Night Witch (Weatherstone College, #2)(55)

When I reached up to touch his face, he moved closer once more. “I love you and I trust you,” I said, determined that when he left here today, he’d know exactly how much he meant to me. “Promise that no matter what you learn today, even if it’s going to change my life, you tell me the truth. I don’t ever want to go back to last year when you were a beautiful and scary stranger, keeping all your dark secrets.”

Logan shook his head. “We’re partners, Precious. I won’t keep the truth from you, even if it’s hard. You’re mine.”

“And you’re mine.”

Logan leaned over and brushed his lips against mine. “Always. I’ve been yours for most of my life. You know that.”

I did know it.

Now we just had to hope that it wasn’t too late to reverse whatever Rafael had done to me and my magic.





Chapter 25




Logan was showered and dressed in dark jeans and a hoodie. Noah had arrived too, and they were about to head to Italy, where the Kingston Enterprises head offices were located. “I’ll call you soon,” he promised as he pressed a kiss to my lips.

Noah gave me a quick hug and said, “I’ll keep him safe.”

Logan ignored his best friend, spending a few seconds opening the transport on the back deck. When they stepped through, my heart slammed in my chest, and I clutched my phone, waiting for his call. Mom and Dad guided me into the dining room, and we were soon joined by the rest of my siblings.

Everyone had put their life on hold to deal with my issue, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

“Rafael didn’t used to be a billionaire,” Dad said as he sipped his coffee; he’d been attempting to joke me out of my nerves for fifteen minutes. “When I met him, he was a punk-ass kid building cars out of his garage, and computers out of his tiny bedroom. Always was brilliant with anything electronic or that contained an engine.”

“He was brilliant,” Mom agreed. “Isabel used to rave about how she wasn’t good enough for him because he was so much smarter than her. But she was an earth witch, you know. One who reveled in nature and in the energy of the moon. She was never indoors, and yet she married this nerdy science warlock who would spend days tinkering with his computers.”

“Yin and yang,” Trevor said with a shrug. “There’s a reason they say opposites attract. It’s that lovely balance that keeps everything interesting.”

His eyes met mine, and my heart ached at his pain hovering in the flames. Trevor was hurting. He hadn’t mentioned Belle at all since we came home, but I knew she was on his mind. She’d be on mine more too if I weren’t so stressed by my current malady—as Logan would say.

“When Isabel died, he broke,” Dad said, his humor fading as the darker memories took over, “and I lost my oldest friend. It felt as if a part of my family died. It took me a long time to move forward without him. The second he enacted the blood oath against me, though, I put our past behind me and decided he was dead to me as well. A threat to me or mine was enough to cut the cord.”

Mom toyed with her teacup, and I found myself asking one more time: “What actually happened that day in the forest, Mom? It’s too late to worry about your theory disturbing our balance. We’re already deep in it.”

Dad lurched forward as if to intervene, but Mom answered before he could. “I truly don’t know, but this theory . . . it’s one that I’ve thought on ever since I read Mom’s letters.” She had all our attention, but she didn’t lift her gaze from the delicate porcelain of her cup. “I think I did call a monster that day in the forest.”

I tried to breathe through the tightness in my chest—Rafael hated our family because he believed Mom killed his wife, and . . . he might be right. “You told me that you don’t have the same affinity as me,” I whispered as my heart broke. “How could you have called a monster?”

She pressed her lips together. “I don’t have your affinity, but I do think I might have tapped into it somehow. After you were born, I noticed a foreign strain of energy in my system. I could feel it, this weird, icy magic that didn’t mesh with my elemental magic. It wasn’t there before you were born.”

“How could my birth trigger a magical share?” I asked, trying to recall if I’d ever learned anything like that in school.

“Your birth was quite traumatic.” Mom tried to smile, but it didn’t entirely hit the mark. “The most traumatic I had in all four pregnancies.”

“She almost died. They had to do an emergency C-section,” Dad added, his voice gruff.

Jensen looked between our parents. “You said Paisley’s huge head almost cut you in half, but we didn’t realize you nearly died.”

This story wasn’t a secret, but they’d clearly kept the full extent of the situation from us.

“Your sister’s head was perfectly sized and shaped,” Mom admonished Jensen. “It was just one of those births where everything went wrong. Mother and child in utero share blood and magic. A literal sharing of life. I can only assume that during either your development or maybe in the trauma of your birth, I took on more of your magic than I should have. A strain of reaper energy that could call a monster in the right circumstances.”

My world ground to a halt, and it wasn’t until Jensen wrapped an arm around me and said, “Breathe, Paisley. Breath, sis,” that I felt the rattling of air in my lungs.