She laughed and crushed her cigarette against a glass vase on top of her dresser. “I don’t want to fight any more than you do,” she said. “But I won’t betray my priestess. I’ll give you the opportunity to leave now before things get messy between us.”
A spark of energy lit on her fingertips. The sheer power of that single spark spread throughout the room, sending chills down my spine. This Prima was from one of the oldest covens of the Order, and her power was no joke.
But I hadn’t come this far just to turn around and go home. She already knew that.
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“As we speak, your daughters are asleep in their beds down the hall,” I said. “I know this because I stopped at their rooms first before coming to yours.”
Her lips parted and she swallowed a lump of fear. “You better not have hurt them, demon, or I will kill you where you stand.”
“They aren’t injured,” I said. “Yet.”
I lifted my hand, revealing three dark ropes of energy that led into the hallway.
“If you don’t give me the information I want, I will snap their pretty necks with one flick of my wrist.”
I hated the words even as I spoke them. These girls were still innocents. It wasn’t their fault they were born into this family. But I had no choice. Harper was in trouble, and I was running out of time. Tonight was our best hope, and it had to go perfectly.
The Prima straightened, her eyes darting from mine to the three ropes of shadow in my hand.
“Please,” she said, blinking back tears. “Don’t hurt them.”
“No matter what your priestess has told you, I’m not a monster,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt your innocent daughters, believe me. But I have to find Harper. I’m willing to do what must be done. It’s your choice.”
She closed her eyes and leaned against the side of her bed. “I can’t tell you where to find her,” she said. “Priestess Evers never tells any of us where she lives, and she always comes to visit us through the Hall of Doorways. I don’t know anything more than that.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
The Prima looked away, lighting another cigarette. Her hand trembled slightly.
“You realize that if I tell you anything important, the emerald priestess will punish me and my daughters beyond anything you can imagine,” she said.
“I know that her evil has no boundaries,” I said.
She tilted her head. “My mother wouldn’t have hesitated to let you strangle me in my sleep,” she said. “She was fiercely loyal to her coven and her duties.”
“And you?”
She looked away, her eyes landing on a photo of her with her daughters when they were younger.
“I love my children more than my mother loved me,” she said.
I studied her. Was she going to talk to me?
“You have to understand the situation you’re putting me in here,” she said. “If I don’t give you what you want, you’ll kill my daughters and fight me as well. If I do talk to you, the emerald priestess will find me and punish me, likely taking my daughters away from me to—”
“To make them part of her collection?” I asked.
Her head snapped toward me. “Yes,” she said. The Prima’s eyes flashed for a moment in the half-darkness of the room. “Who told you that?”
“A hunter confessed it to me with her dying breath,” I said. “A young woman from your coven who used to be called Juliana when she was still human. Did you know her?”
Her hand fluttered near her heart. “Juliana,” she whispered. “She had so much potential.”
“So you remember her?” I asked.
“I remember everything,” she said. “The women in the Prima family aren’t given the luxury of forgetting. We have to rule the coven and keep things in order, which means that we know all of the horrible things that go on. Juliana was a sweet girl, but she wouldn’t listen to reason. Her coven needed her and she turned her back on us. I’m sorry to hear she’s dead.”
“Did you know she’d been turned into a hunter?” I asked.
The Prima shook her head. “I only knew Priestess Evers had taken her. I assumed she had either been turned into a doll or a daughter. That’s usually the way of things.”
“Doll?” I asked.
“If I tell you what I know, you have to make me a promise,” she said.
I waited, not agreeing to anything until I knew what she was asking of me. I’d been making a lot of promises lately, and I didn’t have time to mess around. Right now, all over the world, my friends were standing in similar houses, having similar conversations.
In and out, that was the plan. I needed to get whatever information I could and leave.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Promise me you’ll take us someplace safe until this is all over,” she said.
I stepped back, surprised at her words. “You want to leave your coven?”
She closed her eyes for a brief moment and shook her head. “I don’t want to leave, but I don’t want to lose my daughters, either. If you’re as powerful and determined as I have heard, you’re going to find her one way or another,” she said. “And when you do, I want to be sure that my daughters are safe from her anger.”
I didn’t tell her that I was taking her to the Southern Kingdom tonight, anyway. By morning, our dungeon would be filled with emerald gate Primas and their daughters. In a single night, we will have crippled the emerald priestess’s covens and put every single emerald witch in danger. Kill the Prima and her daughters, and the entire coven dies in an instant.
The emerald priestess wouldn’t be able to ignore that the way she’d ignored the deaths of her hunters.
“I promise to take you somewhere the emerald priestess can’t get to you,” I said. “I can’t promise it will be very comfortable, though.”
She let out a breath of smoke. “Comfort is the least of my concerns,” she said. “I have your word?”
“As long as I have your word that you won’t fight or harm anyone when we get to this place,” I said.
She nodded and put out her cigarette, closing the window.
She laughed softly. “A demon and a Prima trusting each other,” she said. “I never thought I would see the day. But then, it’s a Prima you’re looking for, isn’t it?”
“She was,” I said. “But now she is free. Just as you will be soon.”
“We’ll see about that,” she said. “Now, release my daughters so that I can think straight.”
I shook my head. “I don’t trust you that much,” I said.
She sat back down in the chair by her desk. “Okay, then,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I know. Then will you release them?”
“I will.”
“Like I said, Priestess Evers has never invited me or any of my family to her home. I have no idea where it is, except that it lies beyond a door engraved with an emerald scarab beetle,” she said.
That much, I already knew. I waited for her to say more.
“I can tell you something about her collection, though,” she said. “I’m not sure how it might help you, but it could give you some clue as to what she’s done with your Prima.”
“I’m listening.”
“The priestesses of the Order pride themselves on their ability to continue their family line and name,” she said. “As I’m sure you already know, most of them have a particular cycle of birth and rebirth.”
“I know how it worked with Priestess Winter,” I said. “She had three daughters of her own. When her eldest came of age and had given birth to three daughters of her own, Priestess Winter would consume her power and her life-force, taking on the woman’s identity and essentially pretending to become her through the use of glamours. The second would become permanently glamoured through sacrificial magic and sent out to a strategic location where she would become a spy for her mother. The third was tra
ined in defensive magic and stayed on to protect the priestess until the day she died. Then the cycle would repeat.”
“That is true for all of the priestesses,” she said. “Except Priestess Evers.”
I stared, confused.
“Priestess Evers is infertile,” she said. “She can’t have children of her own, and to this day it is the single most devastating truth of her life.”
I drew in a breath. No wonder the emerald priestess was so determined to gain power over her sisters by reopening the sapphire gates. She felt she had something to prove.
“How does she continue her line?” I asked.
“She steals from her faithful covens,” she said. “Whenever a young girl catches her eye or shows a display of power that Priestess Evers likes or thinks is unusual, she takes that young girl for herself. She wipes the memory of the mother and everyone in town besides the Prima. She wipes the memory of the girl through a series of spells and rituals, and then she refills her with memories of their life together. The girls, for the most part, come to believe they are her daughters, as if they’d been born of her, just as my daughters were born of me.”
“That’s horrifying,” I said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” she said. “Sometimes the mothers of these girls are hard to keep in line. Their memories come back or they refuse to let go of this emptiness inside of them. Some of them lose their minds with grief. In those cases, Priestess Evers captures the mothers before they can cause too much trouble.”
“What does she do with them?”
“Sometimes they become hunters,” she said. “Other times they become fuel for the priestess’s darkest spells. And, of course, both mothers and daughters sometimes become fuel for her life-force. Since she doesn’t have daughters of her own to consume, she eats the power of those who disobey her. Those who serve her but have grown older and less beautiful. She takes what she wants and does as she pleases.”
“How many?” I asked. “How many girls do you think she’s taken over the years?”
“I couldn’t even begin to guess,” the Prima said. “From my records, she’s taken fifteen girls from our coven in the past century. Some of them were just babies at the time. Others were like Juliana, already initiated into the Order and paired with a demon spirit.”
I gasped. “Fifteen from this coven alone? But there are hundreds of emerald gates around the world.”
“I imagine she has quite the collection by now, don’t you?” she asked.
“And she keeps them all with her?” I asked. “In her home?”
“From what I’ve guessed, she has a place near her house where the girls are...let’s call it rehabilitated,” she said. “If I had to guess, that’s where she’s put your Prima. Your Harper.”
“What does she do to them there?” I asked, unable to mask the trembling in my voice.
“Essentially, she brainwashes them,” she said. “I don’t know her exact process, but she works to wipe their memories and then she tells them lies until they believe them to be the truth. I can’t tell you anything more than that, because I’ve never seen it for myself.”
I thought of the emerald shards of glass found on the floor at Winterhaven. Rend’s tests had shown the shards were infused with pieces of Harper’s memories. She was planning to add Harper to her collection, stripping her of her memories of me and her life before she was taken. She was planning to make Harper her daughter.
I shook my head, not wanting to believe it could be true.
“You said something earlier about dolls,” I said.
The Prima sighed. “Sometimes, if the girls can’t be convinced to leave their past behind them, she turns them into living dolls,” she said. “She showed me a picture once, bragging about how beautiful a collection she’d managed to put together over the years. I’ll spare you the details, but it was arguably one of the most sickening things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
My jaw fell open, and I shook my head back and forth.
“I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear,” the Prima said. “But it’s been months since Harper disappeared. If you saved her now, she would probably fight you to the death. She likely has no memory you ever existed, and if she’s been obedient to the priestess and believed her lies, Harper may even be calling Priestess Evers her mother by now. Either that or she’s sitting in a room, all dressed up and posed at a tea party.”
“You don’t know her,” I said. “She’s not exactly the obedient type.”
The Prima sighed. “Then things could be much worse for her than that,” she said. “Priestess Evers does not forgive easily when she doesn't get what she wants. And if she’s taken Harper, there is only one thing she wants from her. The lucky, obedient girls are turned into daughters. The less obedient are turned into dolls. The really naughty girls are turned into hunters or consumed for their power.”
“Harper is a fighter,” I said. “She won’t let go of her memories easily. And even without her memories, she won’t follow the rules blindly. She’ll question them at every turn.”
“Then I can only pray, for your sake, you find her before it’s too late,” she said. “A girl like that, half-demon, half-human, with such remarkable power? She could extend the priestess’s life by another fifty years. Maybe longer.”
“I’ll find her,” I said through clenched teeth. “All I need to know is where she is.”
The Prima smiled. “It’s not where you find her,” she said. “It’s when you find her.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I muttered. “Is there anything more you can tell me before we go?”
She shook her head. “Give me a moment to pack a small bag, and I’ll walk with you to wake my daughters.”
“What about your husband?” I asked.
“He can fend for himself,” she said. “The less he knows about who I truly am, the better. I’ll whisper a spell into his ear as he sleeps. Make him think we’ve gone south to visit my aunt for a few weeks. She’s been ill.”
I nodded and waited as she packed. When she finished, we walked downstairs so she could whisper in her husband’s ear. The man nodded his head and turned on his side, his eyes never opening. She led me back up the stairs and down the hall where she woke her older daughters one at a time, telling them to quickly pack a bag of their own and come with us.
At her youngest daughter’s bedside, she paused, taking a moment to smooth the wild hair of her sleeping child. “Would you really have killed them?” she asked, tears glistening in her eyes.
“Would you ever have let me?” I asked.
I reached for her hand as her two older daughters entered the room, their eyes filled with fear and confusion. The Prima grabbed my hand, and then placed her other one on her youngest daughter’s, gripping it tightly. She motioned for the others to follow suit, and her oldest daughter carefully took my free hand and grabbed her sister’s. Once we were all linked together, I shifted to smoke and carried them through the house, out the crack in the window, and into the night toward home.
The Horror Of It
From the spell book in the basement, I learned that my new ability was called astral projection. According to the book, it was a rare ability, but extremely useful. If practiced, a strong witch could extend her consciousness miles away from her own body.
On nights that I wasn’t able to go down to the basement to practice magic there, I strengthened my astral projection instead, pushing myself farther and farther into the asylum, exploring every corner I could find.
I had no problem walking through doors or walls, and each night I was able to go a little farther before I tired and had to return.
Tonight, exactly a week after the first time I’d used the ability, I decided to explore the doctor’s office a little more thoroughly.
The biggest downside to astral projection was that since I wasn’t in my physical body, I also couldn’t seem to physically move anything. I couldn’t open the doctor’s files or search thr
ough her desk, so I had to settle for whatever she’d carelessly left out at the end of the day, which wasn’t much.
All of her files seemed to be safely locked away. Her desk had been cleared completely, and the only thing that caught my eye was a picture sitting on top of her desk. I hadn’t paid much attention to it before since I could usually only see the back of the frame from my seat in the chair. But tonight I stared at it, the woman in the photo incredibly familiar to me.
The sight of her red hair and green eyes put a bad taste in my mouth and every scar on my body seemed to burn with flame.
I reached out to touch the photo, forgetting for a moment that I couldn’t actually touch it until my hand passed right through it like a ghost.
The door to the office swung open, and I jumped, scared I had just been caught snooping.
Dr. Evers entered the room with a sigh, walking straight through me to stand behind her desk. She had no idea I was even here.
She opened the smaller drawer in the middle of her desk and retrieved a large brass key that had a small emerald embedded in a swirling design at the top.
“I swear, if that woman didn’t have her head screwed on, she’d forget it,” she mumbled. She tucked the key into her pocket and left the room, locking the door behind her.
I followed, wondering if the doctor lived here at the hospital. Why else would she still be here this late at night?
She took a familiar path toward the main entrance of the hospital. I’d never actually left the confines of the asylum. I usually tired out when I got close to the front door, but tonight I pushed forward, determined to see where she was headed.
Dr. Evers pushed the front door open and stepped out into the near-total darkness of the night. She crossed the front lawn and opened the gate of a tall wrought-iron fence that surrounded the property. She stepped toward the quiet street separating the asylum from a large Victorian home.
Was that where she lived?
I paused near the street as she crossed, my head feeling dizzy for a moment. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep following, but I had to at least try. I needed to know if the woman in the picture lived in that house.
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