Page 1 of Alpha Charmed

ONE

ANOUK

The potion is wrong.

I stare at the cauldron, watching the liquid churn in shades of deep violet when it should be a soft periwinkle. The color pulses like a bruise, too vivid, too alive. My fingers tighten on the stirring rod until the worn wood groans.

A simple calming draft. I’ve brewed this exact formula approximately four hundred and seventeen times in the past fifteen years. I could make it in my sleep. I have made it in my sleep.

It has never done this.

Dawn light filters through the high windows of my workroom, catching on the glass jars lining the shelves.

I used to be in control.

“You’re looking particularly aggressive today,” I tell the chamomile. My voice is the only sound in the shop besides the soft bubble of the ruined potion. The flowers bob in a draft that doesn’t exist. “I didn’t give you permission to bloom.”

The chamomile doesn’t respond. Plants rarely do.

But I keep talking to them anyway. Old habits. The silence of the shop weighs differently now—heavier, emptier, full of the absence of feathers and the soft clicking of an owl’s beak.

Corwin would have responded. A soft hoot. A ruffle of feathers. That particular way he had of looking at me that suggested I was being ridiculous and he was far too dignified to comment on it directly. After fifteen years, I could read every tilt of his head, every slow blink of his golden eyes.

Six months. Six months since I woke to find his perch empty, his warmth gone from my shoulder, fifteen years of partnership dissolved into nothing but memory and an ache behind my sternum that refuses to fade. The healers said it was natural—familiars don’t live forever, they reminded me, as if I didn’t know. As if the academic knowledge of inevitable loss somehow prepares you for the reality of it.

They didn’t mention the part where your magic comes unmoored. Where the anchor that kept your power steady and your spells precise simply… disappears. Where you spend six months pretending everything is fine while your control frays a little more each day.

The cauldron bubbles. The violet deepens to near-black.

Damn it.

I wave my hand over the cauldron, and the contents vanish in a wisp of lavender smoke. The scent lingers—too strong, too sweet, the magical signature of a potion that would have been three times more potent than intended. A calming draft that strong would put someone to sleep for a week.

A waste of perfectly good ingredients. The fourth batch this week that’s come out too strong, too wild, beyond all reckoning.

No one can know.

A coven leader does not have unstable magic. A coven leader does not admit weakness.

I will not let anyone see the cracks.

I straighten my spine. Smooth an imaginary wrinkle from my sleeve. Begin organizing my workstation with movements so precise they could be used to calibrate measuring instruments. Labels face forward. Ingredients align in perfect rows. Every jar exactly one inch from its neighbor.

Today is Mathilda’s funeral. I don’t have time for brewing failures.

The shop’s brass bell chimes. Not the front door—that melody is different, a bright three-note sequence I designed myself. This is the back entrance, the one only my staff uses, a lower tone meant to announce without alarming.

“Coven Leader Darkwater?”

My apprentice hovers in the doorway. Bryony is nineteen, eager, and possessed of an optimism that borders on concerning. Her familiar—a perpetually unimpressed tabby cat named Thistle—is draped over her shoulders like a furry scarf, regarding me with the disdain only cats can truly master. Bryony holds a paper cup like it’s a sacred offering.

“I brought you coffee.”

I accept the cup. My fingers wrap around the warmth automatically, years of courtesy ingrained deeper than thought. The first sip reveals a flavor profile that defies description—burnt sugar, bitter herbs, and what might be regret if regret had a taste.

“I’m experimenting with flavor combinations,” Bryony says brightly. Her smile could power the ward-lights for a week.

“What flavor is this?”