Magick (Book 3 in the Coven Series) (2 page)

Fiona’s face flashes through my memory. Then Amos Barrow’s. Even my mother’s. All dead because of me, because of the ancient evil within me and all dark coven witches, an evil I can’t control. My insides twist at the idea of adding more people to that list. Are my friends already a part of that terrible tally?

I swallow hard and force the questions out. “Where are my friends? Is Keller alive?” I hear the desperation in my voice, know how vulnerable it makes me, but I don’t care. I have to know, even though part of me is frightened to hear her answer.

She eyes me with a cold stare. “Where was your concern for them when you let loose at Barrow?”

Sarah might as well have stabbed me in the heart. I swallow hard before I’m able to respond. “I’m not making excuses for what I did. I know it was wrong. But, please, tell me if they’re okay.”

Instead of answering my question, Sarah continues to stare at me with a look that says she’s deciding my fate. Anger wells in me, and I jerk against my restraints, trying with all my strength to draw on my magic. And still, Sarah does nothing but stare. I feel like a rat in a lab with a scientist watching my reaction to stimuli.

I stare back at her, and I don’t try to hide how much I hate her right now.

Sarah takes a few steps to the left. “Adele and Rule are safely back home.”

Why is she mentioning only them by name? My heart squeezes in fear.

“Toni? Egan?”

“Safe.”

“Keller?” My voice breaks midway through his name.

For a moment, I don’t think she’s going to tell me. Tears pool in my eyes at the thought that her hesitation means he’s dead. I shouldn’t look weak in front of her, but the tears break free and run down my cheeks.

“He’s fine. Barrow missed him.”

I send up a prayer of thanks and hope God can hear the prayers of someone like me. I notice Sarah still watching me carefully, and a new fear that she’s lying explodes inside me. After all, I don’t truly know this woman. I know deep in my gut that she’s kept things from me for her own purposes. Is she lying for the same reasons?

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“You don’t, but I am.
They
did nothing wrong. They’re not the ones that set us up for our very own Armageddon.”

I jerk on my hand restraints again as if this time they’ll magically break free.

“You have no power, so you might as well stop struggling,” Sarah says.

I bite down on my anger, knowing I’m not entitled to it. A voice inside me whispers that Sarah may have done more to protect my friends than I have, that I’ve done nothing more than sign their death warrants. But I don’t know that. I can’t know that she’s telling the truth, not until I see the others with my own eyes.

As a little more of the muddle clears in my head, I notice she’s wearing a red dress and heels, very unlike what I’ve seen her wear at the library or when we worked together to try to access any white witch powers I might possess. Are those powers gone along with my dark magic? Did I blow my one chance to truly make a difference?

For some reason, my eyes focus on a bit of swirling piping around the collar of her dress. Something clicks in my head, the red.

“At the cemetery
 . . .
” I squint, trying to remember if I’d really seen what I thought I had. “You were wearing a red cloak. So were the others.”

She nods. “I didn’t know whether you saw before the poison took effect.”

I start to reach for my neck, but my restraints stop me.

“It was necessary to poison you. It gave the darkness inside you something to fight besides us. In the state you were in, you likely would have killed everyone around you, no matter how you felt about them.”

“Why did you bring me here? Why not kill me?”

“We are not in the habit of killing others.”
Unlike me.
“And like it or not, I need you.” She crosses her arms. “You are here because you may still be able to help fix this mess you caused.”

I find it extremely hard to swallow when my mind manufactures a horrible image of the snow-covered ground blanketed with blackened, smoking bodies like Amos Barrow’s. No matter how much I long to be free, the Bane have done the right thing in restraining me.

Sarah takes a few slow steps closer to me. “The answer to one question will determine your future, yours and Egan’s. When the covens arrive, whose side will you be on? Ours or theirs?”

I open my mouth, but the answer is not as simple as it should be. Why does it even matter whose side I’m on? I’ve already proven myself unstable. If the Bane let me go and I regain my powers, will I be more of a danger to them, my friends and the rest of the residents of Salem than savior? If I find myself in the same situation, the intersection of the darkness inside me and my worst fears, will I react the same way? Or is there hope that I can become a true white witch and protect everyone I’ve put in mortal danger?

I look Sarah in the eye and don’t flinch from her hard, demanding gaze. “I don’t know. I want to say yours, but I don’t trust myself. I’m not sure I trust you either.” I lift my hands until the chains at my wrists tighten. “You obviously don’t trust me.”

“With good reason.” Sarah takes a slow step closer. “But as much as I hate being put in this position, I don’t really have a choice here. We need you. The covens are too powerful for us. If we are to have any hope of surviving this war with them, you have to fully access your white witch powers and learn to suppress your darker nature for good.”

I jerk my left hand up until the restraints catch me. “I can’t. I don’t have any power. Somehow you took it away.”

“The dark magic is still in you, but it’s harnessed. That’s why you can’t feel it, can’t access it.”

I look at her, confused. “You have a way of harnessing dark magic, and you haven’t done anything about the covens?”

“There are only a handful of Bane,” she says as she closes the distance between us. She jerks the end of my left sleeve up to reveal a silver bracelet with a Celtic double spiral, a bracelet exactly like the one she wears. “How are we supposed to get these on thousands of dark witches without getting killed?”

Disbelief and anger surge through me, fighting for dominance. “But you could have harnessed me sooner, kept me from killing Barrow.”

“Yes.” A moment of guilt flickers in Sarah’s eyes. “That was a mistake, not doing so, but we didn’t know if it would damage your white magic. We still don’t know.”

“This doesn’t make sense.” I nod toward her wrist. “You wear a bracelet, and you can do magic.”

Sarah lifts her arm. “Look at this,” she says. “Then look at yours.”

For a moment, I simply stare at her as if she’s talking in riddles. I shift my gaze to her bracelet, a twin to mine. But when I look at my own arm again, I realize what she means. She wears hers like a normal piece of jewelry while mine is actually a part of my body, fused to the skin. My stomach turns and my head swims, and I have to look away from where my wrist appears to be melded around the edge of the silver. I let my head fall back against the chair and close my eyes.

“We’ve made adjustments throughout the years,” Sarah says. “The Bane have learned to control our magic, but we still wear the bracelets to guard against us backsliding into dark magic. We’ve created our own spells, including the one that makes it impossible for you to take off that bracelet. It’s not just a device used to prevent dark magic. It causes your own body to work against itself and suppress the magic to where you can’t even feel its presence.”

I swallow down the nausea and look closely at the fusion of metal and skin. “How did you know this would work on me?”

“We didn’t, not for sure.”

I try not to think of what their Plan B probably involved if the bracelet hadn’t worked.

“You took a big risk,” I say.

Sarah nods. “We did, but we had to try to save you from your dark magic. We’re at the point of no return. We’re in new territory here, and I’m not going to stand here and tell you I know exactly how we need to go forward. But we have to do whatever we can to help you access your white witch powers.” She pauses and takes a deep breath. “I should have done more before, brought you here sooner.”

“What if the white magic is gone?”

“It can’t be,” Sarah says, sounding determined. “If it is, every member of the Bane dies. Your friends die. You die.” The way she says it lets me know that despite her earlier assertion, she and the rest of the Bane will kill me if I prove too much of a danger and the covens don’t end me first.

A tremendous weight settles on my shoulders at the enormity of the task before me. This is fate-of-the-world stuff, and I hold it in my hands. A huge ball of doubt settles in my stomach. How can I possibly believe I’m strong enough to defeat the covens now, after I’ve killed a powerless human? But what choice do I have but to try? I can’t just sit here a harnessed prisoner while the covens kill without remorse because of my defection, because they view me as a threat.

This situation is so far removed from what I expected when I ran away from home so I could live a normal life. Where I find myself bears absolutely no resemblance to normal, not even the normal I knew before fleeing my coven.

I started all of this with that one fateful decision. It’s up to me to end it. I may fail, but it won’t be because I don’t try.

“Okay,” I say.

“This will be harder than anything you’ve ever done.”

“Of that I have no doubt.” Nothing worth having ever comes easily. And a world without the covens’ threat to humanity, to my friends, is definitely worth having. “So what now?”

“Now we plan for the inevitable arrival of the covens. The Bane have stayed hidden for a very long time, but that’s going to come to an end.”

“Can’t you just stay here until they go away?”

“Do you really think they’re going to go away without finding you? If your white witch powers are still accessible, you pose the single biggest threat to the covens’ way of life. They’re not going to leave Salem until they root you out and kill you. It’s our job to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

I eye the bracelet melded to my wrist. “How do we find out if the powers are still there?”

“We take off the bracelet and pick up where we left off, only at a more accelerated pace.”

I shift my gaze to Sarah. “Do you really think that’s safe? What if I kill you and everyone else here?”

She points at the bracelet. “We’re not taking it off immediately. There’s a lot you need to know and understand before we take that step. We’ll go through what we’re going to do after the bracelet is removed before we even think about actually taking it off. We’ll take plenty of precautions.”

I shift in my uncomfortable seat. “What do you want me to do?”

“Remember everything we did before you decided to act as judge, jury and executioner.”

I flinch at the term “executioner,” but that’s exactly what I turned into when I killed Barrow. It was one thing to kill a dark witch, quite another to murder a human who had no power beyond the weapons he wielded even if he was a murderer.

“You let your rage rule you that night, and it had deadly consequences,” Sarah says. “We have to encourage the white magic to force its way to the surface, to override the dark and everything you were taught growing up. You have to learn very quickly what it took the Bane decades to control, plus master the full force of the white witch powers. That’s a tall order, but it’s our only hope of surviving.”

“How long before we take off the bracelet?”

“That depends on you.” Sarah takes a few steps across the room. “We’ve never done anything like this before, never had the opportunity, so we’ll be learning as we go, all of us.”