‘If she kills you, the magic is gone, but she can bind you, just like you’ve been begging her to,’ Ashley reminded me. ‘It’s not what you think, binding. You can’t tuck magic away for a rainy day and walk around living an ordinary life. Youareyour magic. If Catherine binds your abilities, you’ll be living half a life. It’ll be agony. Learn the lesson your father didn’t. There’s only one way to escape her control, you must take control yourself.’
‘I’ll run.’ I was thinking out loud as I circled the room, formulating a plan. ‘If we leave now, me and Wyn can be in the middle of nowhere before nightfall.’
‘With what money? With what passport? And how are you planning to travel with a phasing wolf? I don’t think they allow those in an Uber.’
She flexed her legs, testing the movement before dragging herself into a sitting position. She was getting stronger by the second.
‘Catherine would be on you before you’d even crossed state lines. You didn’t even go through the Becoming yet and your magic is already lighting up the sky like a flare gun. Why do you think your wolf is so in love with you? Even if he wasn’t fully initiated into his pack, he still had magic in his blood when you met.’
‘Magic might have drawn us together but that’s not why he loves me,’ I said, urgent and true and sure of my heart. ‘What we have is real.’
‘Don’t matter much. We’re all three of us going to be dead by dawn,’ Ashley said as she carefully lowered her feet to the ground. ‘Scenario one, your boy phases and kills you. Scenario two, his pack finds you, figures out you killed his brother and they kill you. Scenario three, Catherine kills him, kills me,binds you and you wish you were dead, or best-case scenario number four, you drain Catherine, lose control, set the world on fire and we all die.’
She staggered over to the bar cart in the corner of the room. ‘Do you drink? I think we should toast your birthday while we still can.’
The way she laid it out made everything look hopeless. Too many threats, too many ways this could end in nothing but death. That’s what happened last time. But I wasn’t Elizabeth Howell. As my grandmother so often liked to remind me, I was a Bell.
‘She won’t kill me and she won’t let anyone else kill me either,’ I said again, running through Ashley’s scenarios in my head, searching for a light in all the darkness. ‘It’s not just the magic that’s important to her, it’s the whole Bell line. If I’m gone, it’s all gone.’
Ashley paused, listening as she poured.
‘Go on.’
‘There is one possibility,’ I said as she raised a tumbler filled with whiskey in a toast. ‘Catherine really believes I’m the witch from the prophecy. What if I am?’
‘Oh good,’ Ashley cheered. ‘You’ve chosen option four, everybody dies.’
‘Maybe,’ I admitted. ‘But until now, everything has happened to me or around me or because of me. You’re right, I need to take control of the situation. She won’t kill me and she can’t bind me until after the Becoming. All I have to do is fight her and win.’
My aunt yelped out a laugh. ‘That’s all? Great! I’ll make a reservation at Husk for supper since you’ve got this in the bag. I heard their oysters are to die for.’
‘The house let me into her craft room,’ I went on, ignoring her very obvious sarcasm. ‘You shouldn’t be able to tell meany of this but you can because I’m getting stronger. I’m more powerful than she is.’
Ashley stared at me over the rim of her very full glass.
‘You know she hates that word,’ she said.
‘You know she’s going to kill you,’ I replied.
With one hand still on the bottle, she burst out laughing.
‘Emily James, that was pretty good. I’ll be sure to think on your heroic speech when my mother comes back here and rips my lungs out of my body.’
Before I could respond, my cell phone buzzed in my back pocket. Lydia’s name flashed insistently on the screen and I tapped accept.
‘Lyds?’ I said as my aunt topped off her drink. ‘Please tell me you’re calling from somewhere far away?’
‘Em, it’s Jackson.’ The panic in his voice crackled down the line, a bright red energy blaring all the way across town. ‘There’s something wrong with Lydia. She’s awake and breathing but she’s not moving or talking, she’s just kind of staring at nothing. And I swear I just saw your grandmother out back and it looked like she was carrying a body? Do you have any idea what is going on?’
‘I’ll be right there,’ I told him, glancing over to where Ashley was downing another drink. ‘Don’t panic, it’ll be all right.’
‘I’m going to call an ambulance,’ Jackson said.
‘No, don’t, that will only make it worse,’ I replied, cutting off his protestations. ‘I know it sounds stupid but please just trust me, I’m on my way right now.’
‘You’ve got ten minutes then I’m calling the ambulance,’ he said after a moment’s consideration. ‘I hope I don’t regret this.’
I ended the call as the patterns of the wallpaper started to shift again, trees pulling back and birds circling overhead, making way for a new addition. Two tall stone columns I’d seen once before, each topped with a sad-looking figure, both with theirheads bowed. A tall, red-haired woman passed through them with the body of a teenage boy slung over her shoulder.
