“You can’t plan to stand there and watch?” Raven snapped.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I plan to do. Did you think I’d be dumb enough to break the curse and then leave you?” Crimson shook her head. “Oh dear, you do take me for a fool. No, I will be here, making sure my spell does what it was intended to do.”
“I won’t do it with you watching,” Raven said.
Crimson laughed. “Oh, you will do as you have bound yourself to do.”
A swell of arousal rolled through Raven, and Gabriel bent over, catching himself on his knees. His eyes shifted to hers, wide with alarm. Now was her chance—if she could absorb Crimson’s power, she could turn it against her. Even if Crimson cursed Gabriel again in retaliation, if Raven absorbed her magic, she should be able to break it.
She squatted down and touched the symbol. Fire and darkness spread across her skin, the elements of the spell coming to her one by one. Crimson’s magic was layered… layered with Raven’s! Raven cursed. This was the trap. When she’d invoked Papa Legba, she’d injected her magic inside Crimson’s. She couldn’t siphon off the mambo’s magic without weakening herself.
Nausea rolled through her stomach even as her need for Gabriel once again took center stage.
“What is it?” Gabriel whispered.
She shook her head. “We cannot leave the circle without making love,” Raven said. “And the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to resist.” She grabbed her abdomen as a strange sensation rocketed through her. “Whoa.”
Gabriel assessed her and the circle. “She will have our baby, Raven. We will not be able to stop her.”
“No, she won’t.” Another wave of desire blasted through her, and Raven’s focus caught on Gabriel’s sizable erection. Dreadful need bloomed between her legs. Her nipples hardened behind the cover of her dress, and her breath quickened. Wet and ready, she inhaled his scent deep into her lungs, the ache becoming more than she could bear. She lowered her chin. “Trust me.”
The cacophony of Crimson’s chanting rattled through Raven’s head, the woman’s dancing and stomping on the other side of the candles a vivid reminder of the position they were in. Thrusting her staff above her head, Crimson transformed the wooden length into a snake. A boa at least five feet long curled above her, heavy and thick in her hands. She swung the weight of it above her, circling, chanting.
Raven pressed her palms to her ears and shook her head, tears raining over her cheeks. Crimson had outsmarted her. Raven hadn’t known this sort of layering of magic was possible. Now there was no turning back from the humiliation of completing the ritual. Would Crimson know when it was done that Raven could not bear children? Would she then force Gabriel to impregnate her instead? The thought made her sick.
Gabriel’s hands landed on her wrists. As she met his gaze, everything she feared she might find in his dark eyes was there: crushing defeat, unmistakable arousal, and a hint of regret. Regret for something he hadn’t done yet but knew he would do. They both knew.
Her heart grew heavy even as her sex throbbed. He wrapped his fingers around the nape of her neck. She did not resist when he kissed her or when he began to caress and massage the base of her skull. The chanting around them increased. He moved his mouth down her neck and then up to her ear.
“Take from me,” he whispered. “As much as you can.”
Raven pulled back and blinked. He was offering his power. If they made love, she would absorb his magic, now unlimited because Crimson had lifted the curse. Perhaps with that added power she could… What? Could she kill Crimson? Anything less than death would not stop the voodoo queen.
The spell around them seemed to throb in her womb, the ritual begging to be fed, to come to fruition. Gabriel didn’t bother to undress her. Gently, he lowered her to the floor, pushing her skirt up to her hips. He was inside her in another breath, and her body only wanted it faster and harder. Everything in her drew on him, pulling him deeper, her ankles crossing behind his thighs, her fingers tangling in the waves of his hair, her hips rising and falling to meet his. The hot rush of power that flowed into her was intoxicating, its heady, smoky scent filling her nostrils, filling her with every deep thrust.
She came apart beneath him, her body milking his for every drop he would give her. The contraction of her muscles was nothing compared to the contraction of her power. Her body drank of him, soaked him in, until every cell was singing. She felt invincible.
The candles extinguished themselves.
“It is done!” Crimson yelled, shaking the snake in her hands.
Gabriel pulled out of Raven and, in one explosive movement, transformed into the obsidian-green dragon she’d seen before. His body filled the room, breaking from the circle that had once bound them. Candles scattered. Gabriel’s massive jaws snapped.
It happened so fast. He’d shifted and attacked before Raven was off the floor. Crimson’s body should have been bitten in half. Instead, her form turned to smoke between his teeth.
“Do you think I’m stupid, dragon?” she said, re-forming behind Raven. The snake she’d been wielding transformed back into her staff.
“Gabriel!” Raven yelled and threw her hands toward Crimson. Purple energy crackled like electricity toward the mambo. Raven’s magic decided for her in the moment, the spell to immobilize flying from her fingertips before her brain could react.
With a circle of her staff, Crimson blocked the blow. It wasn’t without effort. Raven saw the mambo’s knees buckle and sweat bloom under her nose. Crimson cursed.
Raven raised her hands to try again but was swept aside by Gabriel’s barbed tail. The dragon was trying to pivot, but his massive size made it difficult. The great bellows of his lungs filled with fire, his chest igniting. Blazing red surrounded his emerald-green heart. Raven felt the temperature in the room elevate, and she scurried behind him.
His fire didn’t come fast enough.
“Fè wòch,” Crimson yelled through her clenched teeth, lifting and shaking her staff.
Her spell landed deep inside Gabriel’s open mouth, extinguishing the flame at its source. Raven screamed as the fire within went gray, his shiny black and green armor losing its luster one scale at a time. Her screams came again and again as his neck and front legs turned dull as stone, followed by the long stretch of his torso, his back legs and tail. The transformation crawled up his proud neck and over his head, a spreading concrete disease. His dark eyes were the last to go. They turned on her, glossy with surprise and regret. In an instant, Gabriel, her love, her life, her dragon, was a statue. Gone. Crimson had turned him to stone.
Raven dropped to her knees, the impact driving through her bones and rattling her teeth.
“You stupid, stupid witch. Did you think you could outsmart me? I am hundreds of years older than you.” Crimson’s teeth gnashed in her direction, her staff waving between them. Raven hardly noticed. Her breath had stopped. Her eyes roved over Gabriel, her brain searching for the spell to turn him back. This pain, this loss, this black hole opened in her chest, it would kill her.
“I’ll see you in nine months, Raven. Your baby is mine, promised before Papa Legba himself and bound with your own magic. I warn you, witch, if you try to end this pregnancy or yourself, you will be unsuccessful. You are bound.” Spit flew from Crimson’s lips.
“I am not bound!” she screamed through wrenching sobs. “You didn’t fulfill your end of the bargain. You promised to break the curse.”
“I did,” Crimson said. “It wasn’t the curse that turned him to stone but my spell. I’m allowed to defend myself. I have upheld the bargain.”
Raven’s hands trembled. “Fix him. I’ll do anything. Fix him now.”
“Fix him yourself,” she said. She strode toward the back of the room. Raven didn’t know what she was doing, and she didn’t care. All her focus was on Gabriel.
“No. No!” she cried. Her hands hovered over the cold stone that used to be his flesh. She touched his shoulder and regretted it im
mediately. The stone turned to dust in her hands. She wailed as the whole of him broke apart, ash raining down around her and sifting through her fingers.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A bomb had gone off. The world was ending, burning down around Raven, everything dead, everything leveled. There was no love left on this planet, no life, no goodness. Nothing but despair. Nothing but horror.
Raven dug her hands into the ashes of what used to be her one true love, her tears falling silently on Gabriel’s gray remains, and she could not sort out the storm that brewed within her. Was it the lightning of anger that made her grind her teeth or the agony of loss that beat on her like driving rain, or the wind of change—this idea that she must carry on without him—that was most overwhelming? Elbow deep in the gray dust that was once Gabriel, her fingers bumped something smooth, a bone perhaps. She fished it toward her.
It was an emerald the size of an ostrich egg. She dusted it off and cradled it in her palms, staring at the deep green that glowed bright enough to fill the room with watery light. No, it wasn’t the size of an egg. It was the size of a heart. Gabriel’s heart.
Raven could taste its smoky magic. This heart was alive. Deep inside the facets, Gabriel’s soul pulsed against her touch. She stopped crying and started thinking.
This was Crimson’s temple. Raven stood. Shelves along the wall were laden with roots and herbs and stones. Not what she wanted. Raven needed a book. Crimson’s grimoire. Behind her, Crimson was distracted. Raven couldn’t see what she was doing, but the scent of dark magic came from the corner of the room where she busied herself. Closing her eyes, Raven inhaled deeply and searched with her senses. When she’d touched the symbol, she’d tasted Crimson’s magic. Although it had been layered with her own, she’d never forget it, like saccharine and charcoal, the same signature as the demon she’d met in the library.
The strongest source of Crimson’s magic was not Crimson herself, who retained that strange hollow quality, but a spot at the back of the room. Power curled against her now from that spot. Slowly, Raven pivoted toward the source. In a room otherwise packed with roots, herbs, and dried flesh, there was an empty corner. She raised her hand and walked toward it.
One of the knots Gabriel had given her had been an illusion. She’d spent the better part of a day trying to untie the thing when all she had to do to dispel it was use a spell she’d absorbed in a grimoire that smelled of potatoes and made her hair stand on end. She used it now, focusing on that bare corner of room.
A smug laugh bubbled up from her lips as Crimson’s grimoire came into view. It rested on an altar stained with blood. A black candle burned beside it, in a candleholder made from a human skull. This was Crimson’s altar, her holy of holies, the true seat of her magic. The scent of it made Raven gag: the copper tang of blood, the rot of human flesh, singed hair, and rotten eggs. The last thing she wanted to do was touch it, but touch it she did. She set the emerald on the altar and opened the stained leather cover of that book, laying her hands on one page and then the next, turning quickly, deliberately. The magic poured into her, dark and evil.
“Stop. What are you doing?” Crimson charged toward the altar, and Raven threw out a spell, blocking her from coming any closer. She was surprised when it worked. But Crimson looked tired. Exhausted. Raven was tired too, but she was also grieving. Nothing motivated a woman like grief.
Raven turned faster. She was almost there, almost to the end. “I’m getting to know your magic, Crimson,” she said. “It’s quite an art you have here. Funny you call it voodoo. It’s far darker. Far older.”
A crack of magic rang out, Crimson shattering her barrier. Raven called on the magic of the book before her and circled her wrist. A staff appeared in her hand, the twin of the one in Crimson’s. She used it to block the next curse Crimson hurled at her. The spell ricocheted into the shelf of herbs. Wood splintered and crashed between them, sending Crimson shuffling back. Raven held the staff like a shield between them. Not a twin after all, she saw now. Where Crimson’s was topped with a skull, Raven’s held an emerald dragon. She laughed darkly.
“You can’t hurt me any more than you already have,” Raven said, her voice cracking. She turned the last page of the grimoire and then slammed it shut. “I know your magic and I have nothing left to lose.”
“Then you know that I can’t reverse Gabriel’s death even if I wanted to.” Crimson’s hands were up, her power crackling around her like static, making her hair float in the thick air gathering between them. Demons fled from the light and flitted into the shadowy corners of the room.
“No, you can’t,” Raven said. “Your magic only brings death. And now that I know it, I bring it to you.”
She raised her staff and screamed the worst of the spells she’d read in that horrid tome. Power like lightning lashed out from her, a spell to kill, a spell to maim, a spell to tear Crimson’s head from her body. Crimson blocked it and returned blow for blow. Raven didn’t let up; with everything she had she leveled curse after curse. Block, curse. Curse, dodge. Shelves collapsed. Glass shattered. Precious gems rolled like marbles across the temple.
“You can’t hurt me, Raven,” Crimson yelled, her staff circling to block another blow. “You’re a copycat witch. You don’t know anything I don’t know.”
“Maybe not, but I will wear you down, you awful, horrid woman. I will wear you down until there is nothing left of either of us.”
Crimson scowled. She was tired. The spell she’d forced on her and Gabriel had drained her. Raven gritted her teeth. If it killed her, she would make Crimson pay. The mambo’s eyes darted toward a black box on the floor, fallen from one of the destroyed shelves. She darted for it. Raven attempted a retrieval spell. The box flew toward her. Crimson dissolved into a tornado of black smoke and snatched it from the air. She re-formed with it in her hands.
Lifting a tube of black liquid from the box, she threw it at Raven’s feet. “It’s time you got in touch with your past,” she spat.
Although Raven tried to block it, all her evasive maneuvering did was break the vial before it hit the floor. It exploded in her face. Black smoke surrounded her like a curtain. Her lungs protested with a fit of coughing.
When the smoke cleared, Raven found herself standing on a dirt street surrounded by simple wooden buildings. Her wrists were bound behind her back, and a serious-looking black man held the ropes. Her dress was gone, replaced with a filthy white shift.
“Witch! Witch!” a woman yelled from the crowd.
Simple clothing. Raven’s head snapped right, then left, taking in the conditions of the street, the people. French colonial architecture. Dirt road. Horses. Historic dress. The crowd gathered on both sides of the street. Silently, she cursed.
“Burn her, Louis!” a man yelled. He was speaking French, but Raven understood him perfectly.
Raven’s gaze snapped to the pile of wood in the middle of the square up ahead of her, a pile built around a stake. She glanced back at her captor who had been called Louis. Raven cursed again. She’d seen sketches of him before, in her history books, and the revelation of who was standing behind her turned her blood to ice. That was Louis Congo, public executioner of New Orleans, which meant that Crimson had sent her back to the early 1700s. As much as she’d loved studying history, this was not the point in time she would have chosen to return to.
“Witch! Burn the witch!” a woman yelled.
Raven searched out the voice in the crowd, her eyes landing on Crimson. The other witch raised an eyebrow and wriggled her fingers in a little wave. Raven concentrated on the knot binding her wrists, sending clear intentions to untie it. She whispered the incantation. Nothing happened.
“Your magic won’t work here, Circe,” Louis said, shoving her in the back. “The rope has been blessed by the priestess herself.”
Raven stumbled forward, the packed earth gritty beneath her bare feet. Priestess. Crimson had charmed the fucking ropes to be resistant to magic. Raven growled and gnashed h
er teeth, tugging at the ropes like a wild woman. The crowd roared, hurling obscenities. Arms gripped hers and she was wrestled forward, dragged to the stake and bound to it by rough, bruising hands.
“Circe Tanglewood, I sentence you to burn at the stake until you are dead, for the practice of witchcraft and the poisoning of Miss Delphine Devereaux. May God have mercy on your soul.”
Delphine… Delphine Devereaux. Raven tried to get her head around what was happening. Crimson had said she needed to get in touch with her past. Clearly she was in the body of her ancestor, Circe, whom Crimson had said was the granddaughter of the goddess Circe and a great and powerful enchantress. Circe poisoned someone named Delphine. Why did that name sound familiar? She searched the crowd. There were two dark-haired sisters—they had to be sisters with how alike they looked—weeping to her right. Her sisters, she realized. Circe’s sisters. Three sisters. Were these the three sisters her mother’s bar was named after?
Raven’s mind worked, trying to put it all together as she struggled against her bonds. Her gaze drifted to Crimson. There was someone beside her, someone she recognized. Delphine, the Casket Girl. No wonder she’d reacted so strongly when she found out who and what Raven was. Apparently they had a history, and Delphine fell on Crimson’s side of it.
“Burned over her own tree!” a man yelled. A torch was lowered to the branches under her, the blaze catching with a whoosh that sent her heart racing and her head tipping back against the stake. My own tree, she thought. The Tanglewood family tree. She thought of the crest, the tree of life, Kristina’s sketch in the back of the library catalog.
She glanced down into the branches, through the flames that licked higher, kissing her legs and burning away her shift. The branches below her glowed red. Symbols appeared in the bark, symbols Raven had seen before in her own skin. Symbols Gabriel had drawn out with his touch. The touch of fire.
Raven watched the last of her shift burn away. There was no pain. No scorching heat. She raised her chin. Was this the end? Had her skin burned so quickly that she couldn’t feel it? But when she looked down at herself, her flesh was pale and smooth. Flames reached above her head, caressing her like a lover. Her lover, the dragon. All at once she realized why she wasn’t burning and started to laugh. The fire could not harm her. Dragons were immune to fire, and she had absorbed Gabriel’s power only minutes ago. Now she also had Circe’s. She’d breathed it in, absorbed it through the smoke, through her feet resting on the branches of her family tree.
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