Dark, wet blood stained my skin. My dress. It was all that I had left of him.
Ronan and Darius were both dead.
This time Ididscream, a primal howl that tore through my throat and out my lips, ripping me apart on the way. It was so loud, so deep, it made the trees quake, the tarot-card leaves falling all around me.
The Lovers card landed before me—another naked couple, this time on the beach, wrapped in an erotic embrace. A serpent had just sunk its fangs into the man’s leg.
When I rose up from the ground and looked up the path, my gaze locked onto a pair of familiar ocean-blue eyes.
“Tears? Seriously?” Asher’s cupid-bow lips stretched into a sexy grin. “I thought you’d be at least alittlehappy to see me.”
“Ash!” I reached for him, but he held up a hand to stop me.
“I can’t stay.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I’m dying.”
“But… how? Do you need to feed?”
“Nah. Nothing you can do about that. It’s in my blood. It’s killing me.”
“The devil’s trap? But I… I saved you. It’s gone.” I stretched up on my tiptoes and pressed my mouth to his, desperate to taste the cinnamon heat of his kiss. To remember what it felt like to be in his arms, falling apart at the seams in the best kind of way.
His lips were cold and unyielding.
“No, witch,” he said firmly, pushing me away.
“Why are you doing this?” I whispered.
Asher shook his head, turning his back on me. “Because you’repoison, Cupcake. And you’re killing us all.”
I tried to go after him, but he disappeared beneath the archway of tree branches, and another tarot card fluttered down before me. It was the High Priestess this time, dressed in her sky-blue robes and standing on a crescent moon, wielding her crystal scepter.
Remembering my mother, I reached out to touch the woman’s face, but the card transformed. Unlike the dreamy, peaceful Priestess I’d just seen, the one looking up at me now was fierce and wild-looking, with two interlocking crescent moons for a face and long, skeleton-white fingers. Her dark gray wings were studded with rivets, as if they were made of metal.
The card vanished, and a woman with curly gray hair stepped out from behind the trees. She wore an amulet—a silver crescent moon beneath an eye made of opal, topaz, and black onyx.
I’d know that amulet anywhere. She’d died wearing it. And the hunters who’d butchered her tore it from her neck.
“Calla?” I breathed. It’d been ten years since I’d seen her, but she looked just as I remembered, with sharp eyes and that wild, curly hair.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. They were the first words that came to mind—ones I’d been wanting to say to her since her death.
“I know you are,” Calla said with a small frown. She reached forward to fluff out my dress, which had transformed from the ivory sheath to a peach-colored sundress that just skimmed the tops of my thighs. “But sorry is just a word. It’s not enough. If only you’d been stronger, Rayanne.”
“I survived, though. Just like you told me to.”
“Still, a capable witch would’ve been able to save me, too.”
“But I was just a kid!”
“And yet you were already able to bring animals back from the dead.” She clucked her tongue. “I never should’ve adopted you. You’ve always been broken, child. There was a reason your real mother abandoned you.”
I blinked in confusion, heart hammering in my chest. “But… you told me my mother died.”
“Died, abandoned you, sold you to the highest bidder… What difference does it make? You turned out terrible anyway. She should’ve killed you as a baby. All of us would be better for it.”
