Elodie gave me nothing. Not a quirk of an eyebrow or quiver of her lips.
The anger in my chest burst into a frigid flame of blue and white that matched the ice in my veins. No sooner I’d thought it depleted than it rose to meet my fury. I didn’t pause to analyze that development. I was too fucking angry.
Frost formed at my fingertips, crawling over my skin beneath the layers of my clothing. I felt it lick at my collarbones and then my throat, curling around my ears.
I watched as it drew swirls of sparkling power over my cheeks and framed my eyes—watched—how was I watching?
Elodie.
She’d changed, showing me my own face. Her body was a perfect mirror of mine, her dark blue cloak identical, the same purse tied to her belted waist that now matched the width of mine.
The power inside of me contracted. Elodie’s face changed back to her own.
She lifted two fingers, her middle and index, and drew familiar lines in the air. She traced the lines of the pentagram, inverting the symbol so that the tip pointed toward the snow-covered ground. As if I needed a reminder that my spirit was out of control after that horrifying display.
“Pass through the Seven Gates, lift the curse, and you will be welcomed back,” Elodie repeated, word for word.Words mattered, and she’d clearly been told to report Maura’s precisely.
Crows cried in the distance. Scavengers made to survive in a dying land. Was I really any better, waiting around in a tavern, preying upon the woes of the dwindling, desperate occupants of Velora for my own gain? With my coven, I would live. My power would be restored, rather than dwindling to nothing until my blood ceased to feed my organs and I succumbed to the second death.
I cannot lift the curse. No one can.
No one had ever made it through more than five gates, if the most outrageous of rumors were true, let alone seven. It was impossible.
I opened my mouth to tell Elodie so. To send her back to Maura with a curse of my own, little power though it would have without my coven to bolster me. But she was already walking back in the direction of the tavern, the curve of her hips no longer her own.
This time when my power rose, it was nothing more than an icicle in the empty cavern where my heart had once been.
Returning to my coven was impossible. My sisters were lost to me, both those of blood and those of power. Anger, hope, they faded away until I was empty. Nothing, no one, alone on a dark street in a dying land.
I’d had everything, and I lost it. Not just once, but twice.
CHAPTER 4
BEFORE
I was bornthe year of the curse. Not made. Born. To a mother and father, in a stately manor house set close enough to the sea that the sounds of waves breaking against the cliffs were my lullaby. My father certainly never sang me one. If my mother did, I did not recall. The mind keeps very few memories before the age of five, and she did not live to see my sixth year.
In the beginning, no one understood what the curse truly meant. The fae had overreached their power and tried to set themselves above the gods. The curse was punishment—their punishment, not ours. What did magic or its loss mean to humans, when we had none to begin with?
Everything.
For the first few years, humans prospered in the void left by the fae. My first fully formed memory was of a party—a grand gathering that filled our home to brimming before my mother’s body was fully cold.
“Stay upstairs,” my sister insisted, pushing past me.
I grabbed for the railing but still stumbled. Two hands caught my shoulders and hauled me back, away from the landing.
“You ought to be in bed.” Janessa, my other sister. She didn’t release her hold until I was fully out of her way, leaving her enough space to stand at our elder sister’s side.
Their taller bodies blocked out the light but not the sound. Dozens of voices, laughter, even the hum of stringed instruments. And above it all, one boomed loudest of all. Our father. He laughed and laughed and laughed. How could he laugh like that when all I did was cry?
I pressed closer to my sisters, peering between their bodies to see. But they were arguing and shoving, and all I got were disappointing flashes of color.
“You should not be wearing that,” Janessa hissed at Rylynn.
Rylynn tossed her head. She was always tossing her head and throwing her beautiful dark hair over her shoulder. But she’d fastened it up in some kind of intricate coiffure. My mind twisted with wonder just looking at the plaits and patterns. Beautiful. Like my mother. She even smelled like her.
“And her perfume as well?” Janessa huffed, recoiling enough that I caught a glimpse of a servant carrying a tray of petit fours.
