My teeth snap together. “Will she be safer here or with me?”
“Also can’t say.”
“Will she return to me?”
“Can’t say. You’re really not getting this are you?”
“I’m getting you’re a pain in my ass.”
“Two more questions, pup, then I’m out of time.”
“The war Carina said she saw through the Seer—is it real? As in, it’ll happen?”
“Should I point out that was technically two questions? Yes, it’ll happen. This news was made recent to me as well. I’ll save you a question and will not say when or the outcome or any of what happens during it.”
“Once again, very unhelpful. What happened to her birth coven?”
Freya pauses, tipping her head to the side. “Hm, that’s quite the unselfish question. I can’t say everything since it’s not my story, nor the time for it. They’re alive and in hiding. They’ve…gone to a place.”
“A place?”
“It’s not on Earth, so when she starts hunting for them, pull her back. I swear on Hecate, she won’t find them and will spend her life looking for something that doesn’t exist.”
“And you’re not saying where, I presume.”
“Nope.” ThePpops.
“One more question.”
“Now you’re just in the negatives.”
Ignoring her, I go on, “Sloane seems pretty fixated on the concept of Light versus Dark, good versus evil. You’re the First Witch, Freya, so you’d know best.Ismagick inherently good or bad?”
Her head turns to the side, eyes sliding across the ground, to Carina’s house, and finally past the roof to the sky. “No,” she murmurs. “Magick is a balance. It’s a person’s actions that decide their outcome. The concept of good versus evil was bred in the wars between Heaven and Hell.”
“I though witches didn’t deal with the Celestials.”
She turns to face me, more somber than I’d never imagined her capable of. “Doesn’t mean we’re unaffected by them.”
With that, she disappears.
Seventy
CARINA
Despite Freya’sfrequent demand that Alec and Harlow not linger around Banff, they end up staying in the basement of the Sinclair house after Mom enchants it to be sunproof, allowing Harlow to participate in the upcoming full moon ceremony.
“Not sure I like this,” Alec mutters as they enter our house in the hours preceding the ceremony. “Last month didn’t go so well.”
Last month was only the day after Mom found and retrieved Harlow, and the ceremony focused on combining the coven’s energies into retrieving her memories, since her fake parents Sloane sent continued to wipe her memories of not only her birth parents, but everything they’d been subconsciously teaching her about black magick.
I skip out on the remainder of their conversation to reach the clearing in the woods where our ceremonies are held. Alone, the stuffiness of the house bothers me less.
Four walls is a lot, and I’d forgotten how much. The town of tourists. The customers in the shop. The coven asking about my time with the pack. Even being home is too much. Jasper’s lingering out of Mom’s orders until she trusts him not to run offto Adalyn. With Alec and Harlow around each night for the past couple since their arrival, she’s come to remind me of Leah, who reminds me of Ryder—and that hurts.
Every night, I go to bed staring into the forest, waiting for him to appear in my backyard, and every night I go to sleep disappointed, while reminding myself it isn’t a future that’ll come to pass becauseIpushed him away.
Why?
