My vision blurs, dark spots swimming in my eyes. Blood pounds in my ears, drowning out everything but the white-hot agony gutting me from within and the raw terror in my mate’s voice as he fights for what they’re stealing from us.
Deidre’s face contorts with rage, spittle flying from her lips. “I care nothing for her future!” She slams her fist against the altar, the crack echoing. “What aboutmyfuture? Ours!”
She whirls, gesturing violently toward the circle of witches, their eyes burning with hunger as they lean forward, all rocking and chanting in unison. “Her fertility is a sacrifice we will honor. But it isours!”
“What will you do, hmm?” Ghost taunts in a low, deadly whisper. “A transference spell won’t work, there’s too many of you.”
Deidre’s eyes gleam in the firelight. “Consumption.” Her finger extends toward the cauldron. Ghost’s face drains of color. “Her reproductive organs steeped in her blood. The spell I’ve waited decades for, and all that’s required is we drink.”
My heart drops into my stomach.
“That’s what this is all about?” Ghost steps wide, blocking me from her view. As if that could somehow protect me from her magic. He tilts his head as he takes her in.
“You’re infertile,” he states. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
And then the pieces click. Her obsession with pregnancy. Shifter hormones from heat, our blood.
“With the prisoners we just let escape, and with your blood, Mona, the magic is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Holy shit,” I wheeze.
The witches behind her continue their chanting.
na´chno´ mde´~a~ hers mde´~a~ t'ach mine
na´chno´ mde´~a~ hers mde´~a~ t'ach mine
na´chno´ mde´~a~ hers mde´~a~ t'ach mine
A loud crash comes from behind us, but the pain stabs deeper, sharper.
“Please don’t do this. You can’t take this from her,” Ghost pleads on my behalf. On behalf of our pack, our future.
“She’s a wolf, she’ll regenerate.”
“We don’t regenerate limbs or organs, you fucking psycho!” he shouts. “We heal at the site like a cauterized wound.”
Ghost turns to me. It’s like I can see his heart breaking in real time. “Mona, if she succeeds…”
I’m not ready for children. I don’t even want to think about that. But to lose the choice? To take that away from me, before I’ve even had a chance to live my life?
Aftereverything?
“I don’t understand,” I say, as she watches me. “All of this is about you getting pregnant?”
Everything she said to Silas about having more power over the other covens, it was all just vague nonsense—megalomania, he called it—but no one thought to look closer.
I laugh bitterly through the pain. “You’re barren.”
Her face contorts with rage. “You mock me, but you’re the one on your knees,” she hisses, circling closer. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to have so little power, you’re a joke among your kind? I was withering away like some common hedge witch. I couldn’t control it, I couldn’t slow it. Then an elder witch offered us a bargain—we sacrificed our bloodlines, our fertility, for power that would make us the most powerful witches of our time.”
“So you gave up your fertility?”
“Isacrificed!”
“But I thought witches believed having children diluted their magic? Why bother wanting children now? Why take this from me, from all of us? All this pain and suffering you’ve caused!” I scream.
Deidre’s eyes burn with fury. “Who do you think started that crusade? I’m the one that convinced generations of witches that having children diluted their magic.” Her voice falls to a ragged hiss. “You have no idea what it’s like—a century living with this hollow ache, no one to shape in my image, no one who belongsto me, no legacy!” Her heel cracks against the concrete. “Lovers betray you. But a child, blood of your blood—” her voice breaks, thick with yearning. “Someone to have and to hold. Someone that is yours alone. Someone who will love you unconditionally.”
