Instinctively I reached forward, my fingers slipping into the promise of warmth offered by the light. My skin tingled, but it wasn’t creepy or unpleasant; more like getting into a bath that’s just a little too hot—a surprise at first, then bliss.
“What is this place?” I whispered.
A soft breeze danced across my hair, bringing with it the lilac and lavender scent I knew so well. The answer was in my head, all around me, everywhere at once.
I knew. Remembered.
This wasmyplace. My magic. My source.
The place of calm serenity I’d retreat to, deep inside myself, when my adopted mother Calla was first teaching me how to use my magic.
Some witches drew magical energy by visualizing their bodies extending into the earth, like the roots of a tree—Sophie was like that. Others got energy from the moon, or raised a cone of power with other witches, or performed rituals to call on the grace of their deities.
There were as many ways to access energy for magic as there were witches.
Me? I came here.
I hadn’t though—not for more than nine years.
But now I felt the magic humming through my veins again, waking up after its long nap.
“How is this possible?”
Behind me, the leaves rustled,
It felt so good, so right. Such a part of me, I wondered how I’d managed to go so long without it. Calla had always told me it was a rare and powerful witch who could generate her own magic energy, but once we figured out that that was my method, she’d done her best to teach me how to care for it, access it, and replenish it.
I’d always loved coming here. Always. And for the first sixteen years of my life, I knew it as well as I knew my own face in the mirror.
But I was twenty-five now, and this place… it wasn’t exactly as I’d remembered.
Beneath the scent of lilac and lavender I’d always associated with my magic, something else lurked—a cloying, rotten scent I couldn’t quite place. Where once the path was clear and well-defined, edged in knee-high colorful blooms and ferns as soft as feathers, now it was wild and untamed. Uncontrolled. Before, there had been no eyes watching, glittering and unblinking in the pale moonlight. And out beyond the stone pedestal, the gentle rolling meadow so bright in my memory was now a gnarled, leafless forest. The trees were enshrouded in mist, their branches barren and broken.
It looked like a great black skeleton army on the march.
Nothing is static,a voice inside me said.All things must change.
As I peered into the dark wood, the bare trees began to shift, slowly revealing a new path. Something compelled me forward, though this path was narrower, the trees so close the branches scraped my arms.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched—not just by the glittering eyes of the forest, but something else. Something sinister.
I will find you…
Rubbing the goosebumps from my arms, I hurried down the path toward another clearing, stopping before a stone archway choked with gnarled black vines and carved with glowing silver-blue runes.
Enter,the trees seemed to whisper.
An iron gate appeared beneath the arch, and I wrenched it open and stepped through. Stars glittered in the night sky, but soon the shifting clouds obscured the view. The clearing before me darkened.
The trees were closing in.
Dense mist crept out from the trees and swirled around my ankles, and once again I was shivering. The black skeleton army stepped forward, and for the first time I noticed the black-and-silver threads draped over their branches, swaying gently in the breeze like tinsel on a Christmas tree.
It was breathtaking.
As I watched, mesmerized, the bare black branches stretched forward, closing in around me. With the same instinctual movement that had guided me into the warm indigo light on the pedestal, I reached for the closest branch, twining my fingers with the cool, shimmering threads. They wound around my hands, instantly tightening, icy cold and wrong, wrong, wrong.
“No!” I jerked backward out of the mist and back through the gate, falling hard on my ass. The forest vanished on impact, the alley reappearing just as quickly. But this time, I was surrounded by a dome—some kind of iridescent shield. It glimmered in the air like a soap bubble, blocking out the mist and the sounds of the warehouse district.
