Chapter 1
FIRE!
Allie thought hell would freeze over before the coven Magistra allowed her inside the potions room. Since joining the Silverbarks, Allie had been living from one mishap to another: getting the words of a spell wrong, running late for rituals, falling off her broom. She only fellonce, but Lydia, the Magistra, made sure to remind Allie about it often. All her mishaps were rooted in her inability to control her power—fire. Her mother’s fire.
“Whatever you do, my love, don’t choose a lonely life.”
Allie kept her mother’s words close to her heart and had taken them as guidance to join her mother’s coven as a legacy. If only Petra had lived long enough to teach her about this fire, which had manifested later than it did for the average Witch. By about twenty years.
A couple of months ago, Allie joined the coven shortly after she came back to Pearls Fields from her years in Green Creek that she would rather forget. Confident and excited, she’d knocked on the manor’s door thinking she would get all the help and support from her new sisters.
She was wrong.
Allie was the only elemental Witch in the coven, while the other Witches were gifted with mental talents like telepathy, mind reading, transcending the worlds between the living and the dead, and various otherworldly skills that sent cold chills down her spine when she thought of them. She had begged Lydia and all her sisters for some guidance, but they refused every time, saying they had no experience with elemental magic and would hate to steer her wrong.
Allie did her best, and sometimes Freya, one of her sisters and the closest thing she had to a friend, watched over her practice. It was always short-lived; as soon as Allie’s power grew remotely out of control, Freya would bail on her, too. At least she was nice to her, as the newest arrival to the Silverbarks before Allie.
And that was why this very early morning, long before dawn, as they climbed down the stairs together from their rooms on the second floor of the manor to the potions room in the basement, Freya was the only one cheering her on.
“You’ll do great with the potions, Allie,” Freya said, linking their arms, but no comfort came from her words. “I got my first potions assignment at the same time as you, a few months in. Lydia knows what she’s doing if she’s assigned you to potion-making.”
Allie nodded absentmindedly, trying to ground herself in her friend’s touch. She rotated her rings mindlessly, taking turns between the four hoops on her index and pinky fingers. But her hands trembled, and her breath hitched, cold sweat dripping down her spine under her forest green dress.
“How many drops of rose water does the sleeping potion need again?” Allie asked.
Freya chuckled. “Stop stressing over this, you’ve got it. I’ll be right next to you, and Marla and Aurora will be there too.”
“Great,” Allie muttered under her breath.
Marla and Aurora were two of the elder Witches in the coven who had joined around the same time as her mom. Allie had hazy memories of the two visiting her mother when she was young and had expected them to welcome her into the coven with open arms. She quickly learned they had only disdain and scowls in store for her because she was a “disappointment” and a “waste of magic” compared to the exceptional Petra.
Allie and Freya reached the basement first, the elder Witches right behind them.
The potions room, dusty and dim, had an acrid smell from countless potions being spilled and never cleaned. Allie had once offered to deep-clean the basement, but Lydia had bitten her head off and snarled that this was what a potions room was supposed to smell like.
The Magistra was already there, enveloped in thick shadows, as if wrapped in a black velvet curtain. She sauntered toward one of the antique chests, pulled out a matchbox, and lit a couple of torches around the room.
Allie missed few things about Green Creek, but most of all, she longed for electricity, a coffee machine, and the other little luxuries that came with new magic. Unfortunately, Green Creek and new magic alike were tainted by Sam the idiot, and she would rather give it all up than think of him every time she turned the lights on.
“If Alecsandra would only master her fire, I wouldn’t have to resort to this,” Lydia said, loud enough for all of them to hear, but low enough so they would consider she might have been talking to herself. The Magistra had initially been thrilled to welcome a legacy in the circle, but she wore her feelings on her face, and with each time Allie’s powers erupted out of control, her sneers of distaste and disapproval grew increasingly obvious.
Allie said nothing as she stepped to the heavy oak table in the middle of the room, the wood dented from erosive potion splatters. Empty tins and mortars were scattered on the surface next to bottles filled with colored liquids, herbs, stones, and some things Allie preferred to look away from. The other Witches assessed the elements and smiled wickedly, even Freya.
It had always been like this, and Allie’s heart squeezed with a silent pain. She wished she’d had more time with her mother, so she could have learned from her why she was supposed to smile now. Yet she was left confused, alone, and feeling like she didn’t belong. Sometimes, on her lowest days, Allie truly hated that she was a Witch.
“Today we are making sleeping potions and love potions to fulfill a couple of orders,” Lydia announced, drawing Allie’s attention to her. In the dim light, Lydia looked older than she was, with her red hair pulled back in a ponytail so tight that her eyebrows were lifted far from her brown eyes and a dark, glossy burgundy painted on her lips. “You will work in pairs, as always, and I will supervise.”
Lydia had never supervised potion-making since Allie had joined the coven. Everyone knew the Magistra was here because of her. Because she expected her to make a mess out of this assignment. Allie couldn’t blame her; she hadn’t proven Lydia wrong yet. But Allie knew that with a bit of guidance and more time to practice, she would get her fire under control. She felt it in her bones. It wasn’t supposed to burn her; it was supposed to burn for her. With her.
Allie and Freya worked on the sleeping potions while the elder Witches prepared the love potions, both the coven’s bestselling products at the weekly market—a place for Pearls Fields’ residents to shop, sell, and gossip. The room smelled like rose water and burnt sage, and Allie felt an itching sensation behind her nose and forehead.
Panic gripped her, the memory of almost burning down her old house with a simple sneeze slamming to the forefront of her mind. Her body went taut like a pulled bowstring. She held her breath and counted down from ten, wrinkling her nose in all directions to make the sensation go away. Allie stilled her movements, one hand grasping the edge of the table and the other tightening her grip on the mortar where she and Freya were mixing the ingredients.
As the stinging sensation subsided, Allie swallowed and inhaled, feeling it decrease to a tingle. She exhaled with quiet relief and picked up the rose water bottle. She could do this. The ingredients mixture was almost done, and then she would only have to infuse the potion with her magic. Allie had practiced this so much, she was confident nothing would go wrong. Thankfully, she could use these other branches of magic well enough without having mastered her untamed fire.
A spark drew her attention to the mortar where several herbs were mixed and crushed together. She blinked aggressively to clear her vision, but the spark still flickered in the herbs.
Her body felt warm. Not with a fever, but as if she was heating from the inside out like a furnace. She released her death grip on the mortar and took a step back.
