One I’d seen in my dream.
One that he hated to see staring back at him when he looked at me.
“You’re the spitting image of Loralei, girl,” she said, her voice dropping low as she spoke the words. “Your aunt, if I assume correctly?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, shaking my head in denial. “I’ve never met this woman.”
“Of course you haven’t,” Susannah scoffed. “She was murdered within these walls long before you were born. That doesn’t mean you don’t know exactly what she is.”
I dropped my hand, letting the picture fall to my side as I considered my options. It wouldn’t take much to find my father now that she knew what she was looking for. There had to be records of his birth somewhere, and all things hidden could be found once someone knew what to look for.
“And what do you intend to do with that knowledge? Kill me?” I asked, staring my potential death in the face. I looped a finger in a circle, rousing the plants beside me. They pulled back, preparing to strike if they needed to defend me.
“You are the last of my bloodline. Surely you must know that I would do anything to preserve that,” Susannah said, hanging her head forward. She pinched her brow between two finger bones. “Leave. Leave this place and never return. Ward yourself so that even the Covenant and Alaric cannot find you. I will allow you to live out of loyalty to the blood we share, but you cannot remain here.”
A few weeks prior, the offer would have been everything I wanted. I’d attempted to fulfill my duty and failed, but I’d done what I could. She’d given me permission to leave, to go to Ash and live out our lives free of the Coven.
And yet…
“Where are the bones, Susannah?” I asked, staring her in the face. It was the closest thing she would get to a confession from me, the acknowledgement that I was searching for something only a Hecate would care about.
Susannah laughed, the sound vibrating against her rib bones awkwardly. A chill ran up my spine. I didn’t want to consider what it was that she found entertaining in all of this. I glanced at the rosebush at my side, swallowing as she took a step toward me.
“Foolish girl, your lover has had them all this time. Surely you know that and that’s why you allowed him to touch you. Why you’ve let him take such liberties.”
My heart jolted at the certainty in her voice. In the way she was so confident in her assertion. I couldn’t be positive if she was lying to trick me, but I felt like I couldn’t breathe past the sudden pressure in my chest.
“You’re wrong,” I said, forcing myself to laugh off the pain. “Gray knows what I am. He said he would help me find the bones. He would have given them to me if he had them.”
Susannah stilled, her skull going slack as the traces of amusement faded from her bones. “He knows?” The closest thing I’d ever heard to fear filled the tremor in that voice as she closed the distance between us, clutching my hands in her grip. “Hell’s sake, Willow. Listen to me. If you only ever listen to one thing I tell you, let it be this. Run. Run and do not ever come back,” she ordered, wincing as the thorny vines of the roses wrapped around her bones and pulled her arm back away from me.
“Why would I run? The Vessels loved Charlotte for what she was to them,” I said, laughing in the face of her terror. I couldn’t shake that sinking feeling in my gut, no matter how hard I tried, not even when the roses wrapped around Susannah’s waist and she didn’t fight.
“All that I have done, the choice male witches are forced to make, has been to keep him from getting his hands on you,” she said as the rosebush dragged her toward the ground.
I didn’t command them to stop; I couldn’t. Not when I didn’t believe she’d allow me to live.
Not when she knew who I was.
“You’re not making any sense,” I said, shaking my head in denial.
“Those bones are not worth what you will unleash if you stay here. You don’t know him, Willow. The bargain swore those of us who do to secrecy,” she said, something that resembled a strangled sob leaving her as the rose bush dragged her to the fresh dirt in the garden bed. It pulled her to the surface, snapping her bones as I winced. She lay in a heap of bones as the flowers and thorns wrapped around her, pulling her into the earth.
She disappeared bit by bit, the plants dragging her below.
“I won’t unleash anything. I just want to do what’s right.”