I pulled my jacket closed over my stomach. “I’ve used my magic on you before. If I remember properly, you liked it.”
Mark’s face split into a lazy smirk, and I watched his anger melt away. He sat down on a low tombstone and reached out for me. “Oh, yeah. You in the mood for that kind of magic making? I thought you had a headache?”
My body responded to his touch, in spite of myself. “I think it was just a side-effect of Willow’s toxic perfume.”
Mark grinned into my neck and kissed his way along my collarbone. “The lengths you’ll go to so you can have me to yourself. All you had to do was ask, babe.”
My stomach tightened, and I untangled myself from his embrace. “Actually, I did ask—this morning, and yesterday, and the day before. Every time, you either turned up with a drunken posse or you didn’t show.”
“Gods, what is your problem, Destiny? A drunken posse? They’re our friends. And you were one of them until you went on this stupid healthy living crusade. I mean I tried to support you, but seriously, it’s total bull. You’re the daughter of an immortal god and a high witch. You don’t need to worry too much about anti-oxidants and organic fruit, and honestly, babe, you’re more fun with a bit of alcohol in your system.”
Panic marched over my gut. I needed to tell him, to explain why I had changed, but something was stopping me. Blocking the words from forming on my lips. Lies and secrets were my lifelong friends. If my father had shown me anything, it was the value of trusting nobody. Sharing secrets went against every lesson life had taught me. I screwed my face up and prepared to rip off the band-aid. “There’s something I have to tell you. . .”
Mark lifted his eyebrows and waited for me to continue. My tongue was dry. I eyed the vodka bottle in his hand and sucked air through my teeth. I couldn’t do it. Destiny, the Black Witch—allergic to honesty. My vision focused on the tattoo that decorated Mark’s wrist. The eel, symbol of his clan. “I want to leave the coven. I don’t want to serve the Family.”
The words that burst from my lips were intended as filler, a lie to distract from the secret I was struggling to share, but even as they tumbled from my mouth, I felt the weight of unexpected truth in the air. Mark squinted at me. “You’re kidding, right? This is a joke?”
I shook my head, as surprised by my revelation as he was. Mark started to pace the fire, shooting me black looks as he walked. “This is what you wanted to tell me? This is why you’ve wanted to get me alone?”
I wrapped my fingers around the plastic in my pocket and stayed silent. Mark closed the space between us and gripped my shoulders. “Gods, Destiny, I thought it was something else, you wanted to end it, or you had heard some lies, or something. Damn. That’s crazy talk, Des, you know it is. There’s no out. Especially not for you.”
“We could fight them. Isn’t that what all this stuff is about in the first place? Breaking their rules, sticking two fingers to your mom and dad? We could really tell them where to shove it. The two of us could have a life of our own. Regular school, regular jobs, regular life.” I bit my lip.
Mark stretched his hands over his head. “Destiny, this party crap is just a game. Push the boundaries and cause a bit of friction. Nobody really wants to get kicked out. Regular life isn’t Neverland. It’s dull. No money, no magic, no power. You’d hate it, babe, you’re a Black Witch—raising hell is what you do.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s the only thing I can do. I could use my powers for good. I don’t have to be what they want me to be.” I hugged my arms around my middle, and the memory of my father’s voice hissed through my mind. A Black Witch is a wicked witch, Destiny, nine times out of ten.
Mark clasped his hands behind his skull. “It’s all semantics, anyway. You’re going nowhere. They won’t even let you move to another coven, and you don’t really want to. It’s just a phase, gorgeous. You’re bored. Too much clean living, not enough fun. You need to lighten up. Come on, have a drink, and let’s go play with the human.”
I eyed the bottle of vodka Mark was waving in my direction as I fingered the plastic stick. He was right. The Family was never going to let me leave and if I pushed too hard, after my father had used my power to get what he wanted, I would end up on the Vanished List. Like my mom. All I needed to do was get everything back to normal. Why had I even considered telling Mark? There was no choice. This was the real world, not some fairy story like Peter Pan. I would go to the clinic to get myself sorted in the morning and go back to my normal life.
I snatched the bottle from Mark’s hand and took a gulp of the clear liquid. It burned my throat with a familiar fire. Mark gave me a sly smile and dragged my body against his. His mouth was hot and insistent as he kissed me. The sound of shrieking and howls of laughter rang through the rows of tombstones. The others had found their prey. The intensity of Mark’s kisses grew in response to the wicked delight in the air and magic pumped through my veins. This was my life. This was what I wanted.
I broke off our embrace and vomited on the ground beside Mark’s feet. He prodded my back and threw the bottle of vodka at me as he ran in the direction of his friends’ revelry. “Come on, babe, get back on the horse. I want to see at least half that bottle gone by the time we get to the tower.”
He didn’t wait for me to catch up.
I trailed the bottle of vodka along the top of each tombstone as I plodded over the graves. Men, women, children. Each gravestone was beautiful in its own way. A cheer went up a few hundred meters to my right. I couldn’t see them yet, but I guessed that meant Mark had found the others. They were welcoming their leader. Lord of the Fleas. The shadow of the tower fell on me as I turned towards their noise and I shivered.
As soon as I rounded the corner, I saw them standing in a circle. They were quiet, but it wasn’t the reverent silence you would expect from a crowd in a graveyard. It was the tense, barely veiled excitement of a hound waiting for the fox to bolt. I could practically smell their base desire. My fingers pressed against my lips as I fought another wave of nausea. Mark spotted me at the edge of the circle. “Here she is. Destiny, we’ve got somebody you should meet. I think he wants to talk to some spirits. You could arrange that, right?”
Willow cackled and clawed at Mark’s sleeves with her manicured nails. He shot her a dark glare and shook her off. The other kids parted to let me join Mark, and for a second I contemplated turning on my heel. We weren’t supposed to expose our magic to humans. Officially, it was against the code, but in reality the Family turned a blind eye to a bit of harmless fun. It’s not like anybody ever believed the humans when they told people about the beautiful monsters that lurked behind the walls of Dublin’s most exclusive neighborhoods. And things rarely got out of hand. It was just a bit of fun. Mostly.
Mark covered the space between us in a flash and grabbed hold of my hand. I wondered had he seen the hesitation in my eyes, or if he could smell my loss of appetite. I shook my head. This was my life. This was fun. I took another swig of vodka and turned to get a better look at tonight’s prey. The bottle slipped from my fingers and smashed into a thousand pieces on the stone under my feet.
Usually when we found a human looking for our world they didn’t really believe we existed. That was the beauty of it. People casting spells, telling fortunes, masquerading as mediums between this plane and the next. They didn’t really believe the lies they were peddling. So when we showed them what was hidden in plain sight, their reaction was usually worthy of an award. They blubbered, and cried, and swore they would never come looking for magic or death again if we would only leave them in peace. But the boy sitting in the circle was nothing like that.
He was an ordinary looking kid, about the same age as most of us, seventeen or eighteen. Brown hair, fair skin, medium build. His hands were stained red from the blood he had used to create a protective circle around himself. I had never seen a human do that before, and I might have thought it was a lucky guess, except for his eyes. They were the color of the sky on a spring morn
ing. Clear and pure. And they were staring straight at me as if they could see inside my soul.
I took a step back, and Willow howled as my boots connected with her toes. Open toe stilettos in a cemetery—she deserved the pain. Idiot. Mark tugged at my hand. “Babe, we were just telling our friend here that you can help him talk to whatever spirit he’s looking for, right?”
My eyes narrowed on Mark’s face and then scanned the rest of the circle. I shook my head. They couldn’t sense it. They didn’t realize this guy was different. I let my eyes travel to the stranger's face again. There was no trace of fear, no whitened knuckles or sweat on his brow. He met my gaze and gave me a curious once-over. The ghost of a smile flickered on his lips. Mark slipped his arm around my waist and tapped my stomach. “What do you say, Destiny, want to give him a little show?”
The boy's eyes focused on Mark’s hand on my abdomen, and suddenly they widened. His stare flicked up to my face, and I stumbled backward. “No!”
Mark’s jaw tensed as he tried to pull me back into his arms. His voice was lower now. “We talked about this, Destiny. Time to snap of it, babe. Show our friend what you can do.”
The tone of his voice was like barbed wire in my ears. Had he always spoken to me like that? Willow rolled her eyes and sashayed past Mark and toward the stranger. “Whatever, I’m tired of waiting. Destiny isn’t the only one who can put on a show.”
She threw a lingering glance back over her shoulder and then turned her focus on the boy in the circle. I watched his face. I was unable to see what Willow was showing him from this angle, but I could imagine. I had seen her shift a thousand times before. Watched her turn from a man’s fantasy into his worst nightmare in the blink of an eye. Seen her skin wither and her gums bleed. I waited for her latest victim to begin screaming and cowering in horror, but he barely even watched her show. I caught his eye again and another jolt of electricity danced down my spine.
Willow threw her hands up the air and turned her back to the blood circle. “Okay, what’s with this dude? Is he blind? Deaf? Mute? I can’t get any read on him. This is getting boring.”
The stranger gave no reaction at all to her little speech. Mark narrowed his own eyes and looked from the stranger to me. He pushed his shoulders back and cracked his knuckles. “I’m pretty certain I can make him talk.” Mark nudged the blood circle with his toe and grinned. “Blood circle. Somebody gave you good advice, kid. But not good enough to keep a Red Witch out.”
I wrapped my arms around my body as I watched Mark eyeball his prey. Physical violence against humans for sport was strictly forbidden for the uninitiated, but there was something lurking in Mark’s eyes that I had never seen before. Mark’s grin was savage as he lunged for the boy, and I felt my heart leap in my chest. There was a sickening crack, and Mark shot backward, repelled by an unseen barrier. He scrambled to his feet and wiped away the blood trickling from his nose. Oh, Gods. This was bad. Mark’s eyes were like pools of tar. “You sneaky little creep. How did you know about the salt? Who the hell are you? I’m going to kill you, you little piece of dirt. Is that what you came to the cemetery for? To pick your own grave? Because I’m going to make you dig it yourself.”
I put my hand on Mark’s arm, but he flung it off. The boy in the circle stood up slowly. He was wearing black jeans, trainers, and a plain black sweater. There was nothing about him that was out of the ordinary. He let his arms fall down by his sides. For the longest moment, I thought he wasn’t going to speak, but when he did his voice was calm. “I didn’t come here looking for trouble, brother. I had no intention of crossing your path tonight. My business isn’t with you.”
Mark’s face twitched. He looked around at his cronies and tilted his head to the side. “Do you hear this joker? His business isn’t with me.” Mark’s lip curled back over his teeth as he faced the boy in black. “This is our city, kid. No, scratch that, this is our country—this is our damn world. Everywhere you go, you have business with us. Little turds like you just don’t realize it.”
The boy shrugged his shoulders at Mark. “I have no quarrel with you, friend."
My spine was tight enough to crack as the tension hardened between my vertebrae. I wanted to scream at the boy with the beautiful eyes to shut his fool mouth before it was too late, but I kept silent. Mark nodded at a few of his friends, and they drew closer to him. My heart sank as Willow joined the little group. Red, Silver, Blue, Gold. They were going to break the circle. Willow licked her lips and took a greedy breath, savoring the growing excitement in the air. Mark ground his heel into the soil under his feet. “Any last words, kid. At least you came to the right place to meet your end.”
“Any place can be an end. Or a beginning.” I froze to the spot as his bright blue eyes met my violet stare and turned my soul inside out. I knew those words as well as my own name. Carried inside the deepest corners of my soul since my aunt Aoife had disappeared four years ago, searching for the Free Witches, leaving me nothing behind but a promise that she would return for me.
Willow threw her eyes to the heavens and groaned. “Oh, please. What does that even mean? This guy is a total crapbag.”
Crapbag. Mark’s favorite new word. The one he got from watching a Z-list movie last night. Alone. My blood began to simmer as I let my glare run from Mark to Willow and back again. Mark kept his shoulders low and gave me a slow smile, the one he knew made my knees weak, but I saw through it to the pulse beating in his neck, and the film of lies that he wore like a mask. My scream ripped through the night air. “You cheating mother—”
Ten things seemed to happen at once. Mark gave the nod and his pack burst forward, tearing through the circle like wild beasts. The rest of our classmates rose up for the hunt and released their own magic. The air around me filled with every form of poison and beauty that the world contained, and it whirled toward the form of the stranger. I had a split second to make my decision. This life or another. My fingers grazed the plastic in my pocket, and I unleashed my darkness.
All of the witches froze to the spot, suspended in the space between life and death, at the mercy of my whim. I half-expected the boy with the blue eyes to be frozen too, but he stepped out of the circle and started running for the gate. My mouth dropped open as I watched him sprint by. When I caught up, he was standing by the bonfire in front of the crypts. I dug my hands into my pockets. “What are you doing hanging around? I’m going to get a serious amount of hassle for letting you go. Tomorrow is going to be brutal for me, thanks to you, cemetery boy. The least you can do is actually escape before my spell fades.”
The boy gave me a grim smile and pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his jeans. The breath caught in my throat at the sight of my name written in my aunt’s familiar scrawl. I grasped the letter from the boy’s fingers without a word and stared at it greedily.
“There’s an address inside. If you care about Aoife, you should either use it or burn it. If you tell your father or anyone in the Family that she’s with the Free Witches, she’ll be in even greater danger.” The boy nodded once, and then he was gone, merging into the darkness of the night.
I tugged the plastic stick from my pocket and stared at the two blue lines. Positive. A hundred different tests and they all said the same thing. Positive. Pregnant. Mark’s baby. One crazy, drunken moment that I couldn’t undo, and I didn’t even know if I wanted to. But what life could I offer a child? A cheating father and a lying mother. I was the first Black Witch that had been born to the Family in centuries. Morrigan’s hope.
I gave a bitter laugh. Hope. There was no hope in this life for me. If they had their way, I would be a weapon of destruction, nothing more.
I wrapped the test inside the unopened letter from my aunt and held them over the fire. The flames screamed for the contents of my fist. My heart began to beat harder, and a chant echoed inside my cranium, like a swarm of bees. Wake the dead. Wake the dead. Wake the dead. A Black Witch was a wicked witch, nine times out of ten. That’s what they said. Tha
t was my fate. My fingers began to uncurl, and the pregnancy test slipped from my grasp and began to tumble toward the fire. The memory of my aunt’s voice stirred inside my mind. Be the exception, Destiny.
My cry tore the silence of the night, and I snatched the letter and the test from the flames and cradled them in my hands. There was always hope. Any place can be an end. Or a beginning.
The strength of my spell began to ease as I thundered toward the gate, away from Mark and Willow, away from the stench of death and greed. I felt the others begin to return to life behind me. I pushed myself harder as I bolted past the stirring body of the security guard and skidded through the gate that the boy with the blue eyes had left unlocked. Mark’s voice echoed through the rows of tombstones, calling my name.
I didn’t look back.
I followed the trail of life left behind by the stranger as only a Black Witch could, searching for the Free Witches and the path that would lead me to my aunt. Searching for Neverland. Second star to the left and on until morning.
Screw the Family and raising the dead, I chose to raise the living.
***
Thank you for reading the prequel story to the Wicked Witches Series. Book 1 in the series can be ordered HERE.
If you would like to read an adult Paranormal Fairy Tale retelling set in the same universe as Wicked Witch, check out Beauty’s Beasts HERE.
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy L.C. Hibbett’s bestselling Demon-Born Trilogy—a spellbinding series that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Available HERE.
And if you like paranormal fantasy with a twist of Celtic mythology and a dash of gothic romance, check her website for details of L.C. Hibbett’s upcoming release, The Cursed.
Table of Contents
Before you begin…
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Wicked Destiny_A Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy Series Page 20
