Page 57

“You’re making a mistake,” she said, and I heard something other than anger in her voice. Something that sounded almost like fear. “The world out there... it’s not kind to witches without covens. To women without power. You’ll be vulnerable. Alone. Targeted.”

“Maybe.” I looked back at her, this powerful, terrible woman who had raised me, taught me, shaped me into what I was. “But at least I’ll be free. And at least I’ll be loved. Which is more than I can say for either of us right now.”

I walked out the door and didn’t look back.

The night air was cold against my face, the November wind carrying the scent of woodsmoke and dying leaves. I stood on the porch for a moment, my heart hammering, my hands shaking, my whole body vibrating with the aftermath of confrontation.

I had barely stepped off the porch when Delia emerged from behind the hedge.

I clutched my chest. “Were you waiting in a bush?”

“Technically, I was waiting behind a bush. Inside it would have ruined the velvet.” She brushed a dead leaf from her sleeve. “Also, your mother’s parlor walls are not designed to contain women detonating generations of family trauma.”

“How much did you hear?”

“Enough to know Thanksgiving is going to be tense.” Her attempted smile faded when she saw my face. “She refused.”

“She’s keeping the curse.”

Delia swore under her breath. She looked toward the house, where my mother’s silhouette stood motionless behind the parlor curtains.

“And you?” she asked. “If Jacqueline makes you choose, if she actually strips your place in the coven and takes everything tied to the Fortman name, will you still choose Logan?”

The answer came without hesitation. “Yes.”

My voice was quiet, but the word settled inside me with more certainty than any vow I had ever made in that house.

Delia studied me for a long moment. “Then I need to find something.”

“That sentence has never ended well for either of us.”

“It occasionally ends well for me.”

“Name one time.”

“The blue eyebrows faded.”

“After six weeks.”

“Time is a social construct.”

She glanced at the house again. The humor left her face.

“Your mother doesn’t hate love,” Delia said. “She fears it. I saw her face when you said Logan sees the real you. For one second, she looked like you had reached inside her and touched something she buried.”

“Mother doesn’t bury things. She curses them and displays the remains as a warning.”

“Usually. But there’s a sealed section in the family archive that uses your grandmother’s warding pattern, not Jacqueline’s. Your mother caught me near it when we were teenagers and nearly erased my eyebrows without magical assistance.”

“You think it contains something about her?”

“I think people do not become this furious about other women choosing love unless love once made them bleed.”

The idea of my mother loving anyone felt absurd. Jacqueline treated affection as a weakness and tenderness as a communicable disease.

But I remembered the fear in her voice when she warned me about being alone. I remembered the strange flicker in her expression when I described Logan as a good man.

“The archive is heavily warded,” I said. “If she catches you, she’ll punish your sisters.”