Magick (Book 3 in the Coven Series)

by Trish Milburn

  “No pressure there,” I say under my breath.

  Sarah opens the room to reveal a bathroom. In case she might suddenly change her mind, I hurry inside and close the door behind me. When I notice clean clothes folded on the end of the vanity, I quickly pull off the ones I’m wearing and shove them in the trash can. I never want to see them again.

  When I step below the flow of hot water and lather my skin, it feels better than anything I’ve ever experienced. At least until I start scrubbing so hard that it feels as if my skin really will peel away. But no matter how hard I scrub, the nasty feeling of being cloaked in darkness doesn’t go away. I lean my palms against the side of the shower, letting the water beat against the top of my head and flow down my back. I consider crying again, but all that will get me is a pounding headache and itchy eyes. Crying won’t bring me any closer to ensuring my friends’ safety, no closer to mastering any remnant of white magic I might possess. So instead of giving in to tears, I stiffen my spine and resolve to deal head-on with whatever comes, no matter how much it might hurt.

  I also resolve that I will see my friends before I do one more thing Sarah and the rest of the Bane demand. They will have to give me what I want because they need me.

  When I dry off and get dressed in a pair of loose, gray cotton track pants and a long-sleeved tee, I plunk down on the top of the closed toilet lid, not ready to face Sarah yet. I know every moment is of the essence, but I still take a few to settle the tasks ahead in my head.

  My gaze lands on the bracelet encircling my wrist. I rub my fingertips along the surface, wondering how it can do what I’ve only seen a Siphoning Circle do before. Someone knocks on the door.

  “Yeah.”

  When the door opens, it’s no surprise that Sarah is on the other side. So far, she and Amanda are the only people I’ve seen. I realize I don’t know anything more than I did when I last saw her before killing Barrow. Well, there was the history of the red cloaks, but that doesn’t help me at all.

  “How does it work?” I ask.

  “They’re soaked in water with several evil-warding herbs then spelled.”

  I notice she doesn’t mention which herbs or any details about the spell, but that’s not important right now. “Why does it look like my skin has grown around mine and yours doesn’t?”

  “Because I’ve never lived as a dark witch. Your spell had to be stronger. As did Egan’s.”

  I hate that Egan has been caught up in this mess because of me. I wonder if he’s chained as well, even though he did nothing wrong. I try to reach out with my senses to feel him, but there’s nothing there. Despite how frightening my power has become in recent days, I miss it. My heart aches that I no longer have that connection to Egan. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a brother, to a real, caring family. He’s the only coven witch I know who isn’t pure evil.

  I can’t sense the presence of Keller, Toni or anyone else either. Is this what it’s like for normal humans all the time? Not having any core-deep connection ever? I don’t envy them this yawning emptiness where awareness used to be.

  “I want to see him.” I say.

  “In time.”

  I slowly rise to my feet and face her. “No, now.”

  When she appears as if she’s going to deny me again, I speak before she can. “The sooner you prove to me that my friends are okay, the quicker you gain my full cooperation.”

  Sarah knows she’s going to have to give me what I want, and she doesn’t like it one bit. Without a word, she turns and walks away. Hoping I really have won this duel, I follow. After several twists and turns, she stops in front of a door and places her hand flat against a panel beside it. The lock clicks, and she steps back.

  “Go ahead.”

  I stare at her for a moment, considering this might be a trap set to return me to a room like the one where I was kept until a short time ago or even something worse. But when I wrap my hand around the doorknob and open it, I see Egan sitting in a chair at the back of the room, his feet propped on a metal desk in front of him. I’m so happy to see him alive and well that I don’t even care when I hear the door shut and lock behind me.

  The moment Egan sees me, his eyes widen, the front of the chair drops forward, and he leaps to his feet.

  “Jax, you’re alive.”

  It touches me deeper than I would have ever imagined that he cares so much. Maybe he feels that same type of sibling bond that I do.

  “Yeah,” I say as I walk toward him. “Whether that’s a good or bad thing remains to be seen.”

  He shakes his head as he stops a couple of feet in front of me. “I knew you would do this.”

  “What?”

  “Blame yourself.”

  “It’s not exactly anyone else’s fault that Amos Barrow is dead.”

  “From where I’m standing, it was his.”

  My mouth opens in shock. “Egan, you can’t possibly condone what I did.”

  “Do I think you should have killed a human? No. But he wasn’t without fault.” He pauses. “And neither was I.”

  “You? You tried to stop me.”

  “Obviously not hard enough.”

  “You know you couldn’t stop me, not even if you used every ounce of your power. I was too strong, too far gone.”

  Egan runs his fingers back through his messy blond hair as he paces toward the edge of the room. “None of this is fair to you. It’s too much power for one person to have to control.”

  “It is what it is.” I stand still in the middle of the room, fighting the urge to hug him, to have some sort of positive human contact. “And if I can somehow manage to salvage my white witch powers and use them to stop the covens, it’s a weight I’ll find some way to bear.”

  “So you still have your magic?”

  “Yes and no.” I point toward the silver cuff bracelet on his left arm then at the one on mine. “This is the reason it feels like we have no power.” I tell him everything Sarah shared with me about how the bracelets work.

  He lifts his arm and looks at the bracelet from all sides. “Damn.”

  “That about sums it up.”

  “I couldn’t even sense whether you were alive or dead,” he says.

  “Me neither. It feels so—”

  “Empty.”

  “Yeah.”

  Egan looks past me toward the door. “Have you seen the others?”

  I shake my head. “Sarah says they’re fine, that Adele and Rule were taken back home.”

  “That doesn’t seem safe for them.”

  “I know, but I don’t seem to be in a position to do anything about it.”

  Egan walks toward the door. “So what are they going to do with us?”

  “I’m going to be learning to master my white magic, if it’s still there.”

  Egan’s gaze snaps back to me. “They think it might be gone?”

  “They don’t know. The bracelet could have snuffed it out, or I could have destroyed it when I killed Barrow.”

  Egan turns fully toward me and crosses his arms across his chest. “I’ll help you any way I can, you know that.”

  I do, and he’ll never know how much his support means, especially since I was afraid I might have lost him and the others forever.

  “What are they going to have you do?” he asked.

  “Learn everything I can about white magic, master my emotions, then eventually take off the bracelet and see if I can even be trusted to not kill everyone near me.”

  We spend the next several minutes speculating about where we are, when the covens might arrive, if the Bane might release Keller and Toni and if we’ll ever see them again.

  “It’s better if they send them home,” Egan says.

  “I know.” Even if Keller can somehow dampen my dark urges and Toni can do the same for Egan, I still can’t help wanting them out of the covens’ path. I want them safe from the inevitable battle. And if I lose control again, I don’t want them to either witness it or potentially fall vi
ctim to my dark side.

  Sarah returns with Amanda, the latter with a notebook and pen. “I need for you to tell me every single thing you know about the covens, their powers and their way of thinking.”

  “That’ll take forever,” Egan says.

  “How about we get that down to a day,” Amanda says and opens the notebook.

  I step to Egan’s side and turn to face the two women. “Wouldn’t our time be better spent working on me learning to control my power?”

  “We’ll work on that, too, but we need to be as well armed with knowledge as we are with magic. Successful battles come from well-thought-out battle plans and knowing one’s enemy.”

  “And we can’t afford any more unfortunate accidents,” Amanda adds.

  Sarah and Amanda grill us for hours, with only short bathroom breaks. Even when we eat a bit of fruit in the morning and turkey sandwiches around midday, the interrogation doesn’t stop. Egan and I cough up details about everything from the hierarchy of each coven to the extent of the dark magic wielded by the leaders down to the children. Sarah is particularly interested in every minute detail of the magic Egan and I possess.

  “When will these come off?” Egan asks as he lifts his arm with the bracelet.

  “When we think it’s safe.” Sarah doesn’t elaborate, and I have to bite my tongue to keep from making a snotty remark.

  Finally, when I think if I have to answer one more question my head will explode, Sarah motions for Amanda to close the notebook in which she’s been taking copious notes. With a nod, they head for the door.

  I take a step toward them. “Wait, where are you going? You said we were going to work on controlling the magic.” I still don’t see how that is going to be possible while that magic is locked down tight.

  “We need to consider everything you’ve told us and strategize,” Sarah says.

  I can’t help it. An ugly curse flies out of me as I throw up my hands. “We’ve talked until we’re blue in the face today. It’s time to take some action.”

  “The last time you took action, a man ended up dead,” Amanda says.

  I lunge at her before I think how it will look, but Egan grabs me around my middle and Sarah steps between us, extending her hands out toward us. “That’s enough, both of you.”

  It gives me a small bit of satisfaction that Amanda receives a bit of a scolding, too.

  “We’re wasting time yammering about family trees,” Egan says, echoing my thoughts as he releases me.

  “The covens are all about families,” Sarah says. “From the very beginning, the family and control of that family has been the most important thing. We needed to know if that was still the case.”

  Egan crosses his arms, frustration washing off him in waves. “Why?”

  “Because it confirms that when the time comes, we’ll have to concentrate the majority of our attention toward your two covens. We can’t ignore the others, but yours will be the ones most determined to inflict harm.”

  “I could have told you that,” Egan says.

  “We like to confirm things for ourselves.”

  I throw a rein on my anger. “Fine, it’s confirmed. But every minute we spend talking, it’s one more minute when the covens could be killing innocent people outside this building.”

  Sarah’s face softens by a fraction, as if she’s glad to hear my concern for others. “We did a sweep of the entire area in and around Salem today. They’re nowhere nearby.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re not on their way.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but the information you gave us today will allow us to ask the Latimers and their fellow observers to focus their attention in the right spots.”

  “Don’t get them wrapped up in this any more than they are,” I say, some of the anger creeping back into my voice. That anger is fueled by my fear for my friends who aren’t protected by this facility.

  “They’re going to help whether we ask them to or not. They told us as much.”

  Again, Sarah and Amanda make for the door.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” I ask.

  Sarah turns back and simply stares for a long moment. “A bit of brainstorming. If you’re able to access your full power, consider how we might best attack the covens. If they bring a sizeable force here, even your white witch powers might be overwhelmed if you try to take them on all at once. We’ll have to find a way to attack them in stages.”

  With that directive, the women vacate the room, leaving Egan and me to play generals.

  After a few minutes of frustrated pacing, I tell Egan we might as well do as Sarah suggested. At least it might prove more productive than cursing our current helpless situation.

  About the time my stomach starts growling, the door unlocks, and Amanda and a woman I’ve never seen before appear in the doorway. “Time to eat,” Amanda says, still not sounding like our biggest fan.

  Egan and I give each other a quick glance before following the Bane down the hallway. After a couple of turns, she leads us into a dining room with a twelve-person oak table.

  A gasp draws my attention to the far side of the table. Toni stares back at us with wide eyes that reflect no small amount of fear. It breaks my heart to see the girl I consider my best friend frightened of me.

  In the next moment, my eyes find Keller’s. I’m so happy to see him tears of joy pool in my eyes, and I smile at him.

  He doesn’t smile back.

  Chapter Three

  I’ve lost him. I know it as surely as I know the reason why is that I finally crossed the line he cannot forgive. This isn’t like when he found me in Salem after I’d left him behind in North Carolina. Then there had been obvious anger burning in his eyes. Now they’re just blank. I’d rather have the anger. At least then I’d know he cared.

  After several seconds of looking at his cold, empty eyes, I can’t stand it anymore. Part of me wants to turn and run away, but if I can’t sit in a room with the boy I’ve loved and lost without falling apart, what chance do I have of being strong enough to end the coven threat?

  “Take a seat,” Amanda says as she rounds the far end of the table, taking her spot next to the head chair, which is no doubt Sarah’s.

  Egan touches the lower part of my back, urging me to move. I lower my eyes to the top of the table and settle myself in a chair across from Keller, my stomach tied in knots. Egan takes the spot next to me, across from Toni. None of us says a word, and the silence is suffocating.

  “They can’t hurt you,” Sarah says as she enters the room and obviously picks up on the massive amounts of tension.

  “But . . . but we watched her a kill a man,” Toni says, sounding half-frightened and half-apologetic.

  I glance in her direction and meet her eyes for only a moment before she looks away.

  “Yes, she did, and that’s why she’s here,” Sarah says as she takes her seat in the chair I suspected was hers. “Why you’re all here.”

  “I don’t understand,” Toni says.

  Before Sarah can respond, I say, “Because the amount of magic I used will not be overlooked by the covens. They will arrive here in force, if they already haven’t. This facility is shielded, so you’re safe here.”

  Toni doesn’t look entirely convinced, but there’s enough of my friend left for me to tell that she wants to be. I don’t think she wants to lose me any more than I want to lose her.

  I lift my arm with the bracelet. “The Bane used these to harness our magic. At the moment, I have no more power than you do.”

  That gets Keller’s attention, and the inevitable questions about stopping the covens using this method follow. While Sarah explains to Toni and Keller what Egan and I already know, I can’t pull my eyes away from Keller’s profile. My heart breaks at the same time I grow more determined to redeem myself enough to win him back.

  “I’m going to learn to control the magic.”

  “You tried that before,” he says without looking at me.

  “That’s
enough,” Egan says beside me as his fists clench atop the table.

  I place my hand on Egan’s forearm. “It’s okay. He’s right.”

  “No, it’s not okay. This is not all Jax’s fault. Yes, she’s the one who killed Barrow, but not a one of us is without fault.” He gestures toward Sarah, Amanda and a few other women I don’t recognize. “You all kept secrets, ones that might have kept her from going that far.” He jabs his finger toward Keller. “You left her side when she could have used your support most, when you could have calmed her.”

  I know this isn’t fair because the plan had called for Egan and Keller to approach Barrow from the sides while I occupied him head-on, but I don’t interrupt him. I can’t lie and say that having someone stand up for me doesn’t feel good.

  “I should have tried harder to stop her, fighting magic with magic.” Egan shifts his focus to Toni, though I can tell it pains him to do so. I don’t need our witch connection to sense that. “And when she’s at her lowest point, her friends turn away and blame her for possessing a power she didn’t ask for.”

  Silence settles on the room in the wake of Egan’s accusations.

  I take a deep, shaky breath. “I’m sorry I lost control.” I need to say it out loud, even if it makes no difference to anyone but me. “I’m sorry that I let you all down.”

  I can’t force myself to look at Keller, so my gaze connects with Toni’s instead.

  “I really thought you could control it.” Toni sounds more sad than disappointed. “I’ve never seen anything more frightening.”

  The image of Barrow’s charred face staring at me as we lie face-to-face in the snow causes me to shiver. “Me neither.” Another deep breath. “As much as I wish I could, I can’t undo what happened. I have to live with the fact that I didn’t have to kill Barrow but I did it anyway, that I tortured him and enjoyed it.” Bile rises in my throat at that admission. “All I can do at this point is move forward, try to atone by making sure no one else suffers because of a coven witch. I swear to you that I will do everything I can, no matter how hard it is, to protect you. All of you.”