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I arched a brow. “You make it sound like I’m becoming some kind of saint or something.”
She opened her bottled water with a twinkle in her eyes. “Would you rather call it bridging like when you were a girl scout?”
I rolled my eyes and groaned as I took my first bite of the sandwich. “Oh, this is so good.” I pointed to the folder she set on the table. “What’s that?”
She cracked open the folder and pushed it in front of me. “This is a step-by-step flow chart for the ceremony. It’s been decades since I ascended so I wanted to be sure we didn’t forget any steps.” She bent down and took out a very old, leatherbound grimoire. “And you’ll need to choose a new spell from the fourth level.”
The grimoire contained all the Coven of Light’s spells that had been collected since the 1700s. In the nineteenth century the coven started ranking the incantations and sorting them by difficulty level. I’d never tried any fourth level magic before.
I skimmed the papers in the folder as she flipped pages in the spell book. I peered over at her, trying to keep my tone curious and disinterested. “Have you ever heard of a law firm in Boston called Hinterland and Bloodstone?”
She stopped turning pages and looked at me with a frown. “I knowofthem. Why?”
“After I closed the store yesterday, I noticed a man following me. When I confronted him, he said Hinterland and Bloodstone hired him to track me.”
She visibly tensed. “Years ago, they came looking for another coven member. Carly was pregnant at the time. I sent them away without any information, but I never found out who sent them or why.”
I’d never met Carly, only heard stories about how she had fallen in love with a man who had political ambitions. A public life was dangerous for witches. Her choice could’ve exposed our entire coven to the world. Plus, Carly was an Elemental Witch, rare and precious to our coven. Back then, there was a push to keep the Elemental bloodlines within our coven. The high priestess had to approve the match first and the couple would stay in Salem. But Carly had chosen the man with big dreams in Washington, DC over the coven. She’d been shunned for her choice.
“Her daughter was the one you visited in Sedona, right?”
“Yes.” Lillian nodded. “Hope turned out to be a werewolf’s mate.” She shook her head. “Obviously, I was shocked.”
I blinked. “I thought that was forbidden, right?”
“Well…” She munched on her sandwich and lifted her eyes to my face. “Hope isn’t a member of our coven.”
“True, but I thought the whole having-babies-with-werewolves thing was…bad.”
“I’m not sure how much you know about werewolves.” Lillian sighed, setting her sandwich on the plate. “The wolf cubs born to Sienna, from our coven, and Victor, the Alpha of the Salem pack, were unexpected. He hadn’t bitten her so it should have been impossible to conceive. Usually, a woman would need to be a shifter first. Sienna wasn’t his mate, either, so the pack struggled with how to deal with their Alpha and a witch who would never become a part of the pack.” She picked at the sandwich paper. “When the cubs were born, our high priestess sensed the magic in them so the pack wanted the coven to take responsibility for the boys, but they were also werewolves.”
Hearing her talk about this out loud made me…angry. “So because they weredifferentthe Coven of Light banished them?”
Lillian met my eyes. “Sienna was my peer back then. I didn’t have any say in the outcome.”
“But you stopped speaking to her?”
Lillian picked up her drink, breaking eye contact. “The high priestess thought it best.”
My entire life, I’d always kept Lillian on a pedestal as a pillar of wisdom and fairness, but between her using a dangerous spell to give Mathias her energy without telling anyone and now hearing about her not fighting a decision to ostracize a new mother who now had two werewolf-witch baby boys, I was starting to realize Lillian was…not infallible.
“When you took over the Coven of Light, did you look for her?” I asked.
She shook her head and put her hand over mine. “And you shouldn’t, either. Too much time has passed. Besides, she could have reached out to us, and she never did.”
“You sent her away.” I slid my hand out from under hers. “Why would she try to contact you?”
“This is all ancient history.” Lillian picked up her sandwich. “We have to work on the ceremony for your ascension.”
I wanted to pepper her with questions, but her body language had become stiff and closed off. She was finished discussing this. Besides, Sienna had to be Lillian’s age if they were peers. She might not even be alive still. I sighed. “Fine.”
Lillian brightened up and pushed the grimoire over to me. “You’ll need to choose a level-four spell to prove your magical abilities for the ceremony. I can help you master it.”
That took my mind off the coven’s checkered past. I already knew which spell I wanted. I flipped the pages until I found it. I pointed to the page and looked at Lillian.
Her smile widened as she met my eyes. “Oh, that will be splendid.”
My fingertips tingled with anticipation.
