by Jayla Kane
Do you talk to her about me like this, all secret-like in her head, while we’re all together? Raven’s telepathy was a weapon, and we both knew it. I love her, but my smart-ass big sister was the last person I wanted stomping around in my private thoughts. I twirled a piece of dyed blonde hair around my finger and raised my eyebrows at her, knowing she would take the misdirection and run with it.
Goddamnit, Baby—She turned sharply to the left and stared at the men talking over by the window for a second, then looked down at our oldest sister. “Leo’s a big liability. He can’t leave yet, but I’m not sure he would even if we allowed it. He says he wants to be sure that we understand the risks. I think he feels torn, honestly,” she said, shrugging. “He’s not a bad guy.”
“I thought you had him locked up?” Zelle narrowed her eyes. That brief smile was long gone now. She didn’t sleep here, so she hadn’t seen Leo wandering around like a zombie during breakfast, looking scared out of his skin.
“He can’t leave the house, can’t go anywhere that isn’t a common area. No phones, nothing like that, not yet,” Raven explained, and Zelle frowned. She was asleep when Leo was freaking out about her, or she might feel a little less defiant on his behalf. She understood that the Guild was a threat, but Zelle likes to play fair. She probably thought locking him up was a necessity, but she trusted the Warfields so little she might think they were treating him like a real prisoner. Which they weren’t, not at all. “Jake tells the house what the rules are, and then it just does it. It’s hard to explain.” It certainly was. The random appearance of an old lady here or there in the giant house was weird enough, but when I said something like, hey, Sarah, can I get a hot cocoa? And then it just appeared in my room, on my table, by the time I got back… It might be luxurious, but it was still weird as hell.
I watched Hunter with my peripheral vision and caught him looking at me, Tristan and Jake talking in hushed tones over his shoulder. I turned my head and we watched one another for a moment from our respective bubbles, and I felt my cheeks heat. He was…
It was so hard to describe.
He started to walk towards me, face somber, eyes unblinking, but then Tristan turned towards the room and tried to get us in order again. Hunter swayed where he stood, and Jake wrapped his arm around his shoulder again, the butchest form of a hug I’ve ever seen. He was probably whispering ‘bro’ in his ear.
Raven hid a smile. Get out of my head, I admonished her, but she just shrugged.
Not my fault you’re funny. And loud.
“Ahem,” Tristan said, trying for the third time. “I am grateful to everyone for coming.”
“My sister is missing school for this,” Zelle snapped, all prickles again, and I rolled my eyes.
“Thank god,” I said, and Molly looked down at her lap to hide her smile, just like Raven. “Can I just drop out? Now that I’m in the magic club and all?”
“No,” Zelle and Raven snarled at the same time, and then Tristan sighed and stepped forward, hands out.
“I wanted all of us to meet and… Talk about how to proceed before we go about inviting the rest of the coven—”
“You’re not in the coven,” Zelle said in her hard voice. “I’m not in the fucking coven. Last I checked—”
“Well, I am,” I said, piling on the bored teen-ager act again. Jake is the only other person I know that can sound as completely over something as I can, which bothered me. At the moment he was keeping his smart-ass remarks to himself, though, probably out of deference to Raven. “My sister is, her boyfriend is, and as far as I know they’ve got kind of a hit out on Hunter—along with the Guild—so from my own personal experience, I would recommend we get our shit together before they just kidnap your ass, Zelle, and lock in you a cell so some creep can come by and—” My voice caught for just a second. Raven started to stand up, as if she could reach me from across the room, and Hunter emanated a chill so severe I could feel it where I sat. But fuck it, it was what it was. “And rape you, so his own powers get a little more jazzed up.” I wiggled my fingers in the air, making light of it, but Molly shivered beside me on the couch.
“I’d like to see him try,” Zella snarled, and I noticed, for the first time, the faint scent of woodsmoke. I’d smelled it my whole life. I thought it was just the way the air in our house was, but… It was Zelle, the whole time. Huh. How ‘bout that. “I’d love to get that fucker—"
“He’s dead,” I said bluntly. He was. Hunter killed him; that was the extent of our last conversation, reassurance that my rapist was dead. It was a bittersweet good-bye, let me tell you. “But I’m sure there are more where he came from.”
“I believe that…” Tristan stepped into the silence following my speech with the kind of grace someone only has if they’ve suffered enough to empathize. I know Zelle hates him, but I really don’t. I’ll never forget the way he helped me with Hunter; I might have the power, but I couldn’t do shit with it before Tristan, and he had no real reason to intervene. None. I didn’t know who he was when I saw him, and he’d never met Hunter at all; he wasn’t aware of his relationship with Jake, either, until afterwards. “I believe we are stronger together. And we must accept the fact that our existence itself will be considered a threat by the magical world.”
“Why? Why do they even know we exist?” Zelle never looked directly at him, even when she deigned to speak to him.
“There are some witches—and others, of different breeds—who will have sensed the change. The world is interrelated, right?” Tristan continued standing, but Raven and Jake walked over to the couch across from me and sat down to listen. Hunter leaned against the wall behind them like another sentinel, in the same position as Zelle. “Weather systems are interrelated. The movement of pressure systems across Europe will affect the weather over the Atlantic, and eventually, the weather here. A tidal wave in Japan is the result of an earthquake across the ocean. And on and on. Magic is… Similar. It doesn’t necessarily care about balance, but it reacts to pressure—if that makes sense.”
“So it’s not all harmonious, like Ma’s wiccan books would have us believe?” Raven sent a smile to my mind. She was always heartened by my sarcasm, even if she got tired of how little I believed in our mother.
“Well, I’m sure it’s… If harmony is the same thing as balance, I suppose they’re related,” Tristan said, clearly not knowing a hell of a lot about New Age witchery. “But the Binding is a natural system, like the weather. Like the tides, the movement of the tectonic plates. The difference is that it is directly related to individuals. We are the tectonic plates,” he said, moving his hand in a slow circle, gesturing to all of us. He carefully avoided looking directly at Zelle. “We are the tides.”
“Yikes,” Molly muttered, and that made me grin.
“Badass,” I said, and she giggled nervously. Hunter’s eyes flashed with warmth across the room, and I felt the heat of it in my bones, like he was somehow hugging me from inside.
“Yeah,” Zelle said, sarcasm dripping from the single word. “Fan-fucking-tastic.”
“Jesus, Zella,” Jake started, but Raven silenced him with a look.
“It doesn’t matter how we feel about it, if it’s true,” she said evenly, casting a quick glare at Zelle, and Tristan shrugged with a slightly apologetic look on his face.
“It’s true. And just like we monitor storms, there are people in the magical world who monitor magic. They use concentrations of it for spellwork—”
“You mean, they use people for spellwork? That’s what a concentration really is, right?” Raven raised an eyebrow. Always quick on the uptake, that one.
“Yes,” Tristan said, and his eyes briefly lit on my face. “And not always willing people. The rules are different, in the magical world. Consent is not always required; it’s power that matters.”
“Obviously,” I said darkly, and Molly gave me a quick, uneasy glance. Since we never talked about what happened with her brother, I guess she thought I might resent her
for it. I didn’t. But I also didn’t have the energy to deal with reassuring her right now… Or probably ever.
“That kind of personal violation is openly abhorred by most covens,” Tristan said, his eyes dark, his voice steady. “But the truth—and Leo will object to this, but he is wrong—is that no coven is above rape, murder, torture or imprisonment.” His expression was bland, his voice mild, as if this were all in a day’s work for him. “Leo will tell you that the Guild, in particular, objects to the acquisition of power through violence. That’s nonsense,” he said matter-of-factly. Tristan waved his hand, and a map unfurled in front of us, transparent but clear, in the center of the room. It showed the outline of North America, and as he pointed parts of it lit up in a bright, translucent green, the whole thing stark and eerie as it floated between us, hovering over the coffee tables. “The Guild controls most of the northeastern United States and has alliances with covens all over the world. They act as a kind of international magical cadre, regulating the use of magic according to a treaty that was designed in the wake of the creation of the Ashwood Coven.” The map retracted into a pinpoint, then expanded into a globe with bright sparks of green lighting up everywhere, the reach of the Guild clearly evident as it spanned every continent.
“Jesus,” Jake said, frowning. His brother raised an eyebrow.
“Yes. It’s that bad. The Guild is a terrible adversary to have. Unfortunately—”
“No,” Jake said, shaking his head. “I mean… We must be terrible, if this alliance was created because of the Ashwood Coven.” I have no sympathy for that psycho, but it was a little heartening to see him concerned about anything. Ever. “We must be fucking monsters.”
“Ya think?” Zelle’s comment was under her breath, but everybody heard it. Molly winced.
“Real fucking helpful, Zella,” Raven snapped, turning back to Tristan. Rae had surrendered to the fact that we were magic, but the truth was that she was the only one of us who lost a different, better life because of it. She was supposed to go to Harvard. Become a scientist. Be somebody. But she never complained about any of that to us. “Okay. So why are we so terrible? I mean, if all of these people all over the world were terrified of the Ashwood Coven—just like Leo is, I guess—it must have been… I mean…”
“Blood magic,” I said, and everybody turned and looked at me. I shrugged, feeling Hunter’s eyes on mine. He knew all of this already. “That’s what she said—the Rose. She said our coven was founded on blood magic I couldn’t begin to imagine.” I raised an eyebrow at Tristan, and he shrugged in that way he had. “I didn’t ask for specifics since she was enough of a horrorshow for me not to need them.”
“We don’t need them, either,” Tristan said smoothly, turning back to the map. “It’s irrelevant; it has nothing to do with us. Not directly.” He paused, his gaze lowering briefly as he considered his words. “It is an inheritance,” he said slowly, thinking it over, “that none of us, given the choice, would have accepted.”
“Jake would’ve,” Zelle said, and Raven rolled her eyes.
“You don’t know—”
“I mean, maybe,” Jake said, giving Zella a chilly once-over with perfect frat boy nonchalance as he rested his head on his hands, chest flexing as he leaned back into the couch. “It sure as hell came in handy the other day when you showed up, guns blazing—”
“Alright, goddamnit,” Raven said, interrupting for the second time. She glared at them both, but they continued to stare each other down. “So—”
“My brother would not have chosen his powers if he knew how they were created,” Tristan said quietly. He never looked directly at Zelle, never. She would talk at him, but her eyes never strayed in his direction; he usually tried not to speak to her, as if he understood she would take offense, and he never looked at her face. This was the first time I saw him address her so openly. “No one would.”
“He would,” she hissed, then winced and rubbed her temple with a sharp glance at Raven. “Fine,” she muttered, her forehead creased. Raven’s telepathy wasn’t limited to mind-reading. She was the one who killed Hunter.
I forgave her now, easily. I knew what it was like to have powers you didn’t know how to control.
Tristan waved his hand, and the map went back to North America. “Our challenge is deciding whether or not we join the rest of the Ashwood Coven,” he said, then frowned. “Of those of us who are eligible, at any rate.” He glanced at his brother. “I should not, I hope for obvious reasons.”
“Um, not so obvious,” I said, and he raised his eyebrows, turning back to me. “Why should you not join? I mean, assuming we somehow get the book for you to sign? Wouldn’t that be—”
“Catastrophic?” Tristan gave me a dark smile, knowing I’d get it. “Given the nature of my power, do you really think it would be a good idea to increase its potency?”
“Huh,” I said, and frowned. “Well, it didn’t do jack to mine. Mine is the same weird thing—”
“We don’t know for sure what it was before,” he told me, his voice gentle. “It was changed too quickly to know.” Tristan shook his head, but his face was never unkind. He never made me feel dumb for asking questions. “Imagine the potential for mine—what change could possibly make it less dangerous? None the coven would have allowed.”
“Because that’s what makes signing the book so powerful?” I could have guessed the answer, but I knew Raven and Jake were still behind with all this—and Zelle too, although she was pretending she didn’t care. “The coven… What? They made the book, so they connect to the power somehow?”
“Basically,” Tristan said. “The book is connected to the well of power the Ashwood Coven amassed before it was banned. Countless covens have tried to destroy it since, but it’s essentially indestructible.” He shook his head, his face thoughtful. “What’s more interesting is how you signed it—it’s been locked inside of Darry Prison for a century. Somehow, it was smuggled out and used for its intended purpose for at least a couple months.”
“So… The Ashwood Society wasn’t using the book before?” Jake looked just as confused as everybody else.
“No. Not as far as I know—I have no idea when it was stolen from Darry, just that it was. The Ashwood Society was allowed to exist as a magic-less secret society that more or less guarded artifacts collected by the original coven so that they would never enter common use again,” Tristan explained. “It was just a cover for the town—no one wanted to erase an entire town. And Ashwood was prominent enough to have been missed. It would’ve been a bad idea, particularly as the terms of surrender were already… Challenging. So the Institute continued—with a very different focus, obviously—and the Ashwood Coven became the Ashwood Society.”
“Because the Coven itself was banned,” Raven said, a question in her voice, and Tristan nodded.
“When? Why?”
“After the Civil War,” he said. “It was a long process—another war, a magical one, that raged for decades beneath the surface of other conflicts and battles—but the rest of the magical world basically banded together to destroy the Coven.”
“Because it was so powerful? Or so terrible?”
“Both,” Tristan said simply, and I felt like I was going to get a headache.
“Okay, fine,” I said, mulling everything over. “So that’s why everybody hates us—powerful, terrible, got it. But where does that leave us now? How are we going to survive if the entire frickin’ magical world wants us dead?” A low rumble curdled the air, and my eyes found Hunter’s. His were pitch black, the way they turned when he was about to wolf out.
Tristan politely ignored the sound. “We don’t have a lot of choices. We work together, whether we like it or not, and we protect ourselves, and if we’re very, very lucky, prove that we have no interest in continuing the legacy of the original coven.” The smell of smoke wafted through the air.
“What are our odds?” Jake studied his brother’s face.
“I’m not sure,” T
ristan said, his expression grim. “I know that they will want to recruit us with promises of an easy life—there are those among us they will want to breed with other prominent dynasties, and those they will promise anything they can to lower our defenses so they can murder us outright.”
“Why?” Raven sounded so hurt. She was tough, but not that tough; she hadn’t seen the Rose at work.
“Because we’re too dangerous to live,” Tristan said bluntly. “Some of us, anyway.” His eyes met Hunter’s, but I knew he was thinking of Zelle.
“Why are you alive?” As if she knew where his thoughts lay too, my older sister directly addressed him. She didn’t sound as hateful as usual, either. He lowered his gaze to the floor.
“Because, as far as anyone knows, I can’t be killed.”
“So they tried?” There it was, the snap in her voice. He didn’t even flinch.
“Yes.” Tristan raised his head and looked around at the rest of us. “I don’t believe we have much chance if we separate. They’ll pick us off, one by one. Some of us are much more valuable, but also vulnerable, and it doesn’t seem fair to leave them unguarded.”
“Such a polite term for—”
“You said you wanted us to meet first,” I said, not bothering to let Zelle finish. “What did you mean? The people in this room are the most affected by all this, right?”
“Not necessarily,” Raven said, and we turned and looked at her. “There are other descendants of the original coven that signed the book,” she told us. “I have no idea how many, but it’s got to be a fair number. I can find out if I can cross-reference the enrollment lists from the college with family trees of the town founders, assuming the Rose is recruiting all of us to join the Society—well, what she was calling the Society.”
“I’m sure she tried with everyone,” Hunter said, speaking for the first time, and even though he sounded miserable it was like a balm to my frazzled brain. His eyes were trained on his little sister. He knew as well as I did what the Rose was really capable of.
