And so I stayed. Even when my magic tugged at my guts, the blessing doing its best to save me from what was about to come, I stayed, bearing witness to the brave, proud, defiant witch.
‘Emily?’
Horrified, I turned to see Wyn standing at the back of the clearing.
‘Em,’ he said as the pack surged forward. ‘Where are we?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I told him, holding out a hand for him to come and stand beside me.
He staggered forward, overcome by what was happening to him or around him or both.
‘Can’t we help her?’ he asked and with tears in my eyes, I shook my head.
‘We can’t do anything but we need to watch.’
Wyn’s hand found mine and he stood so close there wasn’t a sliver of moonlight between our bodies.
‘Find him,’ Cathy Bell said to me as the first wolf sank its teeth into her thighs and Wyn disappeared. ‘Find him before he finds you.’
They were the last words she spoke before the wolves tore her to pieces. And all I could do was watch.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I woke up in a bed, towels wrapped around my swimsuit, strong arms wrapped around the towels. I was in Wyn’s arms. Was it only moments ago I’d been dreaming of this, or was this the dream and the wolves had been real? I could hardly tell.
‘You’re OK,’ Wyn whispered into my hair when I shifted against him. ‘You’re safe, you’re OK.’
We sat up together, his arms never once breaking their hold on me. My hair was a nest of matted tangles, drying too quickly in knots full of swimming pool water and styled by the Stovell family’s finest pillows.
‘You were there,’ I whispered in the smallest possible voice. ‘You saw what they did.’
‘You went under the water,’ he replied in a daze. ‘When you didn’t come up, I dove in to pull you out, but the pool kept getting deeper and when I came up for air, I came up in the woods. It was a crynhoad but it wasn’t my pack. Where were we?’
‘Here. But not now.’
He exhaled heavily through his nose.
‘When I went back for you, I came back up and everything was normal.’
‘Normal.’ I smiled at the thought. ‘Good one.’
‘Whatever that was, a vision, a prophecy,’ he said, fire in his voice. ‘I won’t let it happen.’
‘It’s already happened. That wasn’t my trial, it was another Bell witch. From a long time ago.’
The news didn’t seem to make him any happier.
‘They wouldn’t listen to her. Why wouldn’t they listen?’ He stopped and bit his lip under a furrowed brow. ‘Did you stop them?’
‘No.’
What followed after Wyn vanished was so much worse than anything he could imagine. Witches, it transpired, could live far too long without their arms, without their legs. Even when they ripped her heart out of her chest, it kept on beating, and I could almost taste the metallic tang of blood on my tongue here in this room, in this bed, in Wyn’s arms.
‘The blessing only shows me things I need to know,’ I told him, carefully running my hands through my snarled-up hair. ‘There has to be something we can learn from what we saw. I know it was terrible but—’
‘I learned I’m never letting the pack anywhere near you,’ he replied, resolute. ‘I know I said we’d find a way to explain everything to them, but there is no way. The more distance between you and my family the better. No arguments, Em.’
I wasn’t about to give him one, at least not until I understood what my magic wanted me to learn.
