by Sarah Piper
Adele looked a hundred times better than when I’d last seen her in the cemetery, which was a huge relief. Her face was still gaunt, tattooed with the bruises and scrapes her captors had given her, but those marks were already beginning to fade. Her color had completely returned, those beautiful brown eyes sparkling. They were kind eyes, open and trusting despite the fear lingering there.
Despite our different eye color, she looked a lot like me. Same cheekbones, same blonde hair, though hers was a bit longer. Apparently, her captors hadn’t cut it, and now it curled over her shoulder in a low side ponytail.
I blinked back tears. I still couldn’t believe I had sisters, that they were here, that three out of the four of us had finally been reunited after more than two decades apart.
And we’ll find Georgie, too. Whatever it takes.
“Gray! You’re up!”
Haley’s squeal of delight snapped me out of my thoughts, and I stepped in through the doorway, beaming at her as she darted across the kitchen and launched herself into my arms.
“You look fucking amazing, girl.” She laughed as she pulled back and took me in, head to toe. “I missed you so much! I’ve been trying to get in to see you for days, but your supreme protectors were having none of it.”
“That was for your protection, not mine.” I pulled her in for another quick hug. It was so good to see her, to feel her, whole and alive. Despite all the obstacles we’d yet to face, I felt stronger just knowing we’d be doing it together.
“How… how are you feeling? I mean, is it… Am I… Do you…?” Haley trailed off, but I read the questions in her eyes.
Giving her a reassuring smile, I said, “I’m feeling better than I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s super weird. And no, you’re not in any danger from me.”
Haley laughed. “Good to know, because now that I’ve got you back, I’m not leaving your side. Well, other than when you need to pee, or you’re having ‘special’ time with—”
“Special time?” I rolled my eyes, cracking up. “That’s not… Hay, you really need to get some ‘special time’ of your own. Sooner rather than later.”
“I keep asking if the guys have any hot brothers, but no luck.” Haley linked her arm in mine. “Come on. Come meet Addie—officially, this time. She’s dying to talk to you.”
She led me to the counter at the center of the kitchen, where Adele and McKenna, the boisterous witch who’d helped Asher and Haley take care of the witches in the cave prison, were pouring some kind of herbal powder into bottles through a paper cone. The cone tipped, and I grabbed it, catching it just before it spilled all over the counter.
“Thank—” Adele looked up, her eyes going wide when she saw it was me. McKenna winked at me, then slipped out of sight, leaving me alone with my sisters.
“Addie, meet Gray,” Haley said softly. “Gray, meet our sister, Addie.”
Adele—Addie—smiled, her eyes glazing as she took me in. “Gray, I… I just…”
She was suddenly overcome with emotion, unable to get the rest of the words out, and seeing her tears broke the dam on mine. Righting the cone, I walked around to the other side of the counter, then pulled her in for a hug. She stiffened at first, and I worried I’d done the wrong thing—maybe she didn’t like touching, or wasn’t ready for that kind of intimacy with me yet.
But just before I released her, she softened in my arms, her shoulders shaking as she finally let loose the sobs she’d been holding in.
My own tears falling freely, I held her close, rubbing her back, letting her get it all out. She’d just been through a torturous hell I could only imagine, and whether she’d known about us before or not, finding out you had a built-in family was beyond intense. The poor woman was on an emotional roller coaster—I had no idea how long she’d been on this ride, and no idea when she’d be able to get off.
When her breathing finally evened out, she pulled out of my embrace and met my eyes.
“Gray,” she said again, this time with a steady smile. Then, in a clear, determined voice completely at odds with her red nose and glassy eyes, she said, “Thank you for saving my life. For everything you’re doing here. For all the… I mean, Haley told me about the prophecy and the covens, and everything that’s happened, and the stuff in Blackmoon Bay, and your friend Sophie, and… Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… God.” She let out a nervous laugh, swiping away the tears from her bruised face. “How am I fucking this up so badly already? Five minutes into meeting you—that might be a new personal record.”
“You’re not fucking anything up,” I assured her, then smiled. “The first time I met Haley, she practically decked me.”
“Hey!” Haley said. “You’re conveniently leaving out the part about you acting like a complete bitch.”
“Okay, first of all, I wasn’t acting. And second of all, my best friend had just died. I should’ve gotten a free bitch-pass.” I winked at her to let her know I was teasing. I would never joke about losing Sophie, but somehow, making light of my own feelings felt okay—almost as if Sophie herself were watching, egging us on. As painful as that day at Norah’s house had been for me, it was also the moment Haley had come crashing into my life, slipping a note into my pocket that would lead me to Jael and Sophie’s book of shadows, and to everything that had come after.
Everything that had brought us closer. As close as sisters.
I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Haley tossed a dried rosebud at me, pegging me between the eyes. “If I’d known I was your big sister back then, I probably would’ve skipped the practically part and gone straight to kicking your ass, so consider that your free pass.”
“Oh, you want some of this?” I teased, spreading my arms. “Take your best shot, girl.”
“Hmm. Hard pass. You weren’t a super-powered bloodsucker back then.” She grabbed a clean cutting board and knife from the drying rack next to the sink, then handed them to me, her eyes twinkling with laughter. “Now wash up and get to work. Bloodsucker or not, there’s no such thing as a free lunch around here, Desario, and you’ve been laying around for days.”
“Yes ma’am.” I knotted my hair in a loose bun and washed my hands, excited to roll up my sleeves and dig in. It felt good to be doing something tangible, something other than practicing violence, or worse—executing it. After everything that had happened with the guys last night, a few hours of peaceful herbcraft with my sisters sounded like just what the doctor ordered.
“So, what are we working on today?” I asked brightly, joining them at the counter. “Healing potions? Protective charms? Dinner?”
Addie held up a vial marked hemlock. “The fine art of poison-making.”
I laughed. So much for a day of peaceful herbcraft.
“Sounds like a party.” I rubbed my hands together and grinned. “Where do I start?”
Eleven
GRAY
“Crafting the perfect poison is both an art and a science.” Verona, who’d been supervising all the activity in the kitchen, set an armload of clean vials and jars on the counter before us, then handed me a sheet of instructions.
I scanned it carefully, memorizing the ingredients, measurements, and specific incantations necessary for crafting the deadly poisons our witches would be carrying into battle, just in case.
Not everyone had built-in offensive powers. But we’d make damn sure they weren’t left defenseless, either.
I closed my eyes, took a moment to set my intention for this deadly work, then grabbed the kitchen knife and a bottle of what looked like tiny twigs, ready to chop.
Everyone in the lodge was working on something—poisons, spells, protective charms, healing potions, combat training, weapons inspection and inventory, meal planning, cleaning, mending, weatherizing the windows and doors against the insane winter. Half the guys were on guard duty with Elena’s men on the beach and in the woods, Liam was working with Reva on her shadow traveling practice, and the rest had gone out with Elena on another gr
ocery run which, according to Haley, was starting to become a real challenge. A handful of local stores were doing their best to stay open and stocked through the storms, but they were having trouble getting supplies delivered. Most of the major roadways into the Cape and surrounding communities had been intermittently shut down, leaving the National Guard and emergency services to pick up the slack.
If things had gotten that bad here in the Cape, I could only imagine what they were experiencing in Blackmoon Bay—ground zero for the entire disaster.
It took me a few minutes to get into the groove, but once I did, the work became easy, almost meditative. My sisters and I got our own little assembly line going, with me chopping, Haley measuring and mixing, and Addie portioning everything into bottles.
Everywhere I looked, people were in motion. Bodies moved. Hearts beat. Blood flowed, warm and sweet and seductive.
I couldn’t say the presence of so many people didn’t faze me, but I meant what I’d told Haley: no one in this house was in any danger from me. The times I felt the hunger welling up, I just stepped outside for some air, or took the hounds for a romp in the snow, or grabbed some blood from the stash Emilio had brought back for me.
It got the job done, just enough to take the edge off. But it wasn’t satisfying. Not in the least. Drinking donor blood was a choice I made every time, and I was only a few days in.
Darius had been doing this for centuries.
Darius…
I hadn’t spoken with him since our argument last night. I’d gone straight to bed after we’d arrived at the lodge, and last I heard, he was out patrolling the beach tonight.
I missed him. I needed to see him, to let him know I was okay. That I understood what he’d done and why, even if the image of Liam still haunted me…
Desperate for a distraction, I turned to Addie and blurted out, “So what’s your superpower, sis?”
Haley cracked up. “Nice, Gray. Way to ease into it.”
“Well, we’re all witches, right? Magic isn’t exactly a four-letter word around here.”
Haley shot me a smug glare, and even though my magic didn’t come with mind-reading powers, in that moment I could read her thoughts like a book.
I’d come a long way since that first day at Norah’s, when I was willing to do just about anything to keep my magic on permanent lockdown. Back then, I really believed I could outrun my destiny.
Anyway, Addie was our sister. I wanted to know her, just like I wanted to know Haley. And I wanted them to know me, too. Maybe it wouldn’t happen overnight. Maybe we’d fight and keep secrets and avoid any subjects that cut a little too close to the bone.
But magic? That was neutral territory. It was something we all had in common, and a good place to start.
“I guess you’d call it foresight,” Addie replied, and I nodded. Deirdre had mentioned as much.
“But not in the usual ways you hear about,” she went on. “I don’t literally see the future so much as sense it. Like, they’re not visions exactly, but I get these impressions—feelings and smells, mostly. Sometimes I’ll hear things, like a song or a voice or some other noise that helps me home in on whatever it is I’m sensing.”
“Sounds like Sophie’s gift,” I said. “She’d pick up on emotional impressions whenever she touched something. Like, a piece of furniture or jewelry or clothes. People too. I used to call her the human lie detector.”
“Haley told me about that.” Addie smiled. “But it’s not so much about touching objects for me. It’s more like… like there’s something out there, right? A force, divine intervention, an invisible time-traveling multi-dimensional being, something. It taps into my intuition, and then stuff just sort of… appears. From there, it’s up to me to put the puzzle together.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “How does that even work?”
“Let’s say I pull a Tarot card, and the message I get from it has to do with children. Six of Cups, maybe.” She tapped a small bottle against the counter, settling the powder inside before sticking a rubber stopper in it. “Once I accept that message or keyword or whatever, that’s when I open up. Suddenly I’ll smell crayons and paste, or hear kids playing outside, or taste school lunch. That tells me something is going to happen at an elementary school. So I might draw another card to try to pull in more clues—is this an emergency situation, or just something I need to know about? Does this affect someone I care about? These are really simplistic examples, though—usually I’ll get a lot more intuitive hits, all at once. I just try to stay open to whatever messages are trying to come through, and from there, I can usually piece together a prediction.”
“That’s fucking cool,” I said. “Just that you can do that. I feel like I’d get totally overwhelmed.”
“Sometimes I do. I mean, it is cool. But it’s also maddening, especially when I know there’s something important trying to come through, and I can’t quite figure it out.” She reached for an empty bottle and set it up with a fresh paper cone. “Like you guys, for instance. Looking back now, I can see that I’ve been getting bits and pieces about this moment for years, but I had no context for it. I didn’t know what the hell the universe was trying to tell me.
“I grew up in North Carolina—about as far as you can get from Washington, at least in the states. I’d always assumed I’d been there. I didn’t learn about my adoption until two years ago—my mother finally told me, but she left out a lot of details. I thought my real parents had died.”
“That’s what we all thought,” I said. “I take it you don’t have any memories from before?”
“Just flashes, but nothing that ever made sense. Haley told me about our mother, about what she did to us…” Her hands stilled around the bottle, and her eyes went far away, narrowing as if she were trying to pull the memories out of the mists of time. But then she blinked and shook her head, blowing out a breath. “I don’t know if I blocked it all out, or someone altered our memories, or what.”
“Maybe a little of both.” I scraped the latest batch of chopped twigs into the big bowl in front of Haley, then dumped another batch onto my cutting board.
Altered memories. That was the theory Haley and I had come up with. Ultimately, I’d remembered that day at the creek when our mother had tried to drown us, but Haley never did, and she was the oldest—she would’ve been about four when it happened. Deirdre had told me she’d altered our mother’s memories to make her believe she’d succeeded in murdering us, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume our grandmother had “adjusted” our memories as well.
After all, she was trying to keep us apart. To keep the prophecy from coming true.
“Anyway,” Addie continued, “A couple of years ago, I started getting this massive influx of impressions—way more than at any other time in my life—and they all had to do with the west coast. Like, the wind would rustle the trees outside my house, but I’d hear the sound of the ocean instead. Or I’d be eating barbecued chicken at Mom’s Sunday dinner, but it would taste and feel like fresh crab. In bed at night, I’d feel like I was on a boat—you know, that rocking sensation, the wind in my hair, the smell of the sea. Or I’d be watching the sunset over the hills, and suddenly I’d see it setting on whitecaps instead. One morning I just woke up with this urge—a need, really—to go west. Washington, specifically. Don’t ask me why—I’d never even been here.”
“You sensed us,” I said. “Deirdre said that would happen. We were all born in the Bay—she said we’d all be drawn back to it.”
“That’s what Haley told me.” Addie sighed. “I was always a little on the impulsive side, so when it got to the point where I couldn’t sleep anymore because all I could think about was making my way west, I did it. I gave notice at work, broke my apartment lease, packed my belongings into my car and took off. My parents thought I was nuts, but they’d always encouraged me to have a sense of adventure. Mom was a witch, of course, so she knew all about intuition and feelings and signs. Well, and obviously she must
’ve known that my origins were here, but she never said anything. It’s only now that I realize it.”
She got that faraway look in her eyes again, and lowered her head, her hands fidgeting with the bottle.
After a beat, I put my hand on her arm. “Addie, have you been back in touch with them since you got out of…?” I trailed off. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word prison, or cell, or crypt or torture chamber of nightmare hell, but she knew what I was asking.
Addie shook her head as a tear slid down her cheek. “The hunters… It was one of the main ways they kept us all in line. They’d show us pictures or video of our families every few days—they said they had people watching them at all times. If we disobeyed, if we tried to escape, if we tried to get in touch with anyone on the outside, they’d….”
I glanced at Haley, wondering if anyone had tried to reach out to Addie’s parents, but Haley only shook her head.
“Addie, listen to me,” I said firmly. “We left no one alive in that compound—not hunter, not hybrid, not fae, not a soul. Even if they did have someone watching, the hunters have much bigger problems now.”
“I know.” She sniffed, dashing away the tears. “That’s exactly what I’ve been telling myself. But I’m not going to risk calling them—not until we’re out of the woods. At this point, it’s almost better that they think I’m…” Addie shook her head, blowing out another breath.
“Addie,” Haley asked, putting her hand on our sister’s back, “how did you get mixed up with the hunters in the first place?”
“They nabbed me in Port Franklin about ten months ago. I was their prisoner, plaything, and medical experiment every day from that moment until you guys came busting into that crypt.”
“Holy shit,” I whispered. Haley coughed, doing her best to hide her own gasp of shock.