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Chapter One
Liv
I hate being in this place, but when I close my eyes it’s where I come back to again and again.
I thought this space in my head—when my subconscious takes over—was my prison, a place to pay for my sins—and there are many. No matter what I do during the waking hours, no matter the power I find and make my own, when my eyes close I am here again.
Blood is everywhere, the coppery scent like a nauseating wave of perfume that rolls over me and won’t quite dissipate. It saturates the ground as they drag me toward the altar. There are three of them. Altars, that is. We came to Wyoming to find a possible rogue wolf, but evil found us instead. Three torture spaces. Trent lies on one. It’s his blood staining the hem of my pants. I don’t know how long he has to live. His body is so wrecked.
The boy Kelsey found is quiet on his table. It was this kid Fenrir we found when we went looking for the wolf. Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones looking for him. The whole of Lupus Solum wants the abomination dead, and they don’t care that he’s nine and so sweet it hurts my heart to look at him.
He’s still asleep.
I wish I was asleep. I wish I didn’t know what was coming for me.
“Tie her down,” one of the witches says.
I fight, but in this dream, as it was in life, I do not win. They get me on the table, banging my body against the hard rock top so harshly I swear I can feel my bones moving. My head aches from where it slapped against the rock.
Beyond the pain, what I hate is how helpless I am.
I am a witch. I have power in my body. The innate knowledge of how to bend the universe to my will lies in my brain, but I am useless against this coven. They have forced me to do things I couldn’t conceive of doing. Mere hours before I’d pulled my best friend’s soul apart. I’d felt when her she-wolf had scampered up my arms, whispering through my brain. I’d told the wolf to hide in Trent, but now I worry when he dies, she will, too.
They’d held a stake to Casey’s heart. My beautiful vampire. I couldn’t let him suffer a final death. I couldn’t. I’ve loved that idiot almost since I met him. He’s invaded my heart, and I was so afraid of loving him.
It doesn’t matter now.
All is lost.
And then I realize how much more I have to lose as the witch holds up a ceremonial knife and in an instant, drives it through my chest. I feel skin split, bones crack, but beyond that I feel something slipping from inside me. Something essential is leaking out. A trickle at first, and then the chanting begins and the speed builds.
All of my light. All of my magic. I feel it leaving my body. That unique part of me is draining away, and I can do nothing to stop it.
The coven around me hold their hands to my body, groaning in pleasure as they take my power.
They are taking the best part of me and eating it up like it’s a fucking treat.
When they are through and I am nothing more than a hollow vessel, they toss me away like garbage. They don’t even bother to pull the knife out of my chest. They simply pick me up and toss me to the side. They don’t bother tying me up now because they know I have nothing left.
I lay in the bloody grass, staring at the stars as I die. All around they cackle and play with my power. They get ready to do something terrible to Grayson Sloane, and they’ll likely kill my Casey.
Sometimes I wish I had died that night. I wish that had been the end of it and Casey hadn’t fed me his vamp blood and brought me back.
The vampire blood healed my injuries. It did not return what they had taken.
I turned in bed and remembered that now I have an actual physical prison to deal with. My bestie came back after twelve years on the road and she didn’t like my costume change, so she put me in prison.
Okay. I might have been in a place where people who might or might not work with and for me were trying hard to kill her son. But I wasn’t. And he’s like a full-ass grown wolf king now, so I don’t think he needs his mommy, but Kelsey disagrees.
“Rough night?” a familiar voice said.
I gritted my teeth because apparently I didn’t get any privacy in this well-warded room that has become my cage. I tried to shake off the aftereffects of the dream because this one person can’t see how weak I have become. He can’t see that my hands are starting to shake because it’s been days since I last took my medicine.
I don’t like to call it what it is. An addiction. Demon blood. It enhances my magical abilities.
I don’t want him to see I’m starting withdrawal.
Casey.
