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Aunt Mimi collapses, face-first. My sisters are all fallen like dominoes and I’m frozen, the freezing cold grip Aviva has on my ankle vice-like. Her other hand dips the tip of the wand in the water again and now it bubbles. Bubbles rise higher in the water as something is pulled from me. Not just me. My sisters. My aunt. And Lucinda. Not just us, our tools as well. It sounds like fire crackling as I see I’m surrounded by the same blue sparks I saw when I realized something had changed with my abilities. She’s taking energy from me. I’m being tapped, powers tapped like sap from a maple tree. So is everyone else here. Our energy is going into that bowl, and I know Aviva Starling wants it. This isn’t a plan to enrich all three covens and buy Aunt Mimi more good years. That’s not her plan at all.
She looks at me with a demented expression. “You swore all you wanted was your wolf. You didn’t care about your magic. You have your wolf. All you’ve ever wanted, according to you.” She shrugs.
I want to scream for her to stop because I know my power in her hands would be awful, terrible, horrifying. This woman is power-thirsty and evil. I can feel it in the grip she’s got on me. But I can’t speak. I’m frozen. I can’t feel energy, can’t summon anything. Candles flicker and everything else is still. How did Aunt Mimi wind up with a knife in her gut? Is she dead? Are my sisters dead?
I catch movement from my periphery. A large, silver wolf runs toward us, skidding to a halt behind Aviva. He transforms into my cousin Greyson and as he does, I see him drop something on Aviva. A necklace now rests on her collarbone. She jolts and turns, not letting go of my ankle. Red light swirls between Greyson and Mimi’s forms as Greyson eyes the circle.
He grabs Aviva’s wrist.
I read his lips as he aggressively tells her to “Let go!”
Suddenly, noise rushes in again as I hear the cracking of her wrist bones as he makes her let go of my ankle. He drags her away from me, outside the circle and suddenly things feel different. The circle is broken, so whatever she was doing halts. The water in the cauldron has stopped bubbling and the candles have all go out.
Riley’s here, he’s touching me, holding my face, but I’m in shock, I think.
Everything is loud. Too loud. Deafening. Like the entire environment around us is protesting. Did she do something to prevent me from hearing it before? Do something to prevent me from feeling that things here are all wrong?
“Auntie!” I pull away from Riley to grab for Aunt Mimi, searching for her pulse. “I can’t find her pulse! Dani!” I grab my sister, who is still on the grass, but her eyes are twitching as if she’s having a dream. She whimpers.
“Dani! Vivi! Ronnie, Jessie, you guys, please… please help!”
Greyson has Aviva by the throat and he’s hauling her away from us. She’s grappling with him physically, but seems disoriented, weak, and she’s not striking back with magic.
Though the moon is high and the ring around it bright, the light sparking from Greyson’s body is what lights the space the most.
Suddenly, Riley is a wolf. And he’s growling, snarling, and looks even angrier than the night I saw him rip apart that guy that abducted me.
Greyson drops Aviva and she lands on the ground while Riley snarls in her face. She cowers, trying to crawl backwards, but her wrist is definitely broken so she collapses on her back.
He shifts and rises to two feet, looming over her. “You fuckin’ bitch,” he says, voice guttural. “Again. You tried to fuck us over again.”
She pulls on the necklace Greyson had dropped around her neck but smoke curls from her fingers as she shrieks, pulling her hands away like they’re burning.
“Won’t come off unless I take it off,” Greyson clips. She cowers some more, smoking hands shaking.
“Your bullshit fucked us for seven years,” Riley shouts, “And it’s pretty clear to me that you did it for your own gain. And now you try and fuck us again. Well, bitch, I’m about to fuck back.”
“No. No,” Aviva cries. “Not at all. I initially did it because it was the right thing to do. Because it was the necessary thing to do.”
“Bullshit,” he shouts.
I stare at my aunt and tears stream down my cheeks. “Auntie, please wake up.” I try to summon energy, but I feel so weak.
“You’re wrong,” Aviva denies, “It wasn’t until I dug into my own family history because of learning that my ancestral line had a witch who had been what Erica Young would become that I started to look at the possibilities. It was rather intoxicating.” She smiles that demented smile I saw inside the circle.
