PART 1
HARTIK’S HOLLOW
PROLOGUE
EMBER
Eight Months Before
Birthdaywithoutthe Happy was more apt. Mine certainly wasn’t happy, and both times I’d heard those words today, the closest I’d come to smiling was a twitch at the corner of my mouth. Not that it wasunhappy. Today was what it was supposed to be: drizzling, uneventful, and the same as every other year. Though I suppose, last year, on my seventeenth birthday, there hadn’t been this pit of dread in my stomach.
I stared at the cracked-open window on the other side of Gray’s room, my eyes tracking the long path of a raindrop slowly rolling down the glass. A gust of cold air blew in and speckled his desk with freezing rain. Shivering, I shifted closer to him in his bed. His hand twitched on my waist, and I glanced over my shoulder to look at him.
“Gray?”
“I’m just resting my eyes,” he mumbled, the rhythm of his words so slow, he was clearly talking in his sleep.
I sighed and twisted to reach my phone on his nightstand, getting as far as checking the time before I clicked off the screen.
I slid out from under Gray’s arm and sat upright. It was 11:58 p.m., and I’d promised Dad I’d be home before midnight. Heart racing, I scanned the room for my clothes, which were everywhere. My jeans and tank were rumpled on the floor, andGray was sleeping on my sweatshirt.
I pressed my lips together and held my breath, trying not to wake him as I attempted to tug my sweatshirt out from under him by its sleeve.
Gray rolled toward me in his sleep.
My sweatshirt nowcompletelypinned, I let out a defeated breath and dropped the sleeve. It would be a long, cold walk to my car, but I’d rather get home than be warm. I slipped out of his bed, got dressed, and hurled myself out his first-floor window without stopping to tie my shoes.
Gray lived across the cul-de-sac from us. His house was so close I could have been home in an instant, except I was going the wrong way.
Earlier, I’d thought this was a good idea. I’d figured Dad wouldn’t want to know his eighteen-year-old daughter was sleeping with her twenty-one-year-old neighbor. I’d thought it would be better to tell him I was at a “friend’s” house, if I parked my car at the high school then walked to Gray’s.
“How’s midnight sound?” he’d asked, extending my curfew beyond the eleven p.m. time he’d given me for my birthday last year.
“Midnight’s great,” I’d answered. Then my guilt ate away at me as I stood there, waiting for him to finish the same lecture I got every Halloween.
Halloween brings out all the drunk drivers.
Gloomy weather means low visibility and slick roads.
He believed I was going to a friend’s, never mind that — aside from Gray — I didn’t have any of those. He believed me the same way everyone always did.
Lying was my gift.
It was something I was born with, like every other witch. We all had a unique, Goddess-given gift. Our gifts, inherent to us, couldn’t be canceled with a spell and didn’t require any effortor concentration to use. Not even Siphoning — the Dark Witch power to remove every drop of spellcasting magic from a light witch — had any effect on a witch’s ability to use it.
Spellcasting magic — which, because I’d never been to Everden, I didn’t have — had different rules. Witches weren’t born with spells. They had to drink spellcasting magic first. Only after the liquid magic fused with their blood could they access spells, which differed depending what kind of witch they were, like a Dark Witch, Healer, or an Elemental.
My thoughts swerved to my older sister, Ash, who wrote me a letter from Everden after she drank mental magic. Remembering that, and how it was one of the last times I’d heard from her, my body shook with a painful shiver. I folded my arms across my chest and tucked my hands into my underarms for warmth.
Part of me wished I’d just grabbed one of Gray’s hoodies and put that on, but five years of on-and-off history with him told me all I needed to know about howthatwould have gone over. He didn’t like strings attached to him. He’d think I’d taken it just to be able to give it back in-person.
Sometimes I wondered if he’d look at me differently if he knew I was a half witch. But, considering how every other human felt about witches, it was probably best that he didn’t know.
I strode on, held off from sprinting past a streetlamp with a burned-out light bulb by the dangerously slick, leaf-covered sidewalk.
Something felt different about our street tonight. Shadows loomed where warm yellow light from streetlamps usually glowed, and instead of the comforting sounds I was used to — critters hopping from branch to branch, crickets chirping — all I heard was my quickening breath, and rain slow-dripping from the overhead canopy of browning yellow leaves.
Expect a lot of drunk drivers to be out, Dad had warned. Asif I hadn’t driven this road a thousand times, in a derecho, in heavy snow. I was the one who went everywhere for us. I had to because he rarely left home.
