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“My old coven lives in the town. Occasionally, people are ‘chosen’ to live among and directly serve the Aeons in the city below. In the opinion of the newly appointed Priestess, Esther, I was a weakness in the coven that would prevent them from being chosen, so they wanted me gone.”
“Why did they consider you a weakness?” asked Azazel.
“Because my magick is dark,” she replied. “Impure. Unworthy. Tainted. Or, at least, that’s how they see it.”
Azazel’s brow lifted. “You don’t?”
“No,” she said. “Whether or not magick is bad depends on the intentions of the user.”
He inclined his head. “True enough. I heard a witch was exiled but that the keeper who was meant to escort her to the border instead ran off with her. Was he killed by people on your trail?”
Just remembering that little shit stain made her nostrils flare. “Wagner didn’t attempt to escort me to the border. The Aeons claim they steal the memories of exiled people, put them to sleep, and then have someone drive them out of there. I learned something when I was exiled. I learned that, in fact, they paralyze you with power so that you’re easy for keepers to toss over the falls. The exiled are never truly banished. They’re killed.”
“But you escaped,” said Cain.
“I escaped. And Wagner got what was coming to him in the process.”
Cain’s eyes drifted over her face. “Why do the Aeons want you so badly? It cannot possibly be merely because you murdered a keeper and fled.”
She moved to a display table on which a potted plant sat. Wynter dug a finger into the soil and injected a thread of magick into it. Within mere seconds, the plant wilted, dried up, and decayed until it was utterly unsalvageable.
Cain regarded her with renewed interest. “You’re the cause of the rot.”
She slowly nodded. “I’m the cause of the rot.”
Shock. It was an emotion that Cain hadn’t felt in a truly long time. So long, in fact, he almost hadn’t recognized the feeling when it crashed into him.
There hadn’t been even a millisecond where he had considered that Wynter might be responsible for the current fuckery going on at Aeon. He hadn’t even been sure anythingwastruly going on there.
Cain found himself staring at her again, conceding to himself that he’d sincerely underestimated her. Oh, he’d known she was powerful. He’d known she was essentially an alpha playing at being an omega. But he wouldn’t have guessed she could wieldthatlevel of power. No one would think it to look at her.
Seth scratched his head. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Wynter, but how could one little witch infect the land that way?”
“I didn’t infect it, I cursed it,” she said. “There are ways to undo a curse, of course. But the methods are very intricate. You can’t undo one by simply combating theresults. The people of Aeon are no doubt trying to tackle the decay because they haven’t yet realized the root of the problem. That’s why curses are often so successful—people don’t always immediately suspect that that’s what they’re dealing with, and so they don’t take the right steps to counteract it.”
She made the whole thing sound simple. Like hexing protected land was easy enough. It wasn’t. Not at all. But then, maybe it wasn’t as difficult for those who possessed dark magick.
Cain twisted his mouth. “So once the residents of Aeon realize it’s a curse and treat it as such, they’ll be able to undo it?”
She nodded.
“And to undo that, they’ll have to end your life, right?” asked Azazel. “You wanted to cause destruction, and so only your own destruction will undo it. That’s why witches rarely cast such curses, from what I heard.”
“The cost is often considered too high, yes,” she said.
“Not that I’m judging, because I think this is all fucking brilliant,” Azazel went on, “but why retaliate to this extent? I know they essentially betrayed you on every level, but for you to be prepared to die just to get revenge …”
Her eyes dulled, but then her expression shuttered … as if she’d severed whatever connection she felt to the emotions rolling through her. “When I was a child, they exiled my mother. Or so I thought until the day they did the same to me, and I realized she was dead.”
“Why did they exile her?” asked Seth.
She linked her fingers. “I died. Then I came back. The Aeons don’t take kindly to the use of forbidden magick.”
Azazel propped his hip against the wall. “How did you die?”
She looked down, her tongue poking the inside of her cheek. “When I was ten, two teenage boys lured me into the woods where they then paralyzed me with magick so they could have a little sadistic fun. They pissed on me. Spat in my eyes. Shoved sharp little stones up my nose. Tried making me choke on dirt. Stabbed me multiple times. Burned the soles of my feet with magick. Sliced my throat but then, bored of waiting for me to die, jammed the knife into the side of my throat.”
Cain ground his teeth as anger bubbled up inside him. She’d recounted the incident so matter-of-factly, but her words were laced with the helplessness she’d felt back then. There was also a pure predatory rage there—it was subtle, but he heard it. So did his creature, which was at this very moment utterly enthralled by her.
