“You’ve done Dark witch magic before?” came Marcus’s voice near my ear making me jump.
I glared at him. “How d’you do that?” When he just raised a skeptical brow, I added. “I’ve never actually done it before. No. But how hard can it be? Right? It’s just about following the instructions—”
Marcus’s eyes bugged out of his head. “Are you crazy?”
“Possibly.”
“Dark magic can kill you.”
I slipped my book in my bag, not appreciating his tone or his lack of confidence in my abilities. But then again, he didn’t know me. “Are you an expert in Dark magic all of a sudden?”
Marcus loomed over me, his face flashing into alarm. “I know that if you say the wrong word, or even just mess up a sigil or a rune, it can kill you. I also know there’s a reason why White witches don’t do it.” He inched forward a little until I could smell his aftershave, which was a very pleasant smell. “It’s dangerous.”
I didn’t move an inch. “I don’t mind a little danger from time to time. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Right?”
Marcus gave a mock laugh. “And what will your aunts think when you don’t come home? You think gambling your life away is fair?”
“Since when do you care about my life, anyway?” I ground out. “You’ve made your sentiments very clear since I came here.” I gritted my teeth. I was not having this conversation with him in this damn forest right now. No way.
“Back off, Chief,” said Ronin as he pushed a finger on Marcus’s chest, forcing him to take a step back. “If Tess says she can do it, she can do it. Capiche?”
Marcus’s face tightened, and he exhaled slowly. “I might have misjudged you when you first came here. I’m sorry for that.”
Now that was unexpected. I felt like doing cartwheels.
His gray eyes searched my face, making my heart race a little. “I care about your aunts and my town. I want nothing bad to happen. You have to believe that.”
I stared at him and pulled the strap of my bag higher on my shoulder. “Well, at least we have that in common.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing.” With his jaw set, Marcus turned away.
“Me too,” I whispered. Guess we were about to find out.
“Don’t worry, Tess.” Ronin patted my shoulder. “I know you’ve got this.”
Emmet snorted and started forward again with Kaito behind him like his killer shadow. Ronin and I followed next with Marcus picking up the rear once more.
The five of us marched in silence. I strained my ears for any sound of movement coming at us, knowing the others were doing the same in their united silence. More than once I thought I saw glowing green eyes next to some trees. Then another pair of eyes flashed in the shadows of the forest, like things that never quite could be clearly seen. I blinked and they were gone. Nothing came at us, so I kept walking.
It went like this for another half-hour. The deeper we went into the forest, the colder it became, and the stronger the magic pulsed.
It got to a point where it was like I was standing below an electrical power station or a giant beehive.
Emmet was feeling it too. His shoulders kept getting tenser, and he kept reaching out and grabbing his cape, as though it was giving him the strength to keep moving. Now and then I’d catch a glimpse of him muttering to himself. Spells. He was getting ready to throw one.
Even Kaito was on edge. She’d pulled out her sword and was now using it like a machete to cut down branches and underbrush that got in the way.
Ronin was whistling a tune. Either he was enjoying himself, or this was a cover because he was nervous.
We were all on edge. We’d all seen what this sorceress could do, and that was before she’d tapped into the power of the ley lines. And who’s to say there was only one sorceress? My gut told me The Church of Midnight had more members.
I was angsty and nervous, my pace a little slower as I went over the power words in my head. For some reason, the thought of Marcus kept interrupting my thinking.
He obviously didn’t care about my wellbeing. No, he was here for the town. That was certain. Maybe he cared about my aunts. He needed Ruth to keep making those vials for him, so I doubted he wanted harm to come to her.
But he had apologized…
Yes. He’d apologized for being a dick. It was hard to keep holding that against him now, seeing that he was risking his neck for Hollow Cove and possibly my aunts. My ex never apologized. I didn’t even think that behavior or emotion existed in him. I didn’t know what to make of Marcus now. I wasn’t sure I hated him anymore.
I sank into a quiet measured gait through the woods. I was so involved in my own head that when we stepped into a sudden clearing, I froze, Marcus bumping into me from behind.
All my thoughts evaporated.
The clearing in the forest was the size of a football field. Paths wound in and around structures made of tree roots that could have been small huts. Flaming torches held by poles flanked the sides of the paths. Some paths had human and animal skulls dotting the trails like gruesome marker stones. A garden sprawled to my left. Though it wasn’t a vegetable garden but a garden filled with poison ivy, stinging nettle, hogweed, and a variety of poisonous mushrooms.
The moon reflected on a pond, its silvery water rippling in a slight breeze. It couldn’t have been more than two in the afternoon at the most, yet it was gloomy and dim, and there was no sign of the sun. It felt like it was midnight. Only magic could create a perpetual night. Powerful magic.
My eyes moved to the end of a winding path. A fortress sat in the middle. Four stories high, it was a gothic, church-like building with turrets, spires, and towers, all made of tree roots, branches, rock, and mounds of earth twisted together into a gruesome and creepy construction.
The Church of Midnight.
The grotesque way it was built wasn’t what had my insides tightening into a ball, but the power that oozed from it. A heavy thrumming filled the air where powerful magic moved and flowed into motion. I knew that power. I recognized it.
The ley lines.
The power of Hollow Cove’s ley lines was being pulled into that fortress. Like they were slowly being sucked into it, as though the structure was some giant vacuum capable of drawing in ley lines.
And sitting right before the entrance, on a small boulder, was Sadie.
Maternal instincts shot through me, and I was running. I shot past Emmet and Kaito and made a beeline for the little girl.
“Sadie! Are you hurt?” I asked as I stood over her, searching for cuts and bruises but finding none. “Are you okay?” She was still alive. I took that as a good omen.
Sadie looked up at me, her big blue eyes glistening with a wicked delight. “I am now that you’re here. I knew you’d come, Tessa.”
The last part sounded like a laugh. But I was more astonished that the little girl had spoken. “You’re talking?” I asked unsure. Maybe the sorceress had drugged her?
Sadie jumped off the rock and start laughing. Not a cute, little girl’s giggle, but a mature, evil harsh laugh that should not be coming out of her throat.
“Creepy kid,” said Ronin, appearing next to me to my right.
Kid. My blood froze. I took a step back and then another, pulling Ronin with me as Sadie continued to howl in laughter. I knew that laugh.
The skin around Sadie’s face shifted and rippled grotesquely as though it was made of hot wax, yet her creepy laugh never stopped.
“What the hell is happening to her?” came Marcus’s voice from behind me somewhere.
The scent of vinegar and sulfur was thick, and a sheet of black mist wrapped around Sadie as she continued to laugh until she had disappeared under a blanket of shadow. The shadow collapsed, and a shape emerged—a much larger and taller one with a dark, heavy robe wrapped around the shoulders of a bald head with scarred, pointed ears.
Gone was the cute, innocent girl. And in her place stood the sorceress Samara.
<
br /> I swallowed. “Fuck me.”
26
I had a temporary freak-out moment because seeing a little girl morph into a butt-ugly sorceress would do that to a person.
“You’re Sadie?” Go with the obvious when you’re suffering from a mental fart.
Samara smiled, showing off her pointed teeth that looked like they’d been filed down to resemble those of a cat. “I knew you’d come for…” she made a pout and sad eyes, “poor little orphaned Sadie.” She let out a wet cackle. “Pathetic. Really.”
I heard a low growl as Emmet and Kaito emerged to my left, both hunched and poised like they were about to tackle the sorceress. Hell, I wanted to do it too.
“You’re a sick bitch. You’ve been her this entire time,” I said, more of a statement than a question. And then everything snapped into place. “You were there, in the street, the night Avi was killed, and when the pixies had their meltdown. The ward in the library. It was you. It’s always been you.”
Now, come to think of it. Sadie had been at all three places, but I would have never made the connection. I felt like I fool. I’d stopped to help Sadie in the library, thinking the sorceress had hurt her, but the girl had played me. I was a giant fool.
“Let’s take her now,” whispered Emmet. “She’s alone. She’s vulnerable. We won’t get a better chance.”
“Not yet.” I had to disagree with the big Unseen. I doubted very much Samara was alone and vulnerable. A bitch who filed down her teeth into pointy needles and self-mutilated her ears to look like a Vulcan was crazy, yes, but not isolated or defenseless. Looking at her now, it was probably the exact opposite.
The fortress shuddered as it sucked in more ley line power.
The vision of Dolores lying in her bed with black veins covering her face swam in my vision. “What do you expect to gain, apart from taking Hollow Cove’s ley lines? What do you want?”
“Gain?” Samara laughed. “All of it, silly. I want it all. To be all-powerful. The Church of Midnight will rise and we will put an end to all nonbelievers. The non-magical will die. They are weak. Technology will die with them, but magic… magic will rise. Just as it once was. The rise of technology, the rise of humans, forced all magical practitioners, among other creatures, to live in hiding. But the earth’s magic, the ley lines, all were here before technology. And when all the ley lines in the world point to this place”—she flung out a hand and pointed to the fortress— “once all the magic’s concentrated here. We will squish the human world and its technology with it.”
“I think you should ease up on the crazy pills,” I mumbled. “I knew you were the skitzo type, but I thought I’d double check.”
“The bald bitch is crazy,” said Ronin. “No one can control all the ley lines of the world. Right? Tell me I’m right, please.”
I couldn’t because I had no idea. “She seems to think she can.” If she could, we were all dead.
My skin pricked like I had thousands of ants crawling up my back. Something felt wrong. Off. Samara wanted me here. Hell, she’d practically drawn me a map to get me to this place. But why? She’d already destroyed the town’s wards and tapped into its ley lines. So why me?
I stifled a shudder. “Why did you want me to come here? What exactly do you want from me?”
“Finally,” drawled Samara, rolling her eyes dramatically. “I thought you’d never ask.” The sorceress skipped around the boulder, swinging her arms, as a little girl would. “I’m a curious creature by nature.”
“You’ve got the creature part right,” muttered Ronin.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Marcus standing further away from us to my left. He was crouched low, his knuckles touching the ground. He was either getting ready for a hundred-meter dash, or he was about to do something stupid.
“And when you came to Hollow Cove, you intrigued me,” continued Samara. My attention snapped back to her. “Not just because you were the new witch in town. There was something different about you. Something special.”
“I have that effect on people,” I answered, a hand on my hip. Power vibrated from the earth through the soles of my boots just as the air fizzled and crackled with energy. Power thrummed in this place. The ley lines were being pulled here, right where we were. If she could use them, then maybe…
I reached out and tapped into the ley lines. Magic swelled, and my body trembled at the sudden influx of power. I felt my hair rise off my shoulders.
Samara halted, and her face cracked into a grin. Her red eyes grew wide and practically reached over her hairless brows. “Yes. The magic is potent. I know you can feel it.” She pointed a scarred finger at me the nail completely gone. “But you don’t know how to use it. Do you?”
“I’m a fast learner.” Total lie. I might be a slow learner. But once information got into my thick skull, it stayed there forever.
Samara’s smile twitched. “You showed great resistance to the demon’s fire. Uncommon for a White witch, especially when the witch in question is barely a witch. You are weak. Unprepared. Unschooled.”
I raised my brows skeptically. “Really? If that were true, I wouldn’t be here, now would I? No. I think you know I can kick your ass and you don’t like it. That’s why you set this up. You thought you’d bring me here and what? I would let you kill me?”
Ronin laughed. “Fat chance, baldy.”
“You cursed one of the few people I care about. I will end you,” I told her, feeling brash and crazy, the fueling of the ley lines making me nuts.
Samara sucked in air through her teeth as she spread her mouth into a wide, manic grin. “You can’t beat me. You are special, yes, but not that special. Who are you kidding? The force is in me.”
“This isn’t Star Wars, freak.”
The sorceress showed me her pointed teeth and hissed like a cat. “Oh. But I will kill you.” She brightened. “Such a useless scrap of magic contains you,” said Samara, her voice high and clear. “Trivial, and yet it shapes you. And you will die tonight, Tessa. This time your magic won’t save you.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
Samara’s eyes moved to Emmet and Kaito. “I will kill you just like I killed the other Unseen.” She giggled. “I can still smell their burnt flesh and hear their cries for their mommies as they died. Quite the show. Too bad you missed it.”
I looked at Emmet. A giant vein throbbed on his forehead, and his lips were pulled back in a snarl. Damn. That was bad.
As he stood there, Emmet’s face seemed to take on a different cast, the shadows under his eyes growing to make him look ill.
“You’re dead,” he said. His voice changed, became more resonant, and somehow echoed in my head.
In a blur, he rushed forward, his hands dripping in green magic. Latin flowed from his lips.
“Emmet! Wait!” I howled, but it was too late.
I felt a buildup of ley line energy, rising until it was almost painful. He was tapping into it.
Sparks of green magic soared from the Unseen. With a flick of his wrists, he shot them directly at the sorceress.
It was a perfect shot. Samara didn’t move. Hell, it looked like she was waiting for it.
I held my breath as I watched the green energy hit—
Samara vanished on the spot, as though her mere presence had just been a trick of the light.
Emmet stumbled to a halt, a feverish gleam in his blue eyes.
“Am I dreaming? Or did she just pull a Houdini on us?” asked Ronin.
Marcus shifted on his feet. “She’s here somewhere.”
And then the laughter started.
Loud and echoing, it sounded like thousands of voices at once—but all hers. Samara’s laugh rose around us as though she was everywhere at once.
“Where the hell are you?” roared Emmet.
“There!” Kaito pointed with her sword at the fortress.
Samara stood at the bottom step of her fortress. The smile on her face was truly beastly, and she looked like a demon.<
br />
Suddenly, the ground shifted beneath my feet. I could all but feel the soil shifting and roots settling as the forest shivered, like it wanted us out.
“Why do I get the feeling something bad is about to happen,” Ronin said shortly.
As if in answer, The Church of Midnight opened its doors, which looked at least twelve feet high and carved from tree roots. A mass of dark-robed, bald figures came rushing out, spilling down the steps in a swoop of darkness, as though the fortress had vomited them out.
Evil sorcerers and sorceresses on their home turf were boosted with ley line magic. I had barely survived a battle with just one of them, and now I was staring at about fifty. They would hit us in less than twenty seconds.
I let out a breath. “I knew this was going to suck.”
27
I watched the robed figures spilling down the front steps, moving with the speed and precision of predators.
“Man, I hate sorcerers.” Ronin cut me a glance. “What’s the plan, boss?”
“Don’t die,” I told him.
The plan had been to kill Samara, but now, seeing her army, I wasn’t sure it would happen. Too late to turn back now.
The sound of something ripping behind me had me spin around.
Marcus stood there, shirtless, as he unbuckled his belt and yanked off his jeans, ripping them at the same time.
Holy.
Mother.
Of.
God.
I glimpsed a very fit, golden-brown body, rippling in muscles because there was no room for anything else. I stared because, let’s face it, why would I look away from a very naked and well-endowed Marcus? I never thought I’d be the type of woman to drool at the sight of a naked man. I’d seen my share of naked. Just not like this kind of naked.
Drooling. Yup. I was wrong.
Shadow Witch (The Witches of Hollow Cove Book 1) Page 19