“I have had five hundred years of practice.” A thought occurred to me then, and I felt like a fool for not suggesting it earlier. “I’ll become a raven and you can pull one of my feathers out.”
He scratched his stubbly jaw. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? What if you turn back into a human and your eyebrows are missing?”
Despite myself, a laugh erupted from me, bright and shimmering. The sheriff smiled, a genuine smile, and that warm feeling threatened to return.
“I’ve done it before, don’t worry. I’ll hop into your hands and you can take a feather from my back.”
His eyes widened slightly. “You trust me to hold your tiny bird body in my hands without crushing you?” He said it lightly,humour in the curve of his lips, but I knew he felt a little frisson of power at the thought. I would be entirely at his mercy.
“Until the bond is broken, I do,” I replied, icily.
14
STEFANO
Icupped my hands and Morgaine the raven flapped her wings and landed softly in the palm of my hand. I could feel the fluttering beat of her heart and see her clever, dark eyes studying me. I reached for her sleek, black wing and she pecked at my fingers, squawking.
“What do I do?” I waited for any kind of response, but she simply continued to stare at me unnervingly. Finally, I pressed a fingertip to her back. “Here?” When she didn’t attempt to bite my finger off, I grasped one of the feathers on the raven’s back and tugged sharply. The feather came clean away, a drop of red blood at the tip where it had been torn from her flesh.
In a flurry of wings and sharp talons, Morgaine transformed once more, returning to her human form.
“How do you do that?” I asked, unable to hide my curiosity.
“It’s one of the abilities my mentor taught me,” she replied, absently. She did that a lot, I had noticed. Played down her talents; self-deprecating and coy. Was it a ploy to lower my defences and make me easier to kill once the bond was broken? Whatever her motives were, I knew the best way to ensure my survival was to build a rapport, to get her to open up to me. So, I would keep her talking as long as I needed.
“Your mentor?”
She nodded, her gaze distant. “Merlin. He’s long dead now. He was a powerful sorcerer, and the first teacher I had in the craft, but not always on the right side of things.”
Intrigued, I asked, “What are your other abilities?”
She tucked the willow vines and the feather—which didn’t appear to have stripped a single hair from her dark head, let alone disappeared an eyebrow—into her satchel. I caught a glimpse of a black, furry creature inside the bag and realised she was carrying the cat from the cottage. No wonder I’d felt my eyes itching for a while now.
“They’re all connected to life and the natural world. Most witches never learn to transform, but those who do can usually only become one type of creature.”
“How many can you turn into?”
Her expression was neutral, but I could tell from her body language—the way her shoulders rolled back and her chin jutted—that it gave her pride to say it out loud. “Four.”
“Four?” I replied with an appropriate amount of admiration and surprise. “What are they all? I’ve seen a squirrel and a raven. Let me guess, a black cat?”
She narrowed her eyes. “No, a fox and a deer. And that’s a hurtful stereotype.”
“Then what was that in your bag?”
She looked a little peeved. “That’s just Kipper. He was Rosemary’s cat, and he has nowhere to go now that she’s dead.”
Guilt stabbed me in the chest, and I changed the subject quickly. “Is that how you still look so young despite being five hundred years old? You can transform into a younger woman?”
From the way her mouth puckered, I guessed I’d got it wrong. This rapport building wasn’t going quite how I’d planned.
“Not exactly. My healing magic prevents me from ageing. It’s a combination of the two that allows me to change my features slightly, when I need a new identity.”
I feigned shock. “Why would you need a new identity, Morgaine? Are you on the run from the law?”
She rolled her eyes, but I’d managed to draw a tiny smile from her. I shouldn’t have felt so much pride in that.
“I have to become someone new and move from coven to coven every few years, before anyone realises I don’t age. This isn’t my real face, not the one I was born with.”
