The Coven （Coven of Bones, #1）
Harper L. Woods & Adelaide Forrest
PROLOGUE
ALARIC GRAYSON THORNE
In the 329 years since my making, I’d come to appreciate the finer things in life. The beauty of the meticulously cut colored glass in the arched windows and the prisms of light they cast over the dark stone tile of the halls at Hollow’s Grove University was only one of those. It was not to be diminished by the tantalizing scent of witch’s blood drifting from the messenger escorting me to the tribunal room.
The Covenant wouldn’t wait long for any, not even the male they’d appointed as the Headmaster of their precious school. Cobwebs and dust lined the pathway before us, and I turned up my nose at the way the University had fallen into disrepair since I’d last set foot in it fifty years prior.
The witch at my side stopped before the tribunal gates at the end of the hall. She waved a well-manicured hand over the lock, watching as the iron and gold mechanism rotated until it parted. Gears turned slowly, the ripple effect sliding up until the rest of the locks followed suit. The bars latched across the seam where the two doors met finally retreated. The soft click of them opening a signal for the witch to grasp the handle.
“How many generations separate you and George Collins’s sister?” I asked, forcing the witch to pinch her lips as she looked over her shoulder at me.
“Nine generations separate The Covenant and I,” she said with a sneer.
The witches were always so testy when discussing what had become of their leaders, of the two witches who’d commanded them through the centuries.
Susannah Madizza and George Collins were no longer—replaced by the two halves of The Covenant when the Hecate witches raised them from their graves.
“A shame,” I said with a grin. “Sarah Collins was quite lovely before she died. It is unfortunate she wasn’t able to pass that along to her descendants.”
The witch’s face fell with shock as I stepped through the gate she opened. I turned to the right and moved toward the tribunal room where The Covenant waited for me. My escort remained at the gates, the good little puppy her great-, great-, great- whatever grandmother had seen fit to raise her to become.
“You’re one to talk, you undead bastard!” she called out behind me.
I adjusted the jacket of my suit, straightening the lapel as I grasped both the inner doors of the tribunal and swiftly pulled them open.
The Covenant sat in the gilded chairs they’d had fashioned centuries ago, skeletal fingers grasping the arms as what had once been Susannah Madizza leaned forward. Her hood shifted to the side, allowing some of the sunlight shining through the kaleidoscope windows at the side of the circular chamber to illuminate what remained of her face.
The flesh had long since rotted from her body, leaving only the gaunt shape of a skeleton to stare back at me. Her neck tipped at an unnatural angle where it had snapped when they hanged her, the slightest slant to the side displaying the manner of her death all those years ago.
Her eye sockets remained empty even as she somehow saw me. “Tormenting our children once again, Headmaster Thorne?” she asked, that eerie, ageless voice stretching between us. She tapped the tip of her finger bone against the arm of her chair in a steady staccato that I felt like a strike to my impatience.
The other half of her magic sat beside her, the masculine equivalent to her feminine.
George Collins had no descendants to his name to be defensive of—not with the rules that prohibited male witches from procreating if they chose to keep their magic. He was just as skeletal as Susannah, but his neck curved to the other side. What I could see of his bones revealed deep slash marks etched into them, lingering evidence of the torture he’d sustained in the hours before his death.
“I have to presume you did not summon me here to discuss my manners with your grandniece, Covenant,” I said, gritting my teeth.
My kind were not meant to be subservient to any, but the magic that kept us bound to the flesh of our vessels made us reliant on the witches if we ever wanted to be freed from the bodies that trapped us.
We’d thought it a blessing to never need to possess a new form, to have a body that could hold us for an eternity.
We’d thought wrong.
“We have decided to reopen the University,” George said, speaking before his female counterpart could interject. “We all need fresh blood. The attention we suffered as a result of that day has long since faded from memory.”
“As much as I, too, would appreciate new blood to feed upon, I have to urge caution in opening our walls once more. Rumors will spread the moment we announce our reopening,” I said, looking between the two skeletons staring at me.