Elodie curled her fingers around the man’s hand, pressing the blade downward. “Cut it off.”
The man’s cries devolved into shaking sobs. The knife hit the ground. Elodie bent to retrieve it, to begin her bloody flaying. She’d remove his manhood anyway and make sure he was still conscious to see it.
“No.” Maura’s voice echoed through the stone chasm. “Our sister has not yet had the pleasure.”
If I’d still possessed a heart, it was by then a shriveled, useless thing. It had not pumped my blood for nearly a century. But the pain in my chest convinced me for half a second that there was still something alive in that cavity of darkness.
“Koryn,” Maura said. “What is the punishment for entering the coven lands uninvited?”
“Death.” Cold spread through my veins, pumped by the ancient power of the Dark God.
“For stealing the Dark Lord’s bounty?”
“Death.” It coalesced in my fingertips, frost beginning to coat my skin in silvery whorls.
“And for trying to flee our justice?”
“Death.” My pointed fingernails grew, tipped with shards of ice.
“Elodie, Koryn will take your place.”
The desperate man at the center of the pentacle was not the only one being punished. Maura knew it, I knew it, and so did every single one of my coven sisters.
Killing was as natural for a witch as breathing. More, if the faerietales the humans told their children were believed. I’d chanted spells with my sisters that had resulted in death. But I had never done it myself.
In the beginning, Maura did not allow me the honor because of my lack of control over my power. That is what it was, to my kind—an honor. A perfect execution of the Dark God’s gifts. He presided over hell, did he not? We were his vessels, were we not?
I thought I’d been careful, sneaking away over the years to gift spells to Rowellyn and then her daughter. But when Maura fixed her gold-flecked eyes at me, the pupils rimmed by a brown so dark it was nearly black, I saw the warning she did not try to hide.
Disappoint her again at my peril.
Disappoint my coven again and I might find myself an outcast. Alone in death, just as I had been in life. A disappointment in death, just as I had been in life.
Elodie obeyed Maura’s order without question. If she felt anything about it, she did not allow it to show on the perfectly honed blades of her face. I took her place at the center of the pentacle, my shift brushing against my hips, the hem against my calves.
Aurienna began to chant. In temple, it might have been considered a hymn. But here in the cave where the Midnight Coven dwelled, it was an invocation of the Dark God, spoken in his ancient tongue.
I did not have Aurienna’s effortless control over her power, nor Elodie’s perfect composure. But I had learned much since that disastrous night outside the guild hall. I breathed in and out slowly, letting the icy power in my veins have its way. The silvery whorls on my skin brightened, my forearms gilded with shimmering rivulets of ice.
The man’s eyes widened as he watched, as he felt the cold that overtook the warmth of the ever-burning fire and the frost that spread across the stone floor.
I had to kill him. He had broken the covenants. He had attacked my sister.
I would do anything to protect my sister. To protect my coven. To protect my place here.
I will make it quick, I promised him silently, willing him to see the words in my eyes. But I knew all he saw was the glowing coven mark on my forehead.
I lifted my hands. My frost climbed up his body.
The chanting around me grew louder. A blast of heat from my left—Maura had broken away from the group to throw another log onto the fire.
I tried to breathe, to slow the thrum of power in my veins. I had to strike quickly. A dagger of ice would do the job. I faced my palm upward, trying to focus all of my power.
It spiraled out of me, an icy fury that grew with every passing second. I could not disappoint my sisters.
Sweat slid down my temple. The heat was overpowering my frost. I needed more power. But the chanting was so distracting. The hem of my shift had come loose, the threads dragging across my calves. The damn chanting.
Ice began to form in my palm.
