Coming Soon
MAGICK (Book 3 of the Coven Series)
September, 2012
Read on for an excerpt
MAGICK
(Excerpt)
by Trish Milburn
I wake not to flames but a windowless stone room. For an addled moment, I think I’m in the basement of the herb shop. A stab of pain hits me in the heart, and tears pool in my eyes. Fiona, the woman who’d found her way into my heart as a sort of surrogate grandmother, is gone. Dead. Killed by the man who should have killed me instead. I blink against the tears and look at my surroundings. The bare room isn’t the hidden repository of witchlore below Wiccan Good Herbs. It’s also not the cold, snow-covered ground where I lost consciousness.
Where I killed Amos Barrow. Where I gave in to the darkness inside me. After fighting so hard against it, Barrow shot his gun at Keller, the boy I love, and I lost my last shred of control.
Fear shoots through me, stealing my breath. Keller. God, is he even alive? Did Barrow take everything from me? The urge to kill him all over again wells up inside me, followed quickly by nausea.
My stomach churns and I turn to the side to retch. When I’m finished, I can’t even lift my hand to wipe my mouth. I’m chained to a big, thick chair that reminds me of a medieval throne. My feet are as immovable as my hands, and panic surges to the surface. I try to draw on my power, but it’s not there.
Oh, God, what has happened to me? Where am I? Another image settles into my memory, one of red-cloaked figures surrounding me just before I lost consciousness. The Bane. Had Sarah played me all along, making me think she was working with me until she and the other members of the Bane had the opportunity to take me out? Did they capture Egan, too? What about Toni, Rule and Adele? I swallow hard again when I think of Keller and wonder if my actions led to his death. I can’t live with that. Losing him, losing my friends would be so much worse than losing myself.
I fist my hands in anger and frustration, instinctively trying to draw on my magic. But there’s nothing, not the least inkling of power. I scan my surroundings again, panic swelling more with each breath. Is it possible the Bane stripped me of my power? Is there a way to do so without using a Siphoning Circle? Is that what the burning in my arm was after I slumped to the ground to face Barrow’s corpse?
I look at my lower arm but can’t see the damage because it’s covered with my long-sleeved T-shirt. But it doesn’t matter. More than anything, I need to find Keller. I have to believe he’s alive. I can’t even think otherwise. I yank against the manacles holding my wrists and ankles to thick metal rings. I pull so hard that sweat beads on my forehead and my joints ache with the effort, but it’s no use. I’m helpless, at the mercy of whoever walks through the door across from me.
The tears finally spill over and track down my cheeks. Not knowing Keller’s fate is killing me.
But do I deserve to know after what I did? Do I even deserve to survive when I killed a man? Yes, he’d been vile, a murderer, but that didn’t give me the right to take his life. But I had, and I still remember the horrible sense of glee I’d felt rushing through me as I did it. When I gave in to that writhing darkness that had been itching to consume me since I drew it from the earth, I’d done much more than kill a man. I’d ceased to care that using that level of magic would endanger my friends, would bring the covens to Salem in all their awful fury.
I swallow against the surge of bile. If the covens haven’t already arrived, they will soon. And I have no confidence I can save my friends from the vindictive evil of my family, of Egan’s, of all the other dark covens. I am nothing more than a complete and utter failure.
I lean my head against the high back of the chair and stare at the ceiling. I try not to hyperventilate as I replay the events of . . . whenever that was that I killed Barrow. I feel hollow and raw inside, like someone has scooped out anything that had ever been good about me.
Once I get my breathing under control, I check the room again, desperate for some means of escape. I have to get out of here, find my friends, make sure they’re safe. I’ll take whatever punishment I must, but I have to find them first.
But there are no windows, no other furnishings, nothing on the walls. I have no sense of how long I’ve been here, have no idea if it’s day or night. The minutes stretch, but nothing changes.
“Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
No one answers, and I worry that maybe this is all in my mind as I’m dying. Maybe I am still on the ground, moments away from death. Did Keller actually kill me as I asked him to, and the red-cloaked figures were just a hallucination brought about by my imminent death? I shake my head. That doesn’t seem right. I remember a stinging prick in my neck followed quickly by fire racing along my veins. Poison? So I’m lying in the snow with poison burning the life out of me. Maybe it’s a fitting way to go for a killer like myself.
A couple more minutes tick by, and the fog surrounding what happened lifts a little. I consider that I’m not dead, but I’ve instead gone stark-raving crazy. I’m drifting through thoughts I don’t want to have when the door suddenly opens. At first, no one comes in, no one is even visible. I’m still out of it enough to think that I’ve imagined it. I know I didn’t open the door because I’m currently as powerless as Toni and Keller.
I’m beginning to think it’s one of the spirits Keller and his father hunt when someone appears in the doorway and starts walking toward me. I blink several times, trying to focus. As the woman draws close, I recognize her. Sarah Davenport.
Anger explodes out of me, surging against my restraints until they catch me. “You! You did this to me.”
“Yes.” Nothing more. No apology, no explanation, nothing.
“You betrayed us. Where the hell were you? We needed help!”
“No, you are the betrayer.” Her words hit me like a punch to the gut because I know she’s right. “Because of you, the covens will return to Salem. And when they do, more people will surely die.”
Author Biography
The first book Trish Milburn ever wrote was a romance. She just didn’t know it yet. That book, Land of the Misty Gems, was a class project way back in the sixth grade. She wrote the text, illustrated the book with colored pencils, even bound it with twine and pasted a fabric cover on her creation. And now—mumble- mumble years later—she still has that book. It was the beginning of her writing career, even if until the early 1990s that writing consisted mainly of research papers and essay test questions and then newspaper articles.
Trish was born and grew up in Western Kentucky and began reading so long ago she doesn’t really remember how it all started. She does remember loving a little book called The Runaway Pancake, then the regular treasures that would appear in her mailbox from the Weekly Reader Book Club, then books like the Little House on the Prairie series. The library was one of her favorite places. And even though being a bookworm didn’t do wonders for her social life when she was in her teens, she wouldn’t trade her love of books for the world.
After college, she worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor and still does some freelance writing and copy editing. But most of her writing now is fiction, and no matter what kind of story it is she can’t resist putting at least some romance in it alongside the paranormal or suspense elements. Her writing has finaled in Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart Contest eight times, winning twice. White Witch, her February 2012 release from Bell Bridge Books, was the 2007 Golden Heart winner in the Young Adult category.
In her free time, she loves watching movies and TV (she bought herself a TiVo when she made her first sale), hiking, reading and road trips.
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