No,prettywasn’t a strong enough word.
She was an angel, her mahogany eyes wide and her perfect bowed lips parted in shock. Her eyes drifted closed as she took in the sight of me and sighed, and I couldn’t stop the growl that rumbled in my chest.
Didn’t she recognize the predator in her midst?
I stalked forward, pausing only when she stumbled back a step in fear. Her cheekbones were high, cut like glass, and her nose the perfect button at the center of her face. Her uniform revealed a line of cleavage, showing breasts ample enough to fill my hands.
“I didn’t mean for anyone to hear me,” she said, her voice a husky melody tinged with apology. There was a roughness to it that reminded me of passion on a hot summer’s night, that made me think of balmy air and sweat-slicked bodies.
“I heard you, songbird,” I said, taking another step forward.
The woman winced as if I’d physically struck her. “You’llunhear me soon enough,” she said, stepping around me. She kept her head down as she tried to pass me by, her entire body scrambling frantically when I reached for her and my fingers brushed her arm.
I retreated from the touch immediately, unable to understand why I cared enough to respect her wish for space. She was a witch, the very creature I had spent centuries of life despising and plotting for the day I could punish them as I’d been punished. They deserved to know every bit of pain that came with being left behind, to have a life without hope in the darkest of all places.
So why did the very idea that she’d already known such pain fill me with rage I thought myself incapable of after all these years?
My brow furrowed, narrowing down on the look of panic on her face. There was no mistaking the caution there. The fear of being touched.
Who?
I didn’t voice the question, shoving my hands into my pants pockets to appease her. She was already so jumpy. She tracked my every movement, her body tense as if waiting for me to attack.
Her feet were shoulder-width apart, braced to fight just as much as to flee. That alone earned my respect, knowing that she would do whatever it took to navigate her way out of danger—that she’d likely vowed to take any would-be attacker down with her.
The muscle tone in her delicate body only confirmed it.
“What’s your name?” I asked, watching as she ran her tongue over her lip to wet it. My entire world narrowed down to the movement, my body tensing with the need to feel that wet heat on my lips. I knew it had to be a consequence of her song, this attraction that was so potent and unnatural it could be nothing less than her magic working its way through my body, attempting to twist me into her willing servant.
“My name doesn’t matter. You’ll forget all about me soon enough,” she said, turning on one of her high heels. She moved like a professional in them despite the dirt beneath her feet, easingher way over the stone half-wall border that surrounded the flourishing courtyard. Her heels clicked against the stone floors as she fled quickly, but she didn’t run. She didn’t give me the privilege of that fear.
Leaving me staring after the mystery woman, wondering howanyonecould ever forget her.
2
MARGOT
The weight of my mother’s gaze never left me during the class that had long ago become the bane of my existence. Growing up under the thumb of my aunt, the Erotes Tribunal member, was no easy task, but it meant that I already knew all the theology surrounding our magic and the ways that it worked. While my aunt was the Erotes Tribunal member, she hadn’t had children of her own so she and my mother had taken it upon themselves to work in tandem when it came to my education.
That was knowledge she often used to her advantage, asking me for answers that she knew I had when others wouldn’t. While the Reds as a whole were more sexually liberated than many of the families within the Coven, that didn’t mean that all of them were quite as encouraging as my mother had been.
She’d known even from a young age that I wasn’t like the rest, that my magic had a darker nature than many of the others’. They could control the pull in their songs, having to expend effort and magic in order to allow that magic to seep beneath someone’s skin and claim them from the inside, until their body was only an instrument to be used.
I’d never had a choice, never had the option to reject the magic that so easily pulsed at my fingertips. It was in everything I touched, in everything I did, and in every word I sang.
It was the reason I refused all invitations to join the choir thatoccupied most of the Reds’ free time, the reason I often kept to myself in the library instead of spending time with my peers. They didn’t understand the weight of that magic and what it meant for me.
They didn’t understand how it had come to be my curse.
“Are you even listening, Margot?” my mother asked, forsaking the general understanding that even when teaching their own offspring, they are meant to keep a certain level of distance from their progeny.
Here, I wasn’t supposed to be Fritha Erotes’s eldest daughter, daughter of the next heir to the Erotes Tribunal seat, as my aunt who currently occupied that seat had no children of her own. Here, I was supposed to be a cool, collectedMiss Erotes,like so many of the others who occupied the class alongside me—cousins and second cousins and family members who descended from the same line but had merged far enough back that it became impossible to keep track.
The Peabody legacies sat on the other side of the classroom, the divide between the two more evident than ever.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, giving a meek nod of my head as I looked down at the book in front of me. A quick glance to my cousin Belva beside me confirmed that I was six pages behind, lost to my own thoughts. Even before I’d noticed my mother staring at me, it had been a certain red-eyed archdemon who occupied my mind.
Seeing him in the courtyard the night before had kept me awake all night, and I knew half my mother’s anger was probably for what she saw as my lackluster appearance in the wake of that. The first rule of Reds was that appearance was everything, and one couldn’t use magic to replace a good night’s sleep and a few extra moments of care in the morning.
