“I hesitated. I should have stopped my mom while I had the chance.”
“Of course you hesitated, it was your mother. Anyone else would have done exactly the same thing,” he murmured.
They lay there in silence for a while watching the flurry of snow drifting down on ghostly wings.
“What are we going to do?” Olivia finally asked quietly.
“We’re going to find them both, and we’re going to make it right. Whatever it takes,” he replied softly.
She fell silent again, and he thought she’d finally fallen asleep until she spoke again, her voice barely audible in the stillness of the room.
“Theo?”
“Yes?” he whispered.
“My mom’s a murderer.” Her breath caught on the hot ball of misery burning the back of her throat.
“I know.” His arms tightened around her, unable to stand her pain. “It will be alright.”
“My mom tried to kill me, Theo,” she whispered brokenly as the first tears fell. “How is that ever going to be alright?”
31
Isabel West stood on the cliff top gazing down over the black freezing waters of the lake. Her deep whiskey-colored eyes latched onto the tiny pinprick of light in the distance, the lake house, her childhood home, and now the home of her daughter.
The brutal wind whipped her long dark hair back from her face and set it writhing in the turbulent air like Medusa’s serpents. The single white lock at her temple blazed incandescent in the moonlight and highlighted the scar marring her beautiful face.
She wrapped her dark, heavy cloak around her tighter, ignoring the biting cold and the sting of snowflakes as they swirled around her.
Over the howl and shriek of the wind, the whispering began, beckoning, cajoling, a call to her blood. She may not have the power of her husband or her child, but she was still a West. She felt the restless shift and throb of magic beneath her feet as it writhed and briefly flared.
She understood it, understood the deep, dark secret of the town. Even now, she could hear it hammering like a furious heartbeat below the ground.
Hester had been the only other one who’d known the secrets of the land they’d made their home upon. It hadn’t been an accident that Hester and her sister Bridget had chosen this precise location to found the town of Mercy, or why they’d filled it with witches and people of magical descent.
Her mouth curved into a slow smile as she closed her eyes and tilted her head, listening as the dark whisper crawled over her skin like a lover’s caress.
“Isabel.” The voice intruded, breaking her thoughts for a moment so that the whispering settled into a dull muted hiss in the background. The voice was deep, a kind of unpleasant, wet gurgle. She turned slowly, her gaze landing on the strange, mismatched creature standing obediently behind her.
Her appraising gaze swept over his naked body, and the red glow beneath his skin had all but disappeared. He stood now as nothing more than a flesh and blood man, although he was far from it, carved up and stitched together with thick black stitches, making him look like Frankenstein’s monster.
Her eyes met his as they burned black, filled with hate and fury. “What have you done to me, whore?” he rasped.
“Nathaniel,” she tutted slowly. “Is that any way to speak to the person who freed you?”
“Freed?” he hissed. “You simply exchanged one prison for another.”
For a second, his skin mottled and shimmered, small bumps appearing and disappearing as if something writhed beneath his skin, desperate to tear its way out. It was true, she smiled. While he was trapped in that body, he was bound to her.
“You didn’t really think I was just going to turn you loose, did you?” she asked. “Do I look stupid?”
“I’m going to gut you slowly when I get out of this body,” he warned quietly.
“No, you’re not,” she replied calmly. “You’re not going to do anything but what I tell you to do.”
“And why would I do that?” He glared at her with shiny beetle-like eyes.
“Because I know what you want.” She stepped closer to him. “What you’ve always wanted.”
