leaving me. Is that too much to ask?”

“It shouldn’t be, but—”

Nora knelt down next to Kennedy and pried something from her grasp. It was a knife. She threw it across the square, where it clattered in the gutter. Then she yanked Kennedy up from where she sat at the base of the yew tree—a surprising feat considering their difference in stature—and wrapped her arms around Kennedy’s midriff.

“Don’t you dare,” Nora ordered. “Don’t you dare leave me again.”

Suddenly, I understood. Kennedy knew what little chance the Summerses had of defeating Adrienne. This was her last attempt to save her little sister and the rest of Yew Hollow. She was planning to sacrifice herself to break the curse, a plan that Nora clearly didn’t approve of.

I shot out from behind the car and stumbled toward the sisters. The mark tightened around my legs, causing me to trip over the curb. I skinned my knees on the way down, but that didn’t stop me from crawling over the grass. Kennedy and Nora, alarmed, backed away from me, and Kennedy’s hands lit with the familiar sign of an impending ward.

“Wait!” I gasped, pausing in the street and holding up a hand. “It’s me. It’s me! Please, I can’t fight it off for much longer.”

The sisters exchanged glances as if telepathically consulting with one another. Then they both rushed forward, picked me up from the asphalt, and carried me the rest of the way to the yew tree. At the base of its trunk, I felt the faint power of the Summerses magic, diminished by the curse but not yet extinguished. I was exhausted, tired of fighting.

Kennedy crouched beside me, studying me warily. Nora made to approach me, but Kennedy blocked her off, ever the concerned older sibling.

“You left a crack in the ward for me,” I panted.

“You’re not going to make me regret it, are you?”

“God, I hope not.” I dug my fingers into the stiff dirt around me, focusing on the feeling beneath my fingernails rather than the black fog slowly creeping back into my consciousness. “I don’t have much time, but I need to tell you something.”

Nora shrugged off her coat and draped it around my shoulders. I hadn’t realized that I was shivering. “What is it?” she asked gently.

I honed in on her green eyes, which helped me to remember the true color of my aura. “Kennedy doesn’t have to sacrifice herself. There’s another way to end the curse.”

“Yeah, Morgan’s gun,” Kennedy supplied. “That’s her plan, but she’ll never get close enough to Adrienne to shoot her.”

I furiously shook my head. “Even if she did, it wouldn’t work. There’s only one person who can stop Adrienne.”

“Who?”

“Your sister.”

Nora took a step back in surprise. “What?”

Dark magic clenched around my ribcage. I doubled over, drawing in shallow breaths that felt like knives in my lungs. The more I revealed to Nora and Kennedy, the more Adrienne’s influence desperately tried to stop me.

“Adrienne made it so that the curse would still hold if she was somehow dispatched,” I managed to get out. “She passed it on to her only descendant so that the Summerses would still suffer if she was gone. If we get rid of Adrienne, Nora can break the curse.”

“Are you sure?” Kennedy demanded. She gently patted my cheek to keep my focus on her. “Gwenlyn, how did you find this out?”

“She told me,” I rasped.

Nora remained silent and wide-eyed, staring down at me as though she couldn’t process the words coming out of my mouth. I had no time to comfort her. With every passing second, I belonged less to myself and more to Adrienne.

“Hit me,” I pleaded to Kennedy.

Her face wrinkled with confusion. “What?”

A flare of black magic burst from my hands. I buried them behind my back and pressed them against the rough bark of the yew tree. “Hit me,” I said again. “Before it’s too late.”

Understanding touched Kennedy’s expression. As her right hand shot upward, I silently thanked her for not hesitating. The anticipation alone would’ve killed me. Instead, her first two knuckles landed on my temple before I had time to process the result. I saw a burst of orange light and passed out.

17

Kennedy

We carried Gwenlyn to the main house. She dangled limply between me and Nora, her feet dragging on the ground behind us. Neither one of us addressed the elephant in the room. We were still processing Gwenlyn’s insider information. I, for one, was trying not to think about it. In one fell swoop, control over the situation had changed from my hands to Nora’s, which was the last thing I’d wanted to happen. Every time I glanced over at her, her face was a blank slate. I had a feeling that she didn’t know what to make of this either.

As she was prone to do, Morgan somehow already knew of our approach. The screen door burst open as we piloted Gwenlyn up the steps. We paused for Morgan’s approval. She tipped Gwenlyn’s chin up, inspected the bruise on the side of her head, and raised an eyebrow at me.

I shrugged beneath Gwenlyn’s weight. “She asked me to do it. It was the only way to keep her from going back to Adrienne or doing something else rash. Can we come inside or shall we just continue lugging her around Yew Hollow?”

“Put her in the living room. Where did you find her?”

“She found us.”

As Nora and I turned to the side to maneuver Gwenlyn through the door frame, Malia, Karma, and Laurel trundled down the steps from the second floor. All of them looked sick and exhausted, but expressions of hope bloomed at the sight of Gwenlyn’s return. Malia disappeared into the kitchen, but Laurel and Karma accompanied us to the living room.

“Is she okay?” Laurel asked worriedly.

I grunted as I dumped Gwenlyn on the couch and ducked out from under her arm. “I think that’s a solid no. Adrienne is still controlling her.”

Karma sat on the arm of the couch and brushed Gwenlyn’s hair away from the bruise on her temple. “How do we sever the connection?”

I crouched down and rolled up the hem of Gwenlyn’s jeans. As I suspected, the mark had traveled to her other leg. “I have a feeling that we won’t be able to do that until we get rid of Adrienne for good. This mark is no joke.”

“So the plan’s still the same then,” Laurel said. “Find Adrienne at daybreak.”

I glanced at Nora, who made herself small in the far corner of the room, with her chin tucked into her chest. “Hold on to your hats. Gwenlyn came with a warning label this time.”

“What do you mean?” Morgan demanded.

Malia returned from the kitchen, carrying a fresh bowl of healing salve toward Gwenlyn. I took her arm, stopping her from getting any closer. “You don’t want to do that. We can’t afford to let her wake up.”

Morgan stepped up to me. “Kennedy. What’s going on?”

I filled them in on Gwenlyn’s side of the story. The news called for an immediate change of action. We could no longer march into Adrienne’s territory as we had planned. For what felt like the hundredth time in a matter of days, Morgan called the rest of the coven for a meeting at the main house. Soon, the residence bustled with stress and activity. Gwenlyn remained unconscious on the couch, surrounded by a cage of auras that would hopefully keep her restrained should she wake up.

Morgan positioned Nora at the head of the dining table. I sat directly beside her, across from Morgan, while the rest of the witches settled in chairs or around the room. I reached for Nora’s hand, but she pulled it away and tucked it underneath the table. When I tried to catch her eye, she pointedly looked away.

“Hey,” I murmured so that the others wouldn’t hear. “Are you okay?”

Even if Morgan hadn’t called for order at that exact moment, I had a feeling that Nora didn’t plan on answering me. She stared down at the table, tracing a divot in the wood with her other hand as the witches quieted down. They all watched Morgan, waiting for her to announce a new plan. Morgan did not hesitate to give them what they wanted.

“At this point, we’re all aware of the gravity of our situation,” Morgan began. “We are sick, we are tired, and we are fed up with the longevity of this curse. Thankfully, we have finally received some intel that might actually give us a leg up. With that in mind, I move to restructure our plan of attack.”

The witches murmured to one another. To my left, Nora tensed up. I moved my foot underneath the table to tap her shin, trying to get her attention, but she stoically ignored me.

“Our main intention remains the same,” Morgan went on. “At dawn, we pool our resources and set out for Adrienne’s camp. Gwenlyn will lead us there. However, instead of devising our strategy around me, our main goal will be to keep Nora safe. We’ll move to get her as close to Adrienne as possible, at which point Nora will be the one to take her out.”

“How?” someone called from the back of the room. “She’s just a child.”

“If you recall,” Morgan replied, “Gwenlyn vanquished the last enemy who threatened Yew Hollow when she was only sixteen. Why should Nora be any different?”

It was Nora who answered. “Because Gwenlyn wasn’t going face to face with her own mother.”

The coven fell silent as Nora calmly slid her chair away from the table. The witches parted as she left the room. I craned my neck to see where she had gone, but the creak of the back screen door opening and closing was enough to give me an idea. I stood up to follow her, but Morgan took my elbow.

“Maybe it’s best you leave her alone,” she said gently. “She needs time to process this. It won’t be easy for her.”

I shook off Morgan’s grip. “Like you bothered to ease her into it. You don’t understand, do you? I may hate Adrienne, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s Nora’s mother. Nora grew up loving her. Now, all of a sudden, she’s being asked to kill her.”

“Well, she doesn’t have to kill her—”

“It’s too much for her,” I declared. “She needs me.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Morgan insisted. “Let her stew. She’ll come back to us.”

I stared down at her. “She’s not you, Morgan. She’s not Gwenlyn. We’re different than you. No matter what happens, we always find our way back to each other. That’s not something I can ignore because you tell me to, even if I am technically a part of the Summers coven.”

Morgan finally stopped pressuring me. Instead, she gestured with an open hand for me to leave the room, and so the rest of the witches watched as I directly ignored the coven leader’s suggestion, pushed my way through to the kitchen, and let myself out onto the porch.

In the darkness, I almost missed the glimmer of pink across the backyard. Nora sat in one of the swings in the rickety old playground that was the only adornment of the Summers property. I hopped off the porch and jogged toward her, but she didn’t look up when I approached. Instead of pushing her to talk to me, I sat down in the adjacent swing, tilted my face up to where I thought the moon might be hiding behind the clouds, and pushed off. The rusty chains creaked in protest and the height of my seat failed to accommodate my long legs, but there was something oddly freeing about coasting back and forth in a hypnotizing pendulum. It reminded me of what childhood was always meant to feel like: innocent and blissfully ignorant.

After some time, I allowed the swing to slow. It swayed gently as it lost momentum, and when I passed by Nora’s unmoving seat, she reached out to find my hand. I dug my toes into the cold ground to stop the swing from carrying me away from her. She held tighter to my fingers but didn’t say anything. Then, she stood up from her swing, sat in my lap, and buried her forehead against my neck.

“I know,” I murmured, tucking her into a more secure position. Swings weren’t exactly built to hold two people, especially when one of them was as tall as a titan. “I know, Nora.”

She wasn’t crying or anything. She simply wanted to sit in the arms of someone who knew her. This was why I’d ignored Morgan’s warnings to leave Nora alone. This was the basis of our relationship. I loved no one else like I loved Nora. Now more than ever, it was us against the world.

She fiddled with the gold chain around my neck, pulling the tree pendant out from beneath the collar of my shirt. “This was Alana’s, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“No wonder it always felt so special to you,” she said. “It’s charged with her aura. You probably felt it, even if you didn’t understand what it was at the time.”

It was too much for me to consider the possibility that my mother had been with me for my entire life and that the necklace was her way of staying close to me even with Adrienne’s curse in place. I took it from Nora’s fingers.

“Enough about the necklace,” I said. “What about you?”

She lifted her head from my shoulder to peer across the yard to the Summers house. “I’ll do what I have to do. The Summerses will be safe.”

“I’m not worried about the Summerses.” I tapped her nose affectionately like I used to do to get her attention when she was younger. “I’m worried about you.”

She shrugged, lacing her fingers together behind my neck. “I don’t really feel anything. Just numb. What do you want me to say?”

“I’m not sure about this whole plan to let you lead the charge,” I told her. “Not that I doubt your competence, of course. I just think the Summerses are putting too much pressure on you. This is our family, Nora. You and me. If you have a better idea as to how to handle all of this, I’m willing to listen.”

“What else can we do?” She unspun my hair from its bun and let it flow through her fingers as if she were admiring the color of it. “The thing is, Kennedy, the Summerses are our family too. We may not share a last name or know them as well as we know each other, but you can’t deny it. Our mothers are or were members of this coven.”

I bowed my head. “It doesn’t feel like it. I don’t know Alana at all.”

“Because you were robbed of the chance,” Nora reminded me. “I haven’t been sleeping lately, Ken. I keep thinking about how much better off your life would’ve been if Adrienne didn’t exist.”

“Hey,” I said, catching her eye. “If Adrienne didn’t exist, then you wouldn’t either, and I wouldn’t give you up for the world.”

A hint of a smile found its way to Nora lips. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. And there’s no point in pining for a different outcome,” I told her. “You can’t change the past, Nora. All you can do is try to affect the future. I have to ask you something though. Seriously.”

Nora looked up. “What?”

I took an uncertain breath. “Do you really think you can do this? Take Adrienne down? I know you’re a superhero, but this goes deeper than your abilities.”

“I don’t need offensive powers to contain my mom,” Nora replied. For the second time, she took the tree pendant around my neck. “Can I borrow this for a little while? There’s something I need to do.”

“Sure.” I unclasped the necklace and gave it to her. It coiled up in her palm. “Is there anything I can help with?”

“Not yet.”

18

Gwenlyn

By the time I woke up from Kennedy’s right hook, I had been moved from the town square to the barn. The entire loft space was illuminated by a rainbow of auras, crossing over each other to form a makeshift prison. The witches didn’t trust me on my own, and they had every reason not to. The war within me had not ceased. Adrienne’s magic called to me, even at a distance. My own craft fought to silence it. The resulting clash rattled my mind and body. I curled up on Nora’s bed, holding my head between my hands as it ached with the overflow of energy. I was glad for the cage of auras. At least I couldn’t do any more damage to the Summerses if I was locked up.

I had no clue as to how much time had passed since I found Kennedy and Nora at the yew tree, but a glance outside provided me with the basic information. The sky was just beginning to lighten. The ground was still dark, but snow blanketed the entire town. There were no footsteps or tracks nearby, but that didn’t mean the Summerses hadn’t already commenced their march to Adrienne’s camp. I worried that I hadn’t given them enough information. Yes, Nora could defeat Adrienne, but how did she plan on doing it? It wasn’t like her incredible healing power was going to suddenly manifest into a tangible sword to fight Adrienne with.

The most difficult thing about being in quarantine was not knowing what was happening outside. I had no way of making contact with Morgan, Kennedy, or any of the other witches, which was probably intentional in case I was feeding information to Adrienne. Even so, it was painful to wait. The analog clock on the wall mocked me. Every tick of the second hand felt like an hour. It was pure torture not knowing what Adrienne might be doing to my family.

It was worse when I realized that I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

The door to the barn fell off its hinges as Adrienne forced her way through it. She wore a white fur coat, a matching hat, and heeled boots that should’ve been impossible to walk through snow in. When she spotted the floating auras in the loft, she picked her way toward the stairs as if navigating a dirty bar bathroom and invited herself up.

“Ugh, what a nuisance,” she said, waving away the witches’ confinement system with one gesture of her hand as I stared up at her in utter shock. Her black aura swept through the colorful array, nullifying its effect. As soon as it had been disbanded, another power surge rocked through my body. The dark magic finally overpowered my own. “Come along, Gwenlyn. It’s time we put an end to this absolute circus of a coven.”

And my body obeyed no matter how much my subconscious protested. I followed Adrienne down the loft steps, where she took one of Kennedy’s coats from where it hung by the door and offered it to me. I slipped my arms through, cuffing the sleeves to compensate for Kennedy’s long arms, and followed Adrienne out into the snow.

“Where are we going?” I asked. The tail of her coat slithered across the cold ground. It was the only part of her that I could look at. The rest of her reminded me of my betrayal, making me queasy.

I knew from the angle of her trajectory what her answer would be before she spoke it. “To the Summers house. Everything begins and ends there.”

“They’re waiting for you, you know,” I told her. “They’re prepared to take you down. You’re making a mistake. What chance do you stand against an entire army of witches?”

Adrienne’s answering laugh made me shudder. “Oh, please. An army? My dear, armies have numbers and strength and weapons. As of right now, the Summerses’ only advantage is the sheer size of their coven, but you forget that this curse has been wearing them down for months now. They might as well be an angry swarm of church mice. No, I intend to waste no more than an hour on these women. The air in Yew Hollow is wreaking havoc on my skin, and I long to return to Windsor Falls without the stress of this ordeal hovering over us. Are you all right?”

I had fallen to my knees, gagging and retching. Adrienne’s nonchalant tone regarding the Summerses’ demise was too much for me. I couldn’t accept the idea of flattening Yew Hollow and going to Windsor Falls to work beside Adrienne, but my body revolted when I tried to reject it instead.

“Oh, dear,” Adrienne said, taking a step away as I convulsed again. “You know, this wouldn’t happen if you just gave in to it. In fact, if you stopped to consider the advantages of working with me, it would allow you to feel stronger than ever.”

I forced half of a reply out through clenched teeth. “I—hate—”

“Shh,” Adrienne interrupted, dropping down next to me. “Save your strength. Here, I’ll help you finally pick a side. This will relieve you of that horrible nausea.”

Before I understood what she was doing, she pricked the tip of her own index finger and reached out to me, drawing on my cheek in her own blood. As soon as her flesh touched mine, I felt the mark react. It twisted and turned around my legs, pulling more power from Adrienne’s blood. Soon, I felt it slither up my torso and back, like living vines, until it wrapped all the way up to my neck. I vibrated with energy, and Adrienne stepped back as I rose from the ground.

Every part of me thrummed with power, begging me to release it. Adrienne grinned as I leveled a curse at the nearest tree. The trunk exploded, and the giant elm toppled over, sending a resounding crash through the woods.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Adrienne noted. “Let’s put it to good use.”

Morality went out the window as we strolled, now side by side, through the forest. I only had one objective. Rid the world of the Summers coven. It no longer mattered that Morgan was my adoptive mother, or that Kennedy and Nora would never see each other again. All that remained was a ravenous hunger for destruction.

At the edge of the forest, Adrienne did not pause to study the layout of the Summerses’ potential defense, instead marching straight on. I immediately took in the sights. Guard witches were posted at each corner of the main house’s roof, gazing out across the yard. As soon as they spotted us, they raised the alarm, firing sparklers in the air that were meant to warn the others of our approach. All at once, the Summerses burst out of the house, streaming across the lawn. It was the saddest charge I’d ever seen. The witches moved sluggishly, relying on their witchcraft to keep them upright. Adrienne bared her teeth in a grin. This would be an easy fight.

From this distance, I couldn’t see Morgan, Kennedy, or Nora within the throng, but I had expected this. I knew Morgan. I knew that she would keep Nora hidden and protected for as long as possible. Chances were that Nora was at the very center of everything, with Kennedy at her side. I opened my mouth to tell this to Adrienne, but something stopped me at the last second. It was my last shred of hope, the tiniest light in all of the darkness, and keeping it to myself was the last thing I could do to resist Adrienne’s hold on me.

Adrienne took out the guard witches with one spell. Black lightning ripped from her hands and tore across the sky. As it struck the witches, they tumbled from the roof and lay motionless in the grass. This seemed to fuel the Summerses’ anger with Adrienne. They surged toward us in a diamond formation. For a split second, I doubted Adrienne’s ability to fend all of them off, even if they were weaker than usual. But then Adrienne lashed out.

The first sweep of her hand took out ten witches in the front line. They went down easily. Morgan had put her weakest witches up front in anticipation of such an attack. It was no more than a distraction. There was another line of witches to take their place. Adrienne struck again. This time, she was less successful. These witches had wards and defense mechanisms in place. Adrienne’s hex deflected off of most of them. Only two additional Summerses fell to the ground.

In the middle of the backyard, we made contact. A black, spherical ward erupted around me and Adrienne as we crashed against the Summerses’ defenses with a deafening boom. With a jolt, I realized that I was contributing to the chaos, casting my own hexes at the women I had once considered family. Malia, Karma, and Laurel appeared out of the fray, forming a triangle around me as they joined hands. Morgan’s sisters were a force of nature, each of them possessing a hardy amount of power, but they were no match for the energy that Adrienne directed through me. When they attempted to craft a containment ward, I blasted apart their defenses. The sisters were wrenched away from one another, landing in confused separation. Laurel recovered first. Her aura flared and the dirt beneath my feet turned to viscous mud. It sucked my boots into the ground up to the ankle, rooting me in place.

With a growl of frustration, I looked away from the battle to free myself from the earth. Laurel’s spell held fast. Adrienne hadn’t counted on something so simple to disarm me. There was no dark magic application for this. I had to lean down and physically dig my feet out of the mud, at which point Karma appeared in my peripheral vision. With a quick, witchcraft-fueled jab of her fist to my temple—the same place that Kennedy had hit me hours earlier—she stunned me momentarily. I dropped to my knees, bracing myself against the frozen ground.

Karma knelt next to me, glowing from behind the inner sanctum of her lilac force field. “Fight it, Gwenlyn,” she whispered. “This isn’t you. You’re one of us. Adrienne doesn’t own you. Fight it.”

I let loose a feral snarl. It was a foreign sound, one that I never would have made outside of Adrienne’s hold on me. Karma scrambled backward as I wrenched my feet free of the ground and stood up. I towered over her, raising a hand full of black magic.

“Gwenlyn, no!”

Morgan appeared out of nowhere to plant herself between me and Karma. A bright blue force field exploded into existence, rebounding the hex I had aimed at Karma. I ducked to avoid it, but Morgan caught me off guard. Her arm swung around and up to catch me at the throat. My airway spasmed, and my defense faltered as I doubled over, coughing.

“I’m sorry,” she huffed.

Adrienne stepped between me and Morgan. Her fur coat was splattered with blood, but it was unclear as to which member of the coven had met her wrath. She lifted her head, easily flicking away an offensive spell from Karma, to address the coven leader.

“Morgan Summers,” she said, her voice booming across the makeshift battlefield. “Do not lead your coven to its death.”

“Go to hell,” Morgan spat, her fury evident even through her shimmering shield.

Adrienne stood taller, her black aura ebbing and flowing like an army of electric eels around her. “Where are my daughter and stepdaughter?”

It was only then I noticed that both McGrath siblings were missing from the Summerses’ side of the equation. It was not what I had expected. Without them, Morgan gave up any chance of the coven surviving. If Nora and Kennedy weren’t here, she had basically forfeited the match to Adrienne.

Morgan rolled her shoulders back, defiantly assuming a posture that made her look taller than she actually was. “You’re too late. I sent them away. You’ll never see them again.”

Adrienne’s eyes narrowed, as though gauging whether or not Morgan was lying. Then she released a bloodcurdling scream, and all hell broke loose.

19

Kennedy

When Adrienne’s scream echoed all the way back to where I waited in the living room, a jolt of panic hit me like a lightning bolt. I scrambled across the room and peeked through the curtains to check on the battle. Morgan and Adrienne stood across from one another. Spells and curses flew through the air like wayward fireworks as they confronted each other. The other witches attempted to defend Morgan, but Gwenlyn had somehow escaped from the barn. She cut through the Summerses’ defenses mercilessly, all the while sporting a dead look in her eyes.

Morgan was lying. She hadn’t sent me and Nora away. Nora was missing. I hadn’t seen her since she’d taken my necklace a few hours ago. Adrienne’s early attack had taken us by storm. Without Nora, there was no way for us to keep the dark magic at bay. Morgan had instructed me to stay in the house to wait for Nora, but as the clock counted down the minutes, it was starting to look more and more unlikely that the Summerses would be able to hold their ground when—if—Nora returned.

When Gwenlyn struck down Laurel with a savage blow, sending the youngest Summers sister to the ground, I decided that I couldn’t wait around any longer. Morgan was preoccupied with Adrienne, and none of the other witches were strong enough to go up against Gwenlyn. With one last glance over my shoulder in the hopes of spotting Nora coming in through the back door, I turned away from the window and toward the front door. There was no sign of her.

Outside, the noise of the battle intensified. Thunder boomed, but I wasn’t sure if it was nature’s soundtrack or the sound of hundreds of hexes rebounding off one another as the witches fired them off. I sprinted toward the fray. Fire burst from my fingertips at the same time an orange force field erected itself around me. I wasn’t conscious of casting either spell. It felt easy and natural, as if the past several years of struggling with my inner energy had never happened.

I focused on distracting Gwenlyn. As she sent another witch toppling over, I fired a cannonball of power in her direction. Unlike the other witches’ spells, which glanced off Gwenlyn’s ward with hardly any effect, mine crashed through the transparent black shield, leaving an open target. Without thinking, I fired another shot of power at the same spot. This one hit Gwenlyn square in the chest, forcing her away from the other witches. I surged forward, putting myself between her and the rest of the Summerses.

We made eye contact, and Gwenlyn’s resolve seemed to solidify. We attacked at the same time, our auras clashing together like a fiery thunderstorm. I wielded my craft with ease, probing Gwenlyn’s ward for weak spots while maintaining my own personal shield. Though our powers were on par with each other’s, I had a leg up on Gwenlyn. Wards were my thing, and as my confidence skyrocketed, my craft solidified into an unbreachable bunker. I advanced on Gwenlyn, grinning as her attack spells ricocheted off of my ward without even making a dent.

Her black shield was solid enough to take in my hands. I grabbed each side of the hole in the middle and ripped. The muscles in my back and shoulders flexed, and the shield tore in two before vanishing altogether. Gwenlyn had no defense now. She tripped over the leg of an unconscious witch and went sprawling toward the ground. I stood over her, raising a hand full of fire.

“Please,” she begged in a voice that was barely her own. “Please.”

When a sparkle of green energy flickered at the tips of her fingers, I realized that this was the real Gwenlyn, fighting through Adrienne’s influence as she had last night. She wasn’t begging me to spare her. She was telling me to put her down, to stop her from hurting any more members of her own family.

The light left her eyes as a burst of power traveled from my hands to her chest. As she absorbed the spell, her skin glowed orange and the black marks that peeked out from beneath the collar of her jacket writhed like dying snakes. Her aura disappeared entirely, like a breath of wind snuffing out a candle.

“No!” Morgan cried.

Adrienne looked bewildered as Morgan abandoned their duel to rush to Gwenlyn’s side, leaving the rest of the Summerses unprotected from her wrath. This dawned on Adrienne in a matter of seconds, and she used the opportunity to cut down another five witches in her path. I left Gwenlyn in the grass to take Morgan’s place. As I faced Adrienne, staring into her cold eyes, my craft burned like an uncontrollable wildfire. It flared up behind me like a tidal wave, illuminating the entire yard.

“I see you’ve finally gotten control of yourself,” Adrienne said. She tilted her head to look at me. “Pity. All that power and no sense of direction.”

“I’ll give you direction.”

Everything culminated to this moment. It was always going to be me versus Adrienne. She had engineered it herself from the very day I was born. That knowledge burned inside me and translated into control. I was no longer scared of myself. I didn’t have to suppress anything anymore, and so for the first time ever, I freed every single atom of power from within me. The Summerses retreated, dragging each other away from me and my stepmother as flame engulfed Adrienne. She disappeared in the raging fire, and for a moment, I thought that it had taken her over, but she emerged from the inferno like a woman out of hell, unharmed but devilishly red.

She laughed coldly, protecting herself from my spell but allowing the fire to rage on. It melted the snow underfoot and torched the ground below as she stepped toward me. “Did you think it would be so easy?” she hissed. “You’re just like your mother, Kennedy. She was useless. She had no purpose or drive or motivation. She was yet another leech sucking the true power out of the Summers coven.”

Anger boiled in the pit of my stomach, but instead of replying, I used it to fuel my attack. The fire blazed again, but this time Adrienne met it with a fume of black smoke. I felt her magic smothering mine but refused to back down.

“That’s the thing that bothers me most,” Adrienne went on, unconcerned by our warring forces. “The Summerses had so much potential. We could have been one of the most powerful covens in the entire world if it weren’t for the likes of you.”

“And yet here I am,” I snarled.

“Not for long,” Adrienne replied. “After all these years, do you think I never learned anything about you? I raised you, Kennedy. You’re mine. You can expel all the power you want, but in the end, you will never be able to defeat your own mother.”

“You are not my mother.”

My temper erupted, and the fire spread beyond the borders of mine and Adrienne’s turf war. It licked at the heels of the escaping witches, out of my control. Before I could rein it in, Adrienne swept forward. She caught me up at the wrists and yanked, forcing me to step within her cloud of smoke. As soon as I did, my fire extinguished itself, completely nullified by Adrienne’s magic. My ward vanished too, leaving me entirely vulnerable and far too close to Adrienne for comfort.

“Oh, I’m really going to enjoy this,” she said.

As Adrienne’s eyes flooded black, I suddenly knew how Gwenlyn had felt when she’d collapsed in the woods. Adrienne sucked my power from me like a vacuum, but instead of simply taking it from me, she let it devour me instead. My inner fire escaped from the vault in my core and took hold of my insides. It burned through me, ripping a white-hot path through my heart until it had devoured all of me. I fell to my knees at Adrienne’s feet, devoid of energy.

A dreadful calm took over as Adrienne gazed down at me. “Goodbye, Kennedy.”

I squeezed my eyes shut as she raised a hand over me, preparing myself for the end. There was nothing left to do but pray that the Summerses somehow pulled it together. Nora’s face flickered in my imagination. This was all for her. Everything. At least she wasn’t here to watch this.

“Kennedy!”

A burst of pink light forced Adrienne away as a familiar warmth settled over me, soothing the ache of Adrienne’s influence and refilling the void within me. Nora had finally arrived on the scene, but as I weakly looked up to see her strolling toward us, I wanted more than ever for her to be as far away as possible.

“Nora, no,” I gasped.

But instead of listening, Nora planted herself between me and Adrienne. They were two sides of the same coin. Nora perfectly mirrored Adrienne in looks and mannerisms, but when it came to their inner morals and goals, they were absolute opposites.

“Nora, darling,” Adrienne said. “Step aside, won’t you? Once this is all over, we can return to Windsor Falls with our pride still intact.”

“I won’t let you hurt her,” Nora replied, standing firm.

“Let?” Adrienne laughed lightly. “My dear, as much as I love you, I can’t begin to pretend to allow you any sort of power in today’s decisions. When we get home, I’ll teach you the intricacies of negotiation. Until then, it’s best you leave this to me. Off you go.”

Nora shook her head. “I won’t let you tell me what to do anymore, and I refuse to stand idly by while you abuse Kennedy like you’ve done her entire life. You made her feel like she was worthless, but you know what, Mom? She’s the one person in my life that I always knew was worth saving.”

Adrienne dropped her mommy act, her expression morphing into a sneer. “Nora, if you don’t stand aside—”

She stepped up to her daughter, enveloping the pair of them in the black cloud. They were nearly invisible behind the smoke, but I heard Nora gasp in shock or pain.

“No!” I cried, squinting through the gaseous cloud.

Something gold glinted in Nora’s hand as Adrienne loomed over her daughter. It was my necklace, glowing with Nora’s pink aura. Quick as a flash, Nora ducked under her mother’s outstretched arm and slipped the necklace over her head. The tree pendant settled at the base of Adrienne’s throat as she stopped in her tracks. For a second, nothing happened. Then pink, red, and white light spread out from the pendant like splatter paint across Adrienne’s chest. She clutched at the necklace, trying to tear it off, but it stuck to her skin like a new tattoo.

She reached out to Nora, gasping for air. “What have you done?”

Nora evaded her mother’s fingertips. “What had to be done.”

Adrienne stumbled backward, tripping over her long fur coat and sprawling to the ground. Her witchcraft detached itself from me and Nora, and I drew a fresh breath of clean air. Nora ran to my side, dropping to her knees to make sure that I was okay.

“It’s fine,” Nora murmured. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Adrienne—”

“Kennedy, look at her.”

I squinted through heavy eyelids to see that Adrienne’s cloud of magic was shrinking rapidly. The necklace seemed to be drinking in her power. As it disappeared, Adrienne shrieked with rage, writhing on the ground as she scratched at her neck to dislodge the necklace. The red, pink, and white auras spread across her skin and squeezed until she actually started shrinking in size. The pendant was literally absorbing Adrienne herself. With one last horrifying scream, the jewelry sucked her in completely. The yard fell silent save for the Summerses’ heavy breathing and Nora’s relieved sigh.

Nora stood up, walked to the spot where her mother had disappeared, and picked something up. As she did, the sun broke free of the clouds, shining down on Yew Hollow for the first time in months. Nora walked back to me, dangling the tree pendant for me to look at.

“I knew she wouldn’t go down without a fight,” she explained, letting the necklace coil in the palm of my hand. “And I was never going to be able to take her down without any offensive training. I needed another way to contain her. This is what I came up with.”

“What did you do?” I asked in awe, inspecting the piece of jewelry.

“I infused the pendant with power from the yew tree,” she explained. “You see, it already had Alana’s perseverance ability and your ward ability since the two of you were the ones who wore it most. When the yew tree merged those abilities with its own power of the Summers coven, I was able to use the pendant to trap Adrienne. She’s not dead, but she’ll never be able to hurt us again.”

“What about the curse?” Morgan said. Her face was streaked with tears. She was still next to Gwenlyn, who lay unconscious in the grass. The witch’s mark hadn’t faded. It had stretched up to her cheeks like the fingers of the dead trying to draw her under the ground. From this angle, it didn’t look good. Morgan looked down at her, a look of absolute hopelessness in her expression.

Nora left me to join Morgan. She took Gwenlyn’s unresponsive hands in her own. With a sudden swell, her pink aura blossomed outward. It touched everything like a sunrise, illuminating the gray yard with its rosy light. The witches that had been unconscious stirred on the ground. Their eyes brightened, their cheeks regained a pinkish hue, and their faces filled out again, no longer sunken in.

“The curse on the Summers coven is no more,” Nora murmured, holding Gwenlyn’s hands to her heart. Slowly but surely, the marks receded from Gwen’s cheeks and neck. She flushed with color, and with a great gasp, she returned to the land of the living.

“Oh, God, please don’t tell me I’m dead,” she said.

Morgan laughed, cradling Gwen’s head in her lap. “You are definitely not dead.”

Little by little, the effects of the curse wore off. The clouds dissipated completely. The sun melted the snow on the ground. Laurel cried in relief as a family of swallows swooped across the sky and the trees began to whisper in the wind. Yew Hollow was coming back to life. As everyone began to realize that the ordeal was finally over, a sense of celebration flooded through the coven. They whooped in delight, shooting victory sparks into the air.

I got shakily to my feet and made my way over to Nora. She smiled as I wrapped an arm around her, pulled her close, and kissed her forehead.

“I’m so proud of you,” I whispered.

“I’m proud of you too.”

Suddenly, the coven fell silent, their celebratory shouts getting lost in the new wind. My heart stopped, thinking that maybe we had rejoiced too soon. Had Adrienne already discovered a way to escape her lonely prison?

“It’s Alana,” someone said in a hushed voice.

The crowd parted. From across the yard, Alana stepped uncertainly through the coven. The witches reached out to her as she passed them, but she only held their hands for a brief moment before continuing on. I stood frozen in place, clutching Nora’s fingers so tightly that she winced, until Alana walked right up to me. She studied my face, a look of utter heartbreak in her electric eyes.

“Kennedy?”

My breath got caught in my throat. “Hi,” I managed.

She lifted a hand to trace the outline of my cheek, as if checking to make sure that I was actually real. Then she threw her arms around me, and I was—finally—home.

20

Kennedy

“Nora, hold still or it’s going to fall off again,” I mumbled around the collection of bobby pins in my mouth as I tried to fix Nora’s graduation cap to her head for the twentieth time. Whoever designed the mortarboard clearly did not plan for the elaborate hairstyles of one Nora McGrath.

“The ceremony’s over, Ken,” Nora said, squirming as I accidentally scraped a pin against her scalp. “Why do I have to wear the hat for pictures?”

“Because it makes you look collegiate.”

“It’s just high school.”

“And soon you’ll be off to college,” I added, “Which makes you collegiate. Damn!”

A shower of bobby pins cascaded to the floor of Nora’s bathroom and the hat made its escape once again.

“Move over,” Gwenlyn ordered, appearing from the hallway of my father’s house. She hip-checked me out of the way, picked the mortarboard up from the floor, and affixed it to Nora’s head.

“It’s not going to stay—” I began.

Gwen checked the angle of the hat on Nora’s head. Then, with a quick swirl of her fingers, a sparkling emerald halo popped into existence and settled on top of Nora’s waterfall braid. The hat absorbed the spell, and when Nora experimentally shook her head side to side, it remained firmly in place.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” I grumbled.

Gwenlyn patted me on the back and grinned. “Don’t worry, Ken. We know you’re not the brightest of lights.”

“Don’t make me punch you again,” I warned.

Nora stood up, hugged us both, and pranced out of the bathroom. “Careful, ladies,” she called over her shoulder. “I did your makeup, remember?”

Gwenlyn and I blinked, sporting matching eyeshadow, as she danced off.

“How could I forget when she practically tied me to a chair?” Gwenlyn said.

I chuckled, sweeping bobby pins under Nora’s vanity with my foot. “Welcome to my life. That’s what happens when you gain a sister.”

Gwenlyn followed me out onto the mezzanine. “That reminds me. Alana called me during the ceremony. Apparently, Karma tried to bake the cake for Nora’s surprise party, and it all went terribly wrong.”

“Blew up the kitchen?”

“Something like that.” Gwenlyn smirked. “Anyway, we have to pick up a cake on the way there. Personally, I think Karma did it on purpose. She’s still upset that none of the others were invited to Nora’s ceremony.”

“We couldn’t get extra tickets!”

“A pitiful excuse,” Gwenlyn replied in a poor imitation of Karma’s voice.

I rolled my eyes. At the top of the stairs, I paused and looked down at the foyer, where Nora was busy adjusting my father’s bowtie. I smiled as he beamed at his youngest daughter, talking a mile a minute about how proud he was of her accomplishments. All of us had heard the speech multiple times over the past few days, but I never tired of my father’s happy babbling. He tugged Nora into a hug, jostling her hat.

Alana emerged from the dining room, fiddling with a pesky earring. “Owen, honey. You’re strangling her.”

“Oh,” Dad said, releasing Nora. “Sorry, baby.”

Gwenlyn nudged me with her elbow as we watched the familial exchange unfold. “You ever going to get used to this?”

“Probably not.”

It had been a little over two years since the McGrath and Summers families had merged into one. I had moved to Yew Hollow, where Gwenlyn and I shared a small house in the Summerses’ cul-de-sac. Most days, living there was so natural and effortless that I often forgot that I hadn’t always been a part of Yew Hollow. My days of unemployment and apartment-hopping were long over, and with the curse lifted, I no longer carried a string of bad luck with me wherever I went.

Yew Hollow had recovered too. The locals had begun to trickle back in the day after Adrienne’s capture, taking up their daily routines as if they had never left in the first place. The town gradually regained its cozy, bustling attitude. Winter was short that year. When the sun finally broke free of the clouds, it seemed determined to shine as much as possible. The snow flurries were over by the end of January, and a few weeks later, little green buds had already begun to pop out of the ground to recolor the town. Summer was in full swing now, and I had never seen a place more lively and vibrant than Yew Hollow.

Reconnecting with Alana was the gift of a lifetime. It was awkward at first, navigating the territory of an estranged mother, but it shortly became obvious that many of my personality traits were handed down from her. She was outspoken and boisterous with a sense of humor so dry that it rivaled Gwenlyn’s. According to the rest of the Summers clan, whose memories of Alana had finally been returned to them, Alana had always been a ray of sunshine within the group. She was immeasurably optimistic, which helped to offset my long-harbored layer of cynicism. She made the best of our situation, often reminding me of how lucky we were to have escaped Adrienne’s curse at all. I was finally getting used to having her around. The bigger adjustment was watching her interact with my father.

When the curse broke and the ward was lifted, my father had stumbled into Yew Hollow wide-eyed and completely confused. Without Adrienne around, he too regained the memories that he had lost, including the complicated tale of his early thirties that led him to Yew Hollow and the Summers coven. When he and Alana finally reunited, everything seemed to fall into place. It was strange for me, watching the two of them crash together like freight trains when they first saw each other. My parents had an entire history that I didn’t know about, but the thirty-year gap between then and now didn’t put a damper on their reunion. It was as though they picked up right where they had left off, an immediate and comfortable couple.

Nora finished high school in Windsor Falls, graduating at the top of her class despite the months of school she’d missed during her sophomore year. She was heading to Harvard in the fall but planned to spend her summer in Yew Hollow. Boston wasn’t far, and it comforted me to know that my little sister would be within range if I ever needed her. As far as the house in Windsor Falls was concerned, Dad had only continued to live there for Nora’s benefit. Now that she was done with school, he planned on selling the monstrous manor in order to move in with Alana in Yew Hollow. I wouldn’t miss the cold marble halls or vaulted ceilings in the least. With the whole family in Yew Hollow, we could finally begin to repair what Adrienne had taken apart.

“You guys!” Nora called up the stairs to me and Gwenlyn. She waved at us. “Get down here. If I have to pose for photos, then so do you!”

With identical chuckles, Gwenlyn and I joined Nora in the foyer. Then the five of us went outside, where the professional photographer that Dad had hired was setting up near the fountain in the middle of the driveway. As Nora, Alana, and Gwenlyn got into position for the first shot, Dad tugged me out of earshot of the group.

“What’s wrong?” I asked immediately.

“Nothing,” he replied. “I just wanted to tell you something. I know that this is Nora’s day and everything, but I wanted to let you know how incredibly proud I am of you.”

My bottom lip trembled. “For what?”

Dad took me by the shoulders. “For everything. I’ve seen how far you’ve come since Adrienne—Well, let’s just leave it at that. You were dealt a bad hand, kid, and I was never there for you the way I should’ve been. I admire you, Ken. No matter how much the world cut you down, you always pushed through. I’m happier now than I ever have been, and I have you to thank for that.”

I wiped a stray tear from the corner of my eye and laughed. “God, Dad. You’re such a sap.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He pulled me forward into a hug. As the only family member that was taller than me, he could rest his chin on top of my head.

“Dad! Ken!” Nora shouted.

“Coming,” Dad and I chorused.

The surprise aspect of Nora’s party was ruined when we made Dad stop his SUV at a bakery on our way to Yew Hollow. Gwenlyn ran in to find a replacement cake, but as she climbed out of the back seat, she turned to Nora and asked, “What flavor do you want?” Then she immediately smacked her forehead against her palm when she realized what she’d done. Dad, Alana, and I groaned in defeat simultaneously.

With the new cake perched across my lap as we resumed our journey, Gwenlyn and I swore Nora to secrecy. Morgan and Karma would hex us if they knew we’d spoiled the surprise. When we pulled into the long driveway of the Summers house, Nora put on her best acting face at the sight of the balloons—purple and white to honor Windsor Falls Preparatory School’s colors—and gasped appropriately when the witches poured out onto the porch and shouted various welcomes. Morgan and her sisters were the first to hug and congratulate Nora. While the rest of the Summerses lined up to do the same, Gwenlyn and I slipped past the commotion to continue setting up the food. In the kitchen, we argued about the layout of the buffet table, which soon devolved into throwing plastic utensils at each other from opposite sides of the room.

Morgan was the first to break up our display of childish horseplay, right as Gwenlyn chucked the serving knife for the cake at me. It spiraled end over end before freezing in mid-air, hovering in a haze of blue witchcraft. Morgan plucked it from the air and brandished it at the two of us.

“Quit messing around!” she ordered. “And which one of you told Nora about all of this?”

Gwenlyn and I exchanged loaded glances. Busted.

“How did you know?” Gwenlyn asked her.

“Please,” Morgan replied. “I can spot Nora’s customer service smile from a mile away.” She smacked the serving knife into my hand and looked into my eyes. “Behave.”

I gave her a little mock salute, holding the utensil at eye level. As she left the room, Gwenlyn clicked her heels together and did the same.

“I liked it better when the two of you hated each other,” Morgan said before she turned her back on us.

We broke out into giggles but took Morgan’s advice, setting down our makeshift weapons to prepare the platters of food. Malia and Laurel had done most of the cooking, and with Karma no longer allowed in the kitchen, everything had come out perfect.

“So is Morgan still dropping hints about coven leadership to you?” I asked Gwenlyn as we stacked paper plates and folded napkins together.

“Yup,” she replied. “She’s being really subtle about it though. She keeps sending me on errands in her stead and stuff like that.”

I snorted. “Subtle. Sure. How do you feel about all that?”

She flapped the wrinkles out of a napkin. “Honestly? I have no idea. I’m still not ready to take over for her, but I do know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

Gwenlyn twisted her napkin into a whip and snapped it toward me. “I can’t wait to boss you around.”

Quick as a flash, I incinerated the napkin in her hand. She dropped it with a yelp and it fell to the floor, smoking. I grinned. “We’ll see who’s bossing who around.”

Someone cleared their throat, bringing a premature end to mine and Gwenlyn’s second round before it could escalate. Alana leaned against the door of the kitchen, observing our behavior with a mischievous smirk.

“Already causing trouble, are we?” she asked.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gwenlyn replied innocently.

Alana shook her head, smiling. “Gwenlyn, do you mind if Kennedy and I have a word alone?”

“Sure.”

They switched places, Alana taking up the helm to continue folding the napkins that Gwenlyn had left behind. For a few minutes, we worked in silence. Even after two years, it was sometimes hard to start a conversation with my mother. We were still getting to know each other.

When I bent over to find the stash of disposable champagne flutes in the bags of party supplies that were piled on the floor, my hair fell forward over my eyes. Instinctively, Alana reached forward to push it out of my line of vision.

“So your father put the house up for sale,” she finally said.

I straightened up and began to attach the bases of the champagne flutes to their stems. “Thank goodness. I can’t wait to see it go.”

“You— you’re happy about this?”

I glanced over at her confused expression. “Of course. That place has nothing but bad memories. The only thing I ever liked about it was the pool.”

“I thought you might be a little upset about losing your childhood home,” Alana admitted.

I set down the plastic glasses and turned to her. “Mom, that house was never home.”

Her eyes went wide. “You called me Mom.”

The word had popped out naturally, despite the fact that I’d only called Alana by her first name since we had officially met. Now, it seemed silly that I hadn’t automatically gotten into the habit of referring to her as my mother.

“Yeah, I did,” I said. “Is that okay?”

She beamed at me, her eyes shining with happy tears. “Of course it’s okay.”

I leaned down to give her a hug just as someone knocked on the door frame to the kitchen. Nora poked her head in, playfully covering her eyes to avoid seeing her “surprise” cake.

“I hate to break up such an adorable bonding moment,” she said, “but the coven is getting hungry, and Karma’s already breaking out the booze. I really don’t want to see what kind of damage she can do on an empty stomach.”

I laughed and released Alana. “Come on then. Let’s get this food out there.”

Together, we transported the platters from the kitchen to the dining room, where everyone loaded up their plates. The coven broke into subgroups of sisters, aunts, and cousins, all mingling together as they ate. Morgan chatted with Yvette and Yvonne, while Laurel confiscated Karma’s wine glass. The kids snuck tastes of icing from the cake. Across the room, Alana pilfered a cherry tomato from Dad’s salad plate. I smiled as he playfully pretended to take offense.

Nora leaned up against my shoulder, a piece of sourdough bread wedged sideways in her mouth. She handed me her drink so that she had a free hand to swipe the bread through the sauce on her plate.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” she said, watching Dad and Alana from across the room.

“Beyond,” I replied. I nudged her side. “So what’s it like being a free woman, huh?”

She blew the tassel of her graduation cap out of the way of her mouth. Gwenlyn’s spell had yet to relinquish its hold. “It feels amazing for now, but I think as soon as the college homework load hits, I’m going to be singing a different tune.”

“Appreciate it now, kid,” I told her. “Before you know it, four more years will have gone by and we’ll be doing this again to celebrate your graduation from Harvard.”

Nora munched away at her dinner, unconcerned. “Whatever. I’ll be valedictorian then too.”

Her unwavering confidence made me grin. I looped an arm around her shoulders, careful to not jostle her plate, and pulled her toward me. The corner of her hat poked me in the neck. She’d grown an inch or so over the past two years, and for once, I’d been around long enough to actually notice the difference.

As Nora settled against me, I stole a crouton from her plate and looked around the room. Satisfaction and warmth blossomed like a rose in my soul. I’d grown used to the comfortable commotion of the Summers coven. For the first time, everything was as it should have been. Alana and Dad were happy. Adrienne was gone. Nora and I were together.

And I finally had a family.

Many thanks to everyone who read my story!

Writing is the best way I know to express myself, and I’m so glad that you all have rewarded me with the opportunity to share my imagination with you. As an author, I learn and evolve from the input of others, so if you have a spare moment and you enjoyed the story, please leave a short, spoiler-free review of the book. As readers, your personal opinions are often the best references for a writer. Your commentary allows me to further provide you all with fun, engaging material.

I would love if you could leave a review: Click Here to Review!

Again, thank you all for diving into mine and Morgan’s world. May we meet again!

All the best,

Alexandria Clarke

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