She turned to me, full of the deepest empathy, something I never expected to find in the woman who brought me to Savannah like a lamb to the slaughter four months ago.
‘Did it work?’ she asked me again. ‘Did they believe it?’
‘They did,’ I confirmed, sucking in my breath when she pulled me into the comfort of her arms. ‘So did he.’
Even though she wasn’t with us at the park, Ashley had the most important job of all. I knew the only way Wyn would wake up tomorrow still part of his pack was to leave me behind. I also knew he would never do that by choice. Back at Bell House, hidden from the wolves, Ashley had been welcomed back into my craft room, Wyn’s blood-soaked shirt in hand, where she performed the ritual I had spent all afternoon perfecting.
At my signal, the dawning of the red moon, she poured out the herbal concoction I had wept over, regretted and prayed we wouldn’t need to use for every second of its existence. Aconite to cause as much pain as possible, sage to cleanse hisenergy, chamomile, vervain and valerian to put him to sleep as quickly as I could and flecks from the black arfvedsonite crystal to make him forget my last words. When he woke, confused and suggestible, he would believe anything his mother told him and he would never want to see me again. But he would be alive and a member of the pack, not living a shadowy half-life as a lone wolf. I’d made my decision before I walked out under the full moon, but after meeting Cole and Astrid, I was certain it was the right one.
‘What are you going to do about Astrid?’
Lydia’s question pulled me out of a spiral I was keen to avoid for as long as possible. I unzipped one of my pockets and pulled out the handful of bloody moonstones. They rattled in my hand, unnatural and desperate to be undone. The witch whose life she’d ended to cast the spell couldn’t rest until I’d reversed the magic but she knew she wouldn’t have to wait much longer.
‘Leave her where she is.’
Jackson’s tone was pitch black. Something in him had changed and it cut a new wound into my heart to hear it. ‘You can’t let her out, Em. She’s a killer.’
‘But I’m not,’ I said. ‘Leaving her down there is a death sentence.’
‘You don’t need to worry about it.’ Lydia straightened as she spoke, looking off to the back of the house as though listening to something we couldn’t hear. ‘She’s gone.’
‘Gone as in dead?’ Ashley said altogether too hopefully.
‘Gone as in taken,’ I replied, tuning into the same frequency as Lydia.
Astrid was no longer in the tunnels. She was no longer in Savannah or the state of Georgia.
‘Can you tell where?’ I asked Lydia, but she shook her head. ‘I can’t see.’
‘Shrouded somehow,’ she replied. ‘She might be behind the cloaking spell, but she didn’t get herself out of the tunnels.’
‘It’s OK, she won’t come back, she knows she can’t win against us,’ I said with bravado, all four Powells accepting my statement with varying degrees of confidence. They didn’t need to worry about this tonight, they’d been through enough. We’d all been through enough. Alex draped her arms around her children, Virginia’s watchful eye overseeing as they all closed their eyes, ready to surrender to sleep.
‘Emily Bell, you need to rest,’ Ashley decreed. ‘Do I have to carry you upstairs?’
I shook my head, rising unsteadily to my feet and following her out the room. There was no fight left in me. The walls of the foyer had shifted while we were out, returning to the soft sage green of my arrival in Savannah. Not my colours.
‘I saw Catherine tonight,’ I said as Ashley and I slowly mounted the grand curved staircase. She stiffened as she walked but did not stop.
‘She’s back?’
‘No. Not yet.’
‘It’s possible?’
‘I think so.’
No one was more difficult to read than Ashley Bell. She sounded hopeful and afraid at the same time, an inscrutable contradiction, to me and I suspected, to herself. Who could know how to feel about this?
‘I miss her,’ she admitted after a long, thoughtful pause. ‘She did terrible things, to me and you and so many people, but still …’
I nodded, chewing on my response. ‘I miss her too. And I think I understand her a little better now I’ve done terrible things too.’
Her forehead creased with consternation, green eyes rimmedwith red and the hollows below them darker than I’d ever seen before.
‘This feels like a conversation we should have after a good night’s sleep,’ she said, pushing me gently towards my bedroom door. ‘Will you be all right on your own, or do you want a roommate?’
I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t ever be all right on my own ever again.
