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23
As much as my instincts were screaming at me, telling me I needed to run, I needed answers. Alice knew what was going on in the woods. She was there. She’d had a hand in getting rid of the death walkers. Given the choice between her and Sarah, I got the sense she would be the one who had the best chance of helping Dillon. Whether she wanted to help him or not, now that was a different question all together.
Alice led us down a thin hallway into a white and tan kitchen that smelled vaguely like chicken noodle soup. She turned to the right and opened a small door in the far wall that led into a dark stairwell.
“Let’s just throw this out there, so everyone knows,” Jamie sighed. “Our pack knows where we are. They have this address, and they know why we are here. If we don’t check in with them in the next two hours Every last one of them will be breaking down your door, looking for revenge.”
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing. The pack knew where we were, but Adrian would never send his wolves out seeking revenge. Not for me. It was no secret he’d rather seem me lost to some colossal mistake then hovering at the edges of every pack event, glaring at him, testing his patience, challenging his authority.
“You can relax, Fido. I’m not going to kill you, because I can’t hurt her, and I’m pretty sure if you dropped dead, she’d try to kill me in return.”
“But youwantus dead?” I asked descending the staircase after her. My wolf’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and my sense of smell heightened.
“No, actuallyIdon’t particularly care either way. But others do. Our coven leader wants you alive, my grandmother apparently wants you dead, and I’m sure every other witch I know will fall somewhere on that spectrum too,” she said twisting a ring around her finger.
Lanterns lit up all over the wide room, and I stopped dead in my tracks. Where Annie’s secret room had books, and parchment with all kinds of records on it, this room was twice as full of shelves. Each one bursting with jarred herbs, and old leather-bound tomes with frayed edges.
But that wasn’t the eye-catching part. Growing up from the ground, and down from the ceiling around the corners of each shelf were crystals. Amethyst, quarts, and half a dozen others I couldn’t name off the top of my head.
“Beautiful,” I muttered reaching to brush my fingers over what looked like a jagged set of turquoise growing from the ceiling.
“I wouldn’t touch that,” Alice warned. “Witch blood or not, it’s a powerful stone.”
I lifted my hand away and stepped into the center of the room, Jamie at my side. “Alright, is this place safe?”
She held up a finger and picked up a white candle off one of the shelves. Setting it down on a stone plinth in the middle of the far side of the room, she sprinkled a salt circle around it and snapped her fingers igniting the wick with a soft green flame.
Alice’s shoulders sagged, but I could still smell her fear as she spoke. “Now…now we can talk.”
“How do we stop the curse?’ I asked, getting right to the heart of our problem.
“Ask a different question,” she said, folding her arms over her chest.
“It’s why were here, so tell us, or we’ll show you how violent werewolves can be,” Jamie said, but I stopped him from advancing on her with a hand to his chest.
“You can’t tell us, can you? Your grandmother said something about a covenant. There are questions your allowed to answer for us and then ones you can’t.”
“Technically I can’t talk to anyone who isn’t part of our coven, but you have Selene Beaumont’s blood. Which means, you are coven by birth. At least, to me you are, anyway,” she said.
“Great, can we buy a vowel, at least?” Jamie groaned.
I folded my arms over my chest, matching her posture, and weighed my words carefully. “How does someone end a curse?”
Alice smiled. “Smart girl. To end a curse, first you identify whether it’s a basic curse or a one that draws on a power nexus—But those are rare. They’re usually reserved for species ending apocalyptic type magic, and we don’t do that sort of thing anymore.”
I nodded. “So, it’s an old powerful curse. What do you do after you identify the type of curse?”
“Once you know what your dealing with, you either find the witch who cast the curse and convince her to end it, or if you’re up against a paranoid, angry, and violent witch you kill her. Whatever it takes to break the flow of energy.”
“So, it was cast by your coven leader, and in order to stop the curse, we need to kill her.” I sighed. “That’s not going to be easy.”
“I don’t know about my coven leader, but paranoid, angry and violent witches tend to require a lot of forethought to kill. A lot of guts too,” she said.
“I think that’s all we need to know, unless you can think of anything else?” I asked, glancing sideways at Jamie.
His mouth pinched into a tight line, and he looked back at Alice. “What can you tell us about Selene Beaumont?”
I tensed at the sound of my mother’s name on his tongue. Thinking about her made my stomach turn. It’d been one thing to know she existed, to know that my mother had abandoned me, but now she was a witch too? What did that make me, some kind of hybrid?
