by Sadie Moss
She gripped my hand so tightly the bones scraped together, cradling it to her chest as she dropped her head onto my shoulder and sobbed. I brushed her hair back with my other hand, lending her comfort as Jerrett sped down the highway.
This beautiful woman was so fierce, so kind, and so strong.
And yet she hadn’t let the world harden her.
There was a softness about Willow that I didn’t think would ever go away, no matter how long she lived, no matter how much heartache and ugliness she witnessed. Instead of using her power to control or abuse those weaker than her, she would use it to protect them.
Just like Malcolm, Jerrett, and I would.
She really was the perfect match for all of us, the missing piece to our little family.
My thoughts strayed to the other missing piece, and I pressed a kiss to Willow’s head, worry spiking in my veins.
Malcolm, where the hell are you?
3
Willow
After I cried myself out in the back seat of Jerrett’s Mercedes, soaking through the fabric of Sol’s shirt, I fell into a restless sleep. I kept jerking awake, afraid I was going to miss something important.
Had Malcolm returned? Had the weird sisters shown themselves? Had the shades attacked again?
But every time my head snapped up, my eyes flying open, I was greeted by the same dark scenery flying past the windows. The sky slowly lightened with the coming dawn, and when I jolted awake again as Jerrett pulled into the garage of their home in Washington Heights, the rising sun cast long shadows on the street behind us.
Any lingering tiredness faded quickly as the garage door shut. I leapt out of the car and ran past the several other luxury vehicles toward the entrance to the brothers’ house. Jerrett and Sol stuck close behind me, and I knew that despite their attempts to act calm, they were as anxious as I was to know if Malcolm had returned.
“No cars missing,” Jerrett muttered to Sol as we hurried down the hallway deeper into the house. “But fuck if I know whether that’s a good or bad sign.”
“Hello?” I called, picking up the pace and poking my head into rooms as we passed. “Malcolm? Are you here?”
“You’re back!”
I jumped at the voice, and for one split second, hope bloomed. But as soon as the pitch and accent registered, my hope died a quick death.
“Oh. Yuliya.”
My tone was dull and disappointed, and the witch with the weathered face, white hair, and bright purple eyes stopped short in the doorway of the kitchen, her smile slipping into a frown. “What did I do?”
“Nothing.” Sol stepped forward, slipping an arm around Yuliya and planting a kiss on her head.
The old woman scrunched up her nose but couldn’t hide her pleasure at his affectionate gesture. These men were like sons to her.
“It’s more about who you aren’t,” Jerrett added unhelpfully.
Yuliya pursed her lips. Slipping out of Sol’s embrace, she swatted at Jerrett, scolding him in her thick Russian accent. “What are you talking about, you strange boy? I’m Yuliya. Your housekeeper. You haven’t been gone long enough to forget that, have you?”
He nimbly avoided her hands, chuckling lightly. “Hmm, the name rings a bell.” Then his expression fell, growing serious. “But we’re looking for Malcolm. Have you seen him? Has he been back to the house?”
“Malcolm?” Yuliya’s pale white brows pinched together. “No. He hasn’t been here. Is he missing?”
Jerrett and Sol exchanged a quick look, one I was sure they hoped I didn’t pick up on. But I could see the concern on their faces.
“Is Malcolm missing?” the housekeeper repeated, her hands fluttering slightly.
“Not exactly missing,” Jerrett hedged. “We just don’t know quite where he is.”
“That means missing!” Yuliya went after Jerrett for real this time, pulling the dishtowel off her shoulder and snapping it out at him like a whip. “What did you do? How did you lose him?”
“Hey!” He rubbed his ass, where she’d tagged him hard with the towel, and darted behind me and Sol. “Don’t blame me! I didn’t make him fucking run off!”
Yuliya narrowed her eyes at Jerrett, shaking a warning finger at him. “Get him back.”
“That’s the fucking plan,” Jerrett muttered.
The Russian witch’s expression smoothed as she turned back to me. I’d never been totally sure if she liked me, but any doubts about her feelings were put to rest when she tugged me into a tight embrace.
“Don’t worry, dear. They will find him. They would move heaven and earth to find him,” she whispered before pulling back to look me in the eyes with a probing gaze. “So would you, I think. Good. He needs someone like you. They all do.”
She kissed me on the cheek, and it felt like a benediction of a sort. These men were all way too old for their parents or immediate human relatives to be alive anymore—except Carrick, who could go fuck himself as far as I was concerned—but somehow, getting the blessing of their witch housekeeper felt like the next best thing.
I smiled at her, although worry for Malcolm kept the grin from forming fully. “Thank you, Yuliya. I’m glad they have you too.”
“Oh! Well, it goes without saying they need me. They would never survive without me.” She released me from her bony grip, turning back toward the kitchen. Before she passed through the door, she shot another look over her shoulder at Jerrett. “Find. Him.”
“All right, all right.” He sounded like he couldn’t decide whether to be amused, annoyed, or worried.
Yuliya returned from the kitchen a moment later with blood bags for all of us, telling us we looked too skinny. We took them gratefully before Sol led the way through the house, heading upstairs.
“This does present a problem,” he said quietly. “We need to begin our hunt for the Stones of Power as soon as possible. But Yuliya isn’t wrong. We also need to find Malcolm.”
Fear prickled along my skin. “You don’t think he’ll come back?”
Jerrett ran a hand through the long lock of black hair that always fell over his eyes. “Yeah, eventually. But after Ariana, he was messed up for years. I don’t know how long it’ll take this time. And with those fucking shades on the loose, I don’t love the idea of him out there on his own.”
Sol opened the door to my bedroom, gesturing me inside. To my great relief, he and Jerrett followed me in. I might be too worried and emotionally ragged to do anything more than sleep, but I wanted them with me.
“I don’t like it either.” Sol sat down on the bed, running his fingers absentmindedly over the edge of his blood bag. “First thing tomorrow night, we’ll start trying to track him down.”
“How hard will that be?”
Jerrett snorted. “If he doesn’t want to be found? Nearly impossible.”
The room was dark. The coverings on the windows blocked out the sun so effectively that I’d never guess it was midday.
I should be sleeping. I needed to sleep.
But the more I told myself that, the more elusive rest became.
Jerrett muttered something unintelligible, burrowing his face into my hair. On my other side, Sol lay with his hand draped over my stomach, his touch possessive even in sleep.
It was probably their many years as hunters and warriors that let them sleep so soundly with so many worries and troubles hanging over us. Good soldiers knew to grab rest when they could get it, and how to wake up alert and ready for action in seconds.
Unfortunately, I possessed neither of those skills yet. So while they slept, I lay still and gazed up at the ceiling.
What if we couldn’t find Malcolm? Would his brothers abandon the hunt for the sisters to find him? What if the two women got the Stones of Power while we were distracted? Could we risk that?
Goddamn it, Malcolm. Why did you do this?
A thought occurred to me. Could I direct my Sight to show me where he was? I’d only consciously brought on a vision once without some sort of
shock to my system, the night I sat with Sol in the garden. Maybe I could do it again.
I closed my eyes, trying to relax and empty my mind. It wasn’t easy, but the twin breaths filtering into my ears from the men beside me were more soothing than any meditation soundtrack ever could be. I focused on those sounds, matching my own breathing to theirs.
Light began to shine around me, and my eyes popped open.
Shit! The runes.
The pattern of scars adorning my body had begun to glow, giving off a radiant white-yellow light. Panic flared, and I used everything within myself to tamp down the fog rising in my mind.
My body jerked, and Jerrett and Sol both woke up instantly.
“Oh shit! Will?”
“What is it?”
“Her runes are glowing. Will, sweetheart, we’re right here. We’ve got you.”
I tried to scramble out of bed, wanting to get far away from the brothers in case the evil voice in my mind directed me to kill them again.
But I hadn’t even made it off the mattress when my soul suddenly became heavy as a lead weight.
The glow around me disappeared from sight as I fell into blackness.
4
Willow
I fought against the nothingness, struggling to return to my body. What if while I was lost in a vision, the sisters gained complete control of my body? Would I regain consciousness in a few hours and find myself surrounded by corpses?
No! No, no, no! Let me go back!
But my Sight didn’t listen. I had asked for a vision, and it was apparently going to deliver whether I liked it or not.
The heavy, all-consuming blackness finally faded away, and I found myself on a street corner. But this was nowhere I recognized, no time I recognized. It looked old and foreign. The street was made of nothing but packed dirt, and the buildings that lined it appeared to be made of sandstone. Overhead, the sun shone brightly, making me flinch even though I knew it was just a vision.
Where am I?
I shifted my focus up and down the street, searching for some clue. Why had my vision brought me here? Was this where Malcolm was?
Movement to my left caught my attention, and I turned back to see two women walking down the street. One carried a small basket, and they strode arm in arm, their gaits so perfectly synchronized that they almost looked like a single, two-headed entity. Both women wore long white robes, and even before I took in their faces, I knew who they were.
The weird sisters.
But they didn’t look like I’d seen them in life. Granted, I’d only seen them once in person, but in all my other visions, they had looked the same. Now, there was something distinctly different about them. They looked… human. Softer. Sweeter. Less empty.
They both had light blonde hair, arranged on their heads in matching ornate styles. Their faces were carbon copies of each other, with high cheekbones, full lips, and perfectly arched eyebrows. Their eyes were light blue, bright and alive with kindness.
I watched as they stepped lightly past me, and without even having to put much effort into it this time, my consciousness moved, trailing after them. Several streets down, they came to a stop outside a small building and knocked on the door. A large, red-faced woman answered, and her eyes lit up with relief at the sight of them.
“Neoma! Samira! Thank you for coming! Her condition is worsening.”
The sisters shook their heads in unison, murmuring words of comfort and condolence. The large woman ushered them inside, and I slid in after them. The building was a home, but the architecture told me this definitely wasn’t the modern era. Everything was crudely built, and there didn’t seem to be any electricity. Lanterns and a small fireplace lit the space.
In the corner of the one-room domicile, a girl lay on a cot. She had a thin blanket over her body, and she shivered despite the sheen of sweat covering her skin.
Neoma and Samira knelt by her side, flipping open the lid of the small basket. In a strange dance of four arms and hands, they began to remove ingredients and tools, mixing and grinding and combining things. At one point, I lost track of which limbs belonged to which person—they crossed over and under each other, moving with such precision it was impossible to tell.
Finally, the women dipped their fingers into the small bowl they’d used to mix ingredients. With the reddish paste that had formed, they began drawing patterns on the girl’s face, arms, and neck.
Runes? Worry spiked in me, and I wanted to shout, to warn the girl’s mother not to trust these sisters.
But these runes weren’t made from cuts to the skin. Just from the paste. And as Neoma finished the last stroke and drew her hand back, the sisters began to chant. The runes glowed like mine had, and immediately, the girl’s ragged breathing seemed to even out and deepen.
Samira touched the girl’s forehead, brushing her hair back lightly without disturbing the runes. The glowing light still pulsed from them, but it was beginning to fade. “She will live.”
“Thank you. Thank you!” The mother’s voice was choked. Tears tracked down her weathered face.
The two women didn’t answer, just smiled serenely up at her before gathering their things.
What the hell? Had they healed that girl?
Curiosity gnawing at me, I followed as they left the small, cramped house and continued down the street. I kept expecting my vision to end, for the blackness to pull me away, but the familiar tug didn’t come. Instead, I seemed almost bound to the sisters, tugged along after them as they visited several more houses, performing healing spells and distributing food and curative herbs.
After leaving the house of an elderly man with fingers so gnarled he could hardly bend them, they changed course slightly, wending their way toward a large temple that dominated the small village. As they walked, they talked to each other in what almost seemed to be their own language. I’d heard of twins doing that, although I’d never known it was a real thing. And I guessed it usually wasn’t something that persisted into adulthood.
When they reached the temple, they stopped at the entrance and bowed low. Inside, other similarly dressed people moved about the large space as the women walked up to the altar at the front and kneeled.
Were they nuns? Or something like it? Where were we? I tried to memorize everything about the space around me for future reference.
After paying homage to their god, whatever one that might be, the women stood and left the temple, nodding to several of their fellow worshippers as they passed. I let myself be tugged along in their wake, although truthfully, I was getting antsy. I wanted to get back to my body and make sure Jerrett and Sol were all right.
Night had fallen outside while the sisters worshipped, and their white robes seemed to glow in the moonlight as they walked serenely down the street.
Suddenly, a lanky figure dropped onto the path in front of them, landing in a crouch.
“White witches.” He chuckled. “Out so late? Don’t you know the night belongs to darker things?”
If I’d had a body, I would’ve screamed and jumped. As it was, fear tore through me as the women jerked to a stop. They blinked at the crouching figure in surprise. Before they could do anything more than that, the man rose to his feet, leaping toward them in the blink of an eye.
He pulled the one on the right—Neoma?—into his grip, baring his teeth to expose long fangs.
Not just a man then. A vampire.
As he sank his teeth into Neoma’s neck, Samira was the one who screamed. The sound was full of such pain and anger it seemed to pierce my soul. She rushed for the man, reaching into the basket she held and beginning to chant an incantation. But before she could finish, the vampire reached out for her. With one arm still around Neoma and his fangs still lodged in her flesh, he grabbed Samira’s neck and squeezed, lifting her off the ground.
The basket, and whatever spell she’d been reaching for to try to save her sister, fell to the ground, scattering across the packed earth as Samira’s feet kicked uselessl
y.
The vampire continued to drink from Neoma, the sight unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Even the beginnings of the blood orgy after Carrick’s feast hadn’t been like this. This was vicious and cruel. The large man bit into Neoma’s neck again and again, tearing at the delicate, pale flesh with his fangs until blood poured forth in a torrent. He drank messily, making horrible slurping grunts as her blood ran down his chin and neck.
Samira’s kicking feet slowed. The hands that had been clutching the man’s forearm fell limp by her sides. And when the vampire dropped her, she crumpled like a broken doll. He continued to drink from her sister until the spurting blood slowed, then he let her go as well.
For a moment, he stared down at the two bodies, the bottom half of his face covered in blood and his dark hair glinting in the moonlight. Then a red-tinted smile spread across his face.
He crouched down by Neoma’s head first, lifting her upper body and patting her on the cheek to rouse her.
“Here, sweet one. Drink this.”
With bloody fangs, he bit into his own wrist before forcing the limb into Neoma’s mouth. She sputtered, her eyes flying open as she tried to push him away. But he kept his wrist pinned there, holding her head until her throat began to contract with long swallows.
“Good witch. Very good.”
After a few minutes, he pulled away, and she scrabbled for his wrist, trying to yank it back toward her mouth.
“Greedy little thing, aren’t you?” He tutted. “But we have to save some for your sister. She needs some too.”
He left Neoma lying on the ground in a daze and walked over to Samira. The woman’s white robe was stained with blood, and she lay on her back, staring up at the sky as she sucked in small, rattling breaths. He placed his wrist over her mouth, and she almost choked on the blood at first. But then she too began to drink hungrily.
I knew that feeling. I’d been barely conscious when the brothers had turned me, but I could still remember that primal urge to stay alive, my body’s instinctual reaction to devour the healing blood they offered.
