by D. G. Swank
“One,” Celeste said, but Lester had already started to drag Phoebe toward his car again. “Two.”
Be ready, Celeste said to both of us. “Three.”
Suddenly, Phoebe was hurtling toward me and Lester was dropping to his knees. Before anyone could react, he lifted the glowing blue ball to his mouth and swallowed it. Light poured from the skin of his throat and then moved down to his chest, following the ball. Raw power crackled from him, and he gave us a sick grin.
“Grandma has a gift for you,” he said. The word salad suggested that eating a ball of power was probably not good for you, but I had no time to consider the implications. A huge dead tree rose up from the ground, pointed at Phoebe. Another lifted into the air and swung toward me. A boulder was headed straight toward Celeste.
The mage was about to kill us.
Celeste’s scream of pure rage filled my mind, ears, heart. Her fury turned into magic—every reddening leaf clinging to the shedding branches above turned into a glittering dagger. In one swift motion, they all sliced down through the air, missing Phoebe and me, instead burying themselves deep in the young mage’s skin.
With a shocked expression, he staggered for a brief moment, then collapsed to the ground, the items he’d lifted crashing down with him.
I rushed over, mind racing. When I reached his side, I stared down in horror, not knowing how to help him.
“The Dark Set will come for you,” he said in a raspy breath. Then he looked up at me. “Donall will come for your blood.” He gasped again, taking a long time to pull in a breath. A second later, the light left his eyes.
Chapter Two
The three of us stood in shocked silence for several seconds. As the oldest, I knew I should probably take charge, but my stomach was roiling at that sight of all that blood. The skin on the back of my neck felt clammy and my knees were starting to buckle.
Oh shit. I could not pass out.
Celeste was wearing a mask of horror as she crept toward the body. “I didn’t…” She collapsed onto her knees beside him. “I never imagined it would…. gods, what did I do?” The last part came out as a tiny wail, which sprang Phoebe, the nurturer, into action.
She leaned over Celeste and tried to pull her to her feet. “Come on, CeCe. Let’s get you back to the house.”
“We can’t just leave him here,” Celeste cried. “What are we going to do?”
They turned to me, obviously expecting me to have the answers, but being born before them didn’t make me the expert on how to handle dead bodies—specifically, the body of a man my sister had just murdered. Even if it was self-defense.
The same thought must have hit Celeste because her face paled and her entire body began to shake. “I broke the law.”
Phoebe’s horrified gaze met mine. We both knew she wasn’t referring to human law, although she’d broken that too. She’d broken Valerian Council law—never kill anything—animals or people—with magic. Although Phoebe’s magic had killed a carful of dark mages weeks ago, it had done so indirectly. This was different.
“We have to call the Small Council,” Celeste whispered, barely loud enough to hear. “We have to call a Protocol Thirteen.”
I huffed out a breath, frustrated. I knew she was right. A Protocol Thirteen was equivalent to a human 911 call, and in this case, it was totally called for. That’s what procedure dictated.
Then again, I’d never been much of a rule follower.
“No,” I said, trying to sound decisive as I stared down my sisters, but it wasn’t easy with the bloody body behind them. “We’re not calling them.” My stomach began to churn and the squash and mushroom hash I’d nibbled a half hour ago while preparing for my YouTube show was threatening to make an encore.
My answer shocked Celeste enough that she let Phoebe pull her to her feet.
“What are you talking about, Rowan?” Phoebe asked. “We have to call a Protocol Thirteen. We can’t call the human police.”
I held her gaze. “We’re not calling anyone.”
“I have to call Brandon,” she insisted with a dazed look in her eyes.
“We’re especially not calling him.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Are you insane?”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “But we have to protect Celeste.”
“Brandon can help us,” she insisted.
“Brandon is a member of the Small Council. We can’t trust him with this.”
She seemed to be coming to her senses. “You just don’t like him. You never did, and you can’t stand him being around all the time now.”
The hatefulness in her tone stung, but I rolled my shoulders into an I don’t give a shit shrug. “While all that’s true, it has nothing to do with why we have to keep this from him.”
“Then why?” Celeste asked. She looked washed out and scared, which only made me more determined to protect her.
I knew one way to talk her around. She might not care about her own protection, but she did care about the book. “Consider the bigger picture. You heard that guy—the Dark Set didn’t send him. He was acting on his own. For all we know, no one knew he was here, and we need to keep it that way.” When I saw the stunned, unconvinced looks on their faces, I continued. “Do we want the Book of Sindal back or not?”
As I posed the question to my sisters, it struck me that I wasn’t sure how I’d answer it.
Maybe I didn’t want it back.
My life would be infinitely easier without it. No more being stuck in our century-old farmhouse. No more living with my sisters. I could travel freely. I could apply to the Natural Epicurean Academy of Culinary Arts in Austin, Texas. I could eat my way through Europe without worrying about the book or the need to return by the new moon to fulfill my part of the protection ceremony.
But I knew Celeste felt differently. Even though the part she played in protecting the book cost her, she saw the book as hers. She wanted it back.
Seconds after my sisters recovered from their shock, they both began to argue with me at the same time. Celeste felt she should be held accountable, and Phoebe truly believed Brandon would help us.
I held up my hands. “Stop. Just hear me out and then we’ll vote. We’ll make it an official coven meeting.”
I took Celeste’s silence as agreement. Phoebe’s eyes widened, but she nodded. She was no doubt shocked by my suggestion. I found coven meetings stupid and pointless—we were always together, so why bother?—and we all knew it.
“I hereby call an official meeting of the Whelan sisters coven,” I said solemnly without a hint of derision. “To discuss the matter at hand.”
“The mage I killed,” Celeste said in self-disgust.
“To save us,” Phoebe said. “To save me.”
Celeste turned her pale green eyes on Phoebe. “I could have done it another way, but I was so angry, so full of pure rage, and it all came spewing out.” She paused, tears making her eyes look like glittering peridots. “I had absolutely no control over it, Phoebe.”
I swallowed the horror rising in my throat. The power she possessed was dangerous, even more so because she struggled to control it. But she was also my sister. We had to protect her.
“You did what you had to do,” I said in a firm tone. “We are a coven. We are sisters. The Book of Sindal may have been taken from us, but we are its true co-guardians. We protect each other at any cost.” I held Celeste’s gaze. “Any cost, do you hear me?”
Her head bobbed slowly. When she looked fearful and innocent like she did now, it was easy to forget she was twenty-three. She was our baby sister. Most of the time she annoyed the shit out of me, but I’d die many times over for her.
“If we report this, there will be a trial.” My tone was expressionless.
“They’ll find her innocent, Rowan!” Phoebe protested. “She was saving me!”
I had a rebuttal to that statement, but it would hurt Celeste to use it. I’d save it as a last resort.
“Yes, there would be a trial,” I s
aid. “And it would be used as one more mark against us. The council wants a calm, stable environment for the book. They’ll take the fact that someone showed up here looking for it as proof that they should keep it with the Protective Force.”
Neither one of them protested, but I could tell they weren’t totally convinced. Time to bring out the big guns.
“And there is no way on earth Celeste can handle a trial. She’s too emotionally fragile.”
Celeste opened her mouth to speak, then closed it.
Fear snaked in my gut. She usually fought like a cornered dog when accused of being weak. If she recognized her fragility, we were in worse shape than I’d thought.
Phoebe took a breath and plastered on what I called her library face, a soft look with no-nonsense eyes. This was what she’d look like when shushing rowdy patrons at work. “So what do you propose we do with him?”
Well, shit. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but the cemetery to my left offered an obvious solution. “We need to bury him.”
They broke into a fresh round of protests, but I didn’t stop them this time. I wasn’t sure it was the right decision myself. If they had a better suggestion, I was all ears.
“You’re right,” Phoebe finally said, her face turning puke green. “We have to hide the body. Burning would probably be better, but the smoke might draw attention, not to mention the smell.”
“I could glamour the smoke and the fumes,” I said, feeling nauseous again.
“No,” Celeste said. “We need to bury it in case we need it later.”
I couldn’t think of a single reason we might need his dead body later, but I suspected I was being rash, a sure sign that she was right. If we burned him, he’d be gone forever, but we could always dig him up later. Not to mention I had no idea how to make a fire hot enough to turn a body into total ash.
That thought pushed me over the edge, and I leaned to the side and vomited in the grass.
“Rowan,” Phoebe called out in alarm and started to rush toward me, but I stood upright and held up a hand.
“I’m fine. I’m surprised I didn’t do that sooner, frankly. We all know I can barely look at a raw steak without barfing.” There was a solid reason I was a vegetarian—flesh and all the things that leaked, oozed, or shot out of it had always grossed me out. Now here I was discussing a bleeding, oozing body, mulling over the possibility of building a fire big enough to essentially cook it.
I leaned over and vomited again.
“Rowan.” Phoebe sounded more alarmed now.
“I’m fine,” I said, leaning over my knees and sucking deep gulps of fresh air in through my nose and out my mouth. “Give me a minute.”
My sisters let the silence linger for a few seconds before Phoebe said quietly, “So we all agree to bury him?”
“Aye,” Celeste said in a tiny voice. It was a formal coven vote. Somehow I’d forgotten I’d called an official meeting.
“Aye,” I said, forcing myself to stand upright.
“Aye,” Phoebe said, her troubled eyes holding mine.
“And we keep it from everyone unless all of us agree to tell,” I added.
Phoebe started to vehemently protest, but Celeste said, “Aye.” She turned to Phoebe with apologetic eyes. “Sorry, Bee. For now, Rowan is right.”
Tiny pink patches splotched Phoebe’s face, something that always happened when she was overwrought, and tears welled in her eyes. I was sure she wasn’t going to agree to this one, but she bowed her head as her first tears fell. “Aye.”
I felt like a bitch for making that rule. I knew what it cost her. I was asking her to keep an enormous secret from the man she loved. Nothing killed a relationship quicker than a deep, dark, ugly secret, and this one was black and thorny. But I didn’t feel guilty enough to rescind it. Celeste was more important than any man.
“Where are we going to bury him?” I asked, feeling queasy again.
“The cemetery,” Celeste said with an assuredness she didn’t normally possess.
“What?” Phoebe screeched, her spine straightening as though it had been pulled with a taut string. “No! Our ancestors are buried there! We’re not putting this slimy… asshole next to our family!”
“We have to,” Celeste said, taking on a matter-of-fact tone. “If someone sends a cadaver dog to look for him, they won’t think a thing about a dog finding something in the cemetery.”
I wasn’t so certain, but she had a point.
“And besides,” Celeste continued, “we’re not burying him next to anyone. We’re burying him on top of someone.” She gave Phoebe a tiny smile. “Your pick.”
More of those splotches rose on Phoebe’s cheeks.
“Although maybe you should pick someone who died relatively recently. So the grave doesn’t look so obvious.”
“So obvious?” I said in disbelief. “The last person buried here was Great Aunt Olivia thirty-five years ago! Any grave’s gonna be obvious.”
Celeste gave me a stern look that suggested she didn’t appreciate my sudden lack of support for a plan that had been mine in the first place. “Then you’ll glamour it. And I’ll fortify it with expression magic. Just like we did with the book.”
How the hell had we gotten here? I was standing much too close to a puddle of my own vomit, Phoebe was shaking with fear and disgust at the thought of desecrating one of our ancestors’ graves, and scatterbrained, fragile Celeste had taken charge.
“I’ll help too,” Phoebe said in a shaky voice.
“We need to know which grave,” Celeste said. “An ancestor who loves us enough to let us use his or her resting spot or someone you rarely access.”
Phoebe clasped her hands to her chest. “Uh…”
“Maybe you should ask for volunteers,” Celeste said.
Phoebe nodded, and the startled look on her face suggested she’d also noticed this new, take-charge side of Celeste. “Good idea.”
She closed her eyes, and a soft look spread across her face, making her look even lovelier than usual. Phoebe was the prettiest of all of us. The sweetest. Celeste was beautiful in her own right, an exotic, unusual beauty that drew the eye despite, or maybe because of, its edginess. I was certain the lines of her face would soften if she’d put on a good twenty pounds or so, but her magic and the balance she fought to maintain it kept her looking like a runway model. And me… I was the tallest, big-boned. I wasn’t unattractive, but when guys looked at the three of us, few gazes landed on me.
“Hermy,” Phoebe said quietly. “He volunteered.”
“Herman Whelan?” I asked, trying to hide my concern. “He’s been dead over a hundred years.”
“He volunteered,” Phoebe said as though that were the end of that and there would be no more discussion. Which I supposed was true. When we were kids, I’d made the mistake of picking a fight with one of our dead relatives when Phoebe was borrowing her magic. Great-aunt Mildred had haunted me for weeks until I’d profusely apologized. I’d learned my lesson. No more arguing with dead people.
“Okay,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. “I guess we need shovels.”
Phoebe grasped the necklace hanging from her neck. “I’ll ask Grandma Corlew to help.”
In addition to borrowing magic from buried ancestors, Phoebe had begun wearing two pieces of jewelry bearing the bones of two of our grandmothers. The “pearls” in her necklace were rounded and polished carpal bones from our grandmother, Grandma Corlew, whose super strength was magically drawn from the kinetic energy of the molecules around her. The ring, an intricately designed miniature, had been constructed with Grandma Imogene’s hair and her tiny ear bones, giving Phoebe access to her elemental magic everywhere she went.
“Good idea,” Celeste said in her matter-of-fact tone.
Phoebe’s body tensed as she focused on accessing Grandma Corlew’s magic. Seconds later, dirt began to fly out of one of the graves and into a neat pile behind an old, crumbling headstone in the middle of the thirty or so graves.
But the hole was barely a foot deep before sweat broke out on Phoebe’s forehead.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, not bothering to hide my worry.
“My magic…” She glanced over at me, visibly shaken. “It’s weak.”
“That ball of power zapped your energy,” I said. “We need to dig this by hand and let you rest.”
She swallowed. “I’m not sure resting will help.” Her eyes were huge. “I think it might be permanent. That mage, he was using Grandma Corlew’s power against her will.”
“What?” To my surprise, I found myself turning to Celeste to get her opinion, something I never did.
Celeste closed her eyes and held out her hands. The air crackled with electricity. Then it dissipated, and Celeste opened her eyes, chewing on her bottom lip before she said, “I think she might be right.”
“No!” I shouted, good and pissed. “We just have to get that blue ball back. It’s energy. It couldn’t have disappeared!”
“It didn’t,” Celeste said. “It’s inside him, but I can’t access it.” A quick glance assured me she was right—that eerie blue light still glowed from his chest.
“Then we need to figure out how to access it,” I retorted.
Celeste’s confused gaze lifted to mine. “Of course we do, but none of us have the answer.”
“Do you have any idea where to look?” I asked, feeling jolted by this role reversal.
“Aunt Xenya,” she said. “She has an extensive library on magic.”
“Okay,” I said, letting this all sink in. “So we’ll go to Xenya’s.” Xenya was a member of the Small Council, but first and foremost she was a close family friend. She’d loved our mother and vowed to watch over us after her death. We could trust her with at least part of the truth.
“As we know from Phoebe’s power,” Celeste continued, “the magic he died with won’t go anywhere. It’ll stay with his body. So we’ll bury him and find the answer. We’re lucky this happened to Phoebe.”
“Hey!” Phoebe protested.
Celeste cringed. “Well, you’re already used to taking magic from dead people, so it might be easier for you to get your power back. We’ll just figure out a way for you to use your ancestor magic on him.” She paused as she seemed to consider something else. “Unless he’s already a relative?”