Page 84 of The Reaping Rose

But it’s not enough. Nothing is.

I grab the orb hanging around my neck; a pulse shoots through me.

“Open,” the voice whispers.

Stepping into the hallway, I find my way through the manor until I reach a grand space where my sister is pacing before a fire. Her shadows drink any light spitting from the flames. They drain the glow from her alabaster skin.

Hazel’s dark eyes find me as I step into the room, and her shadows part just enough for me to pass through before she clenches her fingers and coils them back in. I’m not the only one struggling to contain my magic lately. The orb calls us both.

She turns to face me, her long black hair unmoving. Her gaze falls to the blood staining my chest, and her shoulders tighten.

“She’s alive,” I assure her.

For some reason, that’s where Hazel draws the line. Even when the female crawled into my bed and told me to take whatever I wanted. Even as the shadows at Hazel’s fingertips dance, itching for death. She cares if I’ve ended that female’s life for some ungodly reason.

“You miss Selia.” Hazel’s head tilts.

The purple flecks in her nearly black eyes sparkle. Sometimes it’s as if my sister can see my secrets in the threads.

“Selia tried to kill me.”

A malicious smile ticks up in the corner of Hazel’s mouth. “And yet… you miss her.”

Maybe there was a part of me that would have missed Selia under different circumstances. She was my favorite. She understood my disdain for her family. Or so I thought. Just like her brother, I never should have trusted her.

I glance down at my hand, the one that gripped the blade I drove through her heart. I can still smell her blood. Feel the heat of it coating my fingers.

You don’t need her.

I clench my fist, shoving that thought to the back of my mind. “Bring me another. This one didn’t work.”

Hazel’s dark eyes follow me across the room as I grab a glass of wine. “Your magic is insatiable. I doubt anything will work at this point. You’re endless lately.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’m almost there.”

“Where is there exactly?” She drops into a chair by the fire, flinching when her shadows pool on the floor.

They’re unruly like the veins that reach out of the Well. Clasping her fingers in her lap, she manages to rein them in, but it’s clearly becoming more difficult.

“You said yourself you need more magic to unlock that which you possess around your neck. Without Elorie and Wilder, how do you plan to harness it?”

“So little faith. But wise nonetheless. Father underestimated you.”

Her teeth clench at my comment. At the mention of the male who would have seen her beheaded had he not feared what her magic might have done should he have tried it. He wasn’t a visionary like me. He didn’t understand the power in nurturing that which others fear.

Hazel might resist on occasion, but her loyalty is deep, and her magic is stronger as an asset than a threat.

“I no longer need Elorie and Wilder for their magic. Not while the Well is doing the work for me. I learned from you, dear sister. Now that I’ve figured out how to tap into what the Well drains, I have everything I need.”

Her eyebrow ticks as I sit in the chair across from her. “You’re siphoning off the magic the Well is taking? That’s why its veins reach farther now?”

“Soon it won’t matter how far they reach. I shall see this realm to dust, and we shall create something new. Something worthy of the praise we give the gods who do not care to save us.”

“But you promised.” She leans forward, her black nails digging into the arm of the chair.

Fear stirs like a wicked tang in the air as her magic nips the edges of my aura. I promised my sister that when I remake the realms, I will unmake her. Put her out of her loneliness. Her isolation. Her magic is her torment, spreading death and making it impossible for her to touch anyone without killing them. She’s bound to those shadows. To the voices that whisper through them.

I promised I’d set her free so she would help me.