Wingbeats overhead announced Isanara’s arrival.
Garrick pressed a kiss to my hair. “Later,” he promised.
Because we would have a later. For as long as the gates permitted, for as long as we could make it so. And even then, even if the inevitable, probable end came… after that night, I knew that I would never be alone again.
CHAPTER 61
I wokein the hour before dawn, cocooned in warmth on both sides. Garrick at my back, his larger body enfolding my own, and Isanara at my front, her steady breath moving her glimmering scales. Up and down, and up and down, and up and down. The sight was so mesmerizing I lay there as the minutes passed, just watching her, almost forgetting why I’d woken at all. But eventually the pressures of my body got the better of me. I sidled carefully from between the two of them, and they both did me the courtesy of pretending to still be asleep as I slipped into the forest to relieve myself in privacy.
I cushioned my footsteps with fresh snow, not out of necessity, but because I did not want either of my companions listening in. I’d had precious little privacy before my beating at the Devotion Gate. Since then, one of them had dogged my every step. The least I deserved was to take care of my normal bodily functions in peace.
I was returning through the forest when something rustled overhead. Wind moving through leaves, my mind told me. A sound I’d heard thousands of times. Except that, held in perpetual winter by Velora’s curse, none of the trees in this forest had leaves.
But I knew a witch who could summon them.
“Aurienna.”
At first, nothing changed. The leaves overhead continued to rustle, deceptively harmless as they moved in the breeze. I glanced up, noting that only the few trees nearest to me bore leaves. It was too dark to see their color clearly, but the scent of lush new growth came to me on the wind.
The red-haired witch stepped from between the trees, her black cloak swaying in time with the trunks. My power swirled beneath my skin, a mixture of frost and ice that formed and then melted and reformed again. It felt as if my power could not quite decide how to react to my sister witch’s presence. She had been there at my resurrection, and because of that, our power would always be linked. But she had also chanted in unison with the rest of my coven when they cast me out.
The moon had already begun its descent, but I could see her clearly enough thanks to my heightened eyesight. Just like she could see me.
She examined me openly, starting at the feet I’d shoved into my boots and the cloak I’d thrown over my shift to go relieve myself.
“I am glad to see you walking under your own power once again,” she finally said.
My mouth fell open. I may have gotten better at controlling my power, but I had yet to master my own face. “How did you know I was injured?”
An echo sounded deep in the recesses of my mind. I’d heard Aurienna’s voice in my fever dreams. But I could not quite recall her words.
She did not answer my question. Nor did she plan to. Instead, she jerked her chin side to side, her fringe of copper hair swaying across her forehead.
It was just so typical of Maura to send another witch to check up on me and then to be evasive about it. She’d played mind games with me from the beginning, encouraging me to use my power and then leveling my fragile nerves with condescension when I failed.
In four hundred years, not a single one of my sister witches had tried to figure out why I struggled to control my powers. Only Garrick had reached out, giving me the stability to anchor myself. Only Tomin had offered concrete strategies for quieting the endless overwhelm from the heightened senses I’d been gifted by the Dark God.
I had conquered four of the Seven Gates without any help from my coven. But now that I stood on the precipice of the fifth, about to do what only one being in all of Velora had ever managed, now Maura wanted to interfere.
Fuck that.
“Why are you here? Does Maura have another message for me? Am I not conquering the legendary Seven Gates of Velora quickly enough for her?” Anger rose in my chest in time with my power.
I’d gotten this far on my own, despite everything Maura had inflicted upon me over the centuries. Not because of it. Loyalty to coven—but when had the coven ever been loyal to me? They’d risen me from death, but even that I had not asked for.
The frost threatened to burst out of me, but I forced it back down. I imagined Garrick’s warm hands curling around my own. I anchored my feet into the ground, inhaled a deliberate breath of cold air, and grounded myself like Tomin had taught me.
Meanwhile, Aurienna opened and closed her mouth. The expressions on her face were impossible to discern because they changed that quickly. There even appeared to be—was that pain?
“Maura does not have a message for you,” she finally said, her throat sliding visibly. It looked like she was about to cough or choke.
My hands went to my hips, power still present but palatable. “Then why are you here?”
She exhaled slowly. I noticed the vines curling around her feet, spreading across the ground thick as a carpet.
“Nothing is as it seems,” she choked out, the harshness of the words cushioned by the greenery sprouting up all around us.
Dark Lord fucking spare me. “Helpful as always, Aurienna.”
