I remained there, trying to keep my dress raised around my hips. “I need something to clean up,” I tried to say without letting the anger out.
“You’re good. Just leave it until you get home.”
I looked back with an arched brow. “And stain my dress?”
“Relax,” he said, fixing his tie and sleeves. “I’m fucking the seamstress who owns the boutique. I’ll have her make you another.”
“Kane, I’m serious.”
He gave me a gentle look that showed that, despite the things he said, he had a soft spot for me. He loosened his tie around his neck and pulled it from his collar, then handed it to me. “Just toss it when you’re done.”
Sacred Sea Covenhad blossomed since the day my ancestors arrived in 1803, but the chamber under the Pruitt mansion was only large enough to hold thirteen of us comfortably. Not all members, but a few from each original family. In the beginning, there were four, which consisted of Pruitt, Cantini, Sullivan, and Morgan. But as far as we knew, Fallon was the last Morgan, and it seemed she chose Norse Woods.
With only three families remaining, Augustine Pruitt became high priest after our former high priest, and Fallon’s father, Tobias Morgan, left the invisible shield twenty-four years prior. And I often wondered what the coven would be like today if he and Fallon had stayed.
The cold, damp air and the anticipation humming within the chamber fell flat when everyone took their seats.
Dad sat at the opposite end near the bookshelves, wearing his navy-blue jacket that matched the other men: the Trinity Celtic knot embroidered on the front pocket.
I sat between my sisters. Ivy to my right and Fable to my left.
Despite winter’s cold, my sisters, like myself, wore strappy dresses that touched the floor beneath their coats. These dresses were crafted from cotton, linen, and hemp, fabrics harvested directly from the earth. The bracelets wrapping around our wrists revealed the contrasting shades of our whimsical souls. They would make a sound reminiscent of laughter each time we moved—a song of our childhood at sea.
The sound reminded me of Mom, before she could laugh no more, and brought the colors of sea glass to my mind—a time when we used to collect them across the shoreline and drop them into a jar.
A jar full of mermaid tears, she’d once said.
“Please, that’s enough,” Mrs. Murphy cried, stealing me from the memory. “I beg you, Augustine. Please don’t do this to my daughter!”
Shackles clashed when Lena, Mrs. Murphy’s thirty-two-year-old daughter, slapped her palms against her ears with a guttural scream. The cry shook the walls within the chamber, and tiny loose rocks fell and broke apart once they hit the ground.
Clenching my teeth, I peered around Ivy to make a silent plea to Kane.
A void took over his eyes as his father’s magical pulses ripped through Lena’s head.
I imagined it to be painful, like pointed nails stabbing your skull or an electric shock that started in the brain and stampeded down the spine, crawling through every vein.
When the next cry came, I flinched, ready to stand in protest.
Ivy noticed and grabbed my wrist to keep me pinned down.
I fired a warning glare at her. “Someone has to stop this. I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
“Yes, you can, and you will,” Ivy whispered back. “Or you’ll be next.”
Viola Cantini clutched the table’s edge and leaned over it. “Control yourself, Mrs. Murphy, or you’ll be removed from the chambers,” she scolded, authority seeping from her tone. “Lena understood the consequences before she recklessly used her magic, and now another life has been taken because of it.”
“She was only trying to save her husband from the Shadows, you see,” Mrs. Murphy cried out in despair. “She was only trying to save him. She didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Isn’t losing her husband and now her grandmother enough punishment?”
Lena fell to her knees, another cry rattling our chests.
Fable dropped her head and grabbed my hand. She squeezed it as if her sorrow had no place left to go but through me.
I pushed a whisper into her ear, “This will be your coven, Fable. You have to watch and not turn your eyes away. Don’t let her be in this pain alone.”
Fable lifted her chin and hesitantly gazed at the torment.
“This is our future,” I said, more to myself that time. But then, despite all efforts, my eyes caught on to the black spring swirling behind the shared glass wall beside Fable.
