I couldn’t breathe.
My lungs filled with raw, unfiltered power the moment the safe opened, and I could barely see through the haze of black as he reached into the safe and pulled something free. I gasped for breath, curling over myself as pain tore my insides in two, as my stomach cramped, and things felt like they shifted within me to make room for the new magic.
For what I’d never been able to touch.
Gray turned away from the safe, holding the unsuspecting velvet bag in his hand. It was the deepest black, the fabric smooth as he ran his finger over the surface of it.
The bones woke up. They rose to answer his call as my back bowed and then straightened.
“You’ve had them all this time,” I gasped, running my hand over my arm as he stepped around the desk. I’d wanted the bones; thought they were the key to completing my destiny.
Now I couldn’t wait to get away from them.
I pushed to my feet, swaying beneath the power trying to draw me in and consume me. I stepped around the arm of the chair as Gray’s voice lashed out like a whip.
“Sit down, Willow,” he ordered, the compulsion in his voice forcing me back to my chair.
He held out the bones for me, watching and waiting for me to take them in my grip. Despite a lifetime of training for this moment, I didn’t want them.
I didn’t want to aid in whatever he had planned, and with the way his blue eyes bore down on me, there was no doubt that it was something.
Something bad.
“Take the bones, Witchling,” he said.
My hand rose as if it would take them in spite of my desires, but I forced my fingers to curl into my palm. Refusing to touch them, to take them on his terms.
“No,” I said, gasping as I fought his compulsion and shook my head. It took everything in me to fight it, to keep my hand away from the bag. “I want no part in this.”
“Your entire life has been a part of this,” he murmured softly, reaching out with his free hand to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. It was wet, and it was only then that I realized I was sweating with the effort of denying the bones.
Of refusing to allow them to make their home with me.
“Then I guess it’s time I make a new one for myself,” I grunted.
Gray smiled, a humorless, twisted thing filled with pity. “I have waited a very long time for you, and my patience grows thin. You will accept the bones one way or another.”
“I don’t want them anymore. Not until you tell me the truth,” I said, laying my hands atop the arms of the chair. I grabbed onto the wood, digging my nails into it with the force of resisting the call.
“What you want does not matter. They’ve chosen you,” he said, opening the top of the bag and staring into it. The soft, pulsing light of faint purple that illuminated his face would live in my nightmares for an eternity.
He snapped out with his free hand, grabbing me by the hair and tugging my head back. My neck arched back, my arms flailing as I tried to find a part of him to scratch.
“Gray!” I protested, struggling as he shoved the weight of something eternal into my chest.
I rasped, power flooding my chest as the bones rose from the bag. He held the soft velvet against my skin, allowing the bones to shift and mold themselves as they climbed around my neck. I squeezed my eyes closed, fighting the burning pain that they brought. It was like nothing I’d ever known before, like being remade and reborn as they snapped and tumbled, the click-clack of bones bumping against one another as they settled into the shape of a necklace and stayed.
I reached up, tugging at the bones and trying to remove them. My aunt hadn’t worn them as a necklace when I’d seen her, and my mother had never mentioned anything of the sort when she spoke of the bag the Hecate witches had been known to carry.
“Why?” I wheezed when the bones wouldn’t budge. I didn’t understand.
Gray leaned forward, touching his mouth to the corner of my lips gently. “Because you will be the last of the Hecate line and the magic in those bones will die with you, my love.”
37
WILLOW
He released his grip on my hair, stepping back and staring down at the bone necklace he’d forced on me. I raised tentative fingers to touch them, wincing back from the feeling they created within me. My earth magic felt like life, like new growth and spring. This felt like the slow decay of autumn, like the death of all nature.
I pushed to my feet, heading for the mirror next to the doorway so that I could look at the bones slung around my neck. They were the finger bones of my ancestors, of the witches who had come before me. They dangled as if tied by an invisible chain, draping themselves in a single layer along my skin.