Total pages in book: 202
Estimated words: 193561 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 968(@200wpm)___ 774(@250wpm)___ 645(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193561 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 968(@200wpm)___ 774(@250wpm)___ 645(@300wpm)
“Stay there,” I demand gutturally and see my mate freeze where she stands.
“Grey. What do you need?” Jase is in the space now.
“Where’s Meadows?” I demand.
“Secured. What do you need, brother?”
My eyes hit my mate and I need her safe so I pull and pull and she’s moving through the space, several inches off the ground.
She gasps and hollers my name, looking panicked, but I set her behind Jase. Jase has her now. I’ve set her behind him.
“What the fuck did you do to my mate?” I repeat, glaring at Soleil.
“I’m okay, Grey,” Stacy insists.
Soleil answers brokenly, “Your mate is unharmed. I’ll explain. She removed the necklace. The SCC sentenced me to a twenty-five-years to life ban with my coven head being able to lift it if they chose to. I contacted Aunt Lyrica at the twenty-five-year mark and she refused me. I knew Aunt Mimi would be the same when Aunt Lyrica died. I may be disconnected from my magic, but know you’re now the head of the coven. I know you were granted my magic. I hoped we would get acquainted.”
“And I’d lift the ban,” I surmise.
“Your mate is pregnant so carrying your blood, Young coven blood. I hoped it would work. It has. When I reached out to you on the phone I knew I couldn’t wait for you to come around, if you even would…” Her chin juts toward the silver chain on a table. “And now–”
“That necklace was put on you because you’re dangerous,” I state through gritted teeth. “You took this off her?” I ask my mate.
“I had to,” Stacy whispers.
“My fault,” Soleil admits. “I leveraged her maternal instincts and her love for you to my advantage. That necklace was worse than death, my son. I don’t want to live any longer without at least one of the two core pieces of me that were taken. My family. My magic.”
She wrenches one of her hands free of my grip and puts it to my face again. More images surge into my brain.
“Maybe we could try to be a family again… maybe you could help me not succumb to the darkness. There’s so, so much light in you. Such beautiful light…”
The images she’s casting into my brain now are of my father. As he is now, embracing her as she is now instead of when she was young. Instead of Carrie. Everything around them is hazy. No. It’s coming into focus. Carrie is a blurred image to the side, in tears, looking on at me where I stand with a bundle in my arms that I know is one of my children. The images are suddenly upscaling and I see it all clearly. Metallic silver and copper sparks arc like fireworks around the bundle in my arms before lighting the baby up so his outline is the silver, copper, and red flames, shrapnel bits blasting in every direction, burning to layers of ash that look as intricate as lace as it floats to the ground. And there’s no baby. My arms are empty and Soleil is now copper and mercury colored as my father burns to the same floating ash. Stacy is there off to the side with another baby and that baby bursts into red flames and evaporates before Stacy melts into nothing and Soleil is red flames, silver and copper. I shake the visuals off and focus.
Two. Two babies.
I strain hard to listen and suddenly hear the sound of both heartbeats in addition to my mate’s own heart in this room, just four feet away. Stacy is carrying two babies. I now distinctly smell them both. Soleil would siphon magic from them both. She wouldn’t want to. But then she would want to because it would be all she could think of doing. And she’d scheme to have my father back. That’s what she’s obsessed with – dark magic and my father.
“You see the light in me? That same light you tried to take from me when I was a baby? That you’ll eventually try to take from my children?”
Her expression drops.
I growl and half shift, baring my teeth. Soleil snatches her hand back, face changing to fear. No. To remorse.
I pull my wolf back. “I see what you’re about,” I tell her. “I saw all those old memories but I see what you’re about. What you’ll always be about.”
She flinches. “Maybe you could fix me. You and Erica. Two powerful Young witches. You could extract the darkness. You could cast a protection spell over me.”
“It won’t work. Not for long.”
Her expression drops and I know she knows this is true. It devastates her.
I half shift again and grab her throat and hold it. And I feel. I feel, I register, and I fucking know. This isn’t me pulling with Ronnie’s gift to know what she’s done. This is more than that. It’s also Vivica’s gift to see things that might come. If she walks away, she’ll eventually plot to have my father back at the peril of Carrie, the only mother I recognize. The only mother I want. And to gain even more magic. From me. My coven. From my children. She’s even had visions of taking it from Halla Starling, who is witch and shifter as well.